DEMOCRATS: The General Manager

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I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

—Will Rogers

This week any Democrat in the U.S. could borrow Will Rogers' words and describe his own status with as much accuracy as humor. Seven months after the great defeat, the Democratic Party is disorganized, in debt and leaderless. Its condition is one that John Fischer, general book editor of Harper & Bros, and a worker in Adlai Stevenson's camp last year, has diagnosed as "intellectual anemia" and "almost total collapse of the . . . organization."

The big-city machines, which once whirred Democrats to victory, have become backfiring rattletraps. There is no indication that anyone with any effective tools in hand is looking under the hood. In New York, the toothless old Tammany tiger still lies dazed and listless, and Democrats are wondering where their next candidates for governor and U.S. Senator are coming from. In Illinois, National Committeeman Jack Arvey has virtually retired from the day-to-day problems of party management, and the once-great Cook County organization is dozing under the hand of an apathetic municipal court clerk named Joe Gill. In California, only one Democrat (Attorney General Edmund G. Brown) holds any position of importance in the state, and some of the party's wealthiest angels are snapping shut their checkbooks. California's left-wingers, who control the party machinery, have seriously contemplated abdication to see whether that might help the party win an election.

Nationally, the titular head of the party is Adlai Stevenson. But for more than three months. Stevenson has been jaunting around the world, keeping in touch with national headquarters only through hastily squiggled notes on postcards, e.g., a card showing a Malayan sitting on an elephant's head, with the notation that this man "rides the elephant much better than Ike does." Harry Truman, on the eve of a nostalgic visit to Washington, is lodged in a quiet limbo between politician and elder statesman, exerting no party leadership. His latest newsworthy act was to let traveling members of the Oklahoma Junior Chamber of Commerce make him an honorary Indian chief in Kansas City, Mo. Stephen Mitchell, chairman of the national committee, is hiking along at his job, but hardheaded old pols regard him as something of a political Boy Scout, who may, if he's lucky, help a few old tottering candidates safely across the street.

Rope Dealer. Into this leadership vacuum has blown a tornado from the Southwest, a Texas-size (6 ft. 3 in., 204 Ibs.) hunk of perpetual motion named Lyndon Baines Johnson. To rank & file Democrats outside his own state of Texas, he is little more than a familiar name. But as minority leader of the U.S. Senate, moving around the Senate floor and into the Capitol Hill conference rooms, he has become the key U.S. Democrat as of June 1953.