A Two-Party South?
SCHULTER, JOHN J.
Pulpit, press and parties involved in Dixie election A Two-Party South? By John J. Schulter ATLANTA IN MID-SUMMER, immediately following the Republican national convention, a public relations...
...If Kennedy wants the South, he will be virtually compelled to come down here and get it...
...For with party leadership comes patronage and the ability to satisfy the demands of the machine at the very lowest levels in the districts and precincts—and it is here the Republicans have nothing to offer...
...Almost all the experts predicted a Democratic victory in the Southern states, contending that the cities would go for Nixon but that this would be offset by the traditionally Democratic vote from the rural areas (where, in addition, the Democratic farm program has strong support...
...What Nixon found in the deep South was that without firing a shot or spending a dime he already had a built-in speakers bureau and an army of thoroughly zealous election workers in virtually every one of the major Protestant churches...
...Given the nominal church institution—with its men’s clubs, women’s clubs, youth and even kindergarten organizations, and above all its influential pastors— such organization couldn’t be had by the Republicans for love, money or anything else...
...funds to carry it into the remotest rural areas...
...This was especially true in the Baptist church, which for the previous three months had been saying that a Catholic in the White House would make the Presidency a vassal of the Roman Catholic Church...
...The combination of the pulpit, press and the power structure, Nixon was told, was sufficient for him to carry the South...
...The National States Rights party, under the leadership of racist and anti-Semite Edward Fields, has placed the Orval Faubus-John Cromellin ticket on the ballots in Arkansas, Alabama and Florida, and hopes to drain off the votes of the lunatic fringe clustered around the Ku Klux Klan...
...In any case, the election in the South will involve a bitter battle, with the contending forces of the pulpit, press and power structure on the one hand and the influence of the local party machines on the other...
...North Carolina is still suffering from its recent divisive gubernatorial primary...
...When Kennedy looks around for defenders of his faith, political and religious, he must necessarily depend upon the organized Democratic party machines in each state...
...Newspaper editors in the South, with one eye to top management and the other to their readers, felt emboldened to reassure Republican campaign managers (1) that there was a definite movement underway on the part of the middle, professional and industrial classes to throw out the one-party system and create an even more conservative party than the Democratic party, and (2) that as a reflection of this sentiment, the majority of the Southern press would shortly endorse Nixon as it had Eisenhower...
...Mississippi will have two sets of electors, one pledged to the Democratic party and the other to a free-wheeling group of independent electors...
...South Carolina Governor Ernest F. Hollings came out for Kennedy, promptly took a trip to South America, and left the matter of waging the local campaign to the party machine which is split in two...
...What they heard and saw was so reassuring that Nixon changed his previous plans of making only token visits to the South and scheduled a full-blown, all-out campaign...
...On the other side of the ledger is the political fact of Southern life that the politicians in the Democratic party have nowhere to go except the party...
...But here he has found a house divided against itself—and against Kennedy...
...I recently spent a month in the South, speaking to scores of people representing a cross-section of public opinion and to a number of newspaper editors and political reporters...
...The party machine is thoroughly split in Louisiana, where the state Democratic Committee won by one vote over the third-party supporters...
...By John J. Schulter ATLANTA IN MID-SUMMER, immediately following the Republican national convention, a public relations team representing the same firm which had successfully steered President Eisenhower through his two campaigns visited central and northern Alabama to make a survey of Vice President Nixon’s strength in the South...
...In Alabama six of the 11 Democratic electors are avowed States-Righters and free agents in their electoral votes...
...The Nixon team also tapped other reservoirs of political strength—the power structure and the press...
...Despite all the money behind Nixon, he cannot hope to cover every ballot box in the rural areas...
...Third-party movements have split the Democratic party in at least half of the Southern states...
...Since what matters is the votes counted, not the votes cast, and since under the one-party system the Democrats control the entire voting machinery, local leaders will be expected to deliver their usual majorities even if they have to vote the cemeteries...
...There is not a single Southern state which the Democrats can claim is in their political bag...
...Local businessmen, politicians, industrialists and bank presidents pledged themselves to assist the Nixon campaign and to provide the necessary JOHN J. SHULTER is a free-lance writer who is now living in the South...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 39
