Larson, (Lewis) Arthur

(b. 4 July 1910 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; d. 27 March 1993 in Durham, North Carolina), law professor and presidential speechwriter best known as the chief theoretician of Eisenhower-era Republicanism.

Larson, who never used his first name, was the third of five children of Lewis Larson and Anna Bertia Huseboe, both of whom were second-generation Americans of Norwegian descent. Although the first generation of Larsons in South Dakota had been farmers, Larson’s father studied law and became a family court judge. His mother was a home-maker. As a result Larson grew up in a comfortable, middle-class milieu in which family life, the Lutheran Church, and the local Young Men’s Christian Association were the leading formative experiences. Larson’s parents were self-described “party of Lincoln Republicans,” though never very partisan ones. Larson matured into a tall, blond, handsome, and well-liked young man who distinguished himself in high school and at Augustana College in Sioux Falls as a champion debater. Larson lost only three debates in high school and college, once for the national championship and twice to teams led by an aspiring actress named Florence Newcomb, whom he married on 31 July 1935. They had two children.

Larson graduated from Sioux Falls High School in 1927 and from Augustana College with a B.A. degree in 1931. He then enrolled at the University of South Dakota Law School. During his first and only year there, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and continued his law studies for the next three years at Pembroke College, Oxford University. In addition to working toward a degree in jurisprudence at Oxford, he became very active in the university’s Political Union and was elected to two of its highest offices, librarian and treasurer. In the course of discussing and debating politics and public policy with other union members, Larson was exposed to the moderate conservatism or “middle way” later championed by such leading British conservatives as R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan. Larson earned a B.A. degree in jurisprudence with first class honors in 1935.

After returning home from England in 1935 Larson practiced law briefly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then became a legal academic at the University of Tennessee Law School and Cornell Law School, specializing in the areas of workers’ compensation and social insurance law more generally. His most important work in those fields was a two-volume treatise The Law of Workmen’s Compensation, which was first published in 1952 and immediately became the standard reference work on that subject. These interests and accomplishments led to his appointments as dean of the University of Pittsburgh Law School in 1953 and as undersecretary of labor in 1954. Larson first came to the attention of the general public in June 1956 when his book A Republican Looks at His Party was published. This work defines Eisenhower or “modern” Republicanism as a moderate conservatism that accepted with qualifications many New Deal public policies but sought to keep those policies and the growth of the government more generally within boundaries. The book was an instant success, in large part because President Dwight D. Eisenhower strongly endorsed it. Eisenhower immediately put Larson to work writing speeches for his successful reelection campaign that year.

Once the campaign was over Eisenhower appointed Larson the director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), where he was responsible for explaining to the other nations of the world what the United States stood for in the mid-1950s. In October 1958 at Eisenhower’s request, Larson moved to the White House staff to supervise speechwriting in the increasingly important area of arms control and disarmament, a field in which Larson remained active for many years. That work led directly to his appointment as head of the World Rule of Law Center at Duke University Law School. He joined that faculty in the fall of 1958 and remained there for the rest of his career.

Over the next decade Larson played a major role in the intense debate within the Republican Party about its future direction. In his 1959 book What We Are For, Larson argued that the party should stay on the centrist, modern Republican path. When the 1964 Republican National Convention rejected that advice and chose the more conservative senator Barry Goldwater as its presidential nominee, Larson endorsed and campaigned for Goldwater’s Democratic opponent Lyndon Johnson. Four years later Larson attracted heavy press attention when he published a book about the Eisenhower presidency, Eisenhower: The President Nobody Knew (1968), which revealed that Eisenhower had privately disagreed with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling in 1954. The book also disclosed Eisenhower’s privately expressed doubts about Richard Nixon’s leadership abilities, revelations that apparently cost Larson whatever chance he might have had to play an important part in Nixon’s administration. During the 1970s Larson faded steadily from public view. He died of heart failure on 27 March 1993 in Durham, North Carolina, and is buried there.

In his memoirs Larson wrote with characteristic clarity, “Modern Republicanism’s heyday was also mine.” One of the leading spokespersons for what he saw as the sensible center, Larson’s rise from and eventual return to obscurity reflected the Republican Party’s move toward the center during the 1950s and its rightward retreat from that position in the three decades that followed.

Larson’s papers are in the Eisenhower Presidential Library. See also his posthumously published memoir A Twentieth-Century Life (1997). With Lex K. Larson he wrote Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, 12 vols. (1952-1997). The Duke Law Journal contains “A Tribute to Arthur Larson” (1980): 385-415. An obituary is in the New York Times (1 Apr. 1993).

David L. Stebenne