I have been watching one of my favorite movies lately: "Thirteen Days" with Kevin Costner. My favorite part is Stevenson's exchange with the Soviet Ambassador at the United Nations. Speaking of Stevenson, let's see how his campaign against Taft is going.
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Stevenson versus Taft
With Chicago behind them, the two Parties entered the fall campaign with a difference of 180-degrees. The Democrats were united behind their ticket while the Republicans were sharply divided on theirs. Having resigned his Army commission so he could legally run for office, Eisenhower became an active participant in Taft’s campaign. He stumped for his one-time rival across the country, proudly appearing alongside him in campaign stops. Not appearing on the campaign trail was the President. Furious with the results, Dewey refused to contribute to Taft’s election in any way. Instead, he stayed home during the entire campaign. Likewise, Eisenhower’s supporters felt that Taft had stolen the nomination and therefore rejected Ike’s pleas to forgive and forget. To them, Mr. Republican carried a “fowl” stench with him that could be neither forgiven nor forgotten.
It wasn’t just voter apathy hurting Taft on the campaign trail; his own personality hamstrung him. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, Taft wasn’t a great communicating charmer who could easily connect with people. Unlike Wendell Willkie, he wasn’t a folksy and easygoing person whom people could sit down and have a beer with. Instead, Taft was heavily detail-oriented, self-absorbed, and possessed an icy demeanor. He wasn’t somebody a person on the street could easily warm up to. Stevenson, on the other hand, had the advantage in the personality department and exploited it. Reporters traveling with him found the Democrat endearing; indeed, even those who worked for Republican newspapers ardently wanted him to win. Millions of Americans became captivated by the Governor’s charm, wit, grace, and his belief that
“we must look forward to great tomorrows.”
He was also someone who could take a joke…such as the time photographer William M. Gallagher snapped a photo of a hole in the sole of one of Stevenson’s shoes. People reacted with amusement that a Presidential candidate was walking around with a hole in his shoe (the photograph itself would earn Gallagher the Pulitzer Prize).
The first election to take place in the second half of the Twentieth Century, 1952 forever changed the way Presidential campaigns are conducted. The railroad, long the transportation of choice for candidates to get around, began to be replaced by the airplane. Stevenson became the first Presidential nominee to rely heavily on air travel in conducting his tours of the country. The other way elections were changed forever was the introduction of television political ads to target a much wider audience without straining effort on the part of the candidates. These ads, which we take for granted today, emerged in 1952 as the result of television pushing radio out of the way as the major medium. The first generation of ads popped up during popular programs like “I Love Lucy” (starring Lucille Ball and her real-life husband Desi Arnaz). Taft’s ads were a reflection of his Conservative beliefs. In a series of ads titled “Taft Answers America”, he explained to skeptical questioners how abandoning the liberal programs introduced during the last two decades would actually benefit America. To drive home the point, these ads were filmed in places that related to the subject matter. For instance, Taft addressed a farmer’s concern while sitting next to a cow.
Stevenson, on the other hand, loathed the idea of ads:
“I think the American people will be shocked by such contempt for their intelligence. This isn’t Ivory Soap versus Palmolive.”
The ads his campaign team did produce were crude by today’s standards. Oftentimes, the ads were nothing more than simple cartoons; among them, a college professor explaining the two different ways to pronounce Stevenson’s first name. Occasionally, there were humans involved – such as a woman singing about why “I Love the Gov”. Unlike Taft, Stevenson never appeared in his own ads. Instead, he focused his television efforts on half-hour speeches. The idea was to take advantage of Stevenson’s oratorical skills and to educate the audience on the issues of the day. The problem was that these live speeches, like the ads, were poorly produced. Rehearsals were inadequate, preventing Stevenson from learning the fine art of time management. He frequently went past his thirty-minute limit, causing the networks to cut him off while he was still talking. It didn’t help either that he suffered from a lack of speaking pace – which caused his speeches to be inconsistent in their deliveries. If inept television handling was a crime, Stevenson would be in jail without parole.
As for the campaigns themselves, they reflected the demeanor of the two men. Stevenson’s strategy was to spend August and September educating the American people of where he stood on the issues; then he would shift over to attacking Taft in October and November. Taft’s strategy was to go on the attack from the get-go, crusading against the evils of liberalism and internationalism. He made no distinctions between Democrats and Republicans, casting himself in the role of America’s savior from the policies of Roosevelt, Willkie, and Dewey. After listening to Taft (accompanied by the Vice President) speak to a crowd in Ohio, a commentator noted:
“Sometimes, Senator Taft sounds more like a third-party candidate than as the Republican nominee.”
Fueled by his hard-core Conservative principles, Taft never strayed from his main campaign points:
-Repealing the Dewey Doctrine of sending anti-Communist aid to other countries
-Withdrawing the United States from NATO
-Reducing Cold War tensions and enhancing diplomatic talks with the Soviet Union
-Stepping up the elimination of domestic Communism
-Dismantling the remainder of the New Deal programs and replacing Left-wing economic policies with Right-wing economic policies
While Taft was busy giving the Liberal-wing of the G.O.P. reasons not to support him, Stevenson stuck to his strategy of educating voters. With a small group of speechwriters – headed by an articulate thirty-four-year-old historian from Ohio named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. – working for him, the Governor spoke thoughtfully on a wide range of domestic and international issues. He paid particularly close attention to dissatisfied Republicans, urging them to vote for him instead of staying home on Election Day in protest
“of the betrayal of Progressive values by radicals who seek to turn the clock back to the dark days of breadlines and closed banks.”
Stevenson’s eloquent speeches were thorough in their content; they were also easy targets of ridicule for Republicans who did support Taft. Stewart Alsop, one such supporter who was the Yale-graduated newspaper columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, labeled Stevenson an
“egghead” for delivering speeches he thought were too honed, too smooth, and too intellectual for the general audience to consume. In other words, the Governor was
“talking over the heads of the people.”
Good-humored, Stevenson took the “egghead” nickname in stride, joking in one speech:
“Eggheads of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks!”
Egg-headed it might have been, but Stevenson’s strategy appeared to be working as the campaign wore on. Throughout August and September, his lead over Taft in the polls steadily grew. By the beginning of October, the Democratic candidate commanded a respectable lead over the Republican candidate. It was at this time that Stevenson switched gears and began to attack Taft directly. He deliberately avoided mentioning Taft by name, referring to him instead as
“the Senator from Ohio”.
He pointed to the
“two-headed elephant” which was the Liberal-Conservative divide within the G.O.P., calling it
“low comedy” and warning that four more years of it would be a
“tragedy” for the nation. He criticized Taft’s crusade against liberalism:
“For it seems to me that an authentic humility, an awareness of the complexity of men’s choices, a tolerance for diverse opinions, and recognition of the need for brave experimentation are the heart of any liberal faith.”
He defended Social Security and other Progressive programs, comparing Taft’s proposal to dismantle them to
“wanting to do away with light bulbs and the automobile.”
He scornfully attacked his opponent’s proposals to cut the defense budget and reduce foreign aid:
“Strength is the road to peace. Weakness is the road to war.”
Furthermore, Stevenson warned, the election of Taft would be the same thing as giving President Herbert Hoover a second term in 1932 during the dark days of the Great Depression.
However, what really caused the sparks to fly between the two candidates was the issue of Communism. Taft alleged that the Democratic Party consisted of
“Left-wing Socialists” who were
“harboring” Communists within their party. In return, Stevenson accused the Republicans of using the Communist witch hunt for mere political gain and blasted Taft for warmly embracing Senator McCarthy and other
“fear mongers who are exploiting the Red Scare instead of curing it.”
In the final month of the campaign, McCarthy himself became a major issue. The Wisconsin Senator was campaigning actively for Taft, who in turn was supporting McCarthy’s re-election bid. Friends in the Senate, the two men shared the belief that Communists were in firm control of the Democratic Party. Not only did McCarthy repeat his baseless accusations of Democrats being Red, his colorful rhetoric warned that
“a vote for Stevenson is a vote for Stalin!”
Stevenson, of course, greatly resented McCarthy’s tactics, calling him
“a sick man” for recklessly trashing the opposition. He also hated the fact that anyone who stood up to McCarthy was immediately labeled a
“Communist sympathizer” by the Wisconsin Senator. In response, the Governor accused Taft of
“stooping to the level of a sick man who believes that anyone who questions him in any way is automatically a Communist sympathizer. The American people, of course, should have the right to ask questions without the fear of being called a ‘traitor’ merely for doing so.
Does anyone have true freedom of speech when not only his views but his very character and reputation are to be subjected to ugly, twisted, demagogic distortions by others that neither educates nor elevates?”
Encouraged by his fellow Republicans to keep up the attacks, McCarthy then declared that the Democratic Party was plotting to hand the Federal Government over to Moscow. This sensational charge proved to be the final straw. Fed up with the fear mongering coming out of the Taft Camp, highly-respected Democrats joined forces to issue a strongly-worded rebuke. It was written by Senate Majority Whip Harry S. Truman of Missouri (who himself was on the campaign trail seeking a fourth term). The rebuke lived up to Truman’s “Give Them Hell” reputation, slamming the G.O.P. for employing McCarthyism as a campaign strategy:
“This is the first time in our experience that we have ever heard of a Senator trying to discredit an entire party as being nothing more than servants of another country. This type of behavior isn’t done by honest public officials. Senator McCarthy’s attacks is not only not true and an insolent approach to a situation that should be worked out by freethinking Americans, but it shows conclusively that Senator McCarthy is not even fit to have a hand in the operation of the Government of the United States.
We are very sure that the people of Wisconsin are extremely sorry that they are represented by a person who has as little sense of responsibility as Senator McCarthy has.”
Remembered today as the “Truman Letter”, it was distributed across the country during the last days of October. It helped trigger a McCarthy-backlash, as many people became turned off by the Senator’s politically-motivated tirades. Not surprisingly, Taft felt the sting of the backlash when his poll numbers dropped heading into the home stretch. Vice-versa, Stevenson’s lead in the polls swelled into double-digits. Thanks to the McCarthy backlash, the Dewey-Taft Feud, growing public weariness towards the Republican Party in general after nearly twelve years in power, and Taft’s hardcore Conservative campaigning, all signs pointed to a Stevenson landslide. On the eve of Election Day, the only thing the experts couldn’t agree on was how big the landslide would be. To help them make educated guesses, giant computers were brought in to make various calculations.
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The next update: the results (even though it's obvious who is going to win this election).
), Eisenhower, a moderate consensus-building Republican. Since its this world... Stevenson has won me over if only because Taft had to stoop so low in his attacks. Out of curiosity, any good books on Stevenson you can recommend? My knowledge of him, his politics, etc. is a bit lacking despite me knowing/having read quite a bit about Truman.
