The Glory of Making Sense

It was a great convention--one of the greatest in U.S. history--and great in a particular way. Not in the level of its oratory, which can be appraised by noting that its best speech was made by Elder Statesman Herbert Hoover. Nor in its platform, which will never be mistaken for resonant prose. Nor in unity.

The 1952 Republican Convention was great in that it fulfilled one of the highest duties of a party (or a man): to make sense. The convention made political, moral and dramatic sense.

Drama & Debate. This generation of Americans tends to view politics as a sordid and (worse) senseless contest . . .

on a darkling plain,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle

and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

To the extent that this view of politics prevails, democracy lacks respect and, by that lack, health. At Chicago, a new medium, TV, met a situation that has been recently missing from U.S. politics. Television and the U.S. press reported a struggle whose terms could be understood at every level, from the most abstract principle of popular government down to the concrete situation in the Louisiana district where, on a night last April, John Jackson's followers held a rump meeting under a live oak tree. Schoolboys can be found in the U.S. today who understand the practical politics of the Taft-Ike fight in Louisiana, and how that relates to "governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The convention opened with that valuable rarity in contemporary American political life--a tense but sense-making debate where most of the speakers stayed reasonably close to the point. It moved on to the never irrelevant detail of the credentials-committee argument and rose to a climax with the Wednesday-night vote on Georgia.

The vote by which Eisenhower was nominated on Friday confirmed the Wednesday-night vote. It tied the moral issue of the contested delegates back into the overriding political issue: Ike was the better man to nominate because Ike was more likely to win.

Principle or Nostalgia? This political issue runs deeper than expediency. The New Deal revolution can be halted, modified or turned into better channels. But it cannot be rolled back to 1932 or 1928. To the end of the Chicago fight there were 500 delegates who seemed untouched by this argument, who stoutly refused to trade out their viewpoint. At a time when circumstances call urgently to the Republican Party to make a winning fight, this firm stand of the 500 seemed a mixture of nostalgia and conviction.

The majority held that only Eisenhower's kind of fight--an approach by the Republican Party to the people--could be won. Only by thwarting the will of the people in the delegate contests could Ike's bid for the nomination have been stopped. The plot and subplot meshed in the pre-convention first act, and the convention played out both without missing a line.

At the final curtain, the delegates might have marred the lesson by flubbing the vice-presidential nomination with a futile compromise to "bind up the wounds." They did not flub it. Richard Nixon, progressive fighter against Communism and corruption, fits the logic of the Monday vote, the Wednesday vote, the nominating ballot--and the struggle for victory on Nov. 4.

That struggle will be tough. The Republican Party is still the minority party and Ike is no magician--only a man who made sense, nominated by a convention that knew what time it was.

Chairman Joe Martin summed it up in the convention's final session. He looked up at empty seats in the galleries. "Open the doors," he said, "and let the people in."

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