Word: sparkman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stepped to the microphone to sing the praises of a bulky, apple-cheeked man who stood slightly to the rear, grinning happily though his eyes were red from lack of sleep and his curly, greying hair was rumpled. Stevenson had scarcely gotten under way when careful, homespun John Jackson Sparkman, who had just been nominated for Vice President of the United States, stopped grinning, fished a cough drop out of his mouth and slipped it through a crack in the platform floor...
...There," commented an unsympathetic observer bitterly, "is a man who has every quality a Democratic candidate for Veep needs: he's from the South." This comment contained considerable truth. Sparkman was not picked because he has a popular or party following, and certainly not because he has shown qualifications to be the heir apparent to a President. He was put on the ticket to bridge the North-South split. The leaders who picked him hope that Northern liberals will accept him despite his stand against civil rights legislation, and that uncompromising Southern conservatives will not consider him a traitor...
Compared to most Southern Senators, he could be considered a New Dealer. But compared to his colleague Lister Hill, the senior Senator from Alabama, Sparkman is a conservative. By accepting the vice-presidential nomination he has (in theory) accepted the Democratic platform, which favors a federal civil rights program. In the past, however, he has fought such a program. Not a leading filibusterer himself, he has defended the sacred Southern right to make such filibusters. In 1948 he voted (in effect) for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, yet he later played a leading part in wresting control of Alabama from the Dixiecrats...
...cannot be said that Sparkman represents the resolution of the conflict between the South and the New Deal. What he represents is a desperate, often skillful, sometimes comic effort to resolve that conflict...
Publisher William R. Hearst Jr., writing in twelve Sunday papers across the country, agreed. "I am sure," wrote Bill Hearst, "that Governor Adlai Stevenson is a good man. Our Chicago newspaper, the Herald-American, says he has made a good governor. And Senator Sparkman seems to be a good Senator ... In reaching our decision to support the Republican ticket, we are more concerned with principles than personalities...