Hard Times

The Republican National Committee, representing the party of thrift, should practice what it preaches. So said G.O.P. Treasurer James Scott Kemper last week in a huffy letter of resignation to National Chairman Guy Gabrielson. Wrote Kemper: "We neither have collected the funds I thought we should collect nor have we reduced expenditures drastically." The party's reserves had dropped from $800,000 in July 1948 to $90,000--"for me," wrote Kemper, "a real tragedy."

The national committee had been spending at close to an election-year rate in an off-year: publicity men, statisticians and high-salaried executives loaded the payroll; expenses ran far ahead of contributions, at a rate of more than $70,000 a month. The big money that was so necessary was not coming in.

But Republican finances had been in a lot worse shape before (notably in 1936, when the deficit after the Landon debacle was more than $1,000,000), and Kemper obviously had more on his mind than economy. It was the bipartisan foreign policy. Kemper had been much under attack as an isolationist (in 1941, as president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he opposed lend-lease). His Lumbermen's Mutual Casualty Co. had sponsored Isolationist Upton Close's broadcasts during the war.

Kemper's current position is that the bipartisan foreign policy is really only bipartisan in support, not "in genesis." Snapped Kemper: "As a result of our so-called bipartisan foreign policy, Republicans have been asked to shower gifts on British Socialism--younger sister of Communism." As G.O.P. Treasurer, Kemper had felt "handicapped" in saying so. He now planned to devote himself, he announced, to electing his kind of Republican Congress in 1950.

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