Down with Moderation

With one announced candidate off and running and some active inactive candidates shuffling about, U.S. Democrats began to maneuver toward the national convention of 1956. Adlai Stevenson had barely started to run, officially, before some fellow Democrats began to elbow him at the turns and throw clods at him.

If they could trip him, they would; if they couldn't they might change his style of running.

At the Democratic National Committee's $100-a-plate dinner in Chicago (TIME, Nov. 28), Stevenson had borrowed a word from the Eisenhower Administration's lexicon to say that "moderation is the spirit of the times." Within 18 hours after Candidate Stevenson uttered the word, New York's Governor Averell Harriman, one of the faster-moving inactive candidates, called a press conference in Chicago, hammered the desk and took aim squarely at Adlai Stevenson. Said Harriman: "The word 'moderation' is not in the Democratic dictionary. It seems to me you fall into the Republican vernacular when you talk about moderate and middle of the road. The Democratic Party is not moderately for labor, not moderately for the small businessman, not moderately for any one such group. We are for them all the way." "Heartsick Ashamed." By week's end, the Harriman cry had been taken up by some other important Democrats. At a Colorado Young Democrats dinner in Denver, Michigan's ambitious, bow-tied Governor G. Mennen ("Soapy") Williams devoted nearly all of a bitterly worded speech to an attack on moderation. Said Soapy: "In candor, I must say that I was acutely disappointed by the 'spirit of Chicago,' the spirit of temporizing with present problems ... I am made heartsick by those in my own party who do not militantly reject the spurious doctrine [of moderation]. I would be ashamed to harken to the counsels of those who have proposed, in effect, that this is an ideal time for a national coffee break."

Warming to his subject, the four-term Michigan governor, now only 44, said that the 1956 Democratic program must be to the third quarter of this century what Woodrow Wilson's was to the first, and Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's were to the second. "They were not timid men," he said, "and they were not tired men. They did not pause to catch their breaths. In the face of great disaster or great opportunity, they did not counsel moderation." Tom, Dick or Harry. While Governor Williams was having his say in Denver, former President Harry Truman was in Seattle to attend a fund-raising banquet for the Truman Library in Independence, Mo. When a reporter asked him whether he thought President Eisenhower's illness had called needed attention to "the American habit of naming any old Tom, Dick or Harry to the vice-presidency," Harry Truman recalled how he rose to the presidency, bristled and snapped: "The country never made a mistake in electing a Vice President." Did his answer mean that he thought Dick Nixon was not a mistake? With the bristles stiffening, Truman growled an answer that was no more moderate than the previous one: "I don't want to discuss Nixon. I don't like Nixon, and I never will. I don't want to even discuss him. He called me a traitor, and if I'm a traitor, the U.S. is in a hell of a shape." To reporters' questions about the spirit of Geneva, Truman shrugged that it "didn't amount to a damn." Dropping a name, he volunteered that he agreed with Averell Harriman that the Geneva Conference was a failure. "Harriman knows what he is talking about," said the former President. "He dealt with the Russians."

When the questions got around to Adlai Stevenson, Truman used his stock answer: he does not intend to announce a position on the Democratic nomination until he gets to the national convention next August. But he had a clear and present position on the spirit of Chicago. Said he: "I don't believe you can use moderation in political campaigns. You have to go alter the opposition with hammer and tongs."

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