After the Vote

Once again, the U.S. had passed through that heady season when national blood pressure shoots up, politicians talk like fishwives, red-eyed poll takers are on the prowl, civil war rages at the dinner table, and the uninitiated observer concludes that the Union cannot endure much longer. Once again, the U.S. had survived.

In the South, they were hard at work, ginning cotton, and the crop looked fine, although below last year's record. In Amarillo, Texas, the seventh annual National Square Dance and Callers' Contest was held, and Manhattan society watched the opening of the 64th National Horse Show. Among the spectators, it was noted, ermine was definitely passe, having been replaced by white mink, which may be a purification symbol.

The weather was chilly, dry and dangerous. Across the land, patches of haze and smoke from forest fires hung in the air. In Idaho, Apaches flown up from the Southwest to fight fires vainly staged a rain dance (too far from home, said the braves, to do any good), and went home again. East and West, farmers scuffed at the powder-dry earth and reported winter wheat in danger. The months-old drought grew so bad that Dallas was almost without drinking water, and citizens were discouraged from taking baths.

The protagonists of a far-from-forgotten drama made news. In the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., Alger Hiss, having served nearly a third of his five year sentence, applied for parole. Whittaker Chambers, meanwhile, was in a Baltimore hospital, after a heart attack suffered on Election Day.

The newspapers slowly, reluctantly turned away from the election. The New York Times one day found itself with enough space on its hands to report that Cambridge zoologists were experimenting with carrier pigeons to whose wings they had strapped tiny cameras--to find out whether "a bird of the opposite sex [can] lure the messenger from the straight & narrow beeline for the home loft." Similar experiments were going on among the human species. Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra were apparently reconciled after their recent spat and took off, cooing, for London. Marilyn Monroe (see CINEMA), on the other hand, was showing clear signs of cooling in her affections for Joe DiMaggio, while Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan definitely called it quits, with Aly settling a reported $50,000 a year on daughter Yasmin. Aly, reported Rita's lawyer, C. Bartley Crum, had behaved like a thorough cad: "Why, he even complained when she took French lessons."

In the chill city streets, the crowds walked faster, and the golden lights seemed warm in the windows. The season of gifts and cruises to the South was approaching, and a large cosmetics firm greeted it with a new lipstick and a momentous ad: "There's a new American beauty . . . she's tease and temptress, siren and gamin, dynamic and demure. Men find her slightly, delightfully baffling. Sometimes a little maddening." In Providence, Mary Burns, 21, hit her father on the head several times with a hammer, explaining: "He's ugly-looking, and he made me that way, too."

On the front in Korea, the first snow fell. Troops were being issued the last of their winter equipment, and the Eighth Army quartermaster announced:. "No American Army, anywhere, ever began a winter better equipped or clothed . . ." In Washington, President Truman issued his annual Thanksgiving Proclamation: ". . . This year it is especially fitting that we offer a, prayer of gratitude for the spirit of unity which binds together all parts of our country and makes us one nation indivisible . . ."

On the morning after the election, a big sign hung from a second-floor balcony at Joy and Mt. Vernon Streets, on Boston's Beacon Hill, said: "Thank God." It seemed to express more than merely one voter's gratitude that his candidate had come in. The trappings of the campaign having been laid away, the nation had quietly made its great decision. Bitterness and disagreement did not disappear, but there was a better chance for unity than in many years, and great cause for hope. Meanwhile, the U.S. went on living its life as usual--strange, wonderful, and wonderfully free.

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