With bright skies to encourage them and dark worry to impel them, Americans overwhelmed their polling places to settle in a matter of hours the suspense of weeks. Here, in Eastern Standard Time, is the hour-by-hour story the returns told:
8 to 9 O'Clock. Radio and TV had not even run their first-string pundits and their elaborate mechanical brains into the game when the decisive answers to some crucial questions began to flood in.
Connecticut heralded the first rumble of an Eisenhower landslide even more decisively than in 1952. In labor-heavy Bridgeport, traditionally Democratic and barely Ike's in 1952, it was Eisenhower by nearly two to one. Well-unionized New Haven chimed in minutes later with a 17,000-vote plurality for Eisenhower, the first time in history New Haven had chosen a G.O.P. presidential nominee.
From Florida came sharp signs of a repeat Eisenhower victory in that no-longer-solid sector of the Solid South. Holyoke, Mass., another good sign of labor's mood, gave Stevenson a margin too thin to suggest anything but defeat.
The hour was only half gone before the suspense had trickled out of the presidential race; but still left in doubt was the No. 2 question: How would Congress go? By 8 p.m., TV's battle of the calculating machines was producing near unanimity—ABC's Elecom prognosticated "less than 100 electoral votes" for Stevenson; CBS's Univac calculated 340 for Ike, 87 for Stevenson, then paused to digest a few more returns. The Republicans' own best calculating machine. Party Chairman Leonard Hall, was confident enough to predict before 9 o'clock that Ike was riding home on a landslide. At about the same moment, young John Fell Stevenson, the Democratic candidate's son, left his fa ther's hotel room for the moment, was asked the state of morale inside. Said he:
"Not too good."
9 to 10 O'Clock. At Chicago's Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, Adlai Stevenson ducked out of a dinner party to huddle with Campaign Manager Jim Finnegan and Speechwriter Willard Wirtz. As rumors mounted that Adlai was preparing to concede, the Eisenhower landslide rumbled on. Ike put the lie to the "as-Maine-goes" Democratic victories of last September (TIME, Sept. 24) by sweeping up Maine's five electoral votes by an even wider margin than his 1952 victory. He surged ahead in Chicago's heavily Democratic Cook County, picked up a three-to-two lead in pivotal Pennsylvania. The Boston Herald hit the streets with an extra predicting that Ike would carry Massachusetts by 250,000 votes, v. 208,000 in 1952. New York's Daily Mirror went to press at 9:22 with a two-star final bannering: IKE WINS!
The tide rolled South. Though the Middle East crisis was costing the G.O.P.