Fork in the Road

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When the westbound pioneers crossed the Continental Divide on the Oregon Trail, according to a legend told in the State of Washington, they came upon a fork in the road. A blank signpost pointed south, another aimed west and bore the words: "This way to the Oregon Territory." Travelers who could read, says the legend, went on to the great Northwest; the illiterates veered south to California.

Today most literate Washingtonians know from billboards plastered from Seattle to Pysht, Humptulips, Fishtrap, Washougal, Tiger and Nooksack that the state is in the middle of a classic campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate--a kind of modern-day fork in the road. One direction leads to Democrat Warren Magnuson, who is staking his fight for re-election on a record of performance of over twelve years in the Senate, and promises a comfortable status quo, only more so. The other leads to Arthur Bernard Langlie, longtime governor of Washington, who promises to work in the Senate for a different kind of future, who looks down his sharp nose at federal aid to states, scorns huge Government-run public-power programs, and plasters the state with a simple but stern motto: "High Office Demands High Principle."

A New Senate. In the Washington senatorial campaign and in a dozen-odd of the 34 other current senatorial contests in the U.S. (see box) lie strong Republican hopes for recapturing control of the U.S. Senate in November. Last week in San Francisco, with the presidential and vice-presidential ticket duly nominated, the G.O.P. turned full attention to its allout drive to win the Senate. But along with the will to win, Dwight Eisenhower pledged himself to another kind of campaign: to fashion a new Republican Party that will bring into action the principles of Eisenhower Republicanism. To this end he has given his personal blessing to such new senatorial candidates as Kentucky's John Sherman Cooper, Kentucky's Thruston Morton, Oregon's Douglas McKay and Colorado's Dan Thornton. But in the dual battle for both principle and ballots, no senatorial hopeful personifies more clearly Ike's kind of candidate than Art Langlie, honored by the party as the keynoter of the 1956 convention.

Langlie is a medium-height (5 ft. 8 in.), grey-tonsured lawyer who has spent 16 years as a reform councilman, reform mayor of Seattle and governor. At 56, he is ending his third gubernatorial term, the longest any governor has served in the 67-year history of the Evergreen State. Like many Washingtonians, he is of Scandinavian descent, with the blue eyes and sharp nose of his ancestors. His manner is easy and sincere; his smile is warm. But the keystone of his character is a deep, uncompromising religious faith.

A Presbyterian, he attends weekly services, teaches a ninth-grade Sunday-school class, has a picture of Jesus on his office wall. He worries lest his religious zeal be taken for political haymaking, guards against that possibility by extreme measures; e.g., he slips out of a service during the benediction to avoid church-step handshaking, insists that he be known to his Sunday-school class as Mr. (not Governor) Langlie. He neither smokes nor drinks, but is undisturbed if others do. In his eyes the ultimate evil is immorality, especially in politics. Says a longtime friend: "If there is an unavoidable choice in making an appointment between immorality and mediocrity, he will even settle for mediocrity."

But religion has made Arthur Langlie into no holier-than-thou. He socializes easily, goes to parties, can stand glassless and gay at a cocktail party without making drinkers feel awkward. His conversation is punctuated occasionally by a "damn" or "hell." But religion has shaped a fierce, almost fanatic zeal for honest government, coupled with a conviction that all responsible citizens should participate. A political reporter once listened to a minor Langlie speech, reported later: "There was nothing new in what the governor said. But every voter who heard him was made to feel that the future of the republic depended upon his participation in government."

Good-Time Maggie. Heavyset, handsome Warren Grant Magnuson, 51, is in many ways Langlie's exact opposite. Maggie Magnuson (who says privately of Langlie's piety: "We better watch that guy at Easter time") is a cigar-puffing, Cadillackadaisical, free-roaming bachelor. Like Langlie, he has a Scandinavian background. But there the similarity ceases. A Washingtonian who knows both sums up the difference: "Art Langlie is the right-living, stern-conscienced, Sunday-go-to-meeting Scandinavian. Maggie is the ever-loving, good-time-Charlie Scandinavian come out of the woods on Saturday night for fun and sociability and a yearning to spread joy. Langlie is the voice of political conscience. Maggie is the voice of political service."

Service, during four House terms and two in the Senate, has been Maggie's byword. He has never lost a campaign (and is today the 14th-ranking member of the Senate). Representing a state whose 1,134 miles of shoreline and harbors make him sensitive to the merchant marine, he sponsored the bill providing that 50% of postwar EGA foreign aid be carried abroad in U.S. ships. He has worked ably to improve air service to the Northwest, business opportunities for Washington pulp mills, the catch for the salmon fishermen. Warren Magnuson's name is on no momentous legislation of the last twelve years, but this omission does not bother him. As Maggie sees it, one of his values is this: "The State of Washington would have to wait about twelve years to get themselves in the same position of seniority with a new man."

Back home, regardless of party, many Washingtonians feel the same way. Magnuson has friends and supporters not only in nominally Democratic circles, e.g., in the labor movement, but in nominally Republican circles as well. To a reception recently at Seattle's exclusive Rainier Club came 125 Seattle businessmen to thank him for work well done and wish him well in the future.

Hostesses & Flowers. The decorous 1956 senatorial campaign stands out in sharp contrast against the backdrop of Washington's wacky political history. In 1910 skinny Hiram Gill, trademarked by his white string tie, his corncob pipe and his Stetson hat, declared: "What Seattle needs is a mayor who will get a chief of police to handle the [red-light] district, and who will back up the chief when the delegations of citizens call and protest. And I'm the bird." He was elected mayor.

In the Depression 1930s an organization called the Unemployed Citizens League, a lineal descendant of the wacky, rowdy International Workers of the World of World War I days, signed up more than 50,000 members and helped vote into office a haphazard assortment of statesmen that included a state legislator who was in jail for rape when the election returns came in. In 1932 jazz Bandleader Vic Meyers donned bed sheet and sandals, led a goat through Seattle in a campaign for mayor. With Cinemactress Laura La Plante as "campaign manager," Meyers promised hostesses on late streetcars and flowerpots on fire hydrants. He lost, but later served five terms as Democratic lieutenant governor, two of them when Arthur Langlie was governor.

Magnuson's predecessor in the House of Representatives was the notorious and pathetic Marion Zioncheck, who in 1936 strewed empty beer bottles across the White House lawn, protesting that Vice President Garner had kidnaped his wife. Ultimately, Zioncheck was sent to an asylum, escaped to file for reelection, then committed suicide.

A 'Debt to Beck. In Washington's whirling '30s there was more abroad than wackiness. Seattle police directed patrons to gambling casinos and winked at sidewalk soliciting. Along the waterfront Teamster Dave Beck fought Longshoreman Harry Bridges for control of the piers, while Beck's teamsters stopped farm trucks at the city line and forced them to take on union helpers. A powerful Communist movement put nine card carriers into the state legislature. Observed Jim Farley: "There are 47 states in the Union and the Soviet of Washington." Foremost of the era's politicians was John F. Dore, who announced in 1936: "Brother Dave Beck was the greatest factor in my election [as mayor of Seattle], and I say again that I am going to pay back my debt to Dave Beck and the teamsters in the next two years regardless of what happens." And he did.

To fight wreckers such as Dore, six young men gathered one day in 1933, formed a nonpartisan organization dedicated to doing something about Seattle's municipal corruption. To candidates who forswore service to special groups, promised to accept no single campaign contribution larger than $50, to make public their finances if asked, the reformers promised to give their support. Seeking a name for their movement, they harked back to the plowman-statesman who left his fields to defend Rome, dubbed themselves the New Order of Cincinnatus. In 1934, on a $600 budget, the Cincinnatus sponsored three council candidates, saw one elected. Two years later they voted in three more councilmen. One of them: Arthur Langlie.

"Come On Out." Art Langlie attributes his strongest traits of character to his mother, Carrie Langlie. Eldest of her three sons, he was born July 25, 1900 at Lanesboro, Minn., where father Bjarne Alfred Langlie clerked in a grocery and bakery. When Art was five his father, anxious for a better job, made the first of a series of moves that took the family from one Minnesota town to another and eventually west to Washington, where Bjarne bought a genreal store on the Olympic Peninsula and wired his family waiting in Minnesota to "come on out."

Langlie describes the journey: "It was quite a trip. All three of us kids had the whooping cough, and I was worried about my dog, who was in the baggage car. When we got off the train in Seattle, I didn't see either the dog or my father. Then, all at once, we saw the dog tied to a telephone pole and my father coming to welcome us." With dog and father accounted for, Art Langlie looked around, announced, "I'm going to like it here, Mother. I like the trees and the water."

Amid trees and water, life was peaceful. Art finished high school with academic and athletic honors, found time to tootle a cornet in the school band at political rallies. ("It could have soured me for life.") At the University of Washington he studied law, played second base for a team that won three regional championships and toured Japan. After graduation he opened a law practice and met a Pittsburgh girl named Evelyn Baker, who, while visiting in Seattle, had spotted his picture in the university yearbook and remarked, "Look at that beautiful smile." One of Art's Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers arranged a blind date. Result (three years later): matrimony.

Petition to Run. Like all young lawyers, Art Langlie talked politics. But he had not seriously thought of a political career until the New Order of Cincinnatus tagged him for the city council. Once in office, he turned practical reformer with a vengeance. Langlie and his reform colleagues, though they were the minority, forced centralized city purchasing, establishment of a police training school, a shutdown of gambling halls and brothels, and a $2,000,000 slash in a fat budget. In 1936 the Cincinnatus decided to run one of their councilmen for mayor, picked Arthur Langlie. He lost to Dave Beck's friend, John Dore, by 5,000 votes, filed again two years later, won by 30,000. He was re-elected in 1940 without making a speech or spending a cent of campaign money. Soon afterward, he was visited by a delegation of eastern Washington Republicans bearing 25,000 names on a petition asking him to run for governor. Not for 40 years had the conservative eastern Washingtonians crossed the Cascades in search of a candidate. Aided by 27,000 volunteer workers, Langlie stumped the state, edged out Clarence Dill, locally famed for selling Franklin Roosevelt on the Grand Coulee Dam idea, by 5,816 votes, while Roosevelt was carrying Washington by 140,000.

From an opposition legislature, Langlie wheedled a sales-tax increase and a state motor-vehicle pool. In 18 months he transformed a $6,000,000 deficit into an $8,000,000 surplus. But he offended old-line GOPoliticos by handing out good jobs to his reformer friends and retaining capable Democrats, offended Washington's old people by opposing an extravagant pension plan. Running for re-election in 1944, he lost to U.S. Senator Mon Wallgren by 28,000 votes. While the Democrats took over Olympia, Langlie joined the Navy, served as a legal officer, returned at war's end to practice law, and enjoy family life with Evelyn, daughter Carrie Ellen and son Arthur Sheridan.

But Langlie kept a practiced eye on the new administration, shuddered at Mon Wallgren's billiards exhibitions in the governor's mansion, his yacht and airplane, his appointment of Dave Beck as a regent of the University of Washington. Langlie beat Wallgren in 1948, was comfortably re-elected in the Eisenhower landslide in 1952.

The Changing Scene. During his postwar terms in Olympia, Langlie found himself head of a state that had shifted into high gear. Western Washington, which once lived primarily off forests, fish and Alaskan shipping, hums today with expanded industry, e.g., the two new plants of Boeing Airplane Co., additions to the Kaiser Aluminum plant, new oil refineries. Natural-gas lines from New Mexico now crisscross the state; others are coming from Canada. In the plains of eastern Washington, blocked off from the rains by the rugged and magnificent Cascade range, lush crops of grain and fruit grow under irrigation, and brand-new cities have burgeoned around the Atomic Energy Commission's Hanford plant. The state's population, 2,500,000, is increasing slowly but steadily, spreading out from the three major cities of Seattle, Spokane and Tacoma.

To exist, to fight the handicap of distance from Eastern markets and the disadvantage of freight-rate differentials, Washington in its early years depended heavily on federal assistance. In the last two decades federal aid has best been symbolized by the estimated $2.1 billion spent by the U.S. to harness the Columbia River for power, irrigation and flood control. Today, with the matter of public power a raging political issue in the Northwest, Washington has reached another kind of crossroad.

In voting for a Senator, Washingtonians must decide whether to heed the Democratic cry that the Administration is engaged in a gigantic giveaway of power resources, or to agree with Langlie and Eisenhower that the time has come to stake real future progress to a power program run--where possible--by public and private local groups. Langlie argues that Washington State has no guarantee that the rest of the U.S. from here on out will earmark the $300 million necessary every year to continue developing Northwest power. More important, he predicts that future power expansion, if it is to be economically sound, will center around steam plants instead of around vast new hydroelectric projects--and ultimately, beyond that, around the atom. Hence, he says, there is no real need for the expensive high dams still advocated by the Democrats.

A Job of Selling. But in a state that has routinely accepted extraordinary federal aid, that has expected its Congressmen and Senators to bring home the bacon, it is hard to talk against the joys of federal aid. Art Langlie realized the difficulty in February 1955 when, invited to the White House, he was urged by Presidential Assistant Sherman Adams to run for the Senate against Magnuson. He returned home to consider, eventually wrote out an involved "I will not run" statement. Asked Evelyn Langlie, when he read it to her: "Why don't you just say you're quitting?"

Langlie tore up the statement, issued a new one, jumped into his greatest campaign with both feet. The first move: organization of a buttonholing, doorbell-punching Langlie-for-Senate committee in each of Washington's 39 counties. Last week these volunteers got the promise of valuable campaign assistance. In San Francisco, Eisenhower told Langlie that he intended to swing through Washington and Oregon before November.

The Ground Gainer. Senator Magnuson has already made 300 speeches in 3 1/2 months, and he takes off across the state this week in a campaign bus all rigged with amplifiers, microphones, record turntable, stacks of literature, and a galley to provide coffee and doughnuts for the voters. Maggie sums it all up this way: "This campaign is basic. Have I done a good job for the state? And if not, can anyone do better?" To this, Art Langlie, the Eisenhower Republican replies: "The people are entitled to make a decision and determine whether they want the facts honestly on a national level or are going to have a continuance of the idea that the federal Treasury is a pork barrel and everyone can reach in and get whatever he can regardless of the welfare of the country."

Although polls indicate that Langlie faces an uphill fight to win, they also show him gaining ground on Maggie. Said a Magnuson supporter: "If I had to bet $100 on Maggie, I'd go right out and hedge it with $50 on Langlie." Ultimately, the traditional tendency of Washington voters (who give the Democrats a nominal 11% edge) is to ignore party labels for a particular man or issue. Until they pass the fork in the 1956 road and make the big choice, the race will be in doubt for everybody.

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