The Bulletin’s Day Book

Yesterday was election day in Jerusalem. The voters went to the polls to do their duty as citizens, our Jerusalem correspondent informs us, but the story seemed to lack something. The zip, the color, the emotional impact of an election in New York, or even of a plebiscite in Berlin, was missing.

In a New York election we have the Tammany Tiger prowling up and down the streets, in and out of blind alleys. In some sections the tiger is strangely absent. In its ferocious stead there stalks a snorting elephant, the G.O.P., standard bearer with the big ears and the memory that never, never forgets. Even the Fusionists had a colorful animal last year—a hybrid donkey-elephant pictured by the political cartoonists as making a monkey out of the once terrible striped beast of Bengal.

Then there are the smoke-laden campaign headquarters packed with jovial politicians, fat, baldpated, booming out greetings and passing out cheap cigars. The excited shouts of the hangers-on as the election returns come drifting in from one district after another.

The torchlight parades. The street-corner speeches. The mud-slinging indulged in by candidates. Election officials patiently instructing women how to operate the levers in the mechanical vote-recording contraptions. Blaring headlines recording the vote. The congratulations, hypocritical or sincere, of the losers to the winners. Then the inevitable demands for recounts. The charges and counter-charges of phenagling of one sort or another at the polls. And everybody taking a holiday and getting drunk and having a grand and glorious time. That’s an election in New York or Mount Vernon or Canton or Podunk.

And in Berlin at a plebiscite. There’s color—sometimes the tragic color of claret—in the storm troopers dashing here and there to get out the “ja” vote and to cow the potential “nein” voters. There’s movement, life, conflicting emotions.

The reader can visualize the millions of sheep moving in and out of the polling places timidly, fearfully doing what they’re told to do. He can visualize, too, with a throb, the supreme courage it took for those citizens of the Reich who voted “ja” in the face of all the terrific pressure the Hitler forces brought to bear upon them.

And if the result is never for a moment in doubt, there is still sufficient drama to stir the blood in the spectacle of millions of persons doing the bidding of one man and in the spectacle of a comparative handful daring to defy him at the risk of Heaven alone knows what punishment.

But what have we in Jerusalem?

Maybe the election was colorful. Maybe it actually had its dramatic situations and tense moments. Maybe there was something about the election that even approximated the bluster and buncombe and bombast of a local election. But one would scarcely suspect it from the report.

Now, this is not meant to be a criticism of the J.T.A. reporter who filed the story. After all, cable charges are high and color is a luxury when it comes at so much a word.

I’m merely trying to convey the impression that the Jerusalem election of yesterday left me and my colleagues very cold. We wanted to know a few of the inconsequential details that make an election interesting over here.

Jerusalem the ancient, Jerusalem the cradle of many religions, Jerusalem the scene of many a bloody racial quarrel, Jerusalem the city of white buildings, blazing suns and rolling hills—what was it like on election day?

I was curious to know about these things: Was there a holiday for election day? Were there parades, torchlight processions, perhaps? How did the voters go about the business of voting. Did they ballot by hand or machine?

How did the candidates electioneer? Was there mud-slinging? Was there much popular interest evinced in the results?

Do the candidates pass out cigars or go around holding babies and kissing them and shaking hands with proud parents? Do they make all sorts of promises to the voters that they never intend keeping? What use is made of the radio? What does an Arab speech sound like? And how does an Arabian politician compare with the Tammany variety?

There are probably a score of other questions I could think of that I’d like to have answered about a Jerusalem election. And I promise readers of the Day Book that if I ever get around to that trip to Palestine I’ll send back a Day Book on election day in Jerusalem that will supply all the answers to the above questions.

—H. W.