Notes on a Running Fight

In the shifting, running, behind-the-scenes fight for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, three new "compromise" candidates emerged last week: Iowa's middle-of-the-road National Committeeman Harrison Earl Spangler, a party wheel horse for two decades; Delaware's strawberry-growing ex-Senator John G. Townsend, close friend of Senate G.O.P. Leader Charles McNary; and Missouri's middle-of-the-road National Committeeman Barak Thomas Mattingly, host to the meeting in St. Louis on Dec. 7 at which the chairman will be picked.

But the leading candidate was still Illinois's Committeeman Werner Schroeder, who, although he disclaimed any campaign on his own part, had the backing of a diversified group that included Old Guardists, ex-isolationists, and those who would like to oust Wendell Willkie from a dominant place in the G.O.P.

Wendell Willkie, still the great amateur among politicians, once again found himself in the position of having to fight from behind: his opponents had been in the field long before he had, sounding out sentiment, lining up votes. He was guilty of a possible tactical error: fighting Schroeder with a principle instead of a man.

For all participants and spectators to the fight, the Chicago Sun's Robert Lasch did some pregnant soliloquizing: "Don't make the mistake of assuming that this is a struggle over the dead issue of pre-war isolationism. What men stood for before Pearl Harbor has been washed out by the elections. It is what they stand for now and in the future that matters. ... I think we shall find that the division, though hinging upon our future foreign policy ... is the progressives against the reactionaries all over again. ... If you are a reactionary at home, you are most likely to be an isolationist abroad. ... If you distrust the plain people in this country, you will certainly distrust them in Russia. High-tariff protectionism, hatred of social reforms, appeasement, isolationism, advocacy of a strictly military war and fear of a people's peace all go together in one package."

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