Embarrassing Reminder

To the swelling chorus of voices which have been prescribing methods for revival of the Democratic Party was added last week the soft Georgia drawl of Senator Richard Russell. Speaking at a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Raleigh, N.C., the South's favorite pre-convention candidate in 1952 spelled out the current thinking of Southern Democrats.

Russell served notice that the South would no longer tolerate a Democratic Party led by Northern "liberals" who blast Southern devotion to states' rights and "the right of private property" as "reactionary." (Though he named no names, Russell's listeners easily conjured up visions of such Americans for Democratic Action-style Democrats as Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey and New York's Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.) "There are those who would have us drink of the fatal potion of national state socialism," said Russell. "We must resolutely reject their enticements."

Last November's elections showed the folly of letting the "liberal" tail wag the Democratic dog, he continued. By trying to mold the Democratic Party to their own image, "extremists who call themselves liberals" had alienated Southern voters and lost the election for two "great Americans"--Stevenson and Sparkman. If the liberals continued their efforts "to drive the South out of the party," he warned, the Democrats would suffer "the most disastrous defeat in American political history" in next year's congressional elections.

Russell's speech was an embarrassing reminder to Democrats that the North-South feud was still on. Embarrassed indeed was the Democratic National Committee, which abandoned plans for a nationwide rebroadcast of the speech as soon as it found out what Russell had to say.

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