“Revolt” in the South?

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25427, 25 February 1948, Page 6

“Revolt” in the South?

It is hardly to be doubted that when Mr Truman sent his civil rights proposals to Congress at the beginning of the. month, he had reckoned on opposition from the 11 former Confederate states of the south, supported possibly by the five border states, still closely enough tied to them to be affected by their political currents. Mr Truman’s programme—requiring among other things a Federal Fair Employment Practices Act. laws to invalidate state poll taxes and various forms of racial segregation, and a transfer from the states to the Federal Government of enforcement authority against lynching—of course, runs deeply into America’s difficult race problem. The South has shown before that emotional issues of this kind can shake its traditional allegiance to the J)emocrats; and if they persist with their programme, as they say they will, Mr Truman and his supporters will need to win a victory on broader grounds than those on which the Southern Democrats in Congress are ostensibly challenging them. If Mr Truman has measured the opposition by the yardstick provided for him in 1944, when the issues were similar to those now in dispute but were joined to objections to a fourth term for Mr Roosevelt, he mav look to the outcome with some confidence. Then, as now, the Southern Democrats threatened to cast their state electoral votes against the Democratic nominees for President and Vice-President, to be chosen at the regular national convention of the party. They went so far as to hold a Southern Democratic conference, as they again talk of doing, to shape and co-ordinate their plans. There were bitter party battles in three of the Southern states. But the “ revolt ” ended with exactly nothing achieved. It could, indeed, achieve little without the aid of complicated machinery, which could be made to work successfully only with the widest popular support. A traditionally Democratic state wishing to withhold its electoral vote from the national Democratic candidates would have to find a way to put uh an independent Democratic ticket, headed by Democrats other than those chosen by the national convention. This ticket, as a correspondent of the “ New York Times ” has said, would have to win the popular vote in November against the regular Democratic and the Republican sets of electors before the electoral vote of the state could be cast for its independent candidates. As the correspondent added, the chances of success for such a ticket would probably be damaged if the state Democratic organisation took part in the party’s national convention; but it weuld be a sign that the “revolt” was deep-rooted indeed if it refrained from doing so. The South, of course, has alternatives. It could vote for Mr Wallace or switch to the Republican camp; but • Mr Wallace supports even stronger measures for racial equality than Mr Truman has advocated, and the 1928 affair, when “ dry ” sentiment and religious and antiTammany feeling drove five southern states and five border states over to the Republicans, seems to suggest ’that an even stronger or more unusual combination of prejudices than is now present would be necessary to impel any or all of them to switch again. Yet if there are few signs so far that the Southern Democrats are able or prepared to go to extremes in opposing the civil rights programme, Mr Truman can hardly be easy; for the 179 electoral votes of the South and border states are more than enough to hold the balance in any presidential election which does not give the Democrats a landslide victory in the rest of the country. The “ mutineers ” may, of course, be content if they can block for the present most of those parts of Mr Truman’s programme that deal with the racial problem and can so contrive to retain the present powers and jurisdiction of the states; but whether they succeed or not, they have opened up a crack into which the Republicans will be busily thrusting wedges. As one observer has suggested, the Republicans might select one or a few civil rights proposals and push for their enactment. If they should be defeated they could blame the Southern filibuster; if they passed, they could beckon to the minority groups.