Voter's Farmer

(See Cover)

That anchor and pride of Republicanism, the great and prosperous state of Pennsylvania, went Democratic--solidly, surprisingly, and in a way that seemed to shatter the pathetic remnants of its once proud and efficient state G.O.P. organization.

In as governor was Democrat George M. Leader, 36, a young man whom few outside of his home York County had ever heard of until eight months ago. On top of that, the state house of representatives went Democratic 111 to 99, and the state senate returned a bare Republican majority (27-23). Never before--not even when fun-loving George H. Earle rode the tidal crest of the New Deal wave in 1934 --had Democrats come so close to making a clean sweep in Harrisburg.

In the congressional elections, the clean sweep stopped: the national pull of Dwight Eisenhower and the local hold of some G.O.P. county organizations was too great. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania will send three additional Democrats to Washington in January, and the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania delegation will be a slim 16 to 14.

The Reasons. What happened? There were several explanations, none of them adequate, all of them providing slivers of truth. Most pundits and politicos settled on unemployment as the major factor in the Democratic sweep. The U.S. Labor Department lists eight counties in Pennsylvania where unemployment is in the critical range of 10% or more of the working population. Some 377,000 Pennsylvanians are jobless; 120,000 have exhausted their unemployment compensation ($30 a week for 26 weeks); uncounted thousands more are what George Leader calls "underemployed," i.e., working less than 40 hours a week. A week before Election Day, a riot broke out in Donaldson's Crossroads, ten miles south of Pittsburgh, when 1,500 men turned out for 40 highway laborers' jobs.

But unemployment was not the only factor in Pennsylvania; it was not even the deciding factor. In other states (e.g., Ohio and Indiana), where unemployment is serious, the Republicans held up well. And in Pennsylvania the Democrats would have won by 60,000 votes even without the big cities and the depressed coal areas.

A second factor was the unpopularity of Republican Governor John Fine's administration and a Pandora's box of contributing local issues. Added to this, the Republicans ran a poor campaign with an unfortunate candidate. Lieutenant Governor Lloyd Wood, a cigar-chomping politician. Wood had to carry all of the liabilities and secured none of the assets of the Republican organization's 100-year-old reputation. The evil that political machines do lives long after their effectiveness is gone.

Another factor was the recent and rapid Democratic upsurge in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1951 the Democrats won the Philadelphia mayoralty, interrupting 67 years of Republican rule at City Hall. In 1952 Adlai Stevenson took the city by 162,000 votes--an election freak that bewildered the experts and bothered the Republican National Committee. It should have jogged the Republicans of Pennsylvania out of their complacency, but it didn't.

Finally--and most importantly--the

Democrats waged a clean and vigorous fight, with an enormously appealing candidate. They called a truce to their own internal squabbles. And in George Michael Leader, the man nobody knew, they found a hot candidate.

Poppa Is All. Pennsylvania's governor-elect is a 6-ft, seventh-generation Pennsylvania Dutchman whose ancestors have been prosperous landowners and farmers in York County since the days of William Penn. His great-great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Leader, was in the first contingent of troops from west of the Hudson to join George Washington's Continental Army. George Michael, the third of seven children, was born on the nourishing farm of his father, Guy Leader, three miles south of York. As with most Pennsylvania Dutch families, Patriarch Guy dominated the family circle, and George still has a deep admiration and respect for his father.

Guy Leader, at 67, is a prosperous breeder of Black Angus cattle and prize poultry. "Leader Leghorns'' are justly famed in eastern Pennsylvania: the two top egg-laying hens at the Harrisburg state egg-laying contest in 1953 and 1954 came from the lush, 500-acre Leader Farms, and Leader Angus cattle have been Grand Champions in the last four Reading fairs. Like most Yorkmen, Guy Leader learned his trade early. "It became my job to assist my mother with her flock of chickens,'' he recalls, "caring for setting hens, making coops from store boxes for the cluck and her little brood when the chicks were hatched, seeing that they were fed and watered and that their heads were greased to kill the head lice when they appeared. At times, I assisted my mother in her efforts to remove tapeworms from their throats by the use of a hair from the tail of a horse. I might add that this last effort was not always successful. Occasionally, the patient died."

Along with poultry, Guy Leader developed a lifelong interest in politics, became a local Democratic leader (York County, resting on the Mason-Dixon line, has always been sympathetic to the Democratic Party). It was only natural that his seven children should consume large slabs of politics along with the eppel sas kuuche, schmierkaese and Lebanon baloney at their father's groaning dinner table. As a teenager, George chauffeured voters on Election Day, and while he was in college, he "worked the polls" for his sister-in-law's father, who was running for the York County Commission. (He won.) In 1946 George became county chairman ("I was the only one who could not talk his way out"), and in 1950, when his father retired from the state senate after a four-year term, George succeeded him. In Harrisburg he had a good record as a mender of factional splits, but after seven generations, George regarded himself as fundamentally a farmer. "I didn't look on politics as a career when I first got into it." he said last week, "and I still don't."

"You Are a Lutheran." George had been an alert student, frisked through eight grades at the local one-room school in six years, graduated from York High at 16. He wanted to go to Swarthmore, but father Leader vetoed that seat of Quakerism with five words: "No, you are a Lutheran."* So George obediently went off to nearby Gettysburg College, a small (1,200 students) institution affiliated with the Lutheran Church. In his senior year he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in order to study more political science, sociology and history. He graduated in 1939, and promptly married Mary Jane Strickler, a pretty, dark-haired local girl he had met at a Lutheran Sunday-school party.

In 1942 George went to the Wharton School of Finance, but left after one semester to enlist in the Navy. For three years (including ten months in the Pacific) Leader was a World War II supply officer. After the war he returned to York County and (with the help of a G.I. loan ) bought Willow Brook Farm, a 28-acre outfit with a tidy 80-year-old brick house and an operating hatchery just 15 miles from his birthplace. After a grinding first year, Willow Brook Farm paid off handsomely. Leader now sells more than 1,000,000 chicks and 60,000 broilers each year.

Mary Leader looks after the three young Leaders and takes care of Willow Brook's books, clattering out the accounts on her typewriter and balancing the books until midnight, most nights, while George relaxes in front of the TV set. (His favorite performers: Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar, Sam Levenson.)

The governor-elect reads history for relaxation, has no hobbies, and keeps his slim figure (6 ft., 164 lbs.) without resorting to athletics. He smokes big black cigars, and rarely drinks. (On election night in Harrisburg, while other Democrats were whooping it up, the candidate did not even indulge in a victory toast.)

Losing Constructively. George Leader's long leap from Willow Brook Farm to the Statehouse in Harrisburg could only happen in Pennsylvania politics. Last February, when the state's top Democrats met in Harrisburg to select a gubernatorial candidate, Leader was just an uninvited nonentity. On the face of it, the logical Democratic candidate was Philadelphia's District Attorney Richardson Dilworth, who had given John Fine a hard fight in the gubernatorial race of 1950. But Dilworth, and his friend, Philadelphia's Mayor Joseph Clark, were embroiled in a nasty intraparty battle over a new city charter with William Green Jr., chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic committee. Under the circumstances. Dick Dilworth felt that neither he nor any Democrat could win in 1954, so he took himself out of the running.

The meeting adjourned in some confusion, with no candidate clearly in mind. After much bickering, regrets and elimination, the name of State Senator Leader eventually bobbed to the surface. As a Yorkman, Leader belonged to neither the Gogs of Philadelphia nor Magogs of Pittsburgh. Clark and Dilworth admired Leader's liberal views; Boss Green decided he had discovered Leader; Pittsburgh's Mayor David Lawrence, who is also Democratic national committeeman, found him politically impeccable. Farmer Leader seemed an excellent choice to soften up the farm vote for a Democratic sweep in 1958. Thus, almost by default, George Leader was picked as a candidate. Everyone settled back with the complacent expectation that Leader would lose--everyone, that is, but the candidate.

Losing Complacently. In the Republican camp there was smugness of another sort. In a century of highly successful Republican bossdom, just two Democrats had tiptoed into the Statehouse. Since the 1938 debacle of George Earle* and his dazed administration, a succession of Old Guard Republicans had moved, like a procession of pelicans, into the governor's chair, led by Arthur James, whose conservatism extended to his high-button shoes. In 1946 it came the turn of James Duff, a bristle-thatched bird of another feather. Midway in his term, Duff led a coup d'etat against Boss Joe Grundy and his Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association. In 1950, what was left of Pennsylvania's Republican power was picked up by a group of county leaders called the Blue Bell Boys (because they held strategy dinners at the Blue Bell Inn, north of Philadelphia). The Blue Bell Boys sent Jim Duff off to the Senate and John Fine to Harrisburg.

Before long, Governor Fine developed a roaring case of political schizophrenia: sometimes he was a Duffman, sometimes he courted the P.M.A. By this year, he had retired, sulking, to his ivory tower in Harrisburg. Meanwhile, the P.M.A. was not what it used to be; Joe Grundy, 91, had retired after half a century of politics, and his successor, G. Mason Owlett, did not have the master's touch. When Owlett, the Blue Bell Boys and the other

G.O.P. leaders met at Hershey (where even the famed rose gardens are permeated with eau de chocolat), Wood seemed the "logical" candidate, mainly because he was lieutenant governor. By the time the brandy and cigars were ordered in Hershey, everything was in eppel sas kuuche order.

Lloyd Wood was presented as a "harmony" candidate, agreeable to all factions of Pennsylvania Republicans, from Duff to Owlett. But he had no organization, no campaign director, and the guidance he got from the headless group of bosses was conflicting and shifting. At first he was to be dignified, and act like a statesman. Later in the campaign, he was ordered to attack the Democrats. In the end, he was to be constructive. When Wood invaded Pittsburgh, where Dave Lawrence's unpopular wage tax was a sitting duck, Wood ignored Lawrence, overlooked the burning issue. When Leader challenged him to a debate on the issues, Wood, who is also a farmer, responded with a challenge to a plowing contest. Leader replied that he would plow if Wood would debate. Wood dropped the whole thing. The G.O.P. gave Wood plenty of money (about $2,000,000), and much of this was used for TV, on which Wood made a poor impression.

They Finally Came to Dinner. The Democrats, on the other hand, ran a flawless campaign--but not until Candidate Leader had been tirelessly beating the hustings on his own for months. The Democratic awakening can be measured in terms of one $100-a-plate dinner in Harrisburg, with Adlai Stevenson as the featured speaker. The dinner was first scheduled in April, but when local Democrats sold precisely seven tickets, it was hurriedly postponed. In June it was rescheduled, and sales soared more than 300%--to 22 tickets. Again the dinner was put off. In September--after the professionals moved in behind Candidate Leader and the campaign gathered momentum--the dinner finally came off. The Democrats brought in 2,914 paid-up diners, the evening was a howling success, and the party suddenly realized, to its surprise, that Leader was going down the stretch ears pricked.

In the interim, between the second and third invitations to the Stevenson dinner, the Democratic bigwigs suddenly realized that now was the time for the party to come to the aid of a good man. The bosses rallied around Leader. Millionaire Matt McCloskey, a flint-eyed Philadelphia contractor who was largely responsible for the factional fight that broke up the Earle administration, agreed to serve as financial chairman. Dave Lawrence produced Joseph Barr to mastermind campaign strategy. A renegade pressagent from the P.M.A. was hired to lacerate and torment his former bosses.

Belatedly, the Republican hares realized what was happening. In his father's grey Chrysler, Tortoise Leader piled up 30,000 miles of campaigning, mostly in the Pennsylvania midlands (he spent a total of three days in Philadelphia, two in Pittsburgh during the campaign). He shook 100,000 outstretched hands and nourished a king-size callus on his palm to prove it. In the farm districts, Farmer Leader was a sensation. In the anthracite counties, lighting the issue of unemployment, he burned like a blue flame. "How many unemployed here?" he would ask his audience. "Raise your hands." And sometimes 90% of his listeners held their hands up. With the Fine administration's bumbling as a target, he sacked ancient Republican citadels like Lehigh County (Allentown) and Fine's own Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre). In the bedroom counties around Philadelphia, normally heavily Republican, Wood looked too much like a professional politician; Leader looked "sincere."

"One for John." On Election Day, complacent Republicans were still claiming victory by 30,000 votes--and complacent political reporters were believing them. When the overwhelming returns were in, the Republicans were stunned and Leader was awed. After his victory statement, a photographer asked him to go over to G.O.P. headquarters for a picture with Candidate Wood. Leader demurred. Said he: "I wouldn't want him walking in on me if I'd been beaten."

For the Republicans, the debacle was complete. Duff's luster was tarnished (he was so confident that Wood was a winner that he did not come back from a European junket until two weeks before election). The P.M.A. was outmoded.

Governor-elect Leader faces a multitude of problems, mainly economic. His Democrats could fatten themselves on the state's 58,000 patronage jobs (biggest of any state), but he still has to face mounting unemployment in the coal regions. He has to find the more than $1 billion needed to run the government in Harrisburg (without a state income tax) and at the same time to kill Governor Fine's sales tax. (Clerks in Pennsylvania stores, collecting tax pennies, say, "And one for John".) He has to deal with mounting discontent among his fellow farmers. If he is to survive politically, he will have to deal with the bosses of his own party. The old pros had decided Leader was naive; each one had reason to believe Leader was his man. In the end, they might discover that Governor Leader is his own man.

This week George and Mary Leader set out on a well-earned vacation in Guy Leader's durable Chrysler. They didn't know where they were going-- they might get as far as Florida. They didn't know how long they would be gone-- they hoped it might be two weeks. All they knew was that they were going to drive very carefully and very slowly.

*George's mother's people are Dunkards, a trine-immersion (three-dip baptism) religious sect that frowns on such sinful adornments as buttons and neckties. *After his four-year fling at Pennsylvania politics, Millionaire Earle served briefly as U.S. Minister to Bulgaria, engaged in a well-publicized brawl with a Nazi officer in a Sofia cafe. In 1948 he turned Republican for a while. This year he "withdrew his support" from the Republicans because of what Secretary Wilson said about the unemployed, but Earle refused to come out for the Democratic Party "until it takes a stronger stand against Communism."

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