Emma & the Birds

The event that might linger longest in the minds of the delegates, spectators, and television watchers of the Democratic Convention was neither Harry Truman's fighting speech nor the Southern schism. It was the pigeons.

President Truman and Senator Barkley had just come into the hall (see above) when Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller bustled up to the podium. The sister of Pennsylvania's ex-Senator Joseph Guffey, and a perennial committeewoman, Mrs. Miller calls herself the Old Grey Mare.

Plump, powdered and behatted, she briskly interrupted Chairman Sam Rayburn's introduction of Barkley, took over the microphone. On behalf of the Allied Florists of Philadelphia, she announced, she wanted to present President Truman with a large Liberty Bell made of flowers. Then, from beneath the bell came a shower of white pigeons (placed there by the florists' pressagent, who had billed them as "doves of peace").

With a flutter of wings, the pigeons swept up & out. The dignitaries on the platform cringed and shrank away like troops before a strafing attack. Torpid delegates broke into a roar of delight. One bird landed on the rostrum, where Chairman Sam Rayburn scooped it up and flung it roofward again. Two landed on a platform fan, stayed there with the breeze ruffling their tail feathers.

If the President had not won his audience right away, the pigeons might have given him real competition. As he spoke, pigeons teetered on the balconies, on folds in the draperies, on overhead lights, occasionally launched on a quick flight to a more pigeonly position. Long after the conventioneers had gone home and workers began to clean up for Henry Wallace's Third Party this week, pigeons still perched in the deserted hall.

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