The New Republic

THE WITHDRAWAL of Harry S. Truman from the 1952 election race greatly increases the chances of the Democratic Party to win. With more than three months to go before the national nominating convention, the Democrats have ample time in which to weigh the available candidates and decide upon their strongest slate. In Gov. Adlai Stevenson and Sen. Estes Kefauver, the Democratic Party has two men fully acceptable as liberal standard bearers. READ MORE >>

“A frightful imposition,” Dewey called the proposal for a special session of Congress, indicating his appraisal of both the sincerity of the Republican Party platform and the urgency of the problems which Americans face. In such a spirit Dewey can lose the 1948 elections. Tor Truman’s call for a special session is a stroke of bold and liberal leadership and a confident reassertion of the Validity of American democracy. READ MORE >>

THE LIBERALS who choose not to support Henry Wallace and the New Party are still far from clear about whom they are for or what they should be doing about it. Some have buried themselves in their gardens and their books until a better day. Some, with government jobs or patronage to protect, are feebly trying to justify going along with another term for Truman. Most of them talk wistfully over their dinner tables about how nice it would be . . . "if we had a candidate." They mean on the Democratic ticket. The most active among them are either talking for Supreme Court Justice William O. READ MORE >>

The Hidden Civil War by Wood Gray New York: The Viking Press. 314 pages. $3.75. Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column by George Fort Milton New York: The Vanguard Press. 368 pages. $3.50. In April 1941, when President Roosevelt called Charles Lindbergh a Copperhead, the newspapers were careful to explain who the Copperheads were. Now for the first time these Civil War fifth-columnists have been made the subject of full-length historical studies for the general reader. READ MORE >>

In the mass of replies and counter-attacks written to answer Benjamin Stolberg’s “Inside the CIO” there has been one significant omission. The pamphlet, as everyone knows, was serialized in the Scripps-Howard papers in January, in twelve installments. As its main point was that Communists were in control of many CIO unions and were disrupting others, and as it appeared while the CIO was being attacked as Communist in New Jersey and elsewhere, it has provoked answers out of proportion to its importance as a piece of labor journalism. READ MORE >>

PRESIDENT Roosevelt’s overwhelming victory promises to change the face of American political life. Even those expert observers who predicted a landslide did not envisage the unprecedented majority, both in popular vote and the electoral college, that he rolled up. As early as eleven o’clock on election night, when the first returns indicated a Roosevelt victory in every one of the doubtful states, and a popular majority of perhaps 9,000,000, leading Republican politicians and newspapers began to concede that their cause was hopeless; only the incredible John D. M. READ MORE >>

THE LATEST bargain-counter sale of the Van Sweringen railroad empire was made on April 24. Two days afterwards, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the buyers became the subjects of a favorable publicity boom which possibly came to an end in exactly thirty days, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The subjects of the publicity were Robert R. Young and Frank F. Kolbe, New York Stock Exchange brokers who bought control of the $3,000,000,000, 23,000-mile railroad system. Young is the dominant partner. READ MORE >>