On July 2, 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was drafted by the the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to be the party’s candidate for President of the United States. No one expected Stevenson to win the election; the Democrats were down in the polls and the Republican candidate for President was Dwight David Eisenhower, an authentic war hero who was liked and admired by people in both parties. Stevenson himself would later say that running against Eisenhower was like running against the ketsup on the kitchen table.
Stevenson was known to be articulate, but no one quite expected that his campaign for the presidency, hopeless as it was, would turn out to be a classic performance — a model of eloquence, wisdom, and courage that made even so hostile a critic as William. F. Buckley call it “a paradigm against which all future political campaigns should be conjugated.” In this post I will try to describe the special qualities of Stevenson’s 1952 campaign for the presidency, and how it elevated Stevenson to leadership of the Democratic Party for the rest of the decade.
And for a certain type of idealistic Democrat, Stevenson would always be a political saint — an attitude that as gently mocked in the comic strip Doonesbury:
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Stevenson became his party’s nominee in a roundabout way. When the Democratic National Convention opened, none of the declared candidates had enough delegates pledged to him to win the nomination on the first ballot. Stevenson himself was not seeking the nomination; he was running for re-election as Governor of Illinois.
The convention, then, would not be able to nominate a candidate before the second or third ballot, when most delegates would be freed from their instructions and able to vote for the candidates of their personal choice. But none of the declared candidates had broad support among the delegates.
This was the situation when Stevenson, as governor of the state hosting the convention, was invited to deliver a welcoming address. He told the delegates:
Here on the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West we can see a long way in all directions. We look to east, to west, to north and to south. Our commerce, our ideas, come and go in all directions. Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, no iron conformity. We want only the faith and conviction that triumph in free and fair contest.
Stevenson’s eloquence impressed the delegates, and even the least attentive among them must have realized that Stevenson was here criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy and the spirit of fear and suspicion that McCarthy had introduced into American life two years earlier, when he began his campaign to expose alleged Communists and Communist sympathizers in the State Department and other branches of the government.
A draft Stevenson movement took shape among the delegates, with the support of President Truman and the party bosses who liked Stevenson because he was a proven vote getter, having been elected Governor of Illinois by the largest margin in state history, because he had been an effective governor, and because he was reliably middle-of-the-road on most issues. They persuaded Stevenson to allow his name to be placed in nomination, and they persuaded one of the other candidates, Averill Herriman, to drop out. That left only three candidates: Estes Kefauver, a flamboyant populist who wore a coonskin cap when campaigning, John Sparkman, an affable segregationist, and Stevenson. Stevenson was nominated on the third ballot.
Stevenson had twenty four hours to produce an acceptance speech. He had never used speech writers, and did not do so now, although he asked several friends and advisors for comments on his first draft. The speech that he wrote would be the best that he wrote for the campaign, and one of the most famous speeches in American political history.
Stevenson began by explaining why he had not sought the nomination that he now accepted:
I would not seek your nomination for the Presidency, because the burdens of that office stagger the imagination. Its potential for good or evil, now and in the years of our lives, smothers exultation and converts vanity to prayer.
This explanation proved controversial. Some people welcomed it as a sign that at last someone asking to be made president understood how much harm a president — a mere mortal — might do with the godlike powers of the office. Other people thought it showed that Stevenson was altogether too sensitive to be president.
He moved on to the most famous passage in the speech:
The ordeal of the twentieth century, the bloodiest, most turbulent era of the whole Christian age, is far from over. Sacrifice, patience, understanding, and implacable purpose may be our lot of years to come. Let’s face it. Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that there — that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man — war, poverty, and tyranny — and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each.
One might admire the force of Stevenson’s rhetoric and still wonder whether it was good politics to warn the public that it would be having to undertake “a long patent costly struggle” of any sort; this was the public that had just engaged in a long patient costly struggle against depression and war. But Stevenson had decided not to wonder about such things.
When Stevenson came to the end of his speech, Eric Sevareid, who was covering the convention for CBS News, turned to a colleague and asked, “How are we going to report on a candidate who writes better than we do?”
The speech made an immediate impression on the public. Many of the country’s writers, artists, and scholars embraced Stevenson’s candidacy enthusiastially; John Steinbeck wrote a glowing preface for a paperback volume of Stevenson’s writings; celebrities such as Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland began to show up at Stevenson rallies.
During the subsequent campaign, Stevenson spoke often about employment, taxation, inflation and the other bread-and-butter issues that decide elections. But McCarthyism — and the hyper-patriotism that it was fostering — was never far from his thoughts, and he criticized it often. He made his most pointed criticism of strident patriotism in front of an audience that he did not expect to hear gladly what he had to say gladly, the annual convention of the American Legion. He said:
We talk a great deal about patriotism. What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power — to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all mankind; a patriotism that puts country ahead of self; a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. The dedication of a lifetime — these are words that are easy to utter, but this is a mighty assignment. For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.”
Stevenson also accused the Republicans of tolerating McCarthyism as a cheap formula for political success. He was in fact nearly alone in his criticisms of McCarthy at this time; it was two years before Edward R. Murrow would broadcast his famous editorial denouncing McCarthy, and two years before the venerable Boston lawyer Joseph Welch would ask McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?” during the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings.
On the day before the election, he addressed a group of supporters with these elegant but prescient words:
Looking back, I am content. Win or lose, I have told you the truth as I see it. I have said what I meant and meant what I said. I have not done as well as I should have liked to have done, but I have done my best, frankly and forthrightly. No man can do more, and you are entitled to no less.
On election day, Eisenhower received over 55% of the vote and carried 39 of the 48 states. He even carried liberal, elitist Massachusetts — by over 100,000 votes. Stevenson received only 44% of the vote and carried only 9 states — all of them traditionally Democratic southern or border states.
When the official results had been reported, Stevenson told a group of supporters in Springfield, Illinois:
Someone asked me, as I came in down on the street, how I felt. I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. That he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.
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Then something happened that is almost against the political laws of gravity. After leading his party to electoral catastrophe, Stevenson was embraced by it and would remain its recognized leader and voice for the rest of the decade. He was constantly in demand as speaker or writer about the issues of the day; he sought and easily won his party’s 1956 presidential nomination. Stevenson’s public career was not over.
In his run at the presidency in 1956, Stevenson questioned the new practice of using paid advertising in political campaigns. It degraded the political process to market candidates or platforms as if they were soap, Stevenson objected. And where were candidates to get the money to pay for the advertising, if not from wealthy donors with an interest in legislation that the candidates might be able to stop or shape? Stevenson foresaw the establishment of our current system of legalized bribery conducted under the aegis of the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.
He also proposed that the United States place a moratorium on its testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, until such time as the United Stated and the Soviet Union could agree upon a treaty that permanently banned atmospheric testing by either country. Vice-president Nixon called the proposal “catastrophic nonsense”. But growing public concern over increasing amount of strontium-90 in the air, the water, and the food chain kept the idea alive in government circles, and in 1963 President Kennedy signed a Partial Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union that incoporated the main points of Stevenson’s proposal. It may be that the main tangible legacy of the wittiest, most eloquent politician of the twentieth century is that our breakfast cereal is less radioactive than it would have been, had he not spoken out against radioactive breakfast cereal.
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What accounts for Adlai Stevenson’s hold on the loyalties of so many Democrats for so many years? He wasn’t a champion of liberal causes such as civil rights for African Americans or the rights of other abused groups. Unlike his friend Eleanor Roosevelt, he never sought direct acquaintance with the poor in order to understand their suffering. He wasn’t at all what today is called a “progressive.”
And in some ways, he set a bad example for following generations of Democrats — indulging in wit tainted with snobbery. Reflecting on his loss to Eisenhower in 1952, he said, “The people have spoken. As for their wisdom, well, Coca Cola still outsells champaign.” When Eisenhower becaame president in 1953, Stevenson said “The New Dealers have been replaced by the car dealers.” When asked whether it bothered him that the popular preacher Norman Vincent Peale had endorsed Eisenhower for president, he said “Not at all. I find the Apostle Paul appealing but Peale appalling.” Great wit, but bad politics.
But these are among the venial sins of politics. I would guess that Stevenson’s admirers perceived him to be a deeply rooted man — rooted in an America that was simpler, more idealistic, more sure of itself and therefore less self-righteous than America found itself to be at mid-twentieth century. More than most politicians, he looked to the past for guidance and support — in particular, to the role his family had played in our country’s history. His grandftather Adlai Stevenson I served as vice-president of the United States during Grover Cleveland’s first adminisration — which historians regard as an oasis of good government in the almost bottomless miasma of the Gilded Age. And on his mother’s side of the family was a great-grandfather, Jesse Fell, who was both a close friend and political advisor of Abraham Lincoln — the one of Lincoln’s advisors, it is said, who never asked Lincoln for anything in return for his services.
The phrase “human dignity” occurs in crucial contexts Adlai Stevenson’s speeches. This simple idea — that every human being possesses a dignity that others ought to consider inviolable — was the central tenet of his political philosophy. His concern for the dignity of others explains his contempt for Joseph McCarthy — the violator of dignity of others — and his distaste for Richard Nixon — who was always willing to surrender his own dignity to advance his political career. And it may explain why, although his was roughly handled by democracy, he never lost faith in the democratic ideals that were espoused and vindicated by his political hero, Abraham Lincoln.
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