The Percentage

(See Cover)

On the last afternoon of the 1952 Democratic National Convention, Adlai Stevenson stepped to the microphone to sing the praises of a bulky, apple-cheeked man who stood slightly to the rear, grinning happily though his eyes were red from lack of sleep and his curly, greying hair was rumpled. Stevenson had scarcely gotten under way when careful, homespun John Jackson Sparkman, who had just been nominated for Vice President of the United States, stopped grinning, fished a cough drop out of his mouth and slipped it through a crack in the platform floor.

"There," commented an unsympathetic observer bitterly, "is a man who has every quality a Democratic candidate for Veep needs: he's from the South." This comment contained considerable truth. Sparkman was not picked because he has a popular or party following, and certainly not because he has shown qualifications to be the heir apparent to a President. He was put on the ticket to bridge the North-South split. The leaders who picked him hope that Northern liberals will accept him despite his stand against civil rights legislation, and that uncompromising Southern conservatives will not consider him a traitor. He has been straddling the gap inside the Democratic Party of the South for so long that he was a natural prospect for the wider straddle required by the national situation of the Democratic Party. Sparkman, in fact, is so resolute a compromiser that it takes a political micrometer to tell just where he stands.

Compared to most Southern Senators, he could be considered a New Dealer. But compared to his colleague Lister Hill, the senior Senator from Alabama, Sparkman is a conservative. By accepting the vice-presidential nomination he has (in theory) accepted the Democratic platform, which favors a federal civil rights program. In the past, however, he has fought such a program. Not a leading filibusterer himself, he has defended the sacred Southern right to make such filibusters. In 1948 he voted (in effect) for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, yet he later played a leading part in wresting control of Alabama from the Dixiecrats. This year he was one of the last of the Southern leaders to declare for Richard Russell--and then became a top Russell aide at Chicago.

It cannot be said that Sparkman represents the resolution of the conflict between the South and the New Deal. What he represents is a desperate, often skillful, sometimes comic effort to resolve that conflict.

Cotton & College. Personally as well as politically, Sparkman is a product of the force which once bound the South to the New Deal--the economic hunger of a have-not region. One of eleven children, Sparkman was born in 1899 near Hartselle, Ala., a small (present pop. 3,429) town in the Tennessee Valley. His father, Whitten Sparkman, sharecropped 160 acres, but much preferred dabbling in politics. While Whitten Sparkman discharged the duties of his occasional political jobs --jailer, deputy sheriff or local judge--his sons chopped cotton. Sometimes the family income dropped below $200 a year, and all of the children's clothes were the handiwork of Julia Sparkman, their gentle, Bible-reading mother.

John, whom all of his family now remember as an inveterately cheerful boy who "wouldn't let us criticize anybody," learned his ABCs at a one-room country school, later walked eight miles a day to & from Morgan County High School. In 1917 he went off to the University of Alabama with $75 borrowed against a cotton crop. When his $75 ran out, he wangled a $4.20-a-week job wheelbarrowing loads of coal into the university powerhouse, and ashes out of it. Trudging along on the same shift was Claude Pepper, later Senator from Florida and the South's most extreme New Dealer.

"Don't Watch a Parade . . ." Sparkman's financial difficulties did not prevent him from becoming a Big Man on the campus. One college classmate recalls: "John always used to tell me: 'Don't watch a parade ... get in it ... If you get in an organization ... sit in the front row and be part of everything."

One of John Sparkman's many extracurricular activities was membership in the Epworth League of Tuscaloosa's First Methodist Church. At their get-togethers, the young Methodists often played a game called "Spinnin' the Pan." When his name was shouted out one night in 1919, John Sparkman failed to catch the pan before it stopped spinning. His forfeit turned out to be a prize: to request a date of a girl he didn't know. He chose a university classmate, shy, blue-eyed little Ivo Hall, daughter of an Alabama country doctor. In 1923, when John finished law school, he and Ivo Hall were married. To support his bride, he became secretary of the college Y.M.C.A., and still has the hearty handshaking manner associated with Y.M.C.A. secretaries.

John Sparkman practiced law in Huntsville for ten years. For the first three he also taught at Huntsville College to eke out his lawyer's fees. The political itch he had developed in college stayed with him. He worked for Hugo Black's election to the Senate in 1926 and 1932, then in 1936 put in his own bid for a House seat. His campaign was so successful that a four-piece band hired by one of his opponents shifted its allegiance and played at Sparkman rallies, free.

The Protege. In January 1937, when John Sparkman came to Washington as a friendly, serious-minded freshman, the brothers Bankhead, Congressman Will and Senator John, ruled Alabama and sometimes appeared to rule the Congress of the United States as well. (A third Bankhead, Will's daughter Tallulah, was already making strenuous efforts to incorporate Broadway and Hollywood into the family domain.) Will Bankhead, who was Speaker of the House, took the fledgling Congressman from Huntsville under his wing, and was soon telling friends: "John Sparkman is the comer in the Alabama group." Sparkman remembers Will Bankhead with affection and reverence.

While Sparkman was learning his congressional ropes, New Deal handouts began to be offset in the eyes of many Southern Democrats by New Deal centralization and cavalier treatment of states' rights. Horrified by F.D.R.'s attempt to pack the Supreme Court, a number of Southern Congressmen drifted into the first loose coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. But Speaker Bankhead and his disciple stood firm.

In 1946 Sparkman succeeded to the Senate seat of the late John Bankhead.-Here his gift for compromise came into sharp relief when he voted to pass the Taft-Hartley Act and later voted to sustain Harry Truman's veto of the bill.

Inescapable Conflict. John Sparkman likes to reconcile--or at least patch up--opposing views, a taste which makes him a good politician. But in February 1948 came Harry Truman's call for compulsory FEPC, anti-lynching and anti-poll tax laws, a blow which forced the great majority of Southern New Dealers into the arms of Southern conservatives. For the first time John Sparkman found his loyalty to the Administration in inescapable conflict with his loyalty to the South and his own political skin. As unobtrusively as possible Sparkman chose the South. He tried to avoid public discussion of the presidential campaign. "I have my own race to run," said he, "and I don't want to get mixed up in anything else." But well before the 1948 Democratic National Convention assembled, the Alabama political climate had grown unbearably hot. Sparkman, who at the beginning of the year had been plumping for Harry Truman's renomination, now felt obliged to call on Truman not to run. Sparkman's own suggestion for Democratic nominee was Dwight Eisenhower, "a good man and one behind whom we can unite."

The Junior Senator. The Dixiecrat dilemma nearly tore the South apart. When the election was over, Sparkman joined with Senator Lister Hill and Governor Gordon Persons in a fight to insure that that dilemma would never again horn in on Alabama. The yeoman work was done by Lister Hill. Junior Senator Sparkman, whose rudimentary personal "machine" consisted largely of north Alabama farmers and his brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, led the fight against the Dixiecrats in the "loyalist" northern section of the state. Hill, whose personal following was tremendous, carried the ball in southern Alabama, a Dixiecrat stronghold. By January of this year the two Senators had purged the state Democratic organization of Dixiecrats.

But since 1948, no Southern Congressman has been completely comfortable in his loyalty to the Democratic Party. John Sparkman, though more loyal than most, has consistently voted against attempts to force consideration of FEPC on the Senate. In April 1950 he proclaimed: "We Southern Democratic Senators--21 of us --are banded together and pledged to use every parliamentary device possible to defeat civil rights legislation." In Washington last week, Sparkman refused to state whether he would support civil rights measures as Vice President.

But -the Administration itself knows and admires the arts of compromise. It has been highly tolerant of such Southern opposition as Sparkman's. In 1950 the State Department selected Sparkman as one of five U.S. delegates to the U.N. General Assembly. From Andrei Vishinsky and Jacob Malik he learned something a good deal more Arctic than anything in Speaker Bankhead's zephyrus philosophy. "For the first time," said Sparkman, "I found men who were not amenable to any reason or compromise."

His greatest hour at Lake Success came -when Polish Delegate Julius Katz-Suchy, in a carefully prepared oration, blasted the U.S. for its lack of a land-reform program as sweeping as that of Communist Poland. John Sparkman, son of a tenant farmer and lifelong student of U.S. farm problems, was on his feet the minute Katz-Suchy sat down. With no preparation, Sparkman delivered a brilliant speech, pulling out of his head facts & figures which completely routed the Pole.

Modest Vision. In their 16 years in the capital, John and Ivo Sparkman have built themselves a quiet, pleasant life. His wife, who dislikes housework, is on the federal payroll at about $3,000 a year as a secretary in Sparkman's office. They live in a three-bedroom, white brick house in Washington's Spring Valley, which they bought in 1948. Their only child, handsome, 28-year-old Julia Ann (who plans to campaign for her dad), lives with them at present: her husband, Navy Lieut. Commander Tazewell Shepard Jr., is awaiting orders to carrier duty.

No man for the social whirl, John Sparkman relaxes by gardening, sometimes shoots a "terrible" game of golf (low 100s). A staunch Methodist, he teaches an adult Bible class at Washing ton's Hamline Church. (In 1944, when asked to describe his idea of Heaven, Sparkman offered this modest vision: ". . . Heaven must afford an opportunity of again meeting . . . our loved ones ... I am sure that in Heaven there must be an opportunity for purposeful work, always with a glorious accomplishment rather than a failure as the result . . .")

In the Senate, Sparkman has not been a standout on the floor. He is most effective in Senate committees (Foreign Relations, Banking & Currency and Small Business). His conduct at meetings has rarely varied. He begins by reading a newspaper, then falls into what seems to be a peaceful snooze. When the contending factions have shouted themselves into a near temper, John Sparkman will open his eyes, lean forward and quietly tell the most belligerent group: "We've got to give consideration to that ..." Then, displaying knowledge of the facts which had apparently put him to sleep, Sparkman will work toward a practical, mutually acceptable solution.

"We Don't Like Bones." On paper, Compromiser Sparkman looks like a good choice in the Democratic effort to patch up a North-South compromise. In fact, the choice of Sparkman has had little effect so far on the party in the South. Dissident Southern leaders, mildly pleased by Stevenson's nomination, tend to be contemptuous of Sparkman. The basic Southern objection to him is clearly expressed by a supporter of Georgia's Herman Talmadge: "Sparkman is as bad a left-winger as the rest, except on the civil rights issue." Says Herman himself: "Sparkman was just a bone tossed to the South. We don't like bones. We'll be a little less than enthusiastic."

But John Sparkman is not a man who expects or seeks full-blown enthusiasm. Says one of his Senate colleagues: "John always looks at the percentage of gain. He's shooting not for 100%, but for 70 or 80%." In the coming election, Sparkman will be doing well if he adds 2 or 3% to the Democratic vote in the South. But that small percentage may be extremely useful. For there may be some close fights in a number of Southern states--particularly Texas, Virginia and Florida--and Sparkman's continual search for an angle here and a formula there may help to reunite a divided party.

* Sparkman had already been nominated for a sixth term in the House when Bankhead died, could not have dropped out of the congressional race without allowing a Republican to win it by default. To avoid that disaster, he ran simultaneously for House and Senate and won both elections--the first man in U.S. history to do so.

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