The Know-Nothing Revolt?

Are the Democrats, apparently riding the crest of the wave, headed for blind disaster on some still-distant shore? One Democrat who thinks so is Harvard Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., brain-truster and speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson through two campaigns. Modern Democratic bosses are deliberately ignoring a treasure of intellectual-liberal candidates in favor of "mediocre party hacks," Schlesinger writes in the New Republic. Case in point: Tammany's passing over of onetime Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter in New York to hand the U.S. Senate nomination to District Attorney Frank Hogan, who "has hardly voiced a public thought on a national issue in half a century."

In such choices, Schlesinger reads a "revolt of the low-level professional within the party organization against the New Deal and post-New Deal leadership . . . Anti-eggheadism is certainly part of the story. Another part of the story is an anti-Ivy League feeling which has been rankling for many years in the murky lower depths of the Democratic Party in the Northeast."

The aim of this "Know-Nothing revolt," writes Schlesinger, "is to wipe out the transformation wrought in the Democratic Party by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and to recreate something like the Democratic Party of the twenties." Today's Democratic leaders "forget that the Democratic Party has been nationally successful only as a great coalition in which intellectuals play a central role," forget also that "the great natural resource of the Democratic Party is brains."

Concludes Schlesinger: "A party which seeks to qualify itself for responsibility in an age of national and international crisis is not well advised to begin to do so by blowing out its own brains."

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