The “Egghead” Got it Right

The Democratic Party nominated Adlai Stevenson for President of the United States twice, once in 1952 and again in 1956. He is often described as a sacrificial lamb, cannon fodder for Dwight Eisenhower in a contest of David and Goliath, except in this case, Goliath won. Stevenson never fared well with the press and could not capture the popular imagination like the war hero Eisenhower. One reporter called him an “egghead”, while others quipped that he would rather write a speech than win an election.

Intellectuals loved Stevenson, though his political opponents often called his supporters “pinks and pansies.” But Stevenson was an ardent anti-communist, and he more than proved his Cold War chops in the 1960s when he faced down the Soviet Union in the United Nations.

Stevenson would not mesh with the modern Democratic Party. He hailed from the Land of Lincoln and served as Governor of Illinois, but he admired the South and ran with Southerners John Sparkman and Estes Kefauver. He favored civil rights legislation but also believed in federalism and sought to temper over centralization of power in Washington D.C. Eisenhower pursued a different path, though he is often regarded as a proponent of the type of restrained federalism Stevenson advocated. Stevenson’s progressive legislative program eventually led to John F. Kennedy’s “New Freedom” and parts of Lydon Johnson’s “Great Society”.

Stevenson made a campaign stop in Richmond, Virginia on September 20, 1952 where he praised both the South and Southern culture. No one, not even a “conservative Republican”, would dare make the same comments today, partly out of fear that they would be called racist and partly because many “Republicans” are too imprudent to understand nuance and are consumed by the myth of Lincolnian nationalism and the Grand Old Party. The modern retort that “Republicans freed the slaves and Democrats are the party of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow Klansmen” highlights the sophomoric positions of the average GOP voter.

Stevenson had better and more intelligent things to say. The same day that Stevenson gave this speech, he wrote the following on a piece of letterhead, “The South is a good place to take our bearings, because in no part of the country does the past—a past of great nobility and great tragedy—more sharply etch the present than in the South. It is a good place to think of the grim problems of war and peace which weigh so heavily on all of us today.”

I quote his 1952 speech at length because it illustrates the depth of Stevenson’s knowledge of Southern life and culture and by contrast the shallow understanding of both Southern and American history by so-called intelligent modern “conservatives”. He praises the Confederate Constitution, Robert E. Lee, Southern literature, and Southern “political genius” while condemning “anti-Southernism” and “self-righteousness.” Stevenson’s conclusion that the South was part of the “great heritage for America” would be considered sacrilegious to the modern woke Political Puritan:

Some years ago a famous American critic (H.L. Mencken) said that the South was the wasteland of the mind. Yet at that very moment, I am told, so many of your housewives had novels simmering with the soup—among them Gone with the Wind—that many husbands had to wait for supper. And men—in an effort perhaps to keep up with their women, among them your own Ellen Glasgow—were writing books and plays, too. So it was that the Nobel Prize for Literature came to the Mississippian, William Faulkner, a prize that he accepted in an exalted address, extolling the unconquerable spirit of man.

If this means much to the nation, it also, I am sure, means much to you. Your way has often been hard. Yet you have always held that civilization is something more than the bending of the resources of nature to the uses of man. Man cannot live without bread, but his spirit cannot live by bread alone.

In the course of this resurgence, I hope that it may be possible for us to keep all that was good of the Old South, while embracing all that is good of the New South. Technicians can make a country, but they alone cannot create a civilization. There are riches in your inheritance which are sometimes overlooked—riches which the rest of the nation could borrow with great profit. I believe it was Gladstone who said that no greater misfortune could befall a people than to break utterly with its past.

Among the most valuable heritages of the Old South is its political genius, which in many respects was far ahead of its time. Even today some of the finest products of Southern governmental thought are only beginning to win the general acceptance which they have so long deserved.

A classic example, it seems to me, is the Constitution of the Confederacy. Scholars of constitutional law have long recognized it as a sound and most thoughtful document. It contained some brilliant innovations, including the so-called item veto—authorizing the President to disapprove individual items in an appropriation bill, without having to veto the entire measure.

This inspiration of the Confederate statesmen has since been incorporated into the constitutions of about three-fourths of our states, including my own state of Illinois.

Is it too much to hope that our Federal Government may soon adopt this priceless invention of Southern statesmanship? I hope not, because it is a most useful tool. It has enabled me to veto more appropriations involving more money, than any Governor in Illinois history. And, by the way, forty-six other states had higher state tax burdens than Illinois in relation to the income of their citizens last year.

In other fields, I am glad to note, the Southern talent for government has won the recognition which it is due. Many of your states are among the best governed in the land. Southern diplomats have earned wholehearted respect in Asia and Europe. In Congress Southern leaders once again give wise and distinguished service to the nation, especially in the all-important area of foreign affairs. I am proud to have one of them, Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, as my running mate. And I am also proud that other such leaders—each himself a candidate for the Presidency—have given me their support—Senator [Estes] Kefauver of Tennessee, and my distant kinsman, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia.

Just as the governmental contributions of the South sometimes were not fully appreciated in the past, so too, I suspect, some of the problems of the South have not been fully understood elsewhere. One of those is the problem of minorities—a problem which I have had occasion to think about a good deal, since my own state also has minority groups.

One thing that I have learned is that minority tensions are always strongest under conditions of hardship. During the long years of Republican neglect and exploitation, many Southerners—white and Negro—have suffered even hunger, the most degrading of man’s adversities. All the South, in one degree or another, was afflicted with a pathetic lack of medical services, poor house, poor schooling, and a hundred other ills flowing from the same source of poverty.

The once low economic status of the South was productive of another—and even more melancholy—phenomenon. Many of the lamentable differences between Southern whites and Negroes, ascribed by insensitive observers to race prejudice, have arisen for other reasons. Here economically depressed whites and economically depressed Negroes often had to fight over already gnawed bones. Then there ensued that most pathetic struggles: the struggle of the poor against the poor. It is a struggle that can easily become embittered, for hunger has no heart. But, happily, as the economic status of the South has risen, as the farms flourish and in the towns there are jobs for all at good wages, racial tensions have diminished.

In the broad field of minority rights, the Democratic Party has stated its position in its platform, a position to which I adhere. I should justly earn your contempt if I talked one way in the South and another way elsewhere. Certainly no intellectually dishonest Presidential candidate could, by an alchemy of election, be converted into an honest President. I shall not go anywhere with beguiling serpent words. To paraphrase the words of Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, better to be a dog and bay the moon.

I should like to say a word about the broader aspects of minority rights.

First, I utterly reject the argument that we ought to grant al men their rights just because if we do not we shall give Soviet Russia a propaganda weapon. This concept is itself tainted with communist wiliness. It insultingly implies that were it not for communists we would not do what is right. The answer to this argument is that we must do right for right’s sake alone. I, for one, do not propose to adjust my ethics to the values of a bloodstained despotism, scornful of all that we hold dear.

Second, I reject as equally contemptible the reckless assertions that the South is a prison in which half the people are prisoners and the other half are wardens. I view with scorn those who hurl charges that eh South—or any group of Americans—is wedded to wrong and incapable of right. For this itself is an expression of prejudice compounded with hatred, a poisonous doctrine for which, I hope, there will never be room in our country.

So long as man remains a little lower than the angels, I suppose that human character will never free itself entirely from the blemish of prejudice, religious or racial. These are prejudices, unhappily, that tend to rise wherever the minority in question is large, running here against one group and there against another. Some forget this, and, in talking of the South, forget that in the South the minority is high. Some forget, too, or don’t know about the strides the South has made in the past decade toward equal treatment.

But I do not attempt to justify the unjustifiable, whether it is anti-Negroism in one place, anti-Semitism in another—or for that matter, anti-Southernism in many places. And neither can I justify self-righteousness anywhere. Let none of us be smug on this score, for nowhere in the nation have we come to that state of harmonious amity between racial and religious groups to which we aspire.

The political abuse of discrimination in employment, the exploitation of racial aspirations on the one hand and racial prejudice on the other—all for votes—is both a dangerous thing and a revolting spectacle in our political life. It will always be better to reason together than to hurl recriminations at one another.

Our best lesson on reason and charity was read to us by Robert E. Lee. It was not the least of his great contributions to the spirit of America that, when he laid down his sword, he became president of a small college in Lexington—now the splendid Washington and Lee University. There he remained the rest of his life; unifying, not dividing; loving, not hating.

As the autumn of 1865 was coming on, General Lee, in one of the noblest of American utterances, said, “The war being at an end, the Southern states having laid down their arms, and the questions at issue between them and the Northern states having been decided, I believe it to be the duty of everyone to unite in the restoration of the country and the re-establishment of peace and harmony.…” Later he said: “I know of no surer way of eliciting the truth than by burying contention with the war.”

We have great need of Lee’s spirit in this hour of peril to our country, when voices of hatred and unreason arise again in our land. As free men we shall always, I hope, differ upon many things. But I also hope that we shall never be divided upon those concepts that are enshrined in our religious faith and the charters of our country’s greatness.

No one could stand here in Richmond without reverence for those great Virginians—Washington, whose sturdy common sense was the mortar of our foundations, and Jefferson, that universal genius who, proclaiming the Rights of Man when few men had any rights anywhere shook the earth and made this feeble country the hope of the world everywhere. And so it is today after nearly two centuries.

Fortunately for us all, the Southern political genius still lives. It flamed not long ago in Woodrow Wilson. It burns steadily today among Southern members of Congress, and among many of the leaders of your states.

Good politics make good government. In this campaign I shall not try to minimize the tasks which we confront. That we shall pass through these troubled times I am sure, not be grace alone, but by faith, intelligence and implacable determination.

In my travels about the country of late in quest of your confidence I have felt that determination, that indomitable spirit. But nowhere more than here where I suspect it is as strong today as it was in the spring of 1865, when the Army of Northern Virginia returned to their homes. They found a wasteland of burned houses and barns, fences fallen and ditches caved in, weeds, and sorrow brooding over the fields.

That was in April. But by June a crop was growing. The next year the crop was larger, and the next year it was still larger, and so, painfully and slowly, with no help except their hands and the benison of God, the South started on its long march from desolation to fruitfulness.

This is part of your great heritage. And if I could speak for all Americans as I now do for myself, I would say that it also is part of the great heritage of America.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the author or co-author of six books, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (Regnery History, 2017), 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, (Regnery, 2009), The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution (Regnery History, 2012), Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012), and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Real American Heroes, (Regnery, 2012). He received a B.A. in History from Salisbury University in 1997 and an M.A. in History from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He finished his Ph.D. in History at the University of South Carolina in 2006, and had the privilege of being Clyde Wilson’s last doctoral student. He lives in Alabama with his wife and three daughters.

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