How We Will Vote

VOLUME 178

NUMBER 4

OCTOBER, 1946

89th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

IN ITS foreign relations the United States is assuming today more vigorously than ever before the role of international champion of political democracy. Our statesmen are resting their plans for the future of the world on the conviction that the right can win out only through an active and open discussion of issues, and that the system of competing political parties is indispensable to the workings of a free society. This conviction is not mere rhetoric. It is, at bottom, a philosophy of government, and it is already seriously in conflict with an opposing philosophy, championed by Mr. Molotov, which argues that only one party (guess which) can represent faithfully the mass interest, and that, in a proper society, no other party should be tolerated.

In the service of our philosophy of government our diplomats watch with anxious solicitude the activities of opposition parties in Eastern Europe. Our newspapermen report vigilantly on the progress of free elections in Poland and Bulgaria. Our editorial columns contrast the stultifying effects of single-list voting with the stimulus to truth and freedom provided by party elections in a democracy.

Yet certain paradoxes emerge. Mr. Byrnes, our Secretary of State, himself represented for many years in both houses of Congress South Carolina, a state where the one-party system is as dominant and occasionally as brutal as the one-party system in Bulgaria. The political standard our press seeks to impose on Rumania would have remarkable consequences if extended to Mississippi (or even perhaps to Vermont).

Today our nation, while operating overseas as the militant apostle of free political activity, is girding itself at home for its first national election after two crucial years of world history. It is the first national election since the death of Roosevelt, the first since the unveiling of the atomic bomb, the first since the end of the war, the first since the dark growth of the sense of irrepressible conflict between East and West. The most grave and consequential issues are poised for judgment. The American system of political democracy is undergoing what Poland and Bulgaria might nastily regard as a test of its capacity to face up to the urgencies of the century.

How does the United States measure up? The answer can only be—unless there are drastic changes in the last ten weeks before voting — that the American people are responding with a deep and widespread apathy. Over a century ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “To a stranger all domestic controversies, of the Americans at first appear to be incomprehensible or puerile, and he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them.”

There are, of course, good reasons for the present apathy. The American people have been through exhausting emotional experiences: the depression, the New Deal, the war. Their liberal and generous instincts have had a thorough workout in the past dozen years, and these instincts are flagging. War has always tended to produce the Grants and the Hardings — the administration characterized by moral indolence and indulged by a people undone by compulsions toward taking it easy.

Copyright 1946, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

There is, in addition, the all-important technical reason: that this is a mid-term election, without a Presidential contest or national platforms to crystallize the differences between the parties, and without even a Congress whose record is intelligible in party terms. The fall elections thus must break down inevitably into several hundred distinct and unrelated battles going on across the land, varying tremendously in the substance of the debate and in the nature of the decisive factors.

Each party has a national committee, located in Washington, whose business it is to provide what over-all direction is possible and to allocate the campaign resources in the way most likely to gain the greatest number of seats. For the national chairmen, mid-term elections soon assume the appearance of a multiple chess game, carried on by telephone and telegraph and in good part played blindfold, with one master engaging many different players, each employing separate gambits and separate systems.

The stake in this gigantic chess match will be the House of Representatives. There are 435 seats in the House, of which the Democrats have 239. Taking the seats held by minor parties into consideration, the Republicans need 26 to gain control. They cannot possibly pick up the 9 seats necessary to capture the Senate, but they stand a good statistical chance of winning the 26 essential House seats. The Democratic vote always falls off more in the mid-term elections than the Republican; labor and minority voters apparently need the stimulus of a Presidential campaign to be drawn out in numbers, while Republicans tend to vote steadily year in and year out.

Connecticut, for example, has been changing hands fairly regularly. In 1938, 4 of its 6 representatives were Republicans; in 1940, all were Democrats; in 1942, all were Republicans; in 1944, 4 out of 6 were Democrats. This is 1946, and the Republicans figure that their turn is coming up again. Another striking case is the 22nd district in Illinois, — the area surrounding East St. Louis, — where Congressman Melvin Price is faced by a tough fight for reelection. In 1940 the Democrats polled 98,000 votes; in 1942, 53,000; in 1944, 83,000 — a considerable fluctuation, while the Republican turnout stayed within 10,000 votes of 75,000.

Now, counting upon an almost certain decline in Democratic voting, the Republicans make tabulations of districts which they barely lost in 1944 when Roosevelt was on the ticket. They calculate that in as many as 30 districts the Democrats won by a margin of 3 per cent or less. Victory in all these districts will give the Republicans control of the House. In addition, they look in some districts to a larger than 3 per cent shift; so in their moods of wilder optimism they think about picking up 35 or 40 seats — enough to insure against the whims of maverick Republicans who might -want to go along with the Administration on certain measures. They will gain 42 seats if their increase in 1946 over 1944 is in the same proportion as their increase in 1942 over 1940. If it is in the same proportion as their increase in 1938 over 1936, they will gain 169 seats; but this is too abandoned a figure for the most sanguine Republican committeeman.

The reason why, as any member of the Democratic committee can demonstrate in sixty seconds, is that, whatever happens, the Democrats have a sure reserve of seats which the Republicans cannot hope to seduce or to steal. There are, first, the districts in the South; and second, the districts in the industrial North and in the border states. The Democrats tot up from 190 to 200 seats which nothing less than a Republican tornado could wrest from them.

The strategy calculations of the two national committees in Washington are thus quickly simplified. The Republicans are not going to waste time and money in contesting districts in Alabama or South Carolina, nor are they going to spend much effort on such Northern city districts as the 4th Illinois in Chicago, where the Democrats polled almost 80 per cent of the votes in 1944. For their part, the Democrats do not expect to score notable triumphs in such implacably Republican states as Kansas, Iowa, and Vermont. Conceding each party about 190 seats, the tacticians narrow the struggle for the House down to the 55 marginal seats.

2

AT THIS point the problem arises of the possible impact on these 55 seats of voting blocs; that is, of groups of people voting, not according to party discipline, but according to some other loyalty — economic, racial, or religious. With a loose party system like the American, blocs have always been the bane of the politicians. The professionals treat them warily, like large and potentially fierce dogs that they stretch out their hands to pat, never knowing whether the animals will lick or bite. A mythology has arisen around the blocs — a mythology fostered both by organizations which purport to represent the blocs and have an interest in exaggerating their strength and unity, and by politicians and newspapermen who find in the bloc mystique an easy means of explaining away election results, particularly if they are unexpected (“What happened to O’Hara was that he just couldn’t hold the Armenian vote on the South Side”).

The question of blocs is, in fact, somewhat more complicated. A single individual may be a longshoreman, an Irishman, a Catholic, and a veteran — which would automatically qualify him for a good many blocs, ranging in political flavor from the Kremlin to the Vatican. But it is just as likely that he will vote in terms of OPA and inflation, or in terms of inheritance and conditioned reflex. For other purposes he may function as a member of the Harry Bridges union, or the Ancient Order of Hibernians, or the Knights of Columbus, or the American Legion; and all of these may claim control over his vote. But can any of them deliver it on election day?

Few public figures have exerted such apparent influence over masses of Americans as Father Coughlin or John L. Lewis. But when Coughlin exhorted his faithful disciples to cast their votes for William Lemke in 1936, most of them regarded him with entire indifference. Lewis had no more luck in trying to swing the CIO vote to Willkie in 1940. Both Coughlin and Lewis were imprudent enough to promise to go into the garden and eat worms if their advice was not followed. Their example has not been lost on other leaders concerned with the problem of converting blocs into votes.

The most effective blocs do not tend to figure much in calculations concerning the marginal districts, because where blocs really predominate — as in a rich farm area or in a large city — the districts are already in the vest pocket of one party or the other. The great majority of the rural districts, for example, are now Republican. Where the liberal National Farmers’ Union is strong, as in Montana, it will help the Democratic candidate, but its power is limited.

Of the great economic blocs, the most significant in the coming elections is labor, and the most significant single non-party organization concerned with the elections is the Political Action Committee of the CIO. It is not necessary to linger long over the charge that CIO-PAC represents an unwarranted intervention in politics, especially when it is made by people who smile benignly upon the American Liberty League. But it should be noted that even PAC has never been tested on the problem of changing the labor vote against the first impulses of the labor voter. Its role this fall will be to arrest the normal off-year decline in the labor vote which was so nearly disastrous to the Democrats in 1942.

3

AMONG the foreign nationality groups the organizations making the greatest clamor politically are the Polish societies. There are about three million persons of Polish origin in the United States, and large and cohesive Polish communities exist in such cities as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland. Next to the Italians and the Germans, they constitute the largest foreign-language minority in urban areas in general; and in all the cities mentioned except New York they are the largest single minority. This group, voting as a unit, could obviously have considerable impact. Moreover, it is traditionally a Democratic group whose defection would seriously weaken the Administration.

Poles are politically irascible by custom as well as by temperament. Many American Poles still cherish the ardent and romantic nationalism which has made their cousins among the most attractive and least practical of Europeans. During the war, with politics blacked out in the homeland, exiled Polish leaders created a substitute political life in Britain and the United States. The factions which sprang up after the death of General Sikorski agitated their cases throughout the U.S. Polish community in a savage rivalry for funds and moral support. As the London and Lublin feud widened into irreconcilability, so did the feud in American Polonia.

About this time Republican strategists, planning for the 1944 elections, saw a chance of detaching the Polish bloc from Roosevelt by playing upon the evident incompatibility between the Atlantic Charter and the designs the U.S.S.R. appeared to have on Poland. The Administration itself became worried by the uproar and looked somewhat glumly upon the Polish situation. But, after the smoke of battle cleared away, the Polish districts were about where they always had been.

This outcome was due in part probably to the fact that the vociferous propaganda of the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent (KNAPP) and of the Polish American Congress inevitably created its own makeweight in the form of the Polish American Labor Council. Under the able leadership of Leo Krzycki of the CIO, the new group argued that Soviet intentions in Poland were much misunderstood. But, in a more basic sense, all the organizations concerned with the rights or wrongs of the Soviet performance in Poland were probably talking chiefly to each other. Other Poles might listen if they were interested; but, like other Americans, they continued to vote in terms of local, state, or national issues, not in terms of their old homeland.

The Republicans still have hopes of the Poles in 1946. The Chicago Tribune, serenely confident that the great world will eventually come round to it, is still urging the Polish vote in the 7th Illinois district to unseat William W. Link, the Democratic Congressman, and strike a blow for Polish freedom. The Polish press is as embittered as ever. But there seems little prospect of any bloc desertion by the Poles from the Democrats. Indeed, the defeat of Thad F. Wasielewski, an anti-Soviet Pole, by another Pole more tolerant of the U.S.S.R., in the Democratic primaries in the 4th Wisconsin district (Milwaukee), suggests that, if anything, the tide is running against the die-hard nationalists. But then Edmund V. Bobrowicz, who beat Wasielewski, is also pro-labor and a veteran; so, as usual, it is hard to know which bloc came out on top.

The Polish situation has been duplicated on a smaller, though hardly quieter, scale among the Yugoslavs. One faction, discreetly assisted by former Ambassador Constantine Fotich and employing as its main organ the Amerikanski Srbobran (American Serb Defender) of Pittsburgh, has fought the fight for Mihailovich and Greater Serbia, while the United Committee of South-Slavic Americans, headed by Louis Adamic and the violinist Zlatko Balokovich, has sought to whip up favorable opinion toward Tito (an enterprise which enjoyed some success until it was recently confounded by Tito himself). The American Slav Congress, claiming to represent fifteen million Americans of Slavic ancestry, has expanded from Yugoslavia to include Bulgarians, Czechs, Poles, and even Russians with an alacrity which ought to delight any Pan-Serb, except that its main purpose is to whitewash the U.S.S.R.

The Yugoslavs have been loud in their arguments, and during the war the main focus of Yugoslav political activity tended to shift to the United States. At one time six Yugoslav ministers of state resided here. But the actual Yugoslav community consists of fewer than 400,000 persons; and the only places where it has much likely political impact are Ohio (particularly around Cleveland) and Pennsylvania. There is no indication that any large number of Yugoslavs intend to vote on the basis of nostalgia for the fatherland.

The Italian vote is more formidable. There are four and a half million persons of Italian stock in the United States, and they make up the largest single foreign nationality in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. Roosevelt’s “stab in the back” allusion in 1940 undoubtedly shocked the sensibilities of Italians long trained by Fascist consuls to admire Mussolini, and the Democrats lost Italian votes that year. Since then, most American Italians have recovered from their passion for Fascism and are taking pride in the new democratic government struggling to get on its feet. The proposed peace terms for Italy are a great cause for dissatisfaction among Italian Americans, but it seems unlikely that the dissatisfaction will change many votes.

The Germans constitute the largest single foreignnationality group. But the German-dominated districts had pretty much turned against the Administration by 1940 and they will not cause any upset in calculations for this fall. It should be noted, however, that James Reston of the New York Times recently reported from Milwaukee that a study of the Wisconsin election returns “does not sustain the myth that there is a solid isolationist GermanAmerican vote. . . . The second, third and fourth generations are voting their pocketbooks, not their origins,”

Of the blocs allegedly moved by developments overseas, only the Jewish community seems at all problematic. The vacillations of Congressmen from districts with a heavy Jewish vote during the fight over the British loan indicates the agitation in Washington. President Truman clearly feels pressure to achieve some satisfactory settlement (or at least obfuscation) of the Palestine question before election. But even in this case there is certainly a tendency to exaggerate the extent of bloc voting likely to result.

The Republicans have indulged in constant hopes during the past two years that the Negroes were finally returning to the party that freed the slaves. In the days when Wendell Willkie was taking his forthright position on race issues, it really looked as if this might happen; but Negro leaders today are thoroughly cynical as a result of the Republican contributions to the run-around given the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

Casual observers wonder why the Republicans, who have no votes to lose in the South, do not fight for proposals like FEPC in order to win back this important bloc in the North. The answer is that Republican Congressmen consider it more important to maintain the conservative coalition and to stay in the good graces of Southerners. One Senator, when asked why he had not voted for action on FEPC, pointed out that a bill for dams in his own state was tied up in a committee dominated by Southern Democrats. “FEPC is all right, but it isn’t worth losing three dams in —— County.”

The veteran vote is a question mark. Since veterans are mostly young, and youth was mostly pro-Roosevelt, the majority of veterans are presumed to have been inclined toward Democratic rather than Republican affiliations. They have not come back from the wars with the anti-labor emotions anticipated so enthusiastically by the National Association of Manufacturers; and indeed, in the absence of any specific veterans’ issue, they have tended to take off the uniform and merge themselves happily in the citizenry. Local political organizations have generally been astute enough to put veterans on their tickets. Where machines have blocked paths to local political advancement, GI’s have formed their own tickets, as in localities in Tennessee and Arkansas, and have resorted to violence when the bosses tried to count them out on election day. Almost 60 veterans of this war have been nominated for the House (at the last tabulation, 34 by the Democrats and 20 by the Republicans), and 11, of whom 9 are Republicans, are standing for the Senate.

Other things being equal, a veteran will certainly get more votes than a non-veteran; but it is not clear that he will necessarily get them from other veterans. Too many men were in the Army: there are war records and war records, as most of these men know, and overseas stripes or battle stars are not necessarily proof of anything. Indeed, many veterans will have difficulty in meeting voting requirements this year. It is the rest of the community which is impressed by a military past and, out of a sense of patriotism or a sense of guilt, votes for the veteran.

4

THOUGH the bloc mythology will be drawn upon to explain all kinds of anomalies in November, it does not seem likely that bloc voting will have anything more than purely local effects. The strategy of wooing blocs is not a major consideration of the national committees. The major consideration is something more mundane and tedious: the simple process of getting out the vote.

A light vote will mean large Republican gains in the House. A heavy vote will mean that the Democrats will hold their own. To get a heavy vote, the Democrats rely upon their own party organizations, tooled to a high degree of efficiency in such places as New York, Chicago, Kansas City, and upon CIO-PAC. The crucial states are California, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It would not require a very large shift of votes to give the Republicans control of the House on the basis of these states alone. The decisive factor in such a shift, however, will not be blocs or ideologies; it will be the technical efficiency of the party machines. And the elections will only prove which party has the better organization, and, in the cases of men of known and obvious integrity, like Mike Monroney of Oklahoma, George Bender of Ohio, Herbert Lehmann of New York, the better candidates.

This is not to say that blocs and ideologies should be ruled out of American politics in 1946. But their significance lies less in the contests between the parties than in the contests within each party. In this sense the primaries of spring and summer may well reveal more long-range political trends than the actual elections in November. For, in spite of the lack of sharp differentiation between the parties in Congress or the campaigns, the patterns emerging from the primaries foreshadow a sharper differentiation in the next Congress. The primaries, in general, show that the Republican Party, after its Willkie-of-the-wisp period, is becoming more conservative, and the Democratic Party, for all its Bourbon wing, is becoming more liberal.

Virtually every liberal Republican who faced a contest in the primaries has been rejected by the Republican voters. The fate of Bob La Follette in Wisconsin, of Dwight Griswold in Nebraska, of Charles LaFollette in Indiana, of Augustus Bennett and Joseph C. Baldwin in Now York, illustrates the general tendency. The Republican Party evidently wants the extreme right-wingers, the Hugh Butlers, the Fritz Couderts. It feels that it need no longer pretend to a liberalism which, even in the great days of Mr. Willkie, it did little more than tolerate. Indeed, PAC, which would like nothing better than to demonstrate its impartiality by endorsing a few Republicans, is hard put to find any it can stamp with the CIO seal of approval.

At the same time, the Democrats have been retiring a considerable number of their more conservative figures. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, George L. Radcliffe of Maryland, and Charles C. Gossett of Idaho wore actually turned down in the primaries, and four other Senators with consistently conservative records anticipated the voters by stepping down voluntarily. Some of the most bitter anti-Administration Congressmen have been defeated, among them Wickersham, Boren, and Johnson of Oklahoma, Tarver of Georgia, Slaughter of Missouri, Daughton of Virginia, and Cannon of Florida. Luther Patrick of Alabama has thus far been the only casualty among liberal Democrats seeking renomination.

In this connection the situation in the South is of special interest. As Stewart Alsop has reported, a two-party system seems to be developing within the framework of the one-party system. Not since the 1890’s have divisions through the South been on such marked ideological lines, so that the voter in almost every state is presented in the primaries with a distinct choice between men of the PepperHill-Sparkman-Amall-Carmack-Rainey stamp, and the Talmadges, Bilbos, McKellars, and O’Daniels.

Southern Senators like Joe Robinson and Pat Harrison, by fighting for New Deal measures shoulder to shoulder with Hugo Black, had saved the Southern conservatives from this situation in the thirties, until Roosevelt forced the issue prematurely in the 1938 purge. Now the open Bourbon hostility to the remnants of New Dealism has roused and united the liberal elements in the South. The rise of the Amalls and the Sparkmans, backed by the unusually able and articulate newspaper editors scattered through the South and by the expanding CIO, seems likely to release important new political energies. Even Harry Byrd was surprised this year by a ground swell of protest votes in favor of his PAC-backed opponent. As A. G. Mezerik has suggested in The Revolt of the South and West, the impetus for another New Deal may very well come from an alliance between aggressive Southern and Western regional leaders and organized labor, united in their dislike of domination by Eastern capital.

5

BUT these stirrings have not had much effect, in formulating the terms of the 1946 elections; and it seems most improbable that they will develop sufficiently in the next few weeks to lift, the canvass from its present mediocrity. That mediocrity would not matter if this were the first mid-term election after World War I, with the United States restored safely to the womb, liberated from world responsibilities. But, whether we like it or not, 1922 is as dead as 1492. What we do today is no longer remote from the rest of the world. Indeed, in view of our loud talk about the virtues of democracy, whatever we do will represent to much of the world an exhibition and testing of democracy in action.

The world situation therefore imposes a new responsibility upon the political leaders of the United States: a responsibility to make the American party system bear some relation to the philosophy of government Mr. Byrnes is defending in Paris. In 1946 our political leadership is not measuring up particularly well.

The Republican Parly is dealing largely in fears and fantasies which have practically nothing to do with urgent world issues. That party is not lacking in constructive ability. Governor Stassen and Senator Vandenberg on foreign affairs, Senators Morse, Aiken, Tobey, and even Taft on domestic questions, have made exceedingly useful contributions to our public life. But they represent the enlightened members of a party whom the more conservative citizens, like Senator Wherry of Nebraska, tend to write off as dangerous radicals. Mr. Brownell, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, once proposed running the campaign on the theory that this was the feeblest Administration since that of Franklin Pierce, which was at least an informed and plausible historical assertion. His successor, Mr. Reece, reached his philosophical heights by charging the Administration with supporting “red fascism.”

Far from attempting to raise the standard of discussion, the Republican leadership is apparently seeking to lower it. The reason is that the Republicans do not want an interesting campaign; for if the contest becomes too lively, too many people will vote and that would help the Democrats. What ever happened to Harold Stassen’s plan for Republican discussion groups? Why did Governor Dewey extinguish the candidacy of Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan in favor of the colorless Irving Ives? The deliberate Republican strategy, reflected in the sleepy atmosphere of the Republican headquarters in Washington, appears to be to keep the elections dull. Apathy is the Republican secret weapon.

The Democratic headquarters, with its staff of bright newspapermen, historians, statisticians, and holders of Guggenheim Fellowships, creates a much greater impression of intellectual alertness, as well as of superior technical efficiency. The CIO-PAC offices, bristling with pamphlets bearing such titles as “What Every Voter Should Know and Do in 1946” and “The Answer Is Full Employment,” show a still more serious sense of the need to focus public attention on the large questions. Whatever else one can say about Mr. Robert Hannegan, the Postmaster General, and Sidney Hillman, late chairman of PAC, they at least tried to present basic issues to the American electorate.

But even Hannegan has not been able to persuade the dominant men in the Democratic Party that the campaign should be fought wholeheartedly on the basis of intelligible and important questions. Though officially denied, the report of Hannegan’s attempted resignation from the chairmanship of the National Committee has been well authenticated; and it: is clear that he is engaged in a discouraging battle with men like John Snyder, George Allen, and Clark Clifford, who would prefer to lead the Democratic Party to that no-man’s land where in the flickering half-light the donkey is indistinguishable from the elephant.

Hannegan believes that combative figures like Chester Bowles and Fiorello La Guardia on the Democratic tickets would produce a spirited campaign and a large turn-out, which would benefit the Democrats; but Snyder fears that, once in the Senate, such men might turn a fishy eye on Snyder’s conservative financial policies in the Treasury. It looks very much as if the conservative businessmen and politicians now running the two parties have, by spontaneous and convulsive agreement, united to drive meaning out of politics. The problem of locating responsibility for the handling of OPA shows the success of this strategy.

In the past, American political scientists have approved the amorphousness of our party system in contrast to a land of strict party discipline and accountability like Great Britain. It is true that, so long as parties do not stand for anything very much, the victory of one or the other is not likely to represent the foreclosure of possibilities which in another country might lead to revolution. Where parties have stood for definite policies, as in the election of 1860, the losing party may well tend to believe that the only option left to it is violence.

Yet parties must not become so meaningless that they drag down the whole level of political understanding. Tocqueville wrote: “America has had great, parties, but has them no longer; and if her happiness is thereby increased, her morality has suffered.” The Democratic and Republican Parties in the current election are considerably more trivial than the parties of Jackson and Clay that Tocqueville observed. One can hardly say that the result has increased either our happiness or our morality.

The undercurrents in the primaries — the tendencies within both parties toward a sharper definition of purpose — suggest that the present leadership is not meeting the needs of the day. As the conservatives operate more clearly in the one party and the liberals more clearly in the other, the Republican and Democratic Parties may begin to mean something by 1948 in spite of Mr. Reece and Mr. Snyder. Although the elections this fall will test little more than the relative efficiency of the party machines, they may nonetheless help make that clear distinction between the parties which will make the coming Presidential election a real demonstration of the democratic process. By 1948 we may have something we can show off to visiting Bulgarians.