Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,927

This is the grave of Adlai Stevenson.

Ah, finally I get to explore a question I’ve wanted to have time to consider for a long time–why midcentury Democrats were so infatuated with this guy.

Born in Los Angeles in 1900, Stevenson came from Democratic Party elite. His grandfather, for whom he was named, was Grover Cleveland’s corrupt hack of a vice-president. His father was a Democratic Party insider and Illinois Secretary of State who did receive some attention for the VP slot under Al Smith in 1928, despite there being no clear reason why to me, except that he was from Illinois and knew some guys. Anyway, Stevenson was raised in the family’s home town of Bloomington, Illinois. Being rich, he was sent to Choate School in Connecticut to hang with other elites. He graduated in 1918 and enlisted in the Naval Reserve, a good way in wartime to say you served in World War I without actually experiencing anything like war. He was discharged in 1919 and then went to Princeton like a good rich Democrat, Princeton still being the South’s preferred Ivy and that meant for northern Democrats too in many cases.

Stevenson was a mediocre student. He graduated, went to Yale Law, and flunked out. He returned to Bloomington to work on the local newspaper. That was the source of much of the family money, so it was just daddy taking care of his failson. But Stevenson decided to take life a bit more seriously. He then enrolled at Northwestern Law and finished in 1926. Being well-connected, he was immediately hired by Cutting, Moore, and Sidley, a top Chicago law firm. Clearly the meritocracy was in full effect here.

Stevenson married a rich socialite named Ellen Borden in 1928 and they became a fab young couple among the Chicago rich. He practiced law and became a prominent Chicago liberal. He supported the Lend-Lease program and became a known name for his speeches in favor of it. He came to work for Frank Knox when the latter was named Secretary of the Navy. He became a big UN guy and worked in to garner support for the institution at the end of World War II.

In 1948, Stevenson decided to run for governor. No one expected him to win, but he defeated the incumbent. Like with Harry Truman, it was a better year for Democrats than expected. And his administration over the next four years goes very far to explain why he became so popular with liberals–he was a clean government guy. He wanted to clean up Illinois from crime and corruption, which to be fair, the state had a lot of. He wanted to crack down on illegal gambling operations and get the machines out of politics. He also put a lot of money into improving the state’s roads.

So in 1952, with a zero bench (amazing after twenty years in power that Democrats really had no bench to speak of), Stevenson became the favored candidate for the party’s liberal wing. He was no radical, that’s for sure. But clean government really appeals to particular kinds of liberals. Now, let’s be honest–it was a very difficult position for Stevenson to be in. Republicans had recruited Dwight Eisenhower. The Korean War had gone poorly. The call that Truman had lost China stuck, stupid as it was. Democrats had been in power for 20 years. I don’t know if anyone could have won in 52. For that matter, I don’t know if anyone could have won in 56 either, not with a popular Eisenhower having offended as few Americans as possible over the previous four years. It’s true enough that some in the South were pretty angry that he had named Earl Warren as Chief Justice and then Brown v. Board of Education happened. But Stevenson was hardly the candidate for these segregationists either. In any case, Stevenson got spanked both times. Probably not much he could have done to fix this.

In 52, he got the nomination largely because Truman was pissed at Estes Kefauver, who had made hay on attacking Democratic political machines and Truman loved his machines. Stevenson was anti-machine of course too but was less demagogic about it. By the time of the convention, it was a done deal. But Stevenson was attacked as an intellectual, which Real Americans fear, or at least the media portrays it that way and certainly went after Stevenson on that. In 56, Truman switched his support to Averill Harriman, but his old friend Eleanor Roosevelt continued to support him and with Kefauver again the likely other option, Stevenson won again and got blown out again, running on a platform of banning above ground nuclear testing. Well, that did separate him from Eisenhower, but not in a way that would allow him to compete.

What amazes me is how many Democrats wanted him to run yet again in 1960. Thankfully, Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy instead, but that required a lot of work to pull Eleanor Roosevelt away from Stevenson especially and she was still so influential with the liberal elite wing of the party that it really mattered when she acquiesced to Kennedy. Stevenson loathed the Kennedys as cold-blooded opportunists, which was true enough, but maybe if he had been a little more of that, he might have competed better on the national front. It was Richard Daley who put the ice pick in Stevenson’s political forehead that year, telling him the Chicago machine would not support the home state candidate. Stevenson did not like machines, but without Daley, he was through.

Here’s the appeal of Stevenson to liberals. To quote a biographer:

They also appreciated Stevenson because of his style…he had clearly dissociated himself, as did many Americans, from the plebians. Stevenson dramatized the complex feelings of educated elites, some of whom came to adore him not because he was a liberal, but because he was not…he spoke a language that set apart from average Americans an increasingly college-educated population. His approach to voters as rational participants in a process that depended on weighing the issues attracted reformers, intellectuals, and middle-class women with time and money (the “Shakespeare vote”, joked one columnist). Or as one enthralled voter wrote “You were too good for the American people … Adlai Stevenson ended the 1952 campaign with an adoring group of Stevensonites. Articulate and loyal…they would soon create the Stevenson legend and make the Man from Libertyville a counterhero to President Eisenhower, whom they would portray as inept and banal.

God, this sounds like liberals today….

Kennedy of course paid Stevenson off handsomely for his service to the Democratic Party, naming him Ambassador to the United Nations. He was the right figure for a job like that, a real internationalist liberal. That said, he was not particularly influential in the administration and was totally cut out of the decisions around the Bay of Pigs, infuriating him. He felt humiliated after he said that the U.S. had not helped the Bay of Pigs invaders. Whoops. He found out just what Kennedy thought about him by not informing him about any of this. He was brought in as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but was largely pilloried by the hawkish wing of the administration, who leaked stories that Stevenson wanted to sell out America. Stevenson argued strongly for peace, saying later, “I know that most of those fellows will consider me a coward for the rest of my life for what I said today, but perhaps we need a coward in the room when we are talking about nuclear war.” In fact, Stevenson thought he should be Secretary of State, but it seems that he remembered when Woodrow Wilson threw that position to William Jennings Bryan for his service to the party and realized that a liberal in the position was not what he wanted.

When Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Stevenson, who had been attacked by John Birch Society members recently in that city, told people he had told JFK to stay away from that city of hate. Johnson did keep him on as UN ambassador, but LBJ had little time for his advice. In 1965, Stevenson went to Geneva for UN meetings. After he went to London. He had a heart attack while there and died. He was 65 years old.

Adlai Stevenson is buried in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other presidential losers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Barry Goldwater is in Paradise Valley, Arizona and Thomas Dewey is in Pauling, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.