U.S. Affairs: We Shall Triumph Again

The Democrats were resolved to make this a businesslike, no-nonsense sort of convention, and on the first day they succeeded. The first session started half an hour behind schedule (despite a promise that sessions would begin only 15 minutes late), but things moved ahead snappily.

The assembly felt its first political thrill when Governor Adlai Stevenson made his brisk speech. Next speaker was Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois. Instead of generalities, which are customary for a convention’s first day, Douglas chose to speak on a very specific issue, and one that was obviously worrying the Democrats: Korea.

To his prepared text, onetime Professor Douglas appended a page of footnotes, and from time to time he referred to a large map of Asia behind him. But it was an all-out political speech, a more or less skillful attempt to whitewash the Administration’s Asia policy.

Douglas cited the standard reasons why it would be dangerous to do anything beyond what the U.S. is doing now in Korea: “We would inevitably kill Chinese women & children by … bombing [beyond the Yalu], and the Communists would use this fact as a powerful propaganda weapon.”

The speech showed signs of the wishful thinking which has characterized the State Department’s policy. Joe Stalin might die soon (“If it should please the Lord to take him from us, we would be resigned to his loss”), and then everything would be better.

As for the Administration’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Korea in 1949, and Dean Acheson’s 1950 statement that the U.S. could not guarantee Korea against attack, Douglas quoted a Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum suggesting that the U.S. could well use its Korea-based troops elsewhere. “Now who do you suppose was the Chief of Staff of the Army when this military advice was given?” asked Douglas, theatrically cupping his ears and leaning over the rostrum, as if to listen for an answer. “It was Dwight D. Eisenhower!” And who did the delegates think made the U.S. proposal before the U.N. to withdraw the troops from Korea? Again the ear business, again the triumphant answer: “John Foster Dulles!”*

The delegates seemed bored by Douglas’ speech, milled through the aisles saying hello to friends, or read newspapers.

Make Believe? It was the same hall, now familiar to millions of TViewers, but the Democratic stage designers had done their best to make it look different. The picture of Lincoln had disappeared; there was Harry Truman now, in the august company of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson and F.D.R. Behind the speaker’s stand loomed a new staircase. “When our people make an entrance,” said one official, “they’ll make an entrance—they won’t sneak up a side stairway.”

Again TV’s glassy, curious stare was everywhere. The Democrats were determined to avoid some of the Republicans’ TV mistakes. Two cameras had been set up above the floor’s center aisle, permitting front views of the speaker on the rostrum. “The Democrats,” said one of the Democrats’ TV bosses, “will hit the American people in the eye.”

The band had been moved from the far end of the hall to the platform, so that the chairman could keep it under better control. “We don’t want anybody playing Make Believe the way they did when Eisenhower was nominated,” said a wary Democrat. Delegates were warned that lip readers watching TV sets might be able to catch their whispers.

Two weeks ago in the Hilton, at almost any hour of day or night, one might have run into a brass band, a fire siren or a bush-league opera soprano straining for high C, but this time the hoopla was relatively restrained.

What the Democrats lacked in noise they made up in quantity: they had so many candidates that almost every telephone booth was somebody’s headquarters. Many were bewildered by bright blue “India for Veep” ribbons; they had not been worrying about the Bengal vote. (The ribbons meant that Mrs. India Edwards wanted to be Vice President.)

The Keynote. At the Monday evening session, Massachusetts’ Governor Paul Dever (rhymes with never) made the keynote speech. It was, in its way, a classic—the kind of old-fashioned political speech, as simple as a morality play, in which the forces of good (led by Archangels Wilson, F.D.R. and Truman) meet the forces of darkness, and thwart their plot to form atomic monopolies and maltreat widows and orphans.

“Our opponents,” cried Dever, “brought forth in this building a shopworn declaration, conceived in malice and dedicated to the proposition that all the great achievements of the last 20 years should be swept away.” As for the Republican nomination: “Was it a conflict over policies and philosophies? Was it an effort to replace the Old Guard with the new?” Not at all, said Dever. “This was a battle between the stalwarts and the opportunists. An ungrateful crew threw overboard the faithful pilot . . . and placed at their head one whose knowledge of navigation was confined to other waters . . .” Eisenhower, said Dever, did his best work under Democratic Presidents, and otherwise is “entirely uninformed.”

Dever sweepingly claimed Democratic credit for the defeat of the Kaiser, Hitler and (somewhat prematurely) Stalin, and blamed all the U.S.’s foreign policy troubles on 1) the Republicans, and 2) “Russian perfidy.”

He painted an artistic word picture of the Depression, crammed with all the old phantoms: apple sellers stood disconsolately around street corners, the bonus marchers once more tried to storm Washington, mean-eyed sheriffs foreclosed mortgages across the land. In the background there was a steady rain of statistics showing that everybody, including business, was infinitely better off than in 1932. “Suppose,” Dever cried, “the dinosaurs of political thought came into power! . . . Suppose these rugged individualists abandoned the farmer to the ravages of uncontrolled free enterprise, and the toiler to the mercies of the sweatshop of former days.”

Corruption? Governor Dever did not hesitate to mention corruption—briefly. Cried he, hurling the statistic of the year: “The Democratic Party pays tribute to the 99.84% of federal employees whose character is above suspicion.

“Let them form their battalions, captained by the lords of the press, the oil tycoons of Houston, and the moneychangers of Wall Street,” he cried. “Let them ride to battle in their motors, forgetful of the day when there was no chicken and there was no pot …” He wound up with a tinny imitation of Tory Winston Churchill’s Dunkirk pledge: “We shall fight them in the cities and fight them in the towns. We shall fight in the counties and fight in the precincts. We shall never surrender . . . We have triumphed before. We shall triumph again.”

*Actually, Eisenhower and the other chiefs merely gave a military answer to a military problem, were not asked for and did not give overall strategic or political opinions. Dulles merely acted on instructions from the State Department.