The Four Parties

As professor of political science at Williams College, erstwhile Washington bureaucrat, sympathetic biographer of F.D.R. and J.F.K., and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress from Massachusetts, James MacGregor Burns has a lot of ideas about politics. Among other things, Liberal Burns is a strong believer in the notion that the President of the U.S. should firmly lead the Congress--and that is the central theme of his latest book, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four Party Politics in America.

Burns is pretty unhappy about present-day politics. Says he: "As a nation we have lost control of our politics." The U.S. has "a government by fits and starts, a statecraft that has not been able to supply the steady leadership and power necessary for the conduct of our affairs. We have reacted to change rather than dominated it." Why is this so? The Burns thesis: "The pattern of national politics is essentially a four-party pattern. The Democratic and Republican parties are each divided into congressional and presidential structures, with all the elements that comprise the American type of party."

More Than Wings. Burns devotes nearly two-thirds of his book to tracing the historical development of this four-party pattern. He writes, "The congressional Democrats began as the Madison party in Congress and the presidential [Democratic] party was founded and built by Jefferson. The symbolic founder of the Republican presidential party was Abraham Lincoln; the congressional [Republican] party had its origin in the opposition to Pierce and Buchanan on the Hill during the 1850s and with the congressional Republicans who went on to fight Lincoln during the Civil War and to dominate Reconstruction.

"Today these four parties are as intact as ever: the Roosevelt-Truman-Stevenson-Kennedy presidential Democrats; the Willkie-Dewey-Eisenhower-Rockefeller presidential Republicans; the John Garner-Howard Smith-Harry Byrd-John McClellan congressional Democrats; and the Allen Treadway*-Robert Taft-Charles Halleck congressional Republicans."

These are not mere party wings, claims Burns; their differences are institutional and ideological. The power fulcrum of the presidential parties is the national convention, where they dominate rank-and-file delegates. "The Robert Tafts and the Lyndon Johnsons usually do not win at Chicago or Philadelphia." The Electoral College compels the presidential parties to "cater to the urban masses and their liberal dogmas." For leadership, they draw from the ranks of big-city lawyers, Eastern financial executives, academicians (Republican examples: Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, John Foster Dulles, Douglas Dillon). These parties are generally internationalist, favor activist government, are concerned with broad "way-of-life" issues.

The congressional parties, on the other hand, use their control of legislative machinery to block the presidential parties. They draw their leadership from the small towns, concentrate mainly on bread-and-butter economic issues. Many Congressmen are from districts with little competition (Burns contends that a mere 125 of the 435 House districts are even reasonably competitive), gain powerful seniority advantages over Congressmen from swing districts who ideologically incline toward the presidential parties. Among Democrats cited by Burns as presidential party members: New York's Emanuel Celler, Rhode Island's John Fogarty, California's Chet Holifield; among Republicans: New Jersey's Senator Clifford Case and New York's Senator Jacob Javits. John Kennedy, says Burns, shifted to the presidential party while still in the Senate.

Tantalizing Question. The resulting deadlock, writes Burns, can and should be broken--by helping the presidential parties swallow their congressional counterparts. To bring this about, he urges elimination of the seniority system in Congress, reapportionment of gerrymandered districts,/- uniform election laws for the Senate, House and presidency, mass dues-paying memberships for the parties. "It is better that a lot of people give a little money than that a few give a lot."

The rewards for such reorganization of the parties, Burns argues, would be immense. "The great task of the presidential party is to forge a new majority organized down to the wards and precincts, towns and villages and effective in Congress as well as in the executive branch. Whether this task will be accomplished by the presidential Democrats under John F. Kennedy, or by the presidential Republicans under someone like Rockefeller, is one of the tantalizing questions of the future."

Tantalizing it certainly is. But is it realistic? After all, one of Burns's favorites, Franklin Roosevelt, tried hard to swallow up the Democratic congressional party--and got bloodied up in the attempt.

*Treadway was a conservative Republican from western Massachusetts mountain country who served 32 years in the House of Representatives (1913-44), 25 of them on the Ways and Means Committee. Burns cites him as an example of congressional Republicans from noncompetitive districts, similar to many Southern Democrats. /-Columnist Roscoe Drummond contends that present malapportionment works to the disadvantage of Republicans: Republican candidates for the House won 48% of the nationwide congressional vote in November but captured only 40% of the seats. The G.O.P., he claims, won one seat for every 137,000 of its votes, the Democrats one for each 100,000 of theirs.

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