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The Republican Party had a program—in outline. It was committed to ending any Government controls that were left. It was committed to some kind of housing program, to solving the problems of industrial strife, to trimming the budget, reducing the national debt, and cutting federal taxes. It was also determined to clean out the federal payroll, although this is always a difficult job.
Democratic Congressman Robert ("Muley") Doughton, who surrenders the chairmanship which Knutson assumes, drily observed: "The Republicans have promised more than they ever can accomplish. And now that they have the opportunity we will see just how they do it."
The Horsemen. Democrats had watched the Republicans in action before, and Joe Martin could ponder some of that history. The position he found himself in was not without historical parallel, but it had an unusual aspect. Harry Truman, his party rejected, would have trouble functioning effectively as President. Many of the Executive functions, for all practical purposes, must be taken over by Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft in the Senate; Joe Martin in the nation's most representative body, the House.
There was little that Harry Truman could or probably would do to prevent this assumption of power. He could lay about him with his veto, and the Republican majority alone would not be strong enough to override him. But Mr. Truman said he would not follow such tactics. If the Republicans would work with him he would work with them. The major conflicts might well come within the Republican Party. In any case, the Republican legislators, led by Martin, Vandenberg and Taft, will have the task of guiding the nation for the next two years, at least.
They had their mandate, but they could not merely pick up where they had left off in the Hoover days of 1930. The nation, and the world, had changed.
For one, Franklin Roosevelt, after his unprecedented third-term election in 1940, had shepherded the people squarely into the middle of international politics, and the people, after some backing & filling, approved. The Republican horse that galloped across the country on Election Night had had some ghostly riders—Henry Cabot Lodge and "a little group of willful men" who killed Wilson's League; Reed Smoot, Joseph R. Hawley and the high-tariff men who started a world economic war.
Joe Martin approved the bipartisan foreign policy of Vandenberg. But Taft had voted against many of the instruments of that policy: the World Bank and the World Fund, reciprocal trade agreements, the British loan. The continuation of such national policies could crack open and vitiate U.S. foreign policy.
Americans would soon forget why they had turned the Democrats out—good as those reasons seemed to be at present. But they would remember the social gains of the New Deal.
The Boy from Orne Street. Altogether there was a great deal for Joseph W. Martin Jr. to cope with.
Joe was not afraid; he is a man who has the confidence of his friends. Once when President Calvin Coolidge asked which legislator was in charge of a bill in the House and learned that it was "Joseph," Coolidge snapped: "Good. It will be done." Joe is a git-up-and-git, self-made, authentic small-town man.
His mother was Irish, his father was