What's a Titular Leader?

"Come in," smiled Adlai Stevenson to newsmen on the morning after, "and have some fried post-mortems on toast." The newsmen, who had followed Stevenson enthusiastically for weeks, exchanged a few fried postmortems, said goodbye and flew off with their portable typewriters, many of them to cover the birth of the new Administration. Most of the speech writers and advisers also left Springfield, going back to making a living in their law offices or newspapers. But what of Adlai Stevenson?

Stevenson's political and personal future was a question that interested millions of Americans, including Harry Truman, who in a wire last week acknowledged him as "the head of our party" and urged him to "revitalize the national committee and set the wheels in motion toward a victory in 1954." Harry added a sentence which many a Stevensonian might regard as a threat: "I will do everything I can to help."

What is the head of a defeated U.S. party? He has no constitutional standing, as he has in Britain. Unless he happens to be also a party leader in Congress, he has no podium from which to speak. Unless he happens to be governor of a large state, he has no nucleus around which to group organizational strength. The party national committees have little or no influence on the party's Congressmen. Stevenson would continue to make an admirable spokesman for his party, but in the nature of the case a spokesman is not needed unless or until the party gets something new to say. The long campaign has exhausted the old arguments; only Republican blunders or a shift in the world situation can open a big new debate.

For the urgent task of holding the defeated Democratic factions together, Adlai Stevenson is not especially suited by either experience or personality. He is not an organization politician, and the immediate Democratic problem may be an organizational one.

There is no doubt that Stevenson is today the most widely respected figure in his party. But that is no guarantee of real (as distinguished from titular) party leadership--as Wendell Willkie found out after 1940.

Not the least interesting of the fried post-mortems of 1952 is the reminder of an old and growing defect of the U.S. political system. Where party discipline is almost nonexistent, the leadership of the opposition cannot be institutionalized. Governor Stevenson, a man without an organized personal faction, shortly (Jan. 12) to be without office and without patronage, may exercise genuine leadership of his party by the sheer power of tongue and pen. But if he does, Stevenson will be the first American who ever managed it.

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