National Reports: The Election Illinois
VOTAW, ALBERT N.
ILLINOIS Douglas banks on independents By Albert N. Votaw CHICAGO IN A SENSE, the rivals in the Illinois Senatorial contest are Herbert Hoover and Alger Hiss. Democratic Senator Paul Douglas is...
...Over the years, he lobbied assiduously at the State Capitol, winning friends and influencing state legislators...
...In Indiana as in Illinois, Hoover may yet prove a bigger bogeyman than Hiss...
...Spot unemployment and some discontent with Administration farm policies are given as the reasons...
...Democratic Senator Paul Douglas is jousting against dat ol' debbil Depression...
...Both sides appear to be gathering strength for 1956, when Capehart's term expires and there is a real possibility of a slam-bang Capehart-Craig battle for organization control...
...In neighboring Indiana, the chief political news is the lack of news...
...Finally, Douglas will gain as a result of the local elections in Cook County, where the Democrats have a much stronger slate than the GOP...
...Last spring, Governor George Craig, an Ike supporter, won control of the State Republican Committee over the bitter resistance of Old Guard Senators Homer Capehart and William Jenner...
...At the moment, the Douglas supporters are confident...
...State and Congressional elections hold the spotlight, but the real excitement is over...
...The appeal of their candidate, who has often been voted the ablest man in the Senate, transcends party lines...
...The suburbs are chiefly agitated about one of the most important stale issues in main years??legislative reapportionment...
...In 1952, Eisenhower carried the county 42,010 to 29,718...
...Reapportionment is one of GOP Governor William Stratton's projects...
...He is reported to have traveled 65,000 miles and shaken 200,000 hands during the primary race...
...It is concentrating on two marginal Congressional districts, where it feels there is a chance of unseating Democratic incumbents...
...Many of these suburbanites live in the Seventh District, which has a million residents...
...He is a formidable campaigner, with the same folksy...
...A newspaper poll now shows a tremendous shift, with 54 per cent of those questioned indicating a Democratic preference in the Eighth District Congressional race...
...It is formally backed by both political parties and by a host of civic organizations...
...Douglas, by pledging support to such elements of the Eisenhower program as foreign policy, hopes to win here...
...Meek has been formally endorsed by President Eisenhower and by the national Citizens for Eisenhower...
...Although the vote in the April primary was the lowest in ten years, registration for the fall election is markedly up, especially in the Chicago suburbs which hold the balance of power in the state...
...Joseph T. Meek, the Republican aspirant, has been sparring noisily against socialism and subversion...
...His hard campaigning has also endeared him to organization Democrats, who might otherwise be tempted to hold against him his independence, his quarrel with former President Truman and his anti-Stevenson stand at the 1952 Presidential nominating convention...
...These GOP-dominated "country towns" are also the stronghold of the good-government, station-wagon independent, the type of voter who cast his ballot for Stevenson and Douglas for Governor and Senator in 1948 but against Stevenson for President in 1952...
...By way of contrast, the district represented by the Democratic leader in the lower house, State Representative Paul Powell, has 74,000...
...On the ballot is a proposition which will give Cook County a majority in the lower house, although downstate representatives will keep their unconstitutional majority in the State Senate...
...But the state Ike group is not participating in the Meek campaign...
...Meek won the GOP Senatorial primary by carrying 79 of the state's 102 counties, including supposedly antagonistic Cook, and piling up a 102.000-vote plurality in a field of ten...
...Republican Meek may be said to have started running for office in 1935, when he founded the Illinois Federation of Retail Associations, of which he is President...
...This year, in his first try for public- office...
...His anti-depression talk is welcomed by voters in the coal-producing delta at the southern end of the state, as well as by those wage-earners who miss the overtime pay and night differential which in past years enabled them to buy homes, household equipment and new cars...
...But Craig failed to follow up, and the party convention in June nominated a slate of Jenner-Capehart supporters for state office...
...Meek supports the Bricker Amendment (if he had been in the Senate instead of Douglas, the measure would have passed), lower taxes, cuts in foreign aid, and a balanced budget...
...His chief emphasis is on Douglas's "prophecies of [economic] doom" and on the Senator's alleged involvement with "the worn-out, Old World philosophy of socialism, with its regimentation and disregard for human liberties...
...cracker-barrel approach as Douglas...
...This is Vanderburgh County, dominated by the industrial town of Evansville...
...Indiana also contains one of the nation's "weathervane" counties, areas which have consistently given majorities to the winner in every Presidential election since 1900...
...Redisricting' is supposed to take place every ten years, according to provisions of the State Constitution which are more honored in the breach than in the observance...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 43
