Present Laughter

Most of the white spectators jamming the small federal courtroom in Jackson, Miss, had a real good time laughing and winking. Sometimes they shouted: "Tell 'em, Bilbo!" "The Man" himself was in high humor--despite the fact that he faced possible loss of his Senate seat.

Even the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee, which conducted the four-day hearing, had trouble keeping an inquisitorial face. Somehow, way down there in Mississippi, the investigation of ailing, aging Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo on charges of having coerced and intimidated Mississippi's Negroes not to vote seemed kind of silly.

An early witness, a Negro veteran, said that white men had whipped him with a piece of cable after he had tried to register for Mississippi's white primary and had then given him a ride back to town. (This brought guffaws from the spectators.) Then a shoe repairman and a taxi driver admitted that they had each received $25 for warning fellow Negroes away from the polls. A white Catholic priest, who had asked polling officials why his parishioners were not allowed to vote, had received the answer: "No Negroes are going to vote in Pass Christian [Miss.] unless they paint their faces white."

"The Best Way. .. ." Throughout the whole parade of 96 witnesses--most of them telling a tale of violence, jailing, bribery or "friendly advice" from white folks--only one piece of evidence connected the confident Bilbo with the fact that only 1,500 of Mississippi's 500,000 eligible Negroes had voted in July. That was one phrase, from a Bilbo campaign address in June: "The best way to keep a nigger away from a white primary in Mississippi is to see him the night before."

When the hearing was over, Bilbo, his five lawyers, the committee, and particularly Louisiana's Democratic Senator Allen Ellender, committee chairman and Bilbo buddy, seemed well satisfied. The committee returned to Washington to write a report. Few expected that it would recommend unseating the Senator.

But The Man had two more hurdles to jump. The Senate War Investigating Committee said that it had well-documented evidence that Bilbo had accepted $100,000 in goods & services from Mississippi war contractors--and it wanted to find out about it. Senator Robert Taft had announced that the new Senate would inquire into Bilbo's qualifications. The Man might have a harder time laughing himself out of these probes.

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In Chicago, Colonel Robert R. McCormick's arch-Republican Tribune suggested a scheme to penalize states which will not let all their citizens vote:

"The second section of the 14th Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution] says, in effect, that any state which denies Negroes the right to vote shall have its representation in Congress reduced in proportion to the number suffering discrimination. [Thus if] the right of Mississippi Negroes to vote was infringed, Mississippi's representation in the House should be cut from seven to perhaps four or five. . . ."

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