Crossing the Line

"A few miles from my home there is an imaginary line. . . ." With these words Pennsylvania's Governor George Howard Earle last week startled 600 members of Washington's Southern Society dining in the Willard Hotel. His hearers, being Southerners, supposed at once that he was referring to the color line. Only two years ago his Legislature passed and he proudly signed a law giving Negroes equal rights with whites in all Pennsylvania's hotels, shops, restaurants, theatres (TIME, Aug. 12, 1935). Useful as that law has been in winning Negro votes for the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania, today, when Governor Earle has become an aspirant for the Democratic nomination for President in 1940, it is a major embarrassment.

Only for a moment, however, did Governor Earle leave his hearers in doubt about his imaginary line. "From my present home," he said, "it is only an hour's drive to the Mason-Dixon line. From my birthplace in Chester County, it is even closer. . . . Whether I am north of it, in my home, or south of it on my farm in Cambridge, Md., I find men and women occupied with similar problems. . . ."

Thereafter he had only the kindest words to say of that section of the U. S. which reveres both the Mason-Dixon and the color lines: "Was it not the Solid South, bulwark and Gibraltar of Democracy, that gave us Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the U. S.?* I need not tell you how that solid, united support of the South saved our Nation from destruction. . . . It was a Virginian, George Washington. . . . It was another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. . . . It was Old Hickory Jackson, from Tennessee. . . . We need, above all else, peace. . . . Our great Secretary of State, Cordell Hull of Tennessee. . . . Mrs. Earle . . . a daughter of the Blue Grass State of Kentucky. . . ."

By the end of his speech there could be no doubt that Governor Earle had undertaken a great feat, never before performed by man: having made a political crossing of the color line, to make a political crossing of the Mason-Dixon.

*The correct answer to this rhetorical question is, of course, No. Had the South voted solidly for Hoover in 1932, for Landon in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt would still have been elected in each year by a big margin.

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