(See Cover)
When Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Martin marched into Philadelphia last week, the event epitomized political history in the making. The key state of Pennsylvania was getting ready to elect Ed Martin to the U.S. Senate. Ed Martin is an unmistakable Republican. The city on which he marched, in the last days of his campaign, is the shrine of traditional Republicanism. And Republicanism, after 14 years of ineffective opposition, was unmistakably resurgent all around the U.S.
It was golden Indian summer when Ed arrived. Rittenhouse Square, hemmed in by the old brownstone houses of an old aristocracy, was patterned with pale sunshine. The city was heavy with factory mists and factory stinks. But as much as anything else, smog and smells were evidences of Republican hardihood. On top of City Hall—above the chambers where a bland, bluff Republican machine had reigned with scarcely an interruption for 58 years—Father William Penn lifted a smog-smudged hand in benediction over the city whose wealth and power were created by high tariffs and Republican enterprise.
On Broad Street, the bronze statue of a Union soldier (First Infantry Regiment, Pennsylvania National Guard) backed against the red-brick headquarters of the Union League of Philadelphia. Old, dignified Republicans, walking up the curving steps to lunch on stewed snapper or crabmeat Dewey while discussing politics and finance, sometimes gave the bronze hero a glance. Theirs was the party which saved the Union 81 years ago.
Theirs is the party, they swear, which in their own words will save it again.
Signs of Stamina. Ed Martin had come to Philadelphia from the state capital in Harrisburg. During that trip he might have reflected on other signs of Republican stamina—the stone walls and rail fences marking off private property, the small-town centers of muscular little businesses, the web of great railroads, the cities of big and busy mills. True, Pittsburgh, sprawling to the westward, was disorderly, recently strikebound, and Democratic-controlled. But Pittsburgh was neatly fenced off by a gerrymander. In 1943 Ed Martin had signed the gerrymandering bill which had cut down Pittsburgh's Democratic influence. Ed had remarked: "It's just the good old American way. When we Republicans were in the minority we bellyached when they ran over us. It just has to be done."
Now the Republicans were surging back to political power. Ed Martin traipsed triumphantly in & around Philadelphia. He went out to fashionable Wyncote (see cut). He marched out to speak in a neighborhood of dirty, dingy brick houses. This was the rebellious northeast section which three times had helped to throw Philadelphia into the camp of Roosevelt. Here were the hosiery mills, the machine shops and shipyards. Franklin Roosevelt had been their idol. But Roosevelt was dead.
Figures on a Tablecloth. That was one political fact discussed by the substantial men at the Union League. The other point was the assumption that after twelve years of the New Deal and a year and a half of Trumanism, the people wanted a change—that, specifically, they wanted to get back to Republicanism.