National Affairs: On Revival Day

In the blue glare of immense spotlights, to the roar of 15,000 throats, the rousing toot-&-boom of brass bands, Republican doctors worked feverishly over the moribund GOP in Cleveland, June 1936. The patient stirred briefly, collapsed in November. Dreary days followed for the Republican Party. The little flicker of life wavered, almost went out. Yet up-&-down the land plodded one yea-saying, stubborn prophet, preaching Principles, an old-fashioned sermon that was drowned out in the pounding, recurrent crescendos of New Deal swing music.

Herbert Hoover argued about such things as liberty. Practical GOPoliticians, running for their lives to the hills, threw him a scornful glance over their shoulders. In the lean days that followed, these harried GOPartisans came out of their fastnesses only to make hungry forays on the fat New Deal outposts. They had little time or inclination to bother with Prophet Hoover.

Poles apart were such men as Mr. Hoover and Massachusetts’ House GOPilot, Joe Martin. The Hoover theorists counseled never-say-die, no-retreat, hold-that-line, polished up their armor for The Day. The practical Martin men were busy bending before the storm, counseled silence, watchfulness, strategy.

Yet by last week the course of political events had brought the two camps of opposites together in one compact Republican army, had clothed them in the same uniforms, issued them the same ammunition. The ammunition was a 33,000-word document laboriously assembled and polished by Glenn Frank, author, educator and political history savant, and some tenscore advisers.

The theorists had become pragmatic, the practical were now willing to take a few theories. The scent of battle, and not a hopeless battle, brought Republicans together in Washington last week. To them the New Deal Administration was like an overfat, overspread empire, whose sentinels are asleep, whose palaces are termite-rotten under the gilt. The hungry guerrillas peered at Glenn Frank’s battle-chart and sniffed the air.

The chart was a good one. Balding Mr. Frank used few purple words, stood hard on commonsense. “A Program for a Dynamic America” (see p. 21) tiptoed by a few apparently impregnable New Deal forts (reciprocal trade agreements, foreign policy), but where the defenses were low, it attacked mercilessly. Taking as one basic premise the statement “the New Deal misunderstands economic America,” the report smashed at what it termed defeatism and reaction in the New Deal, suggested that the passing of the frontier, the slowing-up of the birth rate did not necessarily mean that the nation’s plant was overbuilt, nor that industrial and fiscal stagnation must follow.

On labor the report hacked chiefly at the New Deal’s harried National Labor Relations Board, suggested an overhauling of the NLRAct—specifically, a separation of the judicial and administrative functions of NLRB.

The section most visibly marked with the committee’s sweat was that on a farm program. Here the program committee hung on the two-horned dilemma that has gored every New Deal effort to make sense of farm aid—i) price-wrecking farm surpluses, 2) the ancient gap between the prices a farmer gets and the prices he pays.

The program sensibly admitted that some temporary emergency farm policy must be devised to meet the problems of surplus and disparity, then charged that the New Deal failure was in placing emergency policies, “not economically sound for the long-haul,” on a permanent basis.

The program for Business differentiated between a system of free enterprise and a politically planned-and-dominated economy. The only qualifications on freedom of enterprise, said Mr. Frank, should be “protective” regulation (GOP), as distinguished from “restrictive” regulation (Democratic).

The document’s general forthrightness came cleanest in its politically audacious declaration for increased taxes on the middle brackets, if the national income fails to rise swiftly enough. Also dangerous political doctrine was a demand for reductions in high-bracket surtax rates.

The social program ardently wooed the Negro vote, arguing that the New Deal’s attention to Negro relief needs had actually operated to shunt Negroes out of normal productive enterprise into a status of a separate relief economy. A section on Housing demanded the stimulation of private enterprise to build 4,656,000 needed housing units.

The Republican National Committee, meeting last week in Washington, thanked Mr. Frank, ordered his work sent to every important Republican in the U. S.

In many a newspaper the program drew meager headlines; more exciting as immediate news had been the selection of Philadelphia as the convention city, of June 24 as the convention date. Dopesters had picked Chicago; GOP wiseacres wanted to meet in borderline Illinois. But Chicago’s Mayor Ed Kelly promised a mingy $125,000 to meet convention expenses; more eloquently Philadelphia’s Mayor Robert Lamberton promised to lay $200,000 on the line. Money talked.