Queer Places:
2639 Monmouth Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007
1316 E Washington St, Bloomington, IL 61701
The Choate
School, Wallingford, CT 06492
Princeton University (Ivy League), 110 West College, Princeton, NJ 08544
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Northwestern University, 1801 Hinman Ave, Evanston, IL 60208
25200 N St Marys Rd, Vernon Hills, IL 60061
1904 R St NW, Washington, DC 20009
Evergreen Memorial Cemetery
Bloomington, McLean County, Illinois, USA
Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) was an American politician and diplomat who was twice the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. He was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson I, the 23rd vice president of the United States.
Raised in Bloomington, Illinois, Stevenson was a member of the Democratic Party.[1] He served in numerous positions in the federal government during the 1930s and 1940s, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Federal Alcohol Administration, Department of the Navy, and the State Department. In 1945, he served on the committee that created the United Nations, and he was a member of the initial U.S. delegations to the UN.
In 1948, he was elected governor of Illinois, defeating incumbent governor Dwight H. Green in an upset. As governor, he reformed the state police, cracked down on illegal gambling, improved the state highways, and attempted to cleanse the state government of corruption. Stevenson also sought, with mixed success, to reform the Illinois state constitution and introduced several crime bills in the state legislature.
In the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, he was chosen as the Democratic nominee for president, but was defeated in a landslide by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower both times.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson II[2] was born in Los Angeles, California, in a neighborhood now designated as the North University Park Historic District. His home and birthplace at 2639 Monmouth Avenue has been designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.[3] He was a member of a prominent Illinois political family. His grandfather and namesake Adlai Stevenson I was Vice President of the United States under President Grover Cleveland from 1893 to 1897. His father, Lewis Stevenson, never held an elected office, but was appointed Illinois Secretary of State (1914–1917) and was considered a strong contender for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1928. A maternal great-grandfather,
Jesse W. Fell, had been a close friend and campaign manager for
Abraham Lincoln in his 1858 US Senate race; Stevenson often referred to Fell as his favorite ancestor.[4] Stevenson's eldest son, Adlai E. Stevenson III, became a U.S. Senator from Illinois (1970–1981). His mother was Helen Davis Stevenson, and he had an older sister, Elizabeth Stevenson Ives, an author who was called "Buffie". Actor McLean Stevenson was a second cousin once removed.[5] He was the nephew by marriage of novelist Mary Borden, and she assisted in the writing of some of his political speeches.[6]
Stevenson was raised in the city of Bloomington, Illinois; his family was a member of Bloomington's upper class and lived in one of the city's well-to-do neighborhoods.
Stevenson left Bloomington High School after his junior year and attended University High School in Normal, Illinois, Bloomington's "twin city", just to the north. He then went to boarding school in Connecticut at The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall), where he played on the tennis team, acted in plays, and was elected editor-in-chief of The Choate News, the school newspaper.[10] Upon his graduation from Choate in 1918,[11] he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve and served at the rank of seaman apprentice, but his training was completed too late for him to participate in World War I.[12]
He attended Princeton University, becoming managing editor of The Daily Princetonian, a member of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society,[13] a member of the Quadrangle Club, and received a B.A. degree in 1922 in literature and history.[14] Under prodding from his father he then went to Harvard Law School, but found the law to be "uninteresting", and withdrew after failing several classes.[15] He returned to Bloomington where he wrote for the family newspaper, The Daily Pantagraph, which was founded by his maternal great-grandfather Jesse Fell. The Pantagraph, which had one of the largest circulations of any newspaper in Illinois outside the Chicago area, was a main source of the Stevenson family's wealth.[16] Following his mother's death in 1935, Adlai inherited one-quarter of the Pantagraph's stock, providing him with a large, dependable source of income for the rest of his life.[17]
A year after leaving Harvard, Stevenson became interested in the law again after talking to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. When he returned home to Bloomington, he decided to finish his degree at Northwestern University School of Law, attending classes during the week and returning to Bloomington on the weekends to write for the Pantagraph. Stevenson received his J.D. degree from Northwestern in 1926 and passed the Illinois state bar examination that year. He obtained a position at Cutting, Moore & Sidley, one of Chicago's oldest and most prestigious law firms.[18]
On December 1, 1928, Stevenson married Ellen Borden, a well-to-do socialite. The young couple soon became popular and familiar figures on the Chicago social scene; they especially enjoyed attending and hosting costume parties.[19] They had three sons: Adlai Stevenson III, who would become a U.S. Senator; Borden Stevenson, and John Fell Stevenson. In 1935, Adlai and Ellen purchased a 70-acre (28 ha) tract of land along the Des Plaines River near Libertyville, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. They built a home on the property and it served as Stevenson's official residence for the rest of his life. Although he spent relatively little time there due to his career, Stevenson did consider the estate to be his home, and in the 1950s, he was often called "The Man from Libertyville" by the national news media. Stevenson also purchased a farm in northwestern Illinois, just outside Galena, where he frequently rode horses and kept some cattle.
On December 12, 1949, Adlai and Ellen were divorced; their son Adlai III later recalled that "There hadn't been a good relationship for a long time. I remember her as the unreasonable one, not only with Dad, but with us and the servants. I was embarrassed by her peremptory way with servants."[20] Several of Stevenson's biographers have written that his wife suffered from mental illness: "Incidents that went from petulant to bizarre to nasty generally have been described without placing them in the context of the progression of her increasingly serious mental illness. It was an illness that those closest to her – including Adlai for long after the divorce – were slow and reluctant to recognize. Hindsight, legal proceedings, and psychiatric testimony now make understandable the behavior that baffled and saddened her family."[21] Stevenson did not remarry after his divorce, but instead dated a number of prominent women throughout the rest of his life, including Alicia Patterson, Marietta Tree,[22] and Betty Beale.[23][24]
According to David M. Oshinsky, writing in "The Senior G-Man", New York
Times, September 15, 1991: "In 1952, . . . a memo in the FBI's files noted that Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the Democratic Presidential nominee, was one of "the two best known homosexuals in the state." It hardly mattered to
J. Edgar Hoover that the informant was a college basketball player under indictment for fixing a game or that his evidence was based only on rumor. What did matter was that Stevenson had spoken out against loyalty oaths, criticized Joe McCarthy, and vetoed a bill that would outlaw the Communist Party in Illinois." Oshinsky adds: "The Crime Records Division of the FBI leaked the homosexual charge to selected members of the press. Rumors flew wildly across the Presidential campaign."
On October 27, 1952, while Senator Joseph McCarthy was preparing for a national broadcast from Chicago, the Senatory let it be known that he intended to attack Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign as being full of “pinks, punks, and pansies.”
Democrats White House aides let it be known that if McCarthy attacked Stevenson on the basis of sexual orientation they would leak General Marshall’s 1945 letter to Eisenhower harshly critical of Eisenhower’s plans to divorce his wife Mamie and marry Kay Summersby. McCarthy backed down, and his broadcast was relatively innocuous.
In 1960, Stevenson unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential
nomination for a third time at the Democratic National Convention. After
President John F. Kennedy was elected, he appointed Stevenson as the United
States Ambassador to the United Nations. Two major events Stevenson dealt with
during his time as UN ambassador were the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in
April 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Stevenson served as
UN ambassador from January 1961.
In July 1965, Stevenson traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to attend the annual meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.[125] After the conference he stopped in London for several days, where he visited UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson, discussed the situation in South Vietnam with British officials, and was interviewed by CBS newsman Eric Sevareid.[125] On the afternoon of July 14, while walking in London with his aide and romantic partner Marietta Tree to Grosvenor Square, Stevenson suffered a massive heart attack, and died later that day at age 65 of heart failure at St George's Hospital.[126][127][128] Following memorial services at the United Nations General Assembly Hall (on July 19, 1965), and in Washington, D.C.; Springfield, Illinois; and Bloomington, Illinois, Stevenson was interred in the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois. The funeral in Bloomington's Unitarian Church was attended by many national figures, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Chief Justice Earl Warren.
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