Through the Mill

Back to Washington this week went Connecticut's Representative Clare Boothe Luce, her seat in Congress safe for two more years. This was the news that went with her: in two years Clare Luce had risen from the position of an interesting novelty--a good-looking Congresswoman --to an eminence as a main target of the Roosevelt Administration.

The embattled Fourth District of Connecticut became well-known all over the U.S. for the first time this autumn, as the whole New Deal poured money and speakers into Fairfield County to try to defeat her. Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Orson Welles, Clifton Fadiman and members of what Mrs. Luce called "the whole Broadway-Browder Axis" were all guest stars in the anti-Luce show. The President, himself, asked for her defeat and on election night, when the first returns seemed to augur defeat for the Congresswoman from Connecticut, Franklin Roosevelt told his Hyde Park neighbors: "I think [that] would be a very good thing for the country, and that is a rough thing to say about a lady."

The magnitude of the assault on Mrs. Luce by New Deal press and speakers was in ratio to the size of her attack on the New Deal. From Harold Ickes, whom she dismissed as "that prodigious bureaucrat with the soul of a meat ax and the mind of a commissar," all the way up to the President, she spared no New Dealer. No other Republican orator except Candidates Dewey and Bricker hit the President so hard, so often and before such large crowds. None spoke so sharply as she did.

In a speech in Chicago she reviewed the President's statements about the danger of war from 1937 ("quarantine") to Pearl Harbor and charged: "He is the only American President who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it. ... The shame of Pearl Harbor was Mr. Roosevelt's shame."

The particular difficulties the New Dealers had in trying to defeat Representative Luce were two: 1) more Wilsonian than the opposite, she was on record as a consistent internationalist; 2) as a Representative she had such a consistent pro-labor voting record that the P.A.C. had no effective labor arguments against her, was thus confined to less effective issues.

In a month-long speaking tour--St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, Worcester, Boston --Clare Luce had the biggest rallies of anyone except the national candidates.

Back in the Fourth District after her tour Mrs. Luce found a curious reversal of the normal political situation in the county. The normally Republican sections --the so-called "station-wagon" vote in commuting areas--did not do as well by her as they might, whereas the factory girls of industrial Bridgeport, normally New Deal voters, made her a kind of heroine.

Result: in Connecticut's Fourth District she probably piled up a bigger vote than any previous candidate of any party. The total vote for Congress was 204,507. Her winning margin was narrow--2,013. A freshman Congresswoman had passed over to the old campaigner's ranks.

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