National Affairs: Voices Over Illinois

Like the cry of Stentor, a voice arose last week over the noise of rush-hour traffic at Chicago’s Archer and Western Avenues. “It was Henry Ford who made the automobile,” it thundered, “but it was the Democratic Party that gave you the social system which enabled you to buy the cars.” While Chicagoans headed home for dinner, the voice continued to sound. When traffic began to thin out, a powder-blue Ford station wagon with four loudspeaker horns on its roof wheeled off from Archer and Western and headed across town.

In the car sat Senator Paul Douglas, Chicago Attorney Frank J. McAdams and a man named Joe who did the driving and kept the sound equipment working. Loyal Fair Dealer Douglas, not up for election himself, was campaigning hell-for-leather for his colleague, Senator Scott Lucas. To all good Democrats, the carefully creased, weary-looking Lucas was more than just another candidate. As majority leader of the Senate, he was a symbol of Democratic power. Republican ex-Congressman Everett Dirksen, who was trying to unseat him, had a good chance of doing just that. Scott Lucas had to be saved.

Two Men, Two Arms. On Lucas’ behalf, Douglas and McAdams were using the same tactics they had used to get Douglas elected in 1948. Ever since 1942, when both tried unsuccessfully to buck the Kelly-Nash machine, “Spike” McAdams, a onetime professional bantamweight boxer, had been the devoted sidekick of ex-Professor Douglas. Like Douglas, who lost the use of his left arm while fighting with the Marines on Okinawa, McAdams, now a successful attorney, had lost his in action with the Navy at Leyte. Their 1948 technique had been to scour the state in a jeep, stopping at factories, filling stations, street corners, starting at 7 a.m. and carrying on until midnight; they traveled 40,000 miles to deliver 1,100 Douglas orations.

Last week, to the amplified tune of Goodnight, Irene, the blue station wagon blared its way around Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides. At the giant Crane Co., Douglas shook hands with a group of independent union workers picketing the plant. He ate lunch with the firemen of Hook & Ladder Truck 41, to whom he admitted that he was feeling pretty stiff and sore. He had slipped and fallen that morning taking his bath. Spike pleaded with him to lie down and rest. The Senator napped for two ho.urs at the firehouse. Then he was off again with his advice to the voters of Illinois.

What About Taft? For the rest of the day and well into the evening, Douglas kept at it through a full 20 speeches. The advice: re-elect Lucas, without whom “we would have lost rent control,” who “led the fight for increasing the minimum wage from 40¢ to 75¢ . . . Are there any questions?” “What about Senator Taft?” somebody yelled. Said Douglas, borrowing an old gag: “He’s a good fellow until he makes up his mind. Then he makes it up wrong. I hear he’s coming into Illinois to try to beat Senator Lucas. That’s a pretty good reason for voting for Lucas.”

Robert Taft did in fact appear in western Illinois to speak a word for Dirksen and castigate the Fair Deal. He arrived by plane at the Galesburg airport, rode out to Galesburg’s Drive-In Theater to address, a Sunday crowd of 5,000. Dirksen was there to make an introduction while tired Bob Taft, with enough to do to get himself re-elected in Ohio, studied his notes and yawned unabashedly.

What Kind of Congress? “The issue is the same in Illinois as in Ohio,” said Taft. “Whether we are going to elect an independent Congress or a rubber-stamp Congress . . . Are we going to establish a socialistic state? If you elect a Democratic Congress and if you move them just a little to the left of the present Congress, you will get the whole [socialist] program.”

This week Illinois’ campaign rattled on. Republican Dirksen, who once voted for the Marshall Plan, more recently denounced it as money poured down a “bottomless pit,” hammered at “creeping socialism,” at “bungling” at Yalta and Potsdam, at “appeasement, vacillation and weakness” which, he charged, led up to the Korean war. Scott Lucas went his weary, cautious way. He argued that victory in Korea had prevented World War III. He repudiated several important Fair Deal items such as socialized medicine and the Brannan Plan. The loyal and indefatigable Douglas chugged right & left in his station wagon, lifting his voice for Scott Lucas and the whole Fair Deal.

In one of the closest races of the 1950 campaign, both sides were working up to an all-out effort. For Democrats and Republicans alike, Illinois was a critical battlefront. Republicans were counting on Candidate Dirksen as a top bet to pick up one of the seven seats they needed to upset Democratic control of the Senate. Next to beating Taft in Ohio, Truman Democrats were most deeply interested in saving the political hide of Majority Leader Scott Lucas.