Crusade of Riskers and Doers

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY/HUGH SIDEY

A slow journey down the red shag aisles of the Republican Convention was like a tour that Ken Baker of Jackson, Tenn., might have set up in his travel agency to show off postcard America.

Here and there were a leering face and a defiant bellow, but for the most part the convention was a scene of restrained certitude, the firm jaw-set of people who run things and have things. Ken Baker used to be a teacher, but the vision of affluence and independence beat strong in him, and in 1972 he started his now burgeoning business. The fear that brought him to Kansas City was that the Government, in its ineptitude, would rob him of his chance and his dreams.

Around him stood the dwindling fraternity of Republican people who own, manage, invest, invent and risk. They each have their short stories of work, struggle and success. They also have a single-minded belief in American opportunity that they claim most people can seize if they will.

Roger Shaff of Camanche, Iowa, drills the seed corn every spring into the black soil of his 550 acres, harvests the heavy yield in the fall and feeds the corn to livestock that he sells. His life is his family and his land and his right to do things his way. C. Lee Mantle of Painesville, Ohio, is retired now from his real estate business. He founded it, saw it grow to a firm employing ten people. In his small corner of this country, it was a glorious adventure. He wants to make sure that that kind of opportunity is preserved.

That is what the campaign argument is all about: How far does a Government go before it begins to discourage and destroy this spirit?

Charles Reed, an executive of a savings and loan firm in Los Angeles, thinks the situation is already at the danger point, and if a Democratic Congress is unleashed by a Democratic President, there will be a disaster. So does Nancy Brataas, a Rochester, Minn., housewife who started her own small firm for consultation on political volunteer programs. Lawyer Francis Love of Wheeling, W. Va., understood the need for massive Government action in the 1930s, but now he believes there is an equally compelling need for massive revision of the New Deal concept and programs that still dominate Washington.

If one measured the sheer horsepower that these Republicans provide for the American economic machine, it would be far greater than their numbers suggest. If they are to be criticized for being indifferent to those victimized by the very system they use so successfully, they are also to be credited with being the critical mass in a system that has mixed liberty and freedom with material rewards better than any other that the world has produced.

Most of them have another dimension, often forgotten in the sweeping political assessments of this season. Dick Morrell, a heating and building-supply contractor from Brunswick, Me., is a city selectman and a trustee of the local hospital and serves on the planning commission. Dan Theno of Ashland, Wis., is active in the Elks and the Jaycees. Richard Bell is a Georgia Tech alumni trustee and a member of the Atlanta leadership group that has helped steer that city to its current state of excellence. Hallie Wiggins, who runs the office for her husband's sewer and water facilities construction business in Portland, Ore., works with the Y.W.C.A. and the women's prison council, which won a battle for separate women's prison facilities in the state. And Charles Wolf of Mount Wolf, Pa., a partner in a firm manufacturing corrugated paper, heads the board of York College, helps with the United Way and the York Symphony Orchestra.

Activities like these sometimes draw the scorn of those who dwell on the flaws of American society. But these civic efforts are the grace notes of any community.

Fifty years ago, the Republicans could assume that political power came along with their profits and prominence. No more. The supreme irony is that at a time when people of all political persuasions are calling for the managerial skills that the Republicans possess, the Grand Old Party must fight for its life. At least the Republicans can read a balance sheet. Surely those bleak figures were what roused President Ford to such heights in his acceptance speech and sent the Republicans off with new hope on their mission of self-preservation.

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