The Cantilevered Roof

A political party's platform is really less like a platform than like a large, cantilevered roof under which all wrangling factions can temporarily huddle. After the huddle is over, no one pays much attention to the roof.

Democratic roofers worked and worried last week in the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, trying to hoist up the last piece of lumber before all the fears and feuds of the party were exposed. They listened to pleas and threats. Sometimes they argued. Labor's William Green demanded a plank for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, for which most Southern Democrats had voted in Congress. Harold Ickes demanded federal control of tidewater oil lands, which outraged such states' rights defenders as Texas' ex-Governor Dan Moody.

In between flare-ups, the committeemen listened to lectures on education, agriculture, highway safety, taxes, fishing and the ladies' handbag industry. At last they faced the most explosive subject of all: civil rights.

Simple Issue. Negro witnesses demanded that Harry Truman's full civil rights program be built into the platform without qualifications. Said Dr. Channing Tobias, Negro educator and member of the President's Civil Rights Commission: "I say the issue is simple because it is this: either Negro Americans are citizens of the United States or they are not. If they are, then they are entitled to all the rights of citizenship. If they are not, then it is only fair that our government publish to the world that it has two classes of citizens."

While other members of the committee bitterly protested, Senator Myers and a picked group retired to do the final hammering together in private.

When the job was done, it was ready to be presented to 1) the rest of the drafting committee, 2) Harry Truman, 3) the whole convention platform committee, 4) the whole convention. The roof might be slightly altered in the process, but only slightly.

Its most controversial section was a gabled compromise decorated with the principle of civil rights: "We have implemented our often-expressed belief that racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop, and vote equally with all citizens." To this was appended a Southern balustrade: an affirmation of the right of individual states to make their own laws.

Vague Remedy. The labor section, in deference to the C.I.O and A.F.L., demanded outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. This put conservative Democrats on the spot. But only vague remedial legislation to reduce labor-management conflicts was suggested. On the question of tidewater oil rights: silence.

For the rest, the Democrats were for admission of 400,000 displaced persons, support of a free Israel, continued civilian control of atomic energy, and for action to "curb Republican inflation." They were for tax reduction (especially in the lower incomes), debt reduction, and "broad and adequate" federal housing and education programs. They were against two things: Communism and the Republicans.

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