Battle of Mackinac

Into Mackinac Island's white pine, white-painted Grand Hotel waddled fat little Harrison Spangler, all set to rig up the Republican Party for its biggest blunder in a decade. As G.O.P. National Chairman, he had arranged matters with the exact and elaborate ritual of a Jap nobleman about to commit harakiri.

Sincerely, from the bottom of his compromising heart, Harrison Spangler felt that G.O.P. should not engage in fights, speak bluntly or do anything positive. He had called the Post-War Advisory Council to Mackinac to draft a program. The Council, thought Harrison Spangler, was an expertly hand-picked group. Ob streperous characters, like Wendell Willkie, had not been invited.

Everything seemed shipshape. Michigan's broad-domed Senator Arthur Vandenberg arrived with a foreign-policy resolution in his pocket, a document marvelously vague, in which each word had been planed and sandpapered down to political harmlessness. Chairman Spangler himself had compressed his postwar domestic plank into one typewritten page of anti-New Deal invective and glowing promises.

Before the conference opened, Chairman Spangler made a drastic change in the scenery : a single pottery elephant, with drooping trunk, was removed from the stage, replaced by two elephants with heads and trunks suitably rampant. As the gavel fell, no one could doubt who was in charge. Chairman Spangler occupied the rostrum; Senators Vandenberg and Robert A. Taft sat front center. Swiftly Harrison Spangler entrusted the writing of the foreign and domestic statements to committees headed respectively by Senators Vandenberg and Taft, told them to go behind closed doors. The first session then ended.

Governors' Revolt. But there were others at Mackinac. Particularly, there were 18 of the country's 24 Republican Governors, men who had battled the New Deal in their own states and won, men who felt that they were closer to the U.S. people than the Washington men.

Why had they come to Mackinac? To exchange jokes and cigars in the lobby? They began to wonder. Maine's Governor Sumner Sewall had been on his way almost a week; California's Earl Warren had sat up all night in a plane. Watching the Governors fiddle and fidget, Readers' Digest's Stanley High cracked: "Never have so many come so far to do so little."

The Governors were unorganized, but slowly, surely they began to move as a team. They elbowed their way into the committees, covered the press room with pronouncements, held small rump sessions in the lobby and the bar. Soon the 100 correspondents at Mackinac found all the news coming from the Governors.

Senator Taft had to hold his committee in session until 3 a.m. to hear all the Governors. He and Harrison Spangler composed a domestic statement which pleased no one.

On the Bulletin Board. But by the second day the Governors had wrenched control away from the Old Guard. Arthur Vandenberg had taken such punishment that he vowed to a friend he would never again head a committee to write GOPolicy. Senator Taft threw in the sponge, told the Governors to write the domestic platform themselves. This was precisely what the Governors wanted. They split up in subcommittees, recast the heart of the platform. Iowa's Hickenlooper led a group which rewrote the veterans' plank; Nebraska's Griswold put teeth into the farm program; California's Warren and Washington's Langlie touched up the section on labor (which, in the Taft draft, had not even guaranteed collective bargaining).

In reshaping the foreign-policy plank, the Governors had the help of such able men as Vermont's greying Senator Warren Austin and New Jersey's snow-haired Representative Charles Eaton. They forced adoption of a plank far more specific than , any of them had, as individuals, hoped for. On the record, G.O.P. now favors:

"Responsible participation by. the U.S. in postwar cooperative organization among sovereign nations to prevent military aggression and to attain permanent peace with organized justice in a free world." (Any such action, of course, is to be taken through regular constitutional channels. )

Generally, this statement was favorably received by the press, the more so because newsmen had been notably pessimistic of any worthwhile result.

Life in the Party. But more significant, perhaps, than anything actually said at Mackinac was the vigorous action of the Governors, which proved that the Republican Party has a solid base on which to build. The fight itself not only cleared the atmosphere but ended in a demonstration of workable unity which gives G.O.P. a start for 1944, an advantage it has not enjoyed in three previous election years.

Further, the revolt showed that if the party shies away from extreme internationalism, such as Harold Stassen's proposal for world federation, it need not fall back into the arms of the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert McCormick. For the offense of suggesting the practicability of an Anglo-American military alliance (TIME, Sept. 13), Colonel McCormick had formally read Tom Dewey out of the party in an editorial entitled: "Tom Dewey Goes Anti-American." The Colonel had screamed at Tom Dewey: "He has finished the pilgrimage to Downing Street by way of Wall Street. . . ." But Colonel McCormick apparently approved of the final Mackinac declaration.

As the declaration sank in, it became clear that this was the greatest tactical advance politically made by the Republican Party in years. For once, the party had not set itself up as a helpless punching bag for Franklin Roosevelt. Temporarily, at least, it bound up all quarrels within the party. And it put the next move for the enunciation of a U.S. foreign policy squarely up to the Democrats.

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