Bailey v. Miller

Arkansas law says that a Senate vacancy shall be filled by special election within 120 days. Last week, 96 days after the late great Joseph Taylor Robinson died in the heat of the Senate battle over Franklin Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court, Arkansas voters went to the polls to pick his successor.

To get a Democratic nomination in Arkansas is under normal circumstances tantamount to election. All Arkansas' Governor Carl Edward Bailey needed to do was to call a primary election which he could almost certainly have won. Instead, last August he chose what then appeared to be the even less risky method of having himself nominated by the State Democratic Committee on the ground that 120 days was not enough time to hold a primary and an election. Last summer, anti-Bailey Democrats, including the late Joe Robinson's faction of the party, held a convention of their own, nominated for Senator their own candidate, Arkansas' Representative John Elvis Miller. Last week's election thus took on some semblance of the Democratic primary the Governor had refused to call.

Main campaign issues were the New Deal on one hand, and Governor Bailey's high-handedness on the other. Making capital of the fact that his opponent had opposed major White House bills including the Court Plan in the last session, Governor Bailey promised to support the President's program in full, announced that Representative Miller's candidacy was "conceived in malice and born in hatred of the President's . . . administration." Apparently deciding that criticism of the New Deal was an offense less heinous than highhandedness, Arkansas voters this week swept Representative Miller into higher office by a decisive majority of 5-to-3.

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