SOUTH CAROLINA: At Home on Wheels

The new blue Ford and its matching two-ton trailer cruised slowly through Cameron, S.C., past the white frame houses set amid old oaks and magnolias, past the new cotton gin walled with tight-packed bales. From the trailer, a loudspeaker intoned metallically: “Your Congressman, Hugo Sims, will speak to you in an hour from now . . . Congressman Sims brings his office to you to report, to talk over your problems.”

Within the hour, a boyish 28-year-old with cropped blondish hair and a ready grin wheeled into the vacant spot near A. O. Rickenbacker’s hardware store. He hopped out of the Ford, opened the trailer door, set the coffee pot on the butane stove in the pint-sized kitchen, spread farm literature across his “parlor” table, and rigged a microphone out front. Hugo Sims, youngest man in the U.S. House of Representatives, last week was “at home” to his constituents of Cameron (pop. 624), as he would be in every one of the 150 cities, towns and hamlets of his state’s Second District before Congress reconvened in January.

Listening Post. For a few minutes, standing with military erectness, he talked earnestly into the microphone to a small knot of farmers and townsmen: “I’m not satisfied with the farm price support bill … I know you people don’t want federal control of education and your Congressman will fight that . . .” He said nothing about his wartime exploits as a paratroop officer, when he led a patrol behind the German-line near Arnhem, returning with 32 prisoners and without a scratch. Mostly he told the people about the issues of the 81st Congress, and how to apply for a Farmers Home Administration loan, wound up offering to send a weekly news digest from Washington.

Then Hugo Sims cocked a campaigner’s ear for his own education. Stout, grey Mayor Angelo Stoudermire, a clerk in Rickenbacker’s store, talked about what Sims already knew—how the failure of the local cotton crop had hit hard. “When the small farmers get hit,” said Angelo, “it hurts the stores most. The big farmers don’t buy any more in hard times than in good.” Jesse Huggins, a spare man in old Army clothes, who had been picking pecans until Sims drove up, didn’t think much of the Fair Deal. “We call it the Raw Deal down here. It’s no deal at all,” said he. He agreed with Sims that farmers should diversify their crops, but said that “cotton is all some of them can do. Some go into truck, but truck is high risk along with high profit. It takes money to switch from cotton.”

Target In a Trailer. Hugo Sims, who is a lawyer, taught—and he learned. “I’m trying,” he explained, “to work out a liberal program a Southerner can run on and get elected.” To do it he had mortgaged his home in Orangeburg to buy the trailer, had sunk every cent into the campaign. The primaries weren’t due until next August, but Sims had no machine and knew he made a barn-sized target as the state’s only avowed liberal in Congress. A good many wise birds in South Carolina politics, who quote the old maxim “It’s not how you stand, but how you run,” were ready to wager that the voters would easily remember Hugo Sims and his blue trailer.