HOORAY FOR WHAT?
Rodell, Fred
Hooray For What? By Fred Rodell IT WAS just a little longer than a year ago that Harry S. Truman, to the surprise of almost everybody except Harry S. Truman, got himself duly elected President. As...
...A few weeks back there was another Election Day...
...The essential hooray-making fact is simply that Lehman won...
...This is not a trick question...
...His career, then and since, has been such that New York's conventional conservative press opposed him this fall only mildly...
...By some inscrutable logic, this neutral and meaningless result is generally cited as going counter to the "liberal tide...
...But beating Republicans these days, in the nation at large and in most parts of the nation, is about as hard and as meaningful as beating Harvard at football or beating the St...
...Typical of the contented comments, though milder than most, is a front-page headline in the ADA World: "Votes Prove Liberal Tide Is Still High.'' From San Diego up to Maine, the boys are cheering again—less loudly perhaps but more cockily than they cheered a year ago...
...Even in his campaign, where he presumably put his left foot forward, Lehman was worried and wary about national health insurance...
...To be blunt about it, progressivism in the U. S. is clearly going nowhere fast if it has to depend on men like Herbert Lehman to get it there...
...and even that victory was made less meaningful by the sleazy character of the opposition, which led Philadelphia's reactionary Republican press—the morning Inquirer and the evening Bulletin—to actively support the Democratic ticket...
...As Old Kaspar once quoth: "It was a famous victory...
...Thus Herbert Lehman, the left's biggest boast for 1949, is not in the same league with George Norris or Tom Walsh or Hugo Black or either La Follette or New York's own Bob Wagner in his prime...
...They are for beating those black old bogey-men, the Republicans...
...People cheered because they loved to see the wise guys of the polls and the newspapers made to look ludicrous—or because they just loved to see the underdog win...
...Raking together the results of these random off-year contests, the progressive liberal anti-Communist left has again been indulging in an orgy of self-congratulation...
...But let me take a sour look at 1949 first: Nine-tenths of the liberal jubilation stems from the single fact that New York's ex-Governor, Herbert Lehman, beat out Tom Dewey's putative Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, for the U. S. Senate —and did it thanks to almost half a million votes cast for Lehman, not under the Democratic label, but under the label of New York's progressive anti-Communist Liberal Party...
...People cheered because they hated Tom Dewey...
...Moreover, I mean to question the cheers of 1948 no less than those of 1949...
...Shrewd politician that he is, he sensed that the people wanted to go forward—and so he fed them, even before his swashbuckling campaign, speeches that promised progress...
...III When the progressive liberal anti-Communist left exults nationally over such picayune and piebald electoral events as these, I say it has grown complacent and fat between the ears...
...All through the land, people who had sat up through the night to hear the incredible come true, along with people who had gone to bed decently and awakened to a miracle, whooped and hollered and cheered...
...Less highlighted has been the fact that, for Truman, "government by crony" automatically means government by conservatives...
...S. Congressman in San Francisco and another in Brooklyn, a Governor in New Jersey, and a scattering of mayors and lesser officials in cities big and small...
...The hoorays of 1948—and of 1949 as well—along with the probably hoorays of the future are for one thing alone...
...no one doubts that the same votes by the same voters would have elected Lehman as a simon-pure Democrat if the Liberal Party had never existed...
...And again I shall ask —Hooray for what...
...Have our standards, then, for progressive public servants suddenly gone down even as the nation, by its votes, calls increasingly for leadership from the left...
...It is their choice of Supreme Court justices that lives after them...
...The record is too full to permit recounting here of Truman's sins, of commission and omission, against what he says he stands for—from his demand that striking railroad workers be drafted into the Army, through his indifference, if not behind-the-scenes-opposition, to putting the civil rights plank into the Democratic platform, on to his recent satisfaction with the work of the Democratic 81st Congress which pushed his touted Fair Deal only inches farther toward full, effective enactment than did the hated and berated Republican 80th...
...the new Congressman, Shelley, had rated his Republican predecessor, Welch, so highly that he refused to run against him while he was alive...
...This is the man whose victory I presume they will be cheering again in 1952—unless they are cheering instead for some conservative crony of his, Jike Fred Vinson, to whom he may have willed the White House...
...IV Nor is it only the executive branch of the Federal Government that Truman has contaminated with his conservative-crony favors...
...Long before Election Day of 1948, Truman had amply revealed how synthetic and soft and self-serving was his concern for progressive government...
...Again—or still —liberalism is in...
...As New York's Governor, he coasted along in an easy and undistinguished way on the momentum of the militantly progressive Smith and Roosevelt administration which preceded his...
...As for his appointments, Truman's "government by crony" has long been a stale joke in Washington...
...As for the other hooray-making results, this past November 8th: California's Fifth Congressional District elected to the House a liberal Democratic labor leader to replace a liberal Republican labor leader who had died...
...II "Uncle Herbert" Lehman is a nice old man with about as much fighting liberalism in his bones, or in his record, as your Uncle Fud...
...it was not that they loved Lehman less but that they loved Dulles more...
...It has been said, "The good that Presidents do is often interred with their Administrations...
...but in Connecticut, for instance, Democrats failed in their bids to take over several mayoralties, and Buffalo elected a Republican mayor for the first time in years...
...Hooray for what...
...V If the temper of the progressive liberal anti-Communist left, in these days of a sympathetic electorate, is accurately revealed by their cheering of every beating inflicted on that hapless minority, the Republicans—no matter how wishy-washy or confused or conservative the Democrat who inflicts the beating— then the progressive liberal anti-Communist left had better shut up shop and go home...
...As one disappointed bond salesman put it recently and succinctly: "Everybody keeps talking about doing things for minority groups— this minority needs help or that minority needs protection...
...Or else they had better quit those cheers and get down to something more substantial —something like insisting on militant, able, genuinely progressive men for public office...
...Nor is O'Dwyer half the man, or the mayor, that La Guardia was...
...And the liberals first displayed their fatuous complacence in the face of this fall of standards when they cheered Truman's election— not merely as a kick in the teeth for Dewey and his Old Guard—but as an affirmative forward-looking victory for liberalism...
...As with Min-ton—no world-beater but the probable best of Truman's choices to date —these gentlemen's chief, if not only, qualification for the nation's top judicial job was their personal intimacy, past or present, with Truman...
...Truman's first three Justices are easily the worst trio of nominees since Harding's time—with Chief Justice Vinson far less capable and less liberal than was Stone (appointed by Calvin Coolidge) whom he replaced, and with Burton and Clark both utterly incompetent and utterly conservative...
...Me, I'm not joining the cheering section until I have something more cheering to cheer about than the empty election of Harry Trumans and Herbert Lehmans...
...But nobody wants to do anything for me and I belong to the biggest minority of all...
...Louis Browns at baseball...
...But the sluggish and tentative way he went about putting his spoken policies into action and, particularly, the kind and caliber of men he appointed to help him run the nation constantly belied—and still belie—his crusading words...
...The answer is yes...
...A U. S. Senator was elected in New York, a II...
...They got a colorless, respectable, well-meaning Wall Streeter with a dutiful drive toward public service—who happens to be a Democrat and therefore, these days, a Fair Dealer...
...Up-state New York turned out a few Republican mayors in favor of Democrats, Pittsburgh and Cleveland among the bigger cities stayed Democratic...
...almost without exception, Truman's appointed pals and party faithfuls, high and low—from John Snyder in the Cabinet to Harry Vaughan in and out of the doghouse—have no more use or sympathy for the Fair Deal than does Tom Dewey or John Foster Dulles...
...A Brooklyn District which hasn't gone Republican since the sector was a pup sent to Congress a Democratic lady who campaigned for the Fair Deal and the Brooklyn Dodgers...
...New York City re-elected Fair Dealing Mayor O'Dwyer over able Newbold Morris, who is about as far left as any Republican can reach, and who was backed by the Fair Dealing ADA...
...As an old, if congenitally querulous, member of the progressive liberal anti-Communist left, I should like to ask precisely what the cheering is all about...
...I mean to sound just as jaundiced as others of my political stripe sound jubilant...
...I suppose, after all, I do know the answer...
...This last refinement is, of course, strictly a ward-heeler's technicality, blown up out of all proportion to its real significance in post-election palaver...
...Yet what, in all honesty, did New York's voters get in Dulles' place...
...And the man most responsible is sweet-singing Harry S. Truman...
...Big D Democrats cheered and small d democrats cheered...
...on other specific domestic reforms he was rarely very far to the left of Sen...
...I'm a Republican...
...The Supreme Court which Roosevelt reshaped into an able, largely liberal body has sharply felt the sure Truman touch for right-of-the-road mediocrity...
...They should have known better...
...he is not in the same league with the scores of great liberal Senators of the past or even the few fighting liberals, of both parties, in the Senate today...
...Robert A. Taft...
...But nobody cheered louder, longer, or lustier than the progressives, the liberals, the anti-Communist left—call them what you will —who saw in Truman's election a tremendous triumph for the anti-Communist left, for liberalism, for progressivism...
...Only in Philadelphia, where four Democrats full of fight and liberalism broke the rotten Republican machine to win high city office, was there anything resembling a clear-cut progressive victory...
...Driscoll was re-elected over a Democrat named Wene, about whom nobody except ex-boss Hague seems to have cared two hoots...
...People cheered because they hated Henry Wallace— or Henry Luce...
...Granted it is a fine and fortunate thing that New York's voters removed from the Senate a colorless, respectable, well-meaning Wall Streeter with a dutiful drive toward public service but with the ridiculously anachronistic right-wing-Republican notion in his head—or at least in his words—that the Fair Deal is some sort of mantrap called "statism," to be avoided and opposed and campaigned against...
...In this light, a second-rate Supreme Court, conservative for years to come, may well stand as the most enduring monument to the real Harry Truman...
...Yet this is the man whose victory my political bed-fellows cheered in 1948...
...In New Jersey, mildly liberal Republican Gov...
Vol. 14 • January 1950 • No. 1
