Split Strategy

The racial-equality issue, hotter by the week, may hurt the Democratic Party hard in the 1956 Presidential campaign. Nearly all of the noisiest segregationists and desegregationists are Democrats. Political analysts believe that nearly 80% of Northern Negroes vote Democratic; on this vote rests the party's hope of victory in such important states as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois. But the national party leans even more heavily on the South. Nearly half of the Democratic Senators and Representatives are from the South, and enjoy lush seniority.

Adlai Stevenson and other "moderate" Democratic leaders have tried, understandably, to ignore the growing rift between the pro-Negro and anti-Negro wings of the party. Signs now appear that this will be more and more difficult. Adlai Stevenson finds himself cast as a villain by the liberal magazine Frontier, "the Voice of the New West." Cried Frontier last month: "As long as small colored boys can be murdered in Mississippi without protection of the law, Stevenson's moderate approach to reform will strike most Negroes as distressingly inadequate. And Stevenson's frequent trips into the South, along with those of his lieutenants, Butler and Mitchell, have given rise to speculation among Negroes that he has made a deal on civil rights in return for support."

As plain as the fact of the Democratic split on civil rights is the fact that the Republicans will make the split a campaign issue. For three years, the Eisenhower Administration has concentrated on making its civil-rights record: Government lawyers argued for school desegregation ; segregation is being wiped out in the District of Columbia; long strides have been made toward ending discrimination by Government contractors, in the armed services and in veterans' hospitals.

Two brief--and generally unnoticed--paragraphs in the President's 1956 State of the Union message opened the campaign. One called upon Congress to authorize a bipartisan fact-finding commission on civil rights. The other promised future recommendations for legislation "to assure our citizens equality in justice, in opportunity, and-in civil rights."

Late this month Attorney General Brownell will send to the Congress specific proposals for the fact-finding commission and other civil-rights legislation, e.g., a stronger right-to-vote law. A group of Congressmen led by Pennsylvania Republican Hugh Scott and New York Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, a Negro, has been mapping plans for bringing the Administration program to a floor vote.

On the Senate side, the Republicans must depend heavily on Northern Democratic help to force civil-rights legislation through the Judiciary Committee. They are likely to get that help. Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, for one, says: "The Democratic Party is spelling its long-term doom unless it does something. Our party ought to be the champion of equal rights-it's morally right and it's politically right. If this Administration is sincere, they'll get my full support."

If these proposals are debated in Congress this year. Northern and Southern Democrats may be split as no U.S. party has been in recent years.

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