Broom or Bilbo

Like South Carolina, Mississippi also holds a primary-as-good-as-an-election next week. Unlike South Carolina's Senator Byrnes, however, Mississippi's Senator Pat Harrison was up against the hardest fight in his long Democratic career. On the ballot Senator Harrison's opponent is onetime (1932-36) Governor Martin Sennett ("Mike") Conner; on the stump his real adversary was his Senate colleague, squat, little Theodore Gilmore ("The Man") Bilbo.

In spite of the fact that Senator Harrison got Bilbo a $6,000 job in Washington when that undersized politician was down & out of office, and in spite of favors he did Bilbo after his election to the Senate in 1934, "The Man" Bilbo renounced Mississippi's senior Senator to back Conner for Harrison's seat. Last week when President Roosevelt suddenly summoned Chairman Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee to Washington for a conference on taxes, the Mississippi campaign temporarily became a battle of governors: onetime Governor Conner and onetime Governor Bilbo v. Governor Hugh White and onetime Acting Governor Dennis Murphree, whom the New Deal gave leave of absence from the National Emergency Council to stump for New Dealer Harrison.

Striking aid came to Senator Harrison from Senator Bilbo's one-time law partner, Stuart C. ("Sweep Clean") Broom, with a speech which brought down the house wherever he delivered it. Boomed Lawyer Broom: ''I am a professor in the Bilbo school of politics; I can read his shorthand notes; I know his tactics. I am a Bilbo man and have always supported him, and when he is a candidate for re-election in 1940 and Conner is his opponent--and he will be as sure as there is a hound dog in Georgia-- I will be found supporting Bilbo again.

He sure will need us. too.

"We all know what tantrums are. Actors, actresses, politicians and babies occasionally have them. ... I called in my personal physician, Dr. Bynacker, a horse doctor, and he told me it was practically the same thing as 'running fits' in dogs and caused in the same way. . . . Then it was the sunlight of understanding flooded my soul, and I knew exactly what caused Bilbo's tantrums. I remembered, as you remember, that he was living on a diet of sardines and crackers and cheese until we elected him to the Senate with a salary of $10,000 a year and immediately he took up his abode in a fine hotel in Washington and he got to eating caviar, cav-eh-ah. It ain't a thing in the world but Russian catfish eggs, and it upset him and disordered him. What is the cure? . . . Take him across our specked and checkered aprons and give him a first class political spanking and presently he will be all right, sitting up and taking his milk as usual.

'. . . Bilbo is hedging his bets. He can't lose. If he can lead Conner off into the middle of the stream and drown him politically, then he won't be back on his neck when he comes up for reelection.

If, on the other hand, Conner should be elected, he couldn't get in the back door of the White House because he opposed the nomination of the President in the first instance, and Bilbo would be senior Senator and sitting pretty. But the trouble is Bilbo has miscalculated the situation this time. . . .

"That's why I am trying to get you Bilbo folks to join me in saving him from his own blunder. When that time comes poor Bilbo will be confronted with the old nigger preacher's text which he said would be found in the 19th Chapter and 16th verse of Duteronimy ∣sic∣ and reads as follows: 'And Jonah said unto the whale, if you had kept your damned mouth shut, this never would have happened.'"

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