National Affairs: Binding Tie?

Like many another astute Republican, George Magoffin Humphrey is painfully aware of a mounting Midwest crisis for the G.O.P. Growing Old Guard resentment at Eisenhower Republicans has already cost the Republicans some key statehouses, congressional seats and a Wisconsin Senate seat, may inflict even more wounds in the 1958 congressional elections unless the right wing starts fighting Democrats instead of Ike Republicans. Visiting Chicago last week for what Illinois’ Governor William G. Stratton had proclaimed as “George Humphrey Day,” the ex-Treasury Secretary spoke at a fund-raising banquet in his honor, volunteered a Dutch uncle’s advice. Stop complaining about little things, he admonished, and start appreciating big accomplishments.

At a closed-door, pre-banquet luncheon before 150 G.O.P. fund raisers from nine Midwestern states, Humphrey tried to straighten some of the hair he had frizzed during the budget flap last winter, when he remarked that continued big budgets would bring on a hair-curling depression. Said he: “I think you might just as well admit that there is a wave of criticism, a wave of disappointment, a wave of complaint that is going all over the country-here in Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, in a lot of places. It is more prevalent with just the kind of people who are right here, the kind of. people who have done the work to furnish the money for these political campaigns.”

The Bright Future. Why did the wave occur? “I don’t know why,” said Humphrey. “It isn’t local, attributable to any one newspaper or anything of that kind. I have been trying to think what it is. I just wonder if perhaps it isn’t because this Eisenhower Administration has done such a tremendously successful job on the big things—on the things that got him elected. Each of us is thinking of some of the more minor things that we would like to have handled just the way we would have done, and one after another becomes dissatisfied with what is going on.”

That evening, in a jammed hotel ballroom, Humphrey proceeded to give more of his from-the-shoulder talk to 2,300 who had paid $100 a plate to hear it. The record of the Republican Administration, said he, “is a record of outstanding performance, and its promise for the future is bright if all of us will lay aside our little disagreements and will work . . . ”

Nodding Old Guard. “We have encouraged a rapidly rising economy which has brought more wealth, more purchasing power, more comfort, more jobs, more homes, more luxuries, more leisure, more education and more security to our people than they have ever enjoyed before. Do we want to lose this? Do we want to let some pet or personal scheme of our own keep us from going on with the fight? Do we want to have Republicans sit on their hands as some 500,000 of them did in Wisconsin the other day? I’ll say we don’t.”

At the close of the speech even the Old Guard people in the audience were nodding in agreement. Their reaction was a sign that George Humphrey, respected by business and trusted implicitly by Ike, could become the tie that would bind together the G.O.P.’s two wings in time for the 1958 elections.