THE PAPERS OF ADLAI STEVENSON: Governor of Illinois, 1949-1953

The Papers -- sometimes oracular, often avuncular, always urbane and sapient -- continue the steady documentation of the Stevenson career, this third volume covering the Springfield years when he won kudos as an innovative and uncommonly intelligent governor -- qualities which led him to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 (papers dealing with that event will be included in Vol. IV). As in the previous collections (KR, 1972, pp. 789 and 1400), there is an ample selection of the private letters and notes, public documents and speeches, memoranda and articles, all with the indispensable headnotes and other explanatory material which have previously distinguished Johnson and Evans' conscientious editorial job. Speaking of Lincoln before the Abraham Lincoln Association in 1952, Stevenson remarked that ""If the record of man's progress, or lack of progress, is the chronicle of everlasting struggle between right and wrong, it follows that the solutions of our problems lie largely with ourselves, that only with self-mastery can we hope for peace and contentment. . . . Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with human benevolence before it becomes wisdom."" It is observations like these which remind us that the American system, so much in doubt today, can and does throw up the occasional politician who is unstained by power, who indeed grows in the pursuit and exercise of it.