National Affairs: The Drummer

Through four Ohio counties last week, Senator Robert Taft methodically toted his political sample bag, dispensing his own brand of anti-Fair Deal specifics. He had abandoned his upturned Panama for a nondescript grey fedora. Grinning, never argumentative, spouting statistics and shaking his forefinger, he trotted from Cleveland to Parkman to Painesville to Warren and points between, opening his bag and displaying his wares.

What he was trying to sell, he explained, was a middle way. Said Drummer Taft: “There is a middle way. We need not agree with those who want government to run their daily lives and look after the welfare of every citizen to the destruction of individual liberty and incentive and progress. On the other hand, we need not agree with those who refuse any interest on the part of the Federal Government.”

Government, said Taft, had an obligation to help those who simply could not help themselves. On that principle he estimated the Taft program for housing, health, education and relief would cost only $1 billion a year; in contrast, he figured, the Fair Deal line which Harry Truman was peddling would cost the country $14 billion a year.

Touring a rubber factory (nonunion) he laid out his labor line. The Taft-Hartley Act was designed to cut down the power of labor bosses, he explained, just as the Sherman Act had been designed to cut down the power of covetous industrialists. Carbon-begrimed workers, some of them Amishmen with stony faces and beards, listened carefully and thoughtfully applauded him.

Only once was he booed: at the Cleveland air races, by two large, anonymous men sitting in the spectators’ section marked “Public Officials.” The rest of the time he was well received. At a luncheon on his 60th birthday, the Republicans of Parkman sang “Happy Birthday, dear Bob.” At Lakewood’s Westlake Hotel at a gathering of 400 clubwomen, a lady soloist sang Thank God for a Garden, coming down hard on the last line: “Thank God for you.” She meant the Senator, she explained.

Facing the fight of his life for re-election in 1950, Taft felt encouraged. Despite the brassy threats of organized labor, no one with a chance of outselling him had yet appeared. The Democrats’ popular Governor Frank Lausche had already all but taken himself out of the race. Cleveland’s Mayor Tom Burke, the only other Democrat with a solid chance of beating Taft, was showing a marked reluctance to get into the fight. Taft felt so encouraged that he remarked to a friend: “I feel too good too early.”