The Political Scene

What Will Happen When George F. Babbitt Tastes This Freedom?

WALTER LIPPMANN

AFTER examining the election returns for thirty-six hours, Mr. Harding let the -L rumor leak out of the White House that he was now the actual leader of his party. This sounded like a paradox. It seemed to say that Mr. Harding considered his party's defeat as a kind of personal promotion. It seemed to argue that an electoral result, which under any parliamentary government would have meant Mr. Harding's resignation, was to be interpreted as a signal for Mr. Harding's elevation to a still greater dignity.

Yet the paradox provides a rather searching comment on the political situation to anyone who will reconstruct the argument that must have passed through Mr. Harding's mind.

The election was a humiliating defeat for the elder statesmen who selected Mr. Harding at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago early one Saturday morning in June two years ago. That is what Mr. Harding must have had in mind when he described a Republican defeat as a kind of personal emancipation for himself. He must have been thinking of the fact that his political creators had been found out and rejected by the rank and file of his party. And he would have been quite right then, I believe, in concluding that the decisive vote against the administration was not a vote against President Harding.

Government by Senatorial Commission

HE would have been right because he knows very well that in any substantial sense he has never yet been President of the United States. He has had the titles, the White Plouse, and the Mayflower, but the Presidency as it had developed under Roosevelt and Wilson has never yet been occupied by Warren G. Harding. The Presidency has been in commission to a group of Senators who seized the party machinery between 1918 and 1920. This fact is not disputed, and nobody has made any bones about it. At the Chicago convention no candidate who threatened to' be the actual President of the United States had a real chance for the nomination. Mr. Harding was selected out of the obscurity of his defeat in the Ohio primaries precisely because no one ever suspected he would try to exercise the power of the office to which he was certain to be elected.

Mr. Harding has been faithful to the understanding reached in Chicago. For twenty months he has been an English king who makes speeches from the throne that are written for him by a Welsh lawyer. No wonder Mr. Harding does not read the result as a rebuke to himself. Does George the Fifth feel he has been rebuked if the policy he proclaimed while sitting on his throne in the House of Lords with a diamond crown on his head is rejected at the polls? Not at all. That is a rebuke for Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Asquith. The same reasoning applies to Mr. Harding. Having never yet been President of the United States, he cannot honestly feel that the decision registered by the voting in the November election was a repudiation of his administration.

Mr. Harding is, of course, too amiable a man to rejoice in the defeat of his friends. But Mr. Harding is human all the same, and there must be some barbaric jinx in his soul which let out a carefully stifled cry of joy the day after election. Ninety percent of Mr. Harding's soul felt, of course, quite orthodoxly disheartened by what happened to his political masters. But a miserable ten percent must have shouted in his ear: "Man, you're free! You're free of this terrible burden of gratitude. Your lordly benefactors arc biting the dust. You are now elected President of the United States." And so, as I figure it out, at the end of thirty-six hours in which righteous grief wrestled with disreputable joy, Mr. Harding proclaimed himself the actual leader of his party.

Now this proclamation is something more than a declaration of independence against the manipulators of the Chicago Convention. It is a denial of their judgment on a question of human psychology. The Republican managers who selected Mr. Harding were determined men. They had decided that the center of power should not be in the White House, but in the steering committees • of the Senate. They were also experienced men. They knew the prestige of the Presidency, and how the office tends to lift any man far above any other politician. In their desire for a President who would reign but not rule, they were too practical, therefore, to pick a man who was able to rule as well as reign. They knew better than to ask a man who had the temperament to be President to make some kind of verbal agreement with them not to exercise the powers of the President. They exacted what from their point of view was a much surer guaranty. They picked a candidate whom they considered to be temperamentally incapable of leadership. They called this incapacity the modesty of Mr. Harding and this abdication of power they praised as Mr. Harding's respect for the Constitution of the United States.

Emancipation of Mr. Harding

BUT thirty-six hours after these gentlemen had gone down to defeat, Mr. Harding proclaimed in effect that they had been mistaken about him. He was not incapable of leadership. He had simply been "too kind to distress his friends." But now that his friends were a tlock of lame ducks, they were going to see a sight which would completely upset the calculations of those benefactors who picked a President in Colonel Harvey's sittingroom at the Blackstone. They were going to see President Harding for the first time and they were going to see him soar. They were going to see George F. Babbitt taste This Freedom.

That remains to be seen. For even assuming that Mr. Harding is able to lead his party, it is reasonable after this election to inquire whether there remains in any practical sense a party for Mr. Harding to lead. A group of men all of whom call themselves Republicans still constitute a majority of both houses. But who are these Republicans? A good decisive section of them might be the political twin brothers of William J. Bryan. For Republicanism west of the Mississippi River is about as satisfactory to a Mark Hanna Republican like Harding or to an Elihu Root Republican like Hughes as populism is to Nicholas Murray Butler and the editor of the Wall Street Journal. This western Republicanism is heretical to the core. It is a soft money faction.

It is as suspicious of Wall Street and of Eastern Big Business as Mr. Sumner is of the Follies and Vanity Fair. The most conspicuous men in it are Borah who goes around talking about a Third Party, and LaFollette who but yesterday was to be shot at sunrise, and Brookhart whom Mr. Harding's father ui a burst of paternal candor described as a Bolshevik. This western Republicanism is in the hands of men who have been excommunicated by ail the high priests of Republicanism within the last four years as pro-Germans, Bolsheviks, traitors, and anarchists. It will be joyous to see Air. Harding lead them. It will be a pleasure to watch LaFollette and Borah and the Non-Partisan League and the Farmer-Labor Party being led. They will adore it. For they are just waiting for the chance to surrender their prospect of controlling the 4924 convention.

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These Republicans from across the Mississippi River are strong out of all proiortion to their members, because they hold the balance of power for the election of 1924. They at least believe this firmly, and most of their opponents concede this power to them. And since in political manoeuvering, beliefs are facts, the belief that the farm bloc is master of the situation will tend actually to make the farm bloc the master of the situation. The Westerners are. therefore, able to say to the Eastern Republicans: "Give us the control of the party for 1924, or face a certain victory for the Democrats coupled with a split in the Republican Party like that of 1912." The Republican Party can hardly hope to win in 1924 unless the states west of the Mississippi go Republican. With men like Al Smith abroad in the land, the Republicans cannot count on the East. They must go West, and in the West they encounter the farm bloc and must make terms with it. Now the power behind the farm bloc is an intense hostility to Wall Street and to Big Business. It is an hostility arising quite naturally out of the terrific financial losses of the cattlemen and wheat growers during the time when farm prices collapsed, while most other retail prices remained far above the pre-war level, These bankrupted farmers are in rebellion, as they have been many times before in American history from the days of Thomas Jefferson to populism.

UNLESS there is a sensational improvement in the price of wheat they are almost certain to set off an explosion in 1924. The only question is whether their rebellion will take the form of a fight within the Republican Party, or of a wholesale desertion to the Democratic Party. This question interests the politicians enormously. The farm bloc politicians, most of whom are Republicans, will move heaven and earth to use Western discontent as a force to hoist themselves to leadership of the Republican Party. The Democrats will do their utmost to turn this discontent into votes.

Therefore, if the western farmers do not become miraculously prosperous and contented by next year, we may expect to see an excited competition for the farmer vote. I do not see much chance of Air. Harding's being able to stay in that sort of game very long. Plis economic heresies are the old-fashioned heresies of the protccted manufacturer in a small but booming town. He would not know his way around in the regions where Mr. Henry Ford and Air. Bryan are at home. Nor would he honestly entertain the ambition.

Disconcerting as all this is to the Eastern Republicans, it is no less disconcerting to the Eastern and Southern Democrats, They know that the capture of their party by some new form of Bryanism would mean a political disaster like that which prostrated them between 1896 and 4912. The price of wheat is not going to remain permanently where it is. And when it recovers, the party which followed the primrose path of Air. Henry Ford's economics, is likely to need a generation to recover the confidence of the nation. For the people are never grateful to leaders who have helped the people to make fools of themselves.