No political element in America can start to match the election-year discomfiture of Americans for Democratic Action. At its showy first formal national convention last weekend in Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel ADA unanimously agreed that it was rebellious toward the Republicans, wrathful to the candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, and coolly critical of Truman's record. Both members and leaders called themselves "the third force" in civilization, rejecting the status quo of the Right and the worldwide totalitarian program of the Communist Left. Every-where it is the third force which finds itself today between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Why the significance of ADA's full-dress show? The rank-and-file members total under 25,000. These are predominantly on campuses (school affiliate Students for Democratic Action boasts half of the 190 chapters) and in the middle-class ranks of socially alert physicians, lawyers, and businessmen--a nebulous tidbit of independent voters politicians understandably have chosen to ignore during the organizational growing-pain months. Its leadership has furthermore consisted largely of intellectuals and ex-bureaucrats of the Roosevelt period whose current strength in public affairs is negligible for all practical purposes.

ADA won long and intent looks from columnists and party bigwigs for the first time last weekend only because it showed that the organized third force in the United States was more now than a collection of the traditional parlor liberals talking to themselves.

Labor leaders popped up everywhere at the Bellevue-Stratford: in the stuffy platform-drafting sessions, on the windy convention floor, hurrying down corridors, upstairs in rooms pointedly unlisted at the registration desk, all the panjandrums and small fry of big labor's leadership showed in full force. They were from the previously-hostile CIO, AFL, and powerful independent unions such as the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and the International Association of Machinists. Phil Murray was present sub rosa for a brief few hours Saturday in one of those up-stairs rooms. William Green made his first appearance before any political convention, on the same platform with Walter Reuther at that; Reuther's biting oratory forced this caricature of an oligarch to struggle hard, through fumbling fighting improvisations upon the stale prepared text, for the most "militant" declaration at unionism's dark hour. Labor moguls and a troupe of politicians on the way up typitied by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis and City Council President George Edwards of Detroit provided for ADA the new aspect of sleeves-rolled-up savvy.

The newly-elected 40-odd-man national board encompasses all of labor minus the Harry Bridges-led splinter of the CIO as well as the young men in the Democratic Party and the now minority-representation of independent liberal citizens. Here enter Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ex-housing expediter Wilson Wyatt, and movie star Ronald Reagan. Eleanor Roosevelt looms a power behind the scenes. This total coalition's impressiveness stems from the fact that it is influence mobilized with the sole immediate political end of isolating Henry Wallace. To do this job and to elect congressmen who meet "progressive" standards ADA will from a united-front throughout the country for the AFL's League for Political Education and the CIO's Political Action Committee. The plans are concrete. Hard-boiled veterans of labor's wars such as organization directors Frank Fenton of the AFL and Allan Haywood of the CIO, both conspicuous at the proceedings and solidly attached to ADA for 1948, are not the sort who convention go for the spectacle.