The Passing of High-Button Shoes

The fight was noisy as a tenement row, and sometimes as unseemly. But when the shouting subsided in Pennsylvania last week, the liberal wing of the Republican Party, led by Republican Governor James Duff, was on top. It had trounced old (87) Joe Grundy, the foxy political grandpa who for almost 30 years had run the state's Republican Party on the principle that what was good for big business was good for the people,

In the biggest primary vote in the state's history, Duff won the nomination for U.S. Senator from Grundy-backed Congressman John C. Kunkel, by a spectacular 2-to-1 majority. More important, he swept in with him (by a comfortable 193,000-vote margin), his politically unimpressive candidate for governor, Superior Court Judge John S. Fine.

"For a Few." "The fight," Duff had said, "is between high-button-shoe reactionaries and the advocates of progressive government." Grundyism, trumpeted Duff, meant "government by a few, for a few, at the expense of the public." Grundymen retorted bitterly that Duff was a "me-too" spendthrift, viewed with alarm the millions he had added to the state's budget for welfare services, pointed out that Harry Truman himself had facetiously invited him to become a Democrat.

With Duff a pre-election favorite, the crucial fight was for the governorship with its control of 40,000 state jobs. Judge Fine, longtime boss of Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre), was heavily attacked by Grundymen who called him "a cardboard candidate," "Little Sir Echo," and a "political judge" who winked at gambling. Grundy set out a bait for undecided voters by backing retired Philadelphia Banker Jay Cooke, who insisted he was an independent. Duff met the challenge headon. "Cooke is no more independent of the old guard than the thumb on Grundy's right hand," snorted Duff. "I would prefer to be defeated than to be on a mixed ticket."

Fine's victory gave Duff undisputed control of the party machinery and patronage, finally put old Joe Grundy out in the anteroom. And as one minor effect, Duff's victory did no good for the 1952 presidential hopes of Harold Stassen. Stassen campaigned for Cooke, his 1948 Pennsylvania campaign manager, and that was not likely to endear him to Jim Duff's 73-member Pennsylvania delegation in the 1952 G.O.P. convention.

Freshest Face. At 67, bristle-haired, homespun Jim Duff had suddenly become a major power in the Republican Party and its freshest face in years. Some even talked of him as a presidential prospect; after all he was only one year older than Harry Truman himself.* The son of a Presbyterian minister, Jim Duff grew up among the rigs and hard-knuckled men of western Pennsylvania's oilfields. Trained as a lawyer, he made a fortune in wildcatting, lost it in the 1929 crash. A delegate to many a political convention but never a candidate until 1946, Duff campaigned for others, ran the 1942 gubernatorial campaign for his (and Grundy's) old friend Ed Martin. Martin made him attorney general, and helped put him in the governor's chair as his successor.

As governor, Duff soon ran afoul of Grundy's Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association when he insisted that they clean up the sewage that their mines and factories spewed into the state's rivers. He turned a deaf ear to pleas for accustomed favors. Snapped Duff: "If these birds think that the general run of people are interested in watching them make the rich richer and the poor poorer, they're crazy."

Nickels & Poets. A big man, Duff is outspoken, disarmingly candid, unaffectedly informal. In Harrisburg, all anyone needs to talk to the governor is a nickel and a pay telephone. At the summer mansion at Indiantown Gap, he putters around the greenhouse and garden, casually returning the waves of passing neighbors. He subscribes to the Manchester Guardian, firmly supports bipartisan foreign policy. His other favorite reading is the seed catalogue and the Elizabethan poets, whom he can quote at length from memory.

The election this fall is still to be won, but Duff is given a good chance of beating plodding Senator Francis Myers, Democratic whip in the 81st Congress. The Democrats have hopefully stored away all the charges of vote buying and fraud hurled by the battling Republicans, and last week they were wondering aloud whether Grundymen would work very hard for a man who has sworn to strip them of all patronage. But Jim Duff had no regrets. Said he: "It was a fight which had to take place, because the party could not go two ways at the same time."

* The only President ever to be inaugurated at 68 was General William Henry Harrison. Less than a month after his inauguration, he caught a cold from a walk in the rain, and died.

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