What Happened?

Did Harry Truman fall or was he pushed?

In the post-election litter of blurred posters, old bunting and battered hopes, the country sat down to figure it out. Mr. Truman, who had predicted that the voters would return him a Fair Deal Congress, had been as wrong in 1950 as he had been right in 1948. The mid-term election was, in many respects, a personal defeat. What knocked Mr. Truman off his pedestal last week?

There were as many incidental answers as there had been races for House and Senate seats. One reason, for example, for Republican victories in Colorado was a scandal surrounding the Democratic warden of the state penitentiary. Local issues elected many Congressmen. There were millions of scratched ballots, millions of voters who crossed party lines to register an independent opinion. But certain important generalizations could be made, especially from the Senate races.

New Git Up & Git. Voters, particularly farmers in the Midwest, had responded enthusiastically to a new G.O.P. spirit of git up & git. Republican candidates had untiringly shouted their messages from platforms and street corners. Republican workers had worked hard to get out the vote. For a number of reasons that proved to be wrong, the Democrats had assumed that a big vote would favor the donkey. (Actually, Harry Truman had won in a small-sized vote in 1948.) In any case, the big vote in 1950 favored the Republicans.

There was an upsurge of conservatism in the Midwest. Voters were alarmed by Government spending, higher taxes, the suspicion that the State Department had played footie with Communists within its own organization and in Asia. They were suspicious of what Harry Truman might do with his oft-repeated Fair Deal program--the Brannan Plan, repeal of Taft-Hartley, etc.--if he got full control of the 82nd Congress. Republicans swam in the conservative tide and rode it to the beach.

Voters apparently wanted a harder hand laid on Communists. That was not true in Connecticut, which Senator Joe McCarthy invaded, shouting his charges against the State Department, in an unsuccessful effort to torpedo Brien McMahon and William Benton. But south and west, where voters may have discounted a good part of what McCarthy said, they nevertheless decided that where there was so much smoke there must be some fire. (The Democrats had argued that so much smoke only indicated an arsonist.) In California, victorious Senator Richard Nixon, who had routed the Democrats' left-leaning Helen Gahagan Douglas, confidently announced: "My victory is a mandate from the people of California for some changes in the State Department."

Hoary Lesson. New Senator Nixon may have been right in his interpretation of the election in California (where left-leaning Jimmy Roosevelt was also overwhelmed by Governor Warren), but his conclusion did not necessarily fit the election results across the nation. They were more nearly an expression of annoyance at the Fair Deal, a surfeit of Democrats and their ways, and a general sense of being put upon. Voters on the whole decided they preferred Senators with independent minds to stooges of the Administration or of labor bosses.

The voters were in a mood to teach Harry Truman the hoary lesson that no politician ever has the U.S. voter in his pocket. A beaten Scott Lucas decided, and probably correctly, that he was the victim in part of Harry Truman's cockiness. He ruefully recalled the President's arrogant preelection remark in St. Louis that any farmer or laborer who voted Republican should have his head examined. The angry Lucas was sure the crack had hurt him, that Illinois voters had decided among other considerations that it was time to take Harry Truman down a peg by rejecting Scott Lucas.

Voters were also dissatisfied with Administration policy in Asia (see above), distressed over the way the war was going in Korea, worried about the country's unpreparedness when it went into war. If they were not sure what the Republicans would have done about these things, they at least knew that they did not like the Truman record on the armed forces, even though he had belatedly sacked Defense Secretary Louis Johnson for his failures.

Democrats tried to comfort themselves with the thought that their losses were the lowest numerically in any off-year election since 1934. Such figuring was reminiscent of the dreamy arithmetic with which the G.O.P. had tried to drug itself after the Democratic landslide in 1948. The fact was that 52% of total votes cast had gone to Republicans, only 46% to Democrats. More important, the Republicans the Democrats had most wanted to beat had won, while Democratic leaders the party could ill afford to spare had been soundly defeated.

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