Sugar, Soap & Shirts

No one could rightly say that ponderous David Ignatius Walsh was a wild-eyed New Dealer who threw monkey wrenches at business. David Walsh is a conservative Democrat who has held his seat in the U.S. Senate for 26 years; along the way he has done many a favor for Massachusetts manufacturers and businessmen, many of them Republicans.

No one could rightly say that Dave Walsh was a darling of the Left and an apple of the Communists' eye. Dave Walsh is a Catholic, and hates Communism.

But Henry Cabot Lodge, his opponent in the Senate race, rightly could and did say last week: "More than a year after the end of the war, we confront shortages of sugar, soap, white shirts, clothes for children, while newspapers tell us of factories closing down for lack of raw materials and of automobile companies scrapping their plans to expand. All this in a country which persists in shipping large quantities of many much-desired articles to a country like Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, in which our own citizens and other friends of human freedom, such as Archbishop Stepinac, have been maltreated and killed."

Onetime Senator Lodge, who had given up his seat to go into the Army, carefully refrained from mentioning Dave Walsh's name in his campaign speeches. But it was this sort of adroit campaign maneuver--aimed at a rumbling discontent over a postwar dream that had gone sour--that made Republican Lodge appear as the likely winner.

In heavily Catholic Boston and other cities, the Republican press hewed hard and effectively on the theme of Communist interference in U.S. politics--the unwelcome kiss which Moscow Radio had bestowed on C.I.O.-P.A.C.-backed candidates (TIME, Oct. 28).

Senator Walsh could expostulate that he was concerned with none of this, but nonetheless, as a Democrat, all of it whirled about his head. All over his state, billboards shouted the smart G.O.P. slogan --"Had Enough? Vote Republican Nov. 5." For Dave Walsh that was a particularly ominous sign. This was a bad year for oldtimers in the Senate, e.g., Burt Wheeler, Henrik Shipstead, Bob La Follette.

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