The Big Show

The jostling G.O.P. hordes saw him, loved him, and made hilarious plans to assassinate him almost from the moment they got into bunting-draped Philadelphia.

He was moored by the feet atop the Broad Street marquee of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. He was a 15-ft. balloon-rubber elephant with an upraised trunk, a flapping lower lip and a silly smile.

The most disappointing early news concerned his hide: lighted cigarettes, dropped from upper windows, had no effect on him. But he obligingly developed a kind of reverse elephantiasis. His trunk took to sagging, and he had to be given repeated injections of air with a vacuum cleaner.

Finally he collapsed completely from the effects of a large and mysterious wound and was removed for a quick vulcanizing job. By the time he got back on duty, the day before the convention opened, he was probably history's most famous captive balloon.

The Midway. But he was only one small and stationary part of the big show. Prosperity, heat, the feel of victory and the Derby Day jockeying of the candidates gave Philadelphia the look and sound of a midway. The tabloid New York Daily News suggested that its atmosphere could be sampled by remote control simply by "swallowing a snort of bourbon, lighting a cigarette, putting scented talcum powder on a damp baby and inhaling."

There were sideshows everywhere. Harold Stassen's backers handed out slices of cheese in their headquarters, carried a pretty girl through jammed lobbies in a rowboat. She held a sign which read: "Man the oars, ride the crest, Harold Stassen, he's the best." The Taft camp imported a real elephant and led it around the streets; they were rewarded with a vicious rumor--that they were doping the beast with digitalis to keep it alive.

Then there were the ladies. Bustling and beribboned, Republican women were on hand in droves. Eyeing them, the New York Times's lean and waggish Meyer Berger wondered if the fate of the party might not be settled in "Coke-filled rooms." Tom Dewey's campaign workers wooed them wildly with gifts. They handed out bottles of deodorant, emery boards, silver polish, Life Savers, chocolate, chewing gum, cigarette holders, pocket combs--and brown paper sacks to carry all the boodle.

Brass Bands. The arrival of candidates heightened the noise and confusion. Harold Stassen got in first. His welcoming party cheered at the wrong railway car, found itself greeting Alf Landon instead. After that, the pumping of brass bands, the milling of the curious, the sound of police sirens and applause were repeated over & over as Tom Dewey, Bob Taft and Earl Warren made their entrances.

There was one lull before the big political storm. The major candidates went to suburban Rosemont for a "purely social meeting" at the home of Martin W. Clement, bony, white-haired president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

By the time the doors of Philadelphia's enormous, echoing Convention Hall were thrown open, the army of sweating and rumpled Republicans gradually attained a state of martial hypnosis, like Indians engaged in nights of war dancing. They thirsted for the raw firewater of campaign oratory. And on opening night, as the jammed hall blinked to the glare of flashlights, they got it by the bucketful.

War Cries. The keynote address by Illinois' Governor Dwight Green was mainly notable for its strong internationalist tone (see The Nation). It also contained gobbets of unreasonable prose and lumpy invective. Green flailed away at Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal just as a generation of G.O.P. keynoters had done before him. "The New Deal," he roared, "mustered its majorities from a fantastic partnership of reaction and radicalism . . . Its offspring was the sorriest series of broken promises in the history of our nation." He was wildly cheered.

The roar of applause was punctuated by waves of laughter as blonde ex-Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce voiced the thesis of her speech: that Harry Truman is a "gone goose." The Democrats, she said, were divided into "a Jim Crow wing, led by lynch-loving Bourbons . . . a Moscow wing, masterminded by Stalin's Mortimer Snerd, Henry Wallace . . . and a Pendergast wing run by the wampum and boodle boys . . . who gave us Harry Truman in one of their more pixilated moments." Harry Truman's term of office, she cracked, was hardly "the pause that refreshes."

The noisy circus atmosphere which all U.S. political conventions traditionally develop continued into the next day. That night, white-haired old Herbert Hoover was scheduled to speak.

Words of Warning. Few Republicans had been so bitterly assailed during the years of Democratic supremacy, but Hoover's prepared speech cast aside partisanship to talk of the nation's place in the world. "It is in our interest and above all in the interest of liberty throughout the world," he said, "that we aid in giving strength and unity to the nations of western Europe." He solemnly warned the convention:

"If you produce nothing but improvised platitudes, you will give no hope. If you produce no leadership here . . . you will have done nothing of historical significance. If you follow the counsel of those who believe that politics is only a game to be played for personal advantage, you are wasting your time . . ."

The next day 1,094 delegates, and the men who controlled or courted them, began framing their historic answer to the people of the U.S.

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