What Price Catcalls?

Many a Republican was proud last week as Ohio's Senator Robert A. Taft pushed on through the West. His speeches were flavorous with facts. He talked reasonably, and on a high plane, never sinking to a discussion of personalities.

In a way, he was selling his party more than himself, and he undertook to define the differences between Republicans and Democrats in great detail. Taft defined the Republican Party as the party which can handle foreign affairs with realism, reduce Government controls, lower taxes, encourage business enterprise, keep labor happy, but in check, and administer the nation's affairs with a sense of sureness and a minimum of confusion. Taft defined the Democratic Party as the party which, because of its alliance with labor and leftist groups, never knows precisely where it is going, is thus given to fits & starts in foreign affairs, to bumbling at home, to the encouragement of inflation, to the suppression of initiative and to bad administration.

In none of his speeches did Bob Taft become excited or overheated. He charged Harry Truman with abuse of the veto power and with refusal to cooperate with Congress. He blamed him for high prices and for continuance of high wartime taxes. He said that Congress would pass no major social-welfare legislation until 1949 because it could not trust the Truman Administration to put it into effect. He said all this in a tone which assumed that his audience was made up of reasonable people, who therefore agreed with him.

He also, as usual, gave frank, personal opinions on controversial issues: he approved a United Nations plan for partition of the Holy Land with Jewish and Arab states. He came out for abolition of the veto in the Security Council, provided a satisfactory definition of aggression were written into the charter. In odd moments, despite his full and exacting schedule, he found time to prepare his speech on foreign policy for this week's appearance at Tacoma, Wash.

He was applauded. A silk-stocking audience in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel broke into a noontime speech 25 times in 35 minutes. He was also cheered, though more perfunctorily, by Republicans in San Francisco and Reno, and greeted heartily by party members in Las Vegas and at Hoover and Shasta dams.

He set off some hearty laughs. When a single boo rang out amid the cheers with which he was greeted before his speech in Los Angeles' Elks Temple, he ad-libbed: "Fellow Republicans and a Democrat, I hope!" When a questioner asked him when the income-tax law was going to be simplified, he said: "You know the income tax law is really very simple for most people. You just fill out a form, turn it over to check what your income is and that's the end of it. ..." A gale of laughter halted him, startled him, and then obviously delighted him.

And Taft's tour was exciting--thanks to Big Labor. Many labor unions, mostly C.I.O., picketed him. A thousand pickets greeted him in San Francisco. In Los Angeles more than 500 unionists jammed the block in front of the Elks Temple. Some bore signs with crude legends like: "Taft is a stinker, Taft is a schnook, Taft stole a leaf out of Hitler's story book." Some, who were promptly arrested (under a city ordinance) for masquerading, wore Taft-like masks and carried signs which read: "I look like Taft but I don't want to crucify labor."

It took a special detachment of cops to get Taft and his wife through this milling throng and he was booed lustily during the momentary confusion which resulted. Taft announced--and probably correctly--that such picketing was helping his cause immensely.

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