Whether or not Adlai Stevenson gets into the White House, he seems sure of a place in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Though his voice has been to Princeton, and his words occasionally sound Wilsonian, at other times they have the dry crack of a Will Rogers aphorism. Some samples from his speeches last week:
Patriotism. ". . . I venture to suggest that . . . patriotism ... is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime."
"When an American says he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun or the wide rising plains, the mountains and the seas. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect."
Republicans, ". . . They have been devoid of new ideas for almost 70 years . . . As to their platform, well, nobody can stand on a bushel of eels."
"In this [campaign] season, Republican candidates are even forgiven for whispering that there could be a better law than the Taft-Hartley Act . . . This is indeed a truly remarkable interval, a sort of pause in the Republican occupation, and I've often thought that it might well be called the liberal hour. I think it should never be confused with any period when Congress is in session."
The Democratic Record. "I've been tempted to say that I was proud to stand on that record if only . . . General [Eisenhower] would move over and make room for me. But, in all sobriety, it's not enough, it seems to me, just to stand on the successes of the past. The people know what has been done and now they want to know what will be done. A party cannot live on laurel leaves."
Debating the Issues. "I hope that the Republican leaders will permit us to discuss our somber foreign problems on the plane where they belong—not on the plane of demagoguery, but rather on the plane of serious factual discussion and in terms of-'" alternatives that are real rather than epithets which are false."
"I don't intend to tell anyone that complicated things are simple and that all the answers are in the back of a book which I will shortly produce."
Hope for the Future. "After all, there was a man named Hitler, and it looked for a while as if he were invincible. Yet we despised and decadent peoples are still talking—and he hasn't made a speech in seven years."