Issues & Men

Mrs. June Shaw, a 32-year-old Chicago housewife, had never given much thought to politics until she entered a Chicago Sun contest to pick the Illinois winners. Her score at prognosticating: almost perfect. Her explanation: "Simple ... I just listened to what the ladies said while I was standing in the meat line."

When they counted the votes last week, Republicans were almost as stunned as Democrats. The G.O.P. had won a tremendous victory, far beyond its most sanguine hopes (see box). In great part it could thank the ladies of the meat line.

There were more specific reasons. Republicans had won the House because they had broken the Democratic stranglehold in the big cities; they had captured the Senate because they had made a clean sweep of six seats in the West and Northwest, once deep-dyed New Deal. Above all, they had won back a sizable batch of the independent vote.

As a result, the race for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination was now on in earnest. Still out in front was Thomas E. Dewey, returned to New York's governor's chair with the biggest majority any New York gubernatorial candidate had ever rolled up (680,000).-As before, there were others breathing down his neck: Ohio's Bricker and Taft, California's Warren, Michigan's Vandenberg, Minnesota's Stassen, Massachusetts' Lodge. As for the Democrats--now Harry Truman's troubles would be the same as those which confronted Hoover after 1930.

But the Republican Party would do well to think of its future in terms other than its men. It now had responsibility, and a record to make. In voting for Republicans, the people had assumed that they were voting for a climate of freedom and for a party which would make a new effort to solve U.S. industrial strife. They assumed that the G.O.P. would take the Government off the side of labor and institute full and free collective bargaining. Thus the election of 1946, which settled quite a number of things, raised two paramount questions. Would the Republican Party solve the labor problem? Would the people use their newly gained freedom from Government controls to good advantage?

*But not the biggest plurality. When Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman ran against more than one candidate in 1930 and 1932, their pluralities were, respectively, 735,000 and 847,000.

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