Brass Tacks

What with a home-town World Series for the first time in a quarter-century, New England's attention for the next week will be focussed on box scores and line totals. But, once the gloves are oiled for the last time and the goal posts go up in Fenway Park, Massachusetts can devote itself to the biennial autumnal pastime: Politics.

Bay Staters take their politics the way they take their beans. The old-fashioned way is best, and that proposition is one that candidates never argue. Massachusetts' constitution dates back 150 years, has been reworked by several conventions, and now carries over seventy amendments on the original skeleton. The state is not a state at all, but a "Commonwealth," and the Legislature officially is the "General Court."

For understanding how elections go, the Massachusetts long ballot is perhaps most significant of all. The columnar arrangement so common in other states has never been used, a fact which means that the voter cannot cast a straight party ticket by making a single mark. He must indicate his choice separately for each office; in Presidential years, that task can be onerous even for the most enlightened patriots.

This system can and does lead to peculiar elections. Personal loyalty can keep a man in office despite the most sweeping landslides, as in the case of the venerable Frederick W. Cook, Republican, who has been Secretary of State perennially since 1921. Or loyalty can propel a man into office when nearly every other name on the party slate is snowed under. Exactly that happened in 1936, when young Henry Cabot Lodge steamrollered one James M. Curley in the Senatorial race while the New Deal was winning 46 states and almost every other Commonwealth office on the ballot.

Similar paradoxes occur repeatedly. The long ballot and a neat system of gerrymandering have resulted in unbroken GOP control of the General Court and the Congressional delegations for twenty years or more. Yet Massachusetts' electoral votes have not been in the Republican column since the Coolidge-Davis race of 1924. Democratic governors won easily from 1920 through 1936, but never had an Executive Council they could call their own.

Through it all, the larger cities in the state remain Democratic. The metropolitan machines, like Curley's in Boston, return a vote as solid as Mississippi's, with methods considerably more subtle. Some urban Congressional districts haven't gone Republican since the turn of the century; others couldn't go Democratic without either electoral revolution or mass migration.

Two inevitable results follow from the peculiarities of Bay State vote-getting. With such wide-spread hardening of the political arteries, the parties have been forced to find a modus vivendi. The patronage gets divvied up on a "love thy neighbor" basis, and campaign oratory frequently resembles nothing so much as Tweedledum denouncing Tweedledee.

In the second place, elections are so easily swung by the floating vote that candidates will employ extreme measures to capture the loyalty of the independent voter. Some speeches this fall will sound like mud-slinging more violent than accurate; others will make you think that the world will explode if whoosis doesn't become the next whatsis. Don't let the fireworks frighten you; as the sociologists would say, they arise from the way the situation is defined. T. S. B.