Southern Comfort for Democrats

Rarely, in a time of me-too politics and an overcrowded middle of the road, are voters in any state offered a clear-cut choice between opposite paths. In Tennessee's Democratic primary last week, the voters had all the choice anyone could want. Battling for a third Senate term, Estes Kefauver stood squarely by his liberal record. His opponent, Circuit Judge Andrew Taylor, was outspokenly critical of everything that Kefauver was for --foreign aid, freer trade, federal welfare programs and, above all, civil rights laws.

Admission of Guilt. With his ear-to-ear grin and coonskin cap routine, Estes Kefauver has often been dismissed by pundits as an excessively folksy light weight. But in his battle against "Tip" Taylor, the Keef showed bracing political courage. When Taylor called him a traitor to the South for voting for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, Kefauver defended the bills on the steps of every courthouse where he could draw a crowd. "I shall continue to favor the expansion of the right to vote," he said in Memphis, Tennessee's most strongly segregationist city, "until every qualified citizen, regardless of race, creed or color, is able to exercise his franchise." When his enemies circulated a photograph of him shaking hands with a Negro, he cheerfully said: "I plead guilty to shaking hands with Negroes."

Even many of Kefauver's supporters expected Taylor to beat him, in the stirred-up atmosphere of sit-ins and Negro demands for more equality. Only a few days before the primary, the Scripps-Howard Memphis Commercial Appeal, pro-Taylor, made a survey, predicted Taylor would win. The prediction was wildly wrong: on primary day, Kefauver buried Taylor in a 2-to-1 landslide.

Denial of Backwardness. As expected, Negroes turned out in force for Kefauver. For the first time since Reconstruction, large numbers of Negroes lined up to vote in Fayette County (TIME, Aug. 8). "All I know is," said one rural Negro, looking for the place to deposit his ballot, "I want Mr. Kefauver's box." Kefauver did not need Negro support to win. He got an overwhelming majority of white votes, collecting them from prosperous suburbs of Memphis and Nashville, as well as from poor rural hamlets and the east Tennessee hills, where Republicans crossed over to vote for him. Editorialized the Nashville Tennessean: "Once again, Tennesseans have proved that the majority accepts the moderate approach to vexing racial problems which confront not only the South, but the nation."

Democrats in Washington happily interpreted Kefauver's lopsided victory as a sign that the strong Democratic platform plank on civil rights was not going to hurt them seriously, at least in the middle states. Added a pleased and triumphant Estes Kefauver: "It is clear that the detractors of the South, who tried to say we are a backward people, have been proven wrong."

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