The Split Decision

...Let the split decision last Tuesday fool no one...

...All over the country, millions of Americans split their tickets, in the greatest show of independent voting in the history of the Republic...

...Unlike Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, Eisenhower in 1956 had no real enemies...

...The part played by the United Automobile Workers in revitalizing Michigan Democracy—without shady deals with semi-criminal elements—points a path for many other states...

...The best new face in the Senate will be that of Joseph S. Clark Jr...

...But they will be impotent if compelled, as Stevenson was, to seek the support of James Eastland and Carmine de Sapio...

...certainly a stronger national effort would have prevented the return -to Washington of West Virginia's Chapman Revercomb, a notorious racist whom Governor Dewey repudiated in 1948...

...A better showing for Stevenson, however, might have averted the re-election of Senators Everett Dirksen and John Marshall Butler, who are far from the "modern Republicanism" the President envisages...

...The extent of this independence is even more startling when one considers Elmo Roper's report that fully 10 per cent of U.S...

...Last Tuesday, they conspicuously failed to do so...

...Instead, he achieved the biggest landslide ever gained by a Republican and a popular showing second only to the Roosevelt victory of 1936...

...The thought which liberalism must face is that very soon indeed the Democratic party will have to run on the memory of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn...

...It is these men who have led Northern liberals into compromise after compromise on the most basic issues of democracy...

...There are times for moderation and conservatism (this appears to be one of them), and there are times for reform and peaceful revolution...

...If conservatism is to be the dish, the Republicans have a patent on it, and few voters will discard the genuine article for the mislabeled facsimile...

...voters do not know how—mechanically—to go about splitting their vote...

...of Pennsylvania, an intelligent, articulate liberal who typifies the young heirs of the Roosevelt tradition who have been rising in the North and West since 1952...

...This strange result would not be so surprising had President Eisenhower won re-election by a narrow margin...

...Democrats must face these alternatives now, in the 85th Congress and in each of the 48 states...

...Here organized labor and unorganized intellectuals will play a crucial role...

...As for the eggheads, the 1956 election should show how ill-fitting was their hard-boiled compromise with Realpolitik...

...Heretofore, the cementing influence between Northern reformers and labor, on the one hand, and the Southern oligarchy, on the other, has been the group of big-city machine bosses who speak at party conventions through such "responsible statesmen" as John MeCormack of Massachusetts...

...and that same nation still regards Dwight Eisenhower, despite his appeals for Republican candidates, as a man above party...

...The Democratic campaign strategy, which allowed the Eisenhower image to remain intact while the party concentrated on local grievances, in fact left the President with no contest...

...Just before the election, the Eisenhower luck encountered some serious setbacks in the world, but the Democrats had not previously prepared the ground to capitalize on them...

...in fact, patent sabotage of the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket in New York by Tammany Hall, in New Jersey by the remnants of the Hague-Kenny machine, and in Massachusetts by the clubhouse gang which has spawned the likes of James Curley and Paul Dever...

...They have been able to do so because in past years they could deliver votes...

...For the first time since 1848, the American people elected a President of one party and gave a clear Congressional majority to the other...

...Either the party of Wilson and Roosevelt will cleanse itself for a new surge of democratic idealism—or the time will come again to speak of a third party...

...their own ideals are the best politics...

...Even the best Democratic candidate for President cannot overcome a stagnant, opportunist Congressional record and a platform shot through with hypocrisy...

...Stevenson, like Truman before him, garnered millions of votes on the memory of Roosevelt—and it was a smaller percentage each time...

...Otherwise, with Vice President Nixon championing civil rights and Dewey attacking Nasser, the Republican party may yet become the "party of the future" which Eisenhower hopes to leave as his monument...

...one would have to go back to the days of Madison and Monroe to find a likely analogy...

...There was...

...These groups, having fought both Stevenson and Kefauver at the convention, abandoned them in the fall to seek surrogateships and like plums...

...It has been obvious for some time, with civil rights the transcendent domestic issue, that the presence of Clarks and Talmadges in the same party makes a travesty of the democratic process...

...The big-city votes that came through for Stevenson were not machine votes, but those of cities like Philadelphia, where a militant, honest Democracy had bred a spontaneous response among intelligent citizens...

...But Clark will take his oath right alongside Herman Talmadge, who brings the soft-spoken slickness of 20th-century public relations to the service of medieval bigotry...

...At the very same time, despite the tremendous power of the President's coat-tails (demonstrated in dozens of Congressional races), the Democratic party's candidates for the Senate and House (and for the Governorships) apparently were even more successful than in the off-year election of 1954...

...All of this means that, if the Democratic party is to have a future (and let no one think that Eisenhowerism will end with Eisenhower), it must give leadership, both in Congress and in the national party, to its young new liberal Governors and Senators—at the price of a split with the Southern die-hards and an all-out fight on the Northern corruptionists...

...instead, the dangers which had in part been created by Administration failures now drove undecided voters into the President's camp...

...The meaning of it all is obvious, as it had been before the conventions and during the campaign: Despite numerous internal contradictions, the Democratic party is still the majority party of the nation...

...On the other hand, those interested in the modernization of the Republican party can take comfort in the Senate victories of Jacob K. Javits and John Sherman Cooper, and in the defeat of Herman Welker, McCarthy's "defense counsel" in the Senate censure debate...

...The voters made it plain this year that they realized this fact, with Negro wards by the score going into the Eisenhower column, while Southern whites—for opposite reasons—also deserted the national ticket...

...Nevertheless, even the best of Democratic campaigns could not have captured the Presidency this year: after all, since 1900 only two Presidents (Taft and Hoover) have been denied re-election, and Eisenhower is far more popular than McKinley, Coolidge and Truman...

...What of those interested in the modernization of the Democratic party...

...In men like Clark, Williams, Robert Meyner and many others, it has the gifted leaders of the "new America' Stevenson could only hint at...

...State machines long entrenched (as in West Virginia) collapsed, while principled, effective Democrats (like Mennen Williams in Michigan) successfully bucked the Eisenhower tide...

...There is a big job to be done, from the precincts right up to Capitol Hill, if the Democratic party is to regain the confidence of the underprivileged and the enthusiasm of the idealistic...

...Democratic control of the new Congress is Southern Democratic control, which without a Roosevelt or a Wilson in the White House differs little from orthodox Republicanism...