MISSISSIPPI: Just Two More Times

Mississippi’s Senator Theodore Gilmore (“The Man”) Bilbo, still champion of white supremacy at 68, had an important communiqué for the waiting world. He smoothed his bright red necktie, adjusted the diamond horseshoe stickpin that he bought for $92.50 at a 1916 auction. Then he announced:

“After long meditation, cogitation and rumination, I have definitely made up my mind to run for re-election [to a third term]. … I am ready to wage the most strenuous fight of my life in an effort to defeat the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the anti-poll tax bill, the anti-lynching bill and the $4 billion loan to England.”

Thereupon he threw open his campaign headquarters in Jackson’s Royal Hotel, which gained his undying gratitude by extending credit when he was down on his luck in 1932. As one of 1946’s first avowed candidates, he gladly spread his political philosophy on the record.

Universal military training? No, sir! Boys of 18 and 19 should not be taken out of school; they are “the seed corn of the Republic and the leaders of tomorrow.” Besides, “if you draft Negro boys into the army, give them three good meals a day, a good uniform and let them shoot craps and drink liquor around the barracks for a year, they won’t be worth a tinker’s damn thereafter.”

Those pickets around his Washington apartment? Humph! “When those poor scums read my new book—entitled Separation or Mongrelization, Take Your Choice—I’ll bet they’ll throw up a picket line a mile long.

“Those poor scums say they are going to picket my place every day that I sit in the Senate. I told them the other day they might as well get ready for 13 more years, because I have one more year to serve under my present term, and I intend to run for re-election two more times.”