Drop That Handkerchief

Illinois' machine-hardened Democrats quivered with trepidation last week when their gentlemanly candidate for governor, Lawyer-Diplomat Adlai E. Stevenson (TIME, Jan. 12), trundled off to Bloomington to open his primary campaign. They needn't have been so nervous.

Stevenson, a novice at campaigning, was completely at ease in Bloomington, where he spent his boyhood and where his family has long published the Daily Pantagraph. At a reception in the high-ceilinged Stevenson homestead on elm-lined East Washington Street, he bore up like a veteran through two dinning hours of handshaking, reminiscing with boyhood friends and chinning with local politicos (including many a curious Republican).

But it was his post-reception speech, delivered before 500 Bloomingtonians at a dinner in the Illinois Hotel, that made his fellow Democrats jump with joy. The speech was sometimes folksy (with recollections of Halloween pranks), sometimes eloquent, always forthright. Stevenson laid into his rival, Republican Governor Dwight H. Green, with one haymaker after another. He accused the Green administration of shaking down Illinois businessmen, of being responsible for the deaths of in men in last spring's Centralia mine tragedy, of neglecting the upkeep of once-model state institutions. He cried: "The unconscionable spoils machine which . . . now holds the state in its grip . . . must be uprooted and the earth scorched."

The diners went wild. "Go get 'em, Ad!" screamed jubilant party functionaries. When it was all over, veteran Chicago newsmen knew that a dazzling political star had been born. Wrote Sun & Timesman John Dreiske: "He was a smash hit. There once were those who gloomily opined he should not travel in the same caravan with Paul H. Douglas [Democratic candidate for Senator] because of the danger [that] he would be eclipsed by that brilliant orator. Put away your handkerchiefs. Don't cry for Stevie."

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