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Home , Adlai Stevenson II, Donald McHenry, Eric Sevareid, Stevenson family

Adlai II witness to 1925 tornado devastation

The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, laid waste to several Southern communities, including Murphysboro. (Courtesy of History Museum, Chicago Daily News negatives collection)

The Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925, cut a swath of destruction 219 miles long, from through Southern Illinois and into . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 .

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 ’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 .” 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, 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.

Stevenson came home to stump on Independence Day in '56

Adlai Stevenson is seen here getting out of Larry Yeast’s 1956 Chevrolet for the July 4, 1956 Democratic Party picnic at Miller Park. Yeast, a local union leader, is on the driver’s side.. (Courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History, Larry Yeast Collection.)

“The American people have been fed a diet of sweet complacency that can lead only to fatty degeneration,” declared Democratic presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson II at a July 4, 1956, picnic at Bloomington’s Miller Park.

The odds on favorite to win his party’s nomination in the upcoming convention in Chicago, Stevenson had returned to his hometown for a two-day stopover. He visited with family and friends, and then attended an Independence Day picnic organized by the McLean County Democratic Central Committee. His “sweet complacency” remark was aimed at Republican Dwight Eisenhower, the current occupant of the White House.

Stevenson grew up in Bloomington, enjoying the comforts of an upper middle-class boyhood. His family lived on Washington St. between Kreitzer and Vale, in what was then the eastern reaches of the city. Young Adlai attended nearby Washington School and later the Model School at Illinois State Normal University (today University High).

In the 1930s and early 1940s, he split time between a law career in Chicago and government service. A lifelong Democrat, Stevenson won the 1948 governor’s race, rising to national prominence as a smart reformer in a state noted for governmental inefficiency and political corruption. In 1952, he captured his party’s presidential nomination, but lost handily to World War II hero Eisenhower.

From his earliest years, Stevenson was no stranger to politics. His father, Lewis Green Stevenson, served briefly as Illinois secretary of state, and his paternal grandfather, Adlai E. Stevenson I (the name skipped a generation), served as vice president during ’s second administration. His maternal grandmother was Eliza Fell, daughter of Normal founder and associate Jesse Fell. “I have a bad case of hereditary politics,” Adlai II once confessed.

In 1956, Stevenson faced an uphill battle in the rematch with the still-popular Eisenhower, who claimed credit for a humming economy and peace (or at least a truce) on the Korean peninsula.

Looming over the coming campaign, however, was Eisenhower’s uncertain health. In 1955, the then-64-year-old former general experienced a serious heart attack, and in June of the following year, he underwent an operation for inflammation of the small intestine. Eisenhower’s health not only limited his ability to campaign, but led to greater scrutiny of Vice President . Although there was no love lost between Stevenson and Eisenhower, Stevenson despised Nixon. “He is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation,” Stevenson famously said of Nixon.

Although polls showed Eisenhower beating Stevenson a second time, most political observers believed the nation would tilt Democratic if the Republican nomination fell to Nixon.

The Cold War and the nuclear arms race also weighed heavily on Stevenson’s mind. In late June, early July 1956, Soviet-backed troops smashed the “Bread and Freedom” workers’ revolt in Poznan, a city in central Poland.

At the Independence Day picnic, Stevenson delivered a speech from the old Miller Park bandstand before a crowd of some 1,500. Sounding one of his principal campaign themes, he said the U.S. was “adrift, leaderless in a troubled and anxious world.” He argued that the Eisenhower administration had given the people of Eastern Europe a false sense of hope that the U.S. would support democratic movements behind the Iron Curtain. “The demand for bread and freedom by the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe is irrepressible,” he told the hometown crowd. “The tragedy is that at this hour the Western nations lack leadership.”

During the finals days of the campaign, Eisenhower received an unexpected boost when Israel, with the support of France and England, moved on the Egyptian-controlled Suez Canal, and the Soviets violently put down another drive for independence, this time in Hungary. Although both crises were a blow to U.S. policy interests, the American people rallied behind Eisenhower, who they believed better suited to navigate the ship of state through troubled waters.

In the November 6 election, Stevenson received 42 percent of the national vote, 3 points worse than his 1952 showing. He won just 7 of 48 states (this was before Alaska and Hawaii attained statehood, and before Washington, D.C. residents could vote in national elections).

Favorite son or not, Stevenson fared even worse in his home state, garnering only 40 percent of the vote. In McLean County, his take was a dismal 32 percent (12,332 votes to Eisenhower’s 25,758). This neighborly rejection is less startling when one considers that McLean County has backed the GOP candidate in 34 of the 38 presidential contests going back to the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s.

With the election of Democrat John F. in 1960, Stevenson became ambassador to the United Nations, a position he held until his death on , 1965 in . He is buried at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery on Bloomington’s south side.

Stevenson's death in 1965 stunned world

President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird (seen on the right) attended the July 19, 1965, memorial service for Adlai E. Stevenson II, which was held at the Unitarian Church on E. Emerson Street. (McLean County Museum of History photo)

Forty-five years ago this Monday, July 19, 1965, Adlai E. Stevenson II was laid to rest at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery on Bloomington’s south side.

“Not since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” noted United Press International, “has the death of an American statesman evoked such expressions of shock and outpouring of tribute from free men around the world.”

Illinois governor, twice Democratic Party presidential candidate (1952 and 1956, losing both times to Dwight Eisenhower), and ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson spent his boyhood years in Bloomington before leaving in the mid-1920s to attend an East Coast boarding school and then

On July 14, 1965, he died of a massive heart attack while staying in London for a few days after wrapping up a U.N. meeting in , Switzerland. He was 65 years old.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched Air Force One to England to retrieve the body of his U.N. ambassador. The official party escorting the casket back across the Atlantic included Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey; Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley; and Stevenson’s three sons, Adlai III, 34 years old; Borden, 32; and John Fell, 29. The day before Stevenson’s death, Johnson announced “new and serious decisions” facing the U.S. with regards to the war in Vietnam, including the expected buildup of troop levels to 100,000 or more by summer’s end.

On Monday, July 12, had a lengthy, heartfelt conversation with Stevenson at the U.S. embassy in London. After Stevenson’s death, the CBS newsman offered readers of Look magazine a candid profile of the exhausted statesman two days before his sudden death. Stevenson acknowledged frustration with LBJ over Vietnam and other foreign adventures, admitting to Sevareid that he longed to resign his ambassadorship and “sit in the shade with a glass of wine in my hand and watch the people dance."

After a Friday, July 16, memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Stevenson’s body was flown to Springfield, IL, again on Air Force One. His closed casket lay in state in the Capitol Building atop the catafalque that carried Abraham Lincoln’s body back to Springfield. The Illinois Statehouse was kept open late Friday through Sunday morning, where an estimated 42,000-plus visitors passed the flag-draped casket.

Stevenson’s body was then placed in a hearse and escorted by motorcade to Bloomington. The casket was brought to the Unitarian Church at 1613 E. Emerson Street, and some 15,000 area residents filed past said goodbye.

Stevenson’s family, including his sister Elizabeth “Buffie” Ives, had initially planned a small, private service at the church, but when LBJ decided to pay his final respects in person, a mad scramble ensued to make room for the president and other dignitaries.

During the Monday, July 19 church service, Johnson and Lady Bird sat in a front row pew (see accompanying image). Also in attendance were the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck; Vice President Humphrey; , chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; and Alverta Duff, the African American housekeeper for the Stevensons when Adlai was a boy.

The final stop was Evergreen Cemetery and a brief graveside ceremony. According to Illinois State Police, some 50,000 spectators, at times 10-to-12 deep, lined city streets to catch a glimpse of Stevenson’s hearse and Johnson’s limousine. The Pantagraph reported that “an almost solid mass of humanity” watched the procession as it made its way south down Main Street and east onto Miller Street and through the cemetery gates.

The 13-minute graveside service ended with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, said to be Stevenson’s favorite. The prayer reads, in part, “Oh, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek / To be consoled as to console; / To be understood, as to understand.”

That same day, 6,000 mostly area residents gathered at Horton Field House on the Illinois State University campus to pay tribute to Stevenson’s life and career. “He was a great believer in national humility, modesty, self-examination and self-criticism,” said Richard G. Browne, head of the state’s higher education board and a good friend of the governor.

In the days after the burial, crowds still flocked to the cemetery. “I thought it would be over after the funeral, but they keep coming,” remarked Hugh E. Coffman, a special guard assigned to watch over the family plot. There were also the expected souvenir seekers. “One woman,” Coffman added, “asked me if she could have some of the black dirt from the grave for her flower box, claiming that it would make her plants grow better.”

Stevenson’s values carried forward in lecture series

On April 23, 1969, Hubert H. Humphrey delivered the Stevenson Lecture Series address before a capacity crowd of some 2,800 at IWU’s Fred Young Fieldhouse. He’s seen here surrounded by autograph seekers after his talk on ending “the insanity of the nuclear arms race.”

Adlai E. Stevenson II died of a heart attack on July 14, 1965, in London, England while on business as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched Air Force One to bring back Stevenson’s earthly remains, and he was laid to rest on Monday, July 19, at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery on Bloomington’s south side.

The local outpouring of both grief (and pride) was such that less than two weeks after his death a homegrown effort was underway to establish a lecture series as a memorial to “our fallen statesman.”

Stevenson grew up on E. Washington St. in Bloomington and attended University High. He later worked for The Pantagraph (of which his family held a large stake) before law school at Northwestern University. Although he never returned to Bloomington to live, Stevenson always remained partial to his boyhood home.

Since 1966, the Adlai E. Stevenson Memorial Lecture Series has served as a fitting tribute to the former Illinois governor (1949-1953), two-time Democratic Party presidential candidate (1952 and 1956), and U.N. ambassador (1961-1965). Past speakers include a Nobel Peace laureate, four heads of state, one vice president, five U.S. senators and two foreign ministers. The impressive list features the likes of British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden (1967), Civil Rights leader and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (1979), U.S. ambassador to the U.N. (1987), and Polish trade unionist and anti-communist leader Lech Walesa (2000). The organizers of the Stevenson lecture series hoped that the ongoing program would “speak to future generations as he spoke to his, by promoting his ideals in the field of international affairs and by furthering the cause of world peace and good will among peoples.” Serving as co-chairs of the fundraising committee were State Farm chairman Adlai H. Rust and Illinois State University President Robert Bone. “It is essential that we not lose the best of what he gave us,” Bone said of Stevenson, “but continue the ideas and ideals in which he believed.”

Perhaps most importantly, the funds to support such an ambitious project were to come almost exclusively from residents of Bloomington-Normal and the immediate environs. The original target of $50,000 was surpassed, and in the end around $75,000 (or the equivalent of about $550,000 today, adjusted for inflation) was raised to serve as an endowment sufficient to attract global newsmakers.

Originally, the lectures were held at ISU, but since the late 1970s they have rotated between ISU and Illinois Wesleyan University.

The inaugural lecture was held June 8, 1966, a mere eleven months after Stevenson’s death. The speaker, Arthur J. Goldberg, was a former secretary of labor and U.S. Supreme Court justice who succeeded Stevenson as U.N. ambassador. He arrived in Normal via helicopter, landing on the Hancock Stadium field before making his way to Horton Field House for his address.

“He was one of those men who hear, as few men do, ‘the slow, sad tread of humanity,”’ Goldberg said of Stevenson. “He felt profoundly the painful gap between man’s possibilities and his actual achievements.”

Stevenson’s tireless support on behalf of the U.N. was not an indication of Pollyanna-like naiveté, argued Goldberg. “He expected that each day would bring a new crisis,” he said of Stevenson, citing Soviet missiles in Cuba, the bloodbath in the Congo, the U.S. entanglement in Vietnam, among countless others. “In all of them, his was the voice of calm, of reason, of firmness, of imagination,” said Goldberg. “He never stopped trying to achieve a consensus, to get nations to reason together.”

Hubert H. Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, was the featured speaker in 1969. As a U.S. senator he helped lead the fight for passage of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. “Adlai Stevenson devoted himself to bringing an end to the nuclear arms race,” said Humphrey. “He fought—as I did—against the testing of nuclear weapons in the air, and he did so even during his campaign for president [in 1956], when he faced the most concerted opposition and ridicule. But he was proved right.”

In no small way, this lecture series set out to disprove the old saying that a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown.

United Nations, Twin Cities once shared close ties

Issued shortly after Adlai E. Stevenson II’s death in 1965, this commemorative 5-cent U.S. postage stamp includes the United Nations emblem, partially obscured below his name. (Courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History)

Earlier this spring, several local residents expressed dismay over the display of the United Nations flag at Bloomington City Hall.

The flag had been there so long and attracted so little attention that no one is entirely sure exactly how it ended up there in the first place, though officials believe it serves as a memorial to Adlai E. Stevenson II, U.S. ambassador to the UN (1961-1965).

That makes sense, given that Bloomington’s favorite son, who was and two- time Democratic Party presidential candidate, symbolized the once-strong connections between the UN and the Twin Cities.

Stevenson was also a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1945 UN organizing conference in San Francisco, referring to himself as “one of the jubilant midwives of the United Nations’ birth and one of its anxious nurses during its infancy.”

The UN arose from the ashes of the Second World War and its tens of millions of dead, with leaders in the U.S. and abroad believing a viable world organization could do much to foster international cooperation. For his part, Stevenson argued that the had a responsibility—both financial and moral— to help shape the UN into a force for good.

The Twin Cities began observing UN Day (October 24) as early as 1949, and it quickly became an annual event. Other local activities followed. In 1950, area Halloween trick-or-treaters began collecting donations for the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), a program sponsored at one time by the Church Women United of Bloomington-Normal. Three years later, in 1953, representatives from sixteen women’s organizations formed a committee to distribute materials to local groups celebrating UN Day.

Around 1964, McLean County residents organized one of the founding chapters of the United Nations Association (UNA) of the United States. The group promoted U.S. participation in the UN, while educating residents on international affairs. Elizabeth “Buffie” Ives, Adlai Stevenson’s only sibling, was a key figure in the chapter, which by its second year boasted more than 225 members.

For UN Day 1961, Hazle Buck Ewing (of Ewing Manor fame) saw to the placement of a public memorial commemorating the life and career of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary-general killed one month earlier in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The stone marker, located in Ewing Park off Towanda Avenue, is believed to be one of the first—or perhaps the first—memorials anywhere erected to the Swedish diplomat. Ewing was a strong supporter of the UN ideal, having helped establish in the 1920s a “School of Nations” at Principia College in Elsah, Ill.

Also on UN Day 1961, a UN flag donated by Elizabeth Ives flew from a McLean County Courthouse flagpole. “Never before in history has the United Nations been needed as much as it is today,” Bloomington Mayor Robert McGraw said at the time. “Is the UN worth saving? We have heard powerful voices raised which suggested it is not. But with all its flaws and failings it has done tremendous good work.”

Interestingly, Stevenson is not the only one with local ties to become U.S. ambassador to the UN. Donald McHenry, a 1957 graduate of Illinois State Normal University, served in that position during the Carter administration. As a student, he was co-president of the first ISNU chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The McLean County United Nations Association also played an organizing role in the Adlai E. Stevenson Memorial Lecture Series, which brought to the Twin Cities the likes of former British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden (in 1967), retired U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of (1975), former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1985), and Polish trade union organizer and anti-totalitarian voice Lech Welesa (in 2000). Into the early 2000s, the association also arranged a UN Day wreath laying ceremony at the Stevenson gravesite in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery.

Stevenson often spoke of the divide between rich and poor nations, believing the UN offered hope to those who needed it most.

On July 9, 1965, five days before his death in London, Stevenson spoke at a UN meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil,” he said. “We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing … No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.”