The Professor's New Course
(See Cover)
Thrusting out of the Midwest into four of the five Great Lakes, Michigan is a self-contained empire. Imperially big, rich and varied, it is the land where Hiawatha played, where the French voyageurs sailed even before the Plymouth colony was founded, where conservative Germans settled on the smiling farmlands of the fertile south, and the Scandinavian Paul Bunyans came to cut the timber and mine the ore of the rugged north. It was here that Henry Ford, messiah of the machine, swung the U.S. mass-production revolution on his assembly lines and broke the bonds of the workingman's poverty by instituting the $5 eight-hour day.
Today Michigan's proud boast is that it can make anything. It manufactures more cars, corn flakes and chloromycetin than any other state, commonwealth or country. Dynamic Detroit may have less charm than any other great U.S. city--but it has more factories. It is the symbol to the world of U.S. industrial genius.
Back-Seat Help. In Election Year 1960 Michigan is something more. It has been governed for an unbroken dozen years by a statehouse administration dominated by organized labor. The influence of labor--on the tax structure, welfare laws, political appointments--is more conspicuous in Michigan than in any other state. Six times in succession a labor-liberal machine has elected Democratic Governor Gerhard Mennen Williams, and "Soapy" Williams, with the unashamed back-seat help of United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, has steered the phaeton of state down a left lane.
In a year when 27 races for the State House all over the U.S. show a glittering entry of hardy challengers, the outstanding challenger of them all is the Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan, a polio-crippled professor of speech from Michigan State University, Paul Douglas Bagwell, 47. To succeed retiring Soapy Williams, the Democrats have selected blond, boyish John Swainson, 35, Michigan's lieutenant governor, who is the handpicked choice of the U.A.W. The candidates are attractive, the issues are sharp, and Michigan's election shapes up as 1960's hottest state race.
"All the Fat Cats." National campaign patterns are reversed in Michigan: Republican Bagwell is attacking the incumbent administration, Democrat Swainson is defending it. Bagwell charges that Soapy Williams' high-taxing and labor-leaning administration has scared off employers, swelled Michigan's unemployment (current rate: 6.3%). Asks Bagwell: "Does anyone believe that re-election of a Democratic state administration, with its uncompromising attitude and continual emphasis on political war between labor and industry, can get the 100,000 jobs a year that our people need?" Democrat Swainson sounds not unlike Republican Richard Nixon as he defends the record of the state administration: "Under Governor Williams' brilliant leadership, we have been developing a winning team and publicly supported programs. This would be a poor time to change the script."
The U.A.W., driving hard for the Democrats, has contributed strategists, speech-writers and great financial support to Swainson. And in a state where memories of the skull-cracking industrial disputes of the '30s are still vivid, union politicians are not above fanning class strife. Says an A.F.L.-C.I.O. pamphlet circulating in Michigan: "The people voting against you are the bankers, the merchants, the car dealers, the big industries, the utilities--all the fat cats who make money whether you have a job or not."
"Shake Hands Anyway." Challenger Bagwell, who has troubles with conservatives in his own party, is fighting a lonely battle against labels. "This is an age when we like to classify people under one heading or another," he says. Just as union politicians oppose him because he is a "Republican," so do some businessmen disown him as a "liberal," a "professor." an "egghead." His rebuttal: "I don't consider myself either a liberal or a conservative. I am a responsible Republican."
Something resembling a Stevensonian cult has formed around Bagwell. At Michigan State, some members of Delta Sigma Pi fraternity sold a pint of blood to swell the Bagwell campaign chest. The statewide Bagwell Boosters number 12,000 members, more than Michigan's Citizens for Eisenhower at highest tide. Negroes have formed an Elephant Club for Bagwell. In Wayne County, the strongest Democratic thralldom (67%) north of the Mason-Dixon line, 4,500 Working Women for Bagwell are ringing doorbells, penning postcards, phoning friends to drum up votes. The long-dormant Michigan Federation of Republican Labor, revolving around former A.F.L. unions, has been revived.
As election day draws close, Bagwell spends up to a dozen hours a day at plant gates, carrying his case to the rank and file. A band of Bagwell campaigners swoop down at shift-break time. The men are orange-shirted and the women are orange-skirted, and each uniform is stamped BAGWELL FOR GOVERNOR in black. (Highly visible orange and black are "this year's colors" for campaigners, so a Madison Avenue firm advised.) They wave orange balloons and they pass out orange matchbooks. An accordionist plays When the Saints Go Marching In or Show Me the Way to go Home--depending upon whether the workers are coming or going. Three Negro campaigners take on the Negroes among the plant workers. In the center of it all stands a jaunty, greying, middle-sized man, his left hand leaning on a cane, his right hand outstretched in the eternal gesture of the office seeker. "How do you do," he says, pumping his hand, already swollen from handshaking. "I'm unemployed, and I want to go to work for you. My name is Paul Bagwell."
Common reaction: "You're on the wrong ticket. We don't vote Republican." To which Bagwell replies: "Shake hands with me anyway, won't you?" A few men drop Bagwell's broadsides to the ground, but this year very few spit on them (an old trick that prevents the broadsides from being picked up and used again). "That's a good sign," says Bagwell. "Two years ago they dropped our pamphlets like snow." It is not uncommon for a worker to sidle up with a wink, fold back his lapel and expose a concealed Bagwell button. Even Democratic leaders figure that one-third of Wayne County's workers will vote for Bagwell.
"I Brought Back Balance." That the G.O.P. can count on any labor support at all suggests that the pendulum of Michigan politics may be swinging back. Soapy Williams took over in 1948 with an outpouring of labor strength that shook the teeth of the Republicans, who had been confidently in control of the state government for most of the century. Carefully the Democrats hammered out their own machine--a three-wheeled speedster that rolled on the vote-delivering power of union leaders, the organizational wizardry of Democratic Chairman Neil Staebler, and the popularity of ebullient bow-tied Soapy Williams, who could out-polka any Polish-American in Hamtramck.
Williams has now been in office longer than any liberal Democratic Governor in U.S. history--long enough to change the entire political complexion of the state. During the Williams era, the Democrats have captured as many as 20 of 23 statewide elective offices, including both U.S. Senate seats, have even won a 5-to-4 majority in the elective state supreme court.*
"I have brought back balance," sums up Soapy. "I won't say that the state legislature was in the hands of General Motors before I came in, but it was one step away from that. Now it is respectable to be a Democrat in Michigan."
Also Imbalance. There is something to be said for Soapy's New Deal. Previous administrations had been seared with scandal; Soapy has been scrupulously clean. He recruited a whole new crop of enthusiastic youngsters into politics. He pushed through a state Fair Employment Practices law, and under him several Negro Democrats have risen to prominent office--including Auditor General Otis
Smith, first Negro cabinet member in Michigan's history. In the Williams era, there have been generous increases in aid for the aged, the blind, the crippled children. The average unemployment compensation check has gone up more than 60%. Michigan has built eight community colleges, 27 mental clinics and hospitals, the $100 million Mackinac Bridge, a latticework of fine highways. The bill for public improvements: close to $1 billion.
But if Soapy restored balance he also brought serious imbalances, because by and large, business has paid the bill. During the Williams years, per capita income rose 54%, but state taxes zoomed 116%--mostly on manufacturing. The authoritative Fantus Factory Locating Service figures that a manufacturer with 500 employees and $15 million in sales would have a state and local tax bill of roughly $54,000 in Ohio, $80,000 in Illinois, $93,000 in Indiana, $143,000 in Michigan. Soapy Williams notes that Michigan has no corporate profits tax. But the hitch is that the manufacturer is taxed on his rate of sales--whether he earns a profit or not. Chrysler ran $5,400,000 in the red last year, still had to pay $31 million in local and state taxes--and rumbled that it might move elsewhere. When Ford located a new Falcon plant in Ohio, Williams put on his straightest face and complained that the company was depriving Michiganders of jobs. This year the Republicans' most effective campaign document is a list of 40 key companies--from ACF Industries to Philco--that have left Michigan. In the past decade, the number of manufacturing jobs in Michigan dropped from 1,070,000 to 983,000. At the same time, manufacturing employment went up 4.9% in Ohio, 7.5% in Wisconsin. In 1959 the U.S. classified nine Michigan cities as depressed areas, and Detroit was the only U.S. city with more than a million population to be so tagged.
As Michigan unemployment mounted (as high as 16% in recession 1958), sales tax returns slumped, welfare costs soared. Soapy Williams, heir to a budget surplus of $21 million in 1949, was faced with a $110 million deficit by mid-1959 and practically no borrowing power. His proffered solution: pile a 5% profits tax on corporations, put a U.A.W.-endorsed income tax on middle and upper incomes, e.g., a family of four earning less than $6,333 Per year would pay nothing.
The Republican-controlled legislature balked, instead proposed a sales tax increase from 3% to 4%. Neither side budged. Newspaper polls showed that the public preferred a sales tax boost to an income tax, but Williams blocked a referendum. Result: chaotic insolvency.
The state skipped a payday, finally squeaked through by tapping its $50 million Veterans' Trust Fund and slapping nuisance taxes on beer, whisky, tobacco, etc. The fight damaged what Paul Bagwell calls "the heart of the image of Michigan," killed Soapy's hopes for a place on the 1960 National Democratic ticket, convinced him that it was time to shop for another job.
"The Charmed Circle." Soapy owed much of his continuing success to Republican arrogance, ineptness, lack of leadership. A 1952 split between Eisenhower and Taft factions died hard. General Motors subsequently supported a conservative wing, while the Fords boosted the liberals. Some big contributors from the auto industry slowed their cash flow when the Republicans began to lose elections.*A determined band of G.O.P. greybeards in the state senate gave the party a black name. They fought free polio vaccine for children, opposed spending bills for education and mental health, blocked efforts to revamp the state industrial code, which was written in horse-and-buggy days.
"The Republican Party admits no one to the charmed circle unless approved by the high command," said Detroit Judge W. McKay Skillman. a Republican, to a G.O.P. gathering in 1951. "Its strategy meetings are held in some exclusive club where the doorman asks who you are and whom you want to see. Anyone who harbors anything approaching a liberal thought is unwelcome." No little part of Professor Bagwell's triumph was that he was able to crash the charmed circle.
"That Was the Last Time." In his speeches, Bagwell quotes Epictetus: "Difficulties are things that show what men are." Bagwell knows.
Son of a hard-scrabbling North Carolina farmer who raised four little Bagwells, Paul soon learned to plow, milk cows and hoe corn that stretched in long rows toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. When he was ten, the family moved to Akron. In high school he was a so-so student who majored in extracurricular activities, doted on football. During a sand-lot scrimmage when he was 18, Paul leaped to grab a pass; tacklers knifed him from either side, bones began to snap--"and that was the last time I ever walked normally.'' His hips had been dislocated and, coincidentally, polio struck him soon after. Today he limps deeply, usually has to be helped up and down stairs.
Affliction fired ambition. Abed for six months, Bagwell taught himself to speed-read, gulping whole paragraphs at a glance. "Instead of attacking a book word for word, I went through it quickly to get a sense of what the author was trying to achieve. Once I understood the organization of the work, I could read it like lightning." At the University of Akron,
Paul became a grade A student (education, speech, political science), a fulltime Big Man on Campus (champion debater, student council boss, president of Lambda Chi Alpha) and a part-time worker for the G.O.P. He picked up pocket money by analyzing election returns for the up-and-coming Summit County Republican chairman, a young man named Ray C. Bliss (since 1949 Ohio's canny Republican state chairman), who had won a certain renown at the university a few years earlier for stuffing ballot boxes in a beauty-queen contest. Bagwell then went on to earn a master's degree in speech at the University of Wisconsin, working his way by tutoring football heroes ("My job was to keep them eligible"). One night he had a date, but his girl fell ill and delegated another coed, brunette Edith Clark, to take care of Paul. "She's been taking care of me ever since," says Bagwell, who married her within four months.
Hired by Michigan State as a speech instructor and debate coach in 1938, Paul
Bagwell began stirring up chalk dust from Detroit to the Soo. He led European students on speaking expeditions through the largely isolationist state. His varsity debaters won gold medals all across the U.S., and Coach Bagwell won headlines all through the state. In 1942, when Bagwell was only 29, he was tapped to head the big department of speech, radio and drama--a promotion that did not endear him to 16 senior faculty members who were passed over.
Out with Social Climbers. From that launching pad, Bagwell became a sought-after speechmaker (about 50 per year), joined every civic and scholastic organization in sight. He got into the charmed circle of the Republican Party by phoning friends, who phoned other friends, and their powerful support sent him to the G.O.P.'s county and state conventions. While Republican mossbacks shunned him, Bagwell became the heretic hero of liberal young Republicans, went on to head the state's Citizens for Eisenhower in 1954. He ran for auditor-general in 1956, lost by 32,000 votes (out of 3,000,000), bat led the G.O.P. ticket. Bagwell's surprising vote-drawing power--and a general shortage of Republicans brave enough to run against Soapy Williams--sewed up the G.O.P. gubernatorial nomination for him in 1958. He cut Soapy's 1956 margin of victory in half.
Since then, Bagwell and his liberal followers have been toiling to modernize the G.O.P.'s machinery and philosophy. The liberal Republican chairman. 39-year-old Larry Lindemer, a trim Lansing lawyer who rose to power along with Bagwell, started a precinct-by-precinct vote analysis, replaced many social climbers with politically minded recruits, re-established G.O.P. outposts in the far corners of the state. Meanwhile, Bagwell has been hammering home his liberal philosophy.
One Came Back. Bagwell's opponent, John Swainson, is something of a lucky political accident. "I've been in the right place at the right time, and that's the story of my life," says he, although he has also been in some wrong places. Born in Canada, son of a low commission cooky-and-tobacco salesman, he grew up in Port Huron, Mich., got his U.S. citizenship after he joined the Army fresh out of high school in 1943. In the assault upon Metz, Private First Class Swainson volunteered for a night patrol, set off in a Jeep. It ran over a land mine. Of the five men in the Jeep, three were killed, one was shaken into insanity, and Swainson lost both legs below the knees. If elected, he will be the only U.S. Governor listed by the Veterans Administration as "totally and permanently disabled."
Back home, Swainson enrolled in Michigan's Olivet College, met and married blonde Alice Nielsen: "She was the cutest girl in the school, and she didn't try to baby me." He took a law degree at the University of North Carolina, moved back to Detroit, started attending political meetings because "it was a good way to build up a law practice." One day in 1954, Democratic leaders casually invited him to run for the state senate. "They came around looking for someone with an impeccable background, preferably a war hero. I decided I had nothing to lose." He won, at 29 became the youngest state senator in Michigan history. In Lansing, he rolled up a reputation as an earnest, ever-smiling Democrat who never skipped a session and rarely missed a chance to run an errand or cast a vote for Soapy. Party chiefs rewarded him with the Democratic floor leadership in 1956, the nomination for lieutenant governor in 1958.
When Soapy decided to wash up and check out, the odds-on favorite of pollsters and pundits to succeed him was popular Secretary of State Jim Hare, who had led the Democratic ticket in 1958. But Hare was known as an independent-thinking cuss. The unions, in a spectacular exercise of political muscle, swung behind Swainson. On primary day, 70,000 Wayne County Democrats cast "bullet" votes for Swainson; i.e., they did not even bother to vote for the other 16 contested offices on the ballot. Swainson's statewide margin of victory: just under 70,000.
"Take It Easy, Fellas." The U.A.W. and its parent Michigan A.F.L.-C.I.O. (membership: 800,000) decline to say how much money they are devoting to the cause of John Swainson and John Kennedy. There are no legal limits to their spending for the virtuous civic activity of getting out the vote. In big Macomb County, for example, the union voter-recruiting army bulges into hundreds, and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. pays a bounty of 40-c- for every new voter. The goal is 40,000 voters, which would cost the union $16,000. On Election Day the A.F.L.-C.I.O. will pay thousands of members $25 each to take off from their jobs and flush out the vote in Michigan. The formula: canvass Democratic areas block by block, drive voters to the polls, pass out "idiot sheets" that tell how and for whom to pull the lever. When need be, the unionists also baby-sit.
Three times a day, Monday through Friday, the confident tones of U.A.W. Commentator Guy Nunn roll over the radio or TV airwaves from station CKLW in Windsor, Ont. to Greater Detroit, extolling the virtues of Swainson, Kennedy & Co. His sign-off on every show suggests a provocative philosophy of labor's role: "Take it easy, fellas--but take it." While John Swainson is the darling of the union-hall speakers' circuit, Paul Bagwell's many requests to address union locals have been turned down cold--except twice. One time, Bagwell was permitted to speak for 15 minutes, and then the local leader delivered a 30-minute rebuttal.
"I'm Going to Try." As of last week, there was plenty of restlessness in Democratic ranks, and politicos gave Paul Bagwell a good even chance of beating the machine. The Detroit News lashed Democrat Swainson for talking generalities while "citizens are coming by firsthand experience to realize that the businesses on which jobs are based cannot be expected to lie still forever while politicians joyfully clout them about the head."
Whether or not the Bagwell middle-of-the-roadster rides into the State House this year, the Michigan G.O.P. will never be quite the same again. As members of the Old Guard retire, they are being replaced by Bagwell liberals. Paul Bagwell and G.O.P. Chairman Lindemer are also carefully grooming young Republicans to take on the Neanderthals in primary races.
The professor has injected fresh spirit and purpose into the Republican Party in a key state. More important, he has demonstrated anew that one man, against odds, can cause a mighty stir.
*One notable decision: last year the court voted 5-to-2 that, in effect, Michigan employers may be taxed to pay unemployment compensation to Michigan workers who are thrown out of work when strikes shut down vital parts plants in other states. Management complained that the ruling would oblige an employer to finance a strike against himself. Author of the majority opinion: Associate Justice George Edwards, 46, onetime (1938-39) U.A.W. director of welfare. * Despite their party's low ebb at home, a remarkable number of Michigan Republicans have been appointed to top jobs in the Eisenhower Administration. Among them: Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, Flint Chevrolet dealer and ex-chairman of the Republican National Committee; Secretary of Defense (1953-57) Charles Wilson, ex-president of General Motors; Secretary of Commerce Frederick H. Mueller, Grand Rapids furniture manufacturer; Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker, onetime Michigan Governor (1931-32); Budget Director (1953-54) Joseph Dodge, Detroit banker.
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