Not just once but twice I voted for Adlai Stevenson for president. The vote in 1952 was the first I ever cast, having then attained the age of 24 and 21 being then the legal voting age. My hope was to see the former governor of Illinois elected to lead our nation.
Unlike the majority of Americans, I did not like Ike for that office even though I admired him for his military leadership in World War II. As a new politician Ike seemed to me bland and uninspiring compared to Adlai with his gift for dynamic speech.
But do I really remember what Adlai sounded like? Is it possible that I allowed myself to be swept away by rhetoric not nearly so solid as I recall? After all, as a first time voter in the election of 1952 perhaps I was overly impressionable.
To refresh my memory of what Adlai sounded like almost fifty years ago, I have been listening to excerpts from his campaign speeches. They are preserved on an undated RCA recording called “Adlai Stevenson Speaks,” with editing and narration by James Fleming.
These speeches were delivered in the first of his two campaigns, that of 1952. You would never know merely from listening to them that they were prelude to an electoral disaster. However, Stevenson himself later wrote that, at a certain point in the campaign, he turned away from the country’s problems and “tried to stir deeper waters and talked more philosophically.”
Listening almost fifty years later, I feel gratified to discover just how moving Adlai’s speeches really were. He was indeed a very effective orator, surely among the best the contest for the presidency has produced over the past century at least. You do not hear from him any “ers” or other verbal hesitations. He speaks boldly and confidently as a person in command of his material and connected to his audience. His language sparkles with arresting and colorful similes and other phrases. A master of the rhetorical question and other classical devices, Adlai knows how to build to an effective climax.
Even more important, he thinks big. The scope of his ideas, his unabashed idealism, his grasp of history – all give power to his speech-making. So does the ways he balances or contrasts phrases and ideas. Contrary to expectation, I feel roused even now by his words almost the way I did so long ago. He may have proven a loser at the polls but he was certainly a winner at the podium.
Thus he says of Communist infiltration: “We must not burn down the barn to kill the rats.” Defining patriotism he says it is “not the fear of something, it is the love of something.” Despite talking realistically about the nation’s problems, he remains upbeat about its prospects.
I had forgotten how humorous Adlai could be. “Man does not live by words alone,” he tells a crowd, “despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.” For people in Los Angeles he recalls a speech by one of his mentors, Colonel Frank Knox: “He made a much better speech than I am making today. I ought to know. I wrote both of them.” In Lincolnesque style he tells of a church that was looking for a new minister. The parishioners wanted someone who was not too liberal, not too conservative. They wanted “just someone mediocre.”
These speeches are sprinkled with arresting quotations. One from La Rochefoucauld catches the attention of this aging writer: “The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they are no longer able to set a bad example.”
Sometimes Adlai speaks frankly about his fellow citizens’ attitudes and behavior. “Whose fault is it that we get what we deserve in government?” he asks one group. “Your public servants often serve you better than your apathy and indifference deserve,” he tells another. No wonder that some of the applause on the recording comes across as muted.
He sees himself as an educator of his fellow citizens and does not hesitate to use imperatives. “Just remember who you are – you are Americans,” he charges the audience and the nation. “This is our heritage, this is our glory.”
These quotations may be enough to reaffirm the wisdom of some readers of this book that they did not vote for Stevenson. Perhaps he seems too much the egghead he was accused of being at that time. But my native orneriness does not allow me to repent of casting not one, but two votes for Adlai.
I still hear him as a leader committed to idealism in the great American tradition. Sure, he might have made an ineffective president; maybe the nation did need Eisenhower at that period in history. But I liked Adlai and believed in him enough to regret that he never had the chance to lead us in the White House.
Richard Griffin