The Skeleton's Rattle

Winding up a United Automobile Workers educational conference in Washington last week, U.A.W. President Walter Reuther deliberately hauled out the biggest skeleton in the Democratic closet and gave it a vigorous oratorical rattling. Said Reuther: "We have made it clear from the very inception of our union that we are not the tail to any political party's kite ... I say to you in all good conscience and I think the labor movement collectively ought to say this: that I believe we ought to say to the leadership of the Democratic Party, who I believe overwhelmingly believe in the things that we believe in, that in 1956 you've got to make a choice--you cannot have Mr. Eastland and have us at the same time."

Controlled Tears. Like all talk of a possible Democratic Party split over the civil-rights issue, Reuther's threat met with dead silence from the party elders. Determined to work out a compromise civil-rights plank that will be acceptable in the North and not too offensive to the South, most Democratic bosses, Northern and Southern, pooh-pooh the notion that the issue is one that cannot be compromised. Meantime, the package they hope to sell is one prepared by Chicago's Negro Congressman William Dawson, i.e., that civil-rights problems belong to President Eisenhower, since it is up to him to enforce the law. So vital a role do civil rights and the Dawson line play in Democratic strategy that in New York last week Adlai Stevenson made a Dawson-like pitch the theme of a Waldorf-Astoria fund-raising dinner (net result: $140,000) that attracted such civil-rights stalwarts as Eleanor Roosevelt, New York's Senator Herbert Lehman and New York City's Mayor Robert Wagner.

But more and more it began to look as though compromise and the Dawson line might founder on the political facts of life. Last week pressure from Negro voters (who could conceivably tip the balance in nine Northern states) was beginning to tell on local Democratic organizations. In Detroit, Negro delegates walked out of the First Congressional District Democratic convention in an argument over national-convention representation, and powerful Michigan Democrats were threatening privately to force a rip-roaring national convention floor fight to get a strong civil-rights plank in the Democratic platform. If they try, they will get considerable Northern support. Said Illinois' combative Senator Paul Douglas last week: "We must take a stand on civil rights. If the Southerners walk out, it will be healthy for the Northern party. I am not urging them to do it, but if they do walk out, I will have no tears."

Controlled Glee. Southern Democrats are stony-faced before these rattlings from the North. In Washington, Southern Congressmen, fighting to keep the House Judiciary Committee from voting out the Administration's civil-rights bill, forced the committee to break up four times in a single day to answer quorum calls in the House itself. Next day, by meeting before the House was in session, a coalition of Republicans and Northern Democrats succeeded in pushing through approval of the bill and passing it on to the Rules Committee (whose Southern members are likely to succeed in holding up action on it for as much as a month more).

For Republicans, anxious to avoid seeming to play politics with civil rights, but also determined to exploit the Democrat-dividing issue to the utmost, the chief problem is not to let their glee at all this Democratic pulling and hauling become too apparent. Said one Republican strategist last week: "If we can just continue to keep our big traps shut until after that Democratic convention in August . . ."

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