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Gordon Haskell

Notes of the Month

The Eisenhower Victory

(November 1952)

From The New International, Vol. XVIII No. 5, September–October 1952, pp. 215–232. [1]
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

Major electoral campaigns perform two vital functions. The first, and by far the most important, is that they bring to political realization the silent and often imperceptible shifts in political sentiment which have been taking place within the various sections of society during the whole period preceding them. Elections not only register the nature and magnitude of these shifts; through them the major political parties are able to polarize the social forces which have been in motion, and to organize them into new configurations of real political power.

The second function is derivative from the first. It is the aspect of elections which Marxists have referred to when they have described them as “barometers” of social change, or more precisely, as yardsticks of changes in social and political consciousness. Although they are by no means the sole instrumentality through which the social scientist may judge and weigh the development of consciousness, in periods of relative political stability they offer them by far the most exact and extensive data on which to base an analysis.

In the recent presidential election in the United States the independent socialists were, unfortunately, in no position to participate effectively in the re-distribution of political power.

At the moment, they do not pretend to play that kind of role. But the speed with which they may hope to reach a position of influence in political affairs depends to no small degree on their ability to perform their analytical function, on the accuracy and fruitfulness with which they can discern the meaning of the election as it affects the political development of the working class in general and the labor movement in particular, and on the skillfulness with which they can translate this meaning into the tools of political effectiveness: political program, political education, and political action.

It is far too soon after the event for anyone to lay claim to a full and complete understanding of all the factors which led to the tremendous electoral victory of Dwight Eisenhower in the election. Compared to what will be available in a few months, the data are far from complete, yet enough is known to serve as a basis for a preliminary estimate. It is, of course, extremely important to understand why a majority of the electors who cast their ballots on November 4 voted for Eisenhower. But it is equally important to understand who these electors were—that is, from which social classes they were drawn. For it is in the answer or answers to this question that a good deal of the social dynamic and the longer-range consequences of the election may be discerned.

The crudest general data are these: Out of a total of almost sixty million votes cast, General Eisenhower got a few more than 33 million, while Governor Stevenson got almost 26.6 million. Eisenhower won majorities in 39 states, while Stevenson carried nine ... all of them in the “solid South” and the “border” region. Eisenhower received 55 per cent of the popular vote to Stevenson’s 45 per cent.

In this election ten and a half million more Americans voted than had ever cast their ballots before, sharply reversing the tendency of a declining vote for both parties which had evinced itself in the presidential elections of 1944 and 1948. The increase in the vote for 1952 over 1948 for the two major parties was a staggering 13.5 million votes. Although Eisenhower got about 9.9 million more votes than were received by Dewey in 1948, Stevenson still received almost 2.5 million more votes than were cast for Truman in the same year. The votes cast for the Democratic candidate would have insured him a smashing victory in any previous election in the nation’s history. He received only 892,000 fewer votes than were cast for Roosevelt in his top year, 1936.
 

Who voted for Eisenhower, and who for Stevenson? It is on this question that much more extensive data will become available only in the future. Yet enough is known now to indicate the following conclusion, and that decisively: In their overwhelming majority the basic forces of the labor-Fair Deal coalition remained faithful to the Democratic Party. The organized workers, the Negroes, both North and South, the mass of the Jews, the vast majority of the Catholic workers, voted for Stevenson. The Democratic Party also retained the support of a considerable section of the poor farmers in the South, and of the white-collar “intellectuals” in the North.

Who voted for Eisenhower? And in answering this question it must be made clear that we are not talking about those who voted for the Republican Party, for there is an important distinction which will be gone into later. The answer is: everyone else. And although this answer may appear facetious, it is not. For the major significance of the Eisenhower vote is precisely that it represented a vast outpouring of the “unorganized” voters, which is another way of describing the sociologically amorphous mass of the citizenry which is usually politically passive and only enters the political arena when it is activated by the strong pull of one of the major classes, or when a state of social stalemate and frustration between these classes prods them into a temporary though sometimes frenzied activity.

Perhaps we can better understand who voted for Eisenhower if we first demonstrate the reasons for our contention that the basic social forces of the Fair Deal coalition remained intact for Stevenson. And we can most readily approach the problem by asking: from where other than this coalition could Stevenson have got two and a half million more votes than Truman polled in 1948?

Eisenhower received a relatively tremendous vote in the South. He won majorities in six Southern and border states, and great increases in the votes of all the rest. He gained powerfully in most rural areas, cutting into the Democratic vote not only relatively, but over large sections of the country in absolute numbers. For Stevenson to get a vote larger than Truman got in 1948 he must have not only held on to his basic Northern and urban vote, but to have increased it to compensate for the loss of so much in the countryside.

Could this increase have come significantly from the new vote, that is, from the ten to thirteen million voters who had been passive for the past four, eight or twelve years? That is just about excluded as a major factor, except to the extent to which it applies to new strata of the working class who were activated in this campaign by the trade-union leadership. Everyone agrees that the “new” vote, the usually passive vote, was overwhelmingly for Eisenhower.

But from what other source could Stevenson’s increased vote have come? From the prosperous farmers? From the old middle class of small businessmen, or the new white-collar middle class? Did the housewives leave their homes in masses to register and vote for him? Just to ask the question is to answer it.

But we need not, fortunately, rely chiefly on this kind of negative and deductive reasoning to arrive at the facts, even though it would be adequate to indicate what they are if no other data were at hand. To the extent that detailed information is now available it points inexorably to an increase of the vote of the organized working class for Stevenson in this election.

In a specialized study of seven industrial counties in Ohio and six in Michigan published in the New York Times for November 9 we get the following popular vote (in thousands):

For the moment, we are not concerned with the implications of the fact that in eleven of these thirteen counties Eisenhower ran ahead of Stevenson, or even of the fact that in 1948 Dewey ran ahead of Truman only five of them. The fact we are trying to bring out at the moment is that in these thirteen counties Stevenson picked up some 266,000 more votes than Truman got last time. Did these come from a shifting across class lines, or from an intensification and consolidation of the conscious working-class vote?

Although the evidence is far from complete, it appears that even in cities where the Democrats as a whole lost heavily proportionately, the total vote for them increased, or at least, the defections were least evident in the strictly working-class districts. It was in the vast suburban areas, the habitat of the minor business executives and the white-collar aspirants to their jobs that Eisenhower made a real killing.

It has been said that the Democrats lost heavily among the Catholics, and particularly in those areas populated by people descended from nations now behind the Iron Curtain. Eisenhower probably did make a dent in the traditionally Democratic “Catholic vote.” But the Catholics in general must be differentiated from the Catholic workers, and particularly the organized Catholic workers. The Czech 20th Ward near Cicero, Ill., voted 64.67 per cent Democratic, and the most heavily concentrated Polish population in the United States in Hamtramck, Mich., was carried by Stevenson well over four to one.

Who, then, voted for Eisenhower? First we have the small though solid phalanxes of substantial businessmen all over the country. Then there are the traditional Republicans of all classes who have never forgotten or learned anything since Roosevelt infuriated them by keeping the unemployed from starving to death in the streets. These are the solid foundation of the Republican party, but by themselves they never have won an election and never will. This time, however, they were joined in their mass by the white collar workers, the small and minute businessmen of town, and country who have been spawned by the industrial boom, the wealthier farmers, millions of housewives who usually leave pursuits like politics to their husbands, unorganized workers and young workers to whom the depression is a legend, and who take their union-won economic status for granted, and a great mass of people in the South to whom labor organizations still look like an imported Northern menace only slightly less dangerous than the “menace” of equal civil rights for Negroes.

These groups in the population are usually politically passive. They are the most backward elements in society. They are the ones who would be last to join any great surge in political consciousness, who tend to sit on the sidelines when history is being forged by the active classes. But this time they marched to the polls in their millions, and from 70 to 80 per cent of them cast their votes for Eisenhower. Why?

The most general way in which the question can be answered is that the Democrats had landed themselves and the country in a blind alley. For them, there was no way out. Even during a political campaign, a period in which candidates of the major parties and their publicity agents are traditionally exempted from the usual social prejudice against people who make promises which they cannot and do not intend to fulfill, they could think of nothing to promise.

That is, perhaps, a slight exaggeration. It would be more exact to say that they could think of nothing good to promise which could be taken seriously by anyone. The only attempt they made in this direction was their promise to the Negroes to pass a Fair Employment Practices Act ... but then there was the South, and there was Sparkman, and there was a record of eighteen years of power for the Democratic Party without such an Act ... and there was the District of Columbia, controlled for eighteen years by a Democratic Congress with segregation and discrimination the daily scourge of its great Negro population.

But except for this feeble effort, what could they say? Did they promise lower taxes, which hit the workers hard and make the small businessman froth at the mouth? Not quite. They insisted, with dignity, that taxes will have to stay high for the duration of the cold war.

Did they promise to lower the cost of living? No, not as long as the armament program compels an unbalanced budget.

Could they hope to balance the budget in the foreseeable future? Hardly.

But then, perhaps it would remain unbalanced in order to pay for increased social services, like national health insurance? No, this was approached with discreet silence. The money is needed for less healthful projects.

Could it be that a vast program for building public low-rent housing is in the making? Nothing like that, said the Democrats by their silence.

Well, it appears that all our troubles in the economic field are caused by the cold war and even more directly by the hot war in Korea. How about ending that war?

Not on your life, said the Democrats. We are going to fight it as long as necessary to prove that we can outlast the Communists, and anyone who raises the hopes of the people for peace there is a demagogue or worse. The war in Korea is only a part of the world-wide struggle between our way of life and the Russian way of life and its solution will depend on the solution of the world struggle.

But how are we going to solve the world struggle? We have poured billions of dollars into the economies of Europe and Asia, and more billions into our own arms program. But we hear that in Europe the economies are still shaky to the point of collapse, and that they have not raised their own armament programs enough to make any relaxation on our part possible. Where is the end to this?

The Democrats replied with commendable honesty: we don’t know where the end is, or if there is one. It will be a long, hard, thankless struggle. Even though you may not believe it, we have made progress, and things may start to break our way any year now. But the watchwords must be vigilance, sacrifice, and honor. In the meantime, count the blessings you now have and consider yourselves fortunate. We can’t promise you more, and there may very well be less before the whole thing somehow blows over. But never forget that what you have you owe to the Democratic Party, and that when the Republicans were last in power you had much, much less.

Winston Churchill was once able to arouse the British people to a heroic national effort, and to increase his own political prestige immeasurably by promising them nothing but blood, sweat and tears. It is no reflection on the courage or the political awareness of the American people that a similar appeal has left them cold. They do not live on a small island under the direct military attack of a powerful foe. Their sons and husbands and sweethearts are not dying almost literally in the defense of their own homes. Their food is not being sunk by submarines, nor are their cities being obliterated by bombers.

The young men of America are dying in a little peninsula thousands of miles from home. To millions upon millions of Americans the war in Korea seems some kind of a ghastly nightmare, the product of an inexcusable diplomatic blunder. And less sharply felt, but almost equally burdensome appears the slow, deadly, inexorable emotional and economic drain of the world-wide struggle with Stalinism.

True, they have food and clothing and shelter and many of the conveniences and luxuries of life which are almost beyond the imagination of the workers of Europe, and quite beyond that of the impoverished masses of Asia and Africa. These things are valued by everyone, and by large numbers of the middle class and the organized workers they are almost taken for granted. But they can be retained and improved upon only by the greatest exertion in the face of high taxes and a rising cost of living. The people are in a gigantic rat-race, even if the course is comfortably furnished and the contestants are well fed. And there is the pervasive feeling that the whole thing rests on unstable foundations, that their instability is somehow connected with the war in Korea, the endless expenditures and confusions abroad, and the “mess in Washington.”

In the circumstances, what, after all, could the Democrats promise the American people, or even those sections of them needed for an electoral victory? Any promise of a drastic change with regard to taxes, the high cost of living, the level of federal expenditures, a thorough shake-up in Washington, the war in Korea or the cold war in general—any such promises would be a repudiation of their own administration. Any promises about new social gains in medicine, housing, or other social programs would also, in the nature of things, have to be promises for ever higher taxes in a country in which the budget is already unbalanced, unless it were connected with a brand new, large- scale assault on the holdings of the capitalist class itself. But neither the structure of the Democratic Party nor the necessities of retaining the support of the capitalists in the financing and execution of the armaments program permit such an assualt. And in any event, would not that smack just a little bit of “Godless Communism,” the arch-enemy which we are being mobilized to resist and eventually crush all over the world?

So, for the future, the Democrats promised virtually nothing, or at least nothing better. But the Republicans were neither inhibited by the burden of their record, nor by the prospect of having to carry out whatever promises they might make. Their campaign was vague in specific proposals, almost ridiculously devoid of concrete program, but devastating in its impact.

From beginning to end, they were on the offensive. And in a period of uneasy social stalemate they chose the perfect candidate and the perfect slogan. Their candidate: a national hero who had never become identified with any particular social or political grouping in the country and who bore no direct responsibility for any of the major policies over which the parties had fought over the years; a man who was known for three major qualities: an architect of victory in war, a unifier of diverse interests in peace, and a stern but always friendly father of his countrymen in both.

Their slogan was as effective as their candidate: It is time for a change!

Your taxes are too high?

Ike will lower them.

But aren’t high taxes caused by the armament expenditures?

No, they are caused by inefficiency and waste and corruption in Washington. Ike will change all that.

But even if all that is eliminated, won’t the budget have to remain high to build arms?

Yes, it will, but Ike knows how to cut arms expenditures to the bone while increasing the armed might of the nation.

But how about the high cost of living—isn’t that a result of the armament program?

No, it is the result of the inflationary policy in Washington. Ike is for a sound dollar, and you remember how much that used to buy before the Democrats squandered away our national wealth.

How about the war in Korea.

Ike will fix that. He will go over there and take a fresh look at it, and see what can be done. The Democrats got us into it, you know, and they say themselves they don’t know either how to win it or how to stop it. Ike will find a way to do one or the other, or at least to get the Asians to do their own fighting and dying.

But the war in Korea, isn’t that part of the cold war, and didn’t the Reds start it in the first place? Will we really be able to end it unless they want to?

Well, Roosevelt gave Stalin Eastern Europe at Yalta and Teheran, and Truman finished the job at Potsdam. The Communists in the State Department and other key spots gave China to Mao Tse Tung and his Russian masters. Whom would you rather trust, the people who were responsible for all our defeats in foreign policy, or a man who showed that he knows how to win a war like Eisenhower did in Europe?

Well, how about the labor bosses and strikes which tie up the country?

Ike will fix that. He knows how to get people around the table and show them where their best interests lie. He’ll be firm, but just; he won’t let anyone mess around.

What about the Communists over here?

Ike will fix them. He doesn’t go for that McCarthy stuff of smearing people, and he is firmly for civil liberties. But he will clean every Communist or Creeping Socialist out of power in Washington. You can rely on that.

While the Republicans were on the offensive throughout the campaign against the stalemate of 1952, while the Democrats were reduced to a pitiful “me tooism” and “you’re another” response on these while attempting to shift the battle-ground to the burning issues of 1932–1936.

The Republicans attacked the open sores of corruption in Washington.

“You’re another,” shouted the Democrats as they gleefully pounced on Nixon’s private pork barrel, or dusted off the history books to remind people of something known as Teapot Dome.

“Ike will clean out the mess in Washington with a new broom.”

“Stevenson can do some cleaning, too.”

“The Democrats let Hiss and the other Communists sneak in and practically run the government. We’ll clean them out root and branch.”

“But we have been cleaning them out ourselves. Just look at our Smith Act and all the people we have sent to jail, and our loyalty program and our subversive list.”

“The Democrats have passed no legislation for civil rights in twenty years. They never intend to pass any. Most of the States which have civil rights programs also have Republican governors.”

“But the Republicans in Congress voted against the civil rights bills too.”

“The Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress increased your taxes, inflated your dollar and raised the cost of living.”

“But the Republicans voted against price controls.”

“Who had the majority in both houses of Congress?”

Did the Eisenhower campaign meet the issues squarely? Did it offer the people a progressive issue from the stalemate in which the United States finds itself both domestically and on the world arena. Not at all. It was not designed to influence the progressive class in society which was given up as a hopeless job before the campaign even started. It was not really designed to win the Negroes who are overwhelmingly working class in status and instinct. It sought only to neutralize the Negroes’ adherence to the Democrats, as much as possible, while really playing for the support of the ruling class and the rascists in the South. It went heavily for the Catholics not as workers, but as anti-Communists, as anti-Atheists. It was not pitched to attract the urban intellectuals who have little influence except when allied with the workers, and fewer votes.

The Eisenhower campaign was directed to the frustrated middle class above all. They are the ones who chafe most under the high taxes and the rising cost of living. They are the ones for whom the rat-race to keep up their standard of living and to improve their social status is most galling. It was designed to appeal to the mothers and fathers with boys in Korea or who are of draft age; to the type of housewife whose social consciousness is limited to her struggle with the family budget; to masses of little people who have no organizations through which they can protect themselves even partially against organized business on the one hand and organized labor on the other, and who seek a strong, fatherly leader to protect them instead.
 

Here we witnessed one of those classic situations which arise every now and then in the period of capitalism’s decline. For one reason or another, the major social classes have stalemated each other. A social movement which had been able to make progress in one way or another, and through which the society had been solving its problems more or less adequately had come to a complete stop. While it was in motion, it had succeeded in neutralizing the most backward sections of the population, and in dragging wide layers of the rest along with it. But new social conditions, new problems had robbed it of its dynamic, and it had found no new source of energy with which to replace it. The old social classes which it had fought are too discredited to be able to return to power under their old symbols and with their old leadership. But they are able enough and powerful enough to find new symbols and new leaders which promise an issue from the frustration of the backward masses.

Where have we seen this most clearly in recent history? In the closing years of the Weimar Republic, of course. There the causes of frustration were far more acute and compelling than they are in America today. The capitalist class had far less room in which to maneuver, and therefore was compelled to select a leader and a movement which was almost as dangerous to itself as to the workers. And the Nazis were able to attract to themselves not only the desperate declassed elements of their brown and black shirted legions, but the vast middle class, and the reactionary peasantry, and the housewives who were convinced that whatever you might say about the Nazis, it was time for a change.

The working class did not go over to Hitler during his rise to power despite unemployment and under-employment. They were split between Stalinists and Social-Democrats, an aspect of the situation which bears no similarity to what is going on in America. But the great mass of them stuck to their Social-Democratic Party and their trade unions and their democratic allies until all of them were thrown into concentration camps together. They did not go over to the class enemy, but they did not offer leadership to the broad masses of the people either. They just stood pat on their gains, while their leaders explained that there were all kinds of difficulties in the way of resuming the road to full employment and socialism.

Here the situation is not so desperate, and there is no effective fascist movement which could thrive only on real desperation. The working class and its natural allies stuck to “their” party in overwhelming numbers because to them the Republicans smelled at a distance of a thousand feet of big business, the Taft-Hartley symbol of union-busting, and depression. The Negroes stuck not because they have any real illusions about the Democrats as a party, but because in the North it was the party of labor and the liberals, and in the South there was no road to political influence outside of it. Above all they stuck because despite the fact that no laws had been passed to protect them they had improved their condition measurably during the war and since, and because they too, like the rest of the workers could smell the open class enemy at a distance. The Jews and the foreign-born workers stuck because they recognized that despite all its deficiencies in this respect, the labor movement and the fair-deal leadership has been their main champion in America, and because they could not fail to discern that the organized rabble of the lunatic fascist fringe feels much closer to the Republicans than it does to the Democrats.

These groups stuck to Stevenson. In fact, they did more than stick. They were more firmly devoted to his candidacy than they had ever been to that of Truman. They wore Stevenson buttons, and they talked Stevenson to each other and their friends, and they campaigned for him. Yet their mood was not one of hope for a better day. It was permeated by the fear of a worse one.

But the white-collar workers, and the little business men, and many of the unorganized workers who regard the unions more as a barrier to good jobs than as a friend, the mothers with boys in Korea, the backward masses who had not bothered to vote before ... they came out and voted. They voted for the General with the big smile who can bring people together and fix things. They voted for an end to the mess in Washington, for a hope of an end to the war in Korea, and in any event, come what may, they lashed out for a change.

The role played by the “Communist” issue in the campaign has tremendous symptomatic importance. In retrospect it appears that it may not have had quite the weight which it appeared to have while the campaign was in progress (see below on McCarthy’s vote in Wisconsin). Yet there is no doubt that it played a significant role.

The Republicans used the Hiss case and the revelations about various Stalinists who had worked their way into some prominent positions in American society to create the impression that Stalinism is a serious internal menace to the country, and that the Democrats have been “soft” toward the Stalinists at best, and in secret collaboration with them at worst.

They sought to whip up a real hysteria over the “Communist menace,” and not without success. The Democrats had prepared the ground for them over the years with their “loyalty” program, their subversive lists, their Smith Act, and the legal and extra-legal hounding of the Stalinists and anti-Stalinist dissidents by their ubiquitous FBI. On this issue the Democrats, often led by their most “liberal” spokesmen, were forced into a most cowardly and even despicable “me too” role.

Although we would be the last to deny the fact that just before and during the last war the Stalinists had succeeded in acquiring positions of considerable influence in many sectors of American society, it is evident that today their strength and influence are at an all-time low in the United States. The function of the anti-“Red” hysteria in America is today chiefly that of singling out a vulnerable scape-goat on which to vent the fury of frustration for the inability of American foreign policy to deal successfully with the real Stalinist menace in the rest of the world.

This frustration is felt not only by the officials responsible for this policy, but by the people as a whole. It is a specific reflex to the pressures of the cold war. Even though Eisenhower’s victory may well tend to relieve the fear which has been created that “Communists” are directing American foreign policy in a manner favorable to Stalin, it is probable that the anti-Stalinist frenzy will be turned from government as its object to other sections of our society.

It is indeed heartening that McCarthyism has shown itself weaker than many had feared. Yet this does not mean that the anti-“Red” hysteria has passed its peak, or that there is any reason to expect its abatement in the future. The basic cause for this menace to the civil liberties of our whole society is the success of Stalinism on a world scale, and the inability of a policy of military containment to defeat it. As a Republican administration can be expected to be even less successful in combatting Stalinism internationally than were the Democrats, both it, and particularly its reactionary wing, can be counted on to utilize the emotional safety-valve of the “anti-Red” drive at home.
 

The backward masses expressed their frustration, and took their revenge on the Fair Deal. But they did not do it altogether wildly or blindly. Their prosperity makes them cautious even in revenge. They like Ike, but they are dubious, or at least they lack enthusiasm for the Republicans. This was expressed in the fact that almost everywhere the General ran ahead of his ticket, that the Republicans were only able to pick up a net gain of one seat in the Senate, and that they gained control of the House by the slenderest margin enjoyed by any party since 1930. It was expressed even more strikingly in the virtual repudiation of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party.

Senators Jenner of Indiana and Malone of Nevada just barely squeezed through on Eisenhower’s landslide. And the Wisconsin Wretch, McCarthy, ran far behind both the presidential and gubernatorial tickets in his state. Three other reactionaries of the “class of ’46,” Kem of Missouri, Cain of Washington and Ecton of Montana went down to defeat. Ten states voted for Eisenhower but chose Democratic Senators, and only one split its ticket the other way.

The same pattern was repeated in the House of Representatives, where all seats were up for re-election. The Republicans made a net gain of twenty-one seats over 1950 out of a total of 435. In twelve Northeastern and Western states which voted for Eisenhower, the Democrats retained all of their seats in the House.

The middle class and the usually passive unorganized mass came out and expressed their frustration by voting for a change. As they were given no leadership by the labor-Fair-Deal coalition, they had no alternative but to express their desires by voting for a conservative symbol of change. But Eisenhower was not a symbol of black reaction, and those who were got their come-uppance.

It is of the utmost importance that this be grasped in its full significance. It has been obscured chiefly by the tendency of the labor bureaucracy and the Fair Dealers to paint Eisenhower and the real core of his leading cadres in the blackest hues. As their own “movement” had been retreating, socially speaking, steadily since 1940, they sought to create the illusion that it had been forging ahead by holding up before the electorate a picture of the Republicans in headlong flight to reaction. Just as the troglodytes of Republicanism tried to convince the people that the real choice in this election was between “socialism and democracy,” so the Fair Dealers tried to scare them by proclaiming in effect that their alternatives were between “democracy and fascism.” The truth was in neither of them.

The shift was to the conservatism of the permanent war economy, not to the conservatism of Herbert Hoover. It was a shift to a conservatism which recognizes and accepts the major social reforms of the early days of the New Deal as built-in features of American society which may be chipped at a little but which must not be touched in their essence. The shift was to a conservatism which recognizes that the labor movement is here to stay, and that the problem is not to destroy it, but rather to integrate it into the structure of the permanent war economy.

The first impact of Eisenhower’s election has been, quite naturally, to stun the labor and Fair Deal leadership, and the working class and other groups which have accepted their ideology and their picture of the social dynamic as the only ones possible. By the same token, it has greatly encouraged not only the conservative elements, but also the extreme reactionaries. It is only necessary to keep ones ears open in any place where the undifferentiated public assembles to know that the racists, the anti-Semites, the union haters, the 100 per cent Americans are in a state of high euphoria. They feel that their day has come at last. But actually, it is still a long way off.

The depth of the stupefaction of the labor leadership and the liberals is a function of their misunderstanding of the era in which we live. This misunderstanding was most clearly revealed in the kind of campaign they conducted, in the symbols, both positive and negative, with which they sought to rally the masses to the Democratic Party.

Quite understandably, they sought to win with the same kind of campaign which had won for them in every election since 1936. Essentially, Stevenson ran against Herbert Hoover and the great depression which started in his regime. He ran for the reforms of the New Deal, and for the prosperity of the war economy.

The working class and its natural allies recognize the Republicans for what they are, the chief spokesmen of big business, and hence voted against them. But it is questionable whether even for them the old symbols retain their potency. The major reforms of the New Deal are now accepted as an integral part of the American Way of Life, and Eisenhower could promise, more or less in good faith, to leave them intact. After twelve years of prosperity, the traumatic effect of the depression on all layers of American society is beginning to wear off. Truman could still invoke its memory with success in 1948, when the country had once again experienced a slight post-war recession with unemployment (even though mostly temporary) reaching four to six millions at its worst.

But in 1952 the attempt of the Fair Dealers to claim credit for the current prosperity, either for themselves or for their New Deal ancestors, was too fanciful to convince anyone except those who were determined to be convinced in advance. Even the Fair Deal professors of economics know, and admit privately, that our prosperity is based on the armament economy in general, and the war in Korea in particular. And the masses who have not been initiated into the “new methods” devised by the Fair Deal to prevent depression even without armaments take this as a matter of course. (The “new methods” are frequently referred to by Fair Deal publicists, but never described. They are, no doubt, being kept a dark secret to be sprung on an unsuspecting public at the proper psychological moment.)

The domestic issues which gave meaning to the Fair Deal-Republican dichotomy for the past twenty years have not been solved. Bet they have been submerged by, or rather, subsumed into the problems of the cold war, of the struggle between the imperialisms of Stalinism and American capitalism. However slowly and dimly, and with whatever gross distortions of understanding, the American people have grasped this fact. They know that their own prosperity is linked to the armament economy, and that this in turn is a function of the struggle for the world. Although they have, by and large, accepted the necessity of this struggle, they have not accepted the consequences which follow from it.

This is particularly true as they do not feel that the struggle is being waged successfully. The bloody stalemate in Korea is only the most dramatic symbol of the stalemate in the rest of the world. At the moment, the people are not worrying about a depression, though they know that its recyrrance is always a possibility. At the moment they are more concerned with high taxes and high prices and the mess in Washington and the world.

The Fair Dealers have misunderstood this era because they cannot accept the permanent war economy as the only basis for continued prosperity. To do so would be to shatter the illusion that they have discovered the magic formula whereby capitalism can be maintained without depressions and without wars on an ever-ascending scale of welfare and progress. But that is the image of American society by which they live. By this image all that is necessary is to keep re-electing Fair Dealers to office, and to keep on subsidizing capitalism all over the world. Finally Stalinism will evaporate as a world menace, and the Europeans and Asians, educated in the mysteries of American know-how will combine in a happy family of nations under the divinely ordained leadership of no one but the Fair Dealers themselves.

Just how long this illusion could have been maintained if Eisenhower had not won the election, it is hard to say. It is not excluded that if the Republicans had chosen Taft, and if they had conducted their campaign along strictly Taftist lines, they might have backed out of victory.

The fact is that Eisenhower dragged the Republican Party to victory with him, and that in doing so he dealt the Democratic Party as we have known it a blow from which it may never recover. This brings us to an assessment of the trends which the General’s victory are likely to set off for the future.
 

It is a commonplace to refer to the sobering effect of office on even the most irresponsible opposition. We have stated above that the Republicans were not inhibited in their campaign by the prospect of having to carry out whatever promises they might make. This was true even though it did not induce them to make very many concrete promises. They did not have to.

But now they are saddled with the cold war and the permanent war economy as the basic framework of capitalist existence. To operate successfully within it, they must maintain a considerable degree of national unity. They cannot do this and at the same time mount a major assault on the working class or its organizations. They cannot even hope to hang on to the electorate which they coaxed to the polls unless they at least make a gesture on taxes and the high cost of living. And most serious of all, for them, they cannot hope to stay in office for more than one term in the event either of major reverses in foreign policy or of a serious recession in this country.

Even while wallowing in their slough of despondency, the Fair Deal publicists can hardly suppress a morbid chuckle of anticipation in their columns. It has been a matter of common knowledge before the elections that the critical period for the American economy would come sometime toward the middle or end of 1953. With a levelling off of the armament economy projected for next year, the surpluses of the productivity of American industry will tend to begin choking the pores of the economy. In Europe the signs of contraction are beginning to show up already. This means that any prospect of dumping the American surpluses abroad is reduced.

With the economic difficulties of the decayed capitalist regimes in Europe piling up, any successes in the cold war appear highly unlikely. Further reverses, and possibly major ones are much more to be expected. And the Stalinists are not being at all helpful with the turn projected by the recent congress of their internationally ruling party in Moscow. They are preparing to exploit every economic difficulty to the maximum.

The Republicans are not Fair Dealers, even though they are confronted with an intensification of the problems which had kept the Fair Deal at dead center or in a slow retreat for the past eight years. Taft and Taber will drive to cut expenditures at the expense of the people, and Eisenhower will not resist them. The right wing of the Republican party will seek to harry the labor movement both from the halls of Congress and from behind their corporation desks. Although it is quite likely that Eisenhower and the moderates will seek to restrain them in the interest of the war economy, the crises in class relations which are bound to arise will force decisions on them which are made in the heat of battle ... and these decisions are even less likely to be favorable to labor than were those of their Democratic “friends.” (Remember Truman’s proposal to draft the railroad workers into the army to break the rail strike of 1946?)

Yet it must be emphasized, once again, that we have witnessed a conservative turn in the country, not a swing to reaction, let alone to fascism. The Republicans will always have to remember a few hard facts: (1) Stevenson got enough votes in the last election to win any normal (numerically) contest. (2) The labor movement is intact, and showed increased political organization and strength in the elections. (3) Any major and direct assault on the standard of living of the people in this country, or on the labor movement, would no doubt generate sharp class conflict and the most vigorous working-class resistance and such an assault would play right into the hands of Stalin and the Stalinists all over the world.

In the meantime, however, there is another problem and it is a pressing one. What will four years out of the White House, and a minimum of two years out of the Federal patronage troughs do to the Democratic Party?
 

The recent electoral campaign and its results in the balloting on November 4, have already shown a remarkable disintegration of the old relations of power inside the Democratic Party coalition.

In the South, the party has fallen apart at the seams. And although the evidence is yet far from complete these seams appear to run, strangely enough, pretty close to the class cleavages whose very existence is denied by our Fair Deal deep-thinkers. It is true that in the South all social relations are distorted by the incubus of racialism even more than they are in other parts of the country. And it is also true that racialism is still strong in the white sections of the new industrial working class of the South, which has only come out of the hills yesterday, so to speak. But it is quite clear that the bolt to Eisenhower in the South was led by the capitalists, both old and new, of the area. The oil millionaires of Texas probably gave as much money to the Eisenhower campaign as the masters of Wall Street.

To whom can the Democratic Party leadership in the South turn in an attempt to rebuild the shattered structure of the party there? Of course they will seek to compromise, to make deals, to appease many of the leaders who turned against them. They have certainly had no principled objection to working with the big landowners, the cotton merchants, the arrant racists and reactionaries who have dominated the Southern Democracy for so long, and they can be expected to have none in the future.

But the leading cadres of reaction in the South have turned against them in this election as they did in 1948. They cannot be trusted to maintain elementary party loyalty in the future. There can be little doubt that their Congressional representatives will continue to cooperate with the Republicans as they have done in the past. They have shown their basic affinity to the Republican Party in legislative matters for years, and they have now twice demonstrated that this affinity is so strong that they are willing to cooperate with them even in an election where power was directly at stake.

From a primitive urge of self-preservation, the Democratic Party would have to seek new bases of strength in the South. And if the ruling class lines up solidly with the Republicans, where could they look? Primarily to the same elements there who form their electoral base in the rest of the country: to the organized workers, the poor farmers and tenant farmers, the enlightened section of the middle class, and yes, to the Negroes.

Such a course could be dictated by political logic, but whether it will actually be pursued is a different matter. The Democratic leaders do not have any intention of transforming their organization into what would clearly be a class political party in the South. Their interests are those of liberal capitalism, not of the working class and the Negroes, and their own desire and ability to cooperate with the Southern Democracy is one of the most conclusive demonstrations of that fact.

But for the labor movement, either as part of the Democratic Party or as an independent force, this course is the only one possible. Their intentions in the matter were demonstrated at the last Democratic Party convention in Chicago, where they attempted to purge a section of the Southern leadership from the party. Even though the party leadership itself has much in common with the Southern bourgeoisie, to the labor movement it is an implacable enemy in both the economic and political fields.

Even if nothing else had happened, a deep and probably unbridgeable breach in the Democratic Party of the South would bring about a new configuration of forces in the party nationally. But much else happened, and it will continue to happen.

We have already pointed to the fact that in the North, the tendency of the organized industrial workers to stick with Stevenson was much more pronounced than was that of the rest of the urban masses who had been, more or less, in the Democratic camp up till now. Not only did they stick, but for the first time the union leadership found, that by and large, where they conducted an aggressive campaign independently of the old Democratic machines they were able to get out the vote, and an even bigger vote than ever before. It is a remarkable fact that in this campaign in which the old-fashioned Democratic machines in city after city revealed their weakness, the Liberal Party in New York and the new labor-Americans for Democratic Action machine in Philadelphia were able to gain votes against the stream.

The success of the labor political organizations and the failure of the old machines dealt a further blow to the relation of forces within the Democratic Party. If the party had won despite this development, the labor leadership might have continued to tag along behind their friends in office for some time to come.

But now they have no friends in office, or at least almost none who are in a position to do anything for them. Throughout the country the Democratic Party organization is bound to weaken and to begin a process of disintegration now that it is deprived of its life-blood of patronage. But the labor movement and its political arm have never depended on patronage for their existence. They have a different base, and it remains intact. Their chief reason for clinging to the Democratic Party was the conviction that this was the only way in which the more direct and open representatives of their major enemy, the employers, could be kept out of office. They will now discover that their movement can survive even under the new conditions—survive and grow.

So far we have sought to demonstrate that the relation of forces inside the Democratic Party coalition has been drastically changed in this election and that it will be changed even more fundamentally as a consequence of the Republican victory. Labor has emerged not as the petitioner who had to content itself with the best compromise it could make on program and candidates in a coalition in which the cards were stacked against it before the game started. The labor movement now emerges as potentially the power inside the Democratic Party.

But between potentiality and realization there is that well known gap. Only a foolhardy person would seek to predict at this time what the future relations of the labor movement will be to the Democratic Party. The most that one can hazard is to indicate possible lines of future development. Which ones will actually be realized will depend on factors which cannot be known now.

The city machines have proven themselves weaker than before, and the party is deeply torn in the South. But the Democratic Party still has a lot of life and kick in it. Its leaders will bend every effort to re-constitute it and re-organize it more or less on the old model, but with “more energetic” personnel. They certainly have no intention of abdicating to the labor leaders, just as the latter have no intention of taking over their functions.

But the changed relationship of forces cannot help but increase the friction among them. This does not necessarily mean that the friction will raise the temperature to a point at which continued collaboration becomes impossible. There will be all kinds of countervailing pressures which will tend to lubricate the rubbing surfaces. The actual development will be determined primarily by the course of the economy itself and the manner in which the working class and its leadership reacts to it.

Even before the Eisenhower victory there was considerable evidence pointing to a new type of participation of the labor leadership in politics and in the Democratic Party. In this campaign over large sections of the country the American Federation of Labor’s Labor League for Political Education, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ Political Action Committee conducted a far more vigorous campaign for Stevenson than they had ever conducted for Roosevelt or Truman, and they proceeded generally outside but parallel to the regular Democratic Party machines. It appears that they were frequently far more successful than the Democratic regulars in getting out the vote for Stevenson. Even now, right after the common defeat, it is evident that there is a great deal of contempt and bitterness among the active union politicos for their Democratic colleagues.

If, in the period ahead, the labor movement finds itself under strong pressure from the capitalists backed up by the Republican administration, it will naturally look to its Democratic allies for help. It is quite possible that they will get much less sympathy from them now that they are out of office, than they got when Truman was in the White House, and that was never too much. Such an eventuality could easily force them to seek to form a new organizational base for their political activity; that is, to form a new party of their own.

Although such a development is to be ardently hoped for and advocated by independent socialists, a different course is not at all excluded. As the labor leadership still thinks of politics almost solely in terms of immediate electoral victories, they may be driven into an even more conservative course by this defeat than that which they had been following in the immediate past. They may be convinced that their only hope is to cling even more tightly to the skirts of the Democratic Party, and to play an even less prominent role inside it. It is certainly too early to predict. It is not too early to seek to drive home to the advanced workers by every means available the strength which labor’s semi-independent instrumentalities displayed in this campaign, to seek to convince them that only a further and broader organizational development of them, and a bolder and politically more independent course can serve their true political interests.

In this connection it is pertinent to draw attention to the remarkable achievement of the Liberal Party in New York. Their own candidate for the United States Senate, George Counts, got 461,229 votes. In 1950 the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Lehman, got 312,594 votes on the Liberal line. Even though Stevenson also polled a heavier vote on the Liberal line than did Truman in 1948, the Counts vote was greater than that for Stevenson.

It may very well be that the Liberal Party picked up a good portion of the 1948 Wallace vote in this election. Furthermore, the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Cashmore, was a little-known party hack whose nomination had been opposed by many Fair Dealers as well as by the Liberals. Nevertheless, the ability of the Liberal party to make headway in New York City against the Eisenhower tide showed that even in this election, with its conservative swing, an independent labor-based party has attractive power.

It will be some time before the vote received by the Socialist Party and other minor organizations is known. It is impossible to state in advance whether or not this vote will prove to have shown a significant increase or decline. In an election the outstanding aspect of which was the feeling of frustration of a large mass of the people with the cold war and specially with the war in Korea, one could normally expect a heavier protest socialist anti-war vote.

Yet the campaign was also characterized by greater heat and emotion than any in recent years, and by a greater organized effort on the part of the leadership of the labor movement. The Democratic candidate had a particular personal appeal for intellectuals in the labor movement, on its fringes and on the campuses, and it is on these groups that socialists in America have in recent times counted for a goodly portion of any vote they get.

The campaign itself clarified two things about the socialist organizations in this country. It underlined the organizational weakness of the Socialist Party as nothing else could have done. Their failure to get on the ballot in some of the key states (California, Illinois) was chiefly a result of the vicious electoral laws passed by the major parties which make it virtually impossible for organizations without enormous resources to place their candidates before the electorate. But even where the SP was on the ballot, its campaign was virtually nonexistent. The Third Camp adherents in the SP are going to have to take a long and hard look at the situation in their organization and come up with some serious answers. A “party” which cannot conduct an electoral campaign even within its accepted limitations must find another reason for organizational and ideological survival.

The other fact demonstrated about the socialistic groups was the almost simon-pure Stalinist-type campaign conducted by the Socialist Workers Party. Anyone listening to their radio and television speeches would have sworn that he was being addressed by one of the Stalinist-front groups. Their campaign was “anti-war” in the typical “peace campaign” manner. If there had not already been enough evidence of the distance the SWP had travelled in a pro-Stalinist direction to justify the Independent Socialist League in withholding its endorsement, the campaign itself would have furnished it.

In this campaign the Independent Socialist League urged a vote for the candidates of the Socialist Party (or in states where they were not on the ballot, of the Socialist Labor Party) as a socialist vote of protest against the policies of both major parties, and particularly against their pro-war orientation. The justification of this policy did not lie in expectations of a large increase in the socialist vote, but in offering the most conscious political people in the country a method of expressing their opposition above all to the cold-war foreign policy of both parties and specifically to its most futile expression in the war in Korea.

The over-all results of the campaign show that among broad masses of the American people the war in Korea is highly unpopular, and that the cold war itself is beginning to have a strong impact on mass consciousness. The Democratic Party went down to defeat primarily because it bears responsibility for the policies which led up to the war and the war itself, and because it could give the people no satisfactory answers in the direction of a new and more fruitful foreign policy.

The most dangerous aspect of labor’s continued allegiance to the Democratic Party is its blind adherence to its foreign policy. Its determination to prevent Stalinism from spreading over the globe is commendable; but its inability to see that this can be accomplished successfully only by a truly democratic foreign policy, by a foreign policy which supports the struggle of the backward nations to free themselves from imperialism and from their own reactionary social institutions; and its failure to recognize that in Western Europe Stalinism can be defeated as a political force only by lining up with the socialist movements in a struggle to replace dying capital ism with a new social order—this blindness leaves only the conservatives in a position to make capital out of the pre-war and war weariness of the American masses.

The political task of the independent socialists remains the same after the elections as it was before: to educate and urge on the advanced militants in the labor movement a course toward the political independence of their organizations and the working class from the deadening alliance with a section of the capitalist class in the Democratic Party, and to urge upon them a foreign policy which will make the American labor movement a staunch adherent of the Third Camp of the peoples against the imperialisms of both Washington and Moscow. This task they will continue to perform with ideological firmness while taking into account the difficulties and the opportunities created for them by the new dynamics of political power which have been set in motion by the elections.

* * *

Footnote by ETOL

1. Despite the date of the magazine (September–October 1952) it is obvious that this article was written after the presidential election, which took place on November 4, 1952.

 
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