Pegler: Democratic Convention Day 2
By Westbrook Pegler
Chicago, Illinois –
Up on the flying bridge which juts out from the platform where the giants sit to watch the antics of the little people, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, according to ancient formula, was viewing with pride and pointing with alarm.
The little people stirred restlessly like things on the quiet surface of a harbor. Down in the alley, beneath the stands, amid the picnic little of that ribald and yet solemn American political rite, the national nominating convention, the members of the band were disappearing around the bend to fall in for the great spontaneous ovation to the man-than-whom. The statesman on the bridge had been going on for a long time and the surprise was due any minute.
Senator Barkley is a man roughhewn like a preliminary study of one of Gutzon Borglum’s monumental great stone faces. He was standing to the microphones, gleaming with the sweat of his devotion and reading in enormous roars the script of a fateful act of American history, already confirmed by Frank Roosevelt’s demure acceptance of his fourth nomination. He was now getting around to the painful part in which he had to humiliate himself by eating the most awful words of his entire career, blurted last winter in honest anger at an insult to Congress delivered by the man whom he now had the privilege to nominate for an honor without precedent in the life of the American nation.
On that occasion, Mr. Roosevelt, rejecting the tax bill, for once went so far that even the docile Barkley, dull but hitherto always reliable, snarled back with an angry speech and, for a few hours, quit his position as Majority Leader of the Senate. In this sharp and sudden test of courage and conviction, both quit miserably.
The President, having fetched a calculated insult, crawled back, denying his obvious intention. And Barkley, reconsidering, accepted a sorry excuse instead of an apology.
Dispute well back in oration
Barkley was coming to that now. He had postponed the issue well back into his oration so that, in the published accounts, it would occur far down the text where few would read it.
Senator Barley might hesitate with his great leader on minor matters, he was explaining, in general terms, and he might disagree on procedure or method, for, thank God, in this great democracy, a man had a right to hold and express an opinion. As Voltaire had said, he might disagree with what you said but he would defend to the death your right to say it. A few words more and the insult to the legislative branch had been swallowed with a muscular gulp in public, diluted to be sure, with prideless phrases, in a scene so abject that a stranger could pity the man and fear for a country in such hands.
He whopped on now and, at the close, his nomination of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” left the little people momentarily unprepared. They were not allowed to cheer a nomination. They could only cheer a fact accomplished long ago and acknowledged by the President in a letter last week to Robert E. Hannegan, the puppet chairman of the party, an affable handshaker in an empty job.
The music came on with a crash and they began to stretch in the aisles, carrying their blue and white legends on the winning of the war and the winning of the peace with Mr. Roosevelt, and bouncing their state standards on high in a trudging procession whose duration the reporters began to clock from force of habit. Barkley swabbed his face, stepped back and then stepped again to the fore to pose for the photographers standing on the press benches and clamoring, “Senator, this way, Senator. Just one more, Senator.”
Jackson gets into pictures
Barkley was good at this. He would throw out his right hand in an oratorial sweep and part his rugged features in a reasonably convincing grin. Now to the left of the bridge, for the photographers over there. Now back to the fight, with a different placard in his left hand. “Hold it higher, Senator, it hides your face. A little this way, Senator.”
Sam Jackson, another obscurity like Hannegan, hailing from Indiana, crowded the old hack for a place in the pictures. He is new and this convention gave him a miraculous chance to get into the papers. He smiled importantly, imitating Barkley’s wave and, once when Barkley paused for a drink of water, pulled our a low-comedy brown derby which he cocked on his head to solemnize a historical even while the little people shuffled by below.
The little people do not know how very little they were. Many of them never had seen a convention before and they came determined to enact their spontaneous demonstration. They seemed to believe literally that they were deciding nominations and policies not knowing that Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray long ago determined that they should nominate Henry Wallace for Vice President and were insisting on this choice against any other preference of the little people.
