Sometimes I end up a bit perturbed at the most minor of grievances. Thus it is that I grated my teeth reading Charles Peters’s “Tilting at Windmills” in the June Washington Monthly and getting to his spiel on Adlai Stevenson, confronted with this:

My father like many other Democrats of the 30s and 40s, thought of himself as a “common man”. Indeed, a liberal leader of that era even wrote a book called The Century of the Common Man, a term that disappared from the Democratic vocabulary with Stevenson’s Emergence. But in the 30s and 40s, men like my father valued the plain spekings of their heroes — Will Rogers, Roosevelt, and Truman, who cared more about making themselves clear to the average American than showing how smart they were.

How hard is to state that that “liberal leader” was Henry Wallace? Or does that lead into an unwanted segue into Henry Wallace and his politics?

Perhaps the prominent use of the phrase “Common Man” by a politician who lost favor by the American people as his association came to be as a Soviet Communist Dupe is part of the picture here.

I don’t know.  The absence of this detail does complicate the picture, though.

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