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His circle widened far in 1952. Harry Truman had decided not to run again, and the winner of most Democratic presidential preference primaries was Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver, a lone-wolf liberal who was unacceptable to most national party leaders. Casting desperately around for someone else, they were drawn to the able, attractive Governor of Illinois. Stevenson was genuinely reluctant; the night before the national convention in Chicago, he sat up until 2 a.m. in Cook County Boss Jake Arvey's kitchen, suggesting alternative names and insisting that he wanted only to run for re-election as Governor.
Acceptance. When he was nominated anyway, Stevenson accepted with a speech that was memorable for its eloquence, but still betrayed his inner doubts. He had not sought the nomination, he said, because the burdens of presidential office "stagger the imagination." He continued: "Its potential for good or evil, now and in the years of our lives, smothers exultation and converts vanity to prayer. I have asked the Merciful Father—the Father of us all —to let this cup pass from me. But from such dread responsibility one does not shrink in fear, in self-interest, or in false humility. So, 'If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.' "
In his campaign, Stevenson insisted only upon trying to talk "sense to the American people" and avoiding what he called the "nauseous nonsense, the pie-in-the-sky appeals to cupidity and greed, the cynical trifling with passion and prejudice and fear, the slander, the fraudulent promises, and the all-things-to-all-men demagoguery." He didn't have much hope that he would win over Dwight Eisenhower. "You know," he said to a friend, "you really can't beat a household commodity—the catchup bottle on the kitchen table."
He took the beating he had expected, and he was a graceful loser. In his concession speech to weeping admirers in Springfield, Ill., he said in a somewhat halting way: "Someone asked me, as I came in, how I felt, and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell—Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh."