At great length Taft argued that the higher defense appropriations Roosevelt was seeking should lead to the end of both Keynesianism (New Deal economists "are confident that a people can spend itself into prosperity") and New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration. Thus Taft was tying the war to domestic politics in a way that today's Republicans have also carped at Democrats for sometimes doing. Finally, there were shades of renegade Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind. (who, angered at the administration's secrecy, has threatened the Bush White House with "war"), when Taft called for a congressional investigation into whether Cordell Hull, FDR's secretary of state, had informed Secretary of the Navy Franklin Knox of the contents of his famous Nov. 26 note to the Japanese. The note contained conditions that Hull knew the Japanese would never accept, and the suspicion was rife among Republicans that Hull, and Roosevelt, actually wanted the Navy to be ambushed at Pearl Harbor to stoke war fever among the populace. "Perhaps the fault at Hawaii," Taft said, "was not entirely on the admirals and generals." Mr. Republican, that Dec. 19, minced few words.

And his fellow Republicans got the message. According to historian Richard Darilek in "A Loyal Opposition in Time of War" (1976), Republicans entered 1942 ready to fight the administration head-on. Wendell Wilkie, the party's nominal leader, was an interventionist, but in a bid to placate the GOP's isolationist wing he appointed an America Firster named Clarence Boddington Kelland head of public relations for the Republican National Committee. On Jan. 8, Kelland delivered a speech in Salt Lake City on the importance of robust partisanship. Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Flynn countered by cautioning against the election of a hostile Congress. New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, who would run against FDR in 1944, warned of the existence within the administration of "an American Cliveden set ... scheming to end the war short of military victory" ("Cliveden set," a reference to the Astor estate in Britain that served as a salon for government ministers, was synonymous with "appeasers"). By the time of the Republican Lincoln Day dinners -- mid-February, just two months after Pearl Harbor -- politics in Washington, Darilek writes, were more or less back to normal.

Two points need to be made about Taft's speech. The first is that he was exactly right to make it. Who can possibly argue with Justice Holmes' statement, the one Taft quoted, that "we do not lose our right to condemn either men or measures because the country is at war"? Well, we know who can, but certainly the vast majority of the American public understands such a right to be a nonnegotiable principle of democracy.

The second is that it's virtually impossible to imagine a Democrat delivering a similar talk these last months without being labeled a traitor. Republicans have decreed that anything but blind support is beyond the pale, and the major media, in their coverage, have largely absorbed the idea that to criticize Bush on foreign policy is to flirt with signing the death warrants of American soldiers. This makes for a stark, and distressing, contrast with Roosevelt's time.

Taft's speech hardly caused a ripple. If the New York Times covered it at all, it did so in a small enough way to escape my notice as I looked through newspapers from that time. The Washington Post did mention the speech, but only at the tail end of a larger story that was mostly about Hull. In the American political system that existed then, Taft's right to speak his mind on policy was a given, and no high-ranking Roosevelt official launched a major public attack.

But imagine the frenzied spasms of today's Republicans and media if Tom Daschle had emulated Taft: asserting the right to dissent, hinting that Democrats might hold the administration's domestic policy hostage to bipartisan agreement on war aims, and calling -- on Sept. 23! -- for an investigation into why our intelligence agencies didn't know Sept. 11 was coming.

No historical analogy is exact, and some things were true then that aren't now, and vice versa. But the real difference between then and now, of course, is that today's hard right has made an art form of demonizing those who disagree with it and turning legitimate, necessary dissent into insurrectionist treachery. The next time they try that, Democrats should remind Republicans of a time when their own party, and one of their supposed heroes, thought differently.

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