Pleasantly flustered, Robert Alphonso Taft looked out over the ballroom in the Sherman Hotel and guessed that he "was getting more notorious than that great Chicago citizen, Al Capone." Some 1,500 Executives Club businessmen cheered lustily. In distant banquet rooms, an overflow 1,000 listened by public-address system. Senator Taft, arriving in Chicago for the first time since his November triumph, had pulled the biggest turnout of any lunch-club speaker in recent memory.
Flanked by the Midwest's most impressive industrial brass, Taft preached his own brand of reluctant internationalism,. Only two or three more U.S. divisions should be sent to Europe, he insisted,...
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