STATESMAN IN A HURRY

By FORREST DAVIS

On still nights the Honorable Raymond J. Funkhouser can hear No.4 blowing for Shenandoah Junction, five miles across fields from his sumptuous plantation near Charles Town, West Virginia. To the Honorable Mr. Funkhouser that long- drawn whistle is a personal salute, a pleasing reminder of how far he has risen in the world; for it was from Shenandoah Junction that he set out, many years ago, on the pilgrimage which led to his present lofty status.

Dramatic, indeed, is the contrast between then and now. Then he was a lowly station agent, a revival-shouting mountain lad who toiled obscurely for a monthly wage of thirty-five dollars; now he is a millionaire, a quasi-retired manufacturer, the master of a Cecil B. De Mille version of an antebellum plantation, and a self-made politician who confidently regards himself as the heir apparent to the governorship in 1944.

His confidence is partly based on the showing he made last year when he ran for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate. Abrupt and unsolicited by the party leaders, his entry into politics stirred up a noisy ruckus and drew upon himself a barrage of epithets in the primitive vein still popular in the Mountain State. To select a few printable ones, he was called "carpetbagger" and "Mormon," the latter an irrelevant reference to the fact that he has thrice been united in holy wedlock, twice divorced.

Another verbal tomato was "interloper," this being flung because Funkhouser, at the time of his plunge into West Virginia politics, had been a resident of the state for only four years. Worse, he had registered Democratic as recently as 1938. Neither circumstance gave him pause. Few things do. When he covets something, he goes after it. Therefore, realizing one morning that he wanted the Republican senatorial nomination, he took forthwith to the hustings.

He entered the contest with definite advantages; for nature had equipped him with a friendly eye, the long locks favored by Francis X. Bushman and the easy approach of a veteran cigar drummer. As a further asset, and final proof of his fitness for public office, he insisted that everyone--the local judge, the field hands, anybody with a vote--address him as "R. J."

This medley of virtues proved irresistible to half of the West Virginia Republicans who voted in the 1942 primary. Although our hero ultimately lost out to Chapman Revercomb, the present junior senator, it was a photo finish. The margin was as narrow as 124 votes. Many claim it was really narrower and speak harshly of the curious shenanigans in Kanawha County, where certain precincts went unreported for four days.

Funkhouser was convinced-and still is-that he had been counted out. He took the matter to the courts. Until he dropped his contest a month before election, later pitching in to help Revercomb defeat Matthew Mansfield Neely, the New Deal proconsul for West Virginia, the Republican cohorts were in an uproar from which they have not yet wholly recovered. Old alignments were shaken, new loyalties sprouted; wherefore R. J. fully intends, a year from November, to bowl over both party organizations and capture the governorship as the candidate of the people.

The haste with which Funkhouser jumped into politics was utterly in character. Although it took him a generation to cover the five miles between Shenandoah Junction and Claymont Court, he was hurrying all the way. At the age of thirteen, feeling that life was passing him by, he quit both school and home in order to start climbing in the worlds Later, convinced that station-agenting was leading him nowhere, he quit Shenandoah Junction and hurried off to Pittsburgh in quest of his fortune. The year was 1907 and the winds of the bankers' panic blew him into a fifteen-dollar-a-month job as night clerk, bellhop and porter in a fourth-rate hotel. It was here, between off-duty bouts of saving souls in the rescue missions of the Golden Triangle, that young Funkhouser drew up the plan for his future. The schedule was an ambitious one. Calling for fast action all the way, it blueprinted a get-rich-quick career that would enable him to retire on his fiftieth birthday.

The first important advance came at twenty-one, when he bought his father's store and cross-tie business at Big Pool, Maryland, for $1600 in savings and a loan of $500. Within two years he hustled the business from a gross of $20,000 to $60,000 a year. Unfortunately, he also hustled himself into stomach ulcers which specialists at Johns Hopkins diagnosed as fatal. Expecting to go over Jordan, he sold out for $10,000 profit, but bought a two-cylinder Maxwell as a hedge on this world. When a local cross-tie dealer failed, young Ray rushed to the scene and acquired another enterprise, despite the fact that by now he was principally skin and bones. One day a farmer who was delivering some ties handed him a soda mint. Ray took to chewing mints, got well and ever since has carried a small bottle of the tablets in his pocket.

Time hurried on, and so did Funkhouser, accumulating properties as he went. Presently he owns fourteen corporations, his interests ranging from the highest office building in Baltimore to the O'Sullivan Rubber Company. When his schedule moved him to New York, he learned that Park Avenue had nosed out Fifth as the habitat of the haute monde; so he leased a duplex on the former, took a paneled office on the latter, and joined the Bible class taught by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at the Park Avenue--now Riverside--Baptist Church.

Along the way, in addition to completing three efficient courtships, Funkhouser had hurried--as a Democrat--into and out of the Maryland legislature, where he made a record as a dry. In the mid-30's he delivered one speech at a taxpayers' protest meeting in Harrison, New York, and--still as a Democrat--was elected township supervisor. The post also conferred on him the duties of mayor of Harrison, a tolerant village with some repute as a Gretna Green. Funkhouser fought against the easy-marriage situation, this being the only recorded occasion on which he advocated procrastination.

In 1938, retiring on schedule at fifty, Funkhouser returned to West Virginia to pass, as he unctuously phrased it, "the afternoon of my life with my own people." But there was still an obligation to be fulfilled, for in the long night watches at the hotel in Pittsburgh young Ray Funkhouser had dreamed up a magnificent estate which he had resolved he would own someday in the vicinity of his birthplace. Pending its selection, Funkhouser rented a home near Shepherdstown, the base from which he campaigned for senatorial honors.

Last March he bought Claymont Court, one of four estates which formerly belonged to members of George Washington's family. By acquiring the adjoining plantation and several farms, he expanded his barony to 1050 acres, the approximate area of the original Washington holdings. Then, while most rich Americans were pulling in their belts and saving for taxes, Funkhouser happily faced the task of re-creating Claymont's ancient grandeur, of freeing the formal gardens from wild growth, fixing washed-out roads and the tottering slave quarters, restoring the thirty-four room mansion that had been built about 1820 by Bushrod Corbin Washington, grand-nephew of the Father of his Country.

Always in character, R. J. threw 125 men into the job. He hauled topsoil for the lawns; he cut lumber from a 3000-acre tract he owns in the near-by Blue Ridge for miles of high whitewashed fences; he dammed a large pond, built a swimming pool, erected arbors, laid a patented $8000 tennis court - he owns the company that makes them - and caused the elaborate gardens to bloom once more on their wide, sweeping terraces. No expense was spared.

It was the mistress of Claymont, not the master, who supervised the work inside the mansion. Mrs. Funkhouser, the granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a former U. S. consul to Bucharest and Lyons, once served on the staff of The New York Times. Having also been a professional decorator, she was admirably fitted to restore and beautify the high-ceilinged chambers of her new home.

Today, a thriving plantation with freshly painted barns and silos, Claymont shelters a population of seventy-five, white and black, including family, servants, field hands and tenants. Massa Funkhouser governs all with the paternalism of a Biblical patriarch--but a kindly patriarch, not too strait-laced, and good to his people. When he butchers a hog or a Hereford steer, part of the meat goes into his eighteen-ton quick-freezing unit and the plantation feasts on the rest. Ten pedigreed Guernseys supply milk, butter and cottage cheese for all. The vegetable gardens cover many acres, for the master intends that Claymont shall be as nearly self-sustaining as possible.

A pillar of the United Brethren Church, an indigenous sect of the eighteenth century, Funkhouser says a long and fervent grace before meals and conducts family prayers at the drop of a hat. Once adept at snatching souls from the burning fires, he still likes to testify at protracted meetings. He never swears, dislikes even to hear profanity, and sometimes rebukes associates who use strong language. "Now, friend," he will say reproachfully, "you have a better vocabulary than that."

And yet his creed is sufficiently elastic to permit him to boast that his butler's mint juleps are the best in the Shenandoah Valley. And his piety obviously accords with poker playing, a strictly functional table built for that purpose occupying one corner of his game room. This room he himself designed and decorated, as well as a closed veranda equipped as a bar. In the bar are two slot machines, the gross take of which goes, by Mrs. Funkhouser's direction, to the Red Cross and the British War Relief. It amuses the master that a gambling device enables his wife to be a leading Jefferson County contributor to those worthy causes.

In a vine-clad building, standing beside the big mansion, Funkhouser conducts the affairs appropriate to a retired industrialist and a candidate for governor. He shares the quarters with a bookkeeper and Miss Kitty Linthicum, his private secretary, who calls him R. J. and is forever picking up his spectacles when they fall and slipping them over his ears while he goes on talking. The only wall decorations are an O'Sullivan poster and a lithograph of the thirty-four-story O'Sullivan Building, Baltimore's tallest.

Last spring Funkhouser began publishing a four-page political monthly, the Jefferson Republican, which ladles out warmed-over arguments against the New Deal written by Funkhouser or scissored from his favorite editors, much of it from the Chicago Tribune. Its tone may be deduced from the opening sentence of the leading article in the first issue:

"How far do they have to go-this mob of political parasites called the New Deal-before the average American gets really sick and tired and decides to clean out the whole dirty mess?"

Editor Funkhouser sends the paper free to all applicants. He started with a list of 3000. So many requests for copies were received that the second issue, in June, called for a printing of 8000. He hopes to be mailing 75,000 by the end of the year. As it costs a cent and a quarter for postage alone, the Jefferson Republican gives every promise of developing into a very expensive hobby.

Funkhouser's aggressive antipathy toward the New Deal contrasts with his private manner, which is unfailingly kindly. One of his first acts upon taking title to Claymont was to unbar the gates, long closed to the neighbors. People now come and go without hindrance. A guest may arrive for overnight and still be showing up regularly for meals five days later without having heard any hints that his room is preferable to his company.

The number of week-end guests often reaches twenty-five or more, and on Sunday afternoons it is Funkhouser's happy fancy to herd everyone sound of limb into a ball game on the diamond in front of the mansion. All on the plantation, white and black alike, are bidden to join or watch. It is likewise Funkhouser's fancy to wind up the game with a hymn-singing bee. And when the master's voice soars into Beulah Land, the family look around for exits. Unless quelled, he is likely to launch into prayer and a sermon.

The Negroes on the place shine in the songfest. Funkhouser's paternalism is accentuated where the colored folk are concerned. He is building six cottages for them in a park-like glen. Equipped with electricity, bathrooms, porches, screens and modern kitchens, the cottages are costing him $3500 each, exclusive of the land. The great scheme for Claymont calls for a chapel, and Funkhouser has picked the site and ordered plans drawn. He expects to lead his own worship and have a bang-up colored choir. When someone suggested that he retain Hall Johnson to train the choristers, Funkhouser made a note of it.

Like the chapel, much of Claymont is still unbuilt. Funkhouser projects a grand canal, three quarters of a mile long and thirty feet wide, for canoeing in summer and skating in winter. Ground has been broken for horse barns, a practice track and paddocks for jumping. This establishment is designed for the plantation's saddle mounts and son Justin's string of Thoroughbreds.

A golf course is also planned. In fact, Funkhouser intends eventually to make Claymont so entertainingly sell-sufficient, with everything from chapel services to steeple-chasing, that it will magnetize the young folk. He and Mrs. Funkhouser have eight children, her three coming from a previous marriage. Already he can boast of seven grandchildren, which he regards as merely a start toward the patriarchal brood he envisages tumbling about Claymont.

Although his industries are at work on war contracts, Funkhouser seems singularly untouched by this war. His emotions are more deeply stirred by a conflict nearer home, by what to him is the clearly defined struggle between the traditional America and bureaucrats in Washington bent on leveling everyone. The broad theoretical outlines of what the pundits call the central issue of this age, the strife between the middle class and the bureaucrats, largely escape Funkhouser, but he is enlisted spontaneously on the side of the middle class.

In 1938, newly arrived in West Virginia, he was registered as a Democrat. He now claims that this was the work of an employee who failed to consult him, personal registration being unnecessary in rural West Virginia. In his senatorial race he asserted a bit lamely that he had been voting Republican in national elections since Calvin Coolidge alienated his father from a lifelong Democratic affiliation. By 1942 the newcomer had the soil of West Virginia again firmly under him. He also had leisure, abundant energy, a taste for the sweaty disputation of neighborhood politics and a downright love of making speeches.

Neely, who had doffed the toga to wrest the statehouse from a Democrat of whom he disapproved, now meditated a reverse maneuver-quitting the statehouse for the Senate. The governor had just about pre-empted the Democratic Party in West Virginia and many were restive under his rule. In moving about the state, Funkhouser identified a political phenomenon which he labeled "Neelyism." As he saw it, Neely was "terrorizing" the state, operating a far-flung machine that discriminated against anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans as to jobs, contracts and other benefits currently flowing from the state and Federal governments.

Along in January of 1942 Funkhouser launched a one-man campaign against Neely. He hired an advance agent, mapped an itinerary and set out to stump the state. Being almost totally unknown, he had to improvise a technique for reaching the people. He used the baits of curiosity and a good meal. In each city his agent invited fifty important ladies to a tea party, and a hundred representative men to dinner on the same day, as Funkhouser's guests. He was billed as a fellow citizen who had something interesting to say on the problems of West Virginia. A hall was hired, usually the hotel ballroom, for a mass meeting after the dinner. Funkhouser spoke of "Neelyism," pouring it on the governor with camp-meeting eloquence. By the time he got through, the crusader was known to his audiences as a rich, retired businessman, a native West Virginian who had come back home to help rid the state of political oppression.

A good many of Funkhouser's newÐfound friends decided that he was the man to lead the fight against Neely. First, however, he had to get a nomination. The Republican organization, led by the experienced Walter S. Hallanan, the national committeeman, was not impressed. Hallanan settled on Revercomb, a Charleston lawyer of good repute and a regular Republican. When Funkhouser announced for the nomination on May thirtieth, his first act as a candidate was characteristic. He had his New York advertising agency get up a "presentation," bound in red, that introduced the new product, his candidacy, much as a new cigarette might be presented to the trade. Armed with this, he called on the Republican county chairman in each of West Virginia's fifty-five counties. Forty per cent of them yielded to his arguments, most of them openly, but the state organization remained firm; Hallanan unprecedentedly opposing a primary candidate with outspoken vigor.

On election night, August fourth, Funkhouser was leading Revercomb in the early returns by a thousand votes, and the state press generally conceded his nomination. Two days later, with only sixteen of the 2788 precincts still out, his lead was down to 201. When the last few precincts straggled in, Revercomb had a slight edge. Funkhouser demanded a recount in selected precincts, a demand which was successfully parried. Before quitting, he carried his contest through the Kanawha County court to the state supreme court. Out of the wrangle came a curious decision by the county court. Funkhouser's attorneys charged that on many ballots the X opposite his name had been erased and a new cross marked for Revercomb. The court held that in the case of two markings the more legible should be counted.

On September thirtieth, after the supreme court had declined to intervene, Funkhouser called off his contest and declared for Revercomb. Subsequently, he stumped for his recent opponent, speaking with him on numerous occasions. Last February he made several Lincoln's Birthday speeches to Republican county gatherings, generating a boom for the governorship. By midsummer his stock had risen high enough to induce Governor Neely, in a speech remarkable for picturesque slander, to lambaste him to a golden brown and harshly advise the Republicans not to nominate him.

By mail and personal appearance at Claymont many hundreds of West Virginians, both Democrats and Republicans, have besought R. J. to re-shoulder the torch against the New Deal and "Neelyism" in next spring's primary. Although he has not yet given a definitive answer, Funkhouser was not loath, as this is written, to barge into the fray again. Nor is he uncertain of the result. One basis for his confidence is the assurance of support which he professes to have received from many state and county leaders who opposed him Last year. Among them Hallanan is not numbered. But if the national committeeman again declines to accept Funkhouser, he must find a man with whom to beat him. Otherwise, should R. J. beat Hallanan's candidate, the master of Claymont might start coveting the leadership of the Republican organization in West Virginia, as well as the governorship. And when the Honorable Mr. Funkhouser covets anything, he goes after it--in a hurry.