The Will of the People

(See Cover)

Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency of the U.S. in a ballot-box revolution.

The size of the vote was impressive in itself, 55% of the popular vote, 38 states (with Kentucky, Missouri and Louisiana still in doubt 18 hours after the count began) and at least 429 of the 531 electoral votes.

More impressive than the number of votes was the revolutionary quality that appeared when the details of the balloting were set side-by-side with the issues of the campaign and the state of the nation in which the campaign was waged.

In a time of unprecedented prosperity, with 62.5 million men & women at work, the voters repudiated the party in power--repudiated an administration which held the awesome political leverage of a $80 billion-a-year budget. The Democrats frankly fought the campaign on the pocketbook issue: "Don't let them take it away." To the last, in spite of all that Ike and his friends could say, an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that the Democratic Party "was better for them personally" in an economic sense than the Republican Party.

The people did what materialists and cynics say people never do: voted against what they believed to be their immediate economic interests.

Certainly, Ike made vast headway in his sincere (and highly feasible) promises to maintain and extend the New Deal's gains and to revive faith in progress through free enterprise. But he did not win the campaign on economic issues.

It was fought and won on transcendent issues of morality: 1) clean government, 2) government for all the people and not for special groups, and 3) government that would express in foreign and domestic policy the moral beliefs that lie at the root of U.S. life and greatness.

Under the last heading comes the question of softness to Communism, of which the confused deadlock of the Korean war was the most persuasive symptom and the Alger Hiss case was the most clinically revealing symptom.

Issues of this kind touched Americans of all classes--and the vote on Tuesday reflected the judgment of all classes. He did not win by breaking away one or two groups from the amazing coalition built by Franklin Roosevelt. He won by gaining appreciable numbers of Democrats in almost every group. Among them:

1) Farmers, who had never had it so good, shifted to Ike by the hundreds of thousands on Korea and kindred issues.

2) Big-city industrial workers, wooed for 20 years by the Democrats, turned by the millions to the Republican candidate.

3) Roman Catholics, long a mainstay of the Democratic Party, moved away from a party that did not seem to understand the moral danger of Communism.

4) Southerners, weary and appalled at the growing bureaucracy of Washington, left the party of their fathers.

5) Young men shifted, partly because they thought it time for a change.

6) Women, reacting against the Korean deadlock, swarmed to Ike.

Never has a people looked so critically at a superficially successful present and voted so overwhelmingly for a more solidly based future.

The man who led this peaceful overturn was a newcomer to politics. He was adopted by the liberal wing of the Republican Party which believed that the tangible gains of the New Deal could be preserved while rejecting certain fundamentals of the New Deal's philosophy. Ike thought at first he would be "drafted" by the Republicans, but he quickly found that the processes of democracy include hard and necessary tests. He passed those in the dramatic weeks when the magic number was 604--the majority of Republican Convention delegates.

He unified his bitterly divided party, defined his "crusade,'' and set out to pass the next test, in which the goal was 266 electoral votes. His campaign survived the Nixon crisis--stirred up partly out of hatred for the man who broke the Alger Hiss case--and turned an apparent setback into an advantage. It survived the egghead rebellion, the desertion of Ike by scores of intellectuals, journalists, Hollywoodians and other opinion makers.

The final victory discloses an alarming fact, long suspected: there is a wide and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the people. (Stevenson made a poor showing in New York City, the font and center of eggheadery.)

The Task Ahead. Intellectuals aside, the vote for Eisenhower suggests that, despite the relative bitterness of campaign oratory, the U.S. is more genuinely united behind the President-elect than it has been for many years. Few Presidents in U.S. history have had so clear a mandate from so many divergent groups. It is, in fact, a mandate for a fresh start in the U.S.'s dealings with the world and with itself--a mandate for leadership. At no time in U.S. history has the need for leadership been so great or the leader's task so complex and fateful. In 1952, the U.S.'s (and therefore the President's) responsibility reaches into the farthest corners of the earth. It faces the greatest threat to free societies in a thousand years. It must deal not only with governments, with armies, with billions of money, with staggering weapons of destruction on the brink of war; it must deal with the souls of men--must, in Eisenhower's words, "persuade the world by peaceful means to believe the truth." That is the measure of the job which a majority of the American people has entrusted to Dwight Eisenhower.

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