The Man Who Wasn't There

The C.I.O., the Northern city bosses and the South clashed last week at the 29th Democratic convention in Chicago. The fight, which ranged from the rawest of ward-heel tactics to the most delicate and nimble-witted of manipulations, ended in defeat for the C.I.O. and the Native Radical wing of the Democratic Party.

The C.I.O. and the evangelical amateurs had proved strong--the strongest of the three clashing wings of the party. But they lost to a combination of the city machines (Kelly, Hague and Flynn) and the entrenched conservatives of the South. But more important, the Wallace wing lost because Franklin Roosevelt had weighted the scales against it.

For Franklin Roosevelt, absent only physically from this convention, as in 1940, was still undisputed master of the Democratic Party. With his support Henry Wallace might again have won the Vice Presidential nomination. But the President chose to buy party unity instead. He gave the go-ahead to unexciting Harry S. Truman of Missouri, whom none of the three factions could warm to--nor strenuously object to, either. The Vice-Presidency had more than Throttlebottom proportions this time: each delegate kept uppermost in mind that his choice for Vice President might become President.

This precarious unity might well hold the Democrats together through the 1944 election. But it had been bought at the expense of those who believed that the Democratic Party was still liberal-dominated ; now all could see that the President had meant it when he said that Dr. New

Deal was dead. Dr. Win-the-War was the Commander in Chief, who might campaign by pageantry instead of platforms.

Equally clear was the other half of campaign strategy--the kind of aggression to be used against the Republicans. In speech after speech the Democrats dragged out Herbert Hoover as the man they prefer to campaign against. The convention relished the steady pounding at the 1928-32 U.S. President. He was one issue all Democrats could agree on.

For the Democratic Party of 1944 was, in the phrase of the New York Times's Anne O'Hare McCormick, "a strange parade of incompatibles." This rickety combination of discordant elements was held together by one man and one man only: Franklin Roosevelt.

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