Walking on Egghead Shells
By Izzy
While recently discussing the footwear of politicians, little did Izzy know of this once-famous photo of Adlai Stevenson showing a hole in his shoe. Taken during the 1952 Presidential campaign, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo was embraced by the eggheaded* politician (the model for the feckless President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove), who saw this image of thriftyness as a way to escape his reputation as an aristocratic intellectual. ”Better a hole in the shoe than a hole in the head,” he would say. His campaign even sold silver lapel pins to memorialize the symbol of everyman frugality.
*Showing a wit all-too-lacking in American politics today, Stevenson would later retort at a 1954 Harvard lecture, “Via ovicipitum dura est, or, for the benefit of the engineers among you: The way of the egghead is hard.”
