(2 of 5)
Including a Tomato. Even from his eminence, the son of President William Howard Taft was not inclined to sneeze. Robert Alphonso Taft had measured the big attack on him with a politician's careful and increasingly anxious eye. It was not Ferguson alone he feared. Taft was running against a large number of other people including, in a way, himself.
Taft's was not the kind of personality that kindled prairie fires of popular support. The fires had to be fanned. Since his twelve years in the Senate were a matter of public record, they were wide open to the scrutiny of his enemies. The C.I.O. kept a staff of men busy combing the Congressional Record for ammunition. Taft's lofty scorn for half-baked ideas, his blunt honesty, his long rear-guard battle against the charging revolution of the New Deal, his stubbornness, his querulous isolationism (which had a way of popping up again just when everybody thought he had overcome it), all could be turned around and used against him.
But chiefly Robert Taft was running against the Truman Administration and the bosses of organized labor, who had loudly proclaimed their determination to beat him this year no matter what the cost. Not only birdshot was whistling around his ears. Big guns were also booming amidst the buckeyes.
Organized labor was fighting a hard and relentless campaign. In an unprecedented formal alliance, the C.I.O., the A.F.L., the United Mine Workers, the Machinists and the Railroad Brotherhoods had got together in a strictly political organization and dubbed it the United Labor League. The auto workers' Walter Reuther had invaded the state to denounce the author of the Taft-Hartley Act. From labor headquarters had rolled thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, posters, books, a lurid comic book (drawn by Al Capp's brother Elliott) attacking and lampooning Taft. A few of the attacks hit home, but some of the blows were foul, e.g., the insinuation that Taft was anti-Negro, that he was against a minimum wage. Other attacks were roundhouse swings, answerable only in the kind of detail no one had time to listen to during an election campaign. Mr. Republican was hit with everything that organized labor could find to throw.
For good measure, when he was in the town of Waynesburg, someone had also hit him with a tomato.
Man on Wheels. Against this bitter, heavily financed and almost anonymous assault Taft had adopted the only practical strategy. It was to counterattack. By last week his fight for re-election and political survival had become the liveliest battle in the 1950 campaign. He had started his counterstroke a year ago, after Labor Day, campaigned until January, resumed the battle again last August. The 61-year-old Taft acted as though he were determined to show his face to every man, woman & child in the state. Occasionally, he went in a Beechcraft plane, piloted by his second cousin, David Ingalls, the Navy's only flying ace in World War I. More often Mr. Republican went by Ingalls' Chrysler, driven at a hair-raising rate by Airman Ingalls in a Tyrolean hat.
Last week, going into the stretch run of the campaign, Candidate Taft rocketed about the state.