Big Noise from Chicago

From Chicago, U.S.A. came a turbulent uproar. In a year when pundits were talking about "the American consensus" and the "reign of moderation," the Democratic immoderates charged full tilt into the nominating arena and set up a clangor that all but drowned out the normal sounds of the nation. The planning for next week's Republican Convention seemed to fall off to a whisper. And even the extraordinary White House meeting of the President, the Secretary of State and congressional leaders on the Suez crisis (see Foreign Relations) took on some aspects of a sideshow because the top Democrats sandwiched it in between their caucuses in the Windy City.

The man at the center of the Big Noise was Harry Truman, thriving on the greatest helping of political attention he has received since upsetting Tom Dewey for the presidency in 1948. He was in Chicago less than three hours before he began cutting into the buttery era of good feeling with a sharp knife. Then, with all his influence as ex-statesman and master politico, he plumped for New York's Governor Averell Harriman for the presidential nomination, gave his ex-presidential word that Harriman's experience could best serve the party and the nation. He spurned Front Runner Adlai Stevenson with some thing close to contempt when he announced that this was no time for trial-and-error leadership.

The Truman pronouncement hurt Stevenson, who had been well on the way to a first-ballot victory. It strengthened Harriman and pumped new life into his campaign. The chances of a Harriman-Stevenson deadlock improved the odds on dark-horse candidates, particularly Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington and Texas' master of compromise, U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson.

As for Harry Truman himself, he had staked the prestige of his old age on the proposition that the reign of moderation was nonsense. By his lights (primaries, said he in 1952, are just "eyewash"), a convention is still the place to get political business done, and 1956 is just like any old year except that the Democrats are out of power and he has a candidate that he wants to put in the White House.

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