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Until the Democratic Party meets a year hence to nominate its candidate for President, the U.S. political grassroots are in for a real combing. Last week, in a symbolic scene, Presidential Hopeful Averell Harriman and Presidential Hopeful Adlai Stevenson met at Stevenson's Libertyville (Ill.) farm, sat on white wicker chairs and gazed around at the smooth lawns. In a tone that meant he was merely being polite, Ave murmured: "Your grass is greener than mine." Adlai said nothing; he just chuckled.
In nearby Chicago most U.S. state governors, attending their annual conference and busily swapping guesses on 1956, agreed that Adlai's grass was indeed the greener—but that Ave's had considerable promise.
And in Manhattan, the man who is responsible for cultivating Harriman's political future retired early in his apartment at 37 Washington Square West. Harriman's head political gardener, Carmine Gerard De Sapio, sachem of the Tamawa political club, leader of the First Assembly District South, Boss of Tammany Hall,* National Committeeman, New York Secretary of State, who will control the largest state bloc of delegate votes at next year's national convention, went to bed with a slight fever. Carmine De Sapio* had the summer sniffles.
His sneezes and wheezes aside, what hefty (6 ft. 1 in., 196 lbs.) Carmine De Sapio says and does for the next few months will be topics for endless speculation by politicians and pundits. For De Sapio's political skills will go a long way toward deciding whether the Democratic Derby is to be a real horse race or a Stevenson walkaway. As Harriman's political trainer, and as a man who has spent a lifetime preparing himself for the part of kingmaker, De Sapio is one of the most fascinating figures on the U.S. political landscape. He is a new kind of Tammany tiger.
Kitchen-Table Medici. The new kind of tiger keeps his nails closely trimmed and highly polished, spreads a heavy coating of talcum over his blue-shaven jaws, wears dark blue suits bought (price range: $75-$90) at Abe Stark's Brooklyn store, has the worldly and weighted mien of a Medici, and goes by the nickname of "The Bishop." He lives in a four-room apartment furnished in a style something less than half way between 1920 Grand Rapids and 1955 Park Avenue. There, one recent morning, Carmine De Sapio was taking his own sort of grassroots samplings.