POLITICAL NOTES: Sure-Fire Campaign

When Mississippi’s Democratic primary campaign got under way this summer, most folks had other things on their minds. Farmers were worried about the long drought; everyone was worried about the news from Korea. Besides, none of the eight candidates for governor did much to attract attention. They campaigned on such routine Mississippi issues as prohibition and streamlining state government.

But when the runoff primary rolled around last month, things looked more promising. The drought had broken and a bumper cotton crop had been laid by; the Korean war news seemed a little more hopeful. Mississippi was ready to whoop it up, and the two runoff candidates were just the men to put on a rousing political show. The favorite was wealthy, 70-year-old Hugh Lawson White, a 263-lb. former governor (1936-40) and battle-scarred veteran of Mississippi politics. His opponent was ex-Marine Paul Burney Johnson Jr., 35, son of a former governor, who resigned as assistant U.S. district attorney to make the race.

Blow for Blow. As the campaign began, young Candidate Johnson started hammering away at the slogan that White was a “70-year-old man with 70-year-old ideas,” that the issue was “money versus the people.” White brushed aside these minor attacks, sallied forth on an issue which has always proved to be a surefire vote-getter in Mississippi: the Negro question. Wearing the traditional white linen suit which is almost a trademark with Mississippi governors, he stumped the piney groves and small-town squares, admiring the farmers’ livestock (the Southern equivalent of baby-kissing) and charging that Johnson was pro-Truman because he had been appointed assistant U.S. district attorney while the pro-Truman splinter party was dispensing patronage in Dixiecratic Mississippi. In thousands of handbills, he accused Johnson of making a deal with Negro voters. (“Was it to put colored children in the same school with your children?”)

Johnson rolled up his sleeves and began punching right back. “So long as I am governor,” he shouted, “there will never be a Negro going to school with a white child . . . I’m a States’-Righter by birth, heritage and choice . . .” He charged that White, in his final days as governor, had engineered a land-grab by deeding tax-foreclosed land to his friends at 40¢ an acre. White retaliated by claiming that Johnson supporters forced one of his sound trucks off the highway.

Toe to Toe. By election day both sides were slugging toe to toe. Cried Candidate White: “This is the dirtiest campaign in which I have ever participated.” Said Johnson: “I deplore the amount of mud that has been slung.”

But canny old Campaigner White had done his job well. Last week Mississippi voters went to the polls, by a vote of 200,000 to 191,000 elected him the Democratic candidate. In Mississippi, that means that he was elected.