Report of the County Chairman (17 page)

Mrs. Ward says, “I was raised a devout Philadelphia Catholic, as prejudiced against every other religion as I could be. My father owned a small business and hated labor unions. Our family fear was the encroachment of Negro families. And then I met this big free-and-easy guy. We courted pretty solidly and he said, ‘I want you to meet my family.’ So he took me to see them and they were delightful. A big Lithuanian family with wonderful spirit. Then on about the fifth visit Jack’s mother said something about loving Jewish cooking. And on the next visit his aunt said something about Jewish holidays, and I stopped dead and asked Jack, ‘Are you Jewish?’ and he said, ‘What else?’ And I was terrified. When I told my parents I said, ‘I’ve fallen in love with a Jewish boy,’ and what they told me I won’t repeat. But Jack’s parents were telling him the same thing, so one day we two tall people, a Lithuanian Jew and a Polish red-headed Catholic said, ‘This is for the birds,’ and we became Unitarians.”

Jack Ward had inherited even more prejudices than his wife, for he was from a little town in the Deep South, but when the Myers family of Negroes moved into Levittown and hideous hatreds erupted all over the city, the first man to mount midnight watch to protect the Myers home was Jack Ward. For some weeks he imperiled his social
position, and his political as well, but he slugged it out and gained in stature by doing so.

When he moved into Levittown he landed in an area that was 70 percent Republican, but by force of his shaggy-dog personality and acid honesty he became a principal factor in making the area 73 percent Democratic and the most powerful precinct in the county. Politics has become his principal interest. In order to provide him time for electioneering, his wife supplements his salesman’s income by working for the Army at Fort Dix, twenty-two miles away.

Of her new life in Levittown, Mrs. Ward says, “Before we came here we were paying $91.50 rent for a dingy, dirty Baltimore row house. Here we pay $88, and much of it is for equity in what amounts to our own house. We have beautiful surroundings, a peach tree in our back yard, a swimming pool only a few blocks away. Our children are outdoors all the time on fine playgrounds. Our son plays on an organized ball team, and as a family we are living rather than just existing. When we talk Levittowners into becoming Democrats we talk from the heart, because we’ve found the good life.”

Two aspects of Levittown impressed me unfavorably. I found the forced segregation of the city into economic areas distasteful, for this causes serious complications, the psychological effects on children being the gravest. Also, in all Levittowns the mature population tends to be of the same age, and this is stifling. How often I wished, during my meetings, that there were occasional old men in the audience who had been through elections much earlier than ones I could remember, or newly married
couples with their own special problems. A wide range of interests is a fine base for a democracy such as the one we try to operate.

Politically, everything I had been told about Levittown was wrong. The “lace-curtain Irish” were not certain to vote Republican again. There was a real chance they might return to the Democratic party. The Jewish intellectuals who in 1956 had flirted with Republicanism were willing to discuss this election on its own merits. Voters in suburbia were not going to adhere slavishly to any economic lines of demarcation. Everybody’s vote was up for grabs. I spent many hours speculating on what the vote would show in Levittown, and depending upon what my most recent experience had been, I fluctuated between a fear that the area would repeat the unexpected 51-to-49 advantage it had given Eisenhower and a hope that it might move into the Democratic column by about 58 percent. At no time during the campaign did I feel confident of the outcome in this critical area.

But one thing I was sure of. Any party which wants to win suburbia in the future will have to make major concessions. Once-rural counties like Bucks can no longer consign their Levittowns to the outer darkness. Local men who have grown up in the party by slow stages will have to find room for newcomers who are in a hurry, distasteful though that accommodation might be. For the essential nature of suburbia is that its men and women tend to be of the same age, the same interests, and the same determinations. If they ever decide that the Democratic party has no home for them, they will swing sharply Republican. Conversely, if the Republicans fail to make the
proper adjustments to absorb them, they will move in droves to the Democrats.

One of the things that reassured me most in this election was the skill with which Senator Kennedy wooed the suburbias, for he accurately sensed that victory could be decided by their swing vote. On the other hand, I was surprised that Nixon and Eisenhower did not stress these areas more, for I believe that at the beginning suburbias were strongly inclined toward the Republicans. With these conflicting speculations shifting back and forth across my mind, I waited anxiously for November 8.

On the first day that I reported to Johnny Welsh’s Doylestown headquarters, from which the official Democratic party was directed, I saw lounging in an armchair a man who made me actually stop and stare. I remember thinking: “If a person were writing a political novel he’d have to use that character as the typical hanger-on.” The man was apparently in his late fifties, wore a loose-fitting suit, brown shoes that needed polishing, a snap-brim hat which he carried on the back of his head, a waxed mustache and a cigar. He had a big, amiable face, eyes which darted about sizing up all visitors, and a most ingratiating smile.

Johnny Welsh was not in the office at the moment, and this gentleman said, “You’re Jim Michener. I want to introduce myself. I’m the only man you’ll ever meet who has a bottle of whiskey named after him.” With that he dragged out of his right rear pocket a fifth bearing a bright new label reading: “Sam Thompson. Selected from our finest reserves of Superior Quality.”

“The name’s Sam Thompson,” he said, extending a friendly hand.

“What do you do here?” I asked.

“Just hang around and make myself useful,” he replied.

Sam was useful in so many ways that I came in time to rely upon him for everything from Scotch tape to advice on electioneering. It was he who decorated the office, working on the principle that “if there’s six square inches of empty space anywhere, paste up a picture of Kennedy.” It was Sam who arranged for motorcades. He knew where he could find a sound truck. It was he who assured me, “That electrician owes me a favor. He’d better lend us some lights for the campaign or else.”

It was also Sam, bland as honey in a bear’s mouth, who solved our first big problem for us. In setting up our headquarters we had, as I pointed out earlier, usurped the town’s best practical location, and we were congratulating ourselves on having outsmarted the Republicans, when one morning I found to my dismay that right up the street from us they had rented an entire abandoned hotel, had plastered it with Nixon-Lodge signs, and had opened a headquarters which frankly swamped ours. I called Sam and showed him the bad news.

“Something’s got to be done about this!” Sam growled. “Look at them! They completely blanket us!”

He stomped off, his old raincoat flapping in the wind, and I wondered what Sam Thompson could do that would in any way frighten the Republican party, but three hours later I noticed to my surprise that the big enemy headquarters had shut down. Later that day they reopened in a small vacant store half a mile from the center of town, where practically nobody could see them. When the forced move had been completed, Sam Thompson came shuffling back to our headquarters and fell into a chair. He was grinning.

“What’d you do, Sam?” I asked.

“Matter of a fire inspection,” he replied laconically.

“Are you a fire inspector?” I asked.

“I got real tears in my eyes,” Sam replied, ignoring my question. “I told ’em that more than anything else in this campaign we wanted them to have the best headquarters available. But I said it was also necessary to protect them, and if that old hotel caught fire, and if any lives were lost, I’d be the sorriest person in town. I told ’em we certainly didn’t want to win any election by burning up good Republicans.”

“Didn’t they argue back?” I asked, staring at the empty hotel.

“They wanted to,” Sam replied, looking up at the ceiling and laughing.

“How did you manage it, Sam?” I asked. But he would never tell.

I did find, however, that it makes a great deal of difference in a national campaign if one’s state is controlled by one’s own party and if the major cities are also in the right hands. The odds against the Democrats’ carrying
Pennsylvania were tremendous, and few outside observers gave us much chance, but repeatedly I noticed that whenever we faced a real crisis, there was always some professional politician in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh who could help, or there was some state official in Harrisburg who, had he been a Republican, could have intensified our difficulty. I came to the conclusion that Democratic control of the state offices, of Philadelphia and of Pittsburgh were worth at least 200,000 votes, and had these various political offices been in Republican hands I doubt that Kennedy could have won the state.

I also found that in Governor David Lawrence we Democrats had an ally who was firm, intelligent, and dedicated. I found him also to be a very appealing man, even though the opposition had long enjoyed painting him as a “typical ward-heeling politician.” I wish he were typical. We understood that Lawrence, a Catholic who had just barely squeaked through in his 1958 race for the governorship, was, of all the professionals who dominated the scene at Los Angeles, the one most afraid of the anti-Catholic vote, because he had seen how powerful it could be in a state like Pennsylvania, which the party felt it must win if the national ticket were to win. We were told that Lawrence had held out to the last, insisting that his fellow Democrats acknowledge the grave risk they were taking, but that when the convention decided to go ahead, it was Lawrence who stood forth as one of the most forceful of Kennedy’s supporters.

I shared the speakers’ stand several times with Governor Lawrence, and he was a valiant campaigner. I also went to many places where he had preceded me, and the
reports were always favorable. For many years he had been the vigorous mayor of Pittsburgh and the unofficial boss of the western part of the state, so I suppose the newspapers were right in labeling him “a typical ward-heeling politician,” but whenever I heard the phrase in connection with Dave Lawrence, I thought, “I wish my ward were in such hands.” For the thing that impressed me most about Governor Lawrence was that he talked sense. In his speeches that I heard he hammered away at specific legislation, at specific problems. He seemed to have a delicate radar set tuned in to the minds of the people to whom he was talking, and with each group he discussed the things that they were interested in. Not once did I hear him degenerate to either stupidity or prejudice, and I never heard him speak without feeling that he had established a higher standard for me to follow. I don’t see how anyone could utter more profound praise for a practicing politician, except that Lawrence, while doing these things, also delivered the vote. Sometimes I suspected that he was able to deliver the vote because he had always done the things of which I have spoken.

What Sam Thompson’s connection was with Governor Lawrence I never found out, and perhaps it was better that I didn’t, because a few days after the closing of the fire trap in which the Republicans had set up office—to the danger of their life and limb—smiling Sam said, “You know, Jim, every morning when I come down here to work …”

“What work do you do, Sam?” I inquired.

“Every morning I see this enormous empty store, right
in the heart of Quakertown, at the main crossroads where everybody has to go past.”

“Sam, put it out of your mind,” I snapped in a rather surly rebuff, for I had found that Sam Thompson could spend unlimited funds on unlimited projects. Some time back he had been propositioning me about a sound truck that could be bought cheap, and I had asked, “Would you buy a whole sound truck to use for six weeks?”

“If it would win an election,” he had replied. “And we could keep on using it for the next ten years.”

“Forget the sound truck,” I had said with ruthless finality. Now I repeated, “The store’s out, Sam.”

“For you, yes. I know your budget is exhausted …”

I remember at the time thinking, “That’s an odd use of words. ‘The budget is exhausted.’ I wonder where Sam heard that?”

“…  but would you have serious objection if I used your name and tried to get the store?”

“Yes I would,” I said firmly, “because once you got the store you’d want money to get the decorations, and there … is … no … money.”

Sam bit his lip, looked out into the street and whispered, “The decorations we got.” He led me to an old car, the back of which was truly crammed with expensive bunting, photographs of Senator Kennedy, full-sized cut-outs of Lyndon Johnson, and a mouth-watering collection of buttons, posters and stick-ups.