Promissory Note

At the first clear news which came out of the pandemonium of Philadelphia this week, the U.S. took heart and hope. So did the anxious world. For the big news from Philadelphia was that the Republican Party, which already controlled Congress and by all the signs would soon have the presidency as well, would not retreat from internationalism.

The Collateral. The promise was both explicit and implicit in the party's platform (see below). It rang through the oratory of the opening days. It even boomed out from Keynoter Dwight Green, the governor of Illinois, who in the past had faithfully followed the "nationalist" line of the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick.

Said Green: "Our defense at home & abroad is not in arms alone, but in every means that builds for freedom and human welfare . . . The Congress has voted a European Recovery Program because it believes that the free nations of the world can grow in strength and unity . . . Our task is to put the world on its feet, and not on our back . . ." The promise was to be repeated, in more solemn tones, by Herbert Hoover the next night.

The platform and the keynote speech were the promissory note; the collateral would appear when the candidate was chosen. The man the Republicans nominated would determine the genuineness of the oratory. The nation watched with curiosity and hope.

The Glittering Prize. For the winner, the nomination would be more than "the glittering prize" which Historian James Bryce once called it. It would be a terrible responsibility. On the eve of the convention, Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the people's first choice in virtually every pre-convention poll, reminded Republicans of that worldwide fact.

General Ike, wrote his friend Roy Roberts in the Kansas City Star, feels that the G.O.P. must make known by its platform, but more especially by its candidate, its intention to stand firm for the bipartisan foreign policy. The candidate Eisenhower would prefer: Vandenberg. Those whom he would count safe: Dewey, Stassen, Warren. Nominees whom Eisenhower would not accept: Taft, Bricker, Joe Martin. If the G.O.P. disappointed Ike, what would he do? Wrote Roberts: "His friends believe that he will take a dramatic way to warn the country. . . How far he'll go, no one knows."

Just as anxious as Ike was the New York Times: "If this country during the next four years returns to the Chinese Wall philosophy for which so many Republicans have been shouting--and in Congress, voting--we face tragedy . . ."

Under the tumult and the shouting, observers felt the confident, mighty ground swell of a party moving forward--a party that, after long exile, knew itself once more as representative of the nation.

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