Down in the Lehigh Valley

Two months ago, Democrats and their amateurish ally, the C.I.O.'s Political Action' Committee, decided that the special congressional election in Pennsylvania's Eighth District was made to order as a 1948 testing ground. The Taft-Hartley Act, they thought, would be the issue.

They went in with their eyes and mouths wide open and with little chance to win. The Eighth District is grumpy old Joe Grundy's home territory, one of the best-watered G.O.P. fields in the country. But it attracted the Democratic donkeys like an acre of fresh clover. The district is about evenly divided between labor and rural areas. And the Republican candidate was the man who had guided Pennsylvania's version of the Taft-Hartley Act through its legislature: slender, 37-year-old Franklin Lichtenwalter, Speaker of the state's House of Representatives. The Democrats figured that if they could bite off a good-sized section of normal G.O.P. pasture, they could claim a comeback trend for 1948.

Last week the Democrats and the P.A.C. came back with their tails left hanging on the barbed wire. Grundyman Lichtenwalter rolled up the biggest G.O.P. majority in the district's history. Democrat Phil Storch, 36, president of the Lehigh Valley Newspaper Guild (C.I.O.), had concentrated on industrial Lehigh County. "If I can win it," he had said, "we will have proved our point that the Republicans can be beaten in the next national election." In Lehigh County the G.O.P. upped its 1946 margin of 54.4% to 55.1%-What pained the Democrats most was the national attention which the election got. They had started the fight; they could not alibi their way out of it now. The P.A.C. had poured out money and speakers whose principal campaign weapon was a pun: they called the new labor law the "Tuff-Heartless Act." Phil Murray, Walter Reuther, Alexander Whitney and other brasshats of labor had issued statements; Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. lent his name and presence. As for a trend, the Republicans could cite one: the Taft-Hartley Act is apparently not a liability to them, and it is going to take something more than demagoguery to make it a red-hot 1948 issue.

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