The Third Party

...Of no great intrinsic importance in themselves, the Communist unemployment demonstrations outside the White House, and in many American cities, are straws, nevertheless, showing the direction in which the wind is now blowing...

...Take for example Massachusetts, where former Governor Alvan T. Fuller has been keeping the regular Republican politicians on pins and needles...

...Yet his stand on public affairs has put him in a position where, if the lightning does strike, he might be the logical man to attempt what neither Roosevelt nor LaFollette could do, to enter the White House as the candidate of a third party...

...The projected tariff legislation is sure to dissatisfy large groups of voters who may prefer to break away from the existing partizan machines...

...If the cycle of insurgency is again to recur, the West would once more seem to be its logical home, and as the gulf between the East and the West widens, we may expect sectionalism to be its greatest appeal...

...Though nominally a Republican, Borah rarely plays ball with the Republican administration...

...A former Bull Mooser, Fuller acts with perfect independence of the regular party leaders in his state, and now that his hat is in the ring for the senatorship, he may be on the road that will lead him to join that already large independent Republican group in the Senate...

...The 1912 campaign broke the life-long voting habits of millions, and in 1928, in the bitterness and heat of the struggle over prohibition and religion, thousands of others broke the habits of ages, and forsook the political ways of their fathers...

...Party enthusiasm, loyalty and discipline do not have the same keen edge with a popular majority of 6,000,000, as they do when the margin of victory is but a small one...

...Many have asked that question in recent months...

...And so, who knows?—The Editors...

...Prohibition is but one of several issues of the hour which reveal a clash between town and country, between the urban East and the rural West...

...Sectionalism is obviously not on the wane...

...Senator Wagner of New York, Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, and others have scored it for its alleged inaction on unemployment...

...As things now stand, Borah is probably not anxious to head a third-party movement...

...An insurgent movement is invariably a movement of protest, and though, when they wish to register a protest, the discontented and disgruntled in one party may always join the opposition, sometimes the discontented elements prefer to wash their hands of both the major parties, and to band together in the great adventure of a third party, with no traditions to handicap it, and no bad debts or unfulfilled campaign pledges to worry it...

...Foes of the administration in the Senate have been quick to see the political possibilities of the present tariff, and the coalition of southern Democrats and periodically to upset the balance between the two major western Republicans have promptly seized the opporpolitical parties...

...If antiprohibition sentiment increases markedly in strength through the country, the Democrats are reasonably certain to renominate a wet as their standard bearer in 1932...

...For the party that wins a landslide victory is apt to find that a certain process of disintegration begins on the morrow of its triumph at the polls...

...The tariff battle in the Senate and the revelations of the Caraway committee must necessarily tend to widen the breach between the East and the West...

...Hoover, the engineer, does not face here an engineering problem, but a problem in practical politics...

...What leadership means in order to give a third party a real chance to bid for power was clearly shown in the insurgent movement headed by Roosevelt in 1912...

...The more evenly divided the two big parties are in voting strength, the greater the potential power in an insurgent movement...

...Has the time come for a resumption of this insurgent activity...

...Twelve years later, 1924, Robert LaFollette, the elder, led an insurgent movement, which if it had won a following of the same relative magnitude as that which followed Roosevelt out of the Republican camp, might have given the Democrats control of the machinery of the federal government with an actual minority of the popular votes cast...

...motive power for many of the insurgent movements of the past, and these factors exist today...

...In 1928, wet Republicans could vote for Alfred E. Smith, as a means of voicing their dissatisfaction with the Eighteenth Amendment...

...La Guardia of New York wears the Republican label in the House, and was the party's candidate for mayor, but no man was ever less fitted for Republican tailoring than he...

...Couzens of Michigan is another Republican who travels under his own umbrella pretty much all of the time...

...If both parties became wet, the drys might rally to form a third to defend the sanctity of the existing order...

...Nor are our foreign relations just now apt to produce an issue that will stir the masses...

...Either contingency, just now, appears very remote...

...If dissatisfied with the dryness of most Republican candidates for Congress Republican wets have heretofore been able to register, their protest, in many instances, by voting for wet Democrats, as they have done in considerable numbers in Massachusetts...

...It cannot have escaped the attention of Democratic strategists that if the history of the past quarter of a century proves anything, it proves that the Democrats cannot capture the machinery of the national government unless there is a split in the Republican party...

...Leadership speculation centers mainly around the name of Borah of Idaho, though there are others who figure in the speculation, such as Norris of Nebraska, Wheeler of Montana, young Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin...

...The tides of public opinion shift quickly but even at that, barring something altogether unexpected, there is no strong likelihood that by 1932 the Democrats can bridge the gap of 6,000,000 popular votes, or the equally wide gap in electoral votes, that separated Herbert C. Hoover from Alfred Emmanuel Smith in November, 1928...

...They know that since third parties have come out of the West before, another may be born there in the future...

...And so on down the line...

...The coalition between southern Democrats and western Republicans in the Senate is the most stubborn fact in the present-day composition of that body...

...By the same token, the passage of the Federal Farm Board Act has taken most of the wind from the sails of the agrarian agitators...

...The congressional elections this fall may tell us much, revealing in particular how strong an issue prohibition really is, and revealing, too, how serious a recession the Republican party has suffered...

...The very size of the Hoover landslide in 1928 carried with it an element of possible weakness...

...Where were the progressives in 1928 who four years previous had followed LaFollette into the wilderness ? That certain Republican members of the so-called Senate coalition are flirting with the possibilities of a third-party movement is pretty well understood in Washington...

...Party allegiance has not the binding force that it had, and it may be easier than ever before to muster recruits for a third party...

...Of course an insurgent movement needs a great and burning issue, and it is precisely this that seems lacking...

...Certainly the tariff controversy lacks the dramatic qualities needed to lead the average voter to a new crusade...

...content and agrarian complaints have furnished the Are the western members of the coalition aiming to 68 THE COMMONWEAL May 2i, 1930 lay the foundations for a later insurgency...

...McKee summarizes information tending to show that it may soon be "easier than ever to muster recruits for a third party...

...Day by day the lobby investigating committee has brought out testimony which tends to discredit the industrialists of the East who have been demanding increased rates...

...Not only is an issue lacking, but no leader is in sight...

...It glittered bravely in the face of a Coolidge landslide...

...It was the personality of LaFollette and his leadership that gave to the insurgent movement of 1924 most of its vitality...

...The old feud between North and South, it is true, has lost most of its ancient force, as the South, like New England, has become industrialized...

...The coalition crew in control of the machinery of the Senate not only have succeeded in throwing out of gear the legislative plans of the administration, but they have widened still further the gap between eastern and western Republicans...

...The Bull Moose movement in 1912 split the Republican party wide open, and the split gave Woodrow Wilson the key to the White House with a minority of the popular vote cast, the first Democrat to win the Presidency since Grover Cleveland...

...Prohibition might be an issue upon which an insurgent party could make a bid for popular support, were both parties to take the same side...

...Tariff revision—or its failure—is sure to have some political results, but just what they will be cannot well be forecast at this writing...

...The Republican states have a goodly quota of off-horses...

...But the increase in the number of investors and the democratization of the investment structure have caused no lessening of the western suspicion against Wall Street, and the "predatory interests" of the East...

...The wider the breach, other things being equal, the easier it will be later to launch an insurgent movement in the West...

...To place a tariff law on the statute books requires bargaining, trading and manipulation, activities which delight the heart of the professional politician...

...there are few men on either side of the chamber who go their own way more completely...

...Prohibition offers another dividing and discordant element...

...Not in years has a lobby investigation created greater popular interest than this...

...In Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot, the perennial and the irrepressible, gazes a bit longingly at the political arena...

...Even if united to a man, the Democrats could not have played the role that has been theirs of late...

...There is neither a great popular interest in, nor a demand for, a revision of the tariff, notwithstanding the millions of words on the subject that have appeared in the Congressional Record during the past year...

...Prohibition might provide the motive power to a third party in either of two contingencies...

...Or again if both Democrats and Republicans became bone dry, the wets throughout the country might create a party pledged to the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment or the modification of the Volstead Act...

...That the administration does not control the Senate, in spite of the landslide victory of 1928, seems clear enough from the actions of that body during the past twelve months...

...The wet wave that has engulfed such eastern States as New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has widened the breach between the Republicans of the East and those who wear the same party label in the West...

...Here again some profess to see an element which may lead to a later insurgency, the creation perhaps of a dry, agrarian party...

...At intervals of twelve or sixteen years or so, as we turn back the pages of American history, an insurgent party arises to challenge the supremacy of the two major parties that between them dominate the political scene...

...Caraway, Blaine, Walsh of Montana, Borah and Robinson of Indiana have been indefatigable in trailing the industrial lobbyist from the East to his den...

...The Republican party today is not without men to whom, as in 1912, an insurgent movement might, under the right conditions, appeal, just as it did to many who joined the Bull Moose hosts in 1912...

...Further back, the Granger, Populist, Greenback and other third parties have threatened Half a dozen years ago, LaFollette waved the flag of a new party...

...Though disclaiming the role of prophet, Mr...

...The Republican administration has been under fire ever since the stock-market crash last fall...

...When Roosevelt passed from the scene, and urged the Republicans to vote for Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, the former Bull Moosers came back into the Republican fold by the tens of thousands, and progressivism, as a party, had passed into history...

...The southern Democrats are willing, and no doubt for more than one reason, to travel in the company of the insurgents from the West...

...Are we at the threshold of the recurrence of another third-party cycle ? Signs are not altogether wanting that might seem to warrant the belief...

...A victory of a third party in those states where its greatest strength may logically be expected, states normally Republican, would, of course, put the Democratic party within striking distance of a capture of the national administration...

...Notwithstanding our greater ease of communication, and a multiplication of business and travel contacts, sectionalism seems to show no signs of disappearing from our political life...

...By entering into partnership with the wild jackasses that so aroused the ire of the pugnacious George Moses of New Hampshire, the Democrats give that group corresponding encouragement in what may prove to be the spade work for a later insurgent movement...

...Economic distunity to raise the cry that the industrial East seeks favors at the expense of the agricultural West...

...It was the Payne-Aldrich tariff act that was one of the factors in bringing the administration of William Howard Taft on the rocks...

...It was the personality and popularity of Roosevelt, no less than the appeal of the so-called progressive principles to which the Bull Moosers pledged themselves, that swept legions of voters from their old political moorings, and gave the progressives 4,123,206 votes as compared with the 3,484,529 votes which Taft received as the candidate of the stand-pat Republicans...

...But in alliance with the "wild jackasses" from the West, the minority has been exercising power without responsibility...