THE U.S. A STRONG & STABLE LAND "Progressive Conservatism" Is Its Mood

In a republic like the U.S., the real news of the nation's political future and its economic direction lies in people who seldom see a reporter. Last month TIME'S Contributing Editor Alvin Josephy set out to talk to these people. He drove 7,400 miles westward through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, along the Oregon Trail through central Nebraska and Wyoming, across northern Utah and southern Idaho, into eastern Oregon and Washington, then back through Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the northern counties of the Midwest farm states. He chose dirt-section line roads in preference to highways, the little towns over the cities. He stopped in at Elks lodges, Chambers of Commerce, Grange halls, talked to Farm Bureau members, Farmers Union members, ranchers, foresters, state and local officials, editors. His report:

EVEN in the smallest towns and most isolated areas, the U.S. is wearing a very prosperous, middle-class suit of clothes, and an attitude of relaxation and confidence. People are not growing wealthy, but more of them than ever before are getting along, have money to spend, and are putting it to use getting satisfaction out of life. I found people with worries and concerns, but there are no great frustrations abroad, none of the strong pressures that make whole groups of citizens desperate and ready to turn to extreme thinking of one sort or another.

Out in the country, on farms and on the range as well as around the borders of every town and shopping center, there is a tremendous amount of building going on: new store buildings, clubhouses and public institutions, and dozens and dozens of modern schools, most of them along simple, functional lines. I remember beautiful schools, for instance, in Idaho Falls and a suburb of Billings, Mont., and others going up in towns in Ohio, Illinois and Iowa. In the commercial centers, the streets are lined with late-model cars. Everywhere I went I had a continuing impression of homes being kept up, business being done, and people being better off than they have ever been before.

In Gaps, No Emergencies. Republicans and Democrats have a surprising sameness of outlook and political thinking. President Eisenhower's policy of "gradualism," or of progressive conservatism, is, in my opinion, exactly the mood of the parts of the country I visited. In normally Democratic country such as northern Idaho and Montana, they don't cheer or worship him, but during the entire trip, only two people expressed to me strong feelings against Ike personally. The great preponderance of people I met did not even suggest that it was still too early to form an opinion on Ike. They like him all right, and he's O.K. Just that.

Delving deeper gives some clues to this satisfied feeling. On foreign affairs, he has filled a gap left by F.D.R. and has given them a secure feeling that everything is in hand and under control. I found a widespread aversion to being whipped up in crises every so often, and Ike hasn't whipped them up. Russia, for the time being, it seemed to many people I talked to, has all the trouble it can handle in its own backyard. Ike's relaxed and confident handling of Korea was fine, and they are sure that somehow he can avoid a collision with Russia. On domestic affairs, Ike gets credit for everything that has been done, or alleged to have been done (lots of talk on how he's cut down on Government workers, lopped off waste in the military, tapered off aid to foreign governments), and what hasn't been done, they believe, doesn't have to be done.

People aren't particularly concerned about lack of accomplishment. The gaps leave no emergencies, and no one has been badly hurt by omissions--yet.

In the areas I visited, Ike won last year because: 1) people who in 1948 had worried that they would lose benefits if the Democrats lost thought Ike promised retention of those benefits in 1952; 2) Ike promised an end to the Korean mess; 3) they were in fear that Washington was being taken over by Reds and crooks. Now there is a settled feeling, I think, that Ike has met the challenge of the latter two points and, though there is need to worry about the first point, nothing definite has yet occurred, and no action is better than wrong action. Beyond those three points, the average farmer and rancher apparently look for little else from the Administration, which accounts for a general indifference to its record, or lack of it, up to now. There are certainly those with strong feelings about taxation, military spending and foreign aid, but save in special areas--such speculation centers and market places as Peoria and Minneapolis or in the Coeur d'Alene mining towns--I found little interest in those subjects which loom as the big issues in Washington. The issue, for instance, of the extension of the excess profits tax was quite often either shrugged off, or given a cold, "Well, what is an excess profits tax, after all? It's a tax on profits that are too big. What's wrong with it?"

In Roots, a Reason. I feel sure that if Ike were running again today, he would get a larger vote than last time in all the regions I covered. Many who voted for Stevenson told me that they were glad Ike was in, and that Stevenson would have been a mistake. I would hesitate to say that all Republicans enjoy the same popularity. From Ohio to Wyoming, straight across the farm belt, among corn, hogs, soybean, alfalfa, wheat, beet and cattle men, I heard Ike praised, and the men around Ike, as well as the Republican Party itself, blamed for going back on promises to the farmers. Farmers and ranchers everywhere told me that Ike had made specific promises in his campaign speeches to them that he would keep "the program" intact if he were elected. Now they blame Secretary of Agriculture Benson and, of course, Tom Dewey and "Eastern money" for talking Ike into breaking his promises. In eastern Oregon, Washington, northern Idaho and Montana, Ike is similarly popular, while Secretary of Interior McKay and the "power trusts and bankers of the G.O.P." are the villains to public-power supporters.

There is a lot of strange political reasoning behind all this, but its roots go back into American history. The area I chose to roam still has its traditions of Populism, the I.W.W.s and assorted brands of native radicalism, aimed for the most part against the moneybags of the East. A managed farm economy, public power, Government control and regulation can raise the hair of an Eastern conservative. Not so on his rural brother of the Midwest and West. That man, if his personal interests so dictate, can vote G.O.P. and be conservative on 99 issues, yet fight stubbornly for one thing which the Easterner might regard as an idea right out of the Kremlin.

A big, prosperous G.O.P. wheat farmer in Gering, Nebr. summed up what a lot of others told me elsewhere: "The thing we've got to fight against is alien, Asiatic Communism--not socialism. A managed farm economy is socialism, and we've got it, and we've got to keep it." And at a service-club lunch at Burlington, Iowa, a man who has 1,400 acres of fine corn land between West Burlington and Mt. Pleasant said: "The big Easterners are trying to sell Eisenhower that all he has to do is toss the farmers a little help after disaster hits, like it has in Texas. We went for the New Deal because it gave us a program to prevent disaster before it comes. We'll go back to the New Deal, if it's the only way to keep the program, whatever names they call it by back East."

A Veto for Canned Scripts. I heard the same sort of determined support for public power voiced by G.O.P. voters in Nebraska (a public-power state) and by people throughout the Northwest (where it has become an issue of enormous magnitude); for federal-irrigation projects by G.O.P.-voting farmers in Riverton, Shoshoni and Douglas, Wyo., and for the strictest maintenance of present Government rules regulating the use of national parks and U.S. forests by chambers of commerce in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

In Missoula, for instance, the local chamber recently got the

U.S. Chamber to abandon a national public-relations program aimed at getting U.S. forests opened wider to logging companies. The local protest, eventually backed by the chambers of commerce of 17 states, began when the Missoula chamber got some "canned" radio scripts from the Washington office.

"We hit the roof," said Don Wilson, the secretary of the Missoula chamber. "Their policy would open the forests to all kinds of irresponsible fly-by-nights and little companies that would clear-cut the land, then let their holdings go back to the counties or the Federal Government for taxes after they were finished and had ruined the area for good." The big companies, which practice responsible scientific tree-farming, he said, are already logging the U.S. forests, and have no reason to agitate for relaxing Government rules. Later, I not only found this to be true, but came away from the Western states with the feeling that the majority of business people, even the big ones, are strong conservationists, and overwhelmingly opposed to those relatively few interests which are trying to make inroads in the national parks and forests.

I heard an anti-internationalist tone in many conversations in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, but nowhere else. Iowa, Nebraska and the states farther west, particularly Idaho and Montana, seemed surprisingly internationalist, with pro-U.N. talk, clubs, study groups, and an awareness of our world position and responsibilities. In the mining areas, where there are shut-down and slowed-down mines and unemployment, there is a lot of angry and unreasoning feeling against the "trade-not-aid" program. At a luncheon in Kellogg, Idaho, I heard a minimum of logic and clear reasoning as people told me that they were all for giving help to our allies, even if it meant high taxes, but they were against "Stassen's damn-fool policy" of buying lead, zinc and antimony from foreign countries and letting our own mines rot on the vine. They were all for the sections of the Simpson amendment which would give special tariff protection to U.S. ores, and when it was beaten, papers headlined the defeat of the amendment in eight-column banners from Spokane to Helena as if it were a national tragedy. The day I left Idaho, the papers carried a story that Senator McCarthy might eventually come to Idaho with his investigating committee to see if there was bad planning among those in the Government who handled foreign-mineral purchases.

An Opportunity to Isolate. In every state except Joe McCarthy's native Wisconsin (where anyone will readily discuss Joe), I got the strong impression that McCarthy isn't much of an issue, but that any candidate who tries to make him an issue may get hurt. The premise is accepted that the Federal Government under Truman was full of Reds, and most of the people I talked to seemed of the opinion that there are still a lot of Reds in Washington, particularly in the State Department. No amount of argument is going to change their minds. In a part of the country where few people can readily identify themselves with "intellectuals," or others whom McCarthy has gone after, Joe still seems accepted as a necessary, and even valuable, bird dog. But opinions are not strong one way or the other. A majority view seems to be: the Communist threat has slackened, many Reds have been exposed, Ike's Administration isn't going to coddle them, but it's good to have McCarthy there keeping up the pressure and watching every hole a rat might try to sneak into. Book-burning, McCarthy's opposition to Ike, even the attack on the Protestant clergy by McCarthy's erstwhile Chief Investigator Joseph B. Matthews, seemed to arouse few passions. In fact, one of the few bookish persons I met, J. H. Gipson, the peppery owner of the Caxton Printers, Ltd., in Caldwell, Idaho, said to me: "McCarthy's just an enthusiastic, two-fisted young man who likes a fight. He's not out to destroy our liberties, or subvert the Constitution, or become a dictator, or anything else wicked. He's doing a necessary job, and he's doing it like a Marine--with both fists." Gipson, it might be noted, once almost wrecked his publishing career by renting his presses during a mine strike to a socialist newspaper whose own plant had been smashed by a mob. "I stayed up all night debating with my conscience," he tells about it. "But I believed in a free press--and I'd do it again!"

Only the faintest lines have yet been etched around what promises to be the main issue in this part of the country: the Republican farm program. Members of the House Agriculture Committee under Kansas' Clifford Hope are out now on a national tour trying to find out what farmers want. Secretary Benson is also in the midst of a great querying operation, collecting opinions from hundreds of farmers and others connected with the farm industry throughout the country.

Support for Insurance. Farmers are as proud as anyone else and they don't want to see headlines castigating them as a special class undermining the free-enterprise system or any other treasured American value. So most of them will begin a conversation by saying that they're all for trying to make a go of it by themselves, without special Government favors. But from then on one wonders if they really mean it. The "farm program," meaning a sort of package tying up' such things as price supports at a high percentage of parity, insurance, loans, storage and marketing aids, REA and soil conservation, means one thing to most of the farmers I talked to: a reassuring piece of insurance against disaster. To them, there is no insurance in a "flexible farm program," or a program minus this or that present-day provision. In North Dakota G.O.P. Senator Milton Young said: "A flexible farm-support program will be tragic for the Republican Party." His words would be taken seriously.

Benson's original policy statements were perhaps too blunt and badly timed. Drought and falling prices were affecting farmers and cattlemen from Ohio to Texas, and they were getting worried. At just that moment the Administration spoke its piece. By the time I reached the Midwest and the plains states opinion seemed to be firming up that Ike would have to be notified that the farm program would have to stay as is, and that if he didn't accept the notification, a lot of farmers would go back to voting Democratic.

Such a move away from the G.O.P. has not begun yet. And it may not occur. The owner of an alfalfa dehydrating plant in Cozad, Nebr. said: "It's a hell of a note. The Democrats bought the farm vote, and next year the Republicans will do it. Wait and see--they'll have to."

Meanwhile, Benson personally bears the brunt of the bitterness. In Goodland and Logansport, Ind., Centerville, Mt. Pleasant and Shenandoah, Iowa, Nebraska City, Kearney, Ogallala and the Scottsbluff area of Nebraska, I met many who complained that the Secretary is a businessman, not a farmer. In strong Farm Union areas such as central and eastern Montana the Republican Party and policy are held to blame rather than Benson. Near Billings, I heard a recorded anti-G.O.P. speech by Senator Jim Murray in use as a radio commercial by a retail outlet as a sales pitch to farmers to buy portable grain-storage bins. The implication: the new Administration is now forcing farmers to fend for themselves. In Hettinger, N. Dak. and Selby, S. Dak., where rust was threatening the wheat crop gripes followed the old Non-Partisan League line, and were directed like buckshot against the banks and Eastern capitalists around Ike.

The Chief Asset. The farmer is not only news politically--a focal question mark for both parties in 1954--but he is facing an important milestone in his relationship with the rest of the nation. "The Program" of almost 20 years' duration is now under study by the new Administration. What the Administration does, for good or bad to the farmers, for good or bad to the nation as a whole, will depend in great measure on the attitudes of the farmers themselves. The whole process of thoughtful consideration of the farm program, reflected in farm and town alike, is part of the general picture of gradualism, of progressive conservatism.

It is hard to digest quickly all that I managed to see in a month's time--hard to sit back and put it in proper perspective, to see all that is important and all that is not, to feel quite sure what is news and of interest and significance to everyone, and what is perhaps of only passing interest. But it is neither trite nor banal, I believe, to say that in its chief asset its people, the U.S. today appeared to be a very strong and stable land, far stronger and more stable than a reading of reports from Washington and the daily headlines would indicate.

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