Mendelian Domain

In Mendel Rivers' South Carolinian fief, the voters do all but pay scutage. The First District's Democrats have loyally returned him to Congress for 28 years; Republicans have long since accepted his seignorial reign and run only occasional token candidates against him.

With some reason. The Mendelian domain, nine counties clustered around the port of Charleston, is abristle with 17 Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force installations that provide 55% of Greater Charleston's economy--and testify to Rivers' nonpartisan efficiency in looking after his constituents as chairman of the puissant House Armed Services Committee. Though Rivers, 62, has by no means been responsible for all of the military largesse that the U.S. has bestowed upon the Charleston area, his constituents generally believe that he has, and return him to Washington with metronomic regularity. Route 52 through Charleston is called Rivers Avenue, and a housing project at the city's naval base is named Menriv Park.

Rivers also appeals to Democratic and Republican South Carolina conservatives with his hard-line views on the war and on integration--although, as the son of an impoverished turpentine distiller from Gumville, he has voted frequently for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. His constituents were not unsympathetic 18 months ago when he proposed that the U.S. "flatten Hanoi and let world opinion go fly a kite." In 1948 he cried that Harry Truman's anti-lynching bill would "lynch the Constitution," and as late as 1956 was defining N.A.A.C.P as "the National Association for the Advancement of Communist Propaganda."

Hero's Style. Only once in the past have the First District's Negroes--43% of the population--challenged the chairman. Rivers trounced their 1950 candidate, a Negro attorney, in that year's Democratic primary. This year, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, another Negro attorney, George Payton Jr., 39, decided to try. Scraping together the $2,000 registration fee with loans from relatives, Payton attacked Rivers as a "warmonger and superhawk," stumped for a $2 minimum wage, expanded social security, and liberal federal housing programs.

Almost inexplicably, Rivers, who wears his silver mane in the style of his South Carolinian hero John C. Calhoun, ran scared, plastering Charleston with billboards and TV spots. Ten days before the primary, Rivers arranged to have 15 members of his committee flock to Charleston along with Admiral Hyman Rickover to inspect a Polaris missile facility and laud Mendel.

The militant campaign was hardly necessary. Last week Rivers' Democrats, along with several thousand Republicans who crossed party lines, gave the chairman 65,842 votes against 18,883 for Payton. The G.O.P. will not even bother to oppose Rivers in November.

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