ELECTIONS: Remember Maine

A grizzled oldster squinted out at the cattle ring of Maine’s Oxford County fair and twanged a fateful political declaration. “B’God,” said he, “I say I’ll vote for any man regardless of party if I like him.” Last week and thousands of other individualists in ironclad Republican Maine proceeded collectively to do the politically inconceivable: they elected a Democratic governor (for the first time since 1934). The winner by a resounding 22,000 votes over Republican Incumbent Burton Cross: Waterville Lawyer Edmund Sixtus Muskie, 40, in whose grey-blue eyes shines a light last seen in the early days of the New Deal.

Less dramatic, but equally worrisome to the national Republican Party, was the fact that the winning margin of G.O.P. Senator Margaret Chase Smith was off twelve percentage points from her margin in 1948. Likewise the winning margins of her three congressional running mates were off by an average twelve percentage points from 1952. Granted that they were running against tougher candidates; this, in itself, betokened better Democratic organization. A national trend one-half that strong would mean disaster for the Republicans this fall.

Budding Grass Roots. Last winter, as Democratic national committeeman, Ed Muskie was resigned to another Democratic licking. With just three weeks to go before the filing deadline, party funds were down to about $300, and willing candidates were conspicuously absent. Then Muskie detected a budding of the grass roots. Says he: “Towns that had never held a Democratic meeting started calling state headquarters and asking, ‘How do we hold a caucus?’ ”

Thus encouraged, Muskie went to work, managed to round up five good candidates for major offices—including himself and a senatorial aspirant (History “Professor Paul Fullam of Colby College) who quoted Socrates while explaining U.S. foreign policy. Using a catchy—and, for Republicans, ironic—slogan (“Maine needs a change”), Muskie made his fight on local issues. There were more than enough. Items:

¶The unseemly aroma of a liquor scandal, which Republicans survived in 1952, still hung over the state.

¶Aroostook County potato growers suffered from wet weather and were outraged by Governor Cross’s stand against price supports.

¶Textile workers worried about unemployment, and Governor Cross had made no practical attempts to lure new industry to Maine.

¶Clam diggers had their perennial complaint of flats closed because of pollution.

¶Sardine workers were hard up—as usual.

Maine-Street Campaign. Moreover, the three Republican bigwigs, Governor Cross, Senator Smith and Senator Frederick G. Payne, had all been working to build up their personal organizations, with little regard for the rapidly deteriorating Republican state machine. (Only at the end of the campaign did Maggie Smith publicly endorse Cross.) Topping all the other Republican problems was Cross’s personal unpopularity with the voters. Too unimaginative, tough and cold even for Maine, honest Burton Cross ran an ad ministration that was distinguished, as one observer put it, “for an everlasting aptitude for ineptitude.” Democrats made the most of his tactlessness, e.g., although he had conscientiously investigated the severe economic distress in Maine’s coastal area, he had remarked that the people would have to “lift themselves by their bootstraps.” After naming his campaign manager to Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court, Cross curtly informed newsmen that the governor was “not required to make any explanation” of court selections.

In perfect contrast to the forbidding Cross personality was the winning way of Ed Muskie, who toured the state three times in a handshaking Maine-Street campaign, and—a Catholic himself—managed to find a way to weld together the French-Catholic and the Yankee nonconformist Democrats.

Not until after the election, when he went on display before gleeful Democrats at a party rally in Indianapolis (see below), did Muskie decide that his victory represented a nationwide trend. During the campaign he had carefully localized the issues, and it was visiting Republican Richard Nixon who set up the election as a test of Eisenhower popularity. But whatever the long-range implications. Ed Muskie showed Maine—and the nation—what a united, aggressive minority can do to a dissident, lethargic majority.

Although he has the face of an inbred Yankee, with a jaw as granitic as any Salstonstall’s, Ed Muskie is the son of a Polish immigrant. His father, born Stephen Marciszewski, fled Poland as a 15-year-old refugee from czarist military conscription. He Americanized the family name, learned the tailoring trade, and eventually settled in Rumford. In spite of his sedentary occupation, father Muskie was a confirmed outdoorsman at heart, and Ed became an enthusiastic fisherman, a good skier and a competent trackman in school.

He was just as handy with the books. At Bates College young Muskie was president of his class (1936), Phi Beta Kappa, and voted “the most respected senior, the most likely to succeed and the best scholar.” He was also something of a political oddity: when the president of Bates was introduced to Muskie, he remarked: “Oh. so you’re the Democrat.”

In 1939 Ed Muskie got his law degree from Cornell and set up practice in Waterville. After four years’ service as engineering officer aboard a Navy destroyer escort in the Pacific, Muskie went back to Waterville, hung out his shingle again and married a local girl, Jane Gray (who, at 27, will quite possibly be the youngest and prettiest governor’s lady in the U.S.). In 1947 he ran for mayor of Waterville and was beaten, then ran successfully for the state legislature, where he served until he resigned in 1950 to become Maine director of the Office of Price Stabilization.

The Muskies and their two children, Stephen, 5½, and Ellen, 3½, live in a $10,500 Cape Cod cottage in a new section of Waterville. Like most of his neighbors, Ed is a do-it-yourself repairman. Last year, in the midst of some intensive carpentry in his attic, he fell down the stairs, crushed a vertebra. At 40 the governor-elect is a slender, slightly stooped reed standing 6 ft. 4 in. He has curly brown hair, and a gentle, bemused manner that appeals especially to women. He describes himself as “neither a New Deal nor a Fair Deal Democrat, but a Maine Democrat.” nonetheless keeps a watercolor portrait of a caped Franklin Roosevelt behind his office chair, believes devoutly in Adlai Stevenson, and does not argue when friends characterize him as a “Democrat-idealist.”