The Smart Quarterback

In a two-day invasion of New York and New Jersey last week, Adlai Stevenson once again displayed his talent for effective oratory. He also proved himself a smart campaign quarterback who mixes his plays astutely.

At the American Legion convention, where he made his first speech of the trip, the Illinois governor admonished his audience. Striking out at "specialinterest" groups, he said: "I have resisted them before, and I hope the Almighty will give me the strength to do so again and again. And I should tell you, my fellow Legionnaires . . . that I intend to resist pressure from veterans also." With obvious reference to Fellow Legionnaire Joe McCarthy, Stevenson denounced attacks on the loyalty of General Marshall and called them an example of the kind of patriotism "which is, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, the last refuge of scoundrels."*

He went on to say: "To strike freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety . . . Most all of us favor free enterprise for business. Let us also favor free enterprise for the mind."

Next day, speaking before the New York State Democratic Convention, the Democratic candidate made a careful pitch to one of the nation's largest "specialinterest" groups--its Negro voters. He was "favorably impressed," said Stevenson, by a proposed bill which would create a federal Fair Employment Practices Commission, but which would also encourage the federal commission to stay out of any state which had an effective FEPC law of its own. In a speech accepting the presidential nomination of New York's Liberal Party, he continued to hammer at the civil rights theme, and went on to denounce the filibuster. Said he: "The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions . . . but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal cords."

In the same speech, Stevenson got in a reference to aid to India, which is getting to be the stock Democratic way of changing the subject on China. Among the men who hoped to ride to Washington with Ike, said Stevenson, were some "who would rather hold post-mortems over the loss of China than do something now to save India."

Shortly before he left New York for Springfield and a weekend of work on his Labor Day speech, it became clear that Stevenson's appeal to the Negro "specialinterest" group had paid off. Said Representative Adam Clayton Powell, who had threatened to lead a Negro "boycott" of Stevenson and Sparkman: "We are just going all out for him now. The platform has been spelled out in his speeches of last night. All doubts about him have been removed from my mind."

* But Dr. Johnson, living in a sparser age, used "scoundrel" in the singular.

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