The Republicans and Their Party
BY D. W. BROGAN AMERICAN politics have seldom been, in one sense, more easy, in another more difficult, to understand and to make comprehensible to the British reader than they are in the late summer of 1956. From one point of view, all is simple. Despite the dangers of prophecy, it is not being over-bold to predict that the Republicans will nominate Messrs. Eisenhower and Nixon and that they will be elected, no matter who is nominated by the Democrats. But—and it is a revealing but—the Democrats may keep `control' of the House of Representatives and, in my guess, are likely to increase their narrow margin in the Senate. The Republican 'administration' will win, but the Republican Party will not. And, of course, if the President should fall seriously ill again, not all the medical skill of Mr. James Hagerty and all the political devotion of Dr. Paul Dudley White will serve to temper the shock. Public faith has been strained by the way the second illness has been treated and 1 fear that not even the arts of Madison Avenue will suffice if the President has to take more time off for illness, even if the illness is one of those attacks that are all for the good. Already, the con- trast between public and private comment is ominous of a crisis in faith. American banks don't like overdrafts; neither does the American voter. The public relations account of the administration is in the black—just. If it goes into the red, all bets are off.
But, medical speculation apart, the Eisenhower administra- tion can look forward to a renewal of its mandate, and the British public still. I think, accustomed to thinking of a Republican administration as dangerous, almost illegitimate, might profitably devote some time to discovering something about the `Grand Old Party,' to asking the question, Is it still the party of Henry Cabot Lodge and of Calvin Coolidge? For this is a question that will be highly important in 1960 and may well be very important much sooner, and it is a question that the British voter, MP, possibly even Cabinet Minister, is not accustomed to ask. And, a notable pheno- menon, it is a question that is being asked in the United States. For after nearly four years of Republican rule the American voter is still puzzled, still wonders what the party stands for and still wonders whether there is a Republican Party. Of course, if you start from the premise that there is only one tolerable and rational system of party govern- ment, that well-tried British system that has led us from triumph to triumph, all over the globe, there is nothing more to be said. If this be so. the Republican Party (like the Democratic Party) is a sham, with neither unity of doctrine nor of command. We can only murmur, 'Non ragionam di lor,' and step aside to await and applaud anoth,er strong statement from Downing Street. If we do this we shall be refusing to understand the nature of the world that we live in, imitating, that is to say, the unreconstructed isolationist Republicans whose influence we deplore when we do not ignore it.
It is more rational to study, for a moment, the questions that Americans are putting and the answers they are getting. One question of burning interest to the practising politician is of interest to our politicians, too. Has the rapid upward movement of the American urban masses, upward in economic scale, upward and outward (to the suburbs) in geographical position, permanently weakened the hold of the Democrats on the once suffering masses? Does the good Democrat who leaves the city street, the tenement, the apartment in the old brownstone house, for the new, green suburbs, for the vast encampments of Long Island or Cook County, take on the colour of his new surrotmdings where it is not quite nice to be a Democrat, where social promotion involves silence if you are still a Democrat and may be accelerated if you can convincingly denounce FDR for whom you wish to forget that you voted four times? Nobody is quite sure, but it is possible that, as Professor Moos* suggests, the greatly increased numbers of voters who refuse to disclose their party affiliations represent in part the ex-Democrats on the move, alienated by prosperity from their old party, not yet quite ready to go over to the Republicans. Is the class war in decline, the average American ready to trust the party of the businessman as he did in the Twenties—with results not yet really forgotten even if it is Democratic bad manners to recall them? No one knows, but Mr. Larsont argues, with a good deal of force, that he is, that a new 'American con- sensus' is being created, that the class problems of Europe (and Asia) have no meaning in this 'brave new world' where only unemployed Democrats and disgruntled café intellectuals doubt that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds under the rule of a new Republican Party that alone has a doctrine and a practice adequate for the times. It will not do to dismiss this doctrine out of hand. I know how sterile, how empty, how lacking in deeper values is the American gadget civilisation. Don't I listen to much intellectual conversation in London, Paris, New York and Cambridge (Mass.)? I am willing to be told by those people in Britain who never refer to the Labour Party but always to the Labour movement that the British worker doesn't want deep freezes, more commercial TV, a car, all the mere 'comforts of the Saltmarket,' that like Rob Roy he despises bourgeois ideals and achievements. The American worker and his wife don't; they like these things and they have never had so many of them before. 'They have,' to quote a Democratic campaign slogan that had backfired, 'never had it so good.' In 1952 what held millions to the Democratic forlorn hope was the fear that the triumph of the Republicans meant unemployment, crude business rule, war against `labor.' These fears have been, so far, proven. false. There has never been more prosperity, more widely spread; there has been no war on 'labor.' The Taft-Hartley Act is still on the statute books, unamended, but Labour seems none the worse. Indeed, in an election year, the unions may be better off under a Republication administration that business desperately wants to see continue in office. It is widely believed that there was plenty of political pressure behind the recent settlement of the steel strike, that the rulers of the steel com- panies were reminded of their political duty not to upset the apple cart in an election year and that they gave way lesi in kindness of heart than in political obedience. No Democratic administration could make such an appeal effectively. Maybe 'neutralism' pays the unions, for if it were certain that all union members would vote Democratic anyway, the steel bosses might be ready to fight it out in the old way if it took all summer. Anyway, the gloomiest Democratic prognostica- tions of 1952 have proved wrong—so far.
And yet doubts remain. The great business chiefs in Washington, spokesmen for such sacred names as Marcus A. Hanna and GENERAL MOTORS (lower case is not adequate for such a name) may respect and fear Walter Reuther, of the Automobile Workers, and like and respect David McDonald, of the Steelworkers, but they speak from opposite sides of the table, and of the tracks. The inhabitants of Grosse Pointe and the auto-workers of Pontiac are, no doubt, less divided than they would be in England by speech, manner, social ambition, educational level. But they are divided. Can the average American businessman learn to control his tongue and his temper when interfered with in the management of his business? No one knows, and until the answer is known— and is known to be `yes'—the Republican politicians can't be relaxed. Another gaffe by 'Engine Charley' Wilson may cost them some hundreds of thousands of votes and further rivet the yoke of Governor Mennen Williams and of Walter Reuther on Michigan. I don't quite agree with Professor Moos that as Michigan goes, so goes the political nation, but the steady growth of a Labour-dominated Democratic Party in the home state of Ford and of GENERAL MOTORS is something to be pondered by optimistic Republicans like Mr. Larson.
He is, of course, ingeniously sophistical as well as optimistic. Some of his dialectical shifts do credit to his Oxford education, but there is a good deal of truth in his general argument. The Eisenhower administration has known and, to some degree, created an 'era of good feelings.' Democrats, knifed in the back by Mr. Nixon or in the front by Mr. Brownell, may find this statement odd, but the man in the street is not interested in the finer feelings of politicians or easily made indignant by their sufferings. He is inclined to take the line of Mr. Truman who, so it is reported, remarked when told how hurt General Eisenhower was by criticism, 'Well if he doesn't like the heat, why doesn't he stay out of the kitchen?' And there are advantages in having American businessmen in a good temper. The American people still trust them to make the day-to-day economic decisions, to run the economy. This attitude may be esthetically and morally repellent to enemies of an acquisitive society, but it is a fact about the United States. There is absolutely no demand for the managerial services of, say, Mr. John Strachey and very little for the managerial services of British higher civil service types.
But the American voter doesn't really want all power in the hands of the managers. That is why he puts up with such unideological politicians and even listens, with some complacency, to Mr. Truman giving them hell. He may read of Mr. Larson's ten million entrepreneurs but he doesn't really believe that the tenant of the corner drug-store or filling station, even the car salesman with the GENERAL MOTORS franchise, is an entrepreneur in any important sense. It is the duty of the Republican politician to bridge this gap, to make the average man feel that his needs are understood by the big boys. And, as Professor Moos laments, the average Republican businessman who is a real entrepreneur finds it hard to understand the self-importance of a Senator. He is wrong, but it is not yet certain that he knows that he is wrong.
To marry the politicians, the average voters and the Republi- can business High Command—that is the job that General Eisenhower set himself in 1953 when he took office equipped with immense popularity, varied experience out- side the United States and a simpliciste view of American politics that would be surprising in a French intellectual. 'The Education of Dwight D. Eisenhower' might be the title of Mr. Donovan's fascinating and unprecedented book.$ Americans have not much use for privacy, especially in public affairs, but the candour of Mr. Donovan's revelations is unprecedented. Thus we learn that, having experienced at first hand that there was little in common between himself and the Republican leadership in Congress, President Eisenhower seriously thought of founding a new party ! No wonder this revelation has provoked the rage of columnists like Mr. David Lawrence and Mr. Raymond Moley for whom the present Republican Party is plenty good enough ! But the gap remains. The Republican Party that Mr. Larson talks of has only an umbilical connection with the party of Senator Knowland and. Representative Martin, not to speak of Messrs. McCarthy, Jenner, Malone, Welker. Will the congressional mother over- lay the presidential child? No one knows, but some of the fears that a possible or probable presidency of Mr. Nixon awakens, arise from just such fears.
It is in the last Eisenhower term that the conversion must be carried through. And there is a danger to which constant reading of the Spectator has possibly made me excessively sensitive. There is an air of secure wealth about the Eisenhower administration that may prove politically expen- sive in an economic or external crisis. It was a little ominous to learn from Mr. Donovan that the meeting at which General Clay told the most representative members of the Republican business High Command that Ike would run again took place at the Link Club. I know, as all students of the matter must, that really 'LI' institutions are impossible in the United States.
CLARENCE STREET, CHELTENHAM • # EISENHOWER: THE INSIDE STORY. By Robert J. Donovan. (Harper
and Brothers, $4.50.)
But, pace Miss Mitford, the Link Club is what Americans think of as a 'V institution. What could defeat all projects of a renewal in life for a Republican Party that will, sooner or later, have to get along without General Eisenhower, would be the successful tying on to it of the label of being an organ of an American 'Establishment.' For what that can do to a triumphant conservative party, the friends of General Eisenhower have only to look across the Atlantic.
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