Other Columns by Paul M. Weyrich
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MEMO TO FORMER SENATOR JACK DANFORTH:

When I joined the Young Republicans in the late 1950s, the senior party was controlled by the Country Clubbers. I came from the wrong side of the tracks. My family lived on the South side of Racine, Wisconsin, where Republicans were an almost non-existent commodity. In the precinct where my parents voted there were regularly six Republican votes cast. Two of those were from my mother and father. My father, a German immigrant to this country, as a first-time voter and a United States citizen, supported Democratic nominee Al Smith. He admitted to shedding a few tears when Smith was trounced by Herbert Hoover in 1928. In 1932 my father supported FDR. By 1936 Al Smith was disgusted with FDR and supported the Republican nominee, Alf Landon. So did my father. After he married my mother in 1939, neither of them ever cast another vote for the Democrats at the national level. In the explosive contest between General Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, my parents staunchly supported Taft.

The country clubbers who ran the local party were intrigued with me, given that my father tended the boiler at a Catholic hospital and we lived among a sea of Democrats. By the way, these same Democrats in my neighborhood were enthusiastic backers of Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI). Most neighbors were Catholic anti-communists who accepted McCarthy's claim that communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. I was treated well by the country clubbers because they wanted to say that young people like me were joining the GOP. That was an untrue lie. Until I recruited some of my classmates at St. Catherine's High School to join the Republicans I was the only one. While I was a useful ornament for the country clubbers to display, they were glad there were not lots more like me. They were not anxious to have the great unwashed as part of their organization. It was the same through the years when I became a reporter and covered politics and later when I started outside conservative groups, which were often allied with the GOP but never a part of the Republican Party.

When I would ask what the Republican Party stood for I always was told "limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defense." Not a word about traditional moral values was uttered. When I called Wisconsin State GOP Chairman Claude Jasper after the Supreme Court ruled against prayer in the schools and asked him, as a reporter, for a comment he said, "We don't get involved in such things." Removing my reporter's hat, I reminded him that I had been active in his party and wanted to understand why he would not comment. He replied, "The party never involves itself in religion." I responded, "Maybe so, but don't you understand it would be the right thing to do by telling voters you don't approve of what the Supreme Court has done." Jasper was not convinced.

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