W. Averell Harriman had dined with Stalin.
That would be Joseph Stalin. The dictator of the Soviet
Union, author of what historians now estimate to be some millions
of executions — murder — of Russians. The two had chowed down
together to discuss international events during a Harriman visit
to Moscow during the war, before Harriman was chosen as the
American Ambassador. An appointment made in part because of his
willingness to chew the fat with Stalin.
Yet walking into a Washington, D.C. dinner party hosted by
columnist Joseph Alsop after the 1950 elections, liberal icon
Harriman — scion of Eastern Establishment railroad wealth, FDR’s
liaison to Churchill, an ex-Ambassador, Truman Cabinet officer,
future governor of New York and Democratic presidential hopeful
— spotted someone in Alsop’s home he would decidedly not dine
with.
Seeing California Senator-elect Richard M. Nixon
comfortably ensconced in the next room, Harriman fumed in a loud
voice: “I will not break bread with that man!” On the spot, he
turned and walked out.
It was a telling moment.
A mere four years earlier Richard Nixon was an unknown
local lawyer, Navy veteran and, briefly, a bureaucrat in the
Office of Price Administration. In 1946 he had won a House seat
from California in the Republican sweep that saw the GOP retake
control of Congress for the first time in sixteen years.
Lots of Republicans had scored victories in 1946, but there
was something about Nixon that set the teeth of the American
liberal establishment on edge. Nixon had campaigned for Congress
against a twelve-year Democratic incumbent named Jerry Voorhis,
presumed to be a political Goliath, using the slogan: “Where’s
the meat?”
“Where’s the meat?” meant, literally, just that. The
federal government had smothered America with price controls
during the war — but the war was over. Meat shortages were
common. Butchers placed signs in their windows suggesting
Americans ask their congressman “where’s the meat?” Nixon, who
would prove to be one of the most astute politicians in the
second half of the 20th century, lost no time in connecting the
meat shortages to…. socialism and elitists.
To the shock of Democrats, Voorhis was the perfect foil.
His father had been the wealthy chairman of the Nash Motor
Company. He was a Yale graduate. In the 1920s, Nixon discovered,
Voorhis had actually registered to vote as a Socialist, becoming
a Democrat with the advent of the New Deal. The solitary piece of
legislation he had gotten passed dealt with federal control of
rabbits.
Nixon brilliantly painted a portrait of Voorhis as an
elitist socialist, tying the shortage of meat to the idea of the
Congressman as, in the words of Nixon biographer Jonathan Aitken,
“too woolly a thinker.” Voorhis was
ridiculed as the candidate of “Rabbits and Radicals.”
Nixon won, instantly famous.
Never forgiven by the Left to the day he died in 1994. Why?
Because Nixon’s winning 1946 race marked the first serious
beginning of what we regularly refer to in politics today as the
divide between Red America and Blue America.
Victory in hand, Nixon went to Washington and immediately
created a furor by exposing Alger Hiss, a favored son of the
Eastern liberal Establishment, as a Communist spy. In spite of
the fact that Hiss was convicted and went to prison, the charge
was resisted by liberals for decades, with some still defending
Hiss after the 1995 release of the Venona Papers — a joint
U.S.-UK Cold War intelligence project — proved Nixon
conclusively right.
Next up was Nixon’s 1950 Senate campaign against the
liberal Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a higher-visibility
reprise of the winning campaign against Voorhis.
The central choice in 1950, said Nixon, polishing the theme
he had so successfully used in 1946, was “simply the choice
between freedom and state socialism.” He defeated Douglas going
away. Shortly thereafter, now a U.S. Senator-elect, he was seated
in Joe Alsop’s parlor when spotted by the liberal Establishment
Harriman, who grew instantly furious at the sight of Nixon and
walked out, uttering his famous comment as he went.
The 1946 Nixon race against Jerry Voorhis is in fact the
template for political races across America some 64 years later.
And the “where’s the meat” line is an excellent place to
understand in 2010 when the “socialist” charge — now being flung
repeatedly at President Obama and
gaining traction in the polls — first began to be used
to real political effect.
It was Nixon who first surfaced the idea that there was
something not quite right with American society in the dawn of
the post-war era. Millions of GI’s had seen the brutal reality of
war close up. They had returned home,
and whether blue-collar workers or those going to
school on the GI Bill, they understood at a
gut-level what Nixon was saying.
Somehow, in some uncomfortable fashion that Nixon intuited
to spectacular political success, there was a divide opening
between average Americans and what The American
Spectator’s Angelo Codevilla
labels “America’s Ruling Class.”
By sheer luck of the political draw, Nixon’s first three
battles involved opponents Voorhis, Hiss, and Gahagan Douglas —
symbols all of a newly emerging liberal elitism.
Looking back years later in his 1961 book Six
Crises, Nixon said of Hiss: “He believed in…principles of
deliberate manipulation by a dedicated elite,” an observation
Nixon extended to the larger group he cited as “liberalists,” a
self-congratulatory term of liberal CBS commentator Eric
Sevareid.
Nixon related the tale of a Washington dinner party (not
the one involving Harriman) after it had been conclusively proved
through the “Pumpkin Papers” that Hiss had in fact stolen State
Department documents. Shouted one enraged liberal guest at Nixon:
“I don’t give a damn what the facts are!” The be all and end all
was the defense of a liberal, elitist worldview, a worldview
which Nixon saw in 1946 as clearly designed to be forced on
Americans whether or not they gave their consent. Their wishes
and the facts be damned.
Nixon’s theme is now seen all over America in 2010 as
Americans find themselves in open political revolt over seemingly
unrelated issues. From the building of a mosque near Ground Zero
in Manhattan to the Obama insistence that all Americans be forced
to buy health care to the overruling by a solitary federal judge
of California’s democratically voted Proposition 8 forbidding gay
marriage, to the Obama Arizona lawsuit — the common foe is the
one first spotted by Nixon in 1946.
The attitude so perfectly illustrated by New York’s Mayor
Bloomberg or California Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker:
“Frankly, my fellow Americans, I don’t give a damn what you
think. I am (fill-in the blank) better-smarter- morally superior
to you ignorant fools and you will do what I say and shut
up.”
That’s why Averell Harriman saw nothing wrong dining with
Stalin — and everything wrong in breaking bread with Richard
Nixon. To see the young Nixon — who had so bluntly challenged
Establishment favorites and won — now literally seated in the
parlor of a pillar of the Washington Establishment was to see the
barbarian inside the gates.
Harriman and Nixon are long gone. But the battle as Nixon
first saw it in 1946 is not only not over it is exploding almost
daily in political battles around America.
And just like Averell Harriman, today’s liberals are
incensed.
Why?
Because the barbarians are inside the gate.
That means you.
