The Cracking South

Last week the revolt of Dixie Democrats stopped being an irritating headache to Candidate Harry Truman--and became a major threat. He and his helpers could no longer ignore the Dixiecrats. In Louisiana, Candidate Truman's name was stricken from the ballot.

In its place, Louisiana's Democratic Central Committee put the J. Strom. Thurmond-Fielding Wright Dixiecrat ticket and committed the state's ten Democratic electors to it. Unless the action is overthrown in the courts, a Louisiana voter who wants to vote for Harry Truman in November will have to write in the names of ten new Truman electors.

The States' Righters crowed; Louisiana was the fourth state in which the regular Democratic organization had walked out on Harry Truman. The others: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina. There was no longer any question that the Dixiecrats were capable of cutting deeply into Candidate Truman's electoral vote in the once-solid South. The rebels already counted 45 of Dixie's 148 electoral votes in their bag. After "Hummon" Talmadge's victory last week (see Georgia), they were also expecting Georgia's 12.

For the first time since the rebel raids began, the Democratic National Committee sputtered with wrath. Said a headquarters statement: "A small clique of men who have assumed dictatorial powers . . . has deprived the people of Louisiana of a free ballot ... a high-handed and arbitrary act which will not go unchallenged."

Writing in the New York Times this week, the Atlanta Constitution's Editor Ralph McGill declared that the Dixiecrats' victory over Harry Truman had "at least done away with their earlier fiction that they were really the Democratic Party."

"The civil rights issue has been presented . . ..by the Dixiecrats ... in a distorted manner," said McGill. "Thousands of rural Southerners believe that, if they vote for Truman, they will be voting for social equality, for intermarriage, for opening their schools, churches and social gatherings to Negroes . . . This party, despite its label, is really the anti-Negro party."

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