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Adlai Stevenson II Witness to 1925 Tornado Devastation the Tri-State

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Adlai Stevenson II Witness to 1925 Tornado Devastation the Tri-State Adlai Stevenson II witness to 1925 tornado devastation The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, laid waste to several Southern Illinois communities, including Murphysboro. (Courtesy of Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News negatives collection) The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, cut a swath of destruction 219 miles long, from Missouri through Southern Illinois and into Indiana. It remains the deadliest twister in U.S. history, and during its horrifying three-and-a-half hours on the ground it claimed the lives of 695 people, destroyed some 15,000 hOmes and laid waste to all or parts of 19 communities. The hardest hit was Murphysboro, IL, and rushing to the devastated community was 25-year-old Pantagraph reporter Adlai E. Stevenson II, whose family held a large stake in the newspaper. “Viewing this broad expanse of scattered, twisted smoldering wreckage,” he wrote upon his arrival, “one cannot but reflect on the futility of life and the insignificance of man.” The previous summer, Stevenson found himself back in Bloomington and the family home on East Washington Street, having flunked out of Harvard Law School. Somewhat tongue and check, he wrote a friend that “the mandate of the family” was that he “familiarize his languorous faculties with the affairs of the family newspaper.” In July 1924, he began this “apprenticeship,” apparently spending time in the business office, and handling newsgathering duties ranging from telegraph operator to feature writer. Stevenson would go on to serve as Illinois governor (1949-1953); run and lose twice for U.S. president (1952 and 1956); and serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Yet before becoming the national face of Democratic Party for most of the 1950s, he was a college dropout attempting to get a handle on the family business, a provincial but profitable small city newspaper in the buckle of the Corn Belt. At this time The Pantagraph was in transition, with Davis Merwin, Adlai’s first cousin, assuming management of the paper from the ailing H.O. “Bert” Davis,” Adlai’s uncle. Stevenson wrote the first of his four Tri-State Tornado articles while traveling southbound aboard the Illinois Central Railroad’s Panama Limited passenger train. “An atmosphere of catastrophe and havoc pervades all trains en route to the storm-stricken area,” began the first dispatch, which appeared March 20. “The train is carrying three cars of volunteer nurses and doctors, many of whom saw service on the muddy fields of Flanders [a reference to World War I] and know, without being told, something of what awaits them.” Stevenson then arrived in Carbondale, the staging area for relief efforts for nearby Murphysboro, where the killer twister took 234 lives, still the record for tornado fatalities born by one U.S. community. “Many of the doctors have not taken off their aprons in 36 hours,” he wrote. “The few available hearses in Murphysboro are racing back and forth to the cemetery, carrying two caskets at a time, many of them small ones. Of formal funerals there are none, but of heroic fortitude there is much.” Although Stevenson was not a trained journalist, and his prose often veered toward the purple, he still had a way of words, a gift that would come in handy during his years as candidate and statesman. He described Murphysboro, for example, as “a field of kindling and bricks over the face of a bleeding and smoking world.” Stevenson’s final Tri-State Tornado dispatch appeared March 23. “I saw a farmer dressed in his best blue suit, pale but dry-eyed and composed, push his way thru a crowd in front of a morgue and emerge a moment later carrying a tiny white casket,” Stevenson wrote. “The crowd gave way in reverent awe and closed behind him intent on its own business.” The death of Bert Davis in the summer of 1925 set off a bitter struggle between the Stevenson and Merwin families over control of The Pantagraph. During a convoluted legal tussle, the Merwins obtained the only 10 shares of stock not controlled by either family, a move which tipped the balance irrevocably in their favor and made further court action pointless. Even so, Adlai (as well as his sister Elizabeth) continued to hold sizable shares of the paper, and for all but a few years of his life, The Pantagraph was his primary source of income. The Merwins’ decision to grab those ten shares also helped push the twenty-something Adlai away from a potential career as a Central Illinois newspaperman and into the wider world of law and politics. Freed from having to manage The Pantagraph, he moved to Chicago and earned a law degree at Northwestern University. Though he occasionally returned on weekends (at least for a little while) to work for the newspaper, he never again lived in Bloomington. Spurning favorite son Stevenson, Bloomington liked ‘Ike’ Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower on the stump in Bloomington, October 2, 1952. (Pantagraph file photo) Six decades after the 1952 presidential election, “I Like Ike” remains one of the best remembered campaign slogans in American political history. And despite the fact that Republican candidate Dwight David Eisenhower was running against Bloomington boy made good Adlai E. Stevenson II, local voters liked “Ike” much more than they liked “Ad.” “The general,” as Eisenhower was known, campaigned in Bloomington on Oct. 2, 1952, speaking from the back of his whistle-stop train at the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad passenger station on Bloomington’s west side. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II, proved popular with the American public. His brand of grandfatherly Republican moderation was a welcome respite for many voters after 20 consecutive years of a Democrat in the White House. Incumbent Harry Truman decided against running for a second full term (he had also served the final three years of Franklin Roosevelt’s fourth term), and so the Democratic faithful embraced the erudite reformer Stevenson, Illinois’ sitting governor who spent his formative years in Bloomington. The Stevensons were well-known Democrats in a city and county decidedly Republican. Adlai E. Stevenson I (Adlai’s II’s grandfather—the unusual first name skipped a generation) served as vice president during Grover Cleveland’s second term (1893-1897). During that 1952 campaign stop, about 7,000 folks greeted Eisenhower at the GM&O station. “I want to compliment your city for being the boyhood home of my distinguished opponent,” Eisenhower told the crowd. “I say that sincerely. I also want to compliment your newspaper for its high sense of discrimination.” The latter remark was likely a reference to the fact that The Pantagraph, though highly critical of Truman’s policies, balked at endorsing the Republican presidential candidate for the first time in its long (dating to the mid-1850s) history. Not only was Stevenson a Bloomington native, but he was a major stockholder of the newspaper! In fact, for all but a few years of his adult life, The Pantagraph was his primary source of income. Eisenhower told the Bloomington crowd that the Truman administration had moved from “crisis to crisis,” all the while having “no real program to deal with the Soviet Union.” The Cold War loomed large in 1952, the Soviets having exploded their first atomic bomb and China falling to communism three years earlier, and the blood-soaked Korean peninsula locked in a two-year stalemate. On the home front, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s unsubstantiated accusations of communist infiltration in the State Department and elsewhere further spooked an anxious, discontented nation. “We’ve lost China and Korea,” declared Eisenhower. “It is high time to renew confidence in the government.” He also called upon South Korea to shoulder a greater share of the fighting in order to reduce the combat burden of the United Nations force (comprised primarily of U.S. troops, though including significant numbers of Brits, Aussies, Turks and others). “The Communists are able to make good fighters out of them; so can we,” Eisenhower said of South Koreans. After his ten minutes on the stump, Eisenhower brought out his wife Mamie, and the two of them waved while holding up ears of corn. “The biggest roar of approval from the crowd … came when the general introduced his wife,” noted Jerry Sohl, one of two Pantagraph reporters on the scene (Sohl, by the way, is best remembered as a science fiction novelist and scriptwriter for television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek”). Stevenson returned to Bloomington the Sunday (Nov. 1) before the election, attending services at the Unitarian Church in Bloomington (then located on the east side of downtown). He spent that night in his boyhood home on East Washington St., which by this time was the residence of his sister Elizabeth (known as “Buffie”) and her husband Ernest Ives. To the surprise of few, Eisenhower clobbered Stevenson at the polls, capturing 55.2 percent of the popular vote and 39 of 48 states (this was before Alaska and Hawaii). In Republican- dominated McLean County, Eisenhower’s margin of victory, percentage-wise, was much higher—65 to 35 percent among votes cast for the two major party candidates. Eisenhower would go on to beat Stevenson by an even wider margin in their 1956 rematch. When it came to McLean County voters, the Stevenson dynasty was 0 for 4 in presidential elections. The two other defeats came in 1892 and 1900, when Adlai E. Stevenson I was the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate. Even the year the Democrats won nationally (Cleveland-Stevenson in 1892) they couldn’t win locally.
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