That Ohio Campaign

"Special interests poured money into Ohio last year to elect a Republican Senator," Harry Truman snapped last month in his speech to the Women's National Democratic Club. Last week, in the Senate Office Building, Senator Guy Gillette's subcommittee on Privileges and Elections hashed over a public investigation of Ohio's 1950 election. Senator Robert Taft, for his part, described the campaign as "a sinister conspiracy designed to punish me for my legislative activities in the United States Senate."

"In the Ohio campaign," Taft told his fellow Senators, "I was subjected to the most vitriolic attack probably ever conducted against a candidate. The entire campaign was one of a complete distortion of facts." He ticked off some of the misstatements used by the Democrats during the campaign. "When Bob Taft was a child in the Philippines with his father, he was stung by a jellyfish," he read from the C.I.O.-P.A.C. Speaker's Handbook. "That's why he is now opposed to foreigners."

The following day "Jumping Joe" Ferguson, Taft's defeated opponent, sauntered amiably into the chamber to talk about Republican slush funds. Ferguson sounded more like comic relief than one of the main characters. "I'm not casting any aspirations on the reporters around here," he malapropped during one explanation, "but those newspapers in Ohio are really Republican." Explaining his own defeat, Ferguson said: "The reason I got beat so bad was that the Democrats and the working people didn't go out to vote." As an afterthought, he added with unprecedented political candor: "Of course, if they'd voted I might have got beaten worse. But you always have the consolation of thinking you would have won."

Ferguson, no man to mince figures, insisted that Taft had spent approximately $5,000,000 against his own $107,004. Answered Taft, who set the expenditures for his campaign at roughly $612,000: "For every one dollar spent in my behalf by my supporters, my opponents spent three." Among Taft's free-spending opponents, the subcommittee was told, was Cleveland Financier Cyrus S. Eaton. Witnesses said that Eaton and his associates had dished, out a total of $35,000. Republican donors were a little harder to trace. Taft's campaign treasurer, Ben Tate, blandly admitted destroying his itemized records of some contributions.

Whatever the figures cited, they were a far cry from the $25,000 limit set on a Senator's campaign spending by the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, a limit so low that almost any candidate in the age of television must evade it to make a serious campaign. (This is done by organizing all sorts of "independent committees" not legally under the candidate's control.) The subcommittee's problem--and its purpose in staging the hearing--was to figure out some new and workable set of ground rules for U.S. elections.

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