As we approach yet another presidential election, it might be enlightening to recall a mostly forgotten presidential aspirant of well over a half-century ago – Adlai E. Stevenson.

Stevenson ran twice (unsuccessfully) against Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, at a time when television was in its infancy, well before its inauguration with the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. This was a time when the Iron Curtain was at its most robust, the Korean War had ended, Douglas MacArthur had been fired, the Chinese communists had consolidated their hold on Asia’s mainland, and U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was demoralizing the State Department with charges of communist subversion.

Perhaps uniquely in modern American history, in 1952 Stevenson was drafted by the Democrats to be their nominee for president, a job he never sought. Why did they want him? What might he bring to that high office? He was concluding a hugely successful term as governor of Illinois. He had been a major force in the creation of the United Nations, a key adviser to the secretary of the Navy in World War II and an Army enlistee in the first World War. Stevenson, moreover, was passionate about responsible government, candid, forthright, literate and, yes, liberal in an era when that label still had a good name.

Even 56 years ago it was something of a novelty for politicians, in America certainly, to write their own speeches. Stevenson had to, as a matter of intellectual integrity; the word had to fit the thought. On one occasion before becoming the nominee, he addressed a gathering saying, “The speech I’m about to give is better than the one you heard from [then vice president to Harry Truman] Alben Barkley last week. I know, because I wrote both of them.”

Adlai Stevenson’s public words commanded attention not just from the so-called intelligentsia but from much of the electorate. His Republican foes, wary of his wit and humor as well of his trenchant intellect, claimed that he spoke over people’s heads when, in fact, groups such as labor and veterans understood exactly what he was saying, much to the discomfiture of Stevenson’s opponents. What is more, he dared to chastise voters in a way that would be unthinkable today, when government is always wrong and the people always right.

Citing Bernard Shaw, Stevenson observed that “democracy is a device that ensures that we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” As for special-interest groups, which today’s politicians court with sickening servility, he skewered those of his day “as groups who seek to identify their special interests with the general welfare,” a neat example of what La Rochefoucauld called the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Organized labor, which was still a formidable political power, heard the Stevensonian warning “that I might as well make it clear right now that I intend to do exactly what I think is right and best for all – business, labor, agriculture alike. And I have no doubt that you will do exactly what you think at the election.” And so, too, at an American Legion convention: “I intend to resist pressure from veterans … if … their demands … conflict with the public interest.”

It was also the flag-waving time of public hysteria over McCarthy’s allegations. Stevenson had this to say about false patriotism: “To strike freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety. Most of us favor free enterprise for the mind.” The press, overwhelmingly for Eisenhower, tended, Stevenson averred, “to argue editorially from the personal objective, rather than from the whole truth,” which reminded him of “the old jury lawyer [who] said: ‘And these, gentlemen, are the conclusions on which I base my facts.'”

Stevenson stood apart, and thought apart, because he believed devoutly that one day the public would cultivate a sense of responsibility that would bring about the kind of government it truly deserved. He lost his run, of course; voters felt less challenged by a war hero who spoke in platitudes.

Like the Cecils, a great English ruling family of Victorian times, Stevenson “met … ill-fortune with an impregnable serenity,” a 20th century descendant, David Cecil, wrote of his forebears. “They were not indifferent to the results of the next election, but they cared more about the immortality of the soul,” he observed. The nightingale, an Oxford scholar declared, “wins no prizes at the poultry show.”

And so it was with Adlai Ewing Stevenson. Today’s presidential seekers might well take counsel of a predecessor who dared greatly in the public arena, whose moral compass compelled him to “say the same thing in Harlem as in Virginia.”

John Gilchrist, a retired medical writer, lives in Unity.