Campaign stop has familiar ring

By Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier

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We hear a lot these days about how the country is so divided politically.

Words like “polarization,” “gridlock,” super-heated rhetoric and an us-versus-them attitude seem to be the order of the day.

Candidates throw out barbs known as “red meat” to motivate their followers.

Amid all that gamesmanship, people in the middle wonder what's happened to the country, whether democracy works and if anything of substance will ever be accomplished again.

Relax. Political rhetoric has always been part and parcel of American politics.

A case in point is The Courier's own coverage of a presidential visit to Waterloo 60 years ago. It bears many parallels to President Barack Obama's campaign stop here last week.

On Oct. 29, 1952, an estimated 10,000 people turned out to hear President Harry Truman speak in Waterloo. It was covered by The Courier's Bill Severin.

Truman spoke from the back of a train on a whistle-stop tour. But this was not his legendary comeback re-election win of 1948. The president, embroiled in the Korean War and lambasted for, among other things, his dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was hardly the most popular man in America. He had decided not to seek re-election. But he was still, true to his nickname, “Give `Em Hell Harry,” doing just that to the Republican establishment.

He said if the “reactionary Republican Old Guard” was put in place it would result in World War III, which he said U.S. and U.N. forces there were trying to prevent by containing the Korean conflict. He also blasted congressional Republicans for opposing farm price supports (a minimum $1.60 bushel for corn) and for passing the Taft-Hartley Act, which he said threatened the gains of organized labor.

As was the case with Obama's visit, a Republican “truth squad” of Midwestern senators shadowing Truman on his tour, labeled his charges “silly,” “poor arithmetic,” and said his speech was “disjointed and inaccurate as usual.”

Local politicos also lined up on either side of the fence. Among the local Democrats riding on Truman's train from Manly to Waterloo were developer Max Guernsey and attorney Ed Gallagher. Among locals joining the Republican “truth squad” were attorney W. Louis Beecher and Congressman H.R. Gross.

Truman apparently took no direct jabs at Republican presidential nominee Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, but did have a barb for Ike's running mate, Richard Nixon.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Are you going to talk any more about Nixon?” Truman replied, “No, I'm only talking about the issues. I don't go down to lower levels.”

Plenty of rhetoric to go around. Yet, in the long view of history, the republic survived. In fact, Truman and Eisenhower are considered two of our greatest post-World War II presidents. They stood for civil rights and forged a foreign policy which, consistently followed, led to the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

This year's election rhetoric, too, shall pass, and our republic will endure.