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In the Gas Bag. What ideological baggage he did carry was a fairly conventional Midwestern conservatism based upon business and old American virtues of religion and family. Dirksen's parents were German immigrants who settled in Pekin, Ill., still speaking their Ostfriesean dialect at home. He was prophetically named for the 19th century orator Edward Everett and for William McKinley, who was elected President the year that Ev and his twin brother Tom were born. The boys went to work early, tending the vegetable gardens on the family's 1½ acres, milking the cows and slopping the hogs.
At 18, Dirksen enrolled at the University of Minnesota, working nights as an ad taker for the Minneapolis Tribune. In 1917, he quit school, joined the Army and shipped off to France, where, as a 2nd lieutenant, he was assigned to man a tethered balloon 3,500 ft. above the lines, spotting artillery targets and sweating out German fighters. He sometimes joked that his duty in the "gas bag" must have had something to do with his later grandiloquence.
Actually, the poet and speechifier had been in him from boyhood: he liked to erect a platform in the barn and electrify himself with his own sermons. After the war, he went back to Pekin, failed in a washing-machine enterprise, then joined Tom and their older brother Benjamin Harrison Dirksen in a bakery. But all the while, Ev was writing short stories and plays. With a friend, he produced three theatrical triumphs in Pekin. In one, Percy MacKaye's A Thousand Years Ago, Dirksen played a fevered lover in pursuit of the Princess of Pekin. He won her, naturally, and kept her. The "princess" was a girl named Louella Carver, who became Mrs. Dirksen in 1927.
Dirksen's political career began in 1927, when he was elected Pekin's city finance commissioner. He ran for Congress three years later and lost to the incumbent. In 1932, however, he made it. Throughout his congressional career, Dirksen displayed a prodigious capacity for hard work, arising at 5:30 every morning and carrying home a bulging briefcase each evening. During the New Deal, he did not support all of F.D.R.'s programs, but did vote for many, including social security and the minimum wage and hour bill. He was an isolationist until September 1941, when he switched to support Roosevelt's international policies, including aid to Britain. Dirksen remained an internationalist throughout the war, later backed the Marshall Plan and creation of the United Nations.
Fearing that he was going blind, Dirksen quit the House in early 1949. He was on his way to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for surgery for degeneration of the retina when he "consulted with the Big Doctor Upstairs" and decided against the operation. With ten months of rest, he recovered his vision. In 1951, Dirksen returned to Washington as a Senator..
The Succession. It is the memory of Dirksen in the early Eisenhower years that has always troubled his liberal critics. He reverted to isolationism and became a domestic reactionary, defending Joe McCarthy's depredations and fighting doggedly to prevent McCarthy's Senate censure in 1954. But after the censure, with his own re-election in 1956 and some courting from Eisenhower, Dirksen gradually moderated his views.