THE BALANCE OF POWER
Rauh, Joseph L. Jr.
THE BALANCE OF POWER By JOSEPH L. RAUH, JR. This is a guest editorial contributed by Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, during the absence abroad, of Morris H....
...It was fear of alienating the independent vote that led the Republican Convention four years ago to deny the nomination to the late Senator Taft...
...The result of this seismic shakeup was to introduce a permanent new figure on the political landscape— the contemporary independent voter...
...Everything is booming but the guns...
...The independents were responsible for the victories of Roosevelt and Truman...
...This is a challenge the United States should surely be able to counter...
...Yet many independent voters are likely to look beyond the size of their own paycheck to consider the hidden moral inequities involved in the distribution of our present abundance...
...Roosevelt cracked Republican urban strongholds such as Philadelphia and St...
...He, too, wants "the better man," but he is more sophisticated...
...The winning appeal this fall will be an appeal to conscience...
...They cannot offer the positive, immediate, creative leadership needed to mediate differences, resolve practical problems, and direct and spur progress on racial matters...
...The Southern Negro is in large part disfranchised...
...On the other hand, foreign policy issues were largely controlling during the war years...
...There is a different independent vote in time of prosperity than in time of depression...
...It is for him to decide which candidates and which party better meets the test, for where he goes in November, there victory lies...
...The winning candidate will be the man who more clearly evidences integrity and courage on the overriding moral issues...
...If reelected, will President Eisenhower act against violence and intimidation...
...The bulk of independent voters are likely to feel that their economic interests are secure...
...This arresting, elusive, demanding figure rivals the familiar loyal Democrat and loyal Republican in strength and stature...
...This is a guest editorial contributed by Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, during the absence abroad, of Morris H. Rubin, the Editor...
...Congress in 1954 gave corporate and individual income taxpayers a tax reduction of $7 billions...
...Is he motivated primarily by self-interest or moral consideration or both...
...Who is this new independent voter...
...On the Democratic side, the issue takes the form of states' rights versus civil rights...
...At the same time, millions of traditionally Democratic voters found their party commitments given a new social content, a new intellectual orientation...
...There are millions of old people whose "golden years" of retirement are darkly shadowed by poverty, who eke out their lives on hopelessly inadequate pensions...
...It is not a question of outbidding the Russians for the favor of other countries in a mood of panic...
...Initial implementation of the school decision lies with the district courts, but it is hypocritical to suggest that courts alone can do the job...
...Politicians in both parties are prone to believe that civil rights is an issue important only to the three or four million Negro voters...
...Common sense reinforces this sense of common humanity, for it is obvious that the United States cannot forever exist a sheltered island of plenty in a world driven half-mad by the denial of material wants we consider elementary...
...We cannot be faithful to ourselves or to our world responsibility as long as our national life is disfigured by racial segregation...
...The issue here is not the level of our prosperity but the character of its distribution...
...Alone they cannot meet the rising tide of violence, the denial of voting rights, the economic coercion of the White Citizens Councils...
...He must also make clear how he will use his powers of party leadership on behalf of civil rights when confronted with a Judiciary Committee headed by Senator Eastland of Mississippi...
...Equally important, the United States can live at peace with itself only if it composes its troubled conscience on the issues of freedom...
...Again in 1948, some independents, particularly the midwestern farmers, voted against Governor Dewey because they did not trust him to protect their economic welfare...
...Franklin Roosevelt's successive victories broke a cohesive Republican majority in this country that had endured with but two transitory interruptions for nearly seven decades after the civil war...
...Finally, what of peace...
...The roots of this year's campaign go back to 1932 and beyond...
...Each of these issues—civil liberties and civil rights, economic justice at home, and a constructive policy abroad—beckons to the conscience of the independent voter...
...The United States can offer effective leadership to the world only if it shows to mankind the face of freedom...
...There are others for whom non-economic considerations are invariably paramount...
...For the same reason, the center of gravity within the Democratic Party has, despite the efforts of the Johnsons and the Lausches, shifted to the liberal side...
...Unless the Democrats nominate a Southerner or an appeaser, the Negro is likely to remain largely in the Democratic fold...
...We have with us still a sprawling, loosely-run complex of overlapping "security" systems covering ten million government employees, soldiers, and defense workers...
...they "shop around" among candidates and parties...
...There are undoubtedly some independents who are swayed primarily by considerations of self-interest...
...This is a task for the President...
...Moreover, there is the related question: to what ends should we devote our national wealth...
...THE decisive issues in the forthcoming election will be moral issues and the decisive voters will be independent voters...
...The new independent believes in political action because he knows that through politics he can advance his principles and interests...
...It is the independent white voter, at least as much as the Negro, with whom the parties gamble when they trim or evade the civil rights issue...
...Senator McCarthy's political power has recently waned, but we have yet to liquidate the fearful vestiges of the rampage of which he was the chief but not the only protagonist...
...In these circumstances, considerations of moral principle are likely to be paramount...
...The Russian leaders have displaced the militant aggressiveness of Stalin's day with quieter words and the serpentine arts of diplomacy...
...There is no sharp line between the economic and the moral forces playing upon the independent voter...
...The new independent is quite different from the old-fashioned Mugwump independent of an earlier era who believed politics was a dirty business, scorned both parties, and voted only for "the better man...
...Together they make for an election contest without parallel in our generation...
...They make their offensive now in the marts of trade and the economic council rooms rather than on the battlefield...
...The Supreme Court has outlawed this evil in our schools and in several other areas of activity...
...he looks behind the personalities to the issues...
...Only a man willing to assume it is worthy of the White House...
...The appeal of the Republicans to bring the Korean war to an end and the absence of economic pressures consolidated the self-interest vote while the issue of corruption and "the mess in Washington" made for a moral appeal that likewise worked to the Republican advantage...
...There are 6,000,000 heads of families with cash incomes of less than $2,000 a year...
...This year's election in the farm states may once more turn on the economic issue, but for the country at large this is a time of apparent prosperity...
...To him, civil rights is a "conscience issue" and politicians should know by now that voters are most rebellious when they are voting their moral convictions...
...Except for the farmer, prosperity has tended to smother the economic issue this year...
...It is without doubt his greatest domestic responsibility...
...This is a serious miscalculation...
...There are thousands of small farmers being edged off the land or depressed to bare subsistence levels...
...We have with us still the faceless informer, the private wiretapper, and the professional blacklisted We have with us still guilt by association, by family relationship, and by mere accusation...
...In 1932 and 1936, for example, the moving impulse of the independent voter was clearly economic in nature...
...The Democratic candidate, whoever he may be, must make unmistakably clear to which of these he gives priority...
...We have with us still an immigration program that discriminates on the basis of unscientific, Hitlerian racial theories...
...In 1952, the self-interest and the moral considerations worked together, each reinforcing the other to produce the Eisenhower landslide...
...With regard to the first question, it seems clear that the rise of the new independent in the last quarter-century has resulted in shifting the political balance of power to the liberal side...
...We owe an equal responsibility to the world and to ourselves to discard once and for all the sullen mask of fear, the distorted grimace of suspicion and self-hatred we have too often displayed of late...
...Should this surplus not have been used rather to finance new schools, new hospitals, new playgrounds, more low and middle-income housing, and to conserve our soil...
...The Northern Negro sees civil rights as one part of his broad struggle for social and economic justice...
...Louis and Republican farm states such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa...
...He is predominantly a low-income voter and like most urban, low-income voters, he votes heavily Democratic...
...Everyone, it seems, has an automobile and a television set, but behind the glittering facade lie hidden suffering and injustice...
...The second great issue is the quality of our prosperity...
...It is much more likely, however, that for most independents both kinds of issues play a part and which is paramount varies from election to election...
...This problem of the quality of our freedom with regard to both civil liberties and civil rights poses some hard political questions...
...We should proceed rather from our deep conviction that common humanity requires us to assist fellow human beings who are hungry, ill, or sunk in degrading poverty...
...The three great issues, it seems to me, are the quality of our freedom, the quality of domestic prosperity, and the quality of world peace...
...Is he liberal or conservative...
...If reelected with a Republican Senate, will he use his powers as party leader to deny the chairmanship of the Investigating Subcommittee to Senator McCarthy...
...If reelected, will he reform the security program...
...He saw a Republican Party unable to master the vagaries of the depression and voted with the Democrats...
...There are school teachers and other civil servants whose incomes have fallen far behind in the onrush of prosperity and inflation in the last fifteen years...
...The courts do not have the authority or the jurisdiction or the speed to cope with the civil rights controversy in all its many phases...
...The prairie wheat farmer, the middle class professional man, the Northern Negro—they were but a few of the Republican voters whom Roosevelt detached from their old party allegiances...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
