Mr. Republican v. Mr. Nobody

(See Cover)

Mrs. Kitty Markham, Democratic worker, rose majestically above the ruins of the Grange ladies' chicken dinner in Radnor, Ohio (pop. 300). Although she had just had a tooth pulled, Mrs. Markham was in fine elocutionary fettle. She exhorted her listeners in the high-school gym to vote the whole Democratic ticket. Then she dropped one hand on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. How proud she was, Mrs. Markham said, to be standing beside "my little pal here." Everyone looked at the man, scarcely noticed until then, who sat peering over the top of the uncleared table. When he was introduced as "someone who needs no introduction --everybody's friend," he leaped to his full 5 ft. 4 in. of height. In the gravelly voice of a baseball umpire near the end of a doubleheader, Joseph Terrence Ferguson, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, addressed himself to the farmers of Radnor and neighboring towns.

"Taft says the unions are taking over the Democratic Party," he roared. "He lies and he knows he's lying. He says that I'm a controlled candidate. He is controlled by the big money interests and he can never be a free man." Candidate Ferguson fanned the air with his short, muscular arms. "I'll be the freest man," he promised, "that ever treaded the U.S. Senate."

Not to Be Sneezed At. Candidate Ferguson sat down amidst applause. He shook some hands and drove off in his 1947 Buick. The following day and the day after, he would bob up in other meetings, often unannounced, to fire the same kind of political birdshot. In such a manner last week, 58-year-old Joe Ferguson, son of a coal miner, was hunting "Mr. Republican" himself. Joe was the cast-iron spearhead of the campaign to get Robert A. Taft out of the U.S. Senate.

The anti-Taft forces could have wished for a spear with a little more point. "Jumping" Joe Ferguson is a bouncing, bespectacled little man who looks like Joe E. Brown, habitually has trouble with the English language. But for better or for worse, the anti-Taft forces were stuck with him.

Outside Ohio, he was a political nobody--a bookkeeper who, in 1936, had slipped in as state auditor on the tail gate of the Roosevelt bandwagon. He had almost no backing from the regular Democratic organization. He did have a following of state employees, auditors and examiners, and he rarely if ever forgot a name or a face. He had organized and supported a Columbus softball team named "Ferguson's Auditors," and annually he mailed out 150,000 Christmas cards bearing photographs of his handsome wife and their growing family of eight children.

He was a likable sort and he had a kind of brash courage. He had challenged Taft when better-known and more prudent men had declined to take the chance. And in some respects, he was not altogether to be sneezed at. He had held the auditor's office for 14 years; in 1948, when Harry Truman was winning Ohio by a scant 7,107 votes, Joe Ferguson won re-election by 291,887--the biggest majority a Democrat ever got in the state.

Including a Tomato. Even from his eminence, the son of President William Howard Taft was not inclined to sneeze. Robert Alphonso Taft had measured the big attack on him with a politician's careful and increasingly anxious eye. It was not Ferguson alone he feared. Taft was running against a large number of other people including, in a way, himself.

Taft's was not the kind of personality that kindled prairie fires of popular support. The fires had to be fanned. Since his twelve years in the Senate were a matter of public record, they were wide open to the scrutiny of his enemies. The C.I.O. kept a staff of men busy combing the Congressional Record for ammunition. Taft's lofty scorn for half-baked ideas, his blunt honesty, his long rear-guard battle against the charging revolution of the New Deal, his stubbornness, his querulous isolationism (which had a way of popping up again just when everybody thought he had overcome it), all could be turned around and used against him.

But chiefly Robert Taft was running against the Truman Administration and the bosses of organized labor, who had loudly proclaimed their determination to beat him this year no matter what the cost. Not only birdshot was whistling around his ears. Big guns were also booming amidst the buckeyes.

Organized labor was fighting a hard and relentless campaign. In an unprecedented formal alliance, the C.I.O., the A.F.L., the United Mine Workers, the Machinists and the Railroad Brotherhoods had got together in a strictly political organization and dubbed it the United Labor League. The auto workers' Walter Reuther had invaded the state to denounce the author of the Taft-Hartley Act. From labor headquarters had rolled thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, posters, books, a lurid comic book (drawn by Al Capp's brother Elliott) attacking and lampooning Taft. A few of the attacks hit home, but some of the blows were foul, e.g., the insinuation that Taft was anti-Negro, that he was against a minimum wage. Other attacks were roundhouse swings, answerable only in the kind of detail no one had time to listen to during an election campaign. Mr. Republican was hit with everything that organized labor could find to throw.

For good measure, when he was in the town of Waynesburg, someone had also hit him with a tomato.

Man on Wheels. Against this bitter, heavily financed and almost anonymous assault Taft had adopted the only practical strategy. It was to counterattack. By last week his fight for re-election and political survival had become the liveliest battle in the 1950 campaign. He had started his counterstroke a year ago, after Labor Day, campaigned until January, resumed the battle again last August. The 61-year-old Taft acted as though he were determined to show his face to every man, woman & child in the state. Occasionally, he went in a Beechcraft plane, piloted by his second cousin, David Ingalls, the Navy's only flying ace in World War I. More often Mr. Republican went by Ingalls' Chrysler, driven at a hair-raising rate by Airman Ingalls in a Tyrolean hat.

Last week, going into the stretch run of the campaign, Candidate Taft rocketed about the state.

He rolled into Ohio's small towns, smiling a little self-consciously, climbed out of his car, dodged the highway traffic, threw back his shoulders and launched into what newsmen had dubbed The Speech. He could time The Speech for anywhere from 18 to 50 minutes, depending on the size and estimated temper of his audiences. Sometimes a few score, sometimes a hundred-odd men, women & children stood staring and listening. The horns of a public-address system, mounted on a sedan, lifted the Senator's flat Ohio voice above the din of Ohio's Main Streets.

"It Matters Most." "My opponent is a captive candidate of the C.I.O.," he charged. "The top brass of the labor movement is trying to take over the Democratic Party . . . Do you want people outside the state telling you how to vote? The Administration wants a rubber-stamp Congress. If it gets one, we will have nationalization of medicine and every other welfare service ... I say the Brannan Plan is a fraud. They promise high prices for the farmer and low prices for the consumer, but they don't tell what would happen in between. It would cost the taxpayer about $5 billion a year. And who are the taxpayers? They are the same farmers and consumers . . ."

Ohio's business--farm trucks, oil trucks, family sedans--buzzed by. In the town of Nevada (pop. 1,000), a mile-long Pennsylvania freight train supplied a thunderous overtone. In tiny Wharton, a siren shrieked and a fire truck rattled past the speaker, slowing down to let four of Taft's 40 listeners jump on. "Maybe it's just a Democratic plot," said Taft dryly, and went on talking. Nothing stopped him, nothing could stop him short of a bolt of lightning.

He shook hands genially, despite a cracked little finger which he kept in a splint. He winced a little in embarrassment when an occasional hearty Republican tried to clap him on the back. No toast-mistress called Robert Taft "my little pal."

But high-school bands tootled along his way. Teen-agers gathered and giggled and asked for his autograph. Taft scribbled his name, although--"Autographs take longer than shaking hands," he told his aides disapprovingly. He left no corner unexplored. In a grey business suit with thin, greying hair plastered across his bald spot, he strode into school gymnasiums, eyed his audiences impersonally through spectacles, and gave fidgety small fry The Speech complete with facts & figures. He told them with punctilious grammar: "No one can tell your parents for whom they shall vote. It matters most that they vote for whom they please. But urge them to vote."

(From other reaches of Ohio, Ferguson rasped: "I say these tactics should be stopped because I say we are sending our children to school to learn their lessons and not to listen to a lot of claptrap from some cheap politician.")

"Volume in Detail." His basic campaign tactic, Taft explained to his aides, was "volume in detail." He was trying to reach those people--the great majority, he figured--who would not turn out for a political mass meeting, but would listen to a candidate if he came to them. If he kindled no prairie fires, he at least engendered some sober interest.

He spoke to labor groups. "Labor leaders have soft-pedaled their line about the Taft-Hartley 'slave-labor' law," he said bluntly. "They know that every workingman knows it is no such thing. Where are the slaves, where is the slave labor?"

At Lima, Republican labor men escorted him in a torchlight procession. He visited the Porcelain Steel Corp. in Clyde, and talked to the workers. He talked to the workers at the Denison Engineering Co. in Columbus. One of them demanded: "Give me two good reasons why a laboring man should vote for you." Said Taft: "I am in favor of our economic system which has given you a high standard of living. I am trying to protect our system from Communist attempts to take it over and change it."

He struck out boldly on foreign policy on which, more than any other issue, he had been criticized by many, including people who could not be rounded up by labor leaders. Taft's feet-dragging on aid to Europe and his attack on George Marshall a month ago had disturbed many of them. He said to one group: "If Russia is a peace-loving democracy, then I'm Harry Truman." He demanded of another group: "What is our policy about Formosa? In January we are not going to defend it. In July we are going to defend it. In August the President doesn't know whether we are going to defend it or not."

The man who was not Harry Truman rode tirelessly on.

Foot in Mouth. Somewhere in Ohio, Joe Ferguson went his helter-skelter way. His friends had done their best to translate him into a national figure, i.e., a U.S. Senator. His national labor policy came from the C.I.O. handbook. A few supporters, like former Akron University Professor Charles West, ardent New Dealer and ex-Congressman, helped him spell out a domestic and foreign policy, and Jumping Joe spelled it out, word by word.

But Joe's tongue would twist. His foot would get in his mouth. "When I am re-elected auditor . . ." he kept repeating to one crowd, oblivious of the hissing voices reminding him that he was running for U.S. Senator. "I have noticed," he proclaimed in the midst of the Community Fund drive in Elyria, "that the fellows who usually head these Community Funds are the fellows who don't pay their employees very much. If they paid them more, maybe we wouldn't need so many of these Community Funds." In between times he just closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. "Taft is an American fascist," he roared. "So are the fellows who surround him. The American workingmen are better Americans than he is."

His labor supporters last week were momentarily quiet. They had made almost too much noise, thus provoking Taft's Republican following to greater efforts and bigger contributions. If the labor groups could beat a somebody with a nobody, then the badly divided Ohio Democratic Party, as well as the Republicans, had reason to worry about the future. Many Democrats were shocked and angered by the audacity of the U.L.L. and the shrillness of its spokesmen. Popular Democratic Governor Frank Lausche, himself up for reelection, kept eloquently mum on the subject of Ferguson's candidacy. Lausche had more than once privately and publicly expressed his admiration for Taft. Now he was cast in the role of a pained sphinx.

Administration and labor strategy was to save their final barrage for the last week before the election. The biggest gun in their artillery, Vice President Barkley, would be rolled into position in Canton and Cincinnati at the end of this week.

Honking Approval. But Taft, noting these things out of the corner of his eye, stuck to a campaign which was as orderly as Ferguson's was haphazard.

He was not through yet. He still had to shake up a lot of farmers, who, like the farmers in Illinois, were doing well and felt no great urge to go out and vote against the Fair Deal. There were those who would stay at home because they did not like either candidate. Taft would get some of the labor vote, but the anti-Taft sentiment was not confined to labor groups. A foreman in the engineering section at Wright Field expressed the feelings of some ordinary voters: "Taft is for big business." A painting contractor in Cleveland expressed a kind of vague, personal prejudice: "I don't like the way he talks. He's too egotistical."

He continued to talk. Ohioans had to take him as he was or leave him if they didn't like him. His idea of serving them as a Senator was not to cater to them for the sake of their votes, but to try to convince them of the wisdom of his own position. He hoped, after they saw him and listened to him, they would believe in him.

By last week, he had not left much political ground uncovered, or much of the state of Ohio. He had even spoken in the full glare of the headlights of 40 automobiles, whose drivers stayed on to listen to him after the show at the Dent Drive-in Theater. At points to be applauded his listeners flicked their lights or touched their horns. At the end Taft was startled by prolonged honking, which the chairman assured him was meant to be applause.

He had been in every one of Ohio's 88 counties. Counting last fall's campaign, he had visited 325 factories, delivered The Speech 762 times, made 136 radio talks and 13 television appearances, attended 129 receptions and 145 meetings with Republicans.

At week's end, he got into his blue Plymouth and drove home to Cincinnati to rest his voice and nurse his tongue, which he had bitten chewing on a piece of beefsteak. His ailing wife, Martha, awaited him. Her active participation in this campaign was sorely missed. Martha Taft's intimate manner and witty tongue, which had given her cool, impersonal husband a kind of reflected warmth, had helped him mightily in the past. He had phoned her every night to report his progress.

What could Mr. Republican report? Two weeks before the election, Joe Ferguson was claiming that he would beat Taft by 250,000 votes. Ohio political reporters guessed: Taft by 50,000 to 100,000. Mr. Republican had made no exact calculation, at least in public. He merely said in his flat voice: "I'm going to win. Don't worry about that."

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