The Voices of the Land

The hulking building with the pink neon sign--it might have been a sports arena, a warehouse or a hangar for tomorrow's giant rocket bomber--stood in the greyer part of grey Philadelphia. Along its long corridors and empty galleries, janitors toiled glumly amid drifts of paper cups, candy wrappers, newspapers and stale buns. As a band blurted out the first brassy music of the morning, the great main floor was only half filled.

But as the first speaker of the day--of any of the five convention days--advanced to the microphone, floor and galleries began filling up, and the convention came alive. Photographers jostled in belligerent knots, each holding a camera to his eye like a unicorn adjusting his horn. Heat and humidity rose. Coats came off and the face of the crowd moved with the urgent fluttering of thousands of cardboard fans. Within minutes it was hot enough to grow orchids.

Shirtsleeves & Galluses. The jumbled roaring which came through the loudspeakers boomed so loudly and with such a passionate rise & fall of voice that it was applauded as if it were an announcement of the final collapse of the Soviet Union. Of the men & women who made purely partisan speeches, Columnist Lippmann wrote: "Never did they admit that they had ever been wrong, less than wise, less than the only true defenders of the faith, or that one trace of humility or magnanimity could be allowed to mitigate their absolute self-righteousness."

But there were other speakers. On the convention floor before them, under the relentlessly glaring spotlights, sat America in its shirtsleeves and galluses, yelling and singing and being judged not only by the folks back home, but also by the folks in foreign parts whom America must lead toward peace.

The orators realized it too. Remarkably little was said about the good opinion of the corner drugstore. Remarkably much was said about the unknown corner of unknown streets in a foreign land, where unknown people would read their papers.

Lobbies & Elevators. The whole show was not in Convention Hall. It overflowed into the streets of downtown Philadelphia and eddied through hotel lobbies, was dammed up in frantically clogged elevators and stairways. It was given direction by the politicking in hotel rooms; it was given the air of a prizefight by the numberless press conferences.

Kansas, Kentucky & Maine. But the most significant part of the gargantuan spectacle was on the steamy floor of Convention Hall. It was dramatized in the round, sugary superlatives of the nominating speeches, in the carefully staged demonstrations for the candidates, in the hoots and cheers from the galleries.

When the balloting began, America was heard and seen in microcosm. No one could hear the roll call of the states without feeling, consciously or not, that this was poetry, and of an epic sort: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado . . . Kansas, Kentucky and Maine . . . Nebraska, Ohio, the Dakotas . . . Vermont and Wisconsin and Wyoming. The voices from the floor were rich with the flavor of the broad land. They spoke with local pride: Georgia, the empire state of the South . . . the great, free state of Maryland . . . Virginia, the cradle of democracy . . . Hawaii, standing on the threshold of statehood.

Skyscrapers & Speed. Was this democracy in action? In its outward manifestations it was a combination of a movie premiere, a World Series, a congressional debate and the Kentucky Derby. But it reflected the character and stirred the emotions of a people who boo umpires, love lodge rituals, build skyscrapers and worship speed and spectacles. Democracy is largely composed of people who like drum majorettes and brass bands.

The show--like democracy itself--was neither smooth, nor particularly dignified, nor comfortable. But its core was the people--the thousands of upturned faces, pink, living, moving constantly, arranged in disorderly and unmilitary rows. The convention had not only good lung power. It had a good heart.

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