The author of the book discussed below wrote about the Republican member of Congress who seemed to most embody the liberal/moderate Republican who became the target of the more conservative members of the coalition.
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- Click here for the Wikipedia on Charles Whalen.
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In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and his conservative aide Patrick Buchanan believed they had discovered a winning Republican formula. A recent book, The Real Majority by Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg, had argued that the prototypical American voter was a forty-seven-year-old machinist’s wife from Dayton, Ohio. The authors believed that Democrats could sway this pivotal voter by emphasizing economic issues, but Nixon and Buchanan realized they could counterattack by playing up social issues on which Democrats were vulnerable, including welfare, busing, crime, student radicalism, and drug abuse. Nixon wrote that this new conservative strategy would be aimed “primarily at disaffected Democrats, and blue collar workers, and at working class ethnics. We should set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year old Dayton housewife.”
But who in fact was the politician who won the votes of that Dayton housewife? For most of the 1960s and ‘70s it was Congressman Charles W. Whalen, Jr., who was usually considered among the most liberal Republicans in the House. Whalen was perhaps the GOP’s most successful vote-getter, racking up margins of over 70% in most of his elections and running unopposed in 1974, despite running in a district with a two-to-one Democratic registration margin. He was counted among the best and most effective Congressmen in multiple surveys, and even his opponents respected his intelligence and integrity. His heterodox positions angered his local Republican organization, however, and raised the question of how much divergence from a conservative agenda the party ought to tolerate.
It was easy to make the case that the former businessman and economics professor was a liberal. As a member of the Ohio state legislature from 1954 to 1966, Whalen had been an outspoken supporter of civil rights and author of the state’s first fair housing law. From the time of his first Congressional victory in 1966, he became a thorn in the side of the GOP leadership, opposing the military draft and the Vietnam War that the party supported, and calling for a reordering of national priorities to address issues such as air and water pollution, education, urban decay, hunger and welfare. He opposed most new weapons systems, including the Nixon administration’s proposal for an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense. In 1971, he co-authored an amendment to the defense procurement bill that would have prohibited new funds being spent on military involvement in Indochina. The measure failed, but offered the first indication of significant House opposition to the Vietnam War. Whalen also made early and controversial calls to offer diplomatic recognition to Communist China and reestablish ties with Castro’s Cuba.
Whalen himself felt that his advocacy of civil rights, education, and the environment were well within the Republican progressive tradition. His social liberalism was also balanced by a deep and sincere fiscal conservatism. His early battles with the GOP leadership came because of his opposition to tariffs, and indeed he proposed a world free trade association that would have eliminated trade barriers entirely. His belief that government needed to address social problems set him apart from Ohio’s mainly rural conservatives, while his conviction that the cost of government services had to be kept low set him apart from liberals who didn’t really seem to believe that government services had to be paid for.
