Up from the Quality

Ot the first time in 50 years a Charleston Aristocrat is bound for the U.S. Senate. In a special run-off primary last week, husky, sandy-haired Governor Burnet Rhett Maybank won the Democratic nomination which in South Carolina is equivalent to election.

Governor Maybank is a high-born gentleman. Among his planter ancestors were five Governors of South Carolina. Like all of Charleston's quality, he lives in the faded district between Broad Street and the Battery. But Burnet Maybank Street is no ghostly revenant; he is is a hustling politician who knows what his people want-- and a good friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who can give it to them.

Robust, 6 ft. 1 in., Burnet Maybank played football at the College of Charleston then joined his uncle in the cotton-export business. Ten years ago he ran for mayor of Charleston as a businessman's candidate, carried every ward in the city. Maybank put Charleston back on its feet financially. But his political career really in in 1935, when as chairman of South Carolina's Public Service Authority he sponsored a PWA power project on the big, clay-red, ambling Santee River, which empties into the sea some 45 miles northeast of Charleston.

Man on a Dam. Two years ago a small army of workmen moved in. They built a dam across the Santee. From the Santee they dug a canal, built another dam, a lock and a powerhouse, diverting some of he Santee's impounded waters into the Caller Cooper River, which empties into the sea at Charleston. (The Cooper, as every Charleston schoolboy knows, "joins the Ashley River at Charleston to form the Atlantic Ocean.")

South Carolina's little TVA was originally planned to cost $37,500,000. It has since expanded into a $57,000,000 project. When it goes into operation around Dec. 1 the Santee-Cooper development will provide public power as far north as Raleigh, as far south as Jacksonville. It will control flood waters in the sleepy swamps along the Santee that once were rich rice plantations, are now desolate hunting and fishing preserves.

Meanwhile, in six years, Charleston's Maybank has generated enough power from Santee-Cooper to bring his ship into Washington.

In the first primary campaign, which ended three weeks ago, all three candidates were Roosevelt men. Maybank's opponents were both natives of the plebeian "upcountry" which had ruled South Carolina since 1890. Former Governor Johnston, born in a sharecropper's cabin, once worked as a lint-head in the textile mills. Representative Joseph R. Bryson was once a millhand too. Burnet Maybank called at the White House. When he left, he was authorized to announce that South Carolina would get two more fat power developments: a $28,000,000 project on the Savannah River, southwest of Charleston, another at Lylesford, northwest of Columbia. A week before the primary, Burnet Maybank called on the President again, came out with an announcement that Charleston's Navy Yard and harbor were to be improved.

All this largesse, transmuted into votes, did not quite win the nomination for Governor Maybank--a run-off was required, between Maybank and Johnston. But Maybank's 48% of the total vote was so close to a majority that last week's verdict was a foregone conclusion. To make it doubly sure, Roosevelt's Maybank came up with a $1,056,000 PWA grant for Charleston.

Like most Charlestonians, Burnet Maybank speaks with a peculiar, coastal twang which sometimes makes it hard for inland voters to understand him. But when they see engineers tramping through the swamps and gangs of laborers digging in the mud, his constituents know exactly what Burnet Maybank is talking about.

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