THE DOOM OF THE G.O.P.
By D. W. BROGAN Washington, November 6th.
N the spring of 1937 I came out to Washington. In November, I 1936, the Republicans had suffered their most disastrous defeat ; they carried two small States out of forty-eight. Dining with a Democratic Congressman, I was introduced to one of the leaders of the tiny Republican minority as somebody "interested in the future of the Republican Party." The depressed statesman replied that he was glad to meet somebody who thought it had a future. It had a future, but the ironist, now even more important in the councils of the " Grand Old Party " than he was then, is in part responsible for the extraordinary fact that the future of the Republi- cans is more in doubt now than it was in 1936.
No doubt some of this bewilderment and despair is due to the simple human resentment at having the cup of certain victory snatched away. Never did a party go into action with more con- fidence than did the Republicans this year. Never did a Presidential candidate give more the impression of performing a ritual rather than fighting for a doubtful victory. It was not a doubtful victory ; it was a certain victory, and the President-elect was touring the country building up general support for an Administration already elected, not trying to be elected. It was all over bar the formal notification—till midnight, November 2nd. At the moment the natural tendency in Republican ranks is to blame it all on Mr. Dewey. He was never popular with the regular party leaders, least of all the Congressional leaders. His New York staff was not popular either, and his known intention of bringing to Washington his highly successful New York methods of disciplining legislators did not endear him to the Congressmen who were to be brought to heel. So there is a natural tendency to throw it all on to Mr. Dewey. A defeated candidate has few friends. Still fewer has a twice defeated candidate. " You can't make a soufflé rise twice," said Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who has had hardly more love for Governor Dewey than for her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But these human reactions are unjust. Governor Dewey's campaign was badly conceived ; we can all see that now. (I did not see it till early on the morning of Wednesday, November 3rd.) But the implication that all would have been well with another candidate, say, with Senator Taft, seems to me baseless. As for the bold suggestion from the Hearst Press that the great mistake was not to nominate General MacArthur, well anything that gives the Republicans a chance to laugh is a kind deed. • The reasons for Republican defeat lie much deeper than the strategic faults of the Dewey plan of campaign. That plan failed disastrously because it was based on a misunderstanding of what has happened to American political life since the last Republican victory of 1928. The Republicans have now lost five Presidential elections in a row, and the last one in circumstances that leave little ground for consolation indeed. There was no depression to be blamed on them ; there was no F.D.R. ; there was no war. Why were they defeated ? Because the Republicans are now the minority party. Most Americans who class themselves as party members now class themselves as Democrats. Most of those who class them- selves as Independents, other things being equal, vote the Democratic ticket. If age groups are taken into consideration; this is still more true ; the relative proportion of Democrats is growing and will grow. By 1952 more than half the voters won't know what it is to have voted in a Presidential election which the Republicans have won. And in American politics more than in any other politics voting habits count. For a majority of Americans it is now an effort to think of voting Republican as it was an effort to think of voting Democratic down to 1932.
For sixty-eight years the Republican Party ruled the United States with three intervals of Democratic Administrations totalling sixteen years. The Republican Congressional leaders are men who grew up in that era of easy dominance, of effortless superiority. They have not got over it, and that is one of their greatest handicaps: They regard a Democratic Administration as an anomaly ; in itself an abuse. In 1936 their theme song was " four long years." And ever
since they have talked (and until the recent debacle) they were talking as if the sixteen years of Democratic rule were a bad dream to which all evil, from Hitler and taxes to Stalin and the atom bomb. could be attributed. If tackled on what the oppressed American people had been doing all this time, they talked as if the voter were an erring daughter who had been seduced by a city slicker, but who had returned home and would be a good girl now. The erring daughter has erred again, and the only conclusion is that she likes being seduced, and, heaven knows, Mr. Truman is no city slicker. The candle may be kept burning in the window, of the Republican Party mansion, but there will be no return to effective power as long as this " legitimist" attitude persists and as long as the leaders of the Republican Party fail to realise one or two truths about the American people.
First of all, the Civil War is over. Mr. Truman held with great success the Negro vote, and successfully defied the Confederates (old Republicans would have called them the Rebels), the " Dixiecrats," who are trying to evade the political results of the Civil War. The Democratic Party under its victorious leader is not only greatly changed from what it was under Cleveland and Wilson, but even from what it was under Roosevelt. Mr. Truman is a plain blunt man incapable of the marvellous juggling feats of F.D.R.; so he defied the Dixiecrats and the fellow-travellers to do their damnedest and is in the happy position of being able to laugh at them both. Yet, at this moment, Republican papers and spokes- men are hinting at an alliance between Republicans and Dixiecrats in Congress to hold up the President's programme. An alliance of the nominal heirs of Lincoln with the real heirs of Jefferson Davis] It is such short-sightedness that makes some young Republicans feel that higher powers have decided their party shall not only die but die with ignominy.
Then the American man in the street lost between 1929 and 1932 his old, naïve faith in American business, and he has never got it back. He is not a Socialist. The parties that preached Socialism (even if we throw in Mr. Wallace's rag-bag) got less than two million votes out of fifty millions. But the majority of the American people don't want to turn the Government over to business-men. The fact that Mr. Truman had been an unsuccessful business-man did not shock the voters. Lots of them were, too. They did not like the demand—one can hardly call it an appeal—for a blank cheque which was what the Dewey team did ask for when they were not promising to do what Mr. Truman had also promised more convincingly to do, and which, he could plausibly assert, the Republican-controlled Congress had not allowed him to do. American business is, politically speaking, not trusted, and' the Republican Party under its old leadership is the party that believes that " the business of the United States is business." That attitude is as dead as the author of the dictum, President Coolidge.
Now many of these truths are known to young Republican leaders. Some were known to Governor Dewey and his very able team. They are known to the two Lodge brothers, the Senator from Massachusetts, the Congressman from Connecticut, who know that the age of their grandfather is gone for ever. But they are not known to the standard congressional leaders, largely for an institutional reason. Power in Congress goes with rank in the standing committees, and rank in the committees goes with seniority. This is truer of the House than the Senate, and, although the Senate was nearly swept clean by the Democrats, it was on the House that the wrath of the electors fell. Ninety seats lost a Democratic majority of nearly a hundred—this is a lesson that the leaders should learn ; but will they? I doubt it, for leadership in the House falls to men who have kept their seats all through the Roosevelt era. In their pocket boroughs (or " stagnant pools," to quote Briand) they have been safe for twenty years or more ; they are still safe, and they cannot feel the anxieties of their junier colleagues in doubtful districts where the general tides of American opinion can be felt. If Messrs. Martin and Taber and the rest devote the next session to being smart and sticking to their old muzzle-loading guns, the Republican Party as an effective opposition will disappear. A depression might bring it back to do the things the Democrats are damned for doing. But it will be disheartened, divided and impotent. Yet for the old guard to change would be asking a lot of aged and highly illusioned men. They are still fighting the Civil War and the New Deal. They thought the President was foolish when he attacked Mr. Hoover or recalled the campaign against Al Smith. Mr. Truman knew what he was doing. He rubbed in the sins of a party whose congressional leaders had not repented of them. And it was the Republicans in their tirades, not Mr. Dewey but the rank-and-file politicians, who could not resist the temptation to dig up a grave and dance on the corpse of F.D.R. They should know better now.
" Imperial Caesar thou art mighty yet."
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