By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
These coming midterm elections aren’t exactly New Hampshire’s bread and butter. We make our mark in February, not in November. We don’t do midterms. We do primaries.
Some of those scenes are famous. Reagan telling Bush that he paid for the microphone, for instance. Or going back further in time: how stories of college kids walking in the snow on behalf of Eugene McCarthy managed to knock Lyndon Johnson out of the race in 1968. Or going back further still: how Sherman Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge conspired to make a president out of Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952. They barely had his permission to put his name on the ballot. His winning here went a long way to convince Ike to give it a shot.
A lot was at stake, and it was not a done deal. On the personal front, Eisenhower had little love for politics. He was an Army man who was used to giving orders. He delegated power generously, but he also liked to be in control. While he ended up having an almost unique level of popularity, he was no glad-hander; to a degree almost impossible to understand or appreciate today, his popularity came from his accomplishments rather than vice-versa.
And on the political front, Ike had no natural constituency. He was so late to the political game that both parties sought to have him run. He was distrusted by the Republican right wing and their leader considered the nomination to be his for the taking. That was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, whose nickname was Mister Republican.
We forget how important Ohio once was. Grant and Sherman both came from Ohio, though, and the Republican Party was grand and old because it had both prosecuted and won the American Civil War. It had also overseen the peace that followed, and from the commercial elegance of Cincinnati in the south to the immigrant-based industrial behemoth of Cleveland in the north, Ohio made fortunes for people the same way California does today (swap those directions and substitute the names San Francisco and Los Angeles to get some sense of the true similarities between these states).
In truth, Ohio gave birth to one modern industry after another: steel, rubber, mining, tractors, road-building, airplanes. But by the middle of the twentieth century, it had lost its leading edge. The west coast had risen by then. The east coast had never gone away. And Mister Republican was a backwards-looking man, leading a party of reactionaries who feared and hated the future.
The debate that followed the war was whether Roosevelt’s great reforms should last or be thrown away. Social Security, the steadying hand of a federal bureaucracy in our economy, various types of assistance for the poor and governmental support for the labor movement; the barest beginnings of racial justice, the barest beginnings of social progressivism. Taft wanted to wipe the slate clean again. It was red meat for reddest states of all.
Eisenhower came from a different type of Republicanism. Raised in Kansas and lifted in life by the military, he had finally settled in New York City to make his way in the civilian world. And the Republicans of New York were a breed apart. Heirs to the great (and greatly loved) Fiorella Laguardia, New York’s Republicans saw themselves first and foremost as the defenders of justice and fairness against the corruption of Tammany Hall, and secondly as the champions of internationalism against the protectionism and the parochial-mindedness of the big New York unions.
They were not backwards-looking. They looked ahead. If their policies were ultimately tainted by their affection for business, that affection itself did not muddy their morals. Their own leader, Thomas Dewey (who had run and lost against Truman in 1948) was known locally for one peculiar fact: as New York’s top attorney, he had hired the first black man to be a prosecutor in that city.
Yes, Republicans used to be proud of things like that. They used to savage their opponents for being racists; they used to argue against corruption; they used to take seriously our nation’s deep security interests.
By running against Taft, then, Ike was consciously, purposefully, and controversially seeking to ground the Republican party in the modern age. Nixon continued fighting that battle, and so did Ford, Reagan, and both presidents Bush. Funny how times change. Ike wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s Republican party. Taft would win going away.
If New Hampshire can do anything to hold the line against that happening, we would be doing our country a favor again.
He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Davidow’s newest book Chanukah Land can be found here.
