Southern Send-Off

One of the earliest and eagerest queries received by Washington press associations one evening last week concerning results of Mississippi's and South Carolina's Dem-ocratic primaries (tantamount to elections) came from the White House. The news the White House got was the best send-off President Roosevelt could have had as he started West on his drought-inspection trip that night. By thwacking majorities Mississippi and South Carolina had returned two of the President's most loyal and useful Senators, for each of whom his attachment to the President had been the prime campaign issue.

In Mississippi, Pat Harrison's 2-to-1 majority over Martin Sennett ("Sure Mike") Conner was not only a triumph for Senator Harrison and the New Deal, but also a thoroughgoing rebuke to junior Senator Theodore Gilmore ("The Man") Bilbo, who had vented his spite against the senior Senator by campaigning for Conner. Theme of all 15 speakers at a Harrison victory feast in Jackson: "Now that we've licked Bilbo, we'll throw him into the Gulf four years from now, the so-and-so."

Even more convincing was dapper little Senator James Francis Byrnes's victory in South Carolina over fiery Thomas Porcher Stoney, onetime Mayor of Charleston, and gaunt Colonel William C. Harllee, retired Marine (TIME, Aug. 24). Jimmy Byrnes squeaked into the Senate in 1930 with 120,000 primary votes to 116,000 for Coleman Livingston Blease. Last week, with 250,000 votes to 37,000 for his two anti-New Deal opponents combined, the President's Senate contact man piled up the biggest majority South Carolina had ever given a State-wide candidate.

Almost the only man who refused to concede that Jimmy Byrnes's great victory, like Pat Harrison's, was a thumping endorsement for the New Deal was South Carolina's senior Senator Ellison D. Smith, no New Dealer. Sulked he: "There are so many elements involved that it is hard to interpret just what that expression means. The main thing in the whole business was South Carolina's loyalty even to the name of 'Democracy.' "

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