My latest reading of Irwin Gellman's The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years, 1946-1952 was about Richard Nixon's 1946 campaign against Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis
for Voorhis' congressional seat. My post tomorrow will look at the
narratives about the campaign that Gellman attempts to refute. In
today's post, however, I'll mention other things about Gellman's
narration of the race that interested me.
Jerry Voorhis was a devout Christian and became a New Deal Democrat after he was a socialist and a pacifist. He
was born into a family of privilege, but he "rebelled against the
family fortune" after his graduation from Yale by living among the
poor. Voorhis later established a number of schools for boys
who were homeless. From what Gellman narrates, Voorhis was close to his
father, Charles, who offered his son political advice. Charles had a
Republican background and feared Communist incursion into labor unions,
yet he was satisfied with President Truman, calling him a "conservative
liberal", and he liked that his son had moved towards the middle. When I
read about Charles, I thought about my own admiration of President Barack Obama for moderate and conservative reasons,
such as my admiration for Obama's willingness to listen to different
ideas, as well as Obama's reform of health care, which contains a number
of conservative proposals (i.e., the health insurance mandate, an
attempt to move Medicare from fee-for-service to a focus on quality,
etc.). When many look at Obama, they see a liberal, as many probably
did when they looked at Voorhis. But there are many, like me, who
notice moderate and conservative aspects to Obama's approach and
policy-proposals, and this is probably what Charles Voorhis saw
when he looked at his son.
The New Deal was controversial in
Voorhis' district. On page 48, Gellman refers to a Republican named
Kyle Palmer who "praised Nixon for calling for the elimination of the
Office of Price Administration; it damaged rabbit growers because the
agency raised the price on feed by 50 percent, but it did not let
growers increase the price for rabbits." Nixon himself worked for the
OPA prior to his service in World War II, and Gellman states on page 21
that Nixon at that time "recognized the need to supervise the supply and
demand for scarce products during a time of national emergency, but
also saw the inefficiency that was part of a large organization that
often fell prey to its own inertia."
Communism was another major
issue. Voorhis himself had anti-Communist credentials, for he served on
the House Committee on Un-American Activities and "led in the passage
of the Voorhis Act in 1940 that required any political organization
controlled by a foreign power or engaged in military activities aimed at
subverting the American government to register with the Justice
Department" (page 36). Voorhis also was critical of Truman's Secretary
of Commerce, Henry Wallace, because Wallace had opposed Truman's foreign
policy for being too tough on Communism. But there were conservatives
who did not feel that Voorhis was tough enough on Communism, for Voorhis
did not want for HUAC to be permanent. Moreover, there was controversy
about Voorhis' relationship with the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), which was experiencing Communist incursions.
Voorhis did not accept financial contributions from the CIO, but he was
criticized because people in the CIO endorsed him.
Regarding the CIO, I
found what Gellman said on page 52 to be interesting: "...even some of
the Communists' severest critics, according to the labor historian
Robert Ziegler, 'have conceded that Communist-influenced unions were
among the most egalitarian, the most honest and well-administered, the
most radically aggressive, and the most class conscious." I have to
admire people who try to live up to their ideals, at least the positive
ideals. A number of Communist societies were far from egalitarian, but
were like the pigs' society in George Orwell's Animal Farm:
they preached egalitarianism, but in reality some were considered to be
more equal than others! At least some of the Communist-influenced
unions in the U.S. sincerely pursued egalitarianism. They may have been
fanatical, but they practiced what they preached!