Chapter 26

Men and Politics in Ohio

Ohio’s deeper boom was there …

—Maurice Thompson

FRANK J. LAUSCHE,¹ governor from 1945 to 1947 of one of the great master states, Ohio, is a character like no other in American public life—something of an athlete, something of a poet, something of a gypsy. What he seems to possess above all is a quality both mysterious in origin and of inestimable value to a politician—a very considerable personal vote-getting capacity. Lausche won the Ohio governorship in 1944 against the most varying of obstacles; for instance he was the first Roman Catholic ever elected governor, and also the first son of an immigrant.

Lausche, pronounced like Low-she, is not nearly so well known outside Ohio as in, though gradually he is being talked of on the national plane. But within Ohio, particularly in and around Cleveland where he was mayor for some years, he is a legendary figure. A small joke makes the point. A teacher told her first graders that the next day was Columbus Day, and that they wouldn’t have to come to school.

“Who was Columbus ?” a child asked.

“He discovered America.”

“Nuts!” replied the child. “America was discovered by Frank J. Lausche.”

Background, Heritage, Career

The Lausche saga begins in Slovenia. His father came from a small band of Germans who lived in the Gottschee, an Alpine valley behind the Adriatic near Fiume, in what is now Jugoslavia; the clan moved into Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, about a hundred years ago. A small Teutonic island in a Slavic ocean, it maintained an exclusive German culture and strict use of the German language for a time, and then intermarriage began to take place. Lausche’s father was half-German, half-Slovene; his mother was pure Slovene.

Anybody who knows that part of Europe will understand what this heritage means. The mountain folk of Jugoslavia, particularly those whose valleys climb down to the sea, have a complex personal distinction. People like the Lausches have a fine appetite for meaty, sauce-laden food; they like to drink, to saunter across meadows blanketed with flowers, to climb mountains in the spring; they are passionately fond of music and hand-embroidered costumes; they have vitality, a love for healthy indolence, and a great gift for happiness.

Lausche’s father came to America in 1885, and Frank was born in Cleveland ten years later. The father worked in the steel mills, and died when his son was twelve. Also he edited a Slovene-language newspaper, with a neighborhood circulation in Cleveland, for a time; the fact that his father was an editor—and a radical editor who always took his own side, that is, the side of the underpossessed—had a profound bearing on Frank’s life. Young Lausche had to earn a living, in the Cleveland slums, practically from the time he can remember. There was a brood of younger sisters and brothers. His mother, whose memory he adores, ran a small wine shop to help support the family.

Look at the Lausches today. One of Frank’s sisters, Mrs. Josephine Welf, is a musician who has made a specialty of recording Croatian and Slovene folk songs; her husband is a referee with the State Industrial Commission. (This was a civil service appointment; Lausche had nothing to do with it. There is not the faintest trace of nepotism about him; no relative has ever been given any kind of job.) The family has a close spirit of kinship, and one thing binding it together is music. One brother, Dr. William J. Lausche, a dentist, is also a composer; another, Charles, is an attorney who plays the piano and is also one of the community’s leading bowlers. One sister is the wife of a doctor (of Jugoslav origin); another brother, Harold, works in the Fisher Body plant.

Lausche himself married a girl of Scotch-Irish descent—once again we witness the extraordinary miracle of the American melting pot—named Jane Sheal. She is not a Catholic. She plays the piano, and often accompanies her husband at the violin. For many years the Lausches did not have a house of their own; they lived in Cleveland with Mrs. Lausche’s father, an engineer, on 100th Street. It did not embarrass them in the least when the neighborhood began to break down, so that a Chinese laundry is next door today. Lausche’s wife, a highly competent young woman, has been of the most signal service to his career, and a strong liberal influence; she goes to all his political meetings and some people in Columbus like to say that she should be the governor, not he. The Lausches have no children. The fact that she is not a Catholic has made a minor political issue. Lausche himself has never paid much attention to religion in the formal sense.

Reminiscing a bit in Columbus, the governor told me that there had been two great turning points in his life, following two great decisions he had to take.

As a boy he was fascinated by athletics; he played marbles, horseshoes and corner lot games of every kind (and today he shoots golf in the middle 70’s). Growing up, he found that he was pretty good at baseball, and he became a semi-pro. Then he got a job as third baseman with Lawrence, Massachusetts, and later with Duluth. Came the First World War. Lausche was learning to be a soldier at Camp Gordon, Georgia. A scout named Charlie Frank, who is now owner of the Atlanta Club in the Southern League, was the camp’s recreational director and manager of its team. Lausche, one of sixty thousand men, made the team; Frank promptly signed him for Atlanta when the war should be over. Lausche was discharged from the Army in January, 1919, and had to decide whether or not to accept the Atlanta offer, and formally adopt professional baseball as a livelihood. Finally, after much turmoil in mind and heart, he chose not to do so. He went back to Cleveland, attended law school at night, and started what became a political career.

Lausche was admitted to the bar in 1920, placing second highest in the state examinations, and practiced until 1932. He was then appointed to a judgeship in the municipal court to fill an unexpired term; the next year, running for office for the first time, he was elected to the Cleveland bench (he led the ticket) and served till 1937, when he moved up—also by election—to the court of common pleas, which is the Ohio equivalent of the supreme court in other states. He held this post till 1941, when he became mayor. Lausche was an admirable judge. For one thing, he loved the law; for a time he taught judicial equity at the John Marshall School of Law. He discovered by so doing that the first thing a teacher must learn is to keep ahead of his own students, a lesson he has sought never to forget. In time, other lawyers came to send their difficult cases to him. As a judge what he liked particularly were laborious cases in equity. Most of his colleagues preferred simple personal injury cases and the like; Lausche took on the difficult ones where, without a jury, he had to decide both facts and law. His most famous decision was probably that in the so-called Crosby case, when he laid down the principle that picketing was illegal if undertaken by members of unions not employed at the place picketed, or if it could be conclusively shown that the employer involved had amicable relations with his own employees. After years of tussle, this decision was reversed by the Supreme Court.

The second great turning point in Lausche’s career came in 1935. He could have gone on being a judge all his life. But a group of civic-minded citizens, and Cleveland is probably the most civic-minded city in the country, urged him to run for mayor. He was very hesitant. He had never held administrative office; he had no idea whether he had the talent necessary. (And indeed, his worst fault today is lack of interest in administration.) Finally he decided not to run. Harold Burton, now a Supreme Court justice, ran instead, and won handsomely, with Lausche cordially supporting him. In 1937 and 1939 friends again urged Lausche to try for the job himself. He refused. Then Burton went on to the Senate, whereupon Lausche was sounded out once more. He happened to be en route to San Jose, California, for a holiday with his wife’s aunt, and he told his supporters that he would give them his decision when he returned. One day he dropped into an old church near Monterey; he heard the chant of the liturgy, and saw the warm rays of the sun pouring through windows bound with ancient iron. He began to meditate, finally made up his mind, and decided that he would not run for mayor. Then he returned to Cleveland. Something “clicked,” as he puts it, when he saw his home town again; what it was, he does not know till this day. But he reversed himself, and announced his candidacy.

Lausche, a profoundly honest man, resigned from his judgeship, a twelve thousand dollar job—more than he got as governor—before he was nominated. He felt that it would be morally wrong to run for one office while holding another, though the opposite example has been set by, let us say, a hundred thousand other politicians who hold onto whatever job they have as long as possible. Nowadays Lausche sometimes regrets his decision. He substituted for the serenity of the judicial chamber—its “absorption and dignity,” as he says—the turbulence and clamor of a hot municipal campaign. He didn’t like a lot of things. But anyway, he was elected mayor, and by a thumping 61 per cent majority; he got the biggest vote in the history of the Cleveland mayoralty. In 1943 he ran again, and was even more thumpingly reelected; he received 71 per cent of all votes cast, which is probably a record for any big city election in our time.

Then, the next year, came the first race for governor. I shall go into this for one reason only, to illustrate Lausche’s attitude toward (a) professional politicians, (b) money.

While mayor of Cleveland he had paid no attention whatever to the regular Democratic machine; he kept all ward heelers and party hacks as far away as possible. This led to strain and resentment both; on one occasion he flatly refused an offer of three thousand dollars for campaign expenditures by the Democratic National Committee; thereafter the party leadership in Washington let him severely alone. But to fight an election in Ohio costs a staggering amount of money. Lausche nevertheless set up a kind of rule, that no contribution should exceed one hundred dollars. Once Marshall Field (whom he has never met) gave him $1,000, and there have been a few donors of $250 or $500, but by and large the $100 limit remained in force. Hence the great bulk of Lausche money had to come from little people who gave small sums; most contributions were under ten dollars, and there were plenty of half-dollars and even quarters. Lausche set up another rule, that under no circumstances would he accept money from gambling or racketeer interests, or from any person doing business with the state. All told, in the 1944 race, he spent only $27,162.75, a minuscule sum for Ohio. His Republican opponent, Mayor James G. Stewart of Cincinnati, together with the statewide Republican party, spent not less than $988,000—and lost!

Once during the campaign Lausche was offered a thousand dollars by the Political Action Committee of the CIO—the CIO was supporting him at the time (albeit coolly), but he turned the money down. On the day after election, his headquarters literally didn’t have a nickel left; it could not buy an airmail stamp, and it was in debt $3,700. Then the Democratic National Headquarters, impressed by the decisiveness of his victory, telephoned him from the Biltmore in New York, offered to let bygones be bygones, and volunteered to help pay the bills, ex post facto, insisting, however, that any check they sent should be payable to the local executive committee of the party. With this group Lausche had had absolutely nothing to do, and he refused the money.²

No wonder New York and Washington were impressed. Roosevelt lost Ohio to Dewey by 11,500 votes, but Lausche won the governorship by 112,000. This is the only instance in the 1944 election of victory by a local Democrat when the president was beaten; almost everywhere else, in fact, it was Roosevelt who carried the local candidate through. But Lausche outran FDR by 33,000 votes.

Some Qualities of Lausche

How account for a success like this? There are several reasons; at the moment let me confine myself to one. I heard the same story twice, in two different cities, and no doubt the same thing happened several times.

Everybody in Cincinnati thought that Jim Stewart would win the governorship hands down. He was widely popular, Ohio is normally a strong Republican state, and he had been working for the post for years. Lausche did not even announce his own candidacy till six weeks before the primaries. Then he arrived in Hamilton County. He completely ignored the regulars and old-line politicos and, instead, made just two talks. One was at the Women’s City Club, with an audience of scarcely a hundred. But these were key women. And Lausche “burned them up.” The other was at the Commercial Club, which is the Cincinnati equivalent of the Union League in Philadelphia or the Somerset Club in Boston. Hardly any Democrat had ever been seen within its portals. It ate Democrats for breakfast. Lausche spoke for an hour. A member who was present told me, “Before he came, it was a dead sure shot that 90 per cent one people there would vote against him; when he left, 90 per cent were on his side.” Among the guests, incidentally, was Mr. Stewart himself, his opponent.

Lausche then called on the publishers of the chief Cincinnati papers, which are arch-Republican. To each he said simply, “I know you’re against me, of course. All I want is a fair deal.”

Everywhere he went, he followed the same technique. He would stay a day or two; by the time he left, the town would be buzzing with his name. He won friends everywhere by a quality of the heart.

But he had very serious barriers to overcome. People said that he was too ambitious, too clever, too impetuous, and a “narrow-horizon man.” They were aghast that he practically refused to speak to A1 Horstman, the powerful Democratic state chairman; they asserted, that he was “woolly minded,” a “terrible administrator” and “all things to all men.” Some people disliked him for being Catholic, and a lot of Catholics disliked him for having a non-Catholic wife. Some labor people said he should have done more for labor, antilabor people said he did too much, and the AF of L refused to take any stand at all. He was accused both of being a parvenu (the snobs could not forget his foreign and plebeian origin) and a slave to the Chamber of Commerce. In industrial cities he praised Roosevelt highly; in the rural communities he never even mentioned Roosevelt’s name—particularly in the America First belt of Ohio, in the western tier of counties—and so he was accused of opportunism and equivocation.

In fact, when you analyze it, everybody in the state was altogether dubious about Lausche—except 1,603,809 voters.

Personal Life of the Former Governor

Frank Lausche is a big man physically, with heavy shoulders, a nice vaistline, and the easy grace of an athlete. He plays golf twice a week, and has had only one serious illness in the past twelve years; the doctor had a hard time keeping him in bed. His smile is grave, yet very warming; charm and vitality are the first things a visitor is apt to feel. He speaks slowly, feeling for words with care, most of the time, and then is likely to spurt into an erupting cloud of rhetoric. Mostly he is direct and simple, but, with his big hands waving and his dark, Indianlike face aglow, he can shoot right off the earth.

He works like an ox and his day is long. Up at seven, he is usually at his desk by 8:15. He seldom goes out to lunch, and he sees people hour after hour. They queue up outside his office, and a great percentage of them are neighborhood folk; they arrive in overalls or workers’ clothes, saying that they must see “Frank” himself; many are foreign born, and few are ever turned away.

Lausche’s only hobby, music and golf aside, is poetry. He enjoys reading, and burrows into the classics every chance he gets. A curious point is that he likes to read Shakespeare in winter but not summer. Poetry supplies something, he told me, that makes it possible for him to be sympathetic to any kind of problem or point of view; he reads it because it makes him mellower. Current magazines and books do not occupy him much, and he goes through newspapers like a buzz saw.

He has no nicknames; people who know him well simply call him Frank. He has no pets, except an English setter. He drinks well, and loves a heavy dinner. Until recently, he smoked about twenty five-cent cigars a day; he practically ate them, and never smoked anything that cost more than a nickel. For the time being he has given up smoking. He plays poker occasionally, but never craves it; sometimes—but rarely—he sneaks off to see a baseball game. He never goes to movies or the theater.

His closest political friend is probably John E. Lokar, his executive secretary. Lokar, also of Slovene origin, was the son of a crony of Lausche’s father; they played in the streets together when both were children, though Lokar is younger. Lausche’s technique with political associates is to listen carefully, but only seldom does he ask advice. When he meets with his cabinet he says, “Boys, tell me what you think,” but no one influences him much; as a rule he sits on a problem for twenty-four hours, then announces what he will do. He likes a considerable number of people; and an enormous number of folk, dating from the time when he was a judge, dote on him, but he relies on nobody.

He has no interest at all in money, though the time may come when he will have to worry about security in his old age. His governor’s salary was $10,000, of which—on payday every two weeks—he got exactly $302.96. The rest went to taxes, and saving was all but impossible. He owns no property, and in Cleveland he drove a 1939 Chevrolet, so tattered that it scarcely looked respectable, even when he was mayor. When he moved into the gubernatorial mansion in Columbus, he had exactly one extra suit of clothes and two pairs of shoes. (Bricker, moving out, had ninety-two suits, I heard it said.)

I asked one friend about his finances. Answer: “Why, the guy don’t have nothin’!” Another said, “Whatever money you may have in your pocket at this moment, I will make you a wager for any amount that Frank Lausche is carrying less.”

What distinguishes him most is probably his compelling sympathy for the underdog; he told me that he had absorbed this mostly from his father. Once, when he was about fifteen, he fought what he calls “the fist-fight of my life.” An immigrant boy, in peasant clothes, had just arrived from Europe; an older boy in the neighborhood bullied him, and Frank took on the older boy. “And I beat him, though he was a foot taller!” When Lausche tells this story today his eyes literally gleam with pride.

One could go on to list other good qualities that Lausche has, for instance his whimsy, boyishness, and considerable (political) sex appeal for women. Another is his instinct for making use of political enemies. His two chief opponents in the last Democratic primary were Frazer Reams and James W. Huffman. He appointed Reams to be state director of welfare, one of the most important jobs in Ohio, and named Huffman to the Senate! To forgive and forget is a basic item in his philosophy.

Also he has very definite defects; mostly these derive from a lack of academic education and a disinclination to think abstractly; he is a man of emotion, not of mind. He is little more than a child as regards foreign policy: his views on world affairs are parochial in the extreme. On some domestic issues he seems to take every possible attitude at once, and on others he is confused, undecisive and indeterminate. I asked him what was the rock-bottom basis of his political thought; he replied that “he had steeled himself to refuse to be alarmed or stampeded by the threats of any single group.” He has, in fact, a terror of seeming to be the candidate of any particular force or interest, no matter how worthy, which makes him far more guarded than necessary. He told me, with a curious touch of self-pity, “I may be battered all to pieces one of these days.” Then he added, pondering, “Defeat can be a victory if you are rebuffed by the wrong kind of people.”

I heard someone say, “Everybody is crazy about him—and wonders why.” I heard someone else say, “Was he a really good mayor? No one knows. But he’d be elected again any time he ran.” I heard a third friend say, “You can get so mad at him you’ll call him every name in the world, and five minutes later be the best of friends. The guy who knocks him most says, ‘He’s mine!’ ”

Of course other than personal qualities have brought Lausche power. He owes a great deal to the simple fact that he comes from Cleveland; he inherits its great tradition of good government as exemplified by Newton Baker and Tom Johnson, and derives strength too from its huge industrialization and reservoir of foreign born. Most of the Germans vote for him because he has a German name, and most of the Slavs because they know he’s Slav.

What does he believe in most? First, honesty. Second, the spirit of American institutions. What does he stand for most? The principle that public office is a trust.

Man of the Future?

Governors in Ohio serve for two years only, and hence most of them start their campaign for re-election the very minute they are inaugurated. Lausche, who is after all a politician, was no exception. Yet, relying on heart, prestige and friendship, he did not seek to build up any actual “machine.” Of course his ambition runs beyond the governorship, and many people think he may be a good vice-presidential possibility in 1948. But he himself is apt to disclaim such futurities. He told me that he had “a sort of abiding conviction that when you aspire too covetously, it is a rule of nature that you’ll be deprived of the enjoyment of your ambition.” He smiled, “There are lots of things we’d like to do that we can’t do.”

Lausche’s record as governor was moderate and unsensational, with good appointments on the whole. He was—it should be pointed out—a Democratic governor with a Republican majority in the legislature, which never makes for happiness. Strangely enough, considering his instinct for the underpossessed,³ his chief struggle was with labor; the issue was revision of the Unemployment Compensation Law which, as it stood on the books, provided sixteen dollars in weekly payments for eighteen weeks. The CIO wanted this raised to twenty-five dollars for twenty-six weeks; Lausche fought for and got an exact mathematical compromise, twenty-one dollars for twenty-two weeks. He said that he thought the CIO plan, which would have increased the cost of unemployment insurance by 140 per cent, was too expensive; he told me, “I believe in giving, but not to the point of exhausting the body that gives.” Then he changed the metaphor, saying, “There can be such a thing as too much reform, if it takes the wheels off the wagon.”

So much for Frank Lausche in midstream. Now only forty-nine, he is obviously a man to watch. The United States doesn’t have so many capable and honest men in public life that it can afford to neglect any favorite son particularly if he comes from Ohio. Lausche, like Stassen on the other side of the fence, seems to be a political natural, despite his defeat in 1946.

Taft and Bricker

Put on your old gray bonnet

With the Hoover button on it

And we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay.

When the New Deal’s over

We’ll be back in clover—

On inauguration day.

—Gridiron Club ditty

Either of these good gentlemen may well be the next President of the United States, which to many is a somewhat horrifying thought. As these pages go to press, Taft overshadows his colleague as a Republican contender, but in a convention deadlocked between Taft and Dewey, say, Bricker might quite possibly emerge as a compromise. Neither Ohioan has, as of January, 1947, had the candor to announce his candidacy openly, as Harold Stassen so forthrightly did, but each is as much in the fight as a baseball team in the first division racing for the pennant.

Naturally, to preclude the possibility of the two Ohio senators fighting one another at the finish and thus canceling each other out, negotiations began immediately after the November 1946 elections for one to withdraw in favor of the other. This has happened before. In 1940, Bricker stepped aside for Taft. But Dewey blocked Taft off, and Willkie became the nominee. In 1944, Taft withdrew in favor of Bricker, and a similar arrangement was confidently predicted early in 1947, with Bricker giving way to Taft. But nobody made any public move. Neither wanted to split the powerful Ohio delegation, but neither, on the other hand, was willing to surrender his own precious chance. With the White House and its glories seemingly almost within reach, the intramural Ohio tensions inevitably became more acute.

A truly remarkable example of the vagaries of American politics and journalism came on Christmas Eve, 1946. Two stories filed from Column bus at the same time were published in two different New York papers the same morning. One distributed by the International News Service was headlined, BRICKER YIELDS TO TAFT IN PRESIDENTIAL RACE. The other, a United Press dispatch, was headlined BRICKER WON’T BOW TO TAFT. Pay your money and take your choice.

It is impossible to understand Robert Alphonso Taft without reference to Cincinnati, which splendid city I will mention in the next chapter, and to his extraordinary family background.

For the first time in this book on an important level—later we shall see the same thing with Saltonstall in Massachusetts—we confront the phenomenon of the Great Political Family. In Poland, Hungary, Great Britain, Japan, Argentina, this phenomenon is, or was, as common as soap; in the United States it is comparatively rare. Bob Taft is to politics and public eminence born. Everybody knows that his father, William Howard Taft, was governor general of the Philippines (Bob grew up in Manila), secretary of war under the first Roosevelt, and the only American in history to be both president of the United States and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Incidentally it is remarkable, considering the number of exalted positions he held, that the elder Taft won only two elections in his life, as clerk in an Ohio court and for president.

The contrast to Lausche is of course extreme. Lausche, Taft, and Bricker represent three utterly different and contrasting poles in American life and origins—the urban melting pot, the political aristocracy, and the barefoot-boy old-red-schoolhouse tradition.

Other ramifications of the Taft family are not so well known. They spread out like Hapsburgs or white mice. Suppose we start two generations back. Taft’s paternal grandfather, Alphonso, a Vermonter, was secretary of war and attorney general under Grant, and minister to both Austria and the Russia of the Czars.⁴ One uncle, by name Louis More (brother of the arch-Tory essayist Paul Elmer More), was dean of the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati. Another, Horace, founded the Taft school for boys in Watertown, Connecticut, and was its headmaster for many years. Another, Charles Phelps Taft, is the source of most of the contemporary wealth of the family; he married an heiress named Annie Sinton, bought up large amounts of Cincinnati real estate, became a traction magnate, and built the Cincinnati Times-Star into a markedly lucrative and influential property. Bob Taft married Martha Bowers. One of her distant forebears is Jonathan Edwards, the theologian; a great-great-grandfather was Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; her grandfather (born in Ireland) was chief justice of Minnesota and her father, Lloyd Bowers, was solicitor general of the United States under William Howard Taft. Bob’s brother, Charles, is a well-known public figure in his own right, his sister (Dr. Helen Taft Manning) is a professor of history at Bryn Mawr, and his cousin, Hulbert Taft, is publisher of the Times-Star.

The brightest star in the family is a lady, Bob’s wife Martha. His debt to her is beyond compass. She is not only one of the most delightful women alive: politically she is indefatigable and indispensable. She is a much more accomplished speaker than her husband, and has assisted in all his campaigns. Once, going to a political rally, her car skidded as she swerved sharply to avoid a dog; the car turned over three times, but she miraculously escaped injury. She proceeded to the meeting, and said imperturbably, “Well, anyway, this ought to get us the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals vote.” Once, before an audience of coal miners, her opponent boasted that he was just an ordinary, humble man. Mrs. Taft’s response was instantaneous: “My husband is not a simple man. He did not start from humble beginnings. He is a very brilliant man. … Isn’t that what you prefer?” After Taft’s first run for the Senate, one Ohio newspaper headlined the event simply, BOB AND MARTHA WIN.

The Taft family lived originally in a heavy, lawn-surrounded stone house built by Alphonso in Cincinnati. Here Bob played as a child with his father (who weighed 312 pounds) and his delicate, beautiful mother who was a school teacher named Nellie Herron and who was called “Fascinating Nellie.” Today, when not in Washington, the Tafts live at Sky Farm, a modest suburban estate in the Little Miami Valley near Cincinnati, where they grow strawberries for fun and profit. Taft was not rich when he and Martha bought Sky Farm in 1916; it cost every cent they had, and didn’t even have electricity. The neighborhood was an outpost then; today, as Cincinnati has expanded; it has become fashionable, and Martha likes to say that buying the house is the only fashionable thing she and her husband have ever done.⁵ The Tafts spend their summers, when they can find the time, at Murray Bay, Canada. Here, for years, their children and other children of the family, in almost Rooseveltian profusion, had their holidays. Bob and Martha Taft have four children; Charlie (who often disagrees with Bob politically) has six.

Sons of politically famous fathers often, it seems, find their parentage an encumbrance. They are marked for the limelight too early if they adopt political careers themselves, and also their fathers overshadow them, no matter how deep the mutual affection and admiration. Both Bob and Phil La Follette will attest to this, and so will several Roosevelts. Bob Taft is an extremely reticent man (politics aside), shy, and not given to advertising privacies. Once he asked Alice Longworth, “What do you say when someone says they knew your father and how much he meant to them?”

Robert was something of a child prodigy. He was a sober, orderly and precise youngster with a great gift for mathematics. He went to the Taft School (inevitably), Yale, and the Harvard Law School. In all three, he was first in his class; he has been called, next to Brandeis, the most brilliant student the Harvard Law School ever produced. He practiced law for a time, was rejected for military service because of faulty eyesight, went briefly to Europe for Herbert Hoover’s Relief Administration, and set up a law firm in Cincinnati with his brother Charles. Almost at once, he interested himself in politics. He became a legislator, speaker of the house, and state senator. This was at a time when the Ku-Klux was almost as strong in Ohio as in Indiana, and his first notable service was a vigorous offensive against the Klan, which took courage. This Klan episode, largely forgotten now, would be well worth recounting in detail if space were available. In 1938, Taft ran for the United States Senate. He won handily. In 1944, running for re-election, he won again—but his majority slipped from 178,000 to 18,000, and a better opponent would probably have beaten him.

Taft is a hard and tireless worker. Not only has he brain power; he knows how to organize it. His sincerity is absolute.⁶ He has the strength of a man who believes in things even when they are the wrong things; he knows the virtues of discipline and order. In formal debate, especially on any financial topic, he is pertinacious and formidably acute; he needs preparation, however, and as an extemporary speaker—or in any field that needs lightness of touch—his record is not happy. One lawyer told me, “The way to win a case against Bob is to get him mad; then he blows up.” He is much more “professional” a politician than most people think; he spends a considerable amount of time and energy keeping his Ohio fences in good repair. Sometimes he takes the line that his job is to vote as his constituents want him to vote, that it is his major duty to reflect their opinions; this is not, however, any excuse for some of his more errant judgments. One famous remark about him is that “he has reached more wrong decisions more ably” than any other man in public life.⁷ He is intricate and clever; for instance he attacked the British loan from the flanks as well as frontally, by putting forward a “substitute” gift idea that would have cut it to $1,250,000,000. Alice Longworth once said that, if he became president, Taft would follow Roosevelt like a glass of milk after a slug of benzedrine. But milk connotes richness, warmth, the upspringing of life, and mellowness; and Taft is not what you would call a warm or mellow man. One of his chief defects was, in fact, pithily expressed once by the New Republic—that “he is about as magnetic as a lead nail.”

From this point forward we deal in the inexplicable and the disconcerting. That Taft should be a conservative is quite understandable—though other leaders with just as authentic an aristocracy-intelligentsia background have not been conservatives. That he should have been an isolationist is also understandable, though it does not jibe well with much of the family tradition. What cannot be explained in Taft are his majestic wrongheadednesses, his Brobdingnagian bad judgments. I confine myself strictly to the record:

On April 14, 1940, he said, “I am opposed to the Selective Service bill because in my opinion no necessity exists requiring such tragic action.”

On February 16, 1941, he said, “It is simply fantastic to suppose there is any danger of an attack on the United States by Japan.”

On February 22, 1941, he said, “An invasion of the United States by the German army is as fantastic as would be the invasion of Germany … by an American army and as unlikely to be undertaken.”

On August 1, 1941, he said, “My opinion is that the situation today … looks infinitely safer. … I cannot understand the statement that the situation is more perilous today than it was a year ago.”

On September 22, 1941, he said, “There is much less danger to this country … today than there was two years ago; certainly much less than there was one year ago.”

Taft is a rationalist; one cannot dismiss him, as one may dismiss Wheeler, as the mere slave to an isolationist obsession. Taft keeps his eyes (on other matters) well above ground; one cannot call him an ostrich or a fool. Taft is honest; one cannot blame these fantastically bad judgments on politics. The clue is probably ambition and a false identification with the temper of the times, plus a certain Philistinism and an almost pathological setness of vision and stubbornness.

Taft was also, it should be pointed out, conspicuous among those isolationists who, “by declaring war on December 8, conceived that they were thus absolved of all their past stupidities and error and were enfranchised to go right on committing just the same kind of error and stupidity thereafter.”⁸ He has clung right onto his old line, with a persistence that one responsible, conservative, and highly Republican commentator calls “sheer and cantankerous.” Consider some other items >n the record:

He voted against Lend Lease, against the ship seizure bill, against extension of the draft, against revision of the Neutrality Act, and even against the confirmation as secretary of war of that eminent fellow Republican, Henry L. Stimson.

He voted for limiting the use of armed forces to the Western Hemisphere, and for limiting the training of drafted men to six months; he voted against the destroyer transfer, and against the arming of our merchant ships.

He spoke at America First meetings (though he was never a member); he led the opposition to Bretton Woods, and sought to block American participation in the world bank and the international stabilization fund. He voted for the San Francisco charter, but soon thereafter introduced an amendment (rejected by the Senate 41 to 18) that would have removed its teeth so far as effective action by the United States is concerned.

In October, 1946, Taft called the Nazi trial at Nuremberg a “miscarriage of justice which the American people would long regret,” and overtly deplored the death sentences. Even Joe Martin, speaker of the house since January, 1947, whose record matches Taft’s in most respects, never went so far as this.

On domestic affairs his record is somewhat contradictory. His first Senate speech was against TVA, which is the most generous work of man in the United States. He favored permanent FEPC legislation, and then turned against it. He led the attack on the confirmation of Henry Wallace as secretary of commerce; this produced a spirited controversy with Walter Lippmann, who wrote, “What Senator Taft does not know on this subject, as on a good many others, is most of what there is to be known about it.”

Taft was the author of the well-known Section V of the Soldier Vote law, which gave the army power to censor books, movies, and the like. Taft’s motive was “to quarantine the GI’s from any federally financed political propaganda.” The result was such absurdities as a veto by the army on films like Wilson and even a comedy, Heavenly Days, starring Fibber McGee and Molly. The law became an ass.

On housing, OPA, labor, and similar domestic issues Taft has slipped and slithered. His record is certainly more liberal than that of senators like Bushfield. This does not, let me add at once, make it very liberal. He helped write the Case bill, voted to amend the Full Employment bill, and fought price control. On the other hand he has several times taken a mild prolabor line; once or twice he has even supported Administration measures favoring labor. He joined Senators Wagner and Ellender to write a housing bill, which though it does not promise much does promise something, and he made a remarkable coalition with two progressive Democrats (Thomas of Utah and Hill of Alabama) to introduce a bill for a modicum of federal aid to education.

John W. Bricker is a totally different article. He and Taft are both conservative senators from Ohio; this aside, there is scarcely any resemblance between them. One can scarcely mention them in the same breath from the point of view of intellectual capacity. Little record exists that Bricker has ever said anything worth more than thirty seconds of consideration by anybody. Intellectually he is like interstellar space—a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés.

“Honest John” is his nickname; any American (except Lincoln) with such a nickname will, one may be sure, be on the dull side. One remark about him, credited to a famous Washington lady of society, the same distinguished lady who called Dewey “an ornament on a wedding cake,” is that Bricker is “just an honest Harding.” A better description might be a “Harding who has no embarrassing friends.” Bricker is the man who—to repeat another well-known phrase—puts his foot in his mouth every time he opens it.

Just before Christmas, 1946, when the Taft-Bricker rivalry became a big story, the senator-elect spoke before the Gridiron Club. Nobody unfamiliar with America can easily understand what a singular function Gridiron dinners perform, and with what effortless but merciless precision the invited guests survey presidential timber. Dewey, it is recorded, once spent a hundred solid hours preparing and rehearsing his first Gridiron speech. Bricker’s Gridiron performance was, observers say, something almost too horrible to talk about. The comment of Harold L. Ickes was. “Before his speech … Bricker thought he was running for the Republican nomination for President. Now he is not only walking, he is limping…. The Republican Party’s Bricker-without-straw could not have done better for his rivals. … In future lexicons ‘Bricker’ will doubtless aapear as a refinement of ‘boner.’ As a presidential candidate, Bricker is a mere flicker.”⁹

John William Bricker, six feet two inches tall, white haired, handsome, the only Republican ever to serve three consecutive terms as governor of Ohio, was born a poor boy on a farm near Mount Sterling, in central Ohio, on September 6, 1893. He worked on his father’s farm, taught school briefly, and went to Ohio State University—which institution he recently said “has become indoctrinated with un-American philosophy.” During World War I, Bricker was a chaplain. This was because, although a lively athlete and baseball player,¹⁰ he was rejected for ordinary military service because he has an abnormally slow pulse, about fifty-five beats to the minute. This, perhaps, contributes to his placidity, his present-day habit of mostly unspotted calm. A friend ordained him into the ministry of the Congregational Christian church, whereupon the Army took him as a chaplain. He served as an athletic instructor too, and was discharged as a lieutenant. After the armistice he took a degree in law, practiced briefly, and almost at once began a steady, plodding, quite honorable but quite undistinguished political career.

A great deal can be understood about Bricker’s personality and the milieu from which he comes by the fact that he was president of the YMCA when a young man, and that the girl he married was president of the YWCA. She was a schoolteacher named Harriet Day. A charming and able woman (like Mrs. Lausche and Mrs. Taft) she has been of the most substantial help to his career. Once a politician said of her, “Harriet is the only woman I know who hasn’t a single enemy in the world and whom I like anyway.”¹¹

Most American politicians—or shall we say most Americans?—are much dominated by women. The “Mom” chapter in Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers comes to mind. Bricker’s mother managed the family farm for twenty-seven years, after her husband’s death; she died in 1941. Until then, out of respect for her principles, Bricker never took a drink, and never went to a Sunday baseball game. Since her death he has relaxed somewhat; he will go fishing on Sundays now, and even drink a glass of beer.

“Honest John” first became governor in 1939, after having served as a town solicitor, assistant attorney general and then attorney general for four years. He got the governorship partly because Ohio, which has known scandals in its time, could no longer stomach the violent corruption of the preceding Democratic administration.

When we inspect his gubernatorial record there is little to write about except “economy.” Bricker came in facing a 40 million dollar deficit; when he left this was a 65 million dollar surplus, which sounds impressive. But several qualifying points arise. First, his administration put in a 3 per cent sales tax, and during the war the money rolled in unendingly. Second, in spite of economies, the budget somehow grew greater every year. Third, the huge Bricker surplus was made possible by starvation of some essential services.

So far, except in passing, we have not mentioned the penitentiaries, insane asylums, homes for the blind and the like, that all states maintain. Mostly their status—particularly insane asylums and homes for the deficient—is a scandal and a disgrace. I will not say that those in Ohio are the worst in the nation. They are certainly among the worst. Not only are the institutions themselves evilly kept up, filthily overcrowded, and operated almost without reference to the human spirit; there are not enough of them. I heard a devoted public servant say in Cincinnati, “Mental disease is so far ahead of us that we can’t possibly keep up with it.” Some states manage much better than Ohio. “Our penitentiary, compared to the one in Michigan, is an oubliette out of the dark ages,” a Columbus editor told me.

What does Bricker believe in? One may guess. It is not, however, easy to pin him down on any concrete issue. He would not even take a stand for or against daylight saving, when this was a controversial point tying up the legislature week after week.¹² At first the observer assumes that, like most favorite sons, Bricker hesitates to commit himself on most things for fear of prejudicing his chances for the presidency. But many Ohioans have come to believe the real reason is something else and simpler—that he takes no stand because he literally has none, that in actual fact he is devoid of convictions on most problems. Everybody knows where Taft stands on everything. But no one knows much about what Bricker believes even on such a matter as foreign policy.

Outside Ohio, in Washington, I heard a potent Republican publicist defend Bricker on the ground that he was an “idealist.” For what? Again, the answer did not come forth. There are moments, indeed, when it is almost impossible not to dismiss Bricker as Simple Simon. He was asked once what he intended to do about the bureaucracy. His answer, in all seriousness, was “One of the best solutions of the problem of a bureaucracy is less bureaucracy.”

As a result of situations and fermentations not within the province of this chapter, John William Bricker, all that he is and isn’t, was nominated for vice president by the Republican party in 1944. He was the hero of the convention, and was vastly more popular with most delegates than Dewey. His “simplicity,” if that is the proper word, seemed irresistible. His subsequent campaign was unbelievably packed with malapropisms. He seemed an actual Throttlebottom come to life. He embarrassed Dewey continually—for instance by welcoming support from Gerald L. K. Smith—and the two scarcely spoke during the campaign.

In 1946 came his election to the Senate. He won overwhelmingly. But as a freshman senator, with the White House beckoning, Bricker will have his troubles. For one thing Taft will be more in the public eye; for another, his intellectual weaknesses are apt to become more and more conspicuous vis-à-vis Taft in the Senate chamber. But, so strange a country is the United States, the very circumstance that Bricker is less intelligent than Taft, together with the fact that he is far more “human,” may make him a better presidential candidate.

Politics, Politics, Politics

I’ll say we’ve done well.

—Sherwood Anderson

Ohio, as everybody knows, has produced more presidents from the point of view of birthplace than any state except Virginia—seven. Moreover if one thinks in terms of where presidents actually lived when they were elected, Ohio leads the nation, with six as against Virginia’s five. As to the seven “native” Ohio presidents, all were Republicans. It is indeed a remarkable tribute to the state’s impact on the Republican party, or vice versa, that since the Civil War every Republican president except Hoover elected for a first term (excluding those who acceded to the White House from the vice presidency, like Theodore Roosevelt and Coolidge) was either born in Ohio or elected from Ohio. Ohioans are very prone to tell the visitor things like this. They are not nearly so prone to admit that none of the Ohio presidents had much distinction, and that the administrations of two at least were embarrassed by the most heinous scandals.¹³

Ohio is such a tremendous state presidentially for three reasons: (1) It is fourth in the union in population, and hence its twenty-five electoral votes carry pivotal weight. (2) Despite its production of Republican presidents it is a state very volatile and touch-and-go. Anybody who can so much as read a comic strip can usually predict how New York and Pennsylvania will go nationally. But nobody is ever sure of Ohio. Once the manager of a presidential candidate, arriving in Columbus, asked the local boss if he could “deliver” Ohio. The legend is that the local boss took a deep protesting breath, curled up his toes, and on the spot died of heart failure. (3) It was formerly famous for its bosses, like Marcus A. Hanna of Cleveland, who wore a president like McKinley practically as a watchfob. But Ohio has no all-state bosses now, and so it is doubly unpredictable.

A curious and suggestive point, which I heard first expressed by former Senator Burton, is that Ohio senators are very short lived politically. As of January 3, 1941, when Mr. Burton himself entered the Senate, Ohio had had forty senators since statehood in 1803. Of these twenty-four or 60 per cent served one full term or less; only eight or 20 per cent ever got two full terms or more. This has had a serious political effect in that the state seldom develops the seniority it deserves, and that the southern states have in such full measure for example. Its turnover is too quick. This means too that its senators usually lack seniority not merely in the literal sense but in experience.

Ohio politics cover a very broad span. For instance before Lausche gave Burton’s senate seat to Huffman, he offered it to two other men, both of whom declined. One was the brilliant young air corps officer who more than any other man was responsible for the strategic bombing that demolished Japan, Major General Curtis LeMay. The other was none other than James M. Cox, the newspaper publisher who (not one American in a thousand will remember) was the Democratic candidate for president to succeed Wilson in 1920, and whose running mate was Franklin Roosevelt.

To ask the question “Who runs Ohio?” is to get into the same kind of problem in differential calculus that applies to most middle western states. The education lobby is a powerful force; it must needs be, since Ohio spends the staggering sum of 55 million dollars per year on schools, the universities not included. The labor movement and in particular the CIO are gravely split. For years a dominant factor was the Anti-Saloon League, and the coal operators are a substantial force. Big business is a potent lobby, and so is agriculture. At least two-thirds of all Ohioans live in cities; nevertheless the farmers, called the “Cornstalk Brigade,” are the biggest single force in the legislature.

I met a good many political worthies in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus. When I left Ohio a telegram from one followed me: IF YOU HAVE REALLY FOUND OUT WHO RUNS THIS PLACE FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T KEEP IT CONFIDENTIAL. KINDLY WIRE TEN THOUSAND WORDS COLLECT.

¹ Lausche lost his campaign for re-election in November, 1946—tribute indeed to the overwhelming nature of the Republican midterm sweep. Lausche got more than a million votes, however, and lost by only about 35,000, in the closest gubernatorial race Ohio has seen in a quarter of a century. No one should think that he is permanently retired from public life. As a matter of convenience I am letting this chapter, which was written before the elections, stand largely as I wrote it.

² While campaigning for governor, incidentally, he returned to the Cleveland city treasurer his pay for each day that he was absent from the city hall.

³ When the housing shortage reached its most acute and exasperating state in Columbus, Lausche opened an unused wing of the state executive mansion to put up veterans’ families rent free.

⁴ Sources for this genealogical material are mainly an article in Time (January 29, 1940), an article in PM by Alexander H. Uhl, October 4, 1942, and “Taft and Taft,” by Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, Life, March 18, 1940.

⁵ See Life, cited above, and an article by Alice Roosevelt Longworth in the Saturday Evening Post, May 4, 1940.

⁶ But Arthur Krock has reported in the New York Times (October 8, 1946), “Up to a point Mr. Tiaft plays obvious or even opportunist politics.”

⁷ Cf. “Taft: 20 Degrees Colder Inside,” by Carroll Kilpatrick, The Nation, December 23, 1946.

⁸ From an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune.

⁹ New York Post, December 27, 1946. But one should point out that recoveries have been made from Gridiron catastrophes. In fact, in 1940, Taft made a similar failure; it was talked about then as Bricker’s was six years later.

¹⁰ Like Lausche, Bricker was catcher on an Ohio State team that won the state championship.

¹¹ See a brilliant study of Bricker, which tells more about him than anything I know, by Eliot Janeway in Life, June 11, 1944, and an article by Malcolm lagan in the New York Post, March 20, 1943.

¹² Cf. an article by Potomacus in the New Republic, June 28, ig43. In many states, for instance Arizona, there were similar attempts to turn back to standard time.

¹³ The seven: Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Taft, Harding. Another point is that of the last fourteen presidents, Republican or Democrat, excluding FDR and Truman, actually seven—50 per cent!—were from Ohio.