THE HIGHBROW IN POLITICS
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intellectual life and a capacity to read without moving one's lips.
Governor Stevenson himself was amused by the word and used it
while speaking to an egghead audience at the University of Wiscon–
sin.
In the next weeks the term caught on with a rapidity which
suggested that it filled some precise need in American discourse or
perhaps touched some sensitive nerve in the social organism.
Certainly there was rough justice in the application. While
Governor Stevenson had no more eggheads about him than Franklin
D. Roosevelt used to have, he diluted them less with the professional
politicians, the admirals, the old Harvard cronies and the other non–
intellectual types who moved in the Roosevelt entourage. Moreover,
while Roosevelt had an active and detailed interest in issues of public
policy, his reactions to art or literature were perfunctory and con–
ventional. Stevenson, with his literate and well-stocked mind, his
urbane and apt allusions and quotations, gave the impression of be–
ing a man of far broader and more humane culture.
To the intellectuals of the country, he seemed one of their own;
and they responded to him as they had never responded to Roosevelt.
Or,
at least, so I have been repeatedly told since the campaign; and,
when I have wondered whether this was simply the application of
the rule that people in love find all their previous affairs tawdry and
superficial, I have been told, No-that there was a sense of kinship
and sympathy with Stevenson which had never been felt with the
more remote, abstract, contrived Roosevelt.
As
Eudora Welty well
stated the Stevenson appeal, "The voice of the passionate intelligence
speaks
to the whole range of the mind-in politics as well as in
poetry."
And, as she went on, in a post-election message to Governor
Stevenson, "This writer knows of people here and there like herself,
previously political ignoramuses (we now feel a fellowship) -well–
intentioned ever, but not ever in the sense of being personally in–
volved, concerned deeply by a political campaign until this year.
Then, with your appearance on the national scene, we found out
how deeply concerned we could be."
Certainly, as the campaign progressed, writers and artists began
to
discover a wholly unexpected intensity of commitment. Men like
Richard Rodgers and Howard Lindsay, who had been for Eisen–
hower in February, found themselves swept away by the Stevenson
movement in October. Others, who had exhausted themselves through
