NEW YORK: Something New

From a distance it looked like a dull campaign between two dignified, successful and high-minded men. But in New York State’s special election for a vacated seat in the U.S. Senate there was the sound of drums. The most emphatic thumps came from the Republican camp. There, looking worried and work-worn, stood John Foster Dulles, the son of a Presbyterian minister, an ex-Wall Street lawyer and an eminent internationalist. He was doing something not to be expected of a Republican candidate of New York.

Dulles was campaigning forthrightly on the proposition that just about everything in the Fair Deal was wrong. His good friend Governor Thomas E. Dewey had never been so bold: he had given his approval to most items of Harry Truman’s program before saying that he could do them better. Republican Senator Irving Ives had been elected as a liberal, especially sympathetic to much of the New Deal’s labor legislation. But, making his first plunge into county-level politics, conservative, 61-year-old Senator John Foster Dulles could not be accused of “me-tooing.”

“On Leash.” The Fair Deal, said Dulles, was a package labeled “Something for Nothing.” The Brannan plan was “economic jabberwocky”; if it worked, it would be “the most amazing miracle since the loaves and the fishes.” Federal aid to education meant federal-controlled schools. The Democratic Party, like the Communists, was “pretending a great love for human welfare that can find expression only by giving more & more power to the all-powerful central government.”

In a chartered bus, rumpled Candidate Dulles rode up & down the state, talking conversationally to small groups of people in the small cities and the small towns. Incidentally he argued how important he thought it was for him to go back to the Senate (“I am the most formidable single opponent that the Russians have”), but principally he lambasted a political philosophy which he said would put the U.S. people “on leash from birth to death to a federal bureaucracy.”

“Galloping Backward.” Indignantly, the Democratic Party took up the challenge. With a pearl-grey fedora planted symmetrically on his grey-fringed head 71-year-old Herbert Lehman, Dulles’ opponent, stumped the state. A Wall Streeter himself* for ten years (1933-43), an able governor of New York, Candidate Lehman went down the line for the Fair Deal, with occasional speechwriting assists from old Roosevelt Speechwriter Judge Sam Rosenman.

He was for human welfare. In Herbert Lehman’s dictionary, welfare meant “condition of health, happiness, prosperity.” What was wrong with that? “This is the bogyman they have set up which is supposed to frighten the wits out of us.” Did Dulles think of himself as a Paul Revere spreading the alarm? Scoffed Lehman: Dulles is “galloping backward.”

“If You Could See . . .” As the battle wore on, something else special emerged from it. Lehman lifted one sentence from a Dulles speech. Recalling that Lehman got 435,000 votes from the Communist-dominated American Labor Party in 1946, Dulles had said to an audience in the upstate town of Geneseo: “If you could see the kind of people in New York City making up this bloc that is voting for my opponent, if you could see them with your own eyes . . . you would be out, every last man & woman of you, voting on Election Day.”

The Lehman forces knew when they had something they could exploit. Dulles could be made to appear as an enemy of all of New York City’s great foeign-born and second-generation population. Lehman accused him of arraying “class against class,” of playing “the part of bigot.”

Dulles retorted angrily that Lehman had quoted him out of context (which he had) and that his record “gave the lie” to Lehman’s charges. Democratic Elder Statesman Bernard Baruch and Cleveland’s Zionist Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver wrote Dulles to denounce the bigotry charges as groundless. Nevertheless, the Lehman forces continued to pound away on the bigotry note, day in, day out, from every political rostrum.

In the final days before next week’s election, the Democrats wheeled up some of their biggest percussion instruments: two Cabinet members (Tobin and McGrath), two Roosevelts (Eleanor and F.D.R. Jr.), Vice President Alben Barkley. Belting odds were about 7 to 5 against Dulles. The Truman Democrats weren’t taking any chances. Republican me-tooism had become a familiar tactic, to be met with standard countertactics. John Foster Dulles’ campaign was something new in recent New York State politics, and Fair Dealers wanted to be sure that the idea wasn’t contagious.

* Wealthy Herbert Lehman is a retired partner in Lehman Bros., investment bankers, which Dulles’ old law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell represents.