(See Cover)
In the two-month wait between the primaries and the real preliminaries of election year 1956, the U.S. voter had a little trouble keeping his eyes open. The U.S. was at peace, its people were more prosperous than ever, President Eisenhower was on the mend, and moderation was the spirit of the day. The voter nodded drowsily while Democratic candidates trudged busily around the country. Last week he woke up with a start to discover that Adlai Stevenson held a runaway lead for the Democratic nomination. And next week even the most somnolent of the U.S.'s 120 million televiewers will know full well that the biggest and boomingest and showiest convention extravaganza in the history of national politics is at hand.
The show's star billing will go to the Democratic nominee ("the next President of the Yewnited States"), and the odds are long that he will be a man of moderation. But a moment of rare drama will come when the face of a man with thick glasses, sharp nose, a cocky grin and a jutting jaw appears on the television screen. At that moment Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the U.S.—the ranking elder statesman (he hates the words) in a party that has not had an active ex-President around since Grover Cleveland—will begin to give 'em hell. Truman's aim: to send his party into the 1956 campaign with the lusty, brawling, they-can't-beat-us sort of Democracy that Truman himself represents.
Harry Truman will never have seen anything quite like the 1956 convention, which should bug even Chicago's convention-jaded eyes. Into the city, beginning late this week, will stream up to 20,000 conventiongoers, led by 2,477 delegates and 1,850 alternates, to jam hotels and motels for 50 miles around. A fantastic corps of 4,000 reporters, pundits, photographers, radio and television performers, spielsmen and technicians (almost double the number in 1952) will swarm around Chicago's International Amphitheatre employing 400 veteran telegraphers to transmit 600,000 words an hour, sending photo plates whirlybirding from a rooftop heliport, poking television's Cyclopic eye into every nook and cranny of the amphitheatre (see RADIO & TV).
Seats for Thoughts. Oldtime Democrats, accustomed to their party's brawling, disorganized conventions of old, may think for a while that they have walked into the wrong building. Gone will be the traditional broad center aisle, scene of many a wild parade and impromptu caucus; instead, in the interests of good order and discipline, the convention managers have made space for only two side aisles. Gone, Democratic publicists promise, will be the fevered brows and sweat-stained shirts; air-conditioning equipment has been stepped up to a capacity equaling 2,000,000 Ibs. of ice daily, will lower the temperature by ten degrees. To replace the backbreaking wooden chairs on the convention floor, the Democratic National Committee has latched onto 2,500 softly cushioned seats from the defunct Paradise Theater—"Thus," says a party publicity puff, "enabling our delegates to concentrate more intently on the very important decisions under consideration."