REPUBLICANS: The Man from Minnesota

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There are few categories of human endeavor in which men are not discouraged by a lack of response from the world around them. But disciples of new prophets, managers of young Dempseys and mothers of prodigies usually experience nothing more painful than lofty anticipation when the public ignores their secret. Last week, by virtue of the same sort of faith in a sure thing, thousands of U.S. citizens reacted like Geiger counters to a completely unradioactive fragment of political news:’ Minnesota’s Republican ex-Governor Harold Stassen had started on a vacation.

It was not the type of holiday on which most bigwigs of U.S. politics were likely to embark. Involved were no state troopers, autograph seekers, photographers, special trains or big names. Big (6 ft. 3 in., 210 Ibs.), balding Harold Stassen just got into his 1946 Ford sedan and drove from South St. Paul to Lake Michigan’s Sturgeon Bay, with his wife, Esther, his children, Glen, u, and Kathleen, 5, and the family dog, Duke. At the end of the six-hour, 321-mile trip, he lugged suitcases into a small rented cottage, changed into faded Navy khaki and settled down for two weeks of loafing, swimming, reading and old-fashioned porch-sitting.

No Crash. There was only one break in this pastoral routine. This week, Harold Stassen flew to Flat Top, W. Va., for a long-planned engagement to address the reunion of the famed Lilly family.* Standing on windswept Flat Top Mountain, he told thousands of Lillyans of his interview last spring with Generalissimo Stalin in the Kremlin. He said Stalin asked him if he expected an economic crash in the U.S. and that he replied: “No, I am confident that we have found the way to improve our system of government. We are determined to find a way to bring prices down and keep wages at their prosperous levels.”

Then he flew back to Sturgeon Bay and got back into old clothes again.

What Comes Naturally. Stassen fans, as well as the original Stassen faithful—mostly men & women from Minneapolis, St. Paul and the Minnesota farm lands—applauded this complete absence of foofooraw. They liked to think of their man resting up after the heat wave. It was, after all, the last vacation Harold Stassen was likely to have for a long time. In the months which followed, they were sure he would become leader of what he called a “new, liberal, humanitarian” Republican Party and be elected President of the United States.

The Stassenites were not perturbed by the fact that many in the U.S. thought of them as impractical zealots, or that Stassen’s Gallup poll rating had sunk in the last 15 months from 34% to 15%. They listened with patient and slightly puzzled expressions to a question-&-answer joke which politicians of both parties were happily repeating among themselves:

Q. What politician believes Harold Stassen will be nominated?

A. Harold Stassen.

That, a good Stassen man was apt to answer, was the whole point. Harold Stassen did believe that he was going to be President. He had naturally proceeded to become a candidate for President when he left the Navy in November 1945, and he -had been running for President ever since. Any follower guilty of flagging faith had only to contemplate the candidate’s prodigious endeavors and remind himself that Harold Stassen was not a man to 1) waste his time, or 2) run out of wind before the race was over.

In 21 months of steady campaigning, Stassen had traveled through 40 of the 48 states, had made speeches before 250 audiences, which included women’s garden clubs, university commencement crowds, community forums, and G.O.P. clambakes. He had developed so wide a reputation as a lecturer (at fees of from $500 to $1,000).that he received a steady average of 20 speaking invitations a week. He had also written twelve magazine articles, and a book to be published this fall. He had earned $42,000 in 1946 (almost all of which was eaten up by the expenses of campaigning).

On a nine-week trip through Europe, he had investigated the black market in Italy, conferred with President Auriol in France, Jan Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Clement Attlee in England. He went to Leningrad, visited Russia’s famed 40-acre art museum, the Hermitage. Climax of the tour was his interview with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin, at the time of the ill-starred Moscow Conference.

Five Themes. In almost every speech, article and interview, Harold Stassen had sounded the five basic, general themes which constitute his political philosophy: ¶ A belief in international cooperation and a successful U.N., coupled with an awareness that the atomic bomb must have an answer other than war. ¶ A conviction that democratic capitalism and Communism are basically “competitive” systems and that capitalism must and will win. ¶ A faith in the U.S. as not only the best hope of democratic capitalism, but as a nation which has not yet reached its full flower of production under free enterprise. ¶ A view that organized labor must not be shackled, but that, if made responsible, it will share fully in an expanding economy. (He endorsed the Taft-Hartley Act in general, but criticized its anti-closed-shop provision, its ban against the use of union funds for political activity.) ¶ A hope and a determination to liberalize the Republican Party.

Plain Man. Thus, in 21 months, the U.S. had almost daily opportunity to study Harold Stassen, the free-wheeling political phenomenon, his plans, his thinking, his reaction to the crisis of the postwar world. But Harold Stassen the man (about whom he did no talking) was a little harder to see.

At 40, Presidential Aspirant Harold Stassen is a complex human being. He is, first and foremost, a Minnesota Midwesterner, a farmer’s son, a plain man, proud of his birthright. The evidences of these traits are everywhere about him. He wears neat, store-bought $50 suits (picked out by his wife), keeps his coat on and neatly buttoned when receiving visitors, even on the hottest day. He does not smoke; as a good Baptist he seldom swears, and he limits “his social drinking to two highballs.

His three-room office suite in St. Paul’s Pioneer Building is small, clean and quiet, the frosted-glass door bears nothing but the simply lettered legend: Harold E. Stassen. The cream-colored walls of his private office have a bare look; framed on them are his diploma from Humboldt (St. Paul) High School, an honorary LL.D. from MacMurray College for Women, a Legion of Merit citation signed by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, a picture of Stassen signing the U.N. Charter in San Francisco. Stassen’s desk is kept equally bare; it bears a two-pen desk set with one pen missing, a pad, a calendar (with the sheets never quite torn off to the right date) and a telephone. He has no nervous mannerisms except that, when talking on the telephone, he doodles. When he was interviewed one day last week, he had been doodling “June, 1946.”

Family Man. He is obviously proud of his even-tempered, well-groomed wife and of his children. His political success has caused no change at all in his easy, affectionate relations with his father, burly, overalled Farmer William Stassen, his brothers, William, a sheet-metal worker, Elmer, a grocer, and Arthur, a state employee. His tall, handsome sister, Mrs. Violet Crawford, runs his office.

But Plain Man Harold Stassen is also, in the old U.S. tradition, an ambitious man who hungers for success and is willing to work for it. He likes to run things and can impose a tremendous amount of discipline on himself. Few men in public life have exhibited more sympathy for the ordinary man, more understanding of the hopes and fears of the average citizen. Stassen has an ease and frankness of manner, a clarity of thought and expression which consistently disarm his critics. As a campaigner, he is an affable, tireless, smiling hulk of a man who can shake a thousand hands and make the last man feel that the gesture came from his heart. But he is a man with few intimates.

Hard Beginning. In one sense, he has been running for President all his life. He has been in politics ever since he organized the University of Minnesota’s fraternity men into a Gopher Party in 1925 and got himself elected president of the student body. He always won. In winning and in administering public office, he has always carefully set the stage for bigger things.

The beginnings of his public career were hard. He drove himself into a state of exhaustion during his last two years in the University of Minnesota law school. On graduation, he filed for county attorney of Dakota County, then discovered that he had contracted tuberculosis in one lung. He went to Pokegama Sanatorium at Pine City, 60 miles north of St. Paul, spent the next four months on his back with the lung collapsed. Then he came home and went to bed again.

Most of his campaigning was done by his law partner and his oldest friend, a short, articulate Irishman named Elmer Ryan. Stassen was elected, and went on resting. By the time he took office in 1930 at the age of 23, he was completely cured. Navy physical exams in 1942 disclosed no sign of the disease, and Stassen is rated a preferred insurance risk.

During two terms as county attorney in the troubled days of the depression, he showed a particular genius for settling labor disturbances. He also turned a clear and critical eye on the left-wingers who composed Minnesota’s uproarious Farmer-Labor Administration. He decided that a Stassen Administration could do better. He was the state’s outstanding Republican at 29, and he was governor at 31.

The War Years. He was re-elected twice—the last time after explaining that he proposed to go on active duty in the Navy almost immediately. (He has run in five elections in his life, won them all.) To the lieutenant governorship, Minnesota gladly voted his choice for a successor, Edward Thye, now U.S. Senator from

Minnesota. Six months later, Lieut. Commander (later Captain) Stassen, still the kingpin of Minnesota Republicans, was in the Navy. He felt that he owed his service to his country. He also knew that military service might well prove a political asset. He was an excellent officer.

He got one big break. He requested combat duty and was sent to famed Admiral Bill Halsey’s staff—a piece of luck such as few fresh-water reserve officers enjoyed. But after that he made his own way. His first interview with the Admiral was one of the shortest in naval history. Growled Halsey: “Are you down here to work?” Said Stassen: “Yes, sir.” That was all.

But those who suspected he was in the Navy only for effect soon revised their opinion. He was the ideal naval administrator—big, neat, quiet, orderly and a bear for work. Halsey made him his flag secretary—chief administrative officer of headquarters ashore, and an assistant chief of staff at sea—and began calling him Harold.

Lucky Stassen. He saw action as Halsey’s observer during a naval engagement off Empress Augusta Bay, and began to be regarded as a sort of human charm: his ship was hit twice and frequently straddled by gunfire but it suffered little damage. He saw more action after that—many an officer was comforted to see him on the bridge of the Admiral’s flagship during the vicious and decisive Battles of the Philippine Sea. Sailormen took to the custom of patting his khaki shirt, just for luck.

He returned to the U.S. before the war was over. Franklin Roosevelt had, to Commander Stassen’s private amazement, appointed him a delegate to the San Francisco Conference. But he was back with Halsey when the fleet moved into Tokyo Bay. There his big job was to get U.S. prisoners of war out of bondage. He began at a camp near Tokyo called Omori Prison Camp No. 8, was wildly cheered by gaunt

Americans, including famed Marine Corps Ace Colonel Gregory (“Pappy”) Boyington. Then he was challenged by a Japanese colonel who said, stiffly: “I have no authority to release these prisoners to you.” Said Stassen: “Colonel, you have no authority, period.” Stassen went sleepless for the first 70 hours; in 14 days he got 13,000 men to hospital ships.

Then he came back to civilian life, and to his endurance race toward the White House.

How much had he accomplished? What were his real chances?

Suspicion. Among the rank & file of politicians, the boys who know the ropes, no one laughs at Harold Stassen. Although many of them think that he has talked too early and too much, they have nothing but admiration for the way he has performed his enormous job of campaigning. But most of them watch him as they would watch a good thoroughbred galloping along the street outside the track —no matter how fast he runs, they cannot see how he can get past the judges’ stand.

Some of them are willing to concede that, if he could be nominated, Stassen might run a better race than either Tom Dewey or Bob Taft. Among other things, he could, more than any other Republican, be counted on to woo away the votes of citizens who supported F.D.R. but do not like Harry Truman. But he has to be nominated first.

To throw doubt on Stassen’s devotion to party responsibility, Old Guardists often try to link him with Wendell Willkie, who became a registered Republican less than a year before he became the party’s nominee. The Old Guard remembers with malice that Harold Stassen, the young keynoter of the 1940 convention, decided at the last minute to be Wendell Willkie’s floor manager, too, and that he was a driving force in the revolt that gave Willkie the nomination. The rest of that bit of history is that Stassen broke with Willkie after 1940. He gave an extraordinarily cool review to Willkie’s One World on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and he refused to go along with Willkie in the latter’s fight to name the G.O.P. national chairman in 1942. Unlike Willkie, Stassen has been a Republican all his life.

The Gladiators. Among political observers, there is now a growing feeling that the G.O.P. convention at Philadelphia next year will be a real horse race, and that there will be no silver-platter nomination. To this feeling, the rise of Harold Stassen has contributed considerably. Political prognosticators guess that Taft and Dewey will gointo the convention more or less neck-&-neck—with between 300 and 400 votes apiece. They are certain that Stassen will have less than 100. Stassen is not the first man who is regularly named as the compromise candidate. The vision of General Dwight D. Eisenhower stamped—ing the convention is also coming to look more & more like a possibility.

Over the past few months, Stassen has listened to such political shop talk coolly and appraisingly, like a man watching the gunnery calculations before a salvo is fired. His backers insist that G.O.P. bigwigs, camped in Washington, are still underestimating the effectiveness of their candidate’s missionary work within the party. He has done his persuasive best to help the campaigns of young G.O.P. candidates. In his months of travel, Stassen has talked to a score of state chairmen and other Republican local officials. When he met men who were backing either Taft or Dewey he did not argue—he simply asked, “Who is your second choice?” and went on from there doing his best to win friends and influence people.

But Stassen and his cohorts have a more dynamic basis for their complete confidence in victory. The Man from Minnesota who believes that “if we are right, we will win,” proposes to convince the plain U.S. voter, and through him the politician, that he deserves the presidency.

The Arena. As he went on vacation, Harold Stassen disagreed with the theory that he had campaigned too early. He believed that he had drawn both Taft and Dewey into the arena far ahead of their own schedules, and now had a better chance to grapple with them before the great, critical voting public. He had slung a sharp stone at the complacent figure of Dewey-on-vacation by announcing that he would refuse under all circumstances to run with him for the vice-presidency.

Stassen considered his rigorous, exhausting early campaign a mere warmup for the main event, proposed to unleash something far bigger in the autumn. He would run in the Wisconsin primary next April, and was sure he could avoid the kind of Waterloo which ended Willkie’s hopes in 1944. He had powerful friends in Wisconsin, among them U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and State G.O.P. Boss Tom Coleman.

A check by TIME correspondents last week indicated that Harold Stassen has a rocky road ahead. A few citizens confessed that they had no idea who Harold Stassen is. But the poll also revealed that many a voter likes the idea of Harold Stassen in the White House—even if he does not think seriously that he can make it.

It is Harold Stassen’s belief that he has the endurance and the ability to work a change in the vast, yeasty face of U.S. public opinion. One thing was certain: the U.S. public, which too often places its faith in polls, like a racing fan watching the odds instead of the horse, also owed itself a steady and calculating look at the Man from Minnesota.

* Clannish U.S. descendants of the French family De Lisle, some of whose members followed William the Conqueror to England in 1066, changed their name to Lilly.