POLITICAL NOTES: On to the Cow Palace

Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall faced the television cameras, adjusted his glasses, and began reading a brief announcement. He stumbled over a familiar name, saying “Dwayt” instead of Dwight. Fortunately, someone kicked out the electric plug leading to the camera cable, and Hall had to start all over again. This time he got it right: the Republican Party has “the greatest leader of our times—Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Presumably to renominate that leader, the G.O.P. will meet for four days, beginning Aug. 20, 1956, in San Francisco’s 16,954-seat Cow Palace.*

The G.O.P. move came hard on the heels of a Democratic decision to convene again in Chicago, starting either on July 23 or Aug. 13, 1956. The August dates for both parties hinge on whether the election laws of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, South Dakota and Iowa, requiring early certification of presidential candidates, can be amended (all five states have indicated that the necessary changes will be made).

Both Chicago and Philadelphia bid for the Republican Convention and, like San Francisco, guaranteed $250,000 to the national committee. But the memory of Philadelphia’s sorry hotel accommodations at the 1948 convention lingered on, and Chicago could make no definite commitment to the G.O.P. as to the desired August date. Moreover, Republican leaders had little enthusiasm for the idea of renominating Ike in the hostile heartland of the Chicago Tribune’s isolationist brand of Republicanism.

It would be the first major national political convention in San Francisco since the Democrats nominated James M. Cox and Franklin Delano Roosevelt there in 1920. For years, some Republican leaders (notably Massachusetts’ Joe Martin) had promised that the G.O.P. would meet in the west, but never before had it ventured west of Kansas City. For the new kind of Republicanism being fostered by Dwight Eisenhower, Ikemen thought, a new convention site was highly appropriate.

In the expectation—and hope—that everything will go smoothly, with Ike accepting the nomination, the Republicans plan only one session a day, from 2 until 7 p.m. (5 to 10 p.m., E.S.T.). Since San Francisco offers some of the nation’s choicest restaurants, and topcoats-in-August temperatures ranging from 54° to 64°, the shift met with widespread approval. Exception: the television industry representatives, who say it will cost them $1,000,000 more than they would spend if both parties met in the same city.

* Its original name was the Livestock Pavilion of the No. 1-A District Agricultural Association. But a Depression-days newsman wrote bitterly: “While people are being evicted from their homes and are walking the streets, a palace for cows is being built in Visitacion Valley.” Cow Palace it has been, ever since.