Report of the County Chairman (8 page)

“Terribly close,” I said.

“Will you carry Pennsylvania?” he pressed.

“If we do, it’ll be by a whisker,” I replied.

“But there is a chance?”

“Yes, there’s an honest chance.”

“Will you carry your county?” the quiet voice probed.

“No. The religious issue will hurt us badly. We’ll lose by about eight thousand. But that’s twelve thousand better than last time.”

“Good,” he said. “Maybe that’ll be enough to enable Philadelphia to carry the state.”

“How do you see it nationally?” I countered.

“Very close.”

“But we will win?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, and we drove through the long night.

The first thing I had done politically upon returning from the boat trip across the Pacific and the car trip across America was to report to my Bucks County chairman, there to volunteer my services in the forthcoming campaign. Renewing acquaintances was a pleasant job, because for nearly fifty years the chairman had been a personal friend. We had grown up together, had seen many storms, and had reached middle age with some illusions intact.

Johnny Welsh, when I saw him again in the fall of 1959, was a wiry, well-preserved, gray-haired, sharp-tongued politician whose iron will and personal integrity had
kept the local Democratic party functioning for more than a quarter of a century. When others of us were working abroad, he and his six sons were at home doing the dirty work of running a complex party organization. When the Democrats were in such low esteem locally that not even candidates could be found, Johnny Welsh ran for office. He made his living selling real estate and insurance, but his real occupation was politics, and he knew more about the workings of my county than any other man alive.

Pennsylvania has the commendable system of placing each county’s affairs in the hands of three elected commissioners who in former days were paid $6,500 a year (now $8,500) and of whom one must by law be of the minority party. Thus no matter how strong the Republicans became, and they used to reap about 80 percent of the votes, there was always one paying job for a Democrat, and starting in 1951 Johnny Welsh filled that job. As such he became titular head of the party, and by the exercise of great will power and leadership in 1955 won the county away from the Republicans. This meant there would be two Democratic commissioners, and Johnny Welsh became the boss of one of America’s most challenging counties.

He was helped conspicuously, I must confess, by the fact that shortly before the county-wide elections in 1955 the Republican coroner was charged with twenty-five counts of misconduct in office. For this misbehavior the unfortunate coroner went to jail, taking his party with him in defeat. But I do not mean to explain away this stunning Democratic victory solely in terms of an imprisoned
coroner. Most of the credit was due to Johnny Welsh, who, as minority commissioner, had so valiantly struggled to build a party.

By 1959 Johnny had run into trouble in the form of a revolt in the southern end of the county, where otherwise loyal Democrats had axed him, so that he not only lost control of the county, but his minority seat on the commission as well. He did not, however, relinquish his leadership of the party, although someone else now stepped forth as titular head. Like everyone else in Bucks County, when I wanted to talk to the head of the Democrats, I went to see Johnny Welsh, who sat like a gray eagle surveying everything with cold caution.

I said, “Johnny, if Senator Kennedy wins the nomination I want to work for his election.”

Welsh said, “I thought you were a Republican.”

I said, “For many years I was registered that way.”

Welsh said, “What’s a Republican doing working for Kennedy? You’re not a Catholic.”

I said, “I think the country needs him.”

Welsh said, “Well, if anything turns up later on, I’ll let you know.”

I said, “All right.”

Welsh said, “By the way, did you mean that if Kennedy is not nominated you don’t want to help?”

I said, “Kennedy or Johnson, either one.”

Welsh said, “Well, who do you think it’s going to be?”

I said, “Maybe Johnson and Kennedy, in that order.”

Welsh said, “That would be a good ticket, but I hope it’s the other way around.”

I said, “So do I.”

I did not hear from my old friend for many weeks, and I suspected that as a professional he did not entirely relish the participation of an amateur in an important election, but his tardiness in responding gave me an opportunity to study my county better, and all that I saw I loved.

Bucks was one of William Penn’s original counties rimming the environs of Philadelphia, and throughout Pennsylvania’s history there had always been antagonism between the crowded city and the lush, spacious counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester. From time to time the central city voted Democratic, but the suburban counties could be depended upon to turn in large Republican majorities. In my youth, in central Bucks County, I grew up without knowing any Democrats. My mother thought there might be some on the edge of town, but she preferred not to speak of them. When I brought my wife home from Chicago, she met my aunts, who had occasion to observe, “We have really never known any Democrats,” and when my wife volunteered, “Well, you know one now,” there was a painful silence.

As a boy I used to sneak into sex trials that took place in the old courthouse just across the street from our school, for one of the major advantages of living in Doylestown was that it was the county seat with a courthouse where lurid trials were always available. Most exciting of all were the murder cases, and rather early in the game I noticed that one of the real tests of wit between contending lawyers came when our local district attorney tried by one subtle means or another to inform the jury that both the accused murderer and his lawyer were not from clean, God-fearing Bucks County but from corrupt, Devil-worshipping
Philadelphia, and from the struggle which the defending lawyers put up trying to prevent this knowledge from becoming public, I could only guess that they acknowledged how prejudicial the comparison was. Well, sooner or later the truth leaked out, and there were very few Philadelphia murderers who got off free in our county.

BUCKS COUNTY,
showing the communities mentioned in the report

Bucks County is a rather large county about forty-three miles long by seventeen wide, lying roughly north and south and extending from the edge of Philadelphia at the south to the large industrial city of Easton at the north. Since it lies wholly along the right bank of the Delaware, it commands the loveliest stretches of that river’s valley, and all of us who grew up in Bucks County have always felt that the Delaware was our special river, for not only does it run along our eastern boundary, but when it has finished its north-south run, it turns abruptly westward to form our southern boundary, too, as if it were determined to tuck us comfortably into place.

This valley is a land of extraordinary beauty. Maple trees and oaks combine with evergreens to lend the forests real majesty. A hundred little streams wind through the meadows, and for a hundred thousand years it has been a resting place for birds in their hurried pursuit of the seasons. In the old days before the gasoline tractor it was a breadbasket for the city, its spacious farms yielding substantial crops of corn and wheat, but now its historic fields are manicured by gentlemen farmers from the surrounding cities.

Bucks County is replete with historic sites. From our hospitable shores General Washington crossed the Delaware
on Christmas night to attack the British encamped in New Jersey. Back and forth across our county he marched, so that we have many houses still standing of which one can truthfully say, “George Washington slept here.” Our old towns are filled with colonial remnants, and along our country roads are many farms that date back to the time of William Penn, our founding father. It seems only proper that we own one of the world’s principal historical museums, and experts come from many parts of the world to study here, for a sense of the past is very strong in Bucks County. Only this morning I was talking with Arthur Eastburn, crafty senior tactician for the Republicans and a man with an astonishing record of maintaining political control of his county, and he told me that he and his father between them had served as lawyers for ninety years, working out of the same office all that time. We are a historic county.

Yet we also have a
nouveau riche
aspect, and the natives despise it. In the 1920’s distinguished men and women from New York theatrical and publishing life discovered our magnificent farms, and for the next forty years one after another of the old places fell into alien hands. I was a boy at the time this invasion began and I can remember the bitterness with which we watched the outlanders arrive with their inflated bankrolls and their station wagons: George S. Kaufman, the playwright; S. J. Perelman, who thought he was funny; Pearl Buck, who wrote all those books about China; Oscar Hammerstein, who was mixed up with musical comedies; Moss Hart, who wrote and directed plays … we watched them all come and of each we suspected the worst.

But we were powerless to keep them out, for our farms were no longer productive, and in time Bucks County became world famous as a center for intellectual bohemianism, not that Kaufman, Perelman, Buck and Hammerstein ever engaged in any of it. They rather disappointed us by staying properly at home on their farms just as if they had been stuffy Bucks Countians all their lives. It was the hangers-on that made Bucks County, and especially the lovely old town of New Hope, notorious. The area was flooded with artists and writers and revolutionaries and people who never took baths. A disproportionate number of homosexuals arrived and people who read poetry aloud and who listened to high-fidelity music at all hours of the night. Our courthouse in Doylestown began to entertain some rather extraordinary cases, and we natives listened agog as things we had never heard of before unrolled before our judges, as such things sometimes will. A few years ago an outsider wrote a novel about us entitled
The Devil in Bucks County
, and all local patriots branded it scandalous, but there was some truth in it if you restricted its more lurid passages only to the New Hope area.

For one thing we were grateful. The strangers who flooded our county generally kept out of politics, so that although there was a natural animosity between the poor honest residents of the county and the rich debauched strangers who swept in—except that after a while it was the residents who were rich and the strangers who were broke—this animosity never expressed itself in political terms. The county remained Republican, and no man
could remember when it had ever voted for a Democratic President.

When I was a boy we took politics seriously. My first memory of a political campaign concerned the 1916 contest between Hughes and Wilson, which occurred when I was nine years old. I remember the joy with which my mother took me into the center of town that Tuesday night while the victorious Republicans paraded with torchlights and a long, horn-honking file of expensive automobiles. We trudged home content that Charles Evans Hughes would be a great President, and my mother explained how good life was going to be, now that the Democrat Wilson had been thrown out.

I also remember that awful Friday night of the same week when my mother, biting her lip to control her tears, hauled me back to the Intelligencer Building, where we stood in the shadows and watched the Democrats celebrate their belated victory. What a grubby lot of people they were, strangers for the most part who had come into town to jeer at the Republicans, who had held their parade prematurely. I remember my mother saying, “Never forget this night, James. Look at them. There isn’t a Buick in the lot.” Years later, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for the second time she went to bed sick for four days and told me she didn’t care if she ever got up.

It was about 1916 that Bucks County fell into the hands of one of the greatest party politicians of our time. Joseph R. Grundy was then a powerful textile-mill owner who lived in Bristol, the industrial center at the southern end of the county, and as a boy I always considered him
a man of better than national stature, for I once worked on one of his newspapers and I can remember how we stood at attention when Mr. Grundy stalked in to lay down the editorial line for the next month.