Bowles Claims Parties Avoid Important Issues

Chester Bowles declared last night that neither political party in the 1956 election is likely to center debate on the great, crucial issues of our time. In the first of three Godkin Lectures, he said that these underlying issues may soon force the United States into a new political era--"calling for new alignments and a fresh burst of political imagination and creative leadership."

The former governor of Connecticut, war-time OPA administrator, and ambassador to India stated to a Sanders Theatre audience of nearly 800, that both parties this year would probably stick to "older and more familiar ground."

"The Democrats," he said, "will be denounced as radical New Dealers who favor an overbearing federal government and creeping socialism.... The Republicans will not get off much easier. It will be said that they are reactionary successors to Herbert Hoover and may lead us into another Great Depression."

Some leaders in both parties will, Bowles suggested, "sense in their hearts that these are clashes on the level of sloganeering, which do not reflect deeply felt rifts in national opinion.

"Yet of those who sense the far more significant questions which are taking shape offstage, few will be able to articulate them. And those who do will be warned by the experts that these questions are not profitable for election year debate," he said.

Bowles suggested that the explanation for the evasion of the real issues by both parties lies in American political history, which he divided into three great cycles of federal consensus.

The first, which extended from Jefferson to the Civil War, found "a general acceptance for the first time in history, of an effective federal government closely responsive to the popular will."

The second, running from 1861 to 1932, "imposed on this primary foundation a dynamic and uniquely American response to the Industrial Revolution, the imaginative and dominant use of corporations, the broadening of civil rights, and an expanding economy."

The third, from 1932 to the present, "reflects a general acceptance of governmental responsibility for minimum standards of living and opportunity, and the full use of our human and capital re- sources within a system of private ownership."

A change from one of these cycles to another, he said, "has always awaited the emergence of urgent and compelling new problems powerful enough to shatter the old majority-minority alignment."

Bowles will give his second talk tonight in Sanders Theatre at 8 p.m., on "The New Deal Becomes Respectable." Thursday night he will discuss "A New Political Focus.