William A. Rusher, the Buckley conservative who founded the Harvard Young Republican Club in 1947, values decorum. Rusher, now publisher of the National Review returns to Harvard every year to speak to today's Republican Club. Last year he said he was pleased to see all the males who had come to hear him without beards and with ties.

The Executive Committee of the Harvard Republican Club, which runs and almost is the club, is not quite so prissy and conservative as Rusher might wish. Room 167 of Memorial Hall basement, where the committee meets, has been entered on occasion by a bearded Republican. Problems like alcoholism and punishment for parietal breaking are not unknown in recent Executive Committee history.

Yet the Harvard Republicans themselves would generally concede, albeit a bit unwillingly, that they are less colorful than their more radical counterparts.

The Executive Committee attracts a particular type of person. Leslie A. Levis '67, one of the club's first Radcliffe members (the club merged with the Radcliffe Republican Club in the spring of 1966) said last year, "Executive Committee members all look like Midwesterners." A Jewish committee member from New York seems more like the Wyoming rancher Republican than other New Yorkers. And the president of the club, Jay B. Stephens '68, is an earnest Iowan.

These are not the sort of people who make headlines, at least not as undergraduates, and to most Harvard undergraduates the Republican Club seems lifeless because of the lack of excitement it generates. But the club is not unexciting to those who make it part of their Harvard career.

Stephens says, "Despite the appearance of listlessness from the outside, the intellectual vitality of the club has never been at a higher point." Executive Committee meetings are often the scene for lively debates on practical political problems. Stephens feels that the examination of political problems justifies the existence of a college Republican club.

But what Stephens calls "an opportunity for a student to examine his thoughts about political problems" is not used by most of the over 300 members of the Republican club. Dissension alone brings interest to a large club of this type. And dissension alone can cure the member apathy that plagues any college political organization, whether it be Democratic, Republican or the Radcliffe Government Organization. And now, there just doesn't seem to be anything left for the YR's to fight about.

A mock convention held last spring was heated enough to cause a walk-out of conservatives when Senator Charles Percy was nominated. But the conservatives who walked out were all from MIT and Holy Cross.

When Paul Wagler '69, then Operations Director of the club, ran last year for the chairmanship of Harvard Students for a Democratic Society and seriously said he felt he could serve both groups effectively, talk of censuring him faded away quickly. In the '50's such behavior would have been considered scandalous for a Republican.

"Appeasement"

The Executive Committee has become, in a short time, quite liberal. In 1960 HYRC members marched on Mount Auburn Street to protest what was termed Adlai Stevenson's "appeasement" in a speech he had delivered on the then-recent summit failure. It wouldn't happen today. HYRC ers are still more conservative politically than their Democratic counterparts but, in many cases, not much more. And there is nothing too exciting, nothing to generate member interest, in being fairly liberal at Harvard today.

But the Republican Club, in a livelier past, had something more to differentiate itself from the present club than a sharper conservative-liberal ideological split. It had a "machine."

For years the members of the Executive Committee have referred to a small group, consisting of the president and a few associates, as the "Machine." When March--and the annual club elections--neared the Machine's candidate for the coming year, who may have been picked when a freshman as a potential president, was generally opposed by another faction. The Machine almost invariably won, and then was violently opposed for the next year by the losers. The friction helped to animate the club.

Charles Scott '67, vice-president of the club last year and now a first year student at the Business School, thinks that the Machine is defunct today. He said, "It never recovered from Eric Van Salzen."

Von Salzen came to the presidency of the club in 1964, a bad year for Republicans. Goldwater is only partially to blame for the decline in the HYRC which began that year. The Republican Party may have recovered from the debacle of '64, but the club has not.