"The Authentic American Center"

WHILE he was propped up in a Walter Reed Hospital bed recovering from his ileitis operation, Dwight Eisenhower read and reread a meaty, 210-page volume entitled A Republican Looks at His Party (Harper; $2.95). Author: Arthur Larson, onetime Rhodes scholar, law-school dean (University of Pittsburgh), expert on workmen's compensation laws and social security, now, at 46, Eisenhower's own Under Secretary of Labor. So impressed was the President that when he returned to the White House, he summoned Author Larson--whom he had met only casually--to a private talk, had him back again and again. Last week a newsman asked Ike at his press conference what the two men were discussing. Enigmatically the President said that he could tell, but would not, brushed off the question by explaining, "he is one of my assistants, and [when] I want to talk with him, why, he comes in."

What they discuss when Larson reports to the Chief Executive are the specifics of a job both want to accomplish: translating the Larson explanation of Ike's crusade into his campaign speeches. For the President was impressed not only by Larson's reasoning, but also by the rippling clarity with which he expressed some powerful new ideas about modern-day U.S. politics.

Changed Facts. The heart of Larson's argument is that Dwight Eisenhower's balanced "New Republicanism" is successful because it recognizes a mid-20th century postulate: despite old party labels, most Americans have gravitated toward basic agreement on fundamental issues, toward the moderate approach to government. The Republicans, Independents and Democrats who voted Ike into office are massed at an "Authentic American Center." At the center, they recognize that the facts of political life have changed. Items:

P: Since there is no longer a national depression or national war emergency, there is no need for strong government centralization.

P: Unemployment has dropped; what unemployment there is today is specially or locally caused and requires special or local remedy.

P: Capital no longer comes from great personal fortunes but from withheld earnings of corporations, from trust, insurance and pension funds and from publicly issued securities.

P: Labor no longer is a disinherited, propertyless minority, but comprises the majority of Americans. Labor and management now bargain from relatively equal strength; government intervention only prevents or delays bona fide bargaining and settlement.

P: The economy has shifted from agrarian to industrial; technological changes on the farm have changed the essential status of the farmer and made his problems similar to those of other businesses.

For all these reasons a new approach to government is necessary, says Larson. But the forces at the Authentic American Center are bucked by two other groups: 1) "the 1896 school," which stands for unregulated private enterprise, is antilabor and indifferent to the individual; and 2) "the 1936 school," which is hostile to private enterprise, oversolicitous of labor and sensitive to individual needs--but sometimes only from a distance and in the mass. The New Republicanism can hold the center for a considerable time; the Democratic Party, since it ranges from ultraradicalism to ultraconservatism, is not structurally set up to gain it. But the Democrats could win the center by nominating a presidential candidate who "took over the formula of the great middle way" at the same time the Republicans nominated an extreme conservative. Writes Larson: "The man who holds the center holds a position of almost unbeatable strength."

Awake at me Switch. Fast-rising Arthur Larson was born a Republican in Sioux Falls, S. Dak. At Oxford University he took first-class honors, won a rowing oar that still accompanies him from job to job. He taught law at Tennessee and Cornell, during World War II served with the Foreign Economic Administration. In Washington after V-E day, he watched returning General Dwight D. Eisenhower ride up Pennsylvania Avenue in a victory parade. Larson flipped on his car radio to hear the general address Congress, remembers that "it went right through me. I was an Eisenhower man from then on."

In the months ahead, Ike-man Larson will find a use for his dedication helping New Republican Eisenhower hold the Authentic American Center in an authentic American election year.

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