Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [24]
How he must have wished old Sam Clemens were still around to help him.
Shortly after they passed Twain’s boyhood home, the Trumans crossed the Mississippi—the river, as Harry called it—and entered Illinois. They kept cruising eastbound on Highway 36, their black Chrysler slicing through waves of green cornfields at precisely fifty-five miles per hour. It was about one o’clock now, and the heat was positively stifling. A few miles east of the town of Jacksonville, they crossed the ninetieth meridian—one-quarter of the way around the world, as a road sign notes today.
Around here, in the middle of nowhere, the car radio crackled with the news: President Eisenhower had denied Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s appeal for clemency. “The execution of two human beings is a grave matter,” Ike announced. “But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.” The Rosenberg children, ten-year-old Michael and six-year-old Robert, were staying with friends of their parents at the time. Michael was watching his favorite baseball team, the Yankees, play the Tigers on TV when the game was interrupted by a bulletin announcing Eisenhower’s decision. “That was their last chance,” the youngster whispered.
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4
Decatur, Illinois,
June 19–20, 1953
About two hours after leaving Hannibal, the Trumans passed through Springfield, the capital of Illinois and the home of Abraham Lincoln. Harry saw a lot of himself in Old Abe, who was one of only two Republican presidents he admired. (Teddy Roosevelt was the other.) “Lincoln,” Harry wrote, “set an example that a man who has the ability can be president of the United States no matter what his background is.”
Harry and Bess drove past the soaring, silver-domed statehouse, where statues of Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas grace the grounds. The statues were financed by the state legislature through the same appropriation in 1913 and dedicated on the same day in 1918. The Lincoln statue cost fifty thousand dollars—twice as much as the Douglas statue. Of course, Lincoln was at least a foot taller than Douglas, who was known as the “Little Giant.”
In 1858, Douglas defeated Lincoln for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Two years later, Douglas, running as the Northern Democratic candidate for president, faced Lincoln again. (Southern Democrats ran their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge.) Douglas received nearly 1.4 million votes in that contest but lost, of course. Staunchly pro-Union, he became an unlikely ally of Lincoln’s after the election. Douglas attended Lincoln’s inauguration, and stunned the audience when he took Lincoln’s hat and “held it like an attendant” while Lincoln delivered his inaugural address. (Hats have clearly played an important but underappreciated role in presidential inaugurations.)
Even if he’d won the election, Douglas’s presidency would have been inconsequential. He contracted typhoid fever and died on June 3, 1861—less than three months after Lincoln took office. He was forty-eight.
In all probability, it was not Stephen A. Douglas but rather a different failed Democratic presidential candidate who was on Harry Truman’s mind as he drove through Springfield that day. Less than a year earlier, Democrats had nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson for president. It was a choice that Truman supported. “You are a brave man,” he wrote Stevenson shortly after the convention. “If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.”
But almost from the moment he was nominated, Stevenson did everything he could to distance himself from Truman, whose popularity was at rock bottom. Stevenson replaced Truman’s head of the Democratic National Committee, Frank McKinney, with his own man, and he moved the party’s headquarters from Washington to Springfield, where he lived in the governor’s mansion. He wanted to “disown any connection with the Truman administration,” according to Matthew Connelly, one of Truman’s aides. “Stevenson actually was running against