Stevenson’s 1952 Running Mate

Your generally fair article on Adlai Stevenson 1922 omits a salient but uncomfortable truth about his career. In 1952 he chose an avowed segregationist, Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama, as his vice-presidential running mate, an act for which history would refuse to forgive a Republican nominee, if any had done so. The free ride that academe has given the Democratic Party for its segregationist past, when other American institutions are berated for far more remote racial sins, continues to puzzle me.