FAMILY PARTY AT THE COW PALACE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 8

FAMILY PARTY AT THE COW PALACE

HE result of the Republican Convention at San Francisco was a foregone conclusion, but for a New Zealander unaccustomed to the excitement of American politics, says BEATRICE ASHTON, it was a drama without parallel. ES ge he ae ee ee oe CA Re ee a ee Ee es ea. ae eee

SAN FRANCISCO, August 23 OR four days I have been sitting in the vast oval of concrete and steel now known to the world as the Cow Palace, watching the Republican Party press on through the machinery of a streamlined agenda to wind up in a frenzy of enthusiasm for its November standard bearers. There were no hitches, no surprises, and in contrast to the Democratic convention the week before, no disagreements on camera. After the high drama in Chicago, where Adlai Stevenson emerged as the undisputed leader of his party, after the neck-and-neck race between Kennedy and Kefauver for the Vice-Presi-dential nomination, this confident. unanimity in San Francisco frustrated the army of reporters present and undoubtedly bored the television audience. Not until the end of the second day, when the President set up his temporary White House in the St. Francis Hotel, did the convention come to life. But for a New Zealander set down in its midst there was no frustration, no boredom-this was a shindig without parallel. If the Democratic Convention had been exciting enough to persuade me to spend my lunch hours in the nearest bar, peering at a shimmering screen in the half daylight, this performance at the Cow Palace was the real thing, made up of flesh and blood, masterminded in the manner of a Cecil B. de Mille, and with a cast of thousands. Yet even here, television dominated the scene, and the three-hour time-lag between San Francisco and the great centres of population in the East forced the convention sessions to run from mid-afternoon through the dinner hour.

The monstrous power of a medium that relentlessly exposes the slightest human error was apparent in the nervous gavel of the chairman and the clockwork precision of the programme. The eye of the camera could never be .ignored for a moment, and each party has sat in caucus before a possible audience of 168 million peoplé. é The Republican Convention opened so hard on the heels of its longwinded rival that there was an air of unreality about the weekend between. To reassure" ourselves that the fresh outburst of news and excitement was actually happening here, rather than on our television set, we tossed’ the camera-eye view and the pundits’ prophesies aside and set out to see for ourselves, "Go straight ahead for the Cow Palace." Thus

a nuggety nawenoy,.. doing his bit for a _ visitor. There it sat, the building with the ridiculous name, squat and solid behind a shining sea of cars. Built during the depression it was immediately the subject of hot controversy. "Building a palace for cows while people are starving," sneered a letter to the paper, and thus as first derisively and then affectionately, it came to be called the Cow Palace. Not every city can play host to a convention and it was the size of

the building, its seating capacity of 15,000, and its open floor space intended for cattle shows and rodeos that finally persuaded the Republicans to convene here. San Franciscans never doubted that the star of the convention would be San Francisco. "It has taken a year to plan, and cost the city a quarter of a million dollars,’ said the Mayor in a television interview, "but we think it’s worth it to know that the dateline round

the world this week will be San Francisco." He might have added that an estimated 40,000 visitors would be good for business. Week after week while convention fever mounted, San Francisco was spread out in full colour in half a dozen national magazines, its photogenic qualities caught in a hundred different poses. But none of these charms, the slender bridge across the Golden Gate, the elegant shops, the sophisticated eating houses, not even the idea that this is a city for fun and frolic, was as enticing to the delegates as the promise of cool weather.

ST ’ me "What did you talk about with the President?" newsmen asked former President Hoover after his social call at the San Francisco White House. "We agreed that it was a pleasure to be in this air-conditioned city," said Mr. Hoover. Forewarned against the chilling ‘fog that drifts in off the Pacific through the Golden Gates, the delegates’ wives lifted their mink stoles out of summer storage. And the night before the convention it was especially cold. Up on Nob Hill visitors shivered as they shuttled between the Mark Hopkins and Fairmont Hotels. This was the nerve centre of the convention; and here, had the Republicans been in a fighting mood, all backstage difficulties would have been settled. But they were not in a fighting mood. They closed their ranks against the brave efforts of Harold Stassen to stimulate a race for the VicePresidential nomination, they had come to agree, and to have a whale of a good time. Never, even in fur-minded San Francisco, have I seen so much mink, so much high fashion, so much sleekness and confidence as in the foyer of the Mark Hopkins. Because it seemed the thing to do we slid up the nine-teen-floor express elevator and followe * the crowd to the top of the Mark, Th. much-praised, fabulous view, I have yet to see, Instead, we were swathed in a cocoon of fog, dazzled by the Hollywood décor and seated among people who were doing their blasé best to be unimpressed. Down below, somewhere in one of the 500 rooms taken over by the party (23 hotels were required in all) was the Vice-President, Not yet shaken by the

sudden desperate illness of his father, he had arrived in the city the day be"fore, a man with the look of ‘a winner. One cannot hang in the clouds for ever. Yet to plunge down precipitous grade of Powell Street, through the happy crowds of visitors doing the town, was frightening. It was not the physical descent alone (though anyone can tell you that to drive up and down Nob Hill is better than a ride in a roller-coaster). Market Street, the great diagonal that cuts the downtown area in half, lay below us. It was forlorn, the lives of the people drifting along its Wide pavements as far removed from the gala atmosphere we had just left, as New Zealand is from California, None of this harsh contrast was apparent next day at the Cow Palace. Here was America, rip-roaring, bannerwaving, and as raucous as a fun fair. To get in at all had not been easy, but now five personal appearances and seventy miles after my original application, I was inside. Teetering dizzily on the outskirts of that huge gathering of the tribes, I found my seat and fought for my equilibrium. At first, it was an ordeal by sound, A 50-man band, supported by an electric organ, kept up a constant boom at a frantic tempo. There are certain tunes I never want to heart again, and California, Here I Come, is one of them, Half-blinded by the perpetual flicker of flashbulbs from the professional photographers on the floor of the assembly and the amateurs in the stands I began to pick out the acting areas on this great stage. On the floor, solidly packed with delegates and their alternates; in the huge half-empty area reserved for the daily press; up and down the aisles; there was a ceaseless, restless coming and going. How, I said to myself grimly, can serious business be done in this mad-house! Now it is all over. By the time the gavel sounded for the last time the whole gargantuan scene had taken on pattern and form. By the second session I found myself pointing out the V.I.P.’s to my neighbour and I had snooped unblushingly through borrowed binoculars at Wendell Corey, who was responsible for the star-studded entertainment. This element of the Convention, designed to brighten the inevitable pauses for the sponsors’ message to the television audience, allowed me to see more celebrities than I had mustered in my entire six years in America. At a discreet distance, certainly, across a vast restless audiehce, I have seen Irving Berlin leading the convention in a campaign song he must wish he had not written; heard Irene Dunne repeat the President’s prayer at his inauguration (with the electric organ coming up under her voice); observed for myself that Ethel Merman requires no amplification system and that John Charles Thomas is not as young as he used to be. There were two elements in the drama of these four days that had me on the edge of my seat. For a visitor from a tightly-knit country where regional differences count for little, there is something about a roll-call of the States, territories and territorial possessions that over-stimulates the imagination and leaves one punch-drunk with the size and diversity of this vast nation. This is the heart-beat of the convention, the time-honoured method of balloting. For

the roll-call to be most impressive there must be a difference of opinion, as there was at Chicago. But even without the added edge of suspense that made such good television viewing last week, without the sturdy opinion within delegations that divides the vote between three, four or even more candidates, the sound of the roll-call is magnificent, and will linger in my ears long after the rest of the tumult is forgotten. Alphabetically, one by one, the secretary drones on in an even voice, and up from the floor come the voices of the chairman, now in a clipped Bostonian accent, now in the drawl of the deep South. The other eye-opening element (not in itself new since Chicago) was the extraordinary phenomenon of the socalled spontaneous demonstration. Everyone knows these are organised, and no one cares, so long as they are ear-splitting and eye-filling. However many demonstrations the lusty-lunged Young Republicans staged, they were all mere dress rehearsals for the moments when first the President, and then his running-mate, were renominated. Up from the stands rose a great flutter of banners and simultaneously the floor of the house was alive with banners, streamers and balloons. To the deafening roar of applause, the. wild screams and shouting, someone added a police siren, while’ the band and the organist whipped into their act through the amplifiers. As if all this were not enough a gentle flock of homing pigeons was let loose to rise frantically above the pandemonium. Ten minutes the chairman allowed for the President's melee, five for the Vice-President. Both outbursts seemed like an. eternity. Waving corn this may be, but it is corn

calculated in bring in a good crop of votes next November, Not all the demonstrations were contrived. For the elder statesmen of the party, for Governor Dewey and for Mr. Hoover, synthetic sound and fury gave way to honest, affectionate, standing ovations. And these were only a prelude to what was to come when the VicePresident arrived, and this again a lukewarm effort by comparison with the uninhibited roars of applause for the President and his wife. It is impossible to gauge a man’s popularity by the sound 20,000 of his own supporters make at such a climactic moment, particularly when two enormous baskets of balloons flutter down to pop merrily among the constant pyrotechnics of flashbulbs.

But when he arrived at the airport I heard the organised clamour utterly drowned in. the open-throated delight of the crowd. For thirteen miles, unti] he reached the heart of the city, and 25,000 people welcomed him to Union Square, this kind of cheering was what he heard. Now the candidates are chosen and both parties have had the eyes and ears of the voters riveted on what

they have had to say for themselves about themselves. The delegates left the Cow Palace in an aura of blissful con-tentment-the family party had been a success. A stocky farmer from North Dakota took the car on our left, a young executive with a decorative wife slid into the white Jaguar on our right, and we drove home through a traffic jam to retire from this marathon and get back to balancing the budget.