The South: From Toehold to Foothold

Republicans, who had previously hacked out only a tenuous toehold in the South, last week went a long way toward making it a firm foothold. In addition to returning its first popularly elected U.S. Senator in Tennessee, the G.O.P. provided Governors in Arkansas and Florida for the first time since Reconstruction and may possibly claim a gubernatorial victory in Georgia as well. In 13 Southern and border states, the G.O.P. made a record modern-day gain of nine congressional seats. This year, moreover, many of the South’s leading Republican candidates were able to discard the Goldwater umbrella and run as bona-fide moderates.

The still-dominant Democrats also got a sorely needed transfusion. While such segregationist stalwarts as Arkansas’ John McClellan, Georgia’s Richard Russell, Louisiana’s Allen Ellender and Mississippi’s James Eastland were returned to the Senate with little or no opposition, a number of more progressive Democrats also won statewide office—notably Buford Ellington, elected Governor of Tennessee, and South Carolina’s Governor Robert E. McNair, who as Lieutenant Governor acceded to the top job last year when Governor Donald Russell resigned. In Virginia, the big winner was William Spong, the moderate Democrat who ousted Senator A. Willis Robertson in the primary.

The Georgeen Gambit. To be sure, old-fashioned racism still flourished in many contests; yet many diehard segregationists covertly courted the new Negro vote. The Negro turnout was disappointing in several states, often because of the sorry spectacle of segregationist running against segregationist.

There were significant exceptions. In Texas, three Negroes became the first members of their race in 71 years to win election to the state legislature; Georgia re-elected all ten of its Negro legislators. In Alabama’s Lowndes County, black voters—who outnumber whites 55% to 45%—were less than enthusiastic about Stokely Carmichael’s aggressive Black Panther ticket, which went down to defeat. Elsewhere in the state, several Negroes were elected, notably Macon County’s Lucius Amerson, 32, a Korean War paratrooper and former postal clerk who became the South’s only Negro sheriff. In Dallas County, Selma’s public-safety director, Wilson Baker, who acted with memorable restraint during last year’s voting-rights demonstrations, was elected sheriff over Incumbent Jim Clark, whose brutal treatment of Negroes shocked the nation.

The top race in Alabama, of course, was no contest at all. Democratic Governor George Wallace, unable to succeed himself, aimed to ride Wife Lur-leen’s skirttails all the way to the White House. Unless the Democrats or Republicans put up a sufficiently conservative presidential candidate in 1968, George told a nationwide television audience, “you can look for us to be in your state all the way from Maine to California.” Ironically, the Wallace presence atop the party ticket helped sweep Democratic Senator John J. Sparkman, a liberal by Alabama standards and no admirer of the Georgeen gambit, to an unexpectedly easy win over Republican John Grenier, 36, who masterminded Goldwater’s Southern sweep in 1964.

“Strong View.” In Georgia’s hopelessly muddled gubernatorial race, neither G.O.P. Congressman Howard (“Bo”) Callaway, 39, nor Democrat Lester Maddox, 50, polled the majority (Callaway had 47.1% of the vote, Maddox 46.8%) required by the state constitution. The stalemate came about because former Governor Ellis Arnall, upset by Maddox in a Democratic primary runoff, received 58,000 votes in a write-in fashioned by moderates unhappy over the segregationist stances of both major-party candidates. As a result, Georgia faced a governmental hiatus unrivaled since its 1946 crisis, which—by coincidence—also involved Arnall.*

What happens in a no-majority contest? The state constitution stipulates that Georgia’s general assembly choose the Governor; since it is overwhelmingly Democratic, it presumably would pick Maddox. At week’s end, however, responding to lawsuits filed after the election, a three-judge federal panel expressed the “strong view,” likely to be embodied in a formal ruling this week, that the election should not be decided by the assembly—because the state’s constitutional provision conflicts with a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision overthrowing the county-unit system in Georgia’s Democratic primary.

A major coup for the G.O.P. in the South was Claude Kirk’s surprising gubernatorial victory in Florida, even though many Republicans disapproved of the candidate’s tactics. Subtly appealing to the segregationist vote, the Jacksonville investment banker assailed his opponent, Miami’s Democratic Mayor Robert King High, 42, as “ultraliberal’ and came out against open-housing legislation. Kirk benefited mainly from resentment over high taxes, an issue that could come back to haunt him in view of his campaign pledge to provide $500 million in new state services without raising taxes.

Like Kirk, Oklahoma Republican Dewey F. Bartlett, 47, was a distinct underdog, but he overcame his state’s 3-to-l Democratic voter advantage to win the governorship against Democrat Preston Moore, 46. The great popularity of Governor Henry Bellmon, ineligible for a second term after becoming the first Republican to win the office in 1962, helped swing Oilman Bartlett’s victory.

Personal Slurs. In U.S. Senate races, the G.O.P. won two expected victories, easily re-electing John Sherman Cooper in Kentucky and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, plus a couple of contests that had been in doubt. In Tennessee, wiry, boyish-looking Attorney Howard Baker Jr., 40, owed his victory in the senatorial race largely to outgoing Governor Frank Clement’s overconfidence. Unlike his rival, Baker campaigned at a breakneck pace, ardently wooed Negroes and union members, and won by 100,000 votes.

Texas Republican John Tower, 41, who in 1961 became the state’s first post-Reconstruction G.O.P. Senator largely as a result of feudin’ and fussin’ among Lone Star Democrats, benefited from renewed dissension and managed to hang onto Lyndon Johnson’s old seat against Democratic Attorney General Waggoner Carr, 48. The G.O.P. also elected two Congressmen—one of them Houston Oilman George Bush, 42, son of former Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush—bringing the party’s congressional strength back to what it was before the 23-member Texas delegation went solidly Democratic in 1964.

Nowhere in the South was victory sweeter for the Republicans than in Arkansas, where Winthrop Rockefeller, 54, had to overcome both political tradition and a barrage of personal slurs by Democrat Jim Johnson, 41, a ranting segregationist who helped make the campaign one of the nation’s dirtiest. Rockefeller, who gave Democratic Governor Orval Faubus a scare in the 1964 election, loosened up his campaign style, tightened up his party’s fledgling apparatus, and let Jim Johnson undo himself. In the process, the nascent Arkansas G.O.P. elected its first Lieutenant Governor and its first U.S. Congressman in modern times.

*Who was the outgoing Governor when the death of Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge precipitated a contest for control of the statehouse between Arnall and Herman Talmadge, who had received write-in votes as “insurance” against his father’s failing health. The impasse ended after two months, when Arnall voluntarily stepped aside, and the state Supreme Court named Lieutenant Governor-elect Melvin Thompson acting chief executive.