THE SOUTH DIVIDED

...Arthur Krock, dean of the New York Times' political analysts, sees the 1960 "free elector" plan as "the most serious of independent movements since 1912...

...What things...

...Kennedy's Catholicism has been under attack in Texas since long before the Senator became the official candidate for the Presidency...

...This ploy is under attack in a Federal court, but the Garner precedent is expected to stand...

...I guess we're gonna be taxed to support Catholic schools...

...Baptists constitute the majority in Texas and generally support conservative candidates for state and national office...

...Lyndon Johnson, of course, said at Los Angeles that he stands squarely on the platform...

...In addition to the pressures on Johnson growing out of no-partyism, there is the Kennedy Catholicism and the Kennedy liberalism...

...If victory goes to the GOP, it will doubtless be because the Republican platform makes more fuss over leaving things to local governments...

...Therefore, Johnson prepared carefully for Los Angeles...

...I have no plans . . . other than to vote for the nominees of the party because I'm titular head of the party —and that's all...

...Senator Ralph) Yarborough organization, a (former Governor Allan) Shivers organization, a (Governor Price) Daniel organization, a Dixiecrat organization (the Dixiecrat movement was born in Texas in 1944), a liberal Democratic organization, a liberal Republican organization, a conservative Republican organization, and radicals of both the Right and Left...

...Senate seat...

...But there is no sign in Texas of a Kennedy organization, and it is only Senator Yarborough who is publicly urging all-out support of the ticket...

...And the old canards, old as the Al Smith candidacy, are circulating again: "Did you hear that there were seven [or eight or ten] Catholic cardinals in Los Angeles working for Kennedy...

...If the Democrats win, it will probably be because the South's professional politicians are convinced that holding onto the Southern bridgehead in Congress is worth swallowing an unpalatable platform plank or two...

...There is even a diehard Martin Dies organization which bestirs itself whenever the sleepy-eyed old Red hunter announces he might LYMAN JONES, a Texas free lance writer, has appeared in The Reporter, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Coronet, and The New Republic...

...It is simply impossible, in most Southern states, for a self-respecting man to be a Republican...

...The Democrats of the South have long considered a platform of the national Democratic Party something to run on, rather than something to stand on...

...It is still not entirely respectable to confess out and out Republicanism in the old South, but it has become perfectly respectable, even highly moral and patriotic, to jump the Democratic fence in the name of states' rights and right-to-work and rum and Romanism and tidelands and let's-keep-the-NAACP-and-Walter Reuther-out-of-the-White House, or any combination thereof...

...The Constitution of the United States originally intended that electors should be thus free to determine election of the President and Vice-President...

...In the sense that Northerners think of political parties, they are no-party states...

...And the more debased bigots are busy spreading their obscene and filthy tales...

...In 1948, he was a member of a committee which nominated South Carolina's Strom Thurmond for President...

...But it is unlikely that these endorsements will have more than a small effect on the outcome...

...No liberal of prominence was on the delegation (Yar-borough was not a delegate), and no liberal of prominence, including Yar-borough, is likely, unless Kennedy insists, to be allowed inside the 1960 Texas national Democratic campaign headquarters...

...Since the Johnson cluster was not big enough to carry the June Texas state convention, which named the delegates to the national convention, Johnson signed a truce with Daniel and took to California a delegation ranging ideologically from center to extreme right...

...Criswell's blast was immediately echoed by pastors of smaller churches all over the state, especially in rural and semi-rural areas...

...But no cluster leader carries this claim to the point where he might actually have to play the lead role in a coronation—that is, none has tried to unify Texas Democrats for other than personal success at the polls...

...In this no-party nihilism, it is every man for himself—with a vengeance...

...This is one important reason the mere presence of Lyndon Johnson's name on the ticket does not automatically insure that the border states and the deep south states will go Democratic in November...

...If Daniel chooses, suggests the chief Texas press exponent of no-partyism, the Dallas Morning News, two roads beckon: "1...

...Daniel and his anti-Kennedy backers have an important ace up their sleeve, because of Daniel's personal possession of the state Democratic Executive Committee...

...The South Divided by LYMAN JONES If, as is commonly supposed, Texas and her ten Southern sisters were truly one-party states, the Democratic Party's John Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson combination might honestly be said to be, as some "pros" are saying, a "dream ticket...

...Lyndon Johnson may be thinking privately—as many of his backers are publicly—that he has more to lose in a Kennedy victory than if Nixon wins...

...It is quite likely that many leading Southern newspapers shortly will endorse Nixon and Lodge...

...The delegation included about forty former Democrats for Eisenhower...

...But there is not in any of the Southern states a cohesive Democratic Party body, complete with common ganglia, equivalent to the Democratic Party machinery of a Northern state...

...Charlton, who flies a Texas flag at half mast on the anniversary of Texas' entrance into the union and unfurls the stars and bars on the dates of Confederate military victories, has been a delegate to four Democratic conventions (plus one Dixiecrat) but he openly brags, "I've not voted a national Democratic ticket since 1924...

...no Texan could hardly be for...

...If Richard Nixon is correct in his post-nomination prediction that the coming campaign "will be a close race, perhaps the closest in our history," it may well be because the no longer solid South is part of the race course...

...The Democratic State Convention . . . could specifically free its electors to vote as circumstances suggest in the Electoral College . . . "2...

...They lie dormant between...

...But would he campaign for the ticket...

...But neither are they two-party states, despite the existence of an heirloom GOP...

...The classic example of the pitfall of prophecy about the solidity of the solid South is H. L. Mencken's, uttered in April, 1928, in the certainty that Al Smith would be nominated at Houston: "It seems to me that all gabble about splitting the solid South is nonsense...

...Nothing in Federal or state law contravenes or restrains such freedom of action by the electors...

...It happened in Texas and elsewhere in the South in 1928 and 1952 and 1956— and it was Southern Democrats who did the fence jumping...

...Such exceptions are jury-rigged, thrown together hastily of whatever material is handy...

...Price Daniel, reached on the convention floor after the Kennedy nomination, said: "I'll support the nominees of the party...

...But in 1956, with the tide running strongly for Eisenhower, the Stevenson-Kefauver headquarters operated by Johnson and Rayburn distributed thousands of copies of a Holmes Alexander newspaper column knocking Stevenson and extolling Johnson...

...At this convention, which will be organized by the present Executive Committee, members of the Executive Committee will be named to serve through the coming biennium...

...Those in Texas will avoid the problem of rejecting a native son by endorsing Johnson for reelection to the Senate...

...The convention could sidestep the issue entirely, in which case the electors would be legally free to vote as they choose...

...The conservative press fills its "letters" columns with anti-Catholic missives...

...Well, I don't want to go into detail . . . the oil depletion allowance...

...W. A. Criswell of Dallas, pastor of what he says is "the world's largest Baptist congregation," said in a sermon broadcast from his pulpit that Kennedy's election would "spell the death of the free church and the free states . . . the end of religious freedom in the United States...

...Daniel said Kennedy could not, in his judgment, carry Texas, "in view of this platform," adding that his vote for Kennedy should not be construed as a vote for the platform which contained "all these things...

...The latter disturbs leaders of the old South at least as much for its economic aspects as for its racial commitments...

...There is some overlapping of their loyalties, but cooperation of clusters is the exception...

...its members include persons who worked publicly for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, protectively colored, for "respectability," as "Democrats for Eisenhower...

...It is the failure to see this which tripped Mencken and trips those who echo his prophecy today...

...try for the governorship or maybe for a U.S...

...Local self-government" has come to mean, in the South, slow compliance on school integration and other civil rights progress...

...Six major Texas daily newspapers, during the period from the opening of the Democratic convention to the closing of the Republican convention, carried ninety-eight anti-Catholic letters, ranging in tone from sincere misgivings about Catholicism to undisguised bigotry, but only eleven letters urging tolerance...

...Sit-downs...

...In unification lies danger—a unified party's nominating processes might get out of hand...

...First thing Kennedy will do is name an ambassador to the Vatican...

...they are not now and perhaps have not been since the last carpetbagger was pointed north and told goodbye...

...It is almost totally anti-Yarborough and anti-Kennedy...

...Each cluster claims to back the only true pretender to the Jefferson-Jackson throne...

...A minimum wage in agriculture...

...The continuation of his Senate majority leadership would provide a superior springboard from which to run for President in 1964...

...Timanus, a former Harris County vice-chairman of Democrats for Eisenhower, refuses to say for whom he will cast his Electoral College vote...

...Returning from the Los Angeles convention, Daniel told a press conference that in 1960, as in 1956, he will vote for the ticket but he repudiates the platform...

...In Texas, for example, there is a Johnson organization, a (U.S...

...If President Eisenhower should be persuaded that it is his Republican duty to mount the stump in Texas, he might swing the state into the Republican column, particularly since Kennedy and the Democratic platform are unacceptable to the anti-liberal, anti-labor interests which make up the core of support for the other half of the ticket, Lyndon Johnson...

...He could fight Johnson (if Johnson should choose to oppose him) for control of the Texas state Democratic convention to be held September 20...

...The delegation at Los Angeles, in addition to the anti-national Democratic Daniel, included such indigenous Texas types as Hall Timanus and George Charlton of Harris County (Houston), both of whom were named Presidential electors by the June state convention...

...But the South is not made up of one-party states...

...But this is the personal tool—part of the cluster—of Governor Daniel...

...This proposal, meant to mesh with the "free elector" plans already afoot in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, is intended to withhold the required simple majority of electoral votes from either of the regular party candidates and force the choice of President and Vice-President into the House of Representatives...

...Additionally, the GOP's economic outlook is closer to the generally conservative Southern mind...

...in 1956, running against national party-oriented Yarborough for governor, he says he voted for Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, but he did no public work for the ticket after winning the Democratic primary, as loser Yarborough did...

...Against this background it is no strain to conclude that either party can carry chunks of the one-time solid South in November...

...And so the clusters are fully operative only for the Democratic nominating primaries...

...It is by no means certain, even, that Johnson's own Texas will go Democratic this year...

...It is impossible to get a reflex response from tapping a knee unless the knee is connected to a central nervous system...

...Daniel himself was a Democrat for Eisenhower in 1952...

...it is partially pro-Johnson...

...There is a state Democratic Executive Committee...

...To make the waters even murkier, the forms of party organization are maintained...

...The Texas legislature, more than a year earlier (with Sam Rayburn personally lobbying), passed a new version of the 1932 Garner Act, setting forward the date of the Democratic primary so that Johnson could have his Senatorial nomination securely pocketed before the convention, and making it legal for the general election ballot to list Johnson as the Democratic nominee for Senator and also for "a national office...