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Mrs. Kitty Markham, Democratic worker, rose majestically above the ruins of the Grange ladies' chicken dinner in Radnor, Ohio (pop. 300). Although she had just had a tooth pulled, Mrs. Markham was in fine elocutionary fettle. She exhorted her listeners in the high-school gym to vote the whole Democratic ticket. Then she dropped one hand on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. How proud she was, Mrs. Markham said, to be standing beside "my little pal here." Everyone looked at the man, scarcely noticed until then, who sat peering over the top of the uncleared table. When he was introduced as "someone who needs no introduction —everybody's friend," he leaped to his full 5 ft. 4 in. of height. In the gravelly voice of a baseball umpire near the end of a doubleheader, Joseph Terrence Ferguson, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, addressed himself to the farmers of Radnor and neighboring towns.
"Taft says the unions are taking over the Democratic Party," he roared. "He lies and he knows he's lying. He says that I'm a controlled candidate. He is controlled by the big money interests and he can never be a free man." Candidate Ferguson fanned the air with his short, muscular arms. "I'll be the freest man," he promised, "that ever treaded the U.S. Senate."
Not to Be Sneezed At. Candidate Ferguson sat down amidst applause. He shook some hands and drove off in his 1947 Buick. The following day and the day after, he would bob up in other meetings, often unannounced, to fire the same kind of political birdshot. In such a manner last week, 58-year-old Joe Ferguson, son of a coal miner, was hunting "Mr. Republican" himself. Joe was the cast-iron spearhead of the campaign to get Robert A. Taft out of the U.S. Senate.
The anti-Taft forces could have wished for a spear with a little more point. "Jumping" Joe Ferguson is a bouncing, bespectacled little man who looks like Joe E. Brown, habitually has trouble with the English language. But for better or for worse, the anti-Taft forces were stuck with him.
Outside Ohio, he was a political nobody—a bookkeeper who, in 1936, had slipped in as state auditor on the tail gate of the Roosevelt bandwagon. He had almost no backing from the regular Democratic organization. He did have a following of state employees, auditors and examiners, and he rarely if ever forgot a name or a face. He had organized and supported a Columbus softball team named "Ferguson's Auditors," and annually he mailed out 150,000 Christmas cards bearing photographs of his handsome wife and their growing family of eight children.
He was a likable sort and he had a kind of brash courage. He had challenged Taft when better-known and more prudent men had declined to take the chance. And in some respects, he was not altogether to be sneezed at. He had held the auditor's office for 14 years; in 1948, when Harry Truman was winning Ohio by a scant 7,107 votes, Joe Ferguson won re-election by 291,887—the biggest majority a Democrat ever got in the state.