The Man They Loved

For those days of 100-degree heat and soaking humidity, the shirt-sleeved Republican crowd sat and fanned themselves apathetically with newspapers, panamas, 50-c- souvenir programs, hunted vainly for elbow room at an air-cooled bar, gasped uneasily all night on their stove-hot beds. But the heat was really only incidental; the main thing was that the Convention was phenomenally dull.

The big show had cost only one-third ($50,000) of what it cost in 1940. After six days & nights of uneventful horse-trading in a small, ovenlike buff and gilt hotel ballroom, the Resolutions Committee had patched together a 1944 G.O.P. platform--no more ambiguous and no more forthright than most--which neither offended nor excited the 1,057 delegates. For the first time in G.O.P. convention history, no one bothered to submit a minority platform report or to offer suggestions from the floor.

For two days the delegates listened with medium attention and much perspiration. But although they thought the speeches able, nothing had made them forget the heat.

The Convention's deep emotional lethargy was in part schizophrenic; it was in love with one candidate but had made up its mind to be sensible and take another.

Suitable Match. Outside the Stadium entrances, in the long perambulatory corridor, the cardboard placards mounted on poles (a blown-up Dewey photograph; Dewey the People's Choice; Dewey Witt Win) were piled in chin-high clumps. They were the same nononsense, black-lettered placards which had decorated the sober-looking Dewey headquarters at the Stevens Hotel for two days. Delegates who had visited the businesslike headquarters to look in awe at the machinelike efficiency of the Dewey staff had already seen them.

As a clerk sang out the roll call of states, four husky men in shirt sleeves began lugging armloads of placards down the Stadium aisles and stacking them neatly at the end of each row of delegates. The whole thing ticked as smoothly as Swiss watchworks. On the second roll call Nebraska's squarish Governor Dwight Griswold, his hair plastered down tight, approached the speakers' microphone and the posters began bobbing briskly down each row of seats. By now the Stadium's high, bunting-hung galleries were crowded with spectators waiting to see the nomination. Governor Griswold wound up his twelve-minute oration with the expected name: "I give you the nominee who is the candidate of the future--Thomas E. Dewey."

The delegates rose on cue, shouted, lifted their Dewey placards. The band struck up Anchors Aweigh. Milling in the timehonored, slow elephants' dance of a floor parade, the delegates whistled, whooped, marched. The demonstration lasted three minutes--and then the bands and the organ took over, and eked it out to another four. It was probably the shortest such demonstration in any U.S. convention's history.

The faces of the Dewey rooters who sweated slowly up & down the aisles showed satisfaction, but no ecstasy. Governor Dewey, in giving the Convention harmony, had robbed it of real excitement. He was the only nominee, they believed, who could be counted on to threaten Franklin Roosevelt's Term IV. But to most of the GOPsters gathered in Chicago, Tom Dewey was still a remote, coldly glamorous figure who inspired more admiration than zeal. Alice Longworth, the knife-tongued wit of the Old Guard gave currency to the mot of the Convention: "How can you vote for a man who looks like the bridegroom on a wedding cake?"

True Love. As the paraders straggled to their seats, high-shoed Joe Martin banged his gavel: "The chair recognizes the Governor of Ohio." Silver-haired John Bricker stepped forward on the platform; the band blared Beautiful Ohio. Now the crowd really broke loose. John Bricker held up his hands for silence. The crowd cheered even louder. This was the spirit that had made Bricker's Grand Ballroom headquarters in the Stevens a confused, human, unpredictable place full of lavishly colored posters, red carnations, glee clubs, highballs, milling Midwesterners, lapel buttons and impromptu speechmaking.

This John Bricker was a regular Republican, a regular human being, a dyed-in-the-wool Party man who had traveled 20,000 miles through 30 states in the last six months, preaching the straight, orthodox Republican gospel.

Up came blue-& -white Bricker placards, and with them the cheers rose again. John Bricker, who had dreamed of being President, was giving up his dream for the Party's good. While the Convention whistled, waved, and shouted, sympathetic Party leaders swarmed the platform to shake the hand and pat the grey-tailored back of a good sport -- a man who could grin while his damp eyes said goodbye to the chance that seldom comes twice.

John Bricker was the first Convention speaker to hold the crowd completely in his palm. He laid down his straight Republican gospel and the crowd responded. He spoke from his good G.O.P. heart, with no notes. When he acknowledged the wish of the Convention to nominate Tom Dewey, there were loud and repeated shouts of "No! No!" He was the first speaker to praise Dewey in unashamedly purple, old-fashioned oratorical prose: "A great, a vigorous, a fighting young American, the noble -- and dramatic -- and appealing -- Governor of the State of New York. ... I am now asking [Ohio] not to present my name to this Convention, but to cast their votes ... for Thomas E.

Dewey. . . ." Delegate Grant A. Ritter of Wisconsin stubbornly refused to make it unanimous.

He had come to vote for General MacArthur and he did, to the jeering hilarity of his friends (see cut). But even Dele gate Ritter approved of "Honest John" Bricker. Dewey for President: 1,056 votes. Bricker for Vice President: 1,057.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.