It was a warm, sunny morning in October 1956 in Pasadena, California. My big brother and I climbed aboard the school bus, bound for St. Bede the Venerable, our Catholic grammar school. School had started about three weeks before; my saddle shoes still cut into my feet after a barefoot summer.
Paul was in seventh grade and I was in second, so we didn't associate publicly as a rule. Walking to the bus stop together was a BFD for me, and I concentrated on not embarrassing him. On the bus, he sat with the coolest big kids, of course; I shuffled off to already-nerdy little kid purgatory. Whatever was, was right.
But this morning, for reasons I've never fathomed, was different. As I was climbing the steps onto the bus, I could see that it had become a howling wilderness (more than usual, that is). And every kid on the bus seemed to be yelling the same thing, "ARE YOU FOR EISENHOWER OR FOR STEVENSON?" I can still see their wide open mouths and their eyes, glaring inimically at us, waiting to identify us as In The Group, or Not.
I quailed. I was always quailing in grammar school; bad at sports, lacking any social skills, tone deaf, goofy hair, big teeth -- I had nothing (until a few years later, when my Rainman-like ability to diagram any sentence gave me a geeky cachet). And what were Eisenhower and Stevenson?
But Paul was an athlete and a confident kid, like our high school age sisters. "Stevenson, of course," he said, coolly, and strode to his usual seat.
He might as well have announced a preference for Jack the Ripper.
Adlai Stevenson is hardly a household name these days, but that doesn't matter. His problem was that he was hardly a household name in the 1950s, when he ran against Dwight Eisenhower for president, in both 1952 and 1956. Here's my mother's description of the era:
As I look back to almost fifty years ago, it seems to me that the period between the 1952 and 1956 election campaigns marked the end of an era--what could be called the Norman Rockwell era. Exhausted by war, the nation was finally at peace. It was prosperous. Most mothers stayed at home to take care of their children and were traditional housewives. Most fathers went daily to work. It was a "Honey, I'm home" time. (This of course applied to average middle class families like ours. Others were less fortunate.) Groceries were packed in paper, not plastic bags. This simple detail was about to change. The great civil rights movement had begun. Such was the background for the election year of 1956.
Stevenson, an erudite, witty former senator [
update: NOT a Senator, per 1stRepublic14thStar] and governor of Illinois (never indicted! What a time it was!) was drafted by the party establishment in 1952 to run against the immensely popular Eisenhower. He was a liberal, bald, not terribly handsome guy:
In honor of the hole in his shoe in that famous picture, Democrats wore little shoe pins:
I still have my father's.
Mocked for his baldness by geniuses like Nixon, he joked about it, once saying “Via ovicipitum dura est” (The way of the egghead is hard) and on another occasion, “Eggheads of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks.”
When he was Governor of Illinois, he vetoed a bill that would have penalized cat owners who let their cats roam around (I know, lots of people would disagree) and wrote:
The problem of cat versus bird is as old as time. If we attempt to resolve it by legislation who knows but what we may be called upon to take sides as well in the age old problems of dog versus cat, bird versus bird, or even bird versus worm. In my opinion, the State of Illinois and its local governing bodies already have enough to do without trying to control feline delinquency.
Nominated by the Democrats again in 1956, he wanted to pick the up-and-coming Senator from Massachusetts, John Kennedy, as his running mate, but decided to allow the convention to pick the VP candidate (Can you imagine? Conventions were a lot more interesting in the 1900s). They chose Estes Kefauver, a really fascinating anti-racist from Tennessee who had won the New Hampshire and other primaries but whom the party establishment disliked (one guess as to why).
But back to the St. Bede's bus. It turned out that almost everyone in the school (except of course the Davidsons), came from an Eisenhower family. I don't know what suddenly triggered their expression of partisan fervor that morning in October, but for the next three weeks or so, the bus ride became a hell of Nixonian invective (Nixon was Eisenhower's VP and the campaign's attack dog). After that first morning I'd figured out that this was about my parent's politics and had aligned myself with them, because my parents were good people and most of their friends liked Stevenson too, but I didn't have to talk about it on the bus because second grade. Paul, however, entered the fray with prescient Kennedy-esque VIGOR every day and engaged with every foe. I can't remember what policy issues came up in these battles, but they were probably more worth listening to than Fox News is now.
We were about five minutes from school one specially vehement morning just before the election when Paul's disdain for the foe reached a point beyond words.
"Stop the bus, please" he said to the driver (I told you he was cool). "I'd rather walk to school than listen to you idiots another second." And he got off the bus.
I'm sorry to say I was too surprised to even think about jumping up and joining him.
Again in my mother's words:
Again in 1956 Adlai Stevenson was the presidential nominee with Estes Kefauver of Tennessee as his running mate. "Ike" was tremendously popular and we Democrats had a grim feeling that it was to be a losing battle for our side. Stevenson put up a brave fight but his wit and charm were not enough--it was a landslide victory for the GOP.
On election night my parents had a party to watch the returns. They always had a party to watch the returns, and it was a very long affair during which they and their friends drank a lot of martinis and my father denounced Nixon in his best courtroom style as returns rolled -- slowly -- in. He never lost a chance to denounce Nixon, who turned up in some capacity in every Presidential election from 1952 through 1972. (California Democrats of that era had a special hatred for Nixon because he
redbaited Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 California Senate race and called her "pink right down to her underwear." Jerk.)
By the day of the election, the fever that had gripped the school bus had burned out as mysteriously as it arrived (though I remain vigilant to this day on public transportation). But the incident confirmed my admiration of my big brother, and as I got older I tried to be more like him. Just remember, quailers, politics is no yolk.