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¶"My slogan has been jobs for the young and security for the old [a guarded endorsement of the Townsend plan helped elect him in 1938] . . . but I'll be damned if I'm going to assure young people about jobs and the old about security when the Government can't provide them."
¶"A spectacular governor is a gift from heaven to newspapers, but too expensive a luxury for the citizens."
Truisms, caution, simplicity and all, Lev Saltonstall has given the Bay State six years of respectable government, after years of storm and scandal. In doing so, Blueblood Saltonstall has become the Republican Party's No. 1 asset in New England. Accordingly he has been mentioned as a Presidential possibility—but more often for the vice-presidency. An internationalist long before Pearl Harbor, Saltonstall was a Willkie man in 1940. Now he is cautiously neutral, and will go to the G.O.P. convention unpledged. He well knows that if either Willkie or Dewey—both New Yorkers—gets the nomination, they will likely seek as a running mate a Westerner such as California's Governor Earl Warren. Saltonstall's only avowed candidacy is for the U.S. Senate, for the seat of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who is off at the war. (Saltonstall's '14 friend, Sinclair Weeks, was handpicked by the Governor to warm Lodge's place until the election in November.) At 51, Leverett Saltonstall's political eyes are not bigger than his stomach. But as a shrewd Yankee, he never discounts the possibility that a platter might be handed him.
Second Revolution. Like all wartime governors, Saltonstall has benefited from bulging coffers and full employment. But even before Pearl Harbor he had begun a project which may be his major contribution in office: a planning board for a postwar revolution of Massachusetts' entire manufacturing economy. As an early bird measure, it bore the now strange title of a "post-defense" program. Its aim: to restore Massachusetts' once-privileged industrial position. Its board members knew that if New England insisted on standing "where she always stood," she would be standing still or going backward. Short-sighted Yankee businessmen had lost their factories to the South and West because newer plants had better machinery and cheaper labor. The Governor's planners have what is perhaps the best state-sponsored program in the nation.
One basic decision has been made: New England can never compete with other sections by lowering its wage levels; cheap-goods industries are probably gone for good. Instead, uses must be found for skilled, high-priced hands. The planners hope that their region's slow and cumbersome transition to diversified, top technological industries will have been telescoped by the war. Already, plastics, radio, radar and rubber are key New England war contributions—industries which spend heavily in research and look boldly into the future. If Leverett Saltonstall's planners, on a plant-to-plant level, can help speed New England's second Industrial Revolution, revitalized New England may keep her stacks smoking long after the guns are silenced.
*The first Brooks arrived on the same ship, the Arbella, as the first Saltonstall.