Unmistakable Republican

(See Cover)

When Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Martin marched into Philadelphia last week, the event epitomized political history in the making. The key state of Pennsylvania was getting ready to elect Ed Martin to the U.S. Senate. Ed Martin is an unmistakable Republican. The city on which he marched, in the last days of his campaign, is the shrine of traditional Republicanism. And Republicanism, after 14 years of ineffective opposition, was unmistakably resurgent all around the U.S.

It was golden Indian summer when Ed arrived. Rittenhouse Square, hemmed in by the old brownstone houses of an old aristocracy, was patterned with pale sunshine. The city was heavy with factory mists and factory stinks. But as much as anything else, smog and smells were evidences of Republican hardihood. On top of City Hall--above the chambers where a bland, bluff Republican machine had reigned with scarcely an interruption for 58 years--Father William Penn lifted a smog-smudged hand in benediction over the city whose wealth and power were created by high tariffs and Republican enterprise.

On Broad Street, the bronze statue of a Union soldier (First Infantry Regiment, Pennsylvania National Guard) backed against the red-brick headquarters of the Union League of Philadelphia. Old, dignified Republicans, walking up the curving steps to lunch on stewed snapper or crabmeat Dewey while discussing politics and finance, sometimes gave the bronze hero a glance. Theirs was the party which saved the Union 81 years ago.

Theirs is the party, they swear, which in their own words will save it again.

Signs of Stamina. Ed Martin had come to Philadelphia from the state capital in Harrisburg. During that trip he might have reflected on other signs of Republican stamina--the stone walls and rail fences marking off private property, the small-town centers of muscular little businesses, the web of great railroads, the cities of big and busy mills. True, Pittsburgh, sprawling to the westward, was disorderly, recently strikebound, and Democratic-controlled. But Pittsburgh was neatly fenced off by a gerrymander. In 1943 Ed Martin had signed the gerrymandering bill which had cut down Pittsburgh's Democratic influence. Ed had remarked: "It's just the good old American way. When we Republicans were in the minority we bellyached when they ran over us. It just has to be done."

Now the Republicans were surging back to political power. Ed Martin traipsed triumphantly in & around Philadelphia. He went out to fashionable Wyncote (see cut). He marched out to speak in a neighborhood of dirty, dingy brick houses. This was the rebellious northeast section which three times had helped to throw Philadelphia into the camp of Roosevelt. Here were the hosiery mills, the machine shops and shipyards. Franklin Roosevelt had been their idol. But Roosevelt was dead.

Figures on a Tablecloth. That was one political fact discussed by the substantial men at the Union League. The other point was the assumption that after twelve years of the New Deal and a year and a half of Trumanism, the people wanted a change--that, specifically, they wanted to get back to Republicanism.

Were the diners at the Union League deluding themselves? Not according to expert analysis (see below). The signs of a historic reversal were all around. By the most conservative estimate Ed Martin would beat old Senator Joe Guffey, slavish follower of his Democratic masters, by 200,000 votes. The margin might be a lot more than that. Ed would carry with him Pennsylvania's Attorney General James H. Duff, his own hand-picked candidate for governor. Of 33 Congressional seats, Pennsylvania's Republicans stood to win 25.

But even better than that, by all the signs, Republican triumphs would be nationwide. G.O.P. chieftains like National Chairman B. Carroll Reece babbled about a Republican Senate. With harder-headed realism they talked about a Republican House. What might not be the results? A Republican President in 1948? The immediate results were easier to see.

Solid & Orderly. Massachusetts' Joe Martin, a politician's politician who as leader of the opposition has had little to do in the last decade except try to keep his guerrillas in hand, would reap his reward and become Speaker of the House. Indiana's Charlie Halleck, a repentant Willkieite now in the Chicago Tribune fold, would become Majority Leader. Illinois' Leo E. Allen, an undistinguished but faithful GOPster, would become chairman of the powerful Rules Committee which controls the House's business.

Other Republicans who would step into House chairmanships: Appropriations--New York's arch-conservative John Taber, loudmouthed, long-winded but an expert on government finance; Ways & Means--Minnesota's bullet-headed Harold Knutson, small-minded and vindictive, who believes that the graduated income tax and the excess profits tax are the devil's work; Foreign Affairs--New Jersey's white-haired Charles A. Eaton, delegate to the San Francisco Conference which set up U.N.; Banking & Currency--Michigan's

Jesse P. Wolcott, eloquent, smart, the man who helped push Bretton Woods through the House; Military Affairs--New York's Walter G. Andrews, reticent, unassuming and trusted by the War Department.

These were key spots. The Republicans who would move into them were perhaps no better and no worse than such present Democratic committee chairman as Andy May, Sol Bloom, Muley Doughton, et al. Committee chairmen all get there the same way--by seniority, which brings experience* but not necessarily ability.

Of course, as the Union League prophets knew, the undiscriminating sun would shine on all Republicans. The Chicago Tribune's isolationist Robert McCormick would bask in it. But the Democratic sun had warmed the backs of even stranger interlopers. This was one of the unpleasant and confusing results of a two-party system.

The point to remember was that a political turnover would lift into a new area of activity such Republicans as Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, John Bricker, Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Harold Stassen--and Ed Martin. To extreme New Dealers perhaps all of these men except Earl Warren and Harold Stassen were anathema. But not to the country at large. Senator Vandenberg had joined freely and courageously with Secretary of State Byrnes to form the nation's strong, bipartisan foreign policy. Taft's cold, moral judgment and insistence on getting at the facts had more than once saved the Senate from hysterical legislation. Dewey's businesslike administration of New York has won him a popularity which would apparently re-elect him by a landslide. What about 67-year-old Ed Martin of Pennsylvania ?

On the Boss's Knee. In the 1932 Republican Convention, when the Hoover crowd was trying to jam through the vice-presidential nomination of Charlie Curtis, "a voice from the floor shouted in answer to the roll call: "Pennsylvania casts 75 votes for General Edward Martin." The vote, as everyone knew, was just a maneuver. Pennsylvania came around to Curtis when the Pennsylvania bosses got what they wanted frolri the National Committee. But it gave Ed Martin his first brief and tentative spin into the national scene.

By then, Ed had been in state politics for more than 40 years. He had been born, properly, in a log cabin and, at twelve, helped round up votes for Greene County Democrats. This was a mistake he soon corrected. When Grover Cleveland and the Democrats took the high tariff off imported wools and ruined Ed's sheep-raising father, Ed reformed and joined the Republicans. In 1898 he marched off to fight the Spanish in the Philippines. He came back and graduated from Waynesburg College.

Ed practiced law and from law went into politics. With his military connections he thus had three careers, and he moved from one to another, like a good general exploiting the terrain to further his advance.

In time he attracted the attention of the mighty Republican state machine, run by the mighty Boies Penrose. Martin describes his association with Penrose in metaphor: "As a youngster I sat on Penrose's knee."

The machine was notorious. Penrose's predecessor was Boss Matthew Stanley Quay, the dark, withered, predatory man whose miscast eyes were cocked over all the craft and spoliation in Pennsylvania. Quay had been content to run the machine. Curiously, Penrose's chief ambition was to be mayor of Philadelphia, an aim which he might have achieved if he had not been photographed one dawn leaving a Philadelphia brothel. Pennsylvania's voters, however, sent him to the Senate for 24 years.

Advance Continued. At the time Ed Martin joined up, Joseph Ridgway Grundy, the cherubic, wealthy Quaker millowner and cold, shrewd defender of high tariffs, was rising to power. "Uncle Joe" Grundy, as Martin still calls him, had been dictating tariff bills since 1897. His masterpiece was the Smoot-Hawley bill of 1930, which precipitated an economic world war and was one underlying cause of World War II. To some Joe Grundy was an ogre. To his friends, the white-haired, thee-saying Quaker was just an old-fashioned businessman. The machine served Grundy.

It also served Andrew W. Mellon, oil man, aluminum man, steel man, Secretary of the Treasury under three Presidents for eleven years.

These were the men for whom Ed Martin labored. He observes: "Of course my enemies always call me Mellon's errand boy. I did enjoy the confidence of Mr. A. W. Mellon." He always refers to him as "Mr. A. W. Mellon." Ed Martin is a respectful man.

Ed became state auditor general, subsequently state treasurer. He had got into an oil business, which prospered. He went broke in the depression and had to settle some $428,000 in debts at 12 1/2-c-; to 15-c- on the dollar--an unhappy episode which political opponents dig up regularly at election time.

Meanwhile he had acquired a further honorable record on the battlefield. As an officer in the Pennsylvania National Guard, he had fought with Pershing on the Mexican border. In World War I he had served in France, where he was wounded, gassed and decorated. In 1939, a major general, he commanded and trained Pennsylvania's famed 28th Division. But when war came again, Old Soldier Martin was retired. Heartbroken, he saw his 28th march off under another man's command.

But the party had use for an old soldier, even if the Army did not. Joe Grundy and Joe Pew--who had thrown himself and his Sun Oil Co. wealth into the party largely on account of his hatred of Roosevelt--wanted him for governor. Ed Martin was a natural for the job in wartime Pennsylvania, organizing for civilian defense, for war production. Even John Lewis' miners, despite their leaders. voted for General Ed. He won in a walk --57 out of 67 counties.

Position Taken. "You know," Ed Martin once remarked, "there's never been anything colorful about me. I've just had to work like the devil." This is an accurate appraisal. The most colorful thing about him is his Army cussing. When the members of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington, Pa., wanted to make him an elder, he demurred. "I take a highball and cuss a little," he explained. They elected him anyhow. Actually he drinks very little, smokes not at all. His gravelly throat is the result of his gassing in the war.

He is a man who leads a disciplined life and exercises a military discipline over others. He is even-tempered, courteous, gracious to the ladies. In the fieldstone house which he had the state build as the governor's summer mansion in Indiantown Gap, his polished boots and riding clothes are arranged in precise ranks. There his wife, Charity, has lovingly collected Pennsylvania Dutch antiques. One of the General's chief diversions is riding over the smoky Blue Mountains. He does not care so much for the old gloomy governor's house in Harrisburg.

He is a man of very modest intellectual attainments. His reading is chiefly military biography and military history--especially Pennsylvania's. The books he studies most are books he himself has compiled. One black notebook contains all the industrial, agricultural, religious and political facts, county by county, of the great and polyglot state which he has run for four years. Another tabulation shows the county by county vote for governor for many years back. On political history and facts the general is solid.

Said and Done. What does his record reveal of Ed Martin, the unmistakable Republican? For one thing, it spotlights a basic difference between the two political philosophies on which the American people will have to decide now and in 1948. In 1935-39 Democratic Governor George H. Earle and his "little New Deal" pushed through much "social" legislation. But virtually all of it was declared unconstitutional by a Republican-controlled state supreme court. Then Earle's successor, hymn-singing Republican Arthur James, axed two more labor-angled measures which the court had overlooked. Martin approved of James and said he hoped to make a record "half as good."

Ed Martin started from that point. He turned a $71 million deficit into a $200 million surplus, reduced taxes $45 million a biennium, and by lowering unemployment compensation contributions saved Pennsylvania employers about $75 million a year. He somewhat liberalized Pennsylvania's workmen's and unemployment compensation laws. He initiated compulsory physical examination of all schoolchildren. He started a program to clear up the state's polluted streams.

Labor leaders, who watched Republicanism in Pennsylvania kill 48 labor-backed bills during one legislative session, decided then that Ed Martin was no friend of theirs. The C.I.O. still thinks of him as hostile. But A.F.L. leaders have changed their minds, and now for the first time since 1937 the Pennsylvania Federation has refused to support the state Democratic candidates.

Pennsylvania voters, fed up with government controls, mandates, busybodiness, liked Ed Martin's administration.

What Ed Martin has said from time to time throws more light on his political philosophy: "When a politician promises he can make a law that will create 60 million jobs he is guilty of a cruel and heartless falsehood. . . . You cannot pass a law that will bring about production. . . . Only enterprise can create employment. . . . Free enterprise is the property of no political party."

In 1944 he attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt for "political debauchery, blunders, quarrels ... for the steady swing of the Federal Government towards the left." In much the same terms, he has attacked the Truman Administration and his opponent, Joe Guffey.

The Smog. In Pennsylvania's golden Indian summer the campaign was in full swing last week, as it was throughout the nation. The key man with the gravelly voice led the Republican cohorts as he once led Pennsylvania's National Guard.

Extravagances were answered with extravagances. Opponent Guffey thundered at Martin: "The plunderbund has run riot at Harrisburg." Roosevelt-hater Joe Pew exulted: "The honeyed voice of the Pied Piper is gone." But, he blared, there are still "political rats."

This was political smog; the voters would have to locate their own course through it. Most would grant that Republicans generally are good administrators. Most would grant that Republicans feel a full measure of responsibility. The real measure of the party is whether it realizes its sense of duty to all the people (and not just to the few, as in its high tariff days) and whether it has grown apace with a nation which has become so much larger and complex since the days of McKinley, or even the days of Herbert Hoover and Mr. A. W. Mellon.

*For a still more sparkling definition of experience, see THEATER.

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