MISSISSIPPI: Jobs for a Price

For the second time in its long and rambunctious history, Mississippi discovered last week that it was infested with scalawags & carpetbaggers. The new crop of chiselers were patronage peddlers, coattail riders and easy-money boys of the Truman Administration.

They were exposed when a Senate Investigations subcommittee set up shop in Jackson, Miss, to examine charges that a pro-Truman Democratic State Committee, which began dispensing the state’s federal patronage after the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, had been peddling jobs in wholesale lots. The charges turned out to be true enough. A steady parade of smalltown postmasters and rural mail carriers told how they had paid or “contributed” from $250 to $1,000 each to get their appointments. One postal employee had even “contributed” $750 to the rump committee to get transferred to another city.

Clarence E. Hood Jr., a taciturn and glum-faced lumber dealer, who headed the pro-Truman committee until he was fired in February by Democratic National Chairman Bill Boyle, denied that he knew about job selling, but he did testify that he had used Washington influence peddlers to get lumber contracts with the Government.

One of his best connections turned out to be his own attorney, Paul Dillon, a Missouri lawyer who was Harry Truman’s campaign manager when the President was elected to the Senate in 1934. Dillon once received a $10,000 fee for getting a Capone henchman paroled. Mississippi Congressman John B. Williams, on the floor of the House, angrily referred to Dillon as “a rascal, an underworld character, a fixer, an influence peddler.” Another of Hood’s Washington “contact men” is Acey Carraway, former financial director of the Democratic National Committee, to whom Hood says he still pays $500 a month for “anything he can do” to help Hood’s lumber business.