Voice of Opposition

As speaker-in-chief of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner (East Coast division) last week, Adlai Stevenson had to do a couple of jobs which many Democrats still found passing strange after all their years in office: 1) help get his own party out of hock, and 2) take a critical look at the party in power. He attracted 1,400 of the faithful into the ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel at $100 a head. There they heard Stevenson use his gift for bright English to express an exceedingly dim view of the state of the world--especially that part of it affected by the fact that the Republicans now hold power in the U.S.

"I should like . . . to thank President Eisenhower for the initiative he has taken this week with respect to atomic materials and for his forthright reaffirmation of our desire for peaceful . . . relations with the Russian people," he said. But, Stevenson went on, "while he speaks of unity his colleagues sow disunity. While he calls for calm his friends light the fires of hysteria . . . Where are [Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms] today? Who speaks for them now?

"Those gallant hopes of yesterday have given way to the sorry confusion of today. [They] have been replaced by the four fears--fear of depression; fear of Communism; fear of ourselves; fear, if you please, of freedom itself." Stevenson did not name Senator McCarthy during an obvious attack on Mc-Carthyism, in which, he charged, "the Bill of Rights is besieged, ancient liberties infringed." He did, however, mention Attorney General Herbert Brownell, "the chief law-enforcement officer of the nation, the very embodiment of our concept of justice, [who] has even imputed disloyalty or Communist sympathy to a former President while our allies . . . listen in bewilderment and disgust."

As for U.S. fear of a depression, Stevenson suggested that a depression, if it materialized, would be unnecessary and "man-made," the Democrats having already proved that "Americans could master their own economic destiny." He closed by indulging in a luxury that was long the privilege of the G.O.P.--visualizing the beneficial results to accrue from turning the bunglers of today out of office. After that, said Stevenson, "I see [the U.S.] united in high endeavors, standing once again before the world calm, wise and resolute, a beacon of hope, a citadel of fortitude--and of faith."

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