Tennessee's Split

Watermelons on ice, fiddle music by the Clinch Mountain Clan and country songs by Grand Ole Opry stars brought out the voters 500 strong one hot night last week in East Ridge, Tenn. (1950 pop. 9,645). After a sample of the most lavish Democratic primary campaign that local politicians could remember, Millionaire Segregationist Prentice Cooper, 62, three-time Governor (1939-45) and Harry Truman's Ambassador to Peru (1946-48), poured it on incumbent U.S. Senator Albert Gore. "He is drawing $75 a day to represent the people of Tennessee," bellowed Cooper in a stomping cadence, "but he is supporting a oneworld, do-gooder, global-giveaway policy which has squandered the resources of the nation." Why, Gore even voted for reciprocal trade, in spite of the state's textile mills.

Cooper's fist clinched around his ultimate weapon: a battered copy of the Southern Manifesto. Gore's refusal to join 19 other Dixie Senators in this 1956 blast against civil rights made him a "traitor to the South," charged Cooper, who swore that his first official act would be to sign it.* Cheered by Orval Faubus' landslide just across the Mississippi, Cooper's rednecks promised to prove that only stout segregationists can now win primaries below the Mason-Dixon. But at vote-counting time in the as-good-as-elected Democratic primary late last week, Albert Gore was renominated with 60% of the total, and swamped Cooper--watermelons, manifestoes and all--under a bigger vote than he dredged up to overturn the late Kenneth D. McKellar in 1952.

After the Faubus fright (TIME, Aug. 11), Northern editorialists happily hailed a big victory for moderation. In fact, it was more a personal victory for forthright Albert Gore than for moderation. Largely unnoted was the sobering point that the Governor's power, which made Arkansas' Faubus far more of a Southern hero than any Senator, was won by Buford Ellington, 50, former state commissioner of agriculture and campaign manager for Governor Frank Clement.

Ellington ran as "an old-fashioned segregationist" with Clement's support, promised to close any integrated schools in case of violence. In a four-man, winner-take-all primary, Ellington's band snatched a last-minute victory from Memphis' Gore-like Reform Mayor Edmund Orgill, after rednecks blanketed rural West Tennessee with pictures of Orgill talking with Negro "friends during N.A.A.C.P. organizational meeting" (actually, he was talking to a nonpartisan civic-improvement group). Additional point for sign readers to note: victorious Segregationist Ellington and more rabid Candidate Andrew T. Taylor between them rolled up 61% of the vote in once moderate Tennessee.

*Scripps-Howard's Knoxville News-Sentinel reported, after searching Washington for the original document, that Cooper might need the whole six-year term to find it.

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