National Affairs: Mr. Republican Goes to Ohio

A long-legged man with a slight paunch climbed into his 1948 Plymouth sedan in Washington last week, settled his Panama on his head and headed for Cleveland. The back of his car was piled with suitcases and a filing cabinet full of material for speeches. Sunday afternoon, with an ear-to-ear grin wreathing his spectacled face, he drove into Cleveland’s southeast end and walked into the Cloverleaf Café. “Hey boys,” said someone, “here’s Senator Taft.”

With the 1950 political campaign still more than a year away, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft had taken to the hustings. The very first day he got down to business; a committee met him at the Cloverleaf and escorted him to a nearby hall where he addressed 350 delegates to the state convention of the Polish Legion of American Veterans.

From Cleveland he bustled through three other of Ohio’s big industrial counties. In the next 13 weeks he would cover some 84 more, appearing in the Senate only for important votes. The forthright and worried Taft made no secret of the reason for this activity. Confronted with an extraordinarily violent opposition, he faced defeat for reelection.

“Cost What It Will.” Organized labor was out to punish him for being the author of the Taft-Hartley Act and leader of the forces that blocked its repeal. “Cost what it will,” the A.F.L.’s William Green had vowed, “we are going to bring about the defeat of the outstandingly reprehensible Senator Taft.” A.F.L. and C.I.O. leaders were prepared to spend millions (collected in $1 and $2 rank & file assessments) to defeat him. He had angered

Truman Democrats by his blunt attacks on the socialistic tendencies of the Fair Deal. He stood for a conservative-liberal philosophy which could support certain federal grants for social welfare, but opposed any further spread of federal power or of the welfare state. On these issues the G.O.P. had a case to make, and in the Senate Ohio’s Taft made it. His fellow Ohioan, Clarence Brown, called him “Mr. Republican.” To Big Labor and the Truman Democrats he was both a leading Republican and an uncompromising obstacle in their paths: they were determined to knock him off.

Politics on Platters. He had actually started his campaign in June when he began writing a column for Ohio newspapers. He distributed it without charge; 180 Ohio dailies and weeklies carried it. He also made a recording a week of his political observations and sent the platters to 40 Ohio radio stations.

The alert Taft machine got an early jump in a fast political maneuver. Ohio ballots now list candidates under the party label so that voters can vote a straight ticket by making one cross at the top of the ballot. Taft people saw the hazard in this for their candidate. The Democratic ticket would be headed by popular, thin-skinned and independent Frank John Lausche, who probably would be running for re-election as governor. Lausche’s name was enough to pull thousands of straight party votes so that any Tom, Dick or Joe, running as a Democratic candidate for the Senate, might slip in.

The Taft forces got some 400,000 signatures on a petition to change to the “Massachusetts ballot,” which requires voting for each separate office. On that kind of ballot Taft would win or lose on his own name. Ohio will vote on the petition in November.

Tom or Joe. What Tom, Dick or Joe will Taft have to beat? So far embarrassed anti-Taft forces didn’t know. Lausche had shown no desire to get in a mortal combat with Taft. Besides, he rather liked Taft and had publicly said so.

With Lausche out, the field was open but the crop was poor. The C.I.O. wanted Murray Danforth Lincoln, a lanky, transplanted Yankee, executive secretary of Ohio’s Farm Bureau Federation. The trouble with Lincoln, who had voted from the beginning for Franklin Roosevelt, was that he was a registered Republican. Tom

Burke, running for re-election this fall as Cleveland’s mayor, was a better bet.

One Democrat was already in the field:

State Auditor “Jumping Joe” Ferguson. A sign on his desk reads: “The politician thinks about the next election; the statesman thinks about the next generation.” Joe was plainly thinking about the next election. Said he: “There ain’t nobody going to get me out of this race.”

Not for—Against. Against the formidable Taft, who had had his hand in virtually every important piece of domestic legislation acted on by the 80th and 81st Congresses, none of these possible Democratic candidates appeared to loom very large. But the opposition recalled how Taft had barely squeaked through against William Pickrel, a comparatively unknown Dayton lawyer, in 1944. Pickrel had faithfully echoed the policies of F.D.R. Since then Taft had made enemies by his astringent honesty, had probably lost some friends by doggedly following his conscience. The anti-Taft forces counted on a majority of Ohioans voting not for somebody but against Bob Taft—voting against Mr. Republican.

Taft himself had to admit the possibility; that was why he was in Ohio this week, worried and working. Taft’s defeat could well mark the end for years to come of any coherent opposition to the Fair Deal. “And if he wins,” hazarded an Ohio newspaper, editor, “he’ll be the next Republican presidential candidate.” It was obviously too soon for such talk, though it would not down. At least, with Taft, the G.O.P. would be able—in fact forced —to make a frontal attack on all those issues which were slicked over and evaded in the G.O.P.’s overconfident 1948 campaign. Standing on such a hot and public spot, Mr. Republican in Ohio began the biggest fight of his political career.