Adlai Stevenson, Fake Farmer

Did you ever have this experience in school? The teacher calls on you to discuss the reading, only you didn’t actually do it, so you try to BS your way through using the little bits of information you recall. Unfortunately for you, the teacher – and most of your classmates – see right through you.

Maybe this happened to you, or perhaps one of your classmates. Either way, we all know that feeling of realizing, “Hey, this guy is just spouting BS. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”

I had that feeling while watching Adlai Stevenson talk about farming.

In 1956, Stevenson’s campaign team cut a series of ads entitled “The Man from Libertyville.” These spots showed Stevenson at home, often with members of his family, to demonstrate that he was just a regular guy, and not the ivory-tower elitist egghead that his critics thought him to be (and which, in fact, he was).

Here’s an ad from that series, featuring Stevenson and Estes Kefauver at Stevenson’s farm, talking about the problems of farmers:

Let’s start by talking about this so-called “farm.” Stevenson’s property was about 70  acres, which is pretty small for a farm (according to the USDA, the average size of a small family farm is about 230 acres).

And what kind of crop does Stevenson grow? According to the narrator of the commercial, timothy hay. This gives the game away right here: If you farm for a living, hay is not your primary crop. You might grow some to feed your animals, or to sell to other farmers, but hay isn’t exactly a cash crop.

Stevenson’s property would best be described as a “gentleman’s farm,” or what today we might call a hobby farm. In short, it’s farming for fun.

You might wonder how Stevenson had time to farm – even as a hobby – while he was Governor of Illinois. The answer, of course, is that he didn’t. He hired a man to take care of the grounds and do the actual farming.

At any rate, here are the running mates, Stevenson and Kefauver, in their shirtsleeves leaning on a fence. “What happens when two men on a farm get together?” the narrator asks. “They talk about farming.” Well, sure, if they’re in a political ad about farming!

Farmer Adlai starts talking. He tells Farmer Estes, “I wish you could have seen my typical Illinois corn belt farm down near my home in central Illinois, because there you can see all of the problems we have here in this part of the country in agriculture.”

Okay, let’s talk about that “typical Illinois corn belt farm.” Stevenson was a city kid. Although born in Los Angeles, he was raised in Bloomington, Illinois. But he wasn’t raised on a farm; his family lived in a big house in a fancy neighborhood.

His father Lewis did own a farm, but there was nothing “typical” about it. It was 12,000 acres and it was farmed by 44 tenants. Lewis Stevenson was their landlord.

He was active in Democratic politics, including a term as Illinois Secretary of State, and he was wealthy enough to send his son to the prestigious Choate boarding school in Connecticut.

Lewis’s father, the original Adlai, had served as a Congressman and as Vice President; his mother helped found the Daughters of the American Revolution.

So no, the Stevenson family had not been living off the land anytime recently.

Farmer Adlai then says of his running mate, “I think you probably know as much about the problems of the farmer as anyone in public life in our country. Certainly you’ve seen a lot of it, from coast to coast, and from Canada to Mexico.”

Stevenson is referring to the fact that Kefauver spent most of his time campaigning in rural areas and farm states. This is partially because he was popular there, but also because – let’s be frank – Stevenson had no interest in going to those places. He preferred to stay in the big cities, hobnobbing with his wealthy smart-set friends.

As for the claim that Kefauver “knows as much about the problems of the farmer as anyone in public life”… that’s a load of bunk. Kefauver didn’t grow up on a farm either. His father owned a hardware store and other businesses. And while his ancestors weren’t quite as wealthy as Stevenson’s, a lot of them were doctors and lawyers.

As we know from my interview with Fred Strong, when Kefauver was tasked with drafting a farm bill, he wound up (unknowingly) enlisting a high schooler in another state to draft it for him, because Kefauver himself knew little about agriculture.

Now it’s Farmer Estes’ turn. He at least sounds credible. “I think the problems of farmers everywhere are just about the same,” he says. “I’m always amazed at how hard it is for city people to understand the problems of farmers. So many of them think that running a farm is like running a big department store, or a factory.”

Kefauver hands it back to Stevenson for an attack on the incumbent administration. “Maybe one of the reasons this administration has failed so dismally on the farm front is that most of the key men in the Eisenhower administration are big industrialists. They know big business, they know how to advertise their products – they even know how to advertise their political products – but they don’t know much about the farmer’s problem.”

Granted, Eisenhower’s cabinet was heavily stocked with titans of industry. On the other hand, did the typical American expect the average Cabinet secretary – obviously excluding the Secretary of Agriculture and maybe the Interior – to know farmer’s problems? Were modern administrations vetting their Secretaries of State or Defense for their farm experience?

Also, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson – although famously unpopular with farmers due to his opposition to government price supports – actually did grow up on a family farm in Idaho, and even ran it for several years. He held a Master’s degree in agricultural economics. He knew far more about farming than either Stevenson or Kefauver.

After Kefauver gets in a line about there not being “many real farmers in this Eisenhower administration, and the ones that are seem to think that running agriculture is like running General Motors” – a double jab at Benson and Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, who ran GM before joining the administration – it’s now Stevenson’s turn to show what the GOP doesn’t understand about how hard farming is.

And it’s here that he sounds like he has no idea what he’s talking about.

He runs through an extended analogy imagining that General Motors had to run itself like a farm – dealing with problems like forecasting demand months in advance, threats from bad weather and insects, rising supply prices, and falling crop prices. It’s a decent line of attack, but he delivers it haltingly. He pauses repeatedly, and he keeps looking down – where I can only assume he has a notecard with the argument written out.

While Kefauver had the reputation for being a poor public speaker, it’s Stevenson who sounds stumbling and awkward here. You know why? Because he didn’t know anything about farming! He’d never farmed for a living, and he seems like he’d barely talked to anyone who has. He’s the kid who didn’t do the reading and is trying to figure it out on the fly.

After Kefauver endorses the bumbling analogy, it’s back to Farmer Adlai for his closing argument. “If the American farmer is going to get himself out of the fix that he’s in” – another awkwardly long pause, as he looks down at his notes – “we’ll have to have an administration in Washington that doesn’t think of the farmer’s problems just in industrial terms, but that is sympathetic, is understanding, and knows what to do about the farmer.”

But based on this performance, why would any farmers think that Stevenson understands them or knows what to do about their problems? Here’s this egghead liberal with a toy farm, stumbling through talking points that sounded like they were handed to him five minutes before the cameras started rolling. This guy is going to save the family farm?

I’d also note that Stevenson didn’t propose any solutions to farmer’s woes here. The whole pitch is based on the idea that he understands farmers and their problems – which he clearly doesn’t.

In this spot, Stevenson reminds me of Oliver Wendell Douglas, the character played by Eddie Albert in the ‘60s sitcom “Green Acres.” For those unfamiliar, Oliver is a Manhattan lawyer who moves to the country and buys a farm, even though he knows nothing about farming. He’s known for things like doing farm chores while wearing a three-piece suit, and he’s constantly baffled and annoyed by the local yokels around him.

That’s how Stevenson comes off in this commercial. Why the campaign thought this would make farmers think he understood them is beyond me.

How would I have made this spot better? Easy: Let Kefauver do most of the talking. He was also not a farmer, but he at least talked to them regularly. He could have relayed stories he’d heard on the campaign trail. And at least he’d have sounded convincing when sympathizing with the plight of farmers. They still could have shot the thing on Stevenson’s hobby farm, to continue the “Man From Libertyville” theme.

Really, anything would have been better than this. America wouldn’t see another politician fail this comprehensively at sounding like a regular person until George H.W. Bush infamously said “Message: I care” during the 1992 primaries.

Bottom line:  If you’re a wealthy patrician, just own it. Trying to act otherwise makes you look like a fool.