Adlai E. Stevenson (1) (1900–1965)

This is a collection of speeches and print articles delivered/written by Stevenson between his two runs for president in 1952 and 1956, both of which he lost to Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson was an intellectual and a proud liberal, the former quality perhaps serving as an impediment to winning over the American electorate. His writing was certainly thought-provoking and offers a very interesting window into Democratic thought circa 1955.

For one thing, we learn that the negative tactics of the Republican Party are older than we might today suppose. Writing just ahead of the 1954 mid-term elections, Stevenson writes:

"All thoughtful citizens have been concerned about the progressive degeneration of this present political campaign. We have observed with sorrow the effect that the pressures of partisanship and political ambition have had on the top leaders of the Republican party. When the campaign began, the President (Eisenhower) said that the only issue was the record of his administration. but the end is a reckless campaign of smear, misrepresentation, and mistrust. No reputation, no record, no name--no Democrat in short--has been immune from savage or sly attack on his integrity, his good sense, his very loyalty. . . . Yesterday on his airport tour the President himself found it in his heart--or in his script--to take up these themes himself.

This Republican campaign has become a program of slander that began a year ago when Mr. Bownell, President Eisenhower's Attorney General, impugned the very loyalty of President Truman, when Governor Dewey identified all Democrats with death and tragedy in Korea, and when the Republican National Committee sent Senator McCarthy around the country to characterize the Democratic administration as 'Twenty Years of Treason' . . .

If ever our system should rise to the highest dignity of its tradition and its responsibilities, it is today. If ever we needed politics which would leave our people informed and united, not confused and divided, it is now. If ever smears, slander, innuendo, misrepresentation were out of place in our national life, it is in this time, at this place, in this world. . . . Instead, the nation has been recklessly torn apart in the search for votes with careless disregard for our self-respect and our unity of national purpose."

Sound familiar?

In the mid-1950s, Stevenson was of course concerned greatly with the Cold War and the campaign of ideas against Communist Russia and China for the friendship of newly independent countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Also, the possibilities for atomic warfare weigh heavily in his thinking. He is at his most impressive when he speaks of the changes being wrought on society by technology:

"Indeed, it seems that at mid-twentieth century, mass manipulation is a greater danger to the individual than was economic exploitation in the nineteenth center; that we are in greater danger of becoming robots than slaves. Surely it is part of the challenge of this next quarter-century that industry and government and the society they both support must find new and better ways of restoring scope to that strange eccentric, the individual. . . . But we shall have to learn the art of coexistence with many strange things in the future, some of them perhaps even stranger than Communism. Technology, while adding daily to our physical ease, throws daily another loop of fine wire around our souls. It contributes hugely to our mobility, which we must not confuse with freedom. The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discrimination of our minds."

Writing in the 1950s, Stevenson foresaw neither the weakening of American industrial production nor global warming, though he does speak frequently about the need for soil, water and other resource conservation, deploring the Eisenhower administrations rush to cede mineral and oil rights from public lands to corporate interests. He also speaks up in favor of integration and civil rights in general. He was a man of his times, though. His commencement speech to the 1955 graduating class of Smith College is titled "Women, Husbands, and History" and begins:

"Countless commencement speakers are rising these days on countless platforms all over the world to tell thousands of helpless young captives how important they are--as citizens in a free society, as educated, rational, privileged participants in a great historic crisis. But for my part I want merely to tell you young ladies that I think there is much you can do about that crisis in the humble role of housewife--which, statistically, is what most of you are going to be whether you like the idea or not just now--and you'll like it!"

Ouch!

At any rate, overall I found this collection a very interesting look into the issues and concerns of the day as seen by one the country's leading liberal Democrats. It has made me think about going in search of an Stevenson biography.… (mehr)

The Wit and Wisdom of Adlai Stevenson is a 95 page book of collected quotes from the afore named presidential hopeful from the late 40s through the 50s. As leader of the Democratic party, then their candidate for president, and finally as US representative to the UN, Stevenson was a Confucian "gentleman", eschewing political success for civil duty and proper action. He's not a memorialized figure; I knew nothing about him beyond that famous photo of the hole in his shoe, but is political thought as it is represented in this book is timeless.

On the Red Scare: "I am no more in favor of socialism than anybody else, and I particularly dislike things that creep. But if I don't like what they call creeping socialism, there is something else I dislike just as much, and that is galloping reaction."

And another: "My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular."

There are some good brain chips here on politics, government and America. This is a nice little book to read through in 10 minutes and pull out every once and a while when you need to be reminded that there are in fact people with some sense in the world.… (mehr)