During the Roosevelt years, he liked to say—and he most definitely was not joking—that he had kept the Republican party alive. By the Republican party he did not mean the party of Dewey and Willkie and Cabot Lodge, he meant the old Republican party—one rooted in small Midwestern towns, one that was antilabor, conservative on all fiscal matters, wary of government intervention in any public matter, and one that did not see the world as becoming more dangerous. His opposition was expressed not only on the editorial page but in every aspect of the paper.
