The Line Squall

The first warning thunderclap came on the second night of the convention.

For an hour that evening the sodden delegates had sat through a memorial service to Franklin D. Roosevelt, only half aware of the ceremony's bad taste, bored by its dreariness. "We are here to honor the honored dead," rasped New York's Mayor O'Dwyer. "Won't you please act accordingly?" But neither Bill O'Dwyer's pleas, nor prayers, nor singing, nor oratory dented the delegates' torpor. The rumble of conversation continued to fill the air, only subsiding a little when Congresswoman Mary Norton presented the credentials committee's report.

The fluttering of thousands of cardboard fans gave the effect of a wheatfield in a freakish wind, across which photographers' bulbs flashed like heat lightning (see PRESS). Then a grim-faced Negro loomed on the platform.

He was announced as George L. Vaughn, a delegate from St. Louis and a member of the credentials committee; he wanted to submit a minority report. The majority had agreed to seat the Mississippi delegation. But the Mississippi delegation, Vaughn charged, intended to walk out if Harry Truman's civil rights program was incorporated into the platform and if Harry Truman was nominated. He recommended, therefore, that the Mississippi delegation "not be seated." He clenched his fist, yelling: "Three million Negroes have left the South since the outbreak of World War II to escape this thing. I ask the convention to give consideration . . ."

The squall broke.

It broke in a vast, excited, ugly roar. Temporary Chairman Alben Barkley pounded his gavel. He ordered a voice vote on Vaughn's report. Although it had been agreed in committee not to have a roll call, Northern delegates shouted into their floor microphones, demanding one. But they could not be heard. The floor mikes were dead. Chairman Barkley asked for ayes and nays. Deadpan, he listened to the response and ruled that the majority report had carried. The Mississippi delegation was accredited.

But the disturbance was not squelched. Directly under the rostrum, Chicago Boss Jake Arvey and Adlai Stevenson, candidate for governor of Illinois, continued to yell at the chair. California's hulking Chairman Jack Shelley, an ex-University of San Francisco football tackle, plunged up the aisle to the platform, roaring for recognition. They all wanted it to be announced that their delegations had voted against Mississippi. On the platform Shelley barked into the ear of Sergeant at Arms Leslie Biffle: "You'd better not cut the mikes on us tomorrow when we start talking on civil rights."

Wings of the Storm. Tomorrow was bound to be stormier. The platform still had to be voted on. The party's worried leaders had done their best to produce something which, if it failed to please everyone, at least would not rile anyone very much. They had kept in touch with Harry Truman, whose cautious advice had been to keep the specific points of his so-called "civil rights" program out of the platform.

As everyone knew, "civil rights" meant, largely, "Negro rights." The platform makers, headed by Pennsylvania's Senator Francis Myers, had hit, upon what they thought was the perfect compromise. They parroted the 1944 platform, affirmed the right of racial minorities "to live ... to work ... to vote." As for federal guarantee of those rights, they called upon Congress "to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers."

It was a magnificent weasel. The Northern bloc, which believed that Congress' power to legislate "human rights" is limitless, could accept it--if it wanted to. So could Southern politicians who firmly believe that certain Negro rights are matters which the Constitution leaves to the states.

But the platform makers had overlooked the determination of the Northerners, whose volatile Americans for Democratic Action had drafted a minority report. A.D.A.'s spokesman was Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr., 37, mayor of Minneapolis, who has a fast and facile tongue, political courage, and is opposing Joe Ball for Senator in November. The A.D.A. amendment commended Harry Truman for "his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights," and in somewhat obscure words urged Congress, in effect, to repeal the poll tax, set up FEPC, make lynching a federal offense, and end segregation in the armed services.

"Out of the Shadow." In the unrelenting heat the next day the delegates gathered. They settled soggily into their chairs while once again the interminable speeches rolled out of the loudspeakers. Senator Myers droned out the compromise platform.

The instant he had finished, Southern leaders were on their feet. Texas' ex-Governor Dan Moody offered the South's minority report defining the sovereignty of the states. Two other Southerners, Mississippi's Walter Sillers and Cecil Sims of Tennessee, followed with similar amendments. Cried Sillers: "Give us the right to govern our own fundamental affairs!" Then ex-Congressman Andrew J. Biemiller, of Wisconsin, a onetime Socialist who helped manage Norman Thomas' campaign in 1932, a colleague of Humphrey on the platform committee, presented the Northern minority report on civil rights.

The debate was on. The drawling voices of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama laid the anxieties and defiance of the South before the convention of their party. The vernaculars of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Minnesota shouted the North's challenge.

"I say the time has come to walk out of the shadow of states' rights and into the sunlight of human rights," yelled Hubert Humphrey Jr.

Pants & Stomach. Yellow skullcaps with propellers on top began appearing on the heads of New York and Pennsylvania delegates. A Powers model, carrying a Truman-for-President sign, edged on to the floor in front of the speakers' stand, where she was ogled and photographed. But the delegates listened to the speeches. The hall had taken on a look of purpose.

Texas' Congressman Sam Rayburn, who had taken over from Barkley as permanent chairman, called for a roll-call vote on Governor Moody's states' rights motion. It was smashed by an overwhelming 925 to 309. The two other Southern amendments were shouted down.

The North was not through yet. The Humphrey-Biemiller civil rights amendment was put to a roll call. The big Northern and Western states held solid and the report carried by 69 votes. The South had been kicked in the pants, turned around and kicked in the stomach. The Humphrey and Biemiller crowd roared in triumph.

Frantically but vainly, Alabama tried to get the floor to make a statement. The session quickly recessed. But the showdown could not be postponed long. That night, when the delegates convened again, Alabama's Chairman Handy Ellis won recognition at last. The eleven electors of the sovereign state of Alabama, he shouted, had been chosen "never to cast their vote for a Republican, never to cast their vote for Harry Truman, and never to cast their electoral vote for any candidate with a civil rights program such as adopted by this convention . . . We cannot participate further in this convention."

Thirteen members of the Alabama delegation, led by Handy Ellis, walked out. Mississippi followed, waving the battle flag of the Confederacy. They all plodded, stony-faced, through the crowd, tripped over Truman signs stacked in the aisles, walked out the doors and into a pelting rainstorm. As they emerged, a thunderclap split the air.

The Sunshine. The rest of the convention dragged out until 2:30 a.m. Alabama's Senator Lister Hill, a party regular, herded a handful of alternates into his state's empty seats. Mississippi had gone for good. The rest of the South remained to fight a futile fight, to rally around Georgia's protest candidate for President, Senator Richard Russell.

But the Russell drive was no more than a gesture. Harry Truman was nominated on the first ballot. The vote: Truman 947 1/2; Russell 263; Paul V. McNutt 1/2. By loud acclamation, faithful Alben Barkley was nominated for the vice-presidency.

The storm receded--a bit. The only clouds were the glowering Southern delegates, who sat in sullen wrath through the loud and sweaty demonstrations. The sun came out when Harry Truman, smiling broadly, appeared to accept the nomination and make a fighting speech--and the squall moved on to Birmingham.

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