The Still-Solid South

The South will string along with the New Deal. That was the news last week from the Alabama and Florida primaries. The victorious New Dealers had bad scares. They had to fight fiercely and draw heavily on their established personal strength. They won by narrower margins than they enjoyed six years ago. But political observers, pondering the returns, agreed that.

P: The much-ballyhooed Southern revolt against term IV was a false alarm.

P: The New Deal political machine still rolls smoothly.

P: The Roosevelt name still pulls at the polls.

P: The Southern race issue, if clumsily used, may backfire.

In Florida, courtly Claude Pepper, who has industriously worked his way up from New Deal errand boy to New Deal advance man, fought four rivals for his seat in the U.S. Senate. Against Pepper the opposition threw all the New Deal symbols which Southerners like least: bureaucracy, OPA bungling, labor and Negro "coddling." ("Drastically below-the-belt mud-slinging!" cried Pepper.)

Wealthy Administration-haters in Palm Beach spent an impressive amount of time & money reminding Florida voters that Senator Pepper is a typical, nationally known personification of New Dealism. New Dealer Pepper retorted by snuggling even closer to the President, charging his enemies with "hoping that by driving a dagger through my heart, it might reach a little ways into President Roosevelt." The chief Pepper rival, Jacksonville's Judge J. Ollie Edmunds, said boldly: "I am willing to stand up and be counted as a Southern Democrat." When he and others had stood up and been counted, New Dealer Pepper had kept himself in the Senate by running up a 5,000 majority over four opponents.*

In Alabama, drawling Lister Hill, who coon-shouted the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt for Term III at Chicago, fought for his U.S. Senate seat against well-to-do, sad-faced James Simpson, 54, banker, corporation lawyer, respected state legislator. With "white supremacy" as a shrill battle cry, Birmingham's moneyed, mill-owning, New Deal-hating "Big Mules" got behind Candidate Simpson and pushed hard. So did the Negro-baiting Alabama Sun and Alabama Magazine, whose specialty is pictures showing Eleanor Roosevelt being civil to Negroes. Simpson campaigners vigorously lambasted Lister Hill as a traitor to Southern ideals, a tool of Washington's "radical Yankee" Administration, a "rubber stamp" for "C.I.O. bosses," a typical New Dealer. New Dealer Hill won by 25,000 votes.

Another Administration victory was recorded in Alabama's Fifth Congressional District when labor-baiting Representative Joe Starnes, the Dies Committeeman who once proposed to investigate Playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) as a Communist,* was defeated by State Legislator Albert Rains. The C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee, which had been quietly undermining Starnes in war-booming Gadsden (pop. 36,975) indulged in no loud boasting. Its prime target is lumbering Martin Dies himself, who must fight for his job in Texas' Second District next July.

In other primaries last week:

P: Maryland Democrats nominated Millard E. Tydings, who survived an attempted New Deal purge in 1938, for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate. For the Senator's 1944 campaign purposes, the purge was carefully forgotten. Indeed, when opponents charged him with being anti-Roosevelt, Tydings retorted: "The President calls me often. I go down to the White House to see him. ... He has trusted me with the most delicate things."

P: In South Dakota, Republicans pondered charges that able, apple-cheeked Senator Chan Gurney was "too New Dealish" in foreign policy, renominated him anyway.

P: In Indiana, four candidates for Congress now serving in the armed services got beaten in spite of their uniforms.

* In 1938 Claude Pepper also escaped a runoff by polling a majority over four opponents. But six years ago Florida voters gave the Senator a whopping 69,000 majority.

* Aside from being 400 years too late, Congressman Starnes was on the right track. Marlowe was regarded as subversive by contemporaries. Francis Kett, who was burned for heresy, was one of his associates.

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