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In a leisurely weekend of social fun and political games at the executive mansion in Albany, New York's Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman and his guest, Chicago Lawyer Adlai Stevenson, greeted each other, smilingly discovered their neckties were of the same color and design. Asked whether he thought that President Eisenhower would run for reelection in 1956, Stevenson, always cagy about his own political future, replied: "I suspect he will." Later, the two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination next year (although Harriman is still on record as favoring Stevenson) put their heads together privately, compared designs on the White House.
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From his uproarious retirement in California, aging (76) Author Upton (The Jungle) Sinclair, long one of America's loudest social consciences, took an ad in New Republic magazine to thunder a special plea. Sinclair, a lifelong teetotaler, was trying to unearth "a publisher who believes in abstention." In a "terrible but rigidly truthful" book titled Enemy in the Mouth, Abstainer Sinclair had "told the tragic stories of 50 alcoholic writers." Their suicide rate was ten times the U.S. norm, their lives 15 years less than the average span. After mentioning four dead drunkards in his own family (including his father), Upton Sinclair sorrowfully listed a surprising roll of fallen slaves "to John Barleycorn."
Wrote he: "For three-quarters of a century it has been my fate to watch . . . a long string of friends . . . traveling to their graves by the alcoholic highway: Jack London, George Sterling, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Millay, Theodore Dreiser, W. E. Woodward, F. P. Dunne (Mr. Dooley), Horace Liveright, Eugene Debs, Douglas Fairbanks, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Klaus Mann." And, lamented Sinclair, the roster of hard drinkers among the illustrious he knew through letters or friends was even longer. Among those departed: "Stephen Crane, James Whitcomb Riley, Heywood Broun, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin A. Robinson, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Wolfe, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, John Barrymore, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Dylan Thomas." Concluded Sinclair: "After wasting a year trying to please publishers, I am making this appeal to the conscience of my country. [Who] will make this book available to those who want it?"
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