Bow to Tradition

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Both the Republicans and the Democrats believe in ancestor worship. Last week the G.O.P. made its annual bow to the shade of Lincoln; this week the Democrats will honor their heavenly twins, Jefferson and Jackson. Harry Truman would make his obeisance to tradition by sitting down with a repentant Jim Farley at the Democrats' Jackson-Jefferson Day dinner in Washington.

Despite the return of Big Jim Farley after two campaigns on the sidelines, Democrats would meet in a somber mood. The hyphen symbolized their dilemma. Few would dispute Harry Truman's descent from Andrew Jackson, the party regular. But angry Southern Democrats, smarting under the President's civil rights program, believed that he no longer had any right to claim Thomas Jefferson. In Mississippi last week, 5,000 local rebels gathered to brandish the Confederate flag and issue a secession call for all "true, white Jeffersonian Democrats."

Remote as the Southern threat was, it added zest to the Republicans' own festivities. In Huntington, W. Va. for a Lincoln Day address, Senate Republican Whip Ken Wherry taunted: "Where are the Jeffersonian Democrats today? They are just waiting to be invited to join us."

Frock Coat & Beard. All last week, other Republicans were out in full force from coast to coast: Speaker Joe Martin in New York, Governor Earl Warren in Los Angeles, Candidate Harold Stassen in Philadelphia. In Indianapolis, G.O.P. Chairman Carroll Reece rounded up a stable of Republican orators for a nationwide Lincoln Day broadcast. In Boston, a Massachusetts college president dressed up in a frock coat and long black beard to recite Lincoln's second inaugural address.

Above the hum of eulogy and the clank of banquet silverware, two Republican voices sounded most clearly.* One was Governor Tom Dewey's. In Boston, in a speech on foreign policy, he laid low once & for all the charge that he is unwilling to take a stand on crucial campaign issues. He endorsed the Marshall Plan to the "full sum which has been requested," called for internationalization of the Ruhr and the immediate economic unity of Europe. He also blasted the Democrats for "the policies which resulted in surrendering 200 million people in Middle Europe into the clutches of Soviet Russia and are rapidly delivering 400 million people of China into the same hands."

The Dewey speech was a belated swing toward the course which Senator Vandenberg has long been steering in Congress (see The Congress). But it represented a clean break with the conservatives in the G.O.P.

"Prime the Pump." The other voice of the week was the flat twang of Ohio's Bob Taft. His galoshes firmly buckled against Midwest winter weather, he tromped across six states, flailing away at federal spending, high taxes, Government controls. Bob Taft was still running against the New Deal, but as always, he met his troubles head-on in that dogged spirit which makes men admire him even though they disagree with him.

In Indiana's big steel center at Gary, he launched into a heated defense of the Taft-Hartley Act. Before a group of Omaha farmers and cattlemen, he stated firmly that farm support prices were too high.

At St. Paul, he laid down his own recipe for a "practical and hard-boiled approach" to foreign aid. "All we can do," said Taft, "is remove bottlenecks and prime the pump. . . . I am in favor of aid to Europe but I think it ought to be administered with due regard to the American taxpayer." At Denver he firmly rejected universal military training in favor of "an air force which will give us complete control of the air."

High Optimism. By the time the week was over, most G.O.P. hopefuls were counting their gains with high optimism. Tom Dewey was sure he would collect seven out of New Hampshire's eight convention delegates, with a good crack at Massachusetts after Favorite Sons Martin, Saltonstall and Lodge. Taft expected to win most of Nebraska's delegates, hoped to pick up Indiana and Illinois, was counting on second place in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Harold Stassen found that his Gallup poll rating had risen to within 4% of Harry Truman's.

And all Republicans agreed that the party stock had risen even higher. Until last week, Harry Truman's best strategy had been to demand economic controls while prices remained high, thus attempting to put all blame for high prices on the Congress and the G.O.P. After last week's market break, that argument had gone down with the price of wheat.

* This year, the Census Bureau estimated, the nation's politicos would be aiming their oratory at 90,641,000 eligible voters. The figure was about 10 million higher than in 1940, almost twice the number who actually voted in 1944.

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