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With a similar almost brazen lack of display, the G.O.P.'s Man of the Hour spent the preconvention weekend on his 350-acre Pawling, N.Y. farm, 700 miles away, continuing to ignore politicos, if not politics. Governor Thomas E. Dewey was, so far as he let the rest of the U.S. know, concerned only with plans for a new road to his front door, with inspection of the new paint job on his barn. Yet he talked frequently by telephone to his Triumvirate. His shrewd dark eyes were on Chicago, just as surely as the eyes of 1,058 G.O.P. delegates in Chicago were on Pawling, N.Y.
Old Faces. Chicago's Mayor Ed Kelly had done his free-spending best to groom the cavernous Chicago Stadium for double duty, hiring Andy Frain as his special "Crowd Engineer." And his faithful aide, Tom Garry, the Democrats' famed 1940 "Voice from the Sewers," explained: "We did it up special so the Republicans couldn't squawk, see?" But four weeks later the 200,000 board feet of priority lumber will be used again, to provide equally uncomfortable roosting for 19,912 of the Democratic faithful.
Priority lumber, a shortage of Scotch, $4 steaks, a lack of taxicabs, other wartime hazards handicapped the delegates. But familiar faces restored an air of normalcy. On hand were Jeff Davis, king of hoboes; Mrs. J. Worthington Scranton of Scranton, queen of the Pennsylvania delegation; Massachusetts' chunky House Minority Leader Joe Martin. Tieless Joe Tolbert engaged in his quadrennial fight to be seated as delegate from South Carolina (he has been attending G.O.P. conventions since 1884), but wound up in the gallery once again. Pennsylvania's aging High Tariffsman Joe Grundy, 81, demanded a plank against reciprocal trade treaties. Alf Landon, the Kansas Sunflower of '36, swung his state's 19 votes to Dewey. Herbert Hoover got a key night radio spot as his Party's only living ex-President.
The only other living GOPresidential nominee, Wendell Willkie, had been invited to sit but not speak; he chose instead to stay home and ponder anew his Republican allegiance in the light of the candidate and the platform. (His 1940 aide, Russell Davenport, threatened to bolt the Party before the convention met.)
New Faces. But the convention's real attention was not on the relic-cluttered past of the Party's numerous defeats, but on the faces of the Party's future.
One of these was Representative Clare Boothe Luce, who gave the convention a new word for New Deal bureaucracy—bumbledom—and told the story of G.I. Jim, dead American buddy of G.I. Joe. As the "heroic heir of the unheroic Roosevelt decade," G.I. Jim, could he have attended the convention, would have said: "Take off your hats to the past, but take your coats off to the future."