SOUTH CAROLINA: Palmetto Stump

Only a very few highly literate and exceptionally inquisitive South Carolinians know who Joseph Warren (“Tieless Joe”) Tolbert is. Those who do recognize this unkempt, unshaven oldster from Ninety Six as the Republican leader of the most overwhelmingly Democratic State in the Union, regard him with political scorn and social contempt. To most decent whites he is guilty of South Carolina’s supreme sin: trafficking with Negroes for political purposes. Nevertheless, in one day last week “Tieless Joe” Tolbert and his black-&-whites turned a trick the like of which it takes the State’s Democrats more than two months to achieve. Meeting in Columbia Boss Tolbert and his Republican committee quickly nominated his nephew, Joseph Augustis Tolbert of Greenville, to stand for the U. S. Senate this November.

South Carolina Democrats will pick their Senatorial nominee in next week’s primary—and simultaneously the next Senator from this once aristocratic State.

To most of them the only question to be settled by a prolonged campaign is whether two anti-New Deal Democrats opposing President Roosevelt’s personal friend, Senator James Francis Byrnes, can make a sufficient dent in his majority to injure the prestige of the New Deal in the country at large.

Unique is South Carolina’s method of campaigning for a primary election. In 1890 Benjamin Ryan (“Pitchfork Ben”) Tillman, out for Governor, charged that only a man of wealth could reach the people through the Press,* stumped each & every county in the State in person, won a great victory. Two years later the anti-Tillman faction sent its candidate out to dog the Governor around the State. Thus the custom developed of having all the candidates in a State-wide primary travel together, speak in the same place at the same time. This system is hard on office-seekers but easy on the voters who have to turn out only once to hear all the candidates. To enter such a Democratic primary, each & every candidate binds himself to obey the party’s rules, one of which is to follow the State-wide campaign itinerary drawn up by the State committee.

This year’s Senatorial campaign began at Lexington, across the Congaree River from Columbia, on June 9 and rolled on, a county a day, through the west central part of the State. After two weeks an adjournment was taken so that candidates could attend the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. By July 4 the tour had covered the southern “low country” counties along the coast, then skipped to the Piedmont. In mid-July the stumpsters knocked off for another week to allow voters time to harvest their tobacco crop, resumed their speech-making in the northeastern tier of counties.

The routine of the meetings in each county is the same. On the scheduled day fields and cotton mills are deserted, Fords and Chevrolets, new when AAA bounties were largest, fill the courthouse square, and sunburned countrymen and linty mill hands gather to judge the candidates at first hand. The candidates arrive separately, take separate rooms at the town hotel, generally eat at separate tables. At the appointed hour each, in rotating alphabetical order, mounts the platform with exactly 30 minutes to speak. Afterwards there is hobnobbing and handshaking with admirers outside the courthouse.

To his two touring companions this summer dapper, little Jimmy Byrnes never referred by name. In his speeches they were “a former Mayor of Charleston,” and a “retired officer of Marines.” The first was Lawyer Thomas Porcher Stoney, who is not a U. S. District Attorney because Senator Byrnes failed to get him the appointment. The Marine is Colonel William Curry Harllee, whose chief service to the service was replacing enlisted men with civilians as servants. Colonel Harllee retired a few months ago without the generalship which he expected, because Senator Byrnes failed to wangle it for him.

Rather better, however, than the average run of disappointed office seekers were Senator Byrnes’s two opponents. Candidate Stoney, born 46 years ago on Midway Plantation in Berkeley County, is a fiery stumpster, full of gags and gusto, with an impressive shock of iron-grey hair and a rafter-raising bellow. Candidate Harllee, tall, bald, gaunt and aging, was born in Florida, spent years in the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti. Because of his South Carolina ancestry, however, he fished for votes by traditionally invoking the shades of the State’s particular heroes: John C. Calhoun, Senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Vice President of the U. S.; Wade Hampton, Confederate Gen eral, (“Hampton’s Legion”), first Democratic Governor after Reconstruction, Senator; Ben Tillman, Governor, longtime Senator, rabble-rouser. A Harllee invocation: “I am a Democrat of the old-fashioned brand. … I shall be guided by the beacon lights kindled on the altars of our ancient faith . . . and kept aglow by . . . that paragon among Democrats, John C. Calhoun … and the noble Wade Hampton who will stand ennobled as long as sacrifice and service to mankind measures the standard of nobility among Christian men and Christian women.”

To his roots in South Carolina, Colonel Harllee pointed when he campaigned at Dillon: “Near Little Rock, on the banks of the Little Pee Dee, in our family cemetery, where, to use the words of my beloved kinswoman, Mrs. Hattie Dillon David, for whose father Dillon County was named, the lovely willows and the cypress cast their soft shadows and the dogwood and the plum trees brighten the spot with their wealth of blossom in springtime, rest three preceding generations of my forefathers.”

Born in Charleston 57 years ago to a poor, widowed mother, James Francis Byrnes learned shorthand, served as a court reporter in the Aiken Circuit, was elected to Congress in 1910. Ambitious, he ran for the Senate in 1924, was beaten by Coleman Livingston Blease, whose appeal to South Carolina “red necks” was then irresistible. Moving to Spartanburg to practice law, Byrnes reversed the result on Senator Blease in 1930. Opening his campaign for re-election last June he declared: “What South Carolina needs is not a good political campaign but a good rain.”

Senator Byrnes studiously ignored attacks of his opponents, stuck to the proposition “Roosevelt will be elected and so will Jimmy Byrnes.” He would not even stay to hear their speeches. At one of the early meetings Candidate Stoney demanded: “Is Senator Byrnes in the house?” Fingers pointed to Byrnes standing in a rear doorway.

“Come and sit down here. Jimmy,” roared Stoney, “I want you to hear this.” “No thank you,” the Senator shot back. “I’ll take it standing up.”

Nub of the South Carolina fight was the New Deal and the slavish support Senator Byrnes has given President Roosevelt. To charges of New Deal extravagance Senator Byrnes countered at every meeting by repeating the story of a farmer who promised himself to economize but, just as he started, his wife fell desperately ill. She could be saved only by an operation, but her husband went to her and said: “I am economizing. An operation would cost far too much. You’ll have to die. Goodby, my love, goodby.” Candidate Stoney said he had heard this sad tale so often that he felt like calling a doctor for the poor woman and paying the bill himself.

A prime campaign statistic which Senator Byrnes used to his advantage: South Carolina received $242,000,000 in relief, AAA benefit payments, etc. from the New Deal, while only $10,000,000 of Federal taxes had been collected in the State. This prompted Candidate Harllee to cry: “Who has fouled the nest of the Democratic Party? It is those who would prostitute its good name by such acts as the boasted plundering of the people’s treasury on the ‘250 million for ten million’ scale.

… O shame, where is thy blush!” When Senator Byrnes quit the campaign tour in mid-June to attend the closing of Congress and the Philadelphia convention, Candidate Stoney made much of his absence, boasted he could get could him beat back on “Little Jimmy” if he could get him back on the stump. While absent, though, the Senator did some of his most effective campaigning, got Admiral Standley, Acting Secretary of the Navy, to guarantee no reductions of personnel at Charleston’s Navy Yard, got Harry Hopkins to raise South Carolina’s relief wages $2 a week. But his visit to the Democratic Convention at Philadelphia backfired on him when he returned to the South Carolina campaign.

Two familiar items in most South Carolina campaigns are “Niggers” and “Catholics.” Senator Byrnes’s mother, was a devout Catholic, as is his first cousin, famed Washington Lawyer Frank Hogan. Though Byrnes was never an out-&-out Catholic, his early connections with that faith were used against him in 1924 when pamphlets saying, “Remember when Jimmy Byrnes was an altar boy” flooded the State. Now, to the great disgust of South Carolina’s few Catholics, the Senator is a thoroughgoing Episcopalian.

This year the “Nigger issue” has been raised against Byrnes, who once in Aiken unsuccessfully tried to get a grand jury to indict a white man for shooting a blackamoor. At the Philadelphia convention South Carolina’s Senior Senator Ellison D. Smith made headlines by walking out in protest when a Negro preacher prayed over the assembled Democrats (TIME, July 6). Senator Byrnes, busy on the Resolutions Committee, did not walk out. Back in South Carolina Candidate Stoney on his tour passed around pictures of the Negro preacher, paid tribute to “courageous Senator Smith,” declared, “Little Jimmy Byrnes is not the man we sent to Washington as a Senator, else he would have walked out too.”

Croaked Candidate Harllee, “Our State has had plenty of experience with the kind of harpies who consort with colored people to control the Government.”

*Because of South Carolina’s topnotch rate of illiteracy, Tillman realized many a voter could be reached only by the spoken word.