Compromise in G. O. P.

It looked as if Wendell Willkie had triumphed over the No. 1 political rule that you can't beat Somebody with Nobody. He was dead set against the isolationist Chicago Tribune's candidate, Werner W. Schroeder, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, but he espoused no candidate of his own. The result was that when the Committee gathered in St. Louis it permitted Somebody in the person of Mr. Schroeder to withdraw gracefully after two ballots, then proceeded by acclamation to name Nobody in the person of Harrison Earl Spangler of Iowa.

Red-faced, 63-year-old Mr. Spangler girded himself last week to take command of the G.O.P. strategy that will lead it to 1944. The unanimity with which he had been chosen was synthetic; the harmony which he is supposed to stand for will be, at best, ersatz. For Mr. Spangler knew, as Willkie knew and as the Chicago Tribune knew, that no mere middle-course champion of compromise could ever span the gap within the party: between the Willkie wing and the extreme isolationist symbolized by Schroeder and Colonel McCormick's Tribune.

Chairman's Progress. Harrison Spangler has been a stanch Republican wheel horse* all his adult life. Only once did he slip his halter--when he became a Bull Mooser in 1912. He worked up through precinct, county and district jobs to become National Committeeman in 1931. In 1936 he bossed Alf Landon's Chicago headquarters. In 1940 he backed Senator Taft's Presidential aspirations.

Balding Winner Spangler made a double-jointed, fence-straddling statement. For the benefit of party progressives, he said: "... We haven't the same world, with the modern bomber, that we had in the days of the 30-knot battleship. You no longer can say that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are moats around America." For the benefit of party diehards: "My job is to build up an army of voters in the United States to defeat the New Deal, and I don't think there are any votes in China or Mongolia or Russia that I can get for the Republicans."

Not victory, perhaps, but averted catastrophe, was Wendell Willkie's verdict. Said he: "My fight was to prevent the masthead of the Chicago Tribune from being imprinted on the Republican Party. I am happy that the result prevented that calamity. Mr. Spangler has a great opportunity for progressive public service."

* Cryptic note sent out by the Associated Press the night of Spangler's election: "In Spangler background, first graf, read it 'X X X one of those party wheel horses, etc.' (deleting 'ideal')."

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