THE EMINENTLY ACCEPTABLE JOSEPH S. CLARK
Shannon, William V.
The Eminently Acceptable Joseph S. Clark by WILLIAM V. SHANNON WHAT ARE the traditional qualifications for a Democratic Presidential candidate? Past experience would indicate he should be a white,...
...Granted that Clark qualifies for admission to the magic circle of those who are available, he is still some measurable distance from the great prize itself...
...Clark is a convinced advocate of the view that in recent years the private sector of the economy has been starving the public sector...
...This was an unorthodox move, but silk-stocking Democrats, unless they happen to be born into the party, are usually mavericks by temperament...
...Indeed, he supported the President's budget requests much more vigorously than Mr...
...Senator Clark favors a "crash program" in federal school construction and a massive onslaught on slums...
...Nevertheless, Clark is thought of as "a Stevenson type...
...This is because he has a lively imagination and an exacting conscience...
...His name is Joseph Sill Clark and he is the junior Senator from Pennsylvania...
...After two years in the Pentagon, he went to the China-Burma-India theater where he compiled an outstanding record, meanwhile contracting a severe case of amoebic dysentery...
...As a left-of-center New Dealish type, he has economic views that make him impeccable in the eyes of labor...
...The next two years will critically determine whether the country comes to share that acquaintance and that respect...
...Clark also led the losing fights against the confirmation of Scott McLeod as envoy to Ireland and against passage of the law to override the Supreme Court decision in the Jencks case...
...Clark's popularity carried over to 1956 when he breasted a strong Eisenhower wave to seize a seat in the Senate away from Republican James Duff...
...This listing of political assets is not meant to suggest I believe that all of these various criteria are valid, or that because Clark meets them, he is sure to be nominated in 1960 and sweep the country...
...Clark was born October 21, 1901, into a well-to-do Republican family in Philadelphia...
...During the 1957 session of Congress, Clark was one of the few open dissenters to the bipartisan economy drive...
...If it does, the Democrats, the party of the many minorities, may ignore the largest minority of all—the once solid white South—and turn to the tiniest minority—the Northern Social Register liberals—to choose a leader cast in the Rooseveltian mold...
...Clark is one of the handful of Northern Democrats who had a perfect voting record on the dozen issues selected by Americans for Democratic Action as key votes in the first session of the current Congress...
...Past experience would indicate he should be a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant from a large Northern state with some executive experience, not too old, and have no serious handicaps in the eyes of trade union members, farmers, Negroes, and Catholics...
...He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was again a top-ranking student, and spent the next fifteen years in the reasonably profitable practice of civil law and the distinctly unprofitable practice of politics...
...The Catholic and Jewish immigrant communities in the big cities and the one-party South have provided the bulk of the party's votes...
...In 1934, Clark, with Dilworth as his campaign manager, ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in Philadelphia...
...Clark passes easily through this multiple screening...
...Clark helped renovate the city charter...
...The property, incidentally, was Avery Island, named after his mother's family...
...Just as the war ended, oil was discovered on Louisiana property he owned, and this freed him of any financial necessity of practicing law...
...this may be a drawback to him if the party is in the mood for a change of pace...
...There is presently emerging in the Democratic Party the first serious challenge in thirty years to this silk-stocking tradition of Presidential candidates...
...He crusaded for slum clearance, more schools, more playgrounds, more of just about everything that would make Philadelphia a cleaner, better city...
...Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts is the idol of the Catholic urban and suburban masses because he is the first of their own politicians since Al Smith with a serious chance to capture the Presidency...
...He attended Chestnut Hill Academy, Middlesex School, and was graduated from Harvard (class of 1923) where he made Phi Beta Kappa and received his degree magna cum laude...
...Eisenhower did...
...They hate to tinker with an old and familiar combination...
...Since he is an intense and sincere man, he delivers these bromides with more passion than some of his political contemporaries...
...After years of dreary hacks in City Hall, Philadelphians now had a chief executive of first-rate intelligence and broad vision...
...As a former mayor of Philadelphia, he has a useful reputation as a creative executive and city reformer...
...It makes no difference...
...Nobody believes him...
...Wilson, Roosevelt, Stevenson, Harriman, Clark—these are all figures with Ivy League, business, or social connections which set them off sharply from the great masses of Democrats...
...He was one of the anchor men in the summer-long struggle for an effective civil rights bill...
...There was no place in it in Philadelphia for young people who wanted to get something done...
...A pair of keen blue eyes dominate his bony face...
...In his view, it is time for an increase in public spending and an upgrading of government services all along the line...
...He was an impressive success...
...Their political philosophy makes most of them "traitors" to their own economic class...
...In 1936, Clark managed Dilworth's equally unsuccessful campaign for the state senate...
...This is much more of an ethnic and cultural hodge-podge than the opposing Republican Party which until recently largely represented Protestant, small-town-and-rural America from New England to the Rockies...
...This complex amalgam of intellectual honesty, emotional restraint, and wariness may make it hard to "package" Clark as a candidate...
...Party managers looking around in this autumn of 1957 find one Democrat who preeminently meets all of these exacting tests...
...On May 29, he offered an amendment to increase the authorization for public housing from a timorous 35,000 units for one year to 200,000 units a year for two years...
...Before turning to the story of Clark the man, we might stop for a moment and consider the whys and wherefores of Clark, the potential Presidential candidate...
...He raised taxes and he spent money...
...The door of opportunity was opening also because the Republican machine was not only steadily decaying, but the awful effects of its long misrule of the city were becoming apparent to everyone...
...Yet their social origins make them seem odd fish indeed to the political machines whose great captains they become...
...He insists he is not running for President, does not expect to be nominated, and is very happy being a U. S. Senator...
...budget is an economic illiterate," he was fond of remarking...
...What did Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common with the Irish braves of Tammany, or Adlai Stevenson with the men who meet in Jack Arvey's private office...
...When war came, Clark entered the Army Air Force as an intelligence officer...
...Philadelphia was corrupt, contented, and safely Republican...
...Clark is likewise at arms length, psychologically speaking, from the Bill Greens and the Bill larretts who run ward politics in Philadelphia...
...I had to leave the Republican Party," Clark says...
...These are simply the criteria a politician would use to establish that indispensable, preliminary status known as availability...
...The electorate in 1952 and 1956 demonstrated a rather considerable distrust of candidates thought to be "eggheads...
...This is the ability to project to the public an image of oneself that excites interest and enthusiasm and that permits an identification to take place between a leader and his followers who may never so much as shake his hand but whose impressions and intuitions are ultimately decisive...
...Kennedy, the millionaire son of an ambassador, with entree to Palm Beach and Newport, is scarcely at one, in economic terms, with his followers, but financial distinctions disappear in the larger and more important cultural identification...
...If the minorities cannot choose a Democratic nominee, each of them has well established veto rights...
...Indeed, one of the issues selected was Clark-made...
...Although Clark is divorced and remarried, he is in no political difficulty on this score since the divorce took place nearly a quarter century ago, and Catholics have no objection to him (except that his name is not Jack Kennedy...
...Because for various reasons no representative of any of the racial, re- • ligious, and regional minorities making up the Democratic Party could be nominated for President, the party has had to turn ironically enough to the group which within its own ranks is the smallest minority of all—the Northern Protestants of middle and upper class background...
...He is aggressively liberal on conservation and public power issues that are important in the Far West...
...The Democratic Party dragged Adlai Stevenson, unwilling and unhappy, into the 1952 race because he was the only big league governor the party had who met all of the necessary criteria...
...Clark and Richardson Dilworth, a contemporary in fashionable Chestnut Hill, bolted the Republican Party in 1928 to support Al Smith...
...In the interim between the two campaigns, Clark had served briefly as deputy state attorney general...
...Unlike Smith, he does not come trailing East Side accents, Tammany connections, and speakeasy bartenders...
...The crucial factor is another intangible variously called energy, magnetism, glamor, political appeal...
...While he has not spoken much on farm issues, he has a general position in favor of strong government that encompasses aid to farmers...
...Both of them are practical men with the iron will and the egotism of the effectively functioning politician...
...He came home with many medals and the rank of colonel to find that fate had thrust open the door to a political career...
...The Democratic Party for a hundred years has been a coalition of diverse and often mutually antagonistic minorities...
...They may take the plunge with Kennedy in 1960, but then again they may not...
...In fact, of course, neither Clark nor Stevenson is an intellectual in the true sense if one defines an intellectual as one who places the pursuit of ideas for their own sake above any immediate practical ends...
...To make the coalition yet more complex, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought in the urban Negroes and, for a time, the grain state farmers...
...Any one who says the country cannot afford a seventy billion dollar...
...Clark is tough as nails, intellectually precise, and fluent without being garrulous...
...He staffed top administrative posts with experts drawn from many parts of the country...
...Before the happy advent of petroleum, it was best known as the source of Tabasco sauce...
...Politicians are cautious and superstitious...
...He appalled the political professionals by his ruthless dedication to the creation of a municipal career service...
...It was time, one might say, for a change...
...His proposal was killed, 54 to 20, which is some rough measure of liberal weakness in the present Senate...
...When this rather obvious fact of political life is pointed out to him, Joe Clark says what any sensible politician would say...
...Moreover, he is emotionally self-contained and wary in his relations with other people...
...Presidential candidates are chosen because the inherent logic of the political situation at the moment demands a certain kind of standard-bearer...
...What manner of man is Joe Clark...
...If this expansive, positive view of government's role has seemed out of step, at least until recently, with the complacent mood of Eisenhower prosperity in the country at large, it proved exciting and popular in Philadelphia...
...WILLIAM V. SHANNON, Washington correspondent for the New York Post, has written for Commonweal and The New Republic...
...Clark retired from City Hall in 1955 after one four-year term with applause and commendations ringing in his ears...
...He is more than acceptable to the Negroes because of his long and earnest championship of civil rights...
...Clark introduced honesty, efficiency, and an invigorating progressive spirit into municipal government, but he makes no pretense that he was able to accomplish all this and save money, too...
...He is thin, of medium height, quick and taut in his movements...
...That change came in 1951 when after 67 years of continuous Republican control, Clark became mayor...
...If the old tradition survives for another campaign, Clark is among the three or four prime possibilities and may well be in front...
...As Clark's colleagues become better acquainted with him, he is beginning to earn their respect for his incisive intelligence, his honesty, and his candor...
...He received the Bok Award for most distinguished service to the community, the first time this honor had ever gone to a politician...
...At the same time, however, he sometimes conveys an impression of tentativeness and tension...
Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12
