Harold Stassen
As Republicans convene, they and their country can be proud to have a candidate like this ex-governor – even though they will probably not nominate him
By Robert Coughlan
This week, 1,059 Republican delegates will meet in Chicago to nominate a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. It is generally assumed that they will choose Thomas E. Dewey. Three weeks later, 1,176 Democratic delegates will meet at the same place in the same city for the same purpose; and with even greater unanimity they will choose Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thomas E. Dewey and Franklin D. Roosevelt will then have a campaign, and next November the voters will choose one or the other of them. This act will generate a good deal of excitement around the country. The Dewey partisans will be hot, and the Roosevelt partisans will be hot, and there will be occasional fistfights, broken heads and bad feelings. To a considerable number of voters, however, it will all seem a little tiresome.
These unexcited voters will feel that way because it is not exciting to be forced to choose between two inadequacies. They would prefer not to vote for Roosevelt for reasons too familiar to mention yet, when faced with the alternative of Dewey, they are not inspired. Many of them, in fact, are dispirited. What they finally will decide, nobody knows. What they do decide, however, may swing the election. For these voters are very numerous. They include several million orphaned Willkieites and many others, both Republican and Democratic, who are of a liberal but anti-New Deal disposition. The polls suggest that there may be as many as five million of them. The present writer is one of them, and this article is written and published on their behalf.
There is nothing the Democratic delegates at Chicago can do about these voters, since their convention will be about as free as a Siberian salt mine. The Republican delegates, however, are ostensibly going to have an “open convention” where supposedly anything can happen. Nobody believes this for a moment; but before the almost inevitable happens and the Dewey nomination is sealed, many delegates will be taking a metaphorical last look over their shoulders at the five million or so pivotal voters. These delegates will be asking themselves, “Is this being smart? Is there any other good Republican candidate who could carry the party and the mugwumps?” And they may remember the name, “Harold Stassen.”
Granting that no one man encompasses the humanity of Lincoln, the good sense of McKinley, the vigor of Theodore Roosevelt, the geniality of Taft, the pulchritude of Harding, the economy of Coolidge and the solemnity of Hoover, and in short, that nobody is humanly perfect, it is nevertheless plain to a lot of people that Stassen is the perfect Republican candidate for the election of 1944. His perfection is whole and unassailable, like a billiard ball. He is, for one thing, a lifelong and party-conscious Republican, with only enough urgency in his record to bless him with the honorable tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. Yet there is no trace of doubt about his liberalism. Long before Tom Dewey came out for Cordell Hull, Stassen was speaking and writing in favor of a foreign policy of enlightened self-interest. He wants a world government – “a definite, continuing organization of the United Nations of the World.” However: “This does not mean that the new level of government will take the place of the national level of government. It will not fundamentally disturb domestic sovereignty. Nations will continue to have their own flags, their own constitutions, their own heritage and their own citizens. The new level should be added to carry out relations among nations” – to keep the peace, enforce international law, stimulate trade, promote health and literacy, administer Axis, backward or disputed territories, and supervised international sea- and airways.
Stassen is equally enlightened on domestic policies. He is for minimum wages, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions; for collective bargaining and strong labor unions; for guaranteed minimum crop prices to farmers; for public works during periods of economic slack. Yet he has so many basic objections to the New Deal that they compound quite a different philosophy of government. He would democratize the labor unions, reform their internal practices, and outlaw jurisdictional strikes altogether. He would liberalize securities regulations, lower taxes on business, tighten up Social Security and government relief in general, and revise the monopoly laws to make them really work.
Stassen’s program for the country is implicit in his program for the Republican Party:
The people want a rebirth of forthrightness, and the world needs a forthright America. The Republican Party can prove itself a match for the times only by being forthright, direct and constructive.
To a practical politician, such sentiments are interesting but not wholly relevant. In an election, principles, while fine to have, are often not as important as a candidate’s oomph or political sex appeal. In the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, this is summed up in the word “charm.” This is very powerful; and yet, as the five million floating voters look across the span of the next four years, they may decide that they want not merely a charming piece and charming post-war world. They have in mind something solid. And as a symbol of solidity, Stassen is practically epochal. He stands 6’3” tall and weighs over 200 pounds, mostly muscle. His face is pleasant and the firm set of his features, capped by thinning sandy red hair, gives him an appearance of competence and maturity despite his age, which is 37. He looks enough like Gen. Eisenhower to be a younger brother. It has been said unkindly of Dewey that his lack of interest in foreign affairs is due to the poor mental picture he has of himself seated between Churchill and Stalin. It has also been suggested that he use Stassen as a stand-in for such occasions. The idea may or may not be funny, but the political implications for the Republicans in November are not funny at all. Stassen’s nomination would take care of that.
He has diversified support
Regarded from any other angle of practical politics, Stassen’s qualifications are almost poetically complete. His personality is warm, but with the quiet restraint that becomes a statesman. He has an engaging family: A pleasant young wife and two photogenic children, Glen, 8, and Kathleen, 2½. He is a churchgoing Baptist whose favorite drink is milk, but who doesn’t feel self-conscious in the presence of a Scotch and soda. He is a good speaker with a firm, calm, baritone voice, lacking any particular accent; and he was practically suckled on a microphone. He appeals to all groups; he was born and raised a farmer, he wooed and won labor in his own state, he looks and talks like a successful businessman; and since he is now in uniform on duty in an active war theater, he has obvious pulling power among servicemen. Perhaps most important of all, he knows politics. After its lamentable experience four years ago, it will be some time before the GOP forgets that courage and energy are not enough in a campaign.
Stassen even has an impeccable history. He was poor but honest. He stayed honest.
No newspaper in Minnesota or anywhere else recorded the fact that on April 13, 1907, Harold Stassen was born. A week after his birth, on April 22, there appeared in the birth-statistics column the calm statement: “Mrs. W. Stasen [sic], boy.” More momentous happenings occupied the papers at the time. The day before his birth, the legislature passed a bill providing a penalty for anyone inducing a mother not to nurse her child. On the day of his birth, the legislature heard a report on automobiles: “Automobiles must not pass teams, animals, or persons on foot at a greater rate of speed than eight miles an hour… Chauffeurs running over people must stop and give their number.” Also on the same day appeared a timely editorial note in a Minnesota paper: “President Roosevelt hoped that the Southern Democrats may force his renomination for a third term received a jolt yesterday…”
The important event of the day occurred in a modest, unpainted farmhouse in Dakota County, which takes place in West St. Paul, a stockyard and packing district surrounded by farm and dairy country. The citizens of West St. Paul, while not swept away, were pleased to hear the news, for William Stassen was and is a well-liked member of the community. He has been its mayor three times, has served on the school board and for more than 40 years has been treasurer of his growers’ association. He operates a small truck farm whose produce he hauls across the river each morning to St. Paul, where he sells it from his stall in the public market. He is Norwegian, German and Czech, and his wife is German; they blend into the blonde, rugged, solid, ethnographic landscape of Minnesota.
He was an Alger boy
Harold, the third of four sons, was marked at an early age by ambition, resourcefulness, energy, a thirst for learning and other good campaign material. He attended a one-room country school to which he had to walk two miles twice a day, sometimes through waist-high snowdrifts. His brothers and sister did the same, but with less pluck and luck, and ended up, respectively, a milk wagon driver, a sheet-metal worker and proprietor of a small grocery store. The sister, who is married, has been a statehouse stenographer. Since the Stassens were poor, the children worked to help buy their books and clothing. Harold sold newspapers and also raised and sold skunks, a distinction he shares with few men and no other presidential candidate. At an early age, he became a crack shot with a rifle, producing an anecdote of value to campaign biographers. It was the custom in his neighborhood to hold turkey shoots each year just before Thanksgiving. Each contestant put up a dime to enter, and the winner got a turkey. Harold would take orders around the countryside for a dozen or so turkeys, then go to all the shoots, win all the turkeys, kill and clean them and deliver them to his customers. Later on, he became a national champion marksman.
Harold finished high school at 14, meantime operating a rabbit and pigeon business and a roadside vegetable stand. For a year and a half, while his father was ill, he stayed at home to run the farm. Nevertheless, he managed to graduate from the University of Minnesota at 19. While at the university, he worked part-time as a grocery clerk, an adding-machine operator, a pan greaser in a bakery, and finally as a Pullman conductor on the St. Paul-Chicago run. In his spare time, he became an intercollegiate debater, a champion orator, captain of the school’s national rifle team, an honor student, leader of sundry campus causes and all-university class president. He was so involved in campus affairs that he had to hire a fraternity brother as his secretary. At 21, still working every other day for the Pullman Company and still immersed in campus affairs, he graduated from the university’s School of Law. Without losing a stroke, he opened a law office with Elmer J. Ryan, a fellow graduate, in St. Paul.
There have been various fashions in presidential candidates during the course of U.S. history, beginning of the soldier, succeeded by the social philosopher, who was replaced by the practical politician, who gave way to the soldier again, who was replaced by the idealist, and so on, in an erratic but discernible cycle. It may be a commentary on the present state of civilization that the current fashion is for champions of law and order. Among the Republican candidates this year, nearly all got their starts as watchdogs of the law: Dewey, most famously; but also Warren, as a district attorney; Bricker, as an assistant state attorney general; Saltonstall, an assistant district attorney and even such a token candidate as Green of Illinois, who was a gangbuster in Chicago. It is both a good omen and a tribute to his sense of destiny that Stassen entered public life in the same way. Little more than a year after getting his law degree, he filed for and won the Republican nomination for a county attorney of Dakota County. Almost immediately he collapsed and had to go to a hospital. His strenuous life in college had caught up with him; he had tuberculosis. While he lay ill, his friend and partner Elmer Ryan, though a Democrat, carried on his campaign. And by the time Stassen had recovered, minus one lung, he was the new county attorney.
How to handle labor problems
Opportunities for spectacular crime are fairly limited in Dakota County. Hence, Stassen did not become a national hero overnight. What he lacked in glamor, however, he more than made up in physical and political courage and in his handling of important social antagonisms, as compared to the antagonism of one gangster for another. He showed his character, as well as mere skill and vigor, in such incidents as the threatened milk strike of 1932. Milk prices to the farmer then were so low that in neighboring Iowa, only a few weeks before, dairy farmers had gone on strike, not only refusing to send their own milk to market, but waylaying dairy trucks and dumping their contents on the road. An agitator showed up in Dakota County and at a meeting of local farmers, tried to stir up similar violence. “Block the highways! Spill the milk!” he shouted. “If the county attorney gets in your way, run him out!”
Stassen’s voice came from the back of the room, “The county attorney is here.” He took the platform and told the farmers that if there were any sort of disorder, he would prosecute – but that if they would submit the issues to negotiation, he would act as their counsel without fee. They agreed; Stassen did; the price was raised (without any increase to the consumers) and the peace was kept.
Almost as melodramatically, he prevented bloodshed during a strike of packing-house workers in South St. Paul. Both sides were ready to take to the barricades when he persuaded them to get together and talk their difficulties out. With Stassen in the middle, they did, and within five days, the strike was over. When the company refused to rehire members of the strike committee, Stassen served without pay as their counsel before the NRA Compliance Board, and won their reinstatement. In another case, involving a tax suit, he had a chance to show his legal scholarship. The case wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court, where Stassen, though only 26, had the job of presenting the main argument for the state of Minnesota. He was questioned for an hour on points of law by Chief Justice Hughes, who later wrote the decision. It was unanimously in his favor and set a precedent that was cited 16 times in the next five years in federal court decisions involving related issues.
Stassen served two terms as county attorney. By the end of the second one, he, as well as some millions of Minnesotans, had decided that something had to be done about the fantastic regime of Elmer Benson, the Farmer-Labor governor. Stassen was only 31. Although he had achieved a certain fame in the state because of his record in Dakota County, it was considered quite a good joke among Republican leaders when he filed in the primary for the governorship. He won the nomination and then proceeded to drive 55,000 miles around the state to wage a personal, curbstone campaign. He won the election and surprised his seniors again by doing it with a 225,000 plurality over the combined Farmer-Labor and Democratic candidates. It was the biggest landslide in Minnesota history.
The present fashion in Republican presidential candidates inclines not only toward gangbusters but also toward governors. No other campaign within memory has failed to turn out at least a few Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices or Cabinet members: Everyone seriously in the race this time is a governor. The reason may be that what the party and country yearn for is a Good Executive – a man who has shown that he can run a state government in a sound, efficient, calm, orderly, orthodox way, and who consequently might run the federal government in the same way. By this criterion, Tom Dewey would be a good candidate. So would Bricker, Saltonstall, Warren, Hickenlooper, Griswold, Baldwin, et al. They each have done a sound, efficient, calm, orderly, orthodox job.
Additional criteria might be suggested, however. One would be: What was the condition of the state government when the sound, efficient, etc., man took over? Another would be: How much of his success does he owe to the war, which has suspended nearly all problems of unemployment, relief, labor relations, public works, patronage, finances? Another would be: What did he do to make these chronic problems easier to handle when they reappear, as they will? By these standards, Stassen’s record in Minnesota is something quite distinct from those of most good Republican (or Democratic) governors.
He reformed the state government
Stassen took office in 1938, two years before the United States began to arm. The preceding regime had been one of the weirdest in American history, marked by every offense from payroll padding to political assassination. The labor war was not a figure of speech; it was a real war, with strong overtones of class revolution. The high point came in April 1937 when a mob took over the state capitol (with Governor Benson’s blessing), broke into a committee room, bulldozed legislators, dispossessed the senators from the chamber and spent the night there, picnicking off the desks and having a riotous good time. Nothing much is lacking but Mme. Defarge and the tumbrils.
The difference between Stassen and his predecessor was shown not many months after his inauguration. Again, an organized mob marched on the capitol to demonstrate against relief methods. Stassen invited its leaders into his office, gave them a polite, attentive hearing, and then escorted them out to the statehouse steps. The crowd booed when he appeared. Stassen looked them over and said: “There’s one nice thing about this country. You can boo your officials without getting pushed up against the wall and shot.” Then he talked about relief, explaining the problems, admitting some faults and promising to do his best to remedy them. When he finished, the mob cheered him and dispersed peacefully.
Stassen not only got along with labor, but so identified himself with its just demands that when he ran for reelection, he won the endorsement of the state CIO. When he first took office, the farm bloc in the legislature pushed a punitive anti-labor bill through the Senate. Stassen persuaded the farmers to drop it in favor of his own temperate program. The chief feature of this is the “Count Ten Law,” requiring a 10-day cooling off period between the time a strike is declared and the time it becomes effective. With Stassen himself and his labor conciliator, who had been the head of a typographical union, as mediators, 10 days usually produced a fair and mutually acceptable solution. When a strike or lockout endangered the public interest, the law also provided that the governor could appoint a special arbitration commission and order a further 30-day wait. During Stassen’s first year, he appointed five such commissions, and each time the threatened strike was prevented.
Fairness and sweet reason were Stassen’s tools in dealing with the labor situation; he applied old-fashioned honesty and efficiency to others. The highway department has a $3 million deficit, incurred in the interest of graft and political pork. Stassen packed 10 members of the old regime off to jail, revamped the department and within a year had converted the deficit into a $3 million surplus. The Farmer-Laborites had loaded the state payroll. Stassen axed 7,000 employees and put through a new civil-service law that covered every department and employee and left him only with the power to appoint the department heads. The Farmer-Laborites had built up an oppressive deficit; Stassen put through a bill that tied expenditures to income. Relief had been an administrative burden of the state; Stassen decentralized it and turned it back to county and local control.
By the time he was ready to leave office, Stassen had fewer statutory powers, by his own request, than any recent Minnesota governor. With his fewer powers, he accomplished more than any other Minnesota governor in history. He had cut the state debt by nearly $40 million, cut yearly expenditures by more than $13 million, reduce the payroll from 17,000 to 10,000, reduce strikes by 70% and lowered property taxes by 46%. At the same time, he increased aid to schools by some $1,600,000, increased old-age benefits by $1,850,000 and improved the functions and increased the budgets of the various social institutions of the state. He set up a $2,500,000 fund for disabled veterans and a $15 million fund for post-war problems.
At the end of his second term, Stassen had a difficult choice to make. His record in Minnesota had made him well known around the country. He had twice been chairman of the National Governors’ Conference. As keynoter at the 1940 Republican Convention, he had impressed his party with his eloquence and manifest ability. As floor manager for Willkie during the convention, he had shown himself to be a shrewd political professional. He was an obvious possibility for the Presidency. If he had stayed on in Minnesota and used his time to proper advantage, his chances for it seemed excellent.
He stepped out of presidential campaign
Stassen ran for a third term, but notified the voters that he was doing so only because his program for the state was not complete. He would resign after the first legislative session, he warned, and then intended to go into the Navy. “This war,” he said, “will be fought by young men of my age, and I want to be with them.” From anyone less obviously sincere than Stassen, this might have sounded precious. But he meant it, and in April 1943, he resigned as governor and was sworn in as a reserve officer. After boot training in the East, he was sent out to the Pacific as a lieutenant commander attached to Adm. Halsey’s staff. When Halsey last week gave over his command of the South Pacific, Stassen continued his duties under Halsey’s successor, VAdm. John H. Newton.
If anyone suspected that Stassen was being politically adroit by putting on a uniform, his subsequent behavior has done nothing to confirm it. He has said nothing, done nothing, nor allowed anyone else to say or do anything for him that would relate his Navy job to politics. Pacific correspondents find him clam-like on the campaign. Not long ago, H. V. Kaltenborn had dinner with Adm. Halsey and the staff at Nouméa, and inevitably, talk turned to the 1944 elections. Finally, after an hour of it, Halsey turned to Stassen, banged his fist on the table and said: “Dammit! Stassen, what’s wrong with you? You haven’t said a word all evening.” Stassen smiled amiably and went on saying nothing.
As flag secretary, Stassen is a sort of general office manager at headquarters, handling routine affairs. He manages to blend into the official landscape and, as one admiral says, be “just another lieutenant commander.” He is well-liked among the staff. He has lived with Halsey and the admiral’s chief of staff and planning officer in a big house near Nouméa, about midway between the beach and the made-over warehouse where Halsey had his offices. Sometimes he accompanied Halsey at sea, sometimes not. He has seen some action, particularly doing a “familiarization cruise” he took with a task force under RAdm. Merrill. A good-sized Japanese force jumped the Merrill ships one night off Empress Augusta Bay. In the battle, the Japanese lost a cruiser and five destroyers and were chased back to within 100 miles of Rabaul, where Japanese planes came in for a dive-bombing attack. The only hits were on Merrill’s flagship where Stassen stayed with the admiral on the open bridge throughout the battle. He made a good target but suffered nothing more than some near misses. Stassen’s evident high safety factor so impressed his colleagues that some of them began to rub him for luck. Superstitious Republicans might note this, and also that, like every other presidential candidate during the century, he has a double letter in his name. E.g.: Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, Warren G Harding, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt. On the other hand, of course, there was Wendell Willkie.
While Stassen has been tending to his new business in the Pacific, his friends back in Minnesota and Washington have been conducting a campaign for him that makes up in fervor what it lacks in size and finesse. Having very little money, and no political contact with or aid and advice from their candidate, they are obviously working at a disadvantage. They have certain principles to go by, informally laid down by Stassen before he went into the service; don’t try to smear any other Republican candidate; don’t trade on the Navy uniform; emphasize the post-war plan; enter the primaries in the states bordering Minnesota in order to get a nucleus of pledged delegates. They have followed these rules, but only with middling success. Stassen picked up some delegates in Wisconsin and Nebraska; these, with his Minnesota delegation, will assure him of 35 votes at the convention and his supporters expect to pick up another 25 or so among unpledged delegates. For a campaign lacking the presence of the candidate, this wasn’t bad, but might have been better. Stassen has run best where it doesn’t count – in university “mock conventions” such as Northwestern’s, where he wins more often than any other candidate. Whatever happens in the convention and election of 1944, there is encouragement in this for both Stassen’s and the country’s future.
But Stassen’s supporters are not thinking about the future now. They are sure that their man is the best man and the only man who can beat Roosevelt, and they refuse to admit that he had already been counted out. Nor do they entertain for a minute the idea that he should settle for the Vice Presidency, giving liberal window-dressing to a Dewey ticket. They are well advised in this since, as a matter of fact, Stassen would refuse the Vice Presidency, as he would almost as certainly refuse a Cabinet job in a Dewey administration. They want him to be President, now, this year. And in their hallucinations, they have the picture of him, nominated by some freak of political luck, notified at Nouméa by wireless, flying back in a great gray Navy flying boat to Chicago, cheered by an excited convention, making a dramatic and successful campaign, riding in an open car down Pennsylvania Avenue… But subconsciously they know it can’t be. As one of them said recently in a conversation, “Golly, he would have been a wonderful candidate.”
