Lincoln, Taft & McCarthy

One week ahead of time, 12,000 Republicans in the nation's capital jammed Uline Arena to buy a boxed chicken supper, gaze at drum majorettes and applaud an aged American Indian in spectacles and war bonnet. With partisan joy they listened to a series of grim, lowbrow political messages reeking with campaign cliches.

The man of the evening was Robert Taft, whom the 12,000 partisans seemed to want for their presidential candidate in 1952. The man who electrified the crowd, however, was Senator Joe McCarthy, who vowed: "The Republican Party [has] a mandate to stand as a solid wall against the slow poison of Socialism and the dagger death of Communism." Lincoln got the homage, Taft got the respect, Joe McCarthy got the cheers.

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