Word: planked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Blackstone Hotel was air-conditioned, but the occupants were not: they were the 16 members of the Democratic Platform Committee's drafting subcommittee. Early in the morning, after more than four hours of wrangling, softened and moderated by Massachusetts' John W. McCormack, the Democrats' civil-rights plank was nailed down. The subcommittee had handled the blazing Supreme Court issue in the spirit of unity, compromise, and remarkable consideration for each others' regional problems...
Outside Pressure. For Mississippi's Governor James Plemon Coleman, who led the five-man Southern wing of the subcommittee over the rough flooring of the plank, the results were "palatable"; i.e., the plank was not shoved down his throat. His willingness to negotiate had kept the committee from blowing up altogether. But he and his fellow Southerners were sure of one thing: they would not countenance a change in the wording that would indicate any pledge to implement the Supreme Court's decision. This settled, John McCormack called for a vote at 2:45 a.m. For the record...
...Mennen ("Soapy") Williams (who comes up for re-election this year, must deal with powerful Negro and auto worker groups in Michigan), New York City's Mayor Bob Wagner, and lesser partisans of the N.A.A.C.P., A.D.A. and other civil-rights groups. They demanded to know what the plank said. McCormack politely refused to tell them...
...Thank You, John." Far into the morning the unhappy warriors, bossed by A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Walter Reuther, fanned out in a relentless search for a copy of the plank. At length they got it; when the subcommittee presented its plank to the full platform committee, a civil-rights agent smuggled out a penciled version of the wording. Now Reuther & Co. set earnestly to work. Nothing would suit the band except the insertion of a sentence in the plank reading, "We pledge to carry out these [Supreme Court] decisions," and the addition of a paragraph from the 1952 platform calling...
Keeping the Inside Track. Pad-and-pencil reporters had to admit that the first major news breaks of the preconvention week went to TV. Adlai Stevenson's support of a strong desegregation plank reached the public first on film on Newscaster John Daly's ABC show in an exclusive interview. Harry Truman's endorsement of Governor Averell Harriman was anything but exclusive; it came before a jammed ballroom of 800-probably the biggest press conference in history. But TViewers saw it as it happened...