DEMOCRATS: Tom-Toms & Cornballs

The donkey, naturally, was feeling his oats. Last week, as the leaders of the Democratic Party gathered in Indianapolis for their big powwow and campaign curtain-raising ceremonies, their mood was confident, almost jubilant. They were a far cry from the bruised, battered and bewildered Democrats of a few months ago. They had sampled victory in Maine, and it tasted good. Through the ornate, musty corridors, bars and bedrooms of the Claypool Hotel wafted the savory odors of more goodies in November. The Democrats could hardly wait.

Love from Harry. There was no genuine business before the national commit tee. The occasion was just an excuse to give the fall campaign a rousing sendoff, to hold informal clinics on the health of the party, and to coach freshmen candidates in the fine art of campaigning. Harry Truman, the party’s oracle of optimism, was unable to attend the meeting (his doctor has ordered him not to do any politicking this fall). But Harry Truman thumped his first tom-tom, with a nostalgic give-em-hell letter to Democratic Chairman Steve Mitchell.

“I once said the Republican 80th Congress was the second worst in our history,” wrote Truman, “but it has now been surpassed—in the wrong direction—by the Republican Sard … It behooves the American people, I think, to give Mr. Eisenhower a Democratic Congress and hope that we can save him from the misdeeds of his own party.”

Behind the curtain of serenity there was the sound of scuffling among the Democrats. Steve Mitchell’s private choice for the man to succeed him as national chair man after the elections is Indiana’s Paul Butler. Since Butler also has the blessing of Adlai Stevenson, he is an odds-on bet to get the job—a political fact that intensely irks Butler’s fellow Hoosier, ex-Chairman Frank McKinney. In a vengeful mood McKinney leaked a story that Mitchell’s big, $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner would be a flop, that seats were selling, and not very well, for $7.50. The story was half true, but insignificant: tickets for every kind of fund-raising dinner are invariably sold at cut rates at the last minute in order to fill the hall. And Mitchell’s dinner brought in $50,000 to fatten the party’s depleted bankroll.

Corn from Clem. At the big banquet, in the hot, stuffy Shriners’ Murat Temple, Adlai Stevenson, the principal speaker, sweated like a Fourth of July orator. His speech somehow missed the mark with the 1,000 Democratic diners, although Adlai had tried to cut it to their measure. “The Republican Party is so deeply split,” he said, “that it cannot pursue consistent policies anywhere . . . Drift, division and demoralization have for 20 months obscured American purposes, discredited American leadership, and heightened the perils and tensions in this tense and perilous world at home and abroad.”

Tennessee’s cornball Governor Frank Clement, who followed Stevenson on the rostrum, was more to the audience’s taste. After identifying himself as a traveler from “south of the Dixon-Yates line,” Clement proceeded to shell out the corn. When the Republicans are thrown out of Washington, he predicted, “there will not remain even a pot for their pottage.” He lambasted “Dixon, Nixon, Martin and Yates,” left his sweltering listeners yahooing and stamping on the stone floor. By the time the meeting broke up there was light-hearted agreement that, come November, there wouldn’t be a Republican in sight from Kennebunkport to Bohemian Grove.