Keefs Hard Days

The face was familiar. So was the earnest, country-boy style, the dark-framed eyes, the soft, friendly drawl. As he roamed the towns and villages of Tennessee last week, Senator Estes Kefauver seemed his old-shoe self. But at close handshake, there was a big difference: campaigning for a third Senate term, the Keef was running scared. Bird-dogging him was the combined specter of a man and an issue that might well keep Estes Kefauver at home next year. The man was Circuit Judge Andrew ("Tip") Taylor, bombastic relic of the Crump machine and no-quarter segregationist. The issue was civil rights.

As Tip Taylor campaigned through the flatlands and the Smokies he thumped Estes Kefauver for virtually every integrationist crime except the Emancipation Proclamation, denounced him for turning his back on Tennessee and the South by voting for the civil rights bill in the Senate last spring. "If I had been in the Senate, there would have been 19 instead of 18 Senators voting against the civil rights bill. Every Democratic Congressman from Tennessee voted against that civil rights bill, but Senator Kefauver voted for it.* Every state is entitled to two Senators. New York has two Senators to represent the people there, and I am tired of us supplying them with an extra Senator. He votes just like Hubert Humphrey." Estes discarded his old coonskin cap in favor of a straw hat that once belonged to Franklin Roosevelt, and tried his darndest to tiptoe past Tip's torrential accusations.

He accused Tip of being against the sacred Tennessee Valley Authority (though Tip denies it) because of his connections with big business. He criticized Tip's attacks on federal aid and charged him with having the support of the "drug interests" who, Estes implies, are out to even the score for the Kefauver Senate investigation of drug prices. Knowing his vulnerability on civil rights, the Keef prudently stayed away from the Los Angeles Democratic Convention, surmising that he might be tagged with partial responsibility for the all-out civil rights plank. Yet, though he was fighting for his political life in the same dogged fashion that he fought for the presidential nomination in 1952, and the vice presidential nod in 1956, Kefauver held fast to his principles.

"I voted for the civil rights bill this year," he said time and again, "because I couldn't square my conscience with denying any qualified citizen the right to vote. I voted for it because I felt it was right, and I think you feel it was right too.

If there is anyone here who doesn't feel every qualified citizen should have the right to vote, let him hold up his hand." So far, Kefauver's bold gamble has worked; he has not yet faced an upright hand of dispute.

By virtue of cold arithmetic, Tennesseans granted that the Keef ought to keep his narrow edge in next week's primary election. The state's Negro vote (roughly 75,000) is with him, and so is much of the labor and big-city vote--with the exception of Memphis, in West Tennessee, where Tip Taylor's strength is greatest.

But there was plenty of indication that Tip Taylor's segregationist rampage, heated by the row over the Democratic platform and recent Negro sit-ins in Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville, was gaining momentum. If Taylor succeeds in moderate Tennessee, that borderland barometer may well reflect the pressure settings on the Democrats' civil rights platform plank throughout the whole South.

* So did Tennessee's other Senator, Democrat Albert Gore.

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