New Chairman

Hardly had the sun set on Election Day 1956 before Connecticut Republicans reached for their cordial glasses and Democrats for their indigestion pills. From precinct after precinct came the news that Dwight Eisenhower was rolling up a massive plurality; in the final result, the G.O.P. made perhaps its most impressive showing in little Connecticut, racking up 63.7% against 1952's 55.7%, with U.S. Senator Prescott Bush and most other state candidates sailing home on Ike's coattails. Last week the President hand-picked--and the National Committee elected--for Republican national chairman the man who is entitled to much of the credit for the Connecticut record: plain-talking, swift-striding H. (for Hugh) Meade Alcorn Jr.. 49, Connecticut national committeeman.

Alcorn's selection caused some growling among right-wing Republicans ("The conservative wing," groused Michigan's stone-age Representative Clare Hoffman, "has been liquidated and is about to be buried"), but even these yowls seemed almost perfunctory. Serious, intense Meade Alcorn, who neither drinks nor smokes, has little of retiring Len Hall's ebullience, but he brings to the job a record for action. Born in Suffield, Conn., he attended Dartmouth, there broke the world's record for the 60-yd. low hurdles. (His 6.9-sec. mark has since been lowered to 6.8.) He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, moved on to Yale Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1933. To his father, then traveling in Europe, Meade wired: "I am a lawyer." Replied Alcorn Sr.. who had been Hartford County state's attorney since 1908: "It will be many a year before a law-school graduate can claim to be a lawyer." But it was not so many years at that; in 1942 Meade Alcorn succeeded his father as state's attorney.

Elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1937, he became its speaker in 1941, took an unsuccessful whirl for lieutenant governor in 1948, and four years later was chairman of the Connecticut Citizens for Eisenhower. Last year Len Hall put National Committeeman Alcorn in charge of arrangements for the smooth-clicking national convention in San Francisco. As national chairman, Alcorn has two major problems: recovering the 1956 House and Senate losses in the Midwest and Far West and continuing to build the G.O.P. in the South.

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