Banker Prescott
| 🎩 | |
| Era | The Fifties |
|---|---|
| Age | 45-55 |
| Home | Greenwich, CT |
| Demographic | establishment, white, finance |
| Lean | business_conservative |
| Race | white |
Prescott is a commercial banker from Greenwich, Connecticut, part of the Eastern Republican establishment. This Wall Street wing took the party's 1952 nomination away from Robert Taft, and it expects the president to run the country with a banker's discipline.
Who they stand for
Prescott stands for the Eastern Republican establishment, a small bloc that chose the party's presidential nominee for a generation. This bloc backed Wendell Willkie in 1940, Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948, and Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, when supporters of Dewey and Henry Cabot Lodge defeated Taft's Midwestern supporters at the Chicago convention in a dispute over seating the Texas delegates. This bloc lived in the commuter towns of Connecticut and Westchester County, sat on the boards of New York banks, and belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. Greenwich itself sent one of its own, Prescott Bush, to the United States Senate in 1952. Its political beliefs centred on the Marshall Plan, NATO, reciprocal trade agreements, and the 1951 agreement that freed the Federal Reserve from Treasury control. Inside the Republican Party, its opponents were Taft's isolationist wing and Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom it eventually helped defeat during the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Senate censure vote of 1954. This bloc also accepted the New Deal. Eisenhower's Modern Republicanism, which extended Social Security in 1954 and balanced the federal budget in 1956, reflected its politics.
Playing to them
Prescott responds well to conventional economic policy. He wants a balanced budget, an independent Federal Reserve, lower tariffs, well-maintained alliances, and a cabinet drawn from established banks and law firms. He is willing to pay for defence spending and foreign aid because the alliances matter to him personally, and he tolerates the New Deal's popular measures because he has calculated that repealing them is not worth the cost. He does not forgive inflation, a budget deficit run for political popularity, an unfunded tax cut, or a president who lets the party's extreme elements set its tone. A president who flatters Senator McCarthy or the isolationist wing of the party loses his support, and a strike settled on the union's terms alarms him as much as a run on a bank would.
The sound-money policies that win Prescott's support lose the support of Cannery Carl, Cannery Rosa and Steel City Stan. Breaking with McCarthy to win his support loses the support of Minute Women Vivian and Texas Oil Tex. The free trade policy he wants loses the support of Farm Wife Edna, who still belongs to Taft's wing of the party.
Where they live
The five states where Banker Prescott makes up the largest share of the electorate in the fifties:
- Texas
- Oklahoma
- Florida
- Connecticut
- California