SOUTH CAROLINA: Beneath the Magnolias

All the members of the U.S. Senate refer to one another as gentlemen. But, what with the industrial revolution, the westering course of empire and the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, the Senate has seen the virtual extinction of gentlemen in the 19th-century sense of the word. Most of the Senate’s gentlemen (and there are some distinguished ones) were made, not born. One of the last Senators to be born an esquire, Burnet Rhett Maybank, 55, died last week of a heart attack.

Although he was a New Dealer, Maybank’s eyes were lightly cysted with the Southern—and more precisely, the South Carolina—point of view, e.g., he fought for public housing for years, then early this year tried to kill the whole program when he realized that Negroes might be admitted to developments where whites would live. Insofar as he was a liberal-and he was—he had little or nothing in common with such liberals as Hubert Humphrey or Herbert Lehman. Insofar as he was a conservative—and he was—he had little or nothing in common with such conservatives as Joe Grundy or John Bricker.

Tradition Upheld. Burnet Maybank could be understood only as a Southern aristocrat. Few of the breed survived politically the triple ordeals of Civil War, Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction revolt of the South’s small farmers and small townsmen—those variously described as the wool-hats, the plain people, the Snopeses; the hillbillies or the pine hill men. Unlike them, Maybank trusted government because he was born to it. Unlike them, he distrusted big government because he wanted nothing from it for himself or his group—other than participation in responsibility and power.

For longer than many members of Britain’s House of Lords can trace gentle ancestry, Maybank’s forebears upheld in tidewater South Carolina the aristocratic tradition, serving the Crown, the Continental Congress, the Union, the Confederacy and, above all, South Carolina—as a colony, as a state and as an idea. Five of his ancestors were colonial or state governors, and Maybank himself was elected governor in 1938.

There have been Maybanks in South Carolina since 1670. Both Burnet and Rhett are maternal family names famous in ante-bellum days. One ancestor, William Rhett, served as Vice Admiral of the colony, cleared the Carolina coast of pirates and hanged Gentleman Freebooter Stede Bonnet at Charleston in 1719. Another ancestor was the Landgrave Thomas Smith, who took his title from the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which Philosopher John Locke wrote when he was secretary to the lords proprietors. Still another ancestor was fiery U.S. Senator R. Barnwell Rhett, “the father of secession,” who refused, out of respect for his religion and his marksmanship, to fight duels; no one suspected Barnwell Rhett of cowardice when he said he was averse to killing a fellow man.

Tradition Shattered. Most of Burnet Maybank’s ancestors were low-country planters. Senator Maybank’s father was a Charleston physician, and Maybank grew up in a stately colonial house in Charleston. After World War I, Maybank became a cotton exporter, then a Charleston alderman and mayor. He shattered the modern tradition that low-country aristocrats could not win the votes of up-country farmers; in 27 years of politics he never lost an election, was elected to the Senate three times, and was unopposed for reelection this year.

Maybank was not the last of the Southern aristocrats in the Senate. Virginia’s Harry Byrd is still very much alive. And as Burnet Rhett Maybank was buried in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery last week, South Carolinians could remember how deep the stream of family runs in the low country. At the graveside was Burnet Rhett Maybank Jr., 30, a rising young member of the state legislature.

Senator Maybank’s death threw South Carolina Democrats into turmoil. Governor James Byrnes wanted a special primary called. But old (66) State Senator Edgar A. Brown, the most powerful man in party circles—and a pine hill man—had other ideas. On the way to Magnolia Cemetery Brown’s Cadillac turned out of the funeral cortege, and he hurried to Columbia, where, at an emergency meeting that day, the state Democratic executive committee, on Brown’s insistence, decided against the primary plan. Then it handed the party’s nomination to Brown.

Ordinarily, the nomination Brown received last week would mean election in one-party South Carolina. But there were hints that Byrnes, who fought Brown in 1952 by coming out for President Eisenhower while Brown stayed loyal to the Democratic ticket, was spoiling for a rematch. Byrnes may take the issue to the voters, ask them to elect former Dixiecrat J. Strom Thurmond as a write-in candidate.

In short, beneath the magnolias this week were things undreamed of in John Locke’s philosophy, unprojected in Landgrave Smith’s gentility. Much had come, as well as gone, with the wind.