Report of the County Chairman (9 page)

He was a powerfully built man, silent, shrewd, and brilliant in command. I can see him now marching from our newspaper offices over to the courthouse, where every man who worked did so solely because Mr. Grundy had assigned him to the job. I suspect that even the judges were judges because Mr. Grundy had selected them. His word was absolute law, and the two things he hated were Democrats and disloyalty.

He controlled our county with an iron hand until he was in his nineties, and even as I write he is ninety-six and still a major force. During his long reign he gave us as good a government as a benevolent dictatorship can, and it was one remarkably free from open corruption. For example, when the overambitious coroner got into trouble it was widely held that if Mr. Grundy had been younger he never would have allowed this to happen, but whenever a Republican makes such a comment to Johnny Welsh, the Democratic boss observes acidly, “From the time I was a boy, every five years by the clock some leading Republican went to jail for stealing the people blind. If Grundy was so powerful, why didn’t he stop that?”

I wouldn’t say that Joe Grundy had ever been a hero of mine—I was far too scared of him for that—but I must admit that I felt a glow of local pride when he branched out from Bucks County to become the dictator of Pennsylvania and finally a United States senator. He was also
president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association and was held by many to be the most typical president that that organization ever had. When he spoke on economic or political matters there was no uncertainty as to what he meant. So far as I knew, he was against every major bill that even the Republicans had ever brought out since the days of Abraham Lincoln, which is as far back as one can go in that direction. As for Democrats, his stand was forever exemplified by the front page of his
Intelligencer
for November 3, 1948, which remains a museum piece in political reporting.

I suppose even the most jaundiced critic would have to confess that Harry Truman’s astonishing victory over Thomas E. Dewey, who had already announced his cabinet, was news. You might not have liked the result, but it was news. Our paper the next day carried big, bold headlines proclaiming the fact that “Dewey Got 12,731 Majority in Bucks County.” The lesser headlines detailed how the great victory had been won, and off to one side was the news that Harry Truman had won the Presidency. If the Democrats had won nationally, Bucks County would do its best to ignore the unpleasantness. We had three daily papers in the county and six weeklies, all vigorously Republican.

After the conventions were over, Johnny Welsh called me to his office and said, “The people backing John Kennedy are eager to have each county establish a committee of independents and Republicans who will work for his election. Will you head that committee in this county?”

I replied, “I’m neither an independent nor a Republican.

John observed, “You’re not a professional Democrat, either. How about taking the job?”

I agreed and was told that the national committee sponsoring my work would get in touch with me promptly. In the meantime I was to be known as the county chairman of Citizens for Kennedy. I was to hire a hall and establish headquarters immediately, and there would be no funds forthcoming from anywhere. Within a few days I had raised $1,200 and was ready for business.

There then occurred a symbolic event which impressed me at the time; its beneficial effects were to sustain me during the campaign. The county seat of Bucks County is the quiet, beautiful old town which had been my home for more than fifty years. Doylestown was strongly conservative, at times almost 90 percent Republican, and a thoroughly delightful rural community with good schools, fine churches, a new shopping center which everyone said was ruining the town but which everyone also patronized, no heavy industry, and very little trouble of any kind. In 1948 my home town had voted 78 percent for Dewey; in 1956, 75 percent for General Eisenhower.

Main Street in Doylestown is a major United States highway running south and north between Philadelphia and Easton. In the center of town it crosses Court Street, which is a major residential and business street running east and west. At this intersection, and commanding the attention of any motorist or pedestrian who moves in any direction, stands an old office building, whose ground floor is just about the most advantageously situated in town. In mid-August that store was vacated and no new occupants were scheduled to move in until after the
election in November. As a temporary political headquarters it was perfect, and I assumed that the Republicans had already paid a deposit on it.

But they never did, and for modest rent we got hold of this fine situation. Here my committee commanded the attention of people and impressed them with the fact that we were really trying to win this election. Hundreds of Republicans stopped by to see us, to ask incredulously, “You really think you have a chance?” And our physical presence at that vital corner, day after day, convinced some that we were serious. Throughout the campaign the Republicans were tardy in almost everything they did. We waited apprehensively for their powerhouse to start rolling, but it never did. We instinctively sensed the next steps they ought to be taking to defeat Kennedy, and often we even discussed them among ourselves so that we could counteract them, but the logical steps were never taken, and we could only conclude that for some reason that we did not know, the Republicans were not throwing their full weight into this campaign.

I am not speaking of the campaign at the local level. Bucks County combines with Lehigh, to the north, to send one representative to Congress. For the last twenty-six years he has been a Republican, and the local party showed no inclination whatever to let a Democrat take over. They fought a remarkably good fight against a strong Democratic adversary, and they won. But what the party did not do was to support Richard Nixon with the all-or-nothing kind of campaign that we Democrats expected and which we feared would give Nixon the victory. We therefore concluded, perhaps incorrectly, that
many Republicans simply did not like their candidate and were not working for him.

This gave me a clue for all my speeches throughout the campaign. Since I addressed mostly Republicans I knew that frontal assaults on their party or their candidate would accomplish nothing, so I consistently pointed out that Richard Nixon was a good man and a respectable candidate. In fact, I was so fair about acknowledging these matters that after my first four talks both my wife and the more ardent Democrats in my audiences protested, “We couldn’t tell whether you were for Nixon or Kennedy.” This was not an accident, for to the end I kept admitting that Nixon was good, but that in my opinion Kennedy was better. But my most telling blow came whenever I observed casually that “the trouble is that many Republicans just don’t like their candidate.” Whenever I said this I could see a dozen or so good Republican heads nodding in agreement. Now whether they were nodding for themselves or from their recollections of other Republicans who had expressed antagonisms, I never knew, but I am sure that by this tactic I won over quite a few Republicans. Equally effective was my constant reference to the fact that quite obviously President Eisenhower did not entirely approve of Nixon and never had. Here scores instead of dozens nodded their agreement, and I am sure that this was one of the most damaging situations with which Mr. Nixon had to contend during his campaign. Whether President Eisenhower actually did find his Vice President distasteful or not we will not know until the memoirs of this age are published, but I can certainly report now that an enormous number of
voters in the 1960 election thought that Ike distrusted Dick, and a great many—across the nation something like 5,000,000—who had voted for Ike in 1956 were persuaded to vote for Senator Kennedy in 1960, partly because they felt that the Republicans themselves did not wholly accept their own candidate.

On the day we opened our headquarters in Doylestown, Johnny Welsh gave me some bad news. “I’ve been looking at the registrations from Bedminster,” he grumbled, “and they don’t look good. Normally the registrations from Bedminster East should be 409 Republicans to 210 Democrats. We always expect to lose that area. This year we got our customary 217 Democrats. But the Republicans turned in an amazing 472. It’s that way in all the rural areas. Know what that means?”

I said I guessed it meant that the Republicans had worked harder in combing out registrations than we had. Johnny shook his head. “It means that the Mennonites have allowed their women to register again. Usually churches like the Amish and the Dunkards and the Mennonites don’t allow their women to vote. Last time they voted in Bucks County was in 1928 when Al Smith ran. Their churches demanded that they vote against a Catholic. Now thirty-two years later they’re voting again, and we’re in trouble. Big trouble, maybe.”

As I studied my county politically, I found that it was divided into three clear-cut sections. To the north and centering upon fine old towns like Perkasie and Quakertown were the German farmers, most of whom were Republicans. There were, however, several strong enclaves of Democrats, where year after year atypical liberal
groups turned in Democratic majorities. Such an area, for example, was the one organized by Mrs. Eva Home Derr in Applebachsville. Mrs. Derr was a good-looking, hard-working doctor’s widow who loved politics and who, because she was a German herself, could talk effectively with the farm people of her district. But for’ the most part Democrats fared poorly in the north. Since the German sections of Bucks County were to be of unusual importance in this election, I had better speak briefly of these remarkable people. Most were of Lutheran or Mennonite families that had lived in the area for two or three centuries, and all were frugal, honest and law-abiding. Few ever went to jail or onto the poorhouse rolls, for the German community protected its people in patterns of cautious behavior inherited from rural Europe. I had grown up with these Germans—the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch—and many of my schoolboy friends had barely been able to speak English when they first came to school. There were still important sections of our county where day-to-day business was conducted in Pennsylvania Dutch and where a candidate for office was expected to campaign in that hilarious language. Historians have always felt that much of Pennsylvania’s colonial greatness stemmed from its German heritage and certainly our county was a conspicuous example of this fact. When I was a boy, it was the vote of these German majorities that determined our politics, and although in recent years their monopoly has been somewhat diluted by the arrival of new populations, any politician would be delinquent who did not consider first the Lutheran and the Mennonite vote. In the jargon of our politics
they were often referred to as “the up-county religious.”

The central part of the county, focusing upon Doylestown and Newtown, still had many Lutheran families, but it was marked primarily by other Protestant groups and by people of some means who had either inherited farms from their ancestors or who had bought them in recent decades. This area, as might be guessed, was also largely Republican. Outsiders, looking at this richly fortunate sector of the county, rarely realized how backward many parts of the county were. Up till only a few years ago in my part of Bucks County we had one-room rural schools without electricity, running water, or indoor toilets. The teacher, in 1957, had to report to school half an hour early in order to start the wood fire, and in other parts of the county these schools exist even today. I remember one bond issue that was opposed by stalwart German farmers who argued, “If you vote for a consolidated school, it will have a football team, and if it has a football team it’ll have to have a band, and the band will have to have uniforms, and when they have their uniforms, you’ll have to buy your son a trombone. Do you want to spend your hard-earned money for a trombone?” The bond issue never had a chance and in that area the one-room schools continue even now. Perhaps the essential quality of our rural areas can best be conveyed through the story of a fine old friend of mine who had a farm with Black Angus cattle and a wife who had lost her teeth. My friend had just enough ready cash to either repair the barn so it wouldn’t rain on his Black Angus or buy his wife a set of store teeth, and he never hesitated a moment in his choice. Furthermore, our neighborhood
warmly supported him on the grounds that a man’s first duty was to look after his farm. In fact, the cows got in turn a new roof, a new drinking system, and a new fence before their mistress got her new teeth, and both the farm and the marriage have prospered.

The southern end of our county forms one of the most spectacular areas in the United States and has often served as the subject for editorials and general reflections on the future of our nation. Ten years ago it was merely an exquisite rural area edged by a few small industries. Its major town was Bristol, from which Joseph Grundy dictated in his benevolent way. Then, in 1952, United States Steel decided to build the world’s largest continuous-flow steel mill at Morrisville, the location farthest north on the Delaware River to which seagoing ore carriers could come from Venezuela. In order to provide homes for the workmen thus to be employed, the New York builder Levitt and his sons began at the same time to build on empty meadowland a model community which in a few short years would become the tenth largest city in the state. The appalling disruptions caused by this combination of steel and suburbia remade the face of Bucks County. Land speculators acquired fortunes overnight. A hundred service industries suddenly sprang up and some prospered fantastically. Restaurants, stores, schools, newspapers, insurance offices exploded all over the place, and 70,000 new people crowded into the area in the space of a few years. Many, in their previous homes, had belonged to labor unions. Many had been Democrats. Thus our sleepy county overnight became one of the principal examples of the new America. Its growth from
1900 to 1950 had been desultory and had lagged behind the national average, but from 1954 to 1960 it was spectacular.