The Progressive Pacemaker

Irving McNeil Ives had no hankering after the headaches that go with the $50,000-a-year job of running New York State. He liked his Senate job in Washington, and the specter of a rough-and-tumble campaign this fall was not pleasant to contemplate. Mrs. Ives agreed. "All I want to do," she sighed, "is go home and raise petunias." But last week, after hours of maneuvering with Tom Dewey (see above), Irv Ives yielded to his strong sense of party loyalty and agreed to run. He has no brown derby, no winning ways, no fiery mannerisms. Although he once taught public speaking, he is only a middling-fair speaker--a quiet man who hides a sharp intellect under the linsey-woolsey coat of an upstate countryman. He has been described (inaccurately) as a Jeffersonian Republican and as a political tiglon, yet few voters know what, specifically, Ives represents--except in the broadest general terms.

Radical Partisan. Ives was born Jan. 24, in 1896, in upstate Bainbridge, the only child of a moderately well-to-do coal "and feed merchant. After two years at Hamilton College, he went off to serve in World War I as an infantry lieutenant in France. After the war he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hamilton, settled briefly in Brooklyn with his wife and infant son. Ives had a hard time stretching his $100-a-month salary as a bank clerk to cover the family bills, became an embittered, somewhat radical partisan of the underprivileged. When another bank offered him a better job in upstate Norwich, much of the radicalism rubbed off ("Banking," said Ives last week, "has a tendency to make one a little more conservative"), but Ives remained a sympathetic champion of the wage earner.

In 1930 the bank dispensed with its

Norwich representative. Ives became an insurance agent--and a politician. Backed by a group of local G.O.P. insurgents, he got himself elected to the New York State Legislature. From his freshman term he specialized in problems of labor and industrial relations (he was co-founder and--for 1 1/2years--dean of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell). Offstage he was a convivial Young Turk who enlivened one party convention by parading through a hotel overturning beds and occupants (in 1936 he swore off drinking). After 16 conscientious years in Albany (including terms as majority leader and Speaker of the Assembly), Ives decided to try national politics. In 1946, he ran against formidable ex-Governor Herbert Lehman for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The voters gave Lehman the licking of his life, and sent Ives off to Washington with an astonishing plurality (251,000 votes), the first New Yorker to sit on the Republican side of the Senate in 20 years.

In Washington Ives steered clear of the label, "Mr. Dewey's Senator," and voted and acted strictly according to his own lights. A pioneer Ikeman; he has nevertheless disagreed with the President on some issues (examples: he voted against the St. Lawrence Seaway, which he considered a threat to New York's seaboard interests, and the housing bill, which he called inadequate).

Diligent Student. In eight years Ives has become a pacemaker in the progressive flank of the G.O.P. Since the death of Robert Taft, he has emerged as the Senate's acknowledged Republican authority on labor problems. As a freshman, Ives astonished Taft and the Senate by introducing--and pushing through--a number of softening modifications of the original Taft-Hartley bill. He is a diligent student of legislation, dogged in debate and rarely hoodwinked. He has consistently served the liberal cause with bills for public housing, welfare, labor and civil rights.

At 58, Ives is a handsome, slender (165 Ibs.), greying six-footer, with the look of a patrician and the manner of a small-town businessman. He has a wry wit, is equally at ease in the company of intellectuals or his own Chenango County dairymen. His only child, George, 32, is his administrative assistant. In 1948, after .the death of his first wife, Ives married his longtime secretary, Marion Mead Grain. "Nothing like having a wife who is a good secretary," he mused last week. "I once had to make a speech in Buffalo and took a train. My wife flew. I got there late and so did a minister on the program. There was Marion, delivering the benediction."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.