Cracker Lumped

When Governor Dan McCarty died (TIME, Oct. 12), he left Florida a heritage of reform and an heir who was no reformer: State Senate President Charley E. (for Eugene) Johns, 49, an unleavened Florida cracker from the upstate piney woods. A onetime railroad conductor, Johns had collected more than $70,000 from selling insurance to state agencies while presiding officer of the state senate. He had voted for legalized slot machines, against school construction and against unmasking the Ku Klux Klan.

As acting governor, after McCarty's death, Johns began to build a personal political machine. State law forbids more than one term as governor, but he got court permission to run for the remainder of McCarty's term, besides running in 1956 for the next four-year term. He suspended 15 state officials, put in his own men. His new state road board budgeted more roads than could possibly be built and showily awarded contracts just before the May primaries. As expected, Johns came out ahead.

Confidently he entered the Democratic runoff--decisive in Florida--against State Senator LeRoy Collins, 45. Son of a circuit-riding Texas minister, Collins was rated the state's outstanding senator. He has a son at Annapolis and three young daughters with him at the Grove, a 129-year-old Tallahassee house built by his wife's great-grandfather, Richard Keith Call, governor of Florida Territory during most of the Second Seminole War (1835-42). A curly-haired six-footer, Collins looked good on TV and campaigned strenuously against Charley Johns's "muster of the vultures."

Johns, riding his campaign road grader hard, pledged a good part of the state's entire road funds to a single Jacksonville highway. Wearing a made-to-order train conductor's uniform, he whooped it up with his "wool-hat boys," sneered at the "silk stockings." He even made an issue of foreign aid ("I think the money should be spent in America, for Americans, and particularly for the old folks"). His demagoguery seemed like a surefire success until last week's voting.

Collins won, 373,409 to 308,435.

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