Thin Pickings

It was not so much the defeat in the November elections (the Republicans were used to defeat) but the direful question: What was wrong with the Republican Party? Nobody knew. Pennsylvania's Republican Governor James Duff thought the party ought "to shed some of the aloofness we have." Harold Stassen was blunt. "The Republican Party is in a bad way," he said. "It is sort of like a football team sustaining a crushing defeat after having advanced the ball to the five-yard line." What Stassen thought the party needed was "a tremendous lot of rebuilding."

A topflight Texas historian thought it would take a lot more than that. Writing in the current Southwest Review, Walter Prescott Webb, longtime professor of history at the University of Texas declared flatly that the great principle of the Republican Party itself was archaic and had been archaic for years.

Golden Era. In an article calculated to raise the hackles on Republican necks, Professor Webb looked beyond the current farm and labor vote, and got the party in his sights down "the long gunbarrel of history." Historically, said Webb, "the debate swings around a principle. The party that originates the principle and establishes it, does so in a national crisis. As long as the principle being acted upon works, it is almost impossible to dislodge the party that discovered it."

The Republican Party found such a principle after its triumphant emergence from the Civil War. It embraced "the new and most dynamic force''--business--and the principle that what was good for business was good for the nation.

The party protected business against cutthroat domestic competition by granting patents, and against foreign competition by levying tariffs. It won other votes by handouts: land to farmers as free homesteads, Treasury funds to Union soldiers as pensions. It won election after election. "What could you do with a party that had emancipated the slave, saved the Union, given everybody a bounty in land or tariff, assured businessmen of prosperity and poor men of a full dinner pail?"

Decline ... But by 1900, the party was forced to choices. "Would it champion the cause of small business or would it go where the power and money were, with Big Business?" The party chose Big Business. When sharp division arose between employer and employee, says Webb, the party chose the employer.

In each case, Webb argues, the party chose to support the minority against the majority. Then the party ran out of homesteads. After that, says Webb, "the Republican Party had no place at all for the farmer ... It compelled him to buy in a protected market and permitted him to sell in a free market with all the world as his competitor." Observes Webb: "Thus the Republican Party successively turned its back on one great segment of society after another, on the farmer, on small business, on labor. The party quit the people long before the people quit it."

. . . and Fall. Then in 1929, business collapsed. The Democrats seized the chance to launch a new principle: "The forces of government were directed, not to the restoration of business alone, but toward the rehabilitation of the suffering and destitute of the entire nation . . . Having no public domain to give away and no other government assets, it would pay for all this by taking money away from those who had it, mainly from Republicans and Big Business, and giving it to those who needed it."

Webb makes no judgment on the rights & wrongs of this principle. He simply observes that, politically, it works. As long as it does, the people will go on supporting it, he believes.*

There is little the Republican Party can do at present, Webb believes. "The Democrats [have] an initiative based on [this] new principle which for the time being the Republican Party cannot possibly take from it and remain the Republican Party ... It can only complain, criticize, claim it can do the job better and more efficiently. Under present conditions it seems doubtful whether it can find anything to offer that its members would accept or the American voters would take at face value. The Republican Party worked out to the last grain its vein of success and for the present it is through."

Webb could only counsel watchful waiting. Said he: "This the Republicans need to bear in mind. They are going to have thin pickings until the present principle of developing a social state has failed."

*Al Smith had made the same observation, more colorfully: "Nobody shoots at Santa Glaus."

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