POLITICS: Crumbled Foundation

faubus (faw-bus), v.i.; FAUBUSED, FAUBUSING. 1. To commit an error of enormous magnitude through malice and ignorance. 2. To make a serious error, to commit a fault through stupidity or mental confusion. Syn. Blunder, err, bollix.

Assessing the political aftermath of Little Rock, Democrats last week saw small humor in Chicago Daily News Columnist Jack Mabley’s new word definition. Federal bayonets in Arkansas might have cut away from the Republicans those Eisenhower Democrats who last year helped Ike win Texas, Louisiana, Florida and Tennessee—and might have skewered hopes of a Republican Southern wing. But the Democratic Party was in far worse shape. The Little Rock crisis crumbled the shaky foundation of compromise which had underlain Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 campaign and the Democratic record in the first session of the 85th Congress. Too late, Democrats last week were beginning to suspect that by attempting to be all things to all factions in the field of civil rights they had faubused badly.

Third Party? In the South, furious Democrats first lashed at Ike, then almost as quickly at their Northern cousins. One of the loudest spokesmen was South Carolina’s jaded Jimmy Byrnes. Attorney General Brownell had pushed Ike into action, Byrnes said, because Brownell was frightened by “the high command of the national Democratic Party” and its attacks on the President’s do-nothing attitude. In the high command he identified National Chairman Paul Butler, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, New York’s Governor Averell Harriman and Michigan’s Governor G. Mennen Williams. “Goaded” by these Democrats, he said, “the President and Mr. Brownell had to take drastic action in order to hold the voters of these minority groups.” Almost to a man, Deep South Democrats leaped to get out of any attitude of compromise.

From the North, in response to these moans among the magnolias, came rapid assurance that Liberal Democrats no longer cared a Yankee damn about Southern salvation. National Chairman Butler lightly dismissed threats of a Southern bolt; said he: “The balance of power is moving towards the Pacific.” Said Illinois Liberal Paul Douglas of a third party: “I would welcome it. It would mean getting the Dixiecrats out of our party.”

Down the Drain? Caught between camps were Southern moderates and erstwhile Northern liberals, e.g., Massachusetts’ John F. Kennedy, Idaho’s boyish Frank Church, Washington’s Henry M. (“Scoop”) Jackson, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver, who had voted in Congress for a watered-down civil rights bill on which both North and South could agree. Chief architect and proud father of the compromise was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who last week drew the venom of Fair Dealing Columnist Tom Stokes: “It was his aim to get a bill weak enough to keep his Southern colleagues from staging one of those filibusters that show the most nauseating side of the Dixie element that controls the Democratic Party in Congress … a fraud.” Eisenhower Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell, speaking to a Maine audience last week, was quick to take the same line: “Here was a strange drama in which those persons and organizations who normally advocate civil rights deserted those millio young Senator Church suddenly discovered that, at the insistence of Minnesota Negroes, his invitation to address a Young Democrat/Farmer/Labor meeting in Minneapolis was suddenly canceled.

Said one knowing New York Harriman Democrat gloomily: “Until Little Rock we figured we were going to make great gains in ’58. The way things look, we may be down the drain for the next 15 years, and Nixon is the great civil rights champion. If Ike and the Southern governors compromise, the Democratic Party is compromised but not lost. If they don’t, we’re not just split—we’re amputated.”

Things probably looked worse in civil rights-conscious New York than they did in the rest of the North. But one thing was sure: the Democratic Party had been thoroughly faubused.