Precarious Victory

U.S. Senator Frank Graham, ill for a crucial ten days at the climax of the campaign, rose from a sickbed last week and addressed some closing words to the voters of North Carolina. In Lexington's jammed courthouse, little "Doctor Frank," sometime (19 years) president of the University of North Carolina, forgot issues and statistics and spoke simply and emotionally. Said Graham: "May our America be a place where democracy is achieved without vulgarity, difference without hate, where the majority is without tyranny and the minority without fear, where the least of these our brethren have the freedom to struggle for freedom, where respect for the past is not reaction and the hope of the future is not revolution. This is America."

In Graham's North Carolina, such generosity of sentiment had not recently been in evidence. The campaign had been one of the roughest in the history of the South's most progressive state. Running as a Truman supporter for the Senate seat to which Governor W. Kerr Scott had appointed him, Graham had spent more of his time denying charges than dealing with positive issues.

His opponents charged him with Communist association with a zest worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy. Full-page ads howled that Graham was a supporter of FEPC, and that he had addressed unsegregated meetings. Voters were asked darkly if they wanted their sons working under a Negro foreman. Thousands received postcards mailed from New York City extolling what Graham had done for Negroes, with the signature: "W. Wite, executive secretary, National Society for the Advancement of the Colored Race."*Against such tactics Graham felt forced to play down his Fair Dealing as much as possible. Though he had served on Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights (which recommended an FEPC), he insisted that, he had dissented on the matter of compulsion. His supporters went further, ran an ad which said: "When Frank Graham speaks, the Senate listens. Graham can win votes against FEPC." fc Obviously designed to be confused with Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who had sent no such message.

Last week, in a record-breaking turnout, Graham won a precarious victory. He polled 295,000 votes to 245,000 for Corporation Lawyer Willis Smith. But Robert R. .("Buncombe Bob") Reynolds and a pig breeder named Olla Ray Boyd had polled a total of 62,000 votes between them--enough to deny Graham a majority and to force a runoff next month if Smith demanded it. Smith probably would.

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