Republicans shun their own
By John Marshall
On the eve of Labor Day, we examine a frayed root of Republican history in Kansas, how the party junked a large part of its “base” and shrunk its foundation.
Kansas sees itself as a Republican state, if one that has preferred Democrats for governor, including the latest, Laura Kelly, elected in 2018. Since 1966, there have been 16 elections for governor, and Democrats have won ten. Since 2002, five elections, three won by Democrats. It’s been said at times that Republicans were the Democrats’ best friends; while Republicans fought each other, Democrats were busy collecting votes.
The party’s troubles rekindled in 1956 with the first election of a Democratic governor in 20 years – the result of a bitter and vindictive GOP primary race between incumbent Gov. Fred Hall and challenger Warren Shaw, a Topeka businessman.
Hall accused Shaw of, among other things, taking kickbacks on state gasoline purchases and implied that another governor, Ed Arn, had looked the other way. Shaw lashed Hall, denouncing the allegations as a “plain, unvarnished, unmitigated lie,” and said the governor was “a desperate little man.” That and more went on for weeks.
George Docking, a Lawrence Democrat who had lost to Hall two years earlier, looked on with amusement. Shaw’s primary victory had been Pyrrhic, sapping both party and candidate. Docking won the general election by 95,000 votes.
Until the late 1950s, the Republican party had been organized labor’s party, the partnership a powerful force in state and national elections. Republicans had been the party of reform in Kansas and in Washington; they worked with progressive Democrats to establish a Federal Trade Commission, minimum wages for men and women, the prohibition of child labor, antitrust laws, an eight-hour workday, worker compensation laws and more.
In Kansas, Republicans were for school hot lunches, statewide polio immunization, new reservoirs for flood control and recreation. They sought, with Democrats, more paved roads, construction of the Turnpike, aid to schools, county health clinics and hospitals, help for the poor, the elderly.
Then things soured. On the ballot in 1958 was a right-to-work constitutional amendment that sparked savage controversy. The measure would prohibit anyone from being denied work for membership or non-membership in a labor union. It also outlawed the union shop in Kansas.
In his campaign for re-election, Docking avoided clear commitment on the issue because Republicans had been so fanatical about it. The less he said about the matter (privately, he supported it), the more money Republicans would spend to get the amendment passed, and the less his Republican opponent, Clyde Reed, would be able to raise as a result.
Besides robbing Reed of Republican party energy and money, right-to-work had capped a four-year Republican effort to drive labor out of the Republican camp. A majority of labor union members had been Republicans until the late 1940s and early 1950s, and were native Kansans most likely to be Republicans.
But big business, which ran the Republican party, was not satisfied and the right-wing, right-to-workers sought to control the party. Labor had nowhere to go but to the Democrats. The issue of right-to-work would give the Democrats thousands of new dollars and voters.
In 1958, organized labor began the expensive, back-breaking precinct work to help its cause and voted Democratic as it never had before. Docking won reelection by more than 100,000 votes. It was the first time Kansas reelected a Democrat governor, and the first time in 24 years Kansas elected three Democratic (of six, then) congressmen.
Labor alone hadn’t elected the governor, but along with labor, Democrats kept much of the Republican vote they had earned in 1956. And more people voted a straight Democratic ticket than ever before.
This change was cumulative, with gradual Democratic gains all over Kansas. Republicans failed to see the trends. They were disillusioned with Fred Hall, disgruntled with moderates among them and determined to defeat labor. In throwing them all out, they had lost two elections, and organized labor for good.
Today Republicans again turn away moderates. The party holds blind allegiance to far-right think tanks and political action committees, its worship of Trump. It habitually rejects expertise on nearly everything, starting with medical science in a pandemic, climate change, the economy, the immigration crisis, and more. The party folds inward, inciting its narrow ranks to wear ignorance and anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. The party bows to Trump, to his authoritarian contempt for truth.
Republicans and Democrats had once believed that government, wherever necessary, should be an agency of human welfare. The difference was in how to achieve this.
The party that once cast off labor now discards and condemns the temperate. The Republican pattern, its fratricidal lunging and careening, continues into its seventh decade. How will it play out this year?
