The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E, Bohn The Move for Clean Elections DEMOCRATIC gradualness puts both patience and longevity to a heart-breaking test. Recently in Washington I sat in on part of a...
...At that point I left the gallery in tears...
...The new law sponsored by Senator Hennings provides that no gift is to go out under the name of anyone under 18 years old...
...The arguments for the bill by Senators Hennings, Neuberger, Albert Gore (D.-Tenn...
...The Democrats dug up and sent out all that they could find...
...But the scandals were on the Republican side...
...The debate which preceded the favorable vote (59 to 22) was one of the most amusing I have ever followed, especially the arguments between the liberals and the conservatives...
...I am under the impression that the patience of the American working man is about exhausted...
...The Republicans went on collecting and expending mountains of money...
...Instead of taking a big, bold and dangerous step, we did precisely what we have always done when we have faced a tough moral or political problem...
...Teddy's beautiful dream, of course, was never realized...
...George Meany will be glad to he reminded that his predecessor, tough old Sam Gompers, left his picket lines long enough to testify for Roosevelt's bill...
...Naturally, efforts at reform went along with the need...
...Where...
...It is well-known that many a plushy and patriotic head of a family distributes many a precisely drawn check for exactly $5.000 in the name of every burbling babe within his circle...
...Suppose, he said, the innocent capitalists should discover what these labor miscreants are up to and should offer to meet them, million to million...
...If the interests of any people are threatened by corruption in our public life or corruption in elections, surely it must of necessity be those . . . whom we for convenience term the 'wage-workers.' "I am not in a mood and never am to indulge in denunciation or criticism, but it does come to me sometimes that one of the reasons for the absence of legislation of a liberal, of a sympathetic or just character, so far as it affects the interests of the wage-earners of America, can be fairly well traced to the growth of corruption funds and the influences that are in operation during the campaigns and elections...
...In the end he pictured the horrendous shadow of trade unionism striking terror to the heart of the nation...
...Whether this bill meets all of the needs," said Gompers, "may be questioned . . . but the necessity of some law upon the subject is patent to every man who hopes for the maintenance of the institutions under which we live...
...Then he had a horrid thought...
...TR sent to Congress a special message in which he suggested that we put an end to our way of giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates...
...In place of it he proposed that the Federal Government allot to candidates sums adjusted to the requirements of their campaigns and that expenditures be limited to these sums...
...As I listened my mind went back more than 50 years to 1906-07, when Teddy Roosevelt was howling and growling about this matter of clean elections...
...The rich easily got around this latter provision, piping their generosity through the names of relatives and friends...
...and others were careful and convincing...
...cried the desperate statesman, "will a candidate who wishes to run on the old-fashioned Jeffersonian or Lincolnian principles be able to get any money...
...It was plain Socialism—even if it was suggested by the greatest Republican since Lincoln...
...It is doubtful in my mind if the contributions and expenditure of vast sums of money in the nomination and election for our public offices can continue to increase without endangering the endurance of our Republic in its purity and its essence...
...But it was Senator Barry Gold-water (R.-Ariz...
...Recently in Washington I sat in on part of a Senate debate on a clean-elections bill introduced and managed by Senator Thomas C. Hennings (D.-Mo...
...Senator Gore, for example, reported that during World War II he served as chairman of a committee which looked into campaign expenditures and had found that 100 military contractors gave $1,133,882 to the Republican party and only $40,975 to the Democrats...
...who supplied the high-class humor...
...Well, the events showed that Gompers underestimated the endurance of the American worker...
...We took a little step...
...We passed a law which forbade any individual to give more than $5,000 to a political campaign during any one calendar year...
...And, of course, the extent of crookedness had to be displayed...
...This cruel limitation is balanced, however, by a top limit of $10.000 for contributions...
...In general the effort has been to include more and more elections, primaries, caucuses and conventions and to limit individual contributions to $5,000...
...He revealed, too, that "individuals listing Manhattan Island addresses contributed more to the Republican party than the Democratic party got from all of the states, including New York...
...And we have gone on from there...
Vol. 43 • February 1960 • No. 7
