Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Yet, there is no evidence that Stevenson’s intellect was anything but an asset during his two campaigns. And while Stevenson was twice defeated for the presidency, Americans have since elected presidents who have been a Rhodes Scholar (Clinton), studied nuclear physics (Carter), and won the Pulitzer Prize (Kennedy). All of these presidents were Democrats, however, so perhaps Stevenson did set “the tone for a new era of Democratic politics” well before the “Camelot” presidency of John Kennedy. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that it was Stevenson who “made JFK possible.” And it was Stevenson’s inspirational and high-minded tone, which predates the rhetoric of Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” that subsequent Democratic nominees from JFK to Barack Obama have emulated.

  To contrast themselves against this supposed Democratic elitism, Republican candidates, even if descended from prominent families and holding Ivy League degrees, have aggressively promoted themselves as having middlebrow tastes, much as Eisenhower and Nixon did in their campaigns against Stevenson. President George H. W. Bush, an alumnus of Yale, insisted his favorite snack was pork rinds. His son, President George W. Bush, with degrees from both Yale and Harvard, stated that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. Former Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan insisted his favorite recreation was clearing brush at his ranch located near Santa Barbara, California.

  In turn, Democrats have charged since 1952 that the Republicans have become extreme in their anti-intellectualism, despising experts of all stripes, and espousing a governing philosophy that represents, in a phrase used by former vice president Al Gore, an “assault on reason.” So ingrained did this perceived difference in the two parties’ intellectual appeals become that one political writer declared that by 2010, American elections were a battle over “who’s stupid, and who’s a snob.” Eloquence was also under assault, as Obama’s rhetoric, inspirational to many, was dismissed as a “platitude” by his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, and “vaporous” by conservative columnist David Brooks.

  The debate over whether intelligence and eloquence are assets or liabilities for a political candidate seems to date back to Stevenson, when the question was acknowledged as a “strange, recurring sub-issue” during his 1952 campaign. Those who could be described as intellectuals did embrace Stevenson “with a readiness and a unanimity that seems without parallel in American history,” according to historian Richard Hofstadter. So closely did intellectuals identify with Stevenson, Hofstadter added, that they questioned whether his defeat by the bland Eisenhower and the mawkish Nixon represented a rejection of “American intellectuals and of intellect itself.”

  The excitement Stevenson stirred among intellectuals was so pronounced that it caught the attention of the conservative columnist Stewart Alsop, who is credited with adding the word “egghead” to the English lexicon. The origin of the term began with an argument Alsop had with his brother, John, a Republican official in Connecticut, in which he asserted that “while Stevenson was appealing and appealed strongly to people’s minds, Eisenhower, as a man and as a figure, was appealing far more strongly to far more people’s emotions.” Alsop said his brother then began imagining what a typical intellectual supporter of Stevenson looked like and envisioned someone with a smooth, balding head, like the candidate himself, and said, “Sure, all the eggheads are for Stevenson, but how many eggheads are there?”

  Alsop used the word in his column, it stuck, and Republicans pounced on it as a pejorative that they hoped would feed into the perception that Stevenson was removed from the concerns of the average voter. Novelist Louis Bromfield, writing in the conservative publication the Freeman, said a future dictionary would define “egghead” as someone of “spurious intellectual pretensions . . . supercilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men.” Further, an egghead was likely to be a “doctrinaire” socialist and “self-conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same place.”

  One of the several ironies of the attacks made by Bromfield and other conservatives on Stevenson’s intellectual supporters is that they were occurring at the very time that conservatives were seeking to validate an intellectual tradition of their own. Stung by barbs from academics like Lionel Trilling that there were no conservative ideas worthy of serious consideration, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, which argued that there was, in fact, a coherent conservative intellectual tradition dating to the English philosopher Edmund Burke. Two years after Kirk’s book was published, William F. Buckley founded the National Review as a journal for conservative intellectuals—who presumably did not see themselves as eggheads.

  Stevenson professed to be baffled by the word “egghead,” joking after the 1952 campaign that it must have been meant to describe “the more intelligensiac members of that lunatic fringe who thought I was going to win.” He did not seem to know exactly how to address the unprecedented accusation that he was too smart for the average American voter. He tried to deflect the issue with humor and silly puns. “Eggheads of the world, unite!” he once exclaimed. “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” At other times Stevenson’s humor was more biting. In remarks made a few weeks after his 1952 loss, Stevenson said of the voters, “As to their wisdom, well, Coca-Cola still outsells champagne.” Four years later, during his second losing campaign, a woman shouted to Stevenson, “Governor, all the thinking people are for you!” To which Stevenson offered the immediate riposte, “Yes, madam, but I need a majority to win!”

  Conservative critics like Barone tut-tut that “it is unthinkable that Franklin Roosevelt would ever have said those things, or that such thoughts would ever have crossed his mind.” Roosevelt, despite his Ivy League education and patrician background, delighted in affecting middle class airs, with his “fireside chats” and serving hot dogs to the King and Queen of England when they visited his home. Stevenson preferred the finer things in life, including champagne, and he also seemed a stark contrast to the Democrat still in the White House, Harry Truman, who was widely read but never attended college.

  It is easy to accuse Barone and Stevenson’s other critics of simply not appreciating Stevenson’s postmodern sense of humor. Yet, while Stevenson made jokes about his intellect, there were, in fact, serious discussions within his campaign about whether his intelligence was a handicap. At a strategy meeting late in the 1952 campaign, Stevenson supporter and New York governor Averill Harriman opined that the great problem with the campaign was “that the thinking minority had been convinced but that [Stevenson] had made very little inroad on the unthinking majority.” Advisors bemoaned that Stevenson had the ability to persuade those who used reason to make their choice but that he could not excite the multitudes that, they presumed, based their choice on an emotional response. Ike, it was acknowledged, was better at that.

  Later in the campaign, longtime CBS newsman Eric Sevareid set aside his professional objectivity and wrote a detailed confidential memorandum to the Stevenson campaign, outlining the problems faced by a candidate who preferred to appeal to voters’ reason rather than their emotions:

  In his almost painful honesty, he [Stevenson] . . . has been analyzing, not asserting; he has been projecting, not an image of the big, competent father, or brother, but of the moral and intellectual proctor, the gadfly called conscience. In so doing he has revealed an integrity rare in American politics, a luminosity of intelligence unmatched on the political scene today; he has caught the imagination of intellectuals, of all those who are really informed; he has excited the passions of the mind; he has not excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, nor, among these, has he created a feeling of Trust, of Authority, of Certainty that he knows where he is going and what must be done.

  Harriman’s and Sevareid’s analyses project the very condescension criticized by Barone and Will, a sense that Stevenson wa
s simply “too good” for the majority of the people whom he sought to lead. Stevenson, himself, would have vigorously disagreed.

  Throughout the 1952 campaign, there was a great deal of worry that Stevenson was “talking over the heads of the American people.” Of course, no one would admit that Stevenson was talking over their heads; they were simply worried about their dimmer neighbor down the street. The journalist Richard Rovere said he overheard a bus driver, whom he felt fit the very definition of the common man, telling some passengers, “I don’t suppose the average fellow’s going to catch on to what he’s saying. But I’m telling you, this is just what I’ve been waiting for.”

  Stevenson, showing more humility than many of his supporters, insisted he had spoken over the heads of the people only once during the campaign—when his train was parked on a trestle and he addressed an audience below. But there is no doubt that Stevenson’s speeches were different from those heard during most campaigns before or since.

  In most campaigns, at least those that aim to win, the candidate develops a formulaic stump speech and then maintains the discipline to give that speech over and over, never deviating from the central message, in the hope that repetition will work as well for them as it does for a commercial product. But Stevenson refused to be sold like “a box of corn flakes” and insisted on giving a unique address at virtually every opportunity. So intent was he on capturing just the right sentiment that he would order his airplane to circle the landing strip near a campaign rally while he struggled to find just the right phrase or word for the speech he would give to the waiting crowd.

  Stevenson himself was a fine writer, extremely sensitive to anyone taking credit for the content of his speeches. He was immeasurably helped, however, by a campaign staff that included four speechwriters who either had won or would win the Pulitzer Prize, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith. And if Stevenson needed further assistance in word-smithing, he could turn to other advisors such as the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Archibald MacLeish, theologians Henry Emerson Fosdick and Reinhold Niebuhr, diplomats George Ball and George Kennan, or the British expatriate journalist (and future host of public television’s Masterpiece Theater) Alistair Cooke.

  Perhaps no other campaign in history could boast such an array of intellectual firepower. It is not surprising then that Stevenson is the only presidential candidate in memory whose campaign speeches were bound together as a best-selling book—twice! The first edition came during the 1952 campaign, when publication of such addresses was a common campaign practice. But these and other Stevenson speeches were repackaged a full year after the campaign had ended and once again the collection became a best seller.

  Among Stevenson’s readers was the novelist and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, who wrote the foreword to the first book of speeches and said he could never recall reading a political speech for “pleasure” until Stevenson came along. It was solely the power of Stevenson’s speeches, he said, that convinced Steinbeck to switch his allegiance from Eisenhower to Stevenson. “As a man, I like his intelligent, humorous, logical, civilized mind,” he said. Steinbeck also expressed amazement that the Republicans or anyone else would suggest Stevenson’s speeches were too cerebral. Said the author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, “I can understand them and I don’t think I am more intelligent than the so-called ‘people.’”

  Stevenson sealed his nomination with an eloquent speech before the Democratic National Convention in 1952, just as a future Illinois politician named Obama would evoke the Stevenson tone at another national convention more than fifty years later.

  Having won a landslide victory to become governor of Illinois in 1948, Stevenson seemed a logical candidate for president in 1952 once Truman announced he would not seek re-election. Truman himself actively recruited Stevenson, seeing qualities that he hoped might make voters overlook all the problems of his administration and keep the Democrats in power. “Adlai,” Truman said, “if a knucklehead like me can be president and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

  Stevenson, however, angered Truman and disappointed admirers by resisting calls to become an active candidate. He preferred, he said, to serve a second term as governor of Illinois. (He also thought he would have a better chance at the presidency in 1956.) But in a bit of serendipity that had also benefited the first Illinoisan who was a candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, the 1952 convention was held in Chicago. Because Stevenson was the host state’s governor, he was charged with giving a welcoming speech to the Democratic delegates. This pro forma task on the first day of a convention is usually a sparsely attended affair, but delegates knew Stevenson’s reputation for oratory and the Chicago Amphitheater was packed.

  “Here, my friends,” Stevenson told them, “on the prairies of Illinois and of the Middle West, we can see a long way in all directions. . . . Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and to aspirations. We want none; we want not shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid pattern of thought, and no iron conformity. We want only the faith and conviction that triumph in free and fair contest.”

  Twenty-seven times Stevenson’s brief address was interrupted by wild applause, even for sentiments that would not seem to be obvious crowd pleasers, such as, “What America needs and the world wants is not bombast, abuse, and double talk, but a somber message of firm faith and confidence. St. Francis said, ‘Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor worry.’ That might well be our text.”

  Stevenson’s was a new style of political oratory that was learned and poignant. Rapt delegates began to believe that they had found the miracle candidate who could overcome the unpopularity of the Truman presidency and maintain the Democrats’ twenty-year hold on the White House. Two days later, even though he had actively discouraged the modest draft movement that had been afoot, Stevenson was nominated for president. Because he had not entered a primary, he had no campaign organization in place. He had to start from scratch.

  In his acceptance speech, Stevenson famously promised to “talk sense to the American people.” He would later complain that most politicians treated American citizens as “fourteen-year-olds.” His acceptance speech did not. He was trying to fulfill his pledge to “tell them the truth”:

  Let’s tell them the victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity. For it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and mistrust, which do not fall before the trumpets’ blast, or the politicians’ imprecations, or even a general’s baton. They are, my friends, walls that must be directly stormed by the hosts of courage, of morality, and of vision, standing shoulder to shoulder, unafraid of ugly truth, contemptuous of lies, half truths, circuses, demagoguery . . .

  It was a sterling beginning to what Stevenson hoped would be a campaign conducted upon a high plane. His speech was marred by a gaucherie when Stevenson compared his own deep reluctance to accept the nomination with Christ’s prayer at Gethsemane: “If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.” Upon hearing Stevenson utter what many Christians would consider a sacrilege, Eisenhower turned off his television set and said, “After hearing that, fellows, I think he is a bigger faker than all the rest of them.”

  Ike was a rare skeptic that day, however. Liberal columnist Mary McGrory, then a young book reviewer at the Washington Star, said Stevenson’s acceptance speech was “politically speaking . . . the Christmas morning of our lives.”

  Before Stevenson’s campaigns, intellectualism had not been considered the province of any single political party, and the very phrase “anti-intellectualism” was hardly heard. Certainly, America had seen debates between those who claimed to represent the common people against an economic elite, and this sometimes took on cultural overtones, such as this bit of doggerel from the 1828 presidential
campaign, which said the contest was between:

  John Quincy Adams who can write

  And Andrew Jackson who can fight.

  But learned men who did not mind being known as learned men could be found in either party, though to the degree there was a cultural elite in America before World War II that disdained popular culture, it was identified with wealthy, conservative Republicans, not liberal Democratic college professors and writers.

  Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard man and the author of serious works of history, attracted the support of numerous intellectuals as a Republican, but then so did Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a professor of political economy who first gained national attention as president of Princeton University. Franklin Roosevelt was celebrated for his “brain trust” of bright young men who came to shape and guide the New Deal, although FDR himself was notoriously charged by Oliver Wendell Holmes with having “a second class intellect.” And Roosevelt’s Republican opponents—Herbert Hoover, Wendell Willkie, and Thomas Dewey—were hardly anti-intellectuals. For that matter, neither was Eisenhower.

  Ike may have lacked Stevenson’s irony, but he was a shrewd and extremely intelligent man who had, as Supreme Allied Commander, successfully managed such egos as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George Patton, and Bernard Montgomery in leading the Allies to victory in Europe. After the war, he had briefly served as president of Columbia University, and his wartime memoir, Crusade in Europe, which he wrote without help from a ghostwriter, is considered among the finest in the genre.