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The point to remember was that a political turnover would lift into a new area of activity such Republicans as Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, John Bricker, Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Harold Stassen—and Ed Martin. To extreme New Dealers perhaps all of these men except Earl Warren and Harold Stassen were anathema. But not to the country at large. Senator Vandenberg had joined freely and courageously with Secretary of State Byrnes to form the nation's strong, bipartisan foreign policy. Taft's cold, moral judgment and insistence on getting at the facts had more than once saved the Senate from hysterical legislation. Dewey's businesslike administration of New York has won him a popularity which would apparently re-elect him by a landslide. What about 67-year-old Ed Martin of Pennsylvania ?
On the Boss's Knee. In the 1932 Republican Convention, when the Hoover crowd was trying to jam through the vice-presidential nomination of Charlie Curtis, "a voice from the floor shouted in answer to the roll call: "Pennsylvania casts 75 votes for General Edward Martin." The vote, as everyone knew, was just a maneuver. Pennsylvania came around to Curtis when the Pennsylvania bosses got what they wanted frolri the National Committee. But it gave Ed Martin his first brief and tentative spin into the national scene.
By then, Ed had been in state politics for more than 40 years. He had been born, properly, in a log cabin and, at twelve, helped round up votes for Greene County Democrats. This was a mistake he soon corrected. When Grover Cleveland and the Democrats took the high tariff off imported wools and ruined Ed's sheep-raising father, Ed reformed and joined the Republicans. In 1898 he marched off to fight the Spanish in the Philippines. He came back and graduated from Waynesburg College.
Ed practiced law and from law went into politics. With his military connections he thus had three careers, and he moved from one to another, like a good general exploiting the terrain to further his advance.
In time he attracted the attention of the mighty Republican state machine, run by the mighty Boies Penrose. Martin describes his association with Penrose in metaphor: "As a youngster I sat on Penrose's knee."
The machine was notorious. Penrose's predecessor was Boss Matthew Stanley Quay, the dark, withered, predatory man whose miscast eyes were cocked over all the craft and spoliation in Pennsylvania. Quay had been content to run the machine. Curiously, Penrose's chief ambition was to be mayor of Philadelphia, an aim which he might have achieved if he had not been photographed one dawn leaving a Philadelphia brothel. Pennsylvania's voters, however, sent him to the Senate for 24 years.
Advance Continued. At the time Ed Martin joined up, Joseph Ridgway Grundy, the cherubic, wealthy Quaker millowner and cold, shrewd defender of high tariffs, was rising to power. "Uncle Joe" Grundy, as Martin still calls him, had been dictating tariff bills since 1897. His masterpiece was the Smoot-Hawley bill of 1930, which precipitated an economic world war and was one underlying cause of World War II. To some Joe Grundy was an ogre. To his friends, the white-haired, thee-saying Quaker was just an old-fashioned businessman. The machine served Grundy.