No Clarion Cry

"It's just simply wonderful. Wonderful! I always knew that something this big would happen!" burbled bustling Mrs. A. Burks Summers, peering through the smoky, klieg-lighted glare of Washington's Uline Arena at some 12,000 happy Republicans. Senators, Congressmen and plain citizens, they filled every seat, sat cross-legged on the concrete floor, munched the chicken legs of the new "poor man's" Lincoln Day box supper (cost $1), danced to Fred Waring's orchestra, sang with Cinemactor George Murphy, shouted themselves hoarse. Cried G.O.P. Chairman Guy Gabrielson: "From this night on, the Republican Party is going to be the strongest, most active and vigorous opposition party ever known!" (" 'ray!") When Ohio's Senator Robert Taft stood up, the arena burst into a roar of cheers. The oldest Washington Republicans could remember nothing quite like it.

Too Many Cooks . . . Outside Uline Arena, there was considerably less enthusiasm over the widely heralded "restatement of Republican Party principles" which the rally was intended to launch. Demanded by Gabrielson and reluctantly hammered together by a group of Congressmen--who would rather have run on their own records and on local issues--the statement was just what might have been expected of the product of so many hands. It was guarded where it should have been outspoken; diffuse where it might have been concise. It sounded no clarion cry.

The basic domestic issue (defined by Taft) is "liberty against socialism"--"whether we shall delegate to an all powerful federal Government, with unlimited power to tax and spend, the rights to direct and operate our agriculture, industry, labor and local communities and the daily lives of our citizens."

The statement of principles endorsed a balanced budget, decreased federal expenditures, a general tax reduction, but it also urged expansion of social-security coverage and benefits, further rural electrification, federal aid to states for "subsistence, shelter and medical care." It urged freer world trade but it insisted that U.S. industry and farmers be protected from the products of "underpaid foreign labor." It stoutly opposed the Brannan Plan but it promised the farmer "fair" support prices.

Spoil the Broth. On one point the statement's drafters were firm. National Committeeman Werner Schroeder, who speaks for the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Bertie McCormick, wanted to abandon the bipartisan foreign policy, but he was briskly quashed. Massachusetts' Senator Henry Cabot Lodge fought vainly for a more vigorous civil-rights plank. Cried Lodge: "We've got to get the ball and run with it. We must declare our forthright determination to break a filibuster if necessary."

But the architects of the statement ran with no ball, even in the field of civil rights and social responsibility. Snapped New York's Senator Irving Ives, after reading what they brought forth: "Weak-kneed and inadequate ... far short of the 1948 platform." Said Pennsylvania's promising Governor James Duff: "Milk and water."

Gabrielson had wanted to declare a policy and close ranks, to prove how united and strong the party was. That he failed was evidence of an even healthier spirit in the G.O.P.: in its leadership, as well as its rank & file, there was a continuing ferment, a determination not to stand on avoidances and doubletalk.

One man whose opinion the G.O.P. statement did not reflect (because it wasn't asked) was Governor Thomas E. Dewey, titular head of the party and its latest presidential candidate. Last week, lecturing to students at Princeton University, he gave his own opinion of what's wrong with the Republican Party. "The epithet 'me-too,' " said he, "comes largely from those who have not recently carried their own states . . . the croaking voices of reaction or isolation." Those who would make the Republican Party the conservative-to-reactionary party, the Democrats a liberal-to-radical party, would achieve only one result: the Democrats would win every election. The victorious conservatives of Australia and New Zealand, Dewey pointed out, had won only "upon the firmest assurances . . . that they proposed to retain the welfare provisions made by their opponents."

Dewey was still stoutly against "the galloping socialism of big government" but he was scornful of whoever had pinned the label "welfare state" on the Truman Administration. "It must have been some very clumsy Republican," said Dewey.* ". . . Anyone who thinks that an attack on the fundamental idea of security and welfare is appealing to the people generally is living in the Middle Ages."

* In a speech last November, Dewey himself denounced the "self-feeding, evergrowing, no-body-can-feed-you-but-us philosophy of the welfare state."

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