Election Sidelights

POLITICAL NOTES

P:The almost eerie calm of the campaign continued through election night. The vast throng which traditionally invades Manhattan's Times Square with horns, bells, whistles and placards simply did not materialize. Broadway crowds were small er than on any normal Saturday night.

P:In Owosso, Mich., Governor Thomas E.

Dewey's home town, Buick-Dealer Harlow B. Ross summed up the election results in one disgusted sentence: "There are just more damned fools in this country than there are intelligent people." P:Leesburg, Fla. reported a heavy Negro vote. It was apparently stimulated by a motorized parade of 250 members of the Ku Klux Klan on election eve.

P:The New York Stock Exchange reacted to the Democratic sweep within minutes after opening on the day after election.

Heavy selling began immediately; by noon the turnover had mounted to 1,840,000 shares and Dow-Jones industrial averages had broken 7.24 points. It was the worst market break since September 1946.

P:Cracked the wife of New York Post Home News Columnist Leonard Lyons: "Crow will be selling wholesale today."

HISTORICAL NOTES

All-Star Team

In the interest of history, Harvard's Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger* worked a variation on an old sport page diversion. He asked 55 authorities on American history to pick a kind of alltime, all-star list of U.S. Presidents. The results, listed last week in an article in LIFE, were a heartening commentary on the democratic electoral process. The U.S., in the opinion of the experts, had produced six great Presidents and only two downright failures.

Abraham Lincoln, it was unanimously agreed, was the greatest President in the nation's history. After him came Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson.

The rest of the 32 U.S. Presidents--with the exception of William Henry Harrison and Garfield (both of whom died shortly after taking office) and Harry S. Truman (whose term is incomplete)--were listed in lesser categories.

Near great: Theodore Roosevelt, Cleveland, John Adams and Polk. Average: John Quincy Adams, Monroe, Hayes, Madison, Van Buren, Taft, Arthur, McKinley, Johnson, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison. Below average: Tyler, Coolidge, Fillmore, Taylor, Buchanan and Pierce. Failures: Grant and Harding, both of whose administrations were marked by corruption.

What makes a President great? In plumbing the question, Professor Schlesinger noted that the six top Presidents were vastly different in appearance and temperament, but they had certain important things in common. All were identified with some crucial turning point in history. All took the side of progressivism and reform. None was a particularly good administrator. All were party men, and all but Washington had set their hearts on becoming President.

To their contemporaries the six great Presidents often seemed politically ahead of their times, but they were careful not to get too far ahead. They were all strong Presidents and magnified the powers of the executive at the expense of other branches of government. All but Washington fell into conflict with the Supreme Court, and all were consistently lambasted by the press. They were also alike in one other respect--they endured the rigors of office confident of being accorded an honored place in history.

*Father of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., author of The Age of Jackson.

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