Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom

5. The 1952 Convention: Victories for Eisenhower and a Two-Party System in Louisiana

1. Transcript of interview of Elbert Parr Tuttle by Joel Wm. Friedman, Atlanta, Ga., February 22, 1993, 8. 5 The 1952 Convention Victories for Eisenhower and a Two-Party System in Louisiana At the same time that John Minor Wisdom was struggling to unseat John E. Jackson and rebuild Louisiana’s Republican Party, another southern attorney, Elbert Parr Tuttle of Atlanta, was spearheading a movement to reform and broaden the base of the Republican Party organization in Georgia. And when Wisdom asked Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in the winter of 1951 to recommend someone who had experience in a delegate challenge and who might be able to advise him in his nascent Eisenhower effort in Louisiana, Lodge immediately tendered the name of Tuttle. Wisdom took Lodge’s advice to heart, called Tuttle, and Tuttle instantly agreed to take a Sunday train to New Orleans so that the two could compare notes. Tuttle was well acquainted with the problems that Wisdom was confronting in Louisiana. The Georgia Republican Party was run by a small clique of “Post Office Republicans,” the term used to describe those who became Republicans “because they hoped that a republican President would be elected so that they could name all the Postmasters as well as everybody that worked at the post office, the district attorney and the marshals.”1 Wisdom and Tuttle spent much of 64 Champion of Civil Rights 2. Ibid., 7. 3. World Affairs, 12 Facts on File 213,216 (1952). the day in the garden of Wisdom’s magnificent Garden District home. Within a few hours, the two had forged a bond of personal friendship and professional admiration that would last for more than forty years. “Of course I fell in love with the Wisdoms the minute I met them,” Tuttle recalled.2 The two men commiserated over the common obstacles that lay in each of their paths and exchanged ideas about how to overcome these hindrances and to promote the hoped-for candidacy of General Eisenhower. And while this initial meeting created a tremendous sense of camaraderie between these two established attorneys, it also had a much more profound impact on the future of their party and the nation. For the strategies exchanged during this initial encounter laid the groundwork for a grassroots movement that eventually reshaped the southern Republican Party and played a pivotal role in Eisenhower’s capture of the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. In the summer of 1952, the epicenter of the political world was located three and a half miles to the southwest of the Chicago loop. Here, on the easternmost edge of the city’s south side—surrounded by mammoth stockyards, steel mills, and diverse ethnic neighborhoods populated by thriving Irish, Greek, Slavic, and Italian communities—lay the Chicago Convention Building and International Amphitheatre, the site chosen by both political parties to host their 1952 presidential nominating conventions . This marked the thirteenth time that the Party of Lincoln chose to gather in Carl Sandburg’s “City of the Big Shoulders,” including the turbulent session in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt and President William Howard Taft locked horns in a delegate fight eerily premonitory of the contest that ensnared that president’s son exactly four decades later.3 For nearly a week prior to the arrival of most of the attendees, long before they would begin the official business of choosing a candidate and adopting a platform, several critically important committees were busily at work. In clandestine caucuses and casual corridor conferences held throughout the massive Conrad Hilton Hotel, as well as in stuffy, smoky salons and bustling ballrooms teeming with reporters eager for any hint of an impending breakthrough, the committee members spent grueling days examining evidence and witnesses and engaging in end- The 1952 Convention 65 4. “G.O.P. Delegate Contests Going On for Century,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, July 6, 1952, 12, col. 4. 5. See John Robert Greene, The Crusade: The Presidential Election of 1952 (Lanham, Md.: 1985), 73. less and spirited debates. Nearly all of this intensive activity centered on a trio of disputes that most insiders realized certainly would affect, and might even resolve, the increasingly bitter battle between the two contenders for the presidential nomination, Senator Robert Alphonso Taft and General Dwight David Eisenhower. This was only the second time in its hundred-year history that the GOP convention experienced a floor fight over the seating of groups of delegates...