Advice to Republicans

The Republican Party, which with blood in its eye has often gone gunning for professors, last week got some clear-eyed professorial advice. The advice came from Ohio Northern University’s Dr. Wilfred Ellsworth Binkley, history and political science professor. His new book, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (Knopf, $3.75), told Republicans: if they want to win the 1944 election they must find another Theodore Roosevelt.

Dr. Binkley’s was no hasty diagnosis.

His book is a painstaking, sobersided examination of the U.S. two-party system and its leaders. Advancing the thesis that the most successful U.S. political leaders have been masters of the art of “group diplomacy”—the bringing together of various interests—he comes to some shrewdly simple conclusions about Republicans and their party’s future.

Diagnosis. Dr. Binkley, although too conscientious a historian to be a partisan, is too good a Midwesterner not to wish Republicans well. And he knows, from his personal political experience as a delegate to party caucuses and conventions, as well as from his reading, that to defeat Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 the Republicans must offer the voters something more than another “return to normalcy.”

The Republican Party, Dr. Binkley points out, was originally a coalition party made up of “small enterprisers,” of farm and labor groups. Its labor strength was so important that at times the G.O.P. looked like an out-&-out labor party. Labor deserted the G.O.P. only after T.R., when Republican leadership passed to William Howard Taft, “Uncle Joe” Cannon and Charles Evans Hughes. Ergo, writes Dr. Binkley, the No. 1 job facing Republicans today is to get the labor and lower-income vote back. He summarizes: > “Rapidly growing organized labor, voting the Democratic ticket almost 3-to-1, will not be impressed by cautiously phrased platform planks perfunctorily approving collective bargaining.” (This advice went unheeded at the recent G. O. P. conferences in Mackinac.) > “It is one of the tragedies of the Republican Party today that despite its origin as the champion of free labor, despite the fact that Republican legislators in normally Republican states were pioneers in labor legislation . . . the party has permitted itself in the last generation to be maneuvered persistently into an anti-labor position by an element within the party that contributes campaign funds instead of votes.”

> “There would now seem to be no other way to a permanent Republican Party revival than deliberately to outbid the Democrats for the middle and lower-income groups. This is the inescapable lesson of 150 years of American party history.”

Medicine Man.

Diagnostician Binkley then concludes:

“In the long generation that has elapsed since Theodore Roosevelt . . . the Republican Party has not had one single national leader expert in the art of integrating the group combinations that constitute major political parties. . . .

“A crying need of the Republicans is a new set of emotional symbols … as in the grand days when concepts of freedom, the Union and the flag were confidently claimed as their own peculiar possessions.”

Looking back to the “grand days” of Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans everywhere will be inclined to agree with Historian Binkley. All they may want to know is where another T.R. can be found.