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otherwise we'd dry up and think it wasn't worthwhile to make any effort. That's true with anything that you're putting over when you can't tell in advance what's going to happen. It always has been that way at headquarters.

I don't recall any special discouragement at Smith headquarters. We knew - we'd known from the beginning and we continued to know - that the religious issue was one of the great imponderables, one of the difficult things in this campaign. I couldn't go back and say where I'd been, who I'd seen and what they'd said to me in the Southern trip without reporting that the Democrats in many of these states were honestly terribly disturbed about the religious issue, to which they added always, in their own minds, and sometimes in their statements, the fact that he was a vulgarian who came from the streets in the slums - the gutters, they used to say - and that they judged that from the quality of his voice, which did not come over the radio well and which was always a husky voice when you heard him. However, it was not unattractive to New York people. Some of them had also heard queer stories about Mrs. Smith and didn't think she was a perfect lady.

Those things were what we had to report. In the South there was no question but that the Democratic party was the dominant party. You weren't trying to make converts