MISSISSIPPI: He Died a Martyr

For eight months, Mississippi’s gnome-like Theodore Bilbo had been waiting for the day he would descend on Washington and reclaim his seat in the U.S. Senate. Part of the time he spent dawdling around his echoing 27-room Dream House at Poplarville, Miss. Part of his exile was spent in New Orleans “getting my mouth reamed out.” He had cancer of the mouth and he underwent a series of delicate operations.*

Despite pain and danger he did not lose the coarse ferocity which had endeared him to voters in Mississippi’s piney woods. He bragged that one operation had left him, with “no more chin than a jack-rabbit”; he said he had a pistol under his pillow for photographers. He talked nonchalantly of death, promised to “haunt the hell” out of the Republicans who had started the fight to bar him from the Senate. As summer wore on he seemed to be on the road to recovery. But a fortnight ago his wizened, 69-year-old body fell prey to another ailment. He began running a fever and developed a blood clot in the lungs. Doctors at New Orleans’ Foundation Hospital discovered that he was partially paralyzed.

Newsmen were not allowed to see him at the hospital. But he had previously been seized with an odd impulse to get something off his chest to a Negro editor named Leon Lewis. In June, he had summoned Lewis to his side. The man who had preached race hate with a venom seldom exceeded in U.S. history delivered a reluctant and rambling apology to his dark-skinned visitor:

“I am honestly against the social intermingling of Negroes and whites but I hold nothing personal against the Negroes as a race. They should be proud of their God-given heritage just as l am proud of mine. I believe Negroes should have the right [to indiscriminate use of the ballot], and in Mississippi too—when their main purpose is not to put me out of office and when they won’t try to besmirch the reputation of my state.”

This, published in Negro South, was his final say on the matter. One day last week, in the early afternoon, he died.

During 40 years in public life Theodore Bilbo had publicly admitted sins which would have shattered a dozen ordinary political careers. He had bragged of being a lecher, and of taking a bribe. He had double-crossed his political allies. When he ended his second term as governor in 1932, Mississippi had all but sunk into bankruptcy. His cries for “white supremacy” had affronted millions. But few demagogues had capitalized so skillfully on fear, prejudice and the human need for drama. The poor Mississippians whom he called “peckerwoods” elected him again & again.

In death, he received the honors due a man of talent and position. Mississippi sent a detachment of 50 national guardsmen to keep a watch as Bilbo, resplendent in the red tie and diamond stickpin which had been his campaign badge, lay in state at the Dream House. The U.S. Senate will pay for his funeral. Mississippi’s Governor Fielding Wright, Senator James 0. Eastland, five Congressmen, scores of state officials, crowded into the Juniper Grove Baptist Church (built with Bilbo’s donations) to attend the services. Five thousand humbler folk stood outside in the churchyard and listened to the services via loudspeakers.

The Rev. D. W. Nix of Bogalusa, La., who had completed his theological training at Bilbo’s expense, preached the sermon. He took his text from Second Timothy, fourth chapter, 7th and 8th verses: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

“His work,” cried the minister, “is finished, but his ideals will live on. God will see to it that the great principles of righteousness with which he was possessed, and which motivated his every desire and hope, will continue. He died a martyr to the . . . real, true principles of American Democracy.”

-Jew-baiter Bilbo had the first of his operations at New Orleans’ Jewish Touro Infirmary.