Washington
There are many obvious things that can be said about the elections of November 4, 1958, and in Washington, where there is little bashfulness about stating the obvious, certain results have been noted with relish.
To begin with, it was clearly a setback for the troglodyte wing of the Republican party, that band of earnest zealots who could have laid fair claim to being the only Utopian purists left in American politics. The slaughter was fearful; Senators Bricker (Ohio), Malone (Nevada), Revercomb (West Virginia), and Barrett (Wyoming) were washed under, while Senators Jenner (Indiana) and Martin (Pennsylvania), with wise prevision, retired without facing the voters. As someone wryly observed, if Senator Goldwater (Arizona) had not been reelected, the Daughters of the American Revolution would have found a rostrum bare of senatorial representation at their next springtime convention here.
Equally certain, the two big losers in the vote were Richard Nixon and Carmine De Sapio. The Vice President lost in two ways—both because the Republican campaign into which he plunged so outspokenly was a disaster, and because the voters of New York perversely installed a popular Republican in Albany to harass Mr. Nixon in his pursuit of still higher things. And, conversely, the defeat of Governor Averell Harriman by Nelson Rockefeller meant at least the temporary eclipse of Tammany’s Mr. De Sapio as the sun-glassed Warwick of Democratic politics in New York, and hence the nation.
Yet the election returns reflect a more general trend, perhaps more interesting than these concrete results, more interesting even than the resurgence of Democratic strength in the Middle West and New England, or than the emergence of a personable group of new Catholic office-holders (Senators Muskie [Maine], Dodd [Connecticut], McCarthy [Minnesota], and Hart [Michigan], and Governors Brown [California], Lawrence [Pennsylvania], and DiSalle [Ohio]). I refer to the emergence of a new collective personality in American politics, a personality—the word is peculiarly apt—most readily apparent in the Democratic party, but which peeks through among the Republicans as well. It is a personality which seems to herald a new style of politics, a new approach to issues, and a new kind of leadership.
At the outset, it should be noted that our political vocabulary suffers from cultural lag. Surely it is misleading to describe the clean-shaven crop of new Senators and Governors elected on the Democratic ticket as New or Fair Dealers. They are, to be sure, “liberals” in the sense of paying their fealty to Franklin Roosevelt, the TVA, and the array of welfare legislation enacted (was it so long ago?) two decades in the past. But New Dealers? Assuredly not. The phrase conjures up a vision of the bold insurgent, the old-style indignant who bristles with reforming zeal, the bogeyman of the Tory press who has a thirst for experiment, a passion for setting the world aright, and a less than reverent attitude to the sanctity of tradition or the tested verities of public finance. Harry Truman and Harold Ickes exemplify the New Deal personality in one familiar form: fiercely partisan, saltily outspoken, and ablaze with righteousness. Or there are Senators Humphrey and Douglas, two true-blue New Dealers who already seem a bit like relics from the past, and who soon may stalk the Senate like Banquo’s ghost—as now does Senator Langer of North Dakota, that last survivor of Middle West Republican insurgency. Or, in another variant, the phrase suggests the Brain Truster—the irrepressible innovator, the iconoclast, the impudent thinker who (in Holmes’s words) imparts a ferment: Rexford Tugwell, Adolf A. Berle, Jerome Frank, and Thurman Arnold immediately come to mind.
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A glance at the prudent liberals who now predominate in the Democratic party—men like Meyner, Kennedy, Symington, Muskie, Jackson, Brown—suggests why this older association simply won’t do and why a new term is so sorely required. Indignation, more often, has given way to an earnest sincerity; righteousness to a suave exurbanite manner; passion to a bland smile. And the Brain Truster has been shrunk to a domesticated egghead, content to hatch more modest schemes.
In a phrase, the New Deal has given way to the Smooth Deal, and I do not intend the term to be altogether pejorative. Certainly the older breed of liberals tended to crankiness, to oversimplification of issues, to hyper-partisanship, to irresponsibility, and even (let us be candid) to occasional demagogy—after all, Huey Long’s “Every Man a King” nostrum was in some ways a caricature of New Deal thinking. If the Smooth Dealers seem drab and gray-flannel hued by comparison, the new liberals also tend to be more fair-minded, better educated, less hysterical, more aware of the limitations of political reform, and more culturally civilized. One observer here remarked that if either Mr. Kennedy or Mr. Rockefeller became tenants of the White House, at least the quality of the paintings would improve. It is always sobering to recall that Mr. Roosevelt’s favorite song was “Home on the Range.”
The reference to Mr. Rockefeller as a Smooth Dealer was deliberate; one trait of the new liberal is his marked lack of old-style partisanship—indeed, without a party label it might be impossible to tell the men in the middle apart. Surely it is one of the ironies of the past election campaign that while President Eisenhower was inveighing against the menace of “radicalism,” in most major Senate races the Democratic candidate was closer to the Modern Republican ideal than his rusting Old Guard opponent. Many of the Smooth Dealers, in fact, seem perfectly interchangeable, like parts in a 1959 Chevrolet Suburban; it is altogether conceivable that Republican Senators Javits, Cooper, and Clifford Case could run as liberal Democrats, while Senators Kennedy and Harrison Williams could be Republicans whom the New York Herald Tribune would beamingly endorse.
This change in tempo and mood was observable throughout the country, but of all the many elections perhaps none was more revealing than the mealtime marathon conducted in New York between Governor Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller, the goldensmiled Gracchus who defeated him. In many ways, Mr. Harriman was the orthodox New Dealer unable to learn the new rhythm of politics, but who tried manfully nonetheless, gulping blintzes and pizza with an awesome determination to match every ethnic munch of his foe.
However, like an Old Roman, Mr. Harriman was unable to repackage his wood-crate personality in a more contemporary plastic box. Despite the best coaches, Harriman could not mask his essential inner-directed gruffness with a smile. As a result, Mr. Rockefeller outcharmed his halting rival and made impressive inroads on the traditional liberal-labor vote—especially among the women. What was possibly the most interesting document in the whole national campaign was a column in the New York Post, in which one of Mr. Rockefeller’s feminine converts explained why at the last moment the house organ of Manhattan liberalism pleaded with its readers not to vote for Governor Harriman. In her “Dear Reader” column of November 7, Mrs. Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s publisher, confided her feelings:
It was obvious to those who knew Nelson Rockefeller that he was always a considerate, sincere, warm, very human being. In contrast, people who had worked in close contact with Averell Harriman had often been dismayed by the difficult personality traits displayed by him.
The key phrase is “difficult personality traits.” One wonders how the cantankerous John Adams, the withdrawn Abraham Lincoln, the haughty Woodrow Wilson might fare in this Age of Trendex when the political platform seemingly must also be adorned with an analyst’s couch.
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It is pertinent to ask a few rhetorical questions: How did the Smooth Deal get its start? Why did it find such a receptive audience? And what changes does it involve in the flavor of American politics?
In some ways, the key figure in the 1958 election was a man who was not a candidate at all, nor an office-holder, and who indeed was only marginally involved in the campaign. Yet Adlai Stevenson, despite being a two-time loser for the Presidency, may have had a more pervasive effect on the tone and quality of the campaign than the General in the White House who loosed an occasional thunderbolt, or the Vice President who wielded the more lethal cutlery. The reason is that Mr. Stevenson is both an agent and a symbol of the change in liberal politics, and the election was unquestionably a victory for that moderate brand of liberalism which Mr. Stevenson represents. Closer in conviction, manner, and temperament to Nelson Rockefeller than to Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson is the example par excellence of the patrician turned politician. Ivy-educated (Princeton, ’22), he speaks in the accents of genteel liberalism, and his appeal is strongest to that growing middlebrow-plus group that has cut its teeth on the New Deal, makes knowing cracks about the political slant in Time, and furnishes the audience for such diverse phenomena as Peanuts, good music stations, and James Gould Cozzens.
To this group, tired of the banalities of the Republican party and too sophisticated to swallow the venerable slogans of the New Deal, the personality of Adlai Stevenson has served as a tonic and a lure. During the Governor’s two campaigns for the Presidency, Volunteers for Stevenson flourished with special élan in the middlebrow enclaves in the suburbs. (I was at Princeton in 1952 and saw the process at work; if you saw a foreign car on Nassau Street, it invariably sported a Stevenson sticker. Interestingly, the faculty overwhelmingly supported Stevenson, while the students liked Ike, a reversal of youth-age roles which stimulated some lively debate in Alumni Weekly’s letters column.)
The end result was an influx of new talent, new candidates, and new leadership in the Democratic party—indeed, one began to hear about “Stevenson-type” Democrats, and even “Adlites.” Thus, in one of those wondrous ironies of American politics, Stevenson, though twice the loser, presided over a reinvigoration of his party—while the winner, even from the exalted heights of the White House, proved ineffably impotent in his task of “modernizing” the Grand Old Party. Despite the best efforts of Robert Montgomery and Henry Luce, the party that boasted the support of the canniest hidden persuaders on Madison Avenue has in six years of power been unable to rid itself of the musty scent of Old Fogeyism. Indeed, it is symptomatic that two of the Republican party’s most promising new personalities—Governors Rockefeller and Hatfield (of Oregon)—owed their victory in 1958 in good part to the fact that they avoided identification with their party and administration.
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This plastic surgery under the auspices of a losing candidate is not without precedent; it has happened at least three times in the past.1 There is first of all the case of William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic Presidential candidate, three times defeated—and yet successful in restoring to his party something of the radical flavor it had during the Age of Jackson. Before Bryan swept the 1896 Democratic convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech, the party had virtually been held in tithe by the Eastern banks under the brokership of Grover Cleveland. When Cleveland was elected in 1884, Jay Gould exultantly telegraphed: “I feel . . . that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands.”
After Bryan took the ’96 convention by storm and joined hands with the Populists in a crusade against the “Goldbugs,” the party lost its preferred-stock aura and was seldom again regarded as entirely “safe” by the condottieri of high finance. Often wrong-headed, pompous, superficial, and plain silly, Bryan had nonetheless breathed back into the party its reforming sense of mission. Richard Hofstadter, who is no admirer of Bryan, concedes this much: “The Commoner, always defeated, had, in the course of a sixteen-year quest for issues, effectively turned public attention upon one reform after another; and many of his proposals had a core of value.” Both figuratively and literally (by his votes at the 1912 convention), Bryan made possible the election of Wood-row Wilson, prophet of the New Freedom.
But the Democratic party remained essentially an agrarian party with only transient urban ties until another great loser—Al Smith—broadened its base and turned a minority party into a majority coalition which still holds sway. Samuel Lubell, who first noted its significance, called the 1928 Presidential election the “Smith Revolution” because for the first time the country’s biggest cities, with their Catholic-Jewish-immigrant electorate, were carried into the Democratic column. For the most part, the cities have remained there since.
Al Smith, Woodrow Wilson, and William Jennings Bryan—this trinity expresses almost too neatly the multiple personality of the Democratic party, the coexistence of opposites which has given the Democracy so much vitality, inner tension, and “openness”—qualities so lacking in the Republican party during much of this century. Bryan, the agrarian rebel, the “dry,” the fundamentalist (who could look with tolerance on the Ku Klux Klan); Wilson, the poised Princetonian of genteel lineage, the aloof idealist who dwelled in a world of rhetoric unsullied by crasser politics; and Smith, Catholic, urban, “wet,” who spoke like and for the immigrants eager to ascend from slum to suburb.
Such was the basic coalition which Franklin Roosevelt fused so successfully through four Presidential campaigns, and which prevailed until two other losing candidates—Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey—found ways of channeling new energy into a moribund Republican party. Indeed, Willkie’s prairie-fire nomination campaign in 1940 was reminiscent of Bryan’s siege of Chicago in 1896. Willkie, an unknown armed mainly with a chant (“We Want Willkie”), became the catalyst for party reform, while Dewey, possessing the more persuasive leverage of New York’s electoral votes, became the executant. Between them, Willkie and Dewey attracted homeless moderates to the Republican cause, and made it respectable for an intelligent person to confess sympathy for a conservative party. Finally, in 1952, the internationalist and moderately progressive wing of the party rode to power on the coat-tails of a hero whose preeminent virtues were that he was likeable and guiltless of any prior association with the party he was called on to lead.
But this insulation from politics, this above-the-battle pose, which so strengthened Mr. Eisenhower as a candidate, proved a disaster for his party. The election of the General signaled a retreat from politics at precisely the moment when the Republican party could best be purged from within; as a result, the reformation begun by Willkie and Dewey remained incomplete, and the various crabbed rightists who give Republicanism such a sour tone remained unmolested in their local satrapies, unrepentant, unmodernized, and unfumigated. Symbolically, the major edifice built in the Capitol area during the present administration is a memorial tower to Robert A. Taft.
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It was within this vacuum created by President Eisenhower’s ineptness or indifference that the Stevenson Revolution has taken place. Surely it is a remarkable tribute to the Democratic party as an institution that even in its worst defeats it has found the seeds of regeneration. Viewed in retrospect, even in the midst of the 1952 disaster, the beginnings of change were evident. There was the victory of Senator John Kennedy in Massachusetts, following a cultivated tea-party campaign; and there was the fact that Stevenson carried Philadelphia where a reform Democratic administration had taken office the year before. In Senator Kennedy and Philadelphia’s Mayor (and subsequently Senator) Joseph S. Clark, the Smooth Deal found two of its most attractive advance agents.
Senators Clark and Kennedy are preeminently tacticians of the soft sell; suavely tailored and unabashedly good-looking, both speak in the urbane accents of a middlebrow-plus, and can contribute a literate article to the Atlantic without any ghostly assistance. Both come from a background of ease and comfort, both attended Harvard, and both brought to politics an attitude of pro bono publico (a tag frequently used by Mr. Clark), a clean-cut sincerity, and a modulated commitment to the tenets of the Liberal Enlightenment. In most respects, their views are identical, although Mr. Clark leans a few degrees further leftward; Americans for Democratic Action regards the Philadelphian as a distinguished alumnus, whereas ADA has never quite forgiven Mr. Kennedy for his handsomely profiled timidity on the McCarthy issue. In all, both men would be equally at home at a Fairfield County barbecue—unlikely torch-bearers indeed for a party damned as “radical” by the highest officeholder in the land.
The years since 1952 have seen a steady increase in the ranks of liberal leaders cast in the Stevenson-Kennedy-Clark mold. In 1953, Governor Robert Meyner (Lafayette, ’30; Columbia Law School) took control of New Jersey’s state house and gave consanguine links to the movement by marrying a comely relative of Adlai Stevenson. Although a Republican Smooth Dealer—Senator Clifford Case (Rutgers, ’25; Columbia Law School)—won office in 1954, Mr. Meyner rounded out his triumph by hand-picking and electing the youthful Harrison Williams (Oberlin, ’41; Columbia Law School) to the Senate this year.
Meanwhile, in California, the Democratic party was rejuvenated by a “club” movement brain-trusted by Stevensonian Democrats whose leader was Paul Ziffren, a singularly able National Committeeman. Aided by Republican blunders and the clashing sabres of Messrs. Knowland and Knight, the Stevenson wing carried the state this November, electing Edmund (Pat) Brown as Governor, Clair Engle as Senator, and winning control of the legislature. Further northward, in Oregon, another Stevenson Democrat—perhaps too ebullient to be regarded as a Smooth Dealer—was able to add Senator to his frequent byline in Harper’s and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. But if there are doubts about Richard L. Neuberger, there can be none about Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington; he is unmistakably a member of the Smooth faction. In Idaho, a state where the class war was once more than a slogan, the miners installed boyish Frank Church in the Senate, where at thirty-two he became the youngest of the Smooth.
In Michigan, Governor G. Mennen Williams—of the polka-dot tie and “telegenic” grin—has been creating a private empire since his first election in 1948, six terms ago. By appearance, background, and schooling (Princeton, ’33), “Soapy” Williams belongs to the Smooth Deal camp, but politics is too peppery in Michigan and the United Auto Workers too strong, and hence the Governor bears a more leftward reputation. However, the state’s new Senator—Philip A. Hart (Georgetown, ’34)—shows more moderate inclinations. Minnesota, where the old Farmer-Labor tradition still has a lingering hold, produces politicians too bumptious to qualify as Smooth (e.g. Hubert Humphrey and Coya Knutson), but the state has sent to the Senate Eugene McCarthy, as civilized an egghead as will likely ever grace those chambers.
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The mention of McCarthy recalls Wisconsin, and that curious state (the author of the present article was born there) requires a paragraph of its own. Surely few elections contain as many paradoxes as the special vote held in August, 1957, to fill the vacancy left on the death of Senator Joseph McCarthy, scourge of the Ivy League. Not only did the voters fill his seat with a member of the “party of treason,” but they chose a candidate with degrees from both Yale (’38) and Harvard (M.B.A., M.P.A.), who also was a former associate in J. P. Morgan’s firm, and who had been wed to a Rockefeller. In part, it was a tribute to the personality of Senator William Proxmire, now reelected to a full six-year term, whose youthfully engaging manner contrasted so strikingly with the belch-and-bearhug traits of Joe McCarthy.
Then there is the case of Maine. In 1954, the voters in this most venerably Republican state elected their third Democratic Governor since the Civil War, later reelected him, and this year in the last of Maine’s “early-bird” elections sent Edmund S. Muskie to the Senate. Mr. Muskie (Bates, ’36, Cornell Law School) is as much Lincolnesque as Smooth, and is among the ablest and most interesting figures in the Stevenson wing of the party. Characteristically, the Maine Democratic party was revitalized by a close-knit group of Stevensonian liberals, including State Chairman John C. Donovan (a Harvard Ph.D. and a professor of government at Bates College), and Frank Coffin (Harvard Law School and Business School) who was reelected this fall to a second Congressional term. In a detailed case study of Mr. Coffin’s 1956 campaign, Professor Donovan concluded that the Congressman’s victory “may be ascribed to a new sort of politics—a politics of youth, of amateurs, substantially without patronage or corruption.”2
Decidedly, there is a new sort of politics prevailing in more and more states, and evidence of it can be found everywhere. If the day of the impassioned New Dealer has passed, the era of the hack and the ward-heeler as a candidate is also vanishing. What ever else can be said of the Smooth Dealers, they are neither uninspired nor illiterate, and for this trend to a more enlightened (if skittishly cautious) politics, much of the credit belongs to Adlai Stevenson. It was just and fitting that among the freshmen Congressmen elected in 1958 were two candidates who shared the distinction of serving successively on Mr. Stevenson’s 1956 campaign staff in the same post: Ken Hechler (a onetime political science teacher at Princeton) of West Virginia’s Fourth District; and John Brademas, of Indiana’s Third. Both headed the research division for Mr. Stevenson in a campaign that was a lost cause only in a narrow, immediate sense.3
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The elections, then, confirmed the emergence of a novel kind of American politician—the candidate as a confident amateur, who, though he may work in tandem with the Old Pro, strives above all not to look like a politician. Instead, he is a well-adjusted moderate, an affable man in the middle, a Suburban Everyman, only a little bit more handsome. He is a candidate who despite a background of wealth is capable of the relaxed and homely touch: interestingly, Mr. Stevenson’s hole-in-the-shoe became a campaign emblem, while Mr. Rockefeller wore a leather patch on his jacket virtually as a panache. He is not afraid to confess that he is educated or has once read (or written) a book. Despite the lamentations of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a much discussed New Republic article, the egghead seems very much on the ascendancy in the Democratic party. A census has not yet been made—it would not be surprising if the Ford Foundation set a research team on the job soon—but it seems likely that no Congress in the past century has been so weighted with Ph.D.’s as the upcoming 86th.
Thus, in the framework of liberal politics, the country seems to be entering an era when breeding, intelligence, and the absence of “difficult personality traits” will be every bit as important as the advocacy of issues. This trend to the Smooth is understandable, given the changing circumstances of American life. It comes at a time when mass media, particularly television, turn an exposing lens on every psychic wrinkle a candidate may possess. The phenomenal increase in college attendance has created a favorable climate for a candidate to admit that he once went to school. The tidal migration from the city to suburb and thence to exurb has wrought a change in mores in which the word “togetherness” has a wholesome rather than repugnant ring. And the new style reflects a time when salesmanship has been refined to an applied science, and merchants lavish as much attention on the package as on the product.
It is possible to overstress the manipulative dangers latent in this trend to packaged politics; the voters have shown a commendable discrimination in sifting out the candidates who are merely Smooth. Too much slickness can be as damaging as too much prickliness; vide the case of Vice President Nixon, whose image has become so frayed from over-exposure since the time of Checkers, Pat, and that good Republican cloth coat. Mr. Nixon has never been able to rid himself of the slight aura of the disreputable, and today Nelson Rockefeller seems by far the most formidable Republican on the scene. Bets are already on that 1960 will see a contest between Governor Rockefeller and Senator Kennedy—a match between blintzes-eaters and tea-bibbers, as one correspondent dourly predicted here.
Remarks like these—half in earnest, half in mockery—reflect the misgivings about the Smooth Dealers so frequently expressed by those who must keep watch on politics. The absence of passion and purpose in American politics, despite the stimulus of domestic and world crises, is a dismaying reality. Too often the great debates on foreign policy find only a faint echo in the Senate. There are honorable exceptions—notably Senators Humphrey, Morse, and Fulbright—but on questions like Quemoy and Matsu, European disengagement and nuclear tests, the clash of debate is missed the more for its manifest need. In the twilight years of the Eisenhower administration, it is especially melancholy to contemplate a Congress where dissonance is muted in the interests of avoiding a “controversial” stand. It is painfully symptomatic that the intellectually liveliest debate in the recent lackluster campaign was over an article which charged that eggheads had been slighted in three local campaigns.
In a mood of stoic resignation, one Washington correspondent prepared a spoofing recipe for the “Instant Presidential Candidate,” which goes like this: “Take one package of quick-frozen smiles, garnish with Ivy, place in flip-top box, and soft-boil in melting-pot politics; sauté with two teaspoons of eau-de-madison, skewer on a Gallup Poll. Baste in Teleprompter before serving. Feeds 180,000,000.”
The burlesque is broad and not necessarily prophetic. If it is too early to applaud unreservedly the rise of the bland new men of politics, it is equally premature to scorn the Smooth as ineffectual. The new Congress may provide clues for a firmer judgment—especially when the fledgling legislators find that it takes more than a statesmanlike speech on Cyprus or an apt quote from Aristotle to win a national headline.
Events generate their own pressure, and the new Senate Democrats may find that it is tactically unfeasible for everyone to sit astride the Golden Mean, even though Majority Leader Johnson may benignly insist that it is the safest place to perch. Heywood Broun accurately remarked that no body politic is healthy “until it begins to itch.” It would be unthinkable that the 86th Congress, so filled with restless young legislators, will not restore a little more health to the body politic when there are so many issues itching to be scratched.
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1 I am indebted to a conversation with Sidney Hyman, the historian of the American Presidency, for some of these ideas, though I alone am responsible for the form in which they are stated.
2 This is quoted from Dr. Donovan's “Congressional Campaign: Maine Elects a Democrat,” one of a valuable series of studies published by Henry Holt for the Eagleton Foundation at Douglass College.
3 Space is lacking for an adequate discussion of the effects of Senator Estes Kefauver's two losing campaigns on the recruitment of new talent for his party. In those states where the Tennessean's delegates carried the Presidential primary, there was often an invigorating effect on the local Democracy. Convention delegates elect the National Committeemen, and thus it is possible for insurgents to dislodge an enfeebled party bureaucracy—a virtue of the primary system often overlooked. In South Dakota, where the Democrats are now resurgent, this revitalization born of the Kefauver campaigns is particularly notable.
