Requiem for an egghead

I knew Stevenson was never an intellectual. According to Michael Kazin, he wasn't much of a liberal, either.

When you review a lousy book, a ceiling of 1200 words doesn’t feel terribly oppressive, but when you review a good book it can. I just reviewed two good books at that length for the New York Times: Michael Kazin’s What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party, and Lily Geismer’s Left Behind, a history of the Democratic Leadership Council. You can read my review here, and I hope you will. It will be published in the dead-tree Book Review on March 27.

I think the review came out rather well, but if I’d had more room, there are many additional topics I’d like to have covered, drawing on both books. Today I’ll confine myself to Kazin’s deliciously savage mini-portrait of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956.

I’ve read demolition jobs on Stevenson before, but these tended to focus on the dubious notion that the candidate identified as an “egghead” (originated by Joseph and Stewart Alsop, who did not mean it as a compliment) was anybody’s idea of an intellectual. I still took it on faith that Stevenson was a liberal—too liberal, sadly, for the conformist 1950s—though I couldn’t tell you exactly what made him one. Kazin says that reputation is bunk, too.

In Kazin’s view, Stevenson’s greatest assets were family connections (Stevenson’s grandfather, also named Adlai, was Grover Cleveland’s last vice president) and an “elegant manner” that attracted the genuinely liberal Eleanor Roosevelt, who made him her protégé when he served in various administrative roles during the New Deal. Stevenson got himself elected governor of Illinois in 1948 and, yes, Kazin concedes, he governed there as a liberal. Among other things, Stevenson vetoed the imposition of loyalty oaths on state workers. “We must not burn down the house to kill the rats,” Stevenson said. That’s the stuff!

But Kazin writes that Stevenson’s liberalism was little in evidence when he twice topped the national Democratic ticket. Stevenson won the 1952 presidential nomination, Kazin writes, by being “the only candidate none of the party’s major factions abhorred.” He proceeded to run “perhaps the oddest presidential campaign in the modern era.”

Cowed by Southern Democrats, Stevenson refused to back a fair employment commission on the grounds that it violated states’ rights. Then he changed his mind and endorsed a commission but seldom mentioned it. On Labor Day Stevenson (who disliked “mingling with ordinary voters”) told a gathering of workers in Detroit’s Cadillac Square that he favored some provisions in the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. He said big business had little to fear from the Democrats. He skipped the Al Smith Dinner in New York City, sponsored by the powerful city archdiocese. He hedged on the Korean War. He sneered at his opponent Dwight Eisenhower’s novel use of television ads: “What do the Republicans think the White House is, a box of cornflakes?”

Eisenhower beat Stevenson in a landslide.

Four years later the Democrats renominated Stevenson, in part because he’d successfully dodged any comment on Brown v. Board of Education for several days before finally urging the North “to extend the hand of fellowship, of patience, understanding, and assistance to the South.” This was, Kazin writes, “the kind of empathetic plea a president might have issued after a major hurricane.” UAW President Walter Reuther, by contrast, tried and failed to insert into the 1956 platform a plank pledging to enforce Brown. In the end, downplaying civil rights and labor issues worked no better in 1956 than it did in 1952. Stevenson lost in a landslide again.

Kazin concludes:

The infatuation of middle-class white liberals with a politician who did so little to appeal to labor or Black voters exposed a weakness in their understanding of the electorate that, if uncorrected, would be fatal to the party’s chances of regaining the White House and building a larger, more racially egalitarian welfare state. One egghead nominee was too many.

Ouch! But enough about Adlai. Read my Times piece here.