The Gleaners

As I was walking up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there;

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

--Hughes Mearns

In Wisconsin last week, General Douglas MacArthur was the man who wasn't there, and he was firmly planted at the head of the political stairs. Almost all observers were betting that Favorite Son MacArthur would win a majority of the state's 27 Republican convention delegates in this week's preferential primary. But Candidates Tom Dewey and Harold Stassen, who were very much there, tried hard to act like men who didn't care. Both of them had scoured the state in a fierce struggle for the leavings.

Candidate Dewey had hustled out from New York for a whirlwind tour. At way stations, he clambered out to address swarms of schoolkids, talked to S.R.O. audiences in small-town theaters. His target was the Administration's foreign policy: "We must not allow a weak, incompetent and wavering Administration to bungle us into war." In Milwaukee, where he posed with the leader of the oompah German band, no one missed his jab at MacArthur: "This is not a war crisis--it is a peace crisis. Military genius, no matter how excellent, is not the answer." At Eau Claire, he leaned back against a table and talked with cracker-barrel familiarity to local farmers about mastitis, Bang's disease and silage. He confided: "My prime interest outside of my family and job is my farm."

Candidate Stassen, sucking cough drops to save his voice, scooted around in a chartered Greyhound bus. In Madison, he talked to 4,000 students in the University of Wisconsin's Stock Pavilion. In farming towns, he munched Wisconsin cheese with farmers and their wives.

MacArthur's only political activity of the week was to furnish a new picture of himself taken at a Tokyo airport (see cut). For his backers, that was enough.

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