How It Went

With bright skies to encourage them and dark worry to impel them, Americans overwhelmed their polling places to settle in a matter of hours the suspense of weeks. Here, in Eastern Standard Time, is the hour-by-hour story the returns told:

8 to 9 O'Clock. Radio and TV had not even run their first-string pundits and their elaborate mechanical brains into the game when the decisive answers to some crucial questions began to flood in.

Connecticut heralded the first rumble of an Eisenhower landslide even more decisively than in 1952. In labor-heavy Bridgeport, traditionally Democratic and barely Ike's in 1952, it was Eisenhower by nearly two to one. Well-unionized New Haven chimed in minutes later with a 17,000-vote plurality for Eisenhower, the first time in history New Haven had chosen a G.O.P. presidential nominee.

From Florida came sharp signs of a repeat Eisenhower victory in that no-longer-solid sector of the Solid South. Holyoke, Mass., another good sign of labor's mood, gave Stevenson a margin too thin to suggest anything but defeat.

The hour was only half gone before the suspense had trickled out of the presidential race; but still left in doubt was the No. 2 question: How would Congress go? By 8 p.m., TV's battle of the calculating machines was producing near unanimity--ABC's Elecom prognosticated "less than 100 electoral votes" for Stevenson; CBS's Univac calculated 340 for Ike, 87 for Stevenson, then paused to digest a few more returns. The Republicans' own best calculating machine. Party Chairman Leonard Hall, was confident enough to predict before 9 o'clock that Ike was riding home on a landslide. At about the same moment, young John Fell Stevenson, the Democratic candidate's son, left his fa ther's hotel room for the moment, was asked the state of morale inside. Said he:

"Not too good."

9 to 10 O'Clock. At Chicago's Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, Adlai Stevenson ducked out of a dinner party to huddle with Campaign Manager Jim Finnegan and Speechwriter Willard Wirtz. As rumors mounted that Adlai was preparing to concede, the Eisenhower landslide rumbled on. Ike put the lie to the "as-Maine-goes" Democratic victories of last September (TIME, Sept. 24) by sweeping up Maine's five electoral votes by an even wider margin than his 1952 victory. He surged ahead in Chicago's heavily Democratic Cook County, picked up a three-to-two lead in pivotal Pennsylvania. The Boston Herald hit the streets with an extra predicting that Ike would carry Massachusetts by 250,000 votes, v. 208,000 in 1952. New York's Daily Mirror went to press at 9:22 with a two-star final bannering: IKE WINS!

The tide rolled South. Though the Middle East crisis was costing the G.O.P.

Jewish votes in south Florida's big cities, it looked as if Ike would better his 1952 Florida lead of 90,000. Despite Democratic hopes that Texas, Tennessee and Virginia would return to the fold, Ike seemed headed for new triumphs in all those states. He led in Kentucky. As returns trickled in from the Midwest, scattered islands of resistance developed. In Michigan, thanks to Democratic Governor Mennen Williams' solid lead over G.O.P. Candidate Albert E. Cobo, Stevenson was ahead in heavily unionized Dearborn and Detroit. In scattered upstate precincts of Michigan and Wisconsin, resentful farmers were whittling down the G.O.P.'s 1952 margin. Elsewhere Democratic bastions were toppling. Pennsylvania's Democratic Lackawanna County gave Ike an early edge. For the first time in 36 years New Jersey's Hudson County--the late Boss Hague's old bailiwick--went Republican.

By 9:45 ABC's superarticulate mechanical brain threw caution to the winds. The Eisenhower landslide, it ground out, would reach "the proportions of President Roosevelt's first victory in 1932." At 10 o'clock Adlai Stevenson, busily writing in his room, was quoted as saying that he would not concede until he had heard from California. Said Adlai's sister, Mrs. Ernest Ives: "It's a pathetic situation.''

10 to II O'Clock. Four-fifths of the vote was still to be counted, but it was all over for caution's good grey grandmother, the New York Times. EISENHOWER WINS IN A SWEEP, it decided at 10 o'clock sharp. By that time. Virginia's twelve electoral votes. Maryland's nine, apparently New Jersey's 16 were Eisenhower's, and he was running ahead in Pennsylvania, the state the Democrats had said they had to take in order to win. The Stevenson forces en joyed a few slim sunbeams--14 sure electoral votes in North Carolina (where one Jerry D. Batts of Roanoke Rapids was declared to have cast his vote, though he died with it clutched in his hand), expected pluralities in most of the other Southern states, a good lead in Missouri, a strong opening in industrial Michigan, a slight opening lead in California.

But already the wire-service reporters were pulling out their "gloom descended" leads for the scene around Stevenson head quarters, while in Chicago at 10:30 Stevenson Campaign Manager Jim Finnegan and Campaign Treasurer Matt McCloskey were on the telephones to their home state, Pennsylvania. "How bad did we get licked?" asked McCloskey on one phone. "So we're behind in Lackawanna and Allegheny, too, eh?" Finnegan muttered on another. Only a robust Democratic lead in the Pennsylvania senatorial race brightened Finnegan's wake. The 11 p.m. calculators had Ike leading in states worth 441 electoral votes, Stevenson in states with only 90.

11 to 12 O'Clock. New England was as solid for the G.O.P. as the South had once been for the Democrats. Even in Democratic Boston Stevenson's lead was pared to 23,000 votes (v. his 68,000-vote margin in 1952), a fraction of the total he needed to counterbalance G.O.P. strength elsewhere in Massachusetts. Ike swept ahead in New Hampshire, seized a 36,000-vote lead in Rhode Island (which he later increased to nearly ten times his 1952 plurality). Bustling ahead in New York City, which the Democrats carried by some 350,000 votes in 1952, Ike was stitching up a powerful statewide lead. At 11:25, with firm victories in ten states, the G.O.P. avalanche overtook wavering Michigan. At G.O.P. headquarters in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, Ike started planning his TVictory speech of thanks.

Adlai still clung to a narrow lead in Minnesota and Oklahoma. Stevenson carried Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia, but seemed likely in each case to end with narrower margins than in 1952. An irony of G.O.P. gains in the South was that they came largely from segregation-conscious white voters, while the G.O.P.'s civil-rights record was winning over Negro votes from Memphis to Miami.

Returns trickling in from the Western and Mountain states put the G.O.P. in the lead from the outset in Arizona, Colorado and Utah, New Mexico gave Ike a heavy lead. Even atom-conscious Los Alamos, one place where Stevenson's H-bomb issue might logically have set a fuse, went for Eisenhower.

12 to 1 O'Clock. The Eisenhower pluralities kept pounding in like the surf. "How long, O Lord, how long!'' muttered a New York Stevensonite, in wry memory of the 1956 Democratic keynote speech. The answer seemed to be: until the last returns from the Coast. West Virginia came in for Eisenhower, voting Republican for the first time since going for Hoover against Smith in 1928. Los Angeles waited for San Francisco to record a slight margin for Stevenson (ascribed by West Coast commentators in part to Nixon's unpopularity there), then slapped it down with a smart plurality for Ike and Dick. With a jolt, South Carolina Democrats noted that they had carried the state for Stevenson only because Republicans (with 73,000) and independents voting for Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd without his authorization (86,000) divided among them a total big enough to exceed the Democratic vote. On behalf of his favorite son, Estes Kefauver, Politico J. Howard McGrath began a small salvage operation in Washington. Kefauver, he said, emerges from the carnage unscarred and running hard--"He's going in '60.'' Otherwise, said McGrath with an Irish grin: "It's a regular wake. We're lucky we still have the corpse."

1 to 2 O'Clock. Lurching into Kentucky Democratic headquarters at Louisville's Seelbach Hotel, a lonely soul with an Adlai button inquired thickly: "Are you all Democrats?" Came the reply: "What's left of us." What was left of the Democrats was at best seven states with 74 electoral votes.

Indefatigably, the speeches of victory and defeat rumbled on in other places across the U.S. Inexorably, the pundits wove the night's loose ends into the semblance of history. Radios and TV sets were still humming into the small hours of Wednesday as, one by one, electronic brains and buzzing human heads signed off.

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