Wildfire in Wisconsin

On the last night of his slam-bang Wisconsin campaign, Candidate Harold Stassen gave a little dinner party at La Crosse for the newsmen who had accompanied his final drive. Then he drove back across the Minnesota line to his home in St. Paul. Next morning he slept late, napped in the afternoon, played a game of chess with his son Glen. After a quiet family supper he flipped on the radio, started listening to broadcast returns and the excited telephone calls from his Wisconsin managers. By 10 o'clock that night Harold Stassen knew he had won.

The final returns added up to a thumping, upset victory. In a state where General Douglas MacArthur was loudly ballyhooed as a dazzling favorite son, where Tom Dewey had twice before swept the field, Stassen had picked up 19 of Wisconsin's convention delegates, cut MacArthur off with eight, frozen Tom Dewey out altogether. Crowed a jubilant Stassenite: "The prairies are on fire and getting hotter for Stassen all the time."

Secret of Success. The torch which had set the fire was Harold Stassen's own relentless campaigning. In the last month before the election, while Dewey and MacArthur remained aloof in their own headquarters, Stassen had raced back & forth across Wisconsin, making at least 35 major speeches, holding countless cracker-barrel discussions at every Wisconsin crossroads.

Wisconsinites liked his forthrightness, his willingness to talk turkey on any issue, his habit of holding informal question-&-answer periods after every formal talk. Meanwhile the well-trained Stassen organization bombarded voters with letters and telephone calls, turned out with their cars on election day to get the Stassen votes to the polls. Beyond that, Harold Stassen had the support and vote-getting pull of Senator Joe McCarthy and former GOP State Chairman Tom Coleman. When the votes were counted, Harold Stassen had propelled himself into the front rank of GOPresidential candidates.

New Odds. He had also revised the odds on the whole Republican sweepstakes. MacArthur's poor showing let the air out of the MacArthur balloon with a sudden, dismal swoosh. Tom Dewey was worse off than if he had never shown up at all. Taftmen had something to crow about. Not only had Dewey's prestige been dented, but MacArthur strength, they hoped, would now flow their way.

But Harold Stassen was too busy for speculation. Two days later he clambered into a plane at Minneapolis, took off for this week's test in Nebraska.

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