Nation: MISSISSIPPI’S BARNETT: Now He’s a Hero

TO the drab little schoolhouse in Standing Pine, Miss., one day long ago, came a glamorous guest. In fact, he was merely the county school superintendent. But to a ten-year-old farm boy at the school he seemed a grand personage, and the talk he delivered to the pupils seemed a splendid display of eloquence. The boy, Ross Robert Barnett by name, decided that what he wanted to be in life was a “public official.” Today, at 64, he is Governor of Mississippi.

Democrat Barnett is fond of pointing to his childhood poverty. “We were poor, poor,” he says. “I wasn’t raised in a hothouse.” The youngest of ten children, he paid his way through Mississippi College and the University of Mississippi law school by working as a barber and a janitor. But once he got his law degree, he left poverty behind. Specializing in damage suits, he proved to be a skillful picker and swayer of juries, became the state’s top lawyer in his field, with an income estimated at $100,000 a year.

As an affluent lawyer, Barnett clung to his boyhood ambition to achieve public office. In 1951, without bothering to serve a political apprenticeship, he plunged in as a candidate in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. He lost, tried and lost again in 1955, finally won in 1959. The secret of his success: as the most outspoken racist among all Mississippi’s segregationist politicians, Barnett won the support of the state’s powerful white Citizens’ Councils. Most Mississippi politicians refer to Negroes as “niggras” in public speeches; Barnett unfailingly called them “niggers,” drew cheers, chuckles —and votes—from rural audiences. In his inaugural speech he declared that public education in the state “must be kept segregated at all costs.” That was one political promise he really meant to live up to.

Once he became a “public official,” Barnett seemed to have no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his post. He put in impressively long hours. But nothing very impressive resulted. He spent much of his time stalling job seekers: “No, not yet, but I’ll have something for you. You needn’t to worry.” Barnett had showered job promises lavishly while running for Governor, and as soon as he took office he was deluged with hectoring visits and urgent phone calls from people who thought they had been pledged places in his administration. “This is nothing,” Barnett said recently, referring to the queue of job claimants outside his office. “At one time we had a line 40 yards long.”

In efforts to create more state jobs that he could fill, Barnett got into wounding fights with the state legislature by grabbing for control of autonomous state agencies. He pushed through a law reorganizing the Game and Fish Commission so as to open up some new jobs. He vetoed a widely supported prison-reform bill that would have removed some posts from his control.

Barnett’s unkept promises, power grabs and appointments of conspicuously unqualified people to state offices alienated a lot of Mississippians who had voted for him. Even the backcountry folks, who found his mixture of piety and racism highly appealing, were soured by revelations that Barnett and his wife had spent $312,000 of the taxpayers’ money to renovate the gubernatorial mansion, adding such splendidly lavish adornments as gold-plated handles on the bathtub faucets. Mississippians found this outburst of luxury all the more distasteful because until then Barnett had seemed to be a man of somewhat austere inclinations. A deacon and Sunday-school teacher at Jackson’s First Baptist Church, he once vetoed a bill to raise the legal limit on the alcoholic content of wine, said the stuff was “devil’s brew.”

So unpopular did Barnett become that students two years ago booed him resoundingly at a University of Mississippi football game. A few weeks ago, before a U.S. district court ordered the university to admit James H. Meredith, Barnett’s political future seemed bleak. But his defiance of the Federal Government in blocking registration of Meredith brought a dizzying turnabout in Barnett’s prospects. He cannot legally succeed himself as Governor, but if his present popularity with the voters of his state lasts until 1964, he can have almost any other public office the grateful citizens of Mississippi can bestow. He is generally suspected of having his eyes on the U.S. Senate seat held for the last 15 years by John Stennis, who is up for re-election in 1964. “He’s riding high now,” says an Oxford restaurant owner. “I’ve never seen the people so united as they are now.” Says a Jackson construction worker: “I’ll vote for him for the rest of my life, and his son and grandson after him.”

“It’s funny,” says a bemused student at Ole Miss. “Last year in English class we had to write a satirical theme. Practically everyone in the class wrote about Governor Barnett. Now he’s a hero.”