From a rising start to notoriety and obscurity
The Republican Party sensed victory ahead in the political races
of 1952, and it was ready.
The Democrats had been in power for 20 years and, with President
Harry S. Truman declining to run again, most members of the GOP
automatically thought of one man to bear its banner to the White
House.
From a rising start to notoriety and obscurity
The Republican Party sensed victory ahead in the political races of 1952, and it was ready.
The Democrats had been in power for 20 years and, with President Harry S. Truman declining to run again, most members of the GOP automatically thought of one man to bear its banner to the White House.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most popular American, and even before he consented to be nominated at the Republican National convention, millions of “I Like Ike” buttons were being distributed and worn.
Eisenhower, the man who had forged the Allies into a machine to crush the Axis in World War II, had never sought office before and seemed above party politics in which the Republicans and Democrats regularly tore into each other.
In Utah, which previously had been counted in the Democrat column, one man presented himself to the GOP as a candidate for the House of Representatives.
Douglas R. Stringfellow’s story was already widely known in the state. He told how as an officer in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, during the war he had helped spirit Otto Hahn, Germany’s foremost physicist, out of the country to England to prevent him from developing an atomic bomb for the Axis. He related his capture by the Germans and imprisonment in an atrocity camp where he had been tortured to the point where his limbs were rendered useless before the German underground rescued him. Stringfellow said he had undergone a spiritual change in prison.
The United States Chamber of Commerce named him one of the nation’s 10 outstanding young men. That November he beat his Democrat opponent by a 3-2 margin, and the GOP picked up 22 seats in the House and enough in the Senate to control Congress.
Stringfellow became a national celebrity. He spoke with evangelistic fervor to audiences throughout the state from his wheelchair, was featured in magazines, and his story aired on the popular television show, “This is Your Life.” He was an inspiration to millions.
Several weeks before the 1954 elections, a Democrat official set up a private meeting with two Republicans and a church leader. They were aghast at his story but verified it for themselves.
Neither Ohio State nor the University of Cincinnati, which Stringfellow had claimed to attend, had any record of him. The Army verified that he had served in the Air Corps but was discharged as a Private First Class. He was awarded the Purple Heart for a leg wound but was able to walk with the aid of a cane.
When confronted, Stringfellow acknowledged “a little embellishing.” Sixteen days before the election he publicly admitted that he had lied and dropped from the race.
He began a national tour to tell paying audiences of his “prank” but so few people showed up that he abandoned it.
Stringfellow resumed his previous occupation as a radio announcer. The stations that hired him did not know his true identity because he used pseudonyms.
When he died in Long Beach in 1966 at age 44, it was ironic that he had hidden his past so well that only a few publications carried the obituary of a man so widely admired in the previous decade.
