The People Clear Their Throats

Last week the people proved the pundits wrong. The people showed that they were actually dead-serious about the 1944 election; they weren't making much fuss, but they were far from apathetic. All over the U.S. millions of citizens poured out to register. In Ohio, they stood outside their registry boards for as long as two hours in the rain; in Brooklyn, hospital patients had themselves wheeled to their polling places five blocks away.

Although the national registration will probably be lower than it was in 1940, the turnout left political experts baffled--and jittery. They had agreed that the campaign silence of the American people was due to apathy; now they knew that it was a mood of silence that was ominously unpredictable. Plainly, there might be enough of the fearsome, unpredictable "silent voters" in this election to throw off all the careful calculations pointing to a close election.

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