Where's the Revolt?

With the scars of their 1948 splinter wounds still throbbing painfully, Southern Democrats demonstrated last week that another full-scale revolt against the party's Northern leadership is one of the farthest things from their minds in 1956 --civil rights or no.

The South's position was made clear in the course of a mild ruckus touched off by South Carolina's Governor George Bell Timmerman Jr. In a letter to some 150 Southern politicos, Timmerman called attention to South Carolina's maneuver of recessing its state Democratic convention until after Chicago instead of adjourning. This procedure theoretically would allow the Southerners to walk out of a hostile national convention and reconvene as a third party. Timmerman also suggested darkly that Southern Democrats should caucus prior to Chicago.

First to react publicly was North Carolina's Senator W. Kerr Scott, who replied that he was "deeply interested in working out a platform that will have the unanimous support of all Democrats, but I feel that this can be done only by working together in Chicago." Then, in a considerably less polite press statement, he said he had "no patience with anything that suggests a third party. The [South Carolina] resolution is nothing but Dixiecrat sugar coating . . . tailor-made for the Republicans."

Many Southerners, e.g., Governors Le-Roy Collins of Florida and Luther Hodges of North Carolina, were in no hurry to answer Timmerman's letter; other governors, Mississippi's James P. Coleman and Georgia's S. Marvin Griffin, got off polite but noncommittal answers. Less tolerant was the Atlanta Constitution, which acidly editorialized that "history teaches some people few lessons, especially if they happen to be governors of South Carolina." Then it put" its finger squarely on the basic weakness of third-party talk: regardless of how strong the South may feel about civil rights, it "cannot go it alone, because only within the framework of the two-party system is it able to maintain enough political power in the Congress to protect its interests [through seniority on powerful House and Senate committees, etc.]. The third party led by J. Strom Thurmond--also of South Carolina--in 1948 should have taught us a lesson . . . Such movements could leave the section politically powerless, with all that this implies."

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