Birth of a Party II

Yesterday's article traced the events leading to the formation of the Constitution Party In Philadelphia in early September.

There may not have been a link between Colonel McCormick's appeal for a new party in the United States and the birth of the Constitution Party in Philadelphia a couple of weeks later. But the timing was perfect. Ex-Republican leaders throughout the country perked up their cars and cast longing looks toward the campaign trail.

A few started to move. One was Hamilton Fish, former Representative and tag line of Roosevelt's famous ban "Martin, Barton and Fish." He announced he would enter the New York Senatorial race on an amalgam of the American and Constitutional party slates. Other support blossomed in Florida and Connecticut.

Fish had no sooner announced than he ran afoul of New York's nomination-filing law. Purposely rigged against new parties, the law states that a candidate must get five thousand signatures in each of the state's counties to get on the ballot. Fish did fine in New York City, but he had to give up in the wilds of the Adirondack mountain counties, where it is hard enough to find five thousand inhabitants, let alone disgruntled Republicans. In Connecticut, however, Miss Vivian Kellems met the filing requirements and began sniping at both major candidates in her weekly radio program. She was a bit disturbed on her last broadcast over the fact that the Republican chairman in Connecticut found five hundred people whose names are on her petition who swore out affidavits saying they had never signed anything.

That is how the new party movement stands as of today--a bit confused, a little disorganized, but not bereft of support. Although its probably will not congeal into a single party with a single set of leaders until after the election, its essential composition is clear enough: it is the group of unreconstructed Taft supporters that stubbornly refuses to follow its hero back into the GOP. That they are united more on what they are against than what they are for is shown by the Constitution Party's support of Congressman John Kennedy, Democratic nominee for Senator in Massachusetts. Kennedy does not think like the Chicago Tribune. In fact, as Fair Dealing a group as Americans for Democratic Action has tallied what they think his "right" votes against his "wrong" ones; and he has a whopping liberal average. But Kennedy is running against Senator Lodge, and the Old Guard considers Lodge the arch-conspirator in the plot to liberalize the Republican party under General Eisenhower.

Associated with these sincere Old Guarders in the new party, however, are elements of the pre-war America First movement. Reporters at the Republican Convention noted with disgust that the MacArthur demonstrations were led by former associates of Gerald L.K. Smith.

That the Constitution Party resembles the old America First movement is apparent. the party's first chairman, Mrs. Stevenson of Connecticut, recently resigned, charging the party's platform smacked of Anti-Semitism. She referred to the plank: "We must preserve our Christian heritage which has been the strength of this union." She also said some of the party members objected to her as chairman because she was foreign-born and a Catholic.

The best hope for the Constitution party is a Stevenson victory in November. If the Eisenhower Republicans lose, the Taft wing will almost surely burst to the fore with a flurry of "I told you sos.' They will say take Ike did not truly reflect the great conservative sentiment in the nation. Yet, others will say Ike lost because he was not liberal enough.

Only if a truly conservative party like Constitutional party can appeal to the nation can this debate be resolved. One national election will be enough to tell whether the Constitutional party represents a small group of Americans born fifty years to late, or whether it represents the feelings of a hefty chunk of the electorate. If the last is true the Constitution Party may well replace the Republican in our two-party system.