Ground Swell

The big news out of last week's elections was that Republicans can win the Presidency in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt or no. Hardly a political commentator of repute disagreed. For the first time in eleven years, Democrats were genuinely on the defensive--except, seemingly, Franklin Roosevelt.

Asked about the results at his press conference, the President was ready. Chuckling, he said he was interested in the returns from Italy, the South Pacific and China.

Slow, steady Republican gains, which began in 1938, had reached groundswell proportions. (In each election since, Republicans underestimated their strength--as did pundits and pollsters.)

The pattern was repeated last week. Not even National Chairman Harrison Spangler had counted on bagging the Kentucky Governorship. This border-state triumph was the key to the whole trend: it demonstrated that Negroes are deserting the New Deal in droves, that public resentment against the "ins" is stronger in the privacy of the voting booth than in polls, editorials or street-corner talk. In New York, no one in his right mind had conceded colorless Joe Hanley more than a 100,000 majority for Lieutenant Governor; Republican Joe Hanley trotted home with a 350,000 margin.

Back to '28. The Republican swing hit hard. Frank Hague's corrupt Jersey gang took a crushing blow in the mazard; the wreckage of Tammany Hall is strewn over Manhattan. Sole potent Democratic city machine left, outside the Solid South, is Ed Kelly's Chicago juggernaut.

The Republican swath cut deep, down to the grass roots. Outstanding and almost sole noncasualty: Cleveland's popular Democratic Mayor Frank J. Lausche. Hartford, Conn. (pop. 166,267) threw out its Democratic mayor after eight years. Plattsburg, N.Y. (pop. 16,351), a tiny Democratic island in the vast upstate New York G.O.P. sea, got its first Republican mayor in 14 years. And the G.O.P. picked up the only two Congressional by-elections, in Pennsylvania and New York.

Republicans now control 26 states, with a population of 85,649,790 and an electoral college vote of 342. In short, the G.O.P. is approaching the strength of the peak year 1928--it has almost everything but the Presidency.

End of the Cycle? To most Americans it is almost unthinkable that Franklin Roosevelt could lose in 1944. But not so to Columnist Walter Lippmann, never rash, who calmly handed the 1944 election over to the Republicans. His reasons:

"Responsibility of governing the country has been passing gradually but surely into the hands of the Republicans. . . .

"When the time comes for such a change of party, the difference between the two great parties on great issues tends to diminish to the vanishing point. That is the secret strength of American society. . . . Our party system is one of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ... To the exquisite pain of the doctrinaires, the party rising in power is ... a 'carbon copy' of the party it is displacing. . . . And the question is one of men, not of principles.

"[The Republicans] are going to win [the next elections], as now seems not unlikely, because the appointed time for a change has arrived, and for no other reason."

On the question of men within the G.O.P., Columnist Lippmann was unshaken in his belief that the "post-New Deal" Republicans, the "men who have lived in the real world and not in the dream world of resentments-," would win out over "pre-New Deal Republicans." But, said the Louisville Courier-Journal: "So far the parallel between 1918 and 1943 has been remarkably close. What is now at stake for America is whether the parallel will project itself into 1944 and heave up another Harding."

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