Ring Lardner, South Bend, and Baseball

 In the spring of 1901 the University of Notre Dame varsity baseball team was busy preparing for a game on the South Bend, Indiana, campus. Ed Reulbach, the team’s starting pitcher and future star of the Chicago Cubs, noticed a tall, lanky youngster approach trainer Tom Holland and ask if he could have the job of water carrier. Informed that the job had already been filled, the kid sat in the grandstand for the entire game “with his overalls and farmer’s sun bonnet on,” Reulbach recalled.

The next day Reulbach traveled to Niles, Michigan, a few miles north of South Bend, to pitch for the town’s baseball team. Sitting on the bench before the game, somebody offered him a tin cup full of water. “I glanced at the individual and almost fell off the bench—there was the same kid I saw at the Saturday game when he asked to be a water boy,” said Reulbach. “He sat next to me on the bench and offered me a cup of water every few minutes, until I finally told him that I did not need a bath, just a cup of water every other inning.”

 

Seven years later, as a pitcher for the Cubs, Reulbach again met up with the eager water boy. He had just sat down to a poker game on a train leaving Chicago—a game that also included the famed Cubs double-play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance—when he heard someone say to Tinker, “I will get you a glass of water.” According to Reulbach, the voice haunted him, and he “looked up, lo and behold, there was the same water boy from Niles and Notre Dame. He smiled and said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I said ‘Yes—but I do not need a bath.’” Reulbach had met the new baseball reporter for the Chicago Examiner—Ring Lardner.

 

Known for creating such indelible baseball characters as Jack Keefe (You Know Me Al), Alibi Ike, and others, Lardner received his early indoctrination to the intricacies of the game by covering the Central League, a Class B minor league for the South Bend Times. The league, which produced such future major-league stars as Goat Anderson, Owen Joseph "Donie" Bush, Slow Joe Doyle, Jack Hendricks, Dan Howley, and John Ganzel, provided Lardner with a training ground for learning more on how to be a reporter and how to cover a sport he had loved since childhood. “Altogether,” Lardner later confided to a fellow newspaperman, “I had a lovely time on that paper.”

 

Ringgold (later shortened to Ring) Wilmer Lardner was born on March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan, the youngest of nine children raised by Henry and Lena Phillips Lardner. A successful businessman, Henry provided his children with all the comforts money could buy. The family's spacious Broad Street home was located just a stone's throw from the Saint Joseph River and each child had his or her own nursemaid. From an early age, Ring and his brother, Rex, developed a mania for baseball. Ring claimed that even when he and his brother were being pushed around Niles in baby carriages, the two “could rattle off the batting order of any of the National Leagues’ twelve clubs.”

 

Although born with a deformed foot and forced to wear a brace until he was eleven years old, Ring did take part in such activities as baseball and swimming. As the children of privilege, however, the three youngest Lardners were not allowed to, as Ring put it, “mingle with the tough eggs from the West Side and Dickereel [a poorer German neighborhood in Niles].” The Lardner children’s insulation from the harsh life outside their home extended to their education. Instead of attending local primary schools, Ring, Rex, and their sister, Anna, were taught by a private tutor named Harry Mansfield. Nicknamed Beady by his young charges, the tutor came to the house “every morning at 9 and stayed till noon and on acct. of it taking him 2 and a 1/2 hrs. to get us to stop giggling,” Lardner remembered.

 

The private lessons offered by Mansfield did not seem to help when the Lardners took their examinations to enter high school—they all flunked. A kindhearted principal, however, relented and, on a probationary basis, placed Ring and Anna in the ninth grade and Rex in the tenth grade. In spite of their sheltered early life, Ring and his siblings flourished in their new surroundings. In addition to playing on the football team, Ring, Rex, Ed Wurz, and Ray Starkweather formed a quartet that spent many nights serenading Niles' young female population. Hardly an evening passed, said Lardner, when “some gal’s father did not feel himself called on to poke his head out his Fourth Street window and tell these same boys to shut up and go home for the sake of a leading character in the Bible.”

 

If Lardner became tired of his hometown’s late-night offerings, he could always hitch up a horse and buggy and set off for South Bend’s bright lights. Convincing the family’s horse Fred, however, to trot at a pace suitable to see a date home before curfew proved to be a difficult task. On one occasion, Lardner did not get his date home until 3:30 a.m., “which was at that time,” he noted, “the latest which either she or I or Fred had been up, but mother was still sitting up and I tried to tell her the old proverb how you can trot a horse to South Bend but you can’t trot him home but she couldn’t hear me on acct. of somebody talking all the time.” It was the last time Lardner dated that girl.

 

In addition to learning the finer points of outwitting parents, Lardner discovered a far more dangerous habit as a young man—drinking. Finding alcohol proved to be no problem for Lardner and his underage friends and together they could always “take our custom down to Pigeon’s where everybody that had a dime was the same age and the only minors was the boys that tried to start a charge acct.” By the time he graduated from high school in 1901, Lardner had “mastered just enough of one live foreign language to tell Razzle, a gullible bartender, that [he] war ein und Zwanzig jahre alt [aged twenty].” (Lardner’s fondness for alcohol was a contributing factor to his premature death at age forty-eight.)

 

After graduation, Lardner turned down a scholarship offer from Olivet College. Times were hard for the Lardner family. Henry's eldest son, William, a Duluth, Minnesota, banker, had convinced his father to invest heavily in the institution. The bank's failure, coupled with a bad investment in a Canadian mining operation, forced Henry to sell his large land holdings to pay off his creditors. Ring's early attempts to make a living did not help matters. He worked in Chicago as an office boy for the McCormick Harvester Company and the Peabody, Houghteling and Company real-estate firm, but was fired after only a few weeks. Returning to Niles, he found a job with the Michigan Central Railroad at a dollar-a-day salary. The railroad fired him, however, for, as he described it, “putting a box of cheese in the through Jackson car, when common sense should have told me that it ought to go to Battle Creek.”

 

In January 1902 Lardner’s father scraped together enough money to send both Ring and Rex to the Armour Institute in Chicago to study engineering, an occupation for which both proved to be ill-suited. “I can’t think of no walk in life for which I had more of a natural bent unless it would be hostess at a roller rink,” Ring observed. Instead of hitting the books, the brothers spent most of their time in Chicago taverns and theaters. By the spring the two had flunked out of the institute and returned to Niles.

 

Although Rex was able to find a job as a reporter for the Niles Daily Sun, as well as being the Niles correspondent for the Kalamazoo Gazette and the SouthBend Tribune, Ring spent the next year recovering “from the strain which had wrought havoc with my nervous system.” He found time to write and perform with a local musical group called the American Minstrels, which organized performances at the Niles Opera House. In 1904 he took a job with the Niles Gas Company at five dollars a week, later raised to eight dollars a week. The only trouble Lardner had with his job came in reading meters, usually located in “dark cellars where my favorite animal, the rat, is wont to dwell. When I entered a cellar and saw a rat reading the meter ahead of me, I accepted his reading and went on to the next house.”

 

Lardner may have spent the remainder of his life avoiding rats in dark basements were it not for a happy accident involving his reporter brother, Rex. In the fall of 1905 Edgar Stoll, son of South Bend Times owner John B. Stoll, visited Niles to try and convince Rex to quit his job and work for the Times. Rex was on vacation at the time, so the Niles Daily Sun editor sent Edgar Stoll to visit Ring at the gas company for more information. Ring's newspaper career came out of this one chance meeting. He remembered:

 

Mr. Stoll sought me out and stated his errand, also inquiring whether my brother was tied up to a contract [with the Daily Sun]. I said yes, which was the truth. I asked how much salary he was willing to offer. He said twelve dollars a week.

Why?

“Oh,'” I said, “I thought I might tackle the job myself.”

“Have you ever done any newspaper work?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said. “I often help my brother.” This was very far from the truth, but I was thinking of those rats.

 

Lardner, who obtained the job at a salary of twelve dollars a week, seemed undisturbed about his venture into a new career. “I had no newspaper experience, but a two years’ course in a gas-office teaches you practically all there is to know about human nature,” he noted. “Besides, I had been class poet at the high school, and I knew I could write.” Lardner's family had other worries. Although agreeing that twelve dollars a week was four dollars more than what he was earning at the gas company, they pointed out that traveling to work on the interurban railroad linking Niles and South Bend cost $2.40 per week, and instead of eating free at home he would have to pay for his lunches. Lardner, having given his word to Edgar Stoll, brushed aside these financial concerns and accepted the job on the Times as a self-described “sporting editor and staff, dramatic critic, society and court-house reporter, and banquet hound.”

 

Before starting work in January 1906 Lardner received a rousing sendoff from Rex in a Daily Sun article that called Ring “a recognized local authority on all matters that pertain to legitimate sports, and he is at the same time a writer of ability having the vernacular of ring, the base ball diamond, the football field and other lines of sport, at ready command.”

 

The first assignment Lardner tackled for the South Bend newspaper failed to endear him to his editors. Sent to cover the wedding of a member of the Studebaker family, well known in the community, he returned to the office with only five lines of news, which, one of his biographers noted, “is probably just what he thought it was worth.” For his next assignment, he gave a negative review to a show written by the owner of the theater where it was presented, who also happened to be a major advertiser with the Times.

 

Lardner discovered his true calling on the newspaper in April when he started covering South Bend's entry in the Central League, a Class B minor league with teams also in Canton, Dayton, Evansville, Grand Rapids, Springfield, Terre Haute, and Wheeling. In those days, minor leagues were not directly tied to major-league teams but were independent entities. Players were lionized by local fans as much as today’s big leaguers and, according to baseball historian Bill James, some of the “best players in the game were in the minor leagues.”

 

The South Bend team’s games were played at Spring Brook Park and Lardner, because a South Bend Tribune reporter was the newest one on the job, was appointed by the league president to serve as official scorer. The dollar-a-game salary he received hardly covered the trouble it caused him. In hopes of impressing major-league scouts, minor-league ballplayers often pressured the official scorer to rule anything—even an obvious error—as a base hit. With the official scorer's desk just twelve feet from the visiting club's bench, Lardner had several altercations with players.

 

Writing a story a day during the season, Lardner, while with the Times, developed the characteristic style he used in his later work. “Instead of writing a stringy, inning-by-inning account,” Donald Edler, Lardner's biographer noted, “he composed his story around a personality or a single dramatic play, and then put into it all the pace and color of a particular game.” His own brand of humor also filled those early stories as Lardner displayed a keen sense of just how far he could go in teasing and tormenting the colorful characters that inhabited America's game at the turn of the twentieth century.

 

In addition to his duties as a reporter and official scorer, Lardner also found time to further his passion for the game by serving as a scout for South Bend team owners Bert McInerny and Ed Doran. During the winter of 1906 and 1907 Lardner learned that a promising young player on the Dayton team, Owen J. Bush, had been released. Informing McInerny and Doran of Bush’s availability, they signed him. Bush, although only five feet, six inches tall and weighing 145 pounds, turned in a stellar performance for the team as its shortstop.

 

Looking for bigger game, Lardner next tried to interest Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey and Chicago Cubs owner Charles Murphy in Bush. The young reporter had met both men at the 1906 World Series between the two clubs and both “had asked me to keep on the lookout for promising young ball players and to report by wire, collect, if I saw one,” Lardner remembered. “I would be financially rewarded if the players I recommended were drafted or bought, and made good.”

 

If he convinced a major-league team to sign Bush, Lardner also stood to receive a cut from the South Bend owners, whose only hope of breaking even during a season came when the possessed a ballplayer good enough—Bush in this case—to elicit an offer from a major-league team before the first day of September, after which Class B players could no longer be bought but were subject to the draft. After spending $9.30 in telephone calls and telegrams, Lardner was unsuccessful in his attempts to get a team to sign Bush. Eventually drafted by the Detroit Tigers, Bush went on to a successful career with the Tigers. After his days as a player ended, Bush managed the Pittsburgh Pirates, the White Sox, and the Indianapolis Indians.

 

Lardner kept busy in the off-season by visiting every city in the Central League during the spring of 1907 and reporting on any activity. When Terre Haute traded Buck Weaver to a Little Rock team, Lardner noted that Weaver had been keeping in shape over the winter “by acting as a life-saving line at a Terre Haute skating rink.” Upon the hiring of new umpire Ollie Chill from Indianapolis, Larnder informed his readers that the rookie man in blue had “obtained his preliminary training throwing pianos into the second-story windows of flat buildings. During his experience as an umpire, he has been known to pick small disgruntled ball players up by the Adam's apple and toss them to the roof of the grandstand.”

 

In the summer of 1907 Lardner split his time between his passion for baseball and his passion for Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana. The two were introduced to one another while attending a picnic along the Saint Joseph River in Niles. His future wife inspired Lardner to write: “The first time I cast my eyes upon young Ellis fair, I thought, ‘It's my affinity who’s seated over there.’” With Lardner embarking on a sportswriting career, however, the couple endured a long courtship, finally marrying on June 28, 1911.

 

Lardner’s tenure at the Times ended in the fall of 1907, when he developed “a desire to quit South Bend and get a job on a paper in Chicago or New York.” His wish came true through the aid of an old family friend. Ring and Rex Lardner cleverly timed their vacations to coincide with the World Series between the Cubs and Tigers. While in Chicago, the Lardners stayed with the Jacks family, former friends from Niles.

 

When Ring informed Phil Jacks of his wish for a change, his friend, who knew Hugh S. Fullerton, baseball writer for the Chicago Examiner, arranged a meeting between the two for the next day. After a brief meeting in the Examiner offices, the two men retired to a neighborhood bar for a few drinks before the end-of-the-season game between the White Sox and Saint Louis Browns. The liquor, said Lardner, “did away with my innate reticence,” and he and Fullerton were soon engaged in a friendly discussion about baseball. When the men arrived at the game, Fullerton introduced Lardner to Comiskey and proclaimed, “I’m going to find a job for this boy in somebody's sporting department. He’s been writing baseball on the South Bend Times for two years, but he isn’t as sappy as that sounds.”

 

Fullerton arranged for Lardner to be seated next to him in the press box when the World Series opened in Chicago at the West Side Ball Park and even traveled with him to Detroit. The series ended with the Cubs sweeping the Tigers in four games. Fullerton introduced Lardner to Frank B. Hutchinson of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, and Hutchinson offered him a sportswriting job at $18.50 a week. After Lardner accepted the offer, his new boss asked him how he could manage to living in Chicago on such a small salary. “I can get on the wagon [swear off liquor],” Lardner said. “You can get on the wagon," Hutchinson responded, “but nobody can work for us and stay there.”

           

Lardner’s decision to leave South Bend did not sit well with his employers who realized they were losing a talented reporter. Fortunately, Lardner’s young assistant, J. P. McEvoy, was able to take over his old job. “The real requiem,” Lardner said, “was held in the old manse in Niles, Michigan.” His mother, who considered Chicago to be "a huge collection of Gomorrahs," arranged for her son’s room and board at a respectable woman’s home on the city’s north side. After a short time, however, Lardner found he could no longer afford this arrangement and moved to a single room on the corner of North State and Goethe Streets.

 

Although Lardner made it back to the old family home on numerous occasions throughout his life—he provided financial support for his family as his fame grew—the sheltered existence he knew as a youth faded as he dealt with the hard life of a roving reporter and writer. “Small towns are fine to grow up in and a writer finds out a lot of things in small towns he can't learn anywhere else,” Lardner later observed. “But it wouldn’t be the same as you got older in a small town.” Those things he learned while living in a small town, and his experiences as a journalist in South Bend, permeated Lardner’s literary life—a career that produced, according to Virginia Woolf, “the best prose that has come our way.”

 

 

Levi Coffin and "The Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad"

While growing up in North Carolina in the early 1800s, a Quaker child came face-to-face with the institution of slavery. One day while he was out with his father chopping wood by the side of a road, a group of slaves, handcuffed and chained together, passed by on their way to be sold in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana.

Questioned by the young boy’s father about why they were chained, one of the enslaved men sadly replied: “They have taken us away from our wives and children, and they chain us lest we should make our escape and go back to them.” After the dejected company had left the scene, the youth wondered how he would feel if his father were taken away from him.

The incident by the side of the road marked the first awakening of Levi Coffin’s sympathy with the oppressed, which, he observed in his memoirs, together with a strong hatred of oppression and injustice in any form, “were the motives that influenced my whole after-life.” Coffin, who moved to Newport, Indiana (Fountain City today) in 1826 and became an important merchant there, acted on his beliefs.

From Coffin’s simple eight-room house in Wayne County, and with the help of his wife, Catharine, he managed over the next twenty years to offer a safe haven to thousands of African Americans fleeing slavery’s evils on the Underground Railroad along major escape routes leading from Cincinnati, Madison, and Jeffersonville. “Seldom a week passed,” said Coffin, “without our receiving passengers by this mysterious road. We found it necessary to be always prepared to receive such company and properly care for them.”

Coffin’s efforts won for him the designation “President of the Underground Railroad” and for the Coffins’ home the title “Grand Central Station” on the path for slaves’ eventual freedom in the north and Canada. Legend has it that one of the refugees who found shelter in the Coffins’ home was later immortalized as the character Eliza, the heroine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Levi and Catharine Coffin are supposedly depicted in the book as Simeon and Rachel Halliday.

Levi Coffin was born on October 28, 1798, on a farm in New Garden, North Carolina, the only son of seven children born to Levi and Prudence (Williams) Coffin. Because his father could not spare him from work on the farm, young Levi received the bulk of his education at home, under instruction from his father and sisters. His home schooling proved to be good enough for Coffin to find work as a teacher for several years.

Coffin shared with his relatives a hatred for slavery. “Both my parents and grandparents were opposed to slavery,” he noted in his reminiscences, published in 1876, “and none of either of the families ever owned slaves; and all were friends of the oppressed, so I claim that I inherited my anti-slavery principles.”

While he was still a teenager, Coffin had his first opportunity to offer assistance to a slave. Attending a cornhusking, the fifteen-year-old Coffin noticed a group of slaves brought to the husking by a slave dealer named Stephen Holland. While the other whites in the party dined, the Quaker boy remained behind to talk with the slaves and to “see if I could render them any service.” He learned that one of the slaves, named Stephen, was freeborn and a former indentured servant to Edward Lloyd, a Philadelphia Quaker, but later had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Thinking fast, Coffin arranged with a “trusty negro, whom I knew well,” to take Stephen the next night to his father’s house. After learning the particulars of the now slave’s case, the elder Coffin wrote Lloyd of his former servant’s plight and eventually Stephen was liberated from slavery in Georgia.

In 1821, with his cousin Vestal Coffin, Levi ran a Sunday school for blacks at New Garden, where the slaves were taught to read using the Bible. Alarmed slave owners, however, soon forced the school to close. Coffin, who married Catharine White, a woman he had known since childhood, on October 28, 1824, decided two years later to join family members who had moved to the young state of Indiana. Establishing a store in Newport, Coffin prospered, expanding his operations to include cutting pork and manufacturing linseed oil. His business success led to him being elected director of the State Bank’s Richmond branch.

Even with his busy life as a merchant, Coffin was “never too busy to engage in Underground Railroad affairs.” In fact, his business success aided him immeasurably in helping slaves to freedom. “The Underground Railroad business increased as time advanced,” he said, “and it was attended with heavy expenses, which I could not have borne had not my affairs been prosperous.”

Coffin’s thriving business and importance in the community helped deflect opposition to his Underground Railroad activities from proslavery supporters and slave hunters in the area. Questioned by others in the community about why he aided slaves when he knew he could be arrested for his activities, Coffin told them that he “read in the Bible when I was a boy that it was right to take in the stranger and administer to those in distress, and that I thought it was always safe to do right. The Bible, in bidding us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, said nothing about color, and I should try to follow out the teachings of that good book.”

The fearlessness the Coffins displayed in offering assistance to the fleeing slaves had an effect on their neighbors. Levi Coffin noted that those who had once “stood aloof from the work” eventually contributed clothing for the fugitives and aided the Coffins in forwarding the slaves on their way to freedom, but were “timid about sheltering them under their roof; so that part of the work devolved on us.”

Fugitives came to the Coffins’ home at all hours of the night and announced their presence by a gentle rap at the door. “I would invite them, in a low tone,” said Coffin, “to come in, and they would follow me into the darkened house without a word, for we knew not who might be watching and listening.” Once safely inside, the slaves would be fed and made comfortable for the evening. The number of fugitives varied considerably through the years, Coffin noted, but annually averaged more than one hundred.

In 1847 Coffin left Newport to open a wholesale warehouse in Cincinnati that handled cotton goods, sugar, and spices produced by free labor. The enterprise had been funded a year earlier by a Quaker Convention at Salem, Indiana. Coffin and his wife continued to help slaves via the Underground Railroad while living in Cincinnati.

Both during and after the Civil War, Coffin served as a leading figure in the Western Freedman’s Aid Society, which helped educate and provide in other ways for former slaves. Working for the freedman’s cause in England and Europe, Coffin, in one year, raised more than $100,000 for the Society. In 1867 he served as a delegate to the International Anti-Slavery Conference in Paris. He died on September 16, 1877, in Cincinnati and is buried in that city’s Spring Grove Cemetery.       

  

All the Way with LBJ: Electing Lyndon Johnson

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ascension to the presidency after John Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 in Dallas had disheartened many members of JFK’s administration, whose poor opinions of the former U.S. Senate majority leader might have been exacerbated by his being from the state in which their leader had been gunned down and his often antagonistic relationship with Robert Kennedy.

Kennedy’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic, noted freelance reporter John Bartlow Martin, had mourned John Kennedy’s tragic death, but had in his heart he nursed a soft spot for Johnson because of an incident at the 1963 inauguration of Juan Bosch as president of the Dominican Republic. During the festivities, Martin’s son, Dan, had broken his arm after being thrown from his burro. A Dominican doctor had set the arm and put a cast on it, but Martin wanted the arm X-rayed by an American doctor onboard the USS Boxer, an American aircraft carrier on hand to provide helicopter air cover for the vice president.

Martin told Johnson that his wife, Fran, could not accompany the vice president’s wife, Lady Bird, on a scheduled visit to the Dominican School for the Blind because she had to be with Dan when he went to the carrier. “Why don’t you let me take the boy, and his mother, too, up to Washington with me Thursday?” Johnson spontaneously asked Martin. “They can take better care of him at Bethesda [Naval Hospital] than here.”

Ever since that time, whenever anyone asked Martin about his view of Johnson, his mind turned back to that occasion and the vice president’s compassionate gesture. Johnson, he noted, helped save his son’s arm, as the break had occurred near the growth center at the elbow, “and if it had not been reset properly it would not have grown.”

When Johnson asked for Martin’s help in his presidential effort against his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, the conservative U.S. Senator from Arizona, Martin agreed. The veteran Democratic speechwriter, who had previously worked on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential efforts in 1952 and 1956, as well as John Kennedy’s in 1960,  had high hopes for the 1964 campaign, believing the  election could be a means to discuss fundamental issues of American policy, including war and peace in the nuclear age and the proper role of government in a free society. Unfortunately, he later observed, the election turned out to be “one of the silliest, most empty, and most boring campaigns in the nation’s history.”

In the late summer of 1964, Bill Moyers, special assistant to Johnson, took Martin to see the president and the two men discussed the upcoming campaign for a few minutes. Johnson believed that Goldwater had a chance to capture the election by winning the South; adding Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, the conservative Midwest; along with New Mexico, Colorado, and the mountain states.

Martin told the president about his background in the Midwest and agreed with Johnson that the region’s conservatism might swing voters to the Goldwater camp as a backlash against gains being made by African Americans, highlighted by the Civil Rights Act Congress passed on July 2 after much wheeling and dealing from Johnson. White workingmen in the Midwest, said Martin, particularly those of Eastern European extraction, felt threatened by black men, fearing they might lose their jobs to them. There also existed in the region vestiges of the McCarthyism of the 1950s and the isolationism of the 1930s in reaction to America’s growing power and foreign commitments, including troop increases in Vietnam, he added. “At the fringe were lunatics who hated communists, Jews, Catholics, Negroes, waste, or big government (or any government, it sometimes seemed) indiscriminately,” Martin noted.

With all these difficulties, the Midwest might well prove to be “the battleground” in the election, according to Johnson strategists. Martin remembered the president telling him: “We need you. You write it and tell me what to say and I’ll say it.” Martin later observed that Johnson was the easiest candidate he ever worked for, as far as speechwriting was concerned, far easier to write speeches for than either John Kennedy or Stevenson had been because Johnson “would say what you wrote.” As he left his meeting with Johnson, the Texan called out to Martin, “Get some new ideas, John,” words he had heard from past Democratic presidential candidates.

That fall Martin had an office in the Executive Office Building, located next to the White House, where he worked under the direction of Moyers, who was in overall charge of the campaign’s speechwriting staff. Unlike his previous experience with John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Martin did not always travel with Johnson, but spoke to him occasionally in the White House, as well as passing along strategy recommendations to Moyers. Martin also worked with the other speechwriters, including Dick Goodwin, his companion on the Kennedy campaign plane, and William Wirtz (Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration), with whom he had worked on Stevenson’s presidential campaigns.

As the incumbent, Johnson had an enormous advantage over his opponent, and he and his advisers decided he should “stay presidential,” initially running his campaign from the White House, ignoring his opponent, touting the surging economy and his legislative successes with Congress, and possibly reassessing his strategy in October. “I guess the best thing for me to do,” said Johnson, “is to stay around here and let people know I’m real busy tending the store, that I’m taking good care of their business.” It seemed to be a sound strategy, as a Gallup poll had 77 percent of eligible voters supporting Johnson to only 20 percent for Goldwater.

Johnson advisers planned, noted Jack Valenti, to treat their GOP rival “not as an equal, who has the credentials to be President, but as a radical, a preposterous candidate.” Not hard to do given Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention, where he had said, “I remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is not virtue.” Goldwater’s statements about selling the Tennessee Valley Authority, making Social Security voluntary, withdrawing the United States from the United Nations, and using low-yield nuclear weapons against Chinese supply lines in North Vietnam only reinforced his reputation as an extremist. “Our overriding issue in 1964 was very simple,” noted Larry O’Brien, a Kennedy aide who had remained to work with Johnson. “In one word, Goldwater.”

While Johnson remained above the fray, using the presidency as his “greatest asset,” his staff set out to convince voters that Goldwater could not be trusted to hold such high office, and used his extreme statements against him. With the assistance of a New York advertising agency—Doyle Dane Bernbach—the Johnson campaign spent $3 million on television advertising hitting Goldwater on his intemperate remarks on Social Security, opposition to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and view that the country would be better off if the eastern seaboard could somehow be cut off America.

One commercial in particular, as Martin noted, treated Goldwater “as a bloodthirsty mad bomber,” and has gone done in history as one of the most famous, or infamous given one’s political leanings, in presidential campaign history. The “Daisy” advertisement, as it is now called, featured a young girl in a field picking petals off of a daisy and counting—sometimes inaccurately—from one to nine. When she reached nine, a menacing male voice took over, reciting a countdown. The camera zooms in on the child’s right eye, followed by a bright flash and roar that gives way to a nuclear explosion. As the immense fireball grows and boils in fury, Johnson’s voice can be heard, saying, “These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must love each other, or we must die.” The spot ends with a voiceover urging, “Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high to stay home.”

According to Martin, Johnson had decreed that no speech of his during the campaign could be longer than seven hundred words. “With commercials like that to explain complicated issues,” asked Martin, “who needs long speeches?” Years later, he learned that while Johnson campaigned as “the candidate of military restraint,” behind the scenes the president had made plans to increase the American combat presence in the Vietnam War. Although he met frequently with such senior presidential advisers as Clark Clifford and Abe Fortas, saw the president occasionally, and Moyers, Goodwin, and Wirtz on a daily basis, Martin said he had no inkling of any such move to widen the war, and he doubted if any of his colleagues did either.

Although many Democrats were extremely confident of victory in November, Martin, still nervous about Johnson’s chances in the Midwest and elsewhere, did some legwork in several states (by car across Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in early September, and Oklahoma, Texas, New York, and Connecticut in late September), and discovered that almost nobody seemed to be paying much attention to the campaign. He found that Democratic voters admired Johnson and believed him to be the safer candidate than Goldwater, but many did not have the same enthusiasm they had previously displayed for Kennedy. Consequently, Johnson could count on “very broad but rather shallow support,” and Martin worried that the president’s lead in the polls could very well breed “overconfidence and indifference among Democrats.”

Martin wrote a memorandum for the president telling him that people in the Midwest were saying that the election had come down to a choice between “a kook and a crook,” with Goldwater being the kook and Johnson the crook. Martin advised Johnson that he should let the voters see him in action and “convince them he was not a crook; and the best way to do that, I thought, was personal, whistle-stop campaigning.” 

Johnson took action to broaden his support, wishing to win over every possible voter in order to achieve the largest popular vote victory in presidential history, surpassing the 60.3 percent attained by Warren Harding in 1920 and the 60.8 percent garnered by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. “He not only wished to win bigger than John Kennedy had won in 1960, but bigger than anybody had won ever,” said Martin. “Moreover, he wanted people to vote for him, not against Goldwater; he wanted all the American people to vote for him because they loved him.”

To achieve such a historic victory, Johnson, at the end of September, set out on a whirlwind tour of the country, traveling 60,000 miles over a forty-two-day period and making 200 speeches in the Northeast, Midwest, and Upper South. With bullhorn in hand, the president attracted enormous crowds (70,000 in Peoria, Illinois, and 40,000 in Indianapolis, for example), stopping his presidential motorcade to shake hands and encourage voters, “Come on folks, come on down to the speakin’. You don’t have to dress. Just bring your children and dogs, anything you have with you. It won’t take long. You’ll be back in time to put the kids in bed.” For Johnson’s appearances in the Midwest, Martin did what he had done during John Kennedy’s presidential campaign—producing for the candidate editorial advance memorandums giving information on where the speech would be held, what political notables might be in attendance, and the background on each community.

The Johnson juggernaut rolled on to what seemed to be a certain victory. The only bump along the way occurred in the middle of October, when the story broke that a key Johnson adviser, Walter Jenkins, had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct with another man in the basement restroom at a Washington, D.C., Young Man’s Christian Association facility. The incident seemed tailor-made for the Goldwater campaign, as its candidate had focusing on the morality issue, including attacking the morals of the president himself. “What had looked like a landslide suddenly promised to be a debacle,” said Martin.

Jenkins, however, resigned and international events, including the fall from power of Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev and the explosion by Communist China of its first nuclear weapon, conspired to knock news about the White House aide’s homosexual tryst from newspaper’s front pages. By the end of October Martin said the Johnson campaign had entered a “holding” pattern, but it probably did not matter as he had received “fantastic” reports from reporters and political insiders about Johnson’s chances in the Midwest, including the key states of Illinois and Ohio, as well as states in the East and the West.

Martin’s reports were accurate; Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide, carrying forty-four states and the District of Columbia. Martin’s warning about paying more attention to the Midwest paid off in particular, as the president swept the region, capturing even the normally Republican-leaning Indiana (no Democratic presidential candidate had won the state since Roosevelt in 1936, and none would do so again until Barack Obama in 2008). 

Johnson received more than 43 million votes, or 61.1 percent of the total vote cast, then the largest in American history. Accompanied by Fran, Martin watched the election returns in Moyers’ White House office, while the president learned of his great triumph at his Texas ranch. Martin reflected that the great conservative crusade that year had begun with a slogan about Goldwater of, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” Democrats had responded, “In Your Guts You Know He’s Nuts.” These two slogans “composed a fitting epitaph on the 1964 campaign,” he said

 

Wilma Gibbs Moore: An Appreciation

In the summer of 1963 a twelve-year-old girl sat in the living room in her family’s home on the northwest side of Indianapolis with her father at her side watching on television images from Washington, D.C. The images were of a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., delivering a speech to a crowd estimated at more than 250,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. With the mantra, “I have a dream,” King saw a day when his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and offered his hope of transforming “the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

Although other members of her large family must have been there, in her memory, the girl, who grew up to be Wilma Gibbs Moore, could only remember she and her father absorbed in King’s ringing words issuing from the screen. She recalled watching her father, William Joseph Gibbs, watching King and “seeing his eyes well up” with emotion at the experience, as hers did as well. That experience only heightened Wilma’s personal connection to history, begun years earlier when, at the age of nine, she and her mother, Tessie Alrene, were fascinated by the televised debates between presidential contenders John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.

Wilma also cemented her passion for history with a love of reading, recalling the thrill of reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and walking for a mile to her local library to uncover other treasures buried in the stacks. “History, for me,” Wilma noted, “is a series of stories and patterns that one gleans from excerpting documents, photographs, newspapers, books, oral histories, and artifacts. Like a great novel, it can have elements of mystery and drama upon a canvas. . . . History is about connection and context combined with knowledge. It is the ability to look back and accurately position people and events within a given time and place.”

From 1986, when she became program archivist for African American history at the Indiana Historical Society, until her retirement from the IHS in 2017, Wilma played an essential role in collecting material on the Hoosier State’s African American heritage, guided researchers through the collection to find the material essential for their work, and shared her knowledge with others through interviews and public presentations. 

Wilma, who died on April 18, 2018, at the age of sixty-seven, also served the vital role of editor and contributor for the IHS’s Black History News & Notes, first during its time as a quarterly newsletter and then in 2007, when it became a regular and well-regarded part of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. As Richard Pierce, University of Notre Dame associate professor of history and Africana studies noted, Wilma’s title as editor only hinted at all she did for her publication. “She tirelessly procured work from reticent writers,” said Pierce. “She would scour conference proceedings to learn if anyone had presented work that would be appropriate to Note[s] readers.”

Wilma was a writer herself, penning the regular column “Everyday People” for Traces, reflecting on her life and the collections she helped obtain for the IHS. She also wrote several articles for the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, edited and wrote for the IHS publication Indiana’s African American Heritage: Essays from Black History News and Notes, and wrote the introduction and was the guiding force behind Gone But Not Forgotten, photo poems by O. James Fox, published by the IHS in 2000.

Talking about her work at the IHS, Wilma, honored for her career with an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and LocalHistory in 2016, believed it was almost as if she had “been set up to get where I was.” Her early life in Indianapolis included growing up in a neighborhood where her grandmother lived across the street and other relatives could be found nearby. It was also a life where segregation was a reality she dealt with every day. “I went to the colored schools with the colored kids taught by the colored teachers,” remembered Wilma, who graduated from the all-black Crispus AttucksHigh School in 1969. The first time she had experiences in a classroom with white students is when she attended Indiana University in Bloomington in 1973. “I had an observatory role, looking at and seeing what was going on,” she said, one of the reasons why history became such a big part of her life.

After earning her master’s degree in library science from IU in 1974, Wilma worked as a librarian at the Black Culture Center before returning to Indianapolis to work at the Indianapolis–Marion County PublicLibrary in several positions, including as branch administrator for the SpadesPark Library and the Flanner House Library. 

Joining the IHS in 1986 and becoming senior archivist for the William Henry Smith Memorial Library in 2004, Wilma worked to expand the material available on African American history, including such major collections as the Madam C. J. Walker Papers,  the Indianapolis Recorder Collection, Black Women in the Middle West Project Records, and the National Black Political Convention Collection. “It’s an important task to have our finger on the pulse of information that’s gathered,” Wilma said in an interview with the Recorder, “and then once it comes here, making sure it’s presented in such a way that [it] is accessible to people who need it.”

Two of the collections Wilma cited as her personal favorites were the Irven Armstrong Collection and the William Trail Letter. The Armstrong collection contains ten letters sent by students at Indianapolis Public School Number 17 to Sergeant Irven Armstrong, who was stationed in France during World War I and had been a teacher at the school. “They thank him for making the world safe for democracy,” Wilma recalled, “and the grammar is good, and the penmanship is excellent and the vocabulary is interesting. You could tell they were trying to work in new words they’d learned possibly in their English class.” The Trail letter came from William Trail, one of four brothers from Henry County who fought in the Civil War as part of Indiana’s Twenty-Eighth Regiment U.S. Colored Troops.

In addition to uncovering material to collect, Wilma made certain it was available to patrons of all kinds, from schoolchildren to academics. Nobody knew the “primary sources, the historical figures, events, and themes better than Wilma,” said James H. Madison, IU professor emeritus of history. Pierce remembered meeting Wilma while he was a graduate student at IU, working on a dissertation detailing the cultural politics of Indianapolis’s African American community. “I thought I knew something but I quickly learned that I knew next to nothing,” he said. Wilma took the time to guide him through the IHS’s “voluminous holdings and provided me with resources that I did not have the good sense to request. I know that is what archivists do, but I’ve encountered dozens of archivists since then and Ms. Moore remains the model that I hold in my mind for comparison.”

Later in his career, when Pierce grew “antsy” waiting for Wilma to finish with a younger patron, he reflected that “years ago, I, too, was that young person overwhelmed with the challenge and resources before me,” and she gently “guided me through the maze.” Serving as a role model and guide was something Wilma always thought of as she did her job. “We all look for affirmation in some kind of way, and history provides answers to all those questions,” she said. “We all have a story, and we’re all historically significant.”

In 2017 the IHS honored Wilma’s extensive contributions to the state’s history with its Eli Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition, since her death, the IHS announced that in the future all those filling its annual Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis collections internship will have the title Wilma Gibbs Moore Intern. In 2020 IndianaHumanities established the Wilma Gibbs Moore Fellowship to support humanities researchers’ efforts to uncover stories of racial injustice and structural racism in Indiana and how Black Hoosiers have responded.

Wilma always took such recognition in stride. Learning of her AASLH honor, she noted, “I have spent the past thirty years doing work that I thoroughly enjoy—toiling in the Indiana history vineyard helping others find material for their storyboards. I am always surprised by special thank you notes from patrons or when authors acknowledge me in their books. . . . I am humble and grateful.”

           

           

           

Writing for the Governor: The Elks Club Group and Adlai Stevenson

During the summer and fall of 1952, John Bartlow Martin, a nationally known freelance reporter, traveled to Springfield, Illinois, to lend his talents to help elect the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, in his race against GOP nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower. Abandoning a position at Stevenson’s press office, Martin gravitated toward the candidate’s speechwriters, called “speech researchers” by a campaign that wished to perpetuate the myth that Stevenson wrote his speeches without assistance from any ghostwriters.

A New York Times article on the Stevenson campaign disingenuously reported that it was the job of the “research staff to dig out facts and figures and ideas for speeches.” They did much more than that. John Fischer, editor at Harper’s magazine and one of Stevenson’s speechwriters, pointed out it would have been physically impossible for one man to produce the material needed for a national presidential campaign. “During the 1952 campaign,” said Fischer, “he [Stevenson] made up to seventeen speeches a day; sometimes two of them were major pronouncements running to about forty minutes, while the others were fifteen-minute whistle-stop talks.” 

Moreover, Fischer noted, all of these speeches had to be different because Stevenson, who hated to give the same speech twice, as it “bored him,” shunned the usual practice of presidential candidates of having three or four basic speeches that could be used over and over again, with minor variations, at whistle-stops or other brief, less formal occasions on the campaign trail. “He wanted something fresh every time, even though the press services couldn’t possibly report more than two speeches a day in any detail,” Fischer added.

The men responsible for crafting Stevenson’s speeches worked at a building located at 509 South Sixth Street in Springfield. Because their working area was located on the third floor of the six-story Elks Club building, located a few blocks from the Leland Hotel and the Governor’s Mansion, the speechwriters became known as the Elks Club Group. The Elks included such prominent names as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Harvard University history professor and a Pulitzer Prize winner; W. Willard Wirtz, who taught law at Northwestern University and was an expert on labor issues; Robert Tufts, a former U.S. State Department official and economist from Oberlin College; and David Bell, who had been a member of Truman’s staff since 1947 and served as a liaison between the administration and the Stevenson campaign. “Most of the speeches,” said Bell, “were drafted for a given occasion, a given place and a given audience, and to include a policy stand on a given issue.”

Schlesinger and Bell shared responsibility for the speechwriting operation, and passed on completed drafts to Carl McGowan, a member of Stevenson’s staff as governor and a key part of his presidential effort, who forwarded them on to Stevenson for his changes. The candidate spent a lot of time “fussing and fiddling” with speech drafts, sometimes staying up in his hotel room until 3:30 a.m. in the morning “turning it [the speech draft] around, writing new paragraphs, until the final product, in a sense, was really a Stevenson-written speech,” McGowan noted. Fischer agreed with McGowan’s assessment, saying that none of the candidate’s speechwriters tried to put “alien words” in his mouth. Fischer compared his task, and that of the other speechwriters, as serving as “literary tailors” for Stevenson, cutting and stitching material to fit his known measurements and according to a pattern and style on which all could agree.

Schlesinger impressed Martin, and the two men became lifelong friends. “He could, seemingly, simultaneously hold a telephone conversation, write a speech, read source materials, and talk to somebody across the desk,” Martin said of Schlesinger. “He wrote rapidly and well. He wrote basic drafts on major speeches, did heavy rewrite on other people’s drafts, and, from his friends around the country, obtained dozens of drafts.” The tall, affable Bell, who had been in Truman’s Bureau of the Budget and had written some speeches for the president, rarely wrote first drafts for Stevenson’s speeches himself, but did rewrite almost everybody else’s first drafts, “to the dismay of some writers,” said Martin. Bell had been told by McGowan that he had been selected for the assignment because of his “broad experience in the various elements of [Truman’s] legislative program,” and therefore was the natural person for liaison duties in the many different areas in which Stevenson would have to take a position on during the campaign, including foreign and domestic policy, labor, agriculture, and education.

The writers who were gathered at the Elks Club seemed to know exactly what they were doing, Martin said, and what they were doing was something he also knew something about—revising a manuscript. “I remember being somewhat surprised that you go about revising a speech manuscript just about the same way you go about revising an article: With a pencil and scissors, straightening out kinks in the line of thought, improving diction and syntax, getting rid of soft and dull spots and ambiguity, etc.,” he said. 

During Martin’s first few days in Springfield some of the Elks had given him drafts of whistle-stop speeches for a campaign trip to Connecticut for his comments and suggestions, which he made and passed back. By mid-September Martin had left the press operation for good and had joined the Elks Club Group, where he remained for the rest of the campaign. One of the reasons the speechwriters welcomed him to their group was the breadth of Martin’s knowledge about the country and its people he had gained while doing his freelance writing. “It got to be a kind of [an] office gag that everywhere the Governor went to make a speech,” Martin said, “it turned out I’d once done a story about the place. It was truer than you’d think.”

A new world opened for Martin when he became one of the Elks Club Group—a world he approached with some trepidation. After all, he never had written a speech, knew nothing about how a political speech should be structured, nor had he ever collaborated with another writer. Because of his previous work on a book about Stevenson, however, Martin did know something about the governor’s speaking style and could “tell when something sounded Stevensonian or didn’t.”

Some of the writers at the Elks Club mainly worried about the quality of their prose, while others, including Schlesinger and Bell, possessed greater political instincts and worried instead about a speech’s political effectiveness. “I began by worrying about the prose and soon learned to worry more about the politics,” Martin said. He recalled being shocked at first when he heard Schlesinger and Bell talking about people—Jews, Catholics, African Americans, farmers—as voting blocs, as he considered such talk the language of political hacks in ward headquarters. “I came to see,” Martin said, “that in a diverse pluralistic democracy like ours, a politician can approach the electorate in no other way.”

Under the tutelage of Bell and Schlesinger, Martin began to translate his emotions, instinct, and feeling for people, especially the disadvantaged in American society, into a rational system of liberalism that could be applied to writing speeches for a politician. “What I brought to liberalism and to the Elks Club was, in addition to writing, a life’s experience and instincts,” Martin said. Liberalism came almost automatically to him, and Martin cited such influences as his underdog feeling in his childhood growing up in Indianapolis, the influence of his liberal-minded friends and the books he read in high school, and what President Franklin D Roosevelt administration’s New Deal policies had done for his family. He noted that when he worked for the Indianapolis Times and reported on a strike, he was “instinctively on the strikers’ side.”

Before the campaign began, Stevenson had informed a friend that he intended to keep his literary effort “on as high a level as I can.” As he traveled around the country touting his candidacy, there were many, said Martin, who by mid-September began accusing Stevenson in his speeches of “talking over the heads of the people.” Martin himself received this complaint from people he knew in New York publishing circles, who were quick to add, “Of course I understand him.” Years later, on another campaign, a tired and tense Stevenson admitted to Martin, “Oh, damn it, I never can say anything simply.” Local Democratic candidates used to being coddled and pampered by their presidential candidates in the past grumbled that Stevenson spent too much time polishing his speeches when he should have been spending time with them, and others were put off by his sometimes biting humor.

Perhaps influenced by Stevenson’s baldness and both his and his staff’s intellectual background, conservative columnist Stewart Alsop came up with a word to describe Stevenson, “egghead,” that was quickly picked up by other journalists. “It became, as Senator McCarthy and Senator Nixon increased their attacks,” said Martin, “a word of opprobrium, well suited to the anti-intellectual climate of 1952.” Stevenson’s speechwriters and other staff worried about this issue, but, as McGowan once told Martin, “You can’t change the Governor.”

As each week’s campaign schedule became available, the speechwriters met to divide the schedule, taking an assignment if they were familiar with the location to be visited or had knowledge about a topic. When a writer received his assignment, said Martin, he usually made telephone calls to people in the community for their advice on local issues (being careful to weigh the validity of the information they provided), did further research, produced a speech draft, and turned it into Bell, who rewrote the draft and gave it to another speechwriter for his comments and revisions. “If it was a major speech, several Elks would gather around . . . and work on it collectively,” Martin noted. “It was not unusual for a speech to go through half a dozen drafts, and some went through more. Rewriting sometimes merely honed language; sometimes it changed policy.”

Although Schlesinger had never met Martin before the 1952 campaign, he had known him through his writing, especially his work on the Centralia mine disaster, and the two men “hit it off at once,” according to Schlesinger. “The brilliant reporter turned out to be a diffident, quizzical, humorous man whose gentleness of manner concealed a sardonic toughness of mind.” Schlesinger and Martin developed a method of writing rough drafts of speeches together, with the Harvard academic writing the substantive center of the speech, while the magazine writer handled the “pleasantries and setup at the beginning and the rising rhetoric at the end; then we would trade drafts and mark them up, and put them together,” Martin recalled. He discovered that he particularly enjoyed writing “rollicking rally speeches” for use before large, enthusiastic Democratic crowds. “They had a gay, rollicking quality,” Schlesinger said of his friend’s speeches for these occasions. Although Stevenson also seemed to enjoy delivering such talks, afterward he seemed apologetic about their partisan nature, no doubt, said Martin, because the governor’s “friends in Republican Lake Forest chided him.”

One or two of the Elks Club speechwriters usually accompanied Stevenson on his campaign trips, and Martin soon became a familiar figure on these visits because, as McGowan noted, he was a professional writer and “could knock it [a speech] out fast at the last minute, particularly for short things, and a lot of these things came up, you know, at the last minute, unscheduled appearances here and there.” The Elks rarely had the opportunity, however, to meet with the candidate as a group—not surprising considering how painful it was for Stevenson to rely on ghostwriters to help him with his speeches. “The Elks got instructions on policy by osmosis,” according to Martin. “‘Ghost candidate’ seemed a better phrase than ghostwriters, from the Elks’ viewpoint. They rarely knew, except by a cryptic sentence from McGowan, what subject Stevenson wanted to talk about or what he wanted to say on it.”

It was McGowan who often came to the Elks Club to pick up the speeches before heading out on the campaign trail, going over the major ones with the speechwriters before returning to the Governor’s Mansion. There, noted Martin, McGowan edited the speeches, sometimes doing substantial rewrites before giving them to Stevenson. “More than any other single person, McGowan shaped the substance of the campaign,” said Martin. According to McGowan, there existed a minimum of personal jealousy among Stevenson’s campaign staff, particularly when it came to the writers at the Elks Club, a fact he found “quite amazing since they have all this pride of authorship that professionals have.” The speechwriters were able to submerge those feelings, he added, and were amenable to the changes he suggested on their speech drafts. “They were wonderful—it was a wonderful performance,” McGowan said.

For Stevenson’s part, he preferred to ignore his speechwriters’ very existence. The best theory as to why Stevenson felt this way, said Martin, was because he “really wished the writers weren’t there. He was proud of his own writing and once told a friend he wished more than anything else he had been a writer.” Martin believed that the candidate subconsciously resented the speechwriters, and “so seemed to take the attitude that if he would just close his eyes we would just go away.” On campaign trips the writers literally slipped their drafts under Stevenson’s hotel room door in the middle of the night for him to find when he awoke. The governor took the anonymous drafts, rewrote them, and made them his own. “It was his way,” said Martin.

Members of the Elks Club Group had a big, bare room, about 650 square feet in size, in which to ply their trade. A long table ran down the middle of the room and on top of it were laid out the typed speech drafts and any incoming documents. Adjoining the workroom were four hotel-like bedrooms that some of them, including Martin, slept in for most of the campaign. During the day Schlesinger, Tufts, Bell, and Martin could be found scribbling in the workroom, while Wirtz, Fischer, and others preferred doing their writing in the back bedrooms. Scattered around the workroom were copies of such magazines as Newsweek, Time, Foreign Affairs, and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as issues of the New York Times, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, and several Chicago newspapers.

For research help, the speechwriters could also turn to such basic documents as the Democratic Party’s platform, Stevenson’s messages to the Illinois legislature, the Illinois state budget, the voting records of Nixon and McCarthy, and even a Stevenson family genealogy prepared by Fran. Early in the campaign, upon returning from a weekend home in Highland Park, Martin brought back to Springfield with him briefcases full of research material from his own files, including hundreds of pages of his typewritten notes on the Midwest he had collected a few years before for a Life magazine assignment. “I found these mid-west notes particularly useful and put a great deal of material into various speeches from the notes,” said Martin. The speechwriters also depended upon Martin’s book on Stevenson, finally published in early September. According to Martin, his publisher had wanted to “play it safe,” and waited to release the book until after Stevenson had won the nomination, which might have contributed to its poor sales (about 9,000 copies). It proved to be a valuable trove of information for the speechwriters, so much so that Martin wished the book had included an index.

When he started working as a speechwriter, Martin attempted to follow the same schedule as he had during his freelance days, working from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with no actual writing being done in the evening, maybe only some light rewriting. Such a schedule lasted only a day or two before he started to work as the other speechwriters did. On a typical day Martin awoke at about 9:00 a.m. or 9:30 a.m. and walked down the street to a drugstore for a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, and a roll before returning to the Elks Club.

The other speechwriters usually started work at 10:00 a.m. or a little later, and the group broke for lunch together at around 2:00 p.m. Most of the time they ate at the Sazerac, located at 229 South Sixth Street, a small, dingy bar equipped with a row of booths, a jukebox, and near the jukebox a big round table at which they sat. Sometimes a patron strolled over to drop a nickel into the jukebox to play a song, which blasted in the speechwriters’ ears at the nearby table. On one occasion, Elks Club Group member John Kenneth Galbraith, hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch, told a patron about to drop his coin in the jukebox, “I’ll give you a dime if you don’t play it.” A waitress named Mona, too young to vote, often took the speechwriters’ orders and had to put up with continued complaints from Martin, Schlesinger, and Tufts that there was no chocolate sauce for their ice cream sundaes. They finally paid for their own private can and peace was restored.

As they waited for their food (“always pretty bad,” according to Martin) each day, the speechwriters discussed forthcoming speeches or talked about the campaign. “Sometimes at lunch we talked general opinions,” Martin said. “We were growing to hate [GOP presidential candidate Dwight] Eisenhower, mostly for his embracing of McCarthy and [William E.] Jenner [a conservative U.S. Senator from Indiana], for his cynical rapprochement with Taft, for his obvious vote-seeking by any means, including promises of the most contradictory sort. . . . He seemed willing to scrap any principle, to do anything for a vote.” To them, Eisenhower may have been “dollar honest,” as Martin said, but the GOP presidential candidate was “intellectually and morally dishonest.”

After they finished eating, the speechwriters used to stop by the offices of the local newspaper, the Illinois State Register, to read the news bulletins written with crayon on sheets of newsprint hanging in its office window and review the newspaper’s latest edition. “Sometimes we’d thus see where the Governor had just delivered a speech we’d sweated over; whoever wrote it got kidded about reading it now,” Martin remembered.

After lunch the Elks Club Group returned to their craft, working on their assigned speech drafts the rest of the afternoon. The noise in the workroom was constant, with ringing telephones, usually long-distance calls, and the clatter of typewriters. “I was the fastest typist and sometimes I guess I made so much noise at it that it disturbed phone conversations; once Dave [Bell] asked me to wait, he couldn’t hear,” Martin said. He also earned a distinction as the group’s fastest writer and “a master of the whistle-stop speech,” according to Galbraith, who added that nobody on the speechwriting staff could “say so much on two pages of triple-spaced typescript.”

When he reached an impasse in his work, Martin took to pacing around the large workroom. Fearing he might be disturbing the other writers, he switched to pacing around the corridor outside that ran in a square around the floor of the building. “This seemed to amuse the others,” Martin noted. The speechwriters took a dinner break at about 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m., making their first stop at the Elks Club bar downstairs next to a bowling alley for drinks. “Every time we went in Dave Bell always stopped and looked longingly at the bowling alleys but I don’t think he ever got time to bowl,” Martin said. For dinner, the writers usually ate at the Leland or Lincoln hotels, a nearby restaurant, or sometimes shared taxis for trips to Stevie’s, a steakhouse with the best food in town, according to Martin.

After dinner, where they talked almost exclusively about the campaign, the speechwriters returned to the Elks Club, working at their assignments until midnight or two or three in the morning. Although Martin said that the Elks toiled “in remarkable harmony,” the relentless pace took its toll. Most of the speechwriters became ill at one time or another; Schlesinger injured his leg during a campaign trip and Martin did not get over a cold he had caught while working for Stevenson until well after the election was over. One day Martin noticed Bell did not look well, and he later collapsed and had to be put to bed. A local doctor paid a visit and gave as his diagnosis overwork. Tufts suggested that the doctor give Bell an antibiotic; the physician agreed and gave Bell a shot of penicillin. Thereafter, Tufts became known around the Elks as Doctor Tufts, said Martin.

Martin enjoyed the new experience of traveling with a candidate. He likened it to being part of a victorious army. “We were coming to a town to take it,” he recalled, “and we had a speech to do it with, and a candidate to deliver it. . . . You felt determined to win and sure you could.” For long trips the Stevenson campaign flew on chartered American Airline aircraft, usually a four-engine Douglas DC-6 with the words “Stevenson Special” emblazoned on its nose and flown by Fred Jeberjahn, a senior pilot with the airline. 

The press, numbering about a hundred by October, flew in separate airplanes that took off after Stevenson’s plane and landed before it did “so that if he [Stevenson] crashed they would be on the ground to report the accident,” Martin noted. Stevenson sat in the rear of the cabin in an office area with a desk, while the speechwriters with him on the trip rode in front near the typewriters and mimeograph machines. Martin always had a fear of flying, but he got over it during the campaign, that is, as long as he was on a plane with Stevenson. “When the Governor was aboard,” he said, “everything was all right.”

There existed a curious family atmosphere among those on the plane, said Martin, almost as if “we were all a bunch of relatives of the Governor, here to try to help him get elected.” The atmosphere changed when Stevenson had to approve a speech draft while still in the air, and it was up to the secretarial staff to type his remarks on the speech typewriter, equipped with oversize type. A stencil had to then be cut to run off approximately 200 copies on the mimeograph machine for distribution to the press. Frequently, the secretaries were still assembling the speech when the plane landed, and visiting congressmen and even a U.S. senator were pressed into service to get the job done.

After the plane landed at the scheduled airport, staff members were the first to disembark, followed by Stevenson, who “always looked surprised at the people being there somehow,” said Martin. “Sometimes he had to say a few words over a PA [public address] system and usually came off pretty well, though in the confusion of the crowd and handshakers and people thrusting microphones at him he always looked confused and harried and terribly alone among hungry strangers.”

On brief visits, Martin usually stayed behind at the airport, finding desk space at airline offices surrounded by teletype machines and busy clerks. He had to do this because he wanted to smoke a few cigarettes while he worked on upcoming speeches and could not stay on the Stevenson plane because of the danger of a fire while the aircraft was being refueled. “Very often I saw nothing of the town but the airport and a desk there,” he recalled. On an overnight stop, Martin’s only introduction to a community would be what he could see from the window of a speeding car or from the window of his hotel room. “We really made, during the campaign, an astonishing journey across the nation—yet saw really almost nothing, learned almost nothing,” said Martin.

One incident stuck in Martin’s mind. He recalled looking down from his room as the Stevenson motorcade returned to a hotel late one night to be greeted by a cheering crowd while a band played. “Strange feeling of power,” Martin reflected, “looking over city under these circumstances; strange feeling of intimacy with the candidate, a satisfaction that though he belongs to the crowd of strangers on the street, they don’t really know him at all; but I do. Must be somewhat like father feels toward famous son. Pride, possessiveness, power, etc.”

Those who have been part of a national presidential campaign have sometimes compared it to being inside a giant bubble, whereby the staff is insulated from what is really happening in the outside world. Good news and bad news are magnified, and victory seems assured. It was that way on Stevenson’s final whistle-stop train trip through Ohio and Indiana and on to Chicago the final weekend of the campaign. Stevenson’s campaign staff was united in the belief that he would win the election, and appeared to be “enthusiastic as well as very tired,” remembered Martin, who got off the train when it stopped in Gary, Indiana, to hear Stevenson’s remarks. “I have a clear recollection,” he said, “of a working man from I would judge the Gary steel mills standing in the cinders by the railroad track holding up his small child to see the Gov and saying to him, ‘There’s the next president.’” An October 25 Gallup poll had given Eisenhower 52 percent and Stevenson 48 percent, and Newsweek magazine had reported, “The guessing is closer, and the ‘experts’ are more genuinely confused than in any other election of our times.”

Many from Stevenson’s campaign staff made their predictions and chipped in $5 to a pool predicting the results in the Electoral College. Martin guessed that Stevenson would garner 400 electoral votes, while Tufts had about 450 and Schlesinger 330. “In general I gave away the farm states, claimed Illinois, New York, California, Minnesota, the South, and Massachusetts,” Martin recalled. “I gave the Republicans Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan . . . Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin.”

On Election Day, Tuesday, November 4, Martin and his wife Fran awoke early at their Highland Park home and voted at a nearby high school. The local precinct captain told Martin that turnout had been heavy at the polling place and believed it was a good sign for the Democrats’ chances of victory. “It was a bright, beautiful election day,” said Martin. They returned home; bid farewell to their daughter, Cindy; picked up their guests, including Tufts, Bell, and his wife, Mary; and drove to O’Hare Airport for a flight to Springfield to watch election returns at the Governors Mansion.

That afternoon Stevenson's staff began hearing reports of heavy turnout all over the country, but nobody knew what to make of the report. McGowan knew it would not be the Democrats’ night when he heard disappointing voting results from usually Democratic precincts in Connecticut while still tying his tie before going over to the mansion from his home a few blocks away. He commented to his wife, “We don’t need to go over there, we can go to bed.” (Eisenhower won 55.7 percent of the vote in Connecticut.)

By 7:00 p.m., with the early returns already coming in and the news all bad for Stevenson, a grim mood hit staff members gathered in the ballroom at the Leland Hotel. A surge of Democratic votes from Minnesota and other farm states raised hopes of a miracle come-from-behind victory for a time, but when Martin asked Bell, the political veteran, about this, he “just smiled in a kind of patronizing way. Looking back, I don’t blame him.”

About 10:30 p.m. the Martins and others, about fifty in all, people who were Stevenson’s personal friends or his close associates in the administration, gathered at the mansion. “I just went and sat in a corner with a small radio and listened to the returns,” Martin remembered. “Other people would come and stop and listen a while and shake their heads and go away. It was more like a wake than anything else.”

About 12:30 a.m. word drifted through the crowd that Stevenson had written his concession speech, which most of them watched on a television with poor reception. A composed Stevenson strayed from his prepared text and ended his concession with the same humor that had marked his campaign. He noted: “Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell—Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.”

Although Stevenson had received the second largest number of votes for a Democratic candidate in history, 27,314,992, he had been swamped by Eisenhower’s total of 33,936,234; Eisenhower carried thirty-nine states with 442 electoral votes, while Stevenson had captured only nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia) and 89 electoral votes. McGowan attributed Stevenson’s defeat to a “very strong tide running for change” throughout the country. “Stevenson was not perfect,” said Martin. “He made mistakes; lots of them. He wanted to be both the candidate and the campaign manager; as a result nobody managed the campaign.”

The landslide defeat crushed the spirits of those who had worked so hard for Stevenson’s election, but the candidate himself tried to raise their spirits. The Martins and others, mainly from the Elks Club Group, were preparing the leave the mansion, thinking Stevenson would want to be alone with family and close friends. Seeing them leave, he stopped them and said, “Come on upstairs and have a drink; let’s celebrate my defeat.” He gave the first glass of champagne to Fran. Several Stevenson’s Lake Forest Republican friends, who had voted for Eisenhower, were also there, and one said to him, “Governor, you educated the country with you campaign.” Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course.”