A NEW DEAL FOR THE MAJORITY

...This was rejected by a Federal court, which distributed both house and senate seats more nearly in accord with where the people live...

...Tennessee's constitution provides that a county with two-thirds the number of qualified voters for a representative shall have one...

...There are no guarantees of checks and balances...

...Usually it's the urban areas that send the liberals and the extremists and the educated cranks to the legislature...

...Cox's emphasis...

...The majority can do anything it wants, a system which Thomas Jefferson called 'elective despotism.' " Adequate checks and balances are provided, of course, by the executive and judicial departments, which are separate, coordinate branches of the government...

...Businessmen especially are fearful that organized labor may gain a stronger voice...

...Solicitor General Archibald Cox, who had joined the fight for reapportionment in the break-through Tennessee case, saw a possibility the Supreme Court might accept a "little Federal system" provided it does not go too far...

...Atlanta and Detroit are cities In much the same predicament...

...Businessmen dealing with Washington and New York complained bitterly about the handicap, of a two-hour time differential during summer months, but they were unwilling to risk other economic advantages they have gained through the benevolence of rural legislators...

...Furthermore, it is evident that the courts are not at all receptive to new proposals designed to circumvent fair and equal representation...

...It prevents hasty, although popular, legislation...

...This issue now has been raised in New York where Negroes and Puerto Ricans charge that Congressional districts are drawn deliberately to deny them opportunities to gain political office...

...Michigan's recent constitutional convention approved a senate apportionment based eighty per cent on population and twenty per cent on area, prompting Democratic Gover...

...Adoption of such a system is being pushed with a measure of success in some legislatures...

...All we are trying to do is get by the Federal court...

...Rural fear of urban power has led a few states to consider solving the reapportionment problem by adding more seats to the legislature, giving additional representation to urban areas without taking any away from rural districts...

...But they ignore the fact that the states were originally sovereign, that it was they which created the United States, and, when this nation was founded, yielded up a portion of their power to the Federal government...

...In New York state, Yates county, with 17,000 residents, sends one assemblyman to Albany...

...During the recent reapportionment, House Speaker Bomar, coached by the Tennessee Farm Bureau, stretched this provision to give rural counties eleven house seats urban lawmakers stoutly contended belonged to them...

...At present," Business Week pointed out, "this state function limps along on a $700,000 budget while agriculture gets $4 million annually...

...Giving a diamond mine a voice in making laws would seem to constitute a novel concept in genuinely representative government...

...In Alabama, significantly, efforts of the rural bloc to maintain legislative control by providing a senator as well as a representative for each county would enhance prospects for the election of Negroes to the legislature since they outnumber whites in a dozen counties...

...Yet rural supremacy leaders believe the Supreme Court would not dare invalidate a state apportionment based on the Federal plan because it would almost certainly lead to a conflict with Congress...

...In 1957-58, the state gave Shelby County (Memphis) $95.85 for each pupil in public school...

...Some such plans have already been rejected with court orders to the states to produce more equitable substitutes...

...Referring to the "ultimatum" given the Alabama legislature, Patterson called it "dictatorial, unwarranted, and without any semblance of legal basis under the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Alabama...

...But just the fact that one district has more people wouldn't be enough, I should think...

...Referring the question to the full court for determination, Justice Stewart made the disturbing observation: "There might be some special interest in the district with fewer people...

...Literally thousands of similar inequities can be cited, from scores of states, in which an urban vote is worth only a small fraction of a rural FRED R. TRAVIS, chief of the national bureau of the Chattanooga Times, has made a special study of the problems and progress in the field of reapportionment...

...They ignore the fact, too, that, unlike states, counties can be created or merged by legislative act, or even abolished entirely, as was done recently in Connecticut...

...In 1957, Tennessee enacted a law making it a misdeamor for anyone "in connection with any place of business of whatsoever kind or nature to employ, display, announce, operate on, maintain, or use any other than standard time...

...Clearly, equitable reapportionment would lead to a renaissance of the power of the states and a decline in urban dependence on the Federal government...

...This pattern of grossly unbalanced distribution of state revenues is repeated generally throughout most of the states...

...The representation of one county, for example, according to an analysis by a critic of the system, would be based 89.1 per cent on land and water and only 10.9 per cent on people...

...Adjacent urban Shelby County with 619,-722 persons also is represented by a single Congressman...

...A plan suggested for Rhode Island would raise house membership to 882, making it only a little smaller and possibly no more orderly than a Democratic national convention...

...In contrast to the snail's-paced "deliberate speed" of the school desegregation decision of eight years ago, the reapportionment decision was followed within months by fifty-three court actions in thirty-one states...

...A solution of sorts was suggested by Dr...

...Said Judge O. Bowie Duckett: "I feel that one of the houses can be constitutionally based upon area and geographical location regardless of population or eligible voters...

...vote...

...With half the members elected every two years, ballots would be shortened and continuity of organization and procedure provided...

...It might be argued with equal validity that the area in Michigan with a high concentration of automobile plants should be entitled to greater representation or that the du Pont corporation should appoint a few senators of its own in Delaware...

...It preserves the checks and balances of the state government, which has worked so well under the Federal system...

...by the 1960 census this figure had soared to seventy per cent...

...But at the moment it is moving hopefully in the direction of truly representative government...

...This restrictive measure was supported not only by farmers but by television station owners eager to get the Doctors Kildare and Casey into their operating rooms an hour earlier, while the children were still up to watch...

...The United States, of course, long ago made the transition from a predominately rural nation to an overwhelmingly urban society...

...Perhaps one of the most far-reaching results of reapportionment throughout the country would be the potential change in the composition of the U.S...

...The assignment of two Senators to each state was a compromise without which the Constitution could never have been adopted...

...Only 10.7 per cent of the California population can elect a controlling majority in the state senate...

...Claiming the state had made "great progress" in rural hands, Baird said: "You never would have had the right-to-work law if the legislature had been in the hands of urban legislators who would have been dominated by the labor unions...

...The Federal allotment of two U.S...

...The Court merely stated that eleven Tennessee citizens, who had come before the bar claiming they were denied equal protection of the law because of grossly unequal representation, had raised a question that the Federal courts should hear...

...The historic decision, which many observers rank with the school desegregation decree as the most important of this century, was basically simple...

...Commuter transportation, urban renewal, migration of minorities, and the many other uniquely urban problems are only hazily acknowledged by lawmakers whose constituency is little affected by these basic developments...

...But each assemblyman from Nassau county represents 215,000 constituents...

...Still another aspect of malapportionment that exasperates and frustrates urban dwellers reflects the outmoded conservatism of the agrarian-oriented districting that persists today...

...In 1955, President Eisenhower's Commission on Intergovernmental Relations argued that the failure of states to aid cities was multiplying local government dealings with Washington, adding to the Federal bureaucracy and weakening a state's control over its political subdivisions...

...Supreme Court stepped last spring and with one great blow cut a swath that released an avalanche of lawsuits in state and Federal courts demanding fair and equal representation for urban residents...

...Blocked by both the legislatures and the courts, the urban population has had to watch helplessly while a horse-and-buggy political apparatus increasingly failed to meet the needs of an age of the automobile and automation...

...there might be a diamond mine there, or some other activity which the state thought should have a voice...

...The Birmingham Post-Herald reported: "This newspaper has never stood for all-out one hundred per cent apportionment of both houses of the legislature on the basis of population...

...Growing urban centers, hard-pressed to fit expanding needs into restricted revenue sources, need more help...

...Senators to each state, regardless of population, backers of this plan insist, provides a valid foundation for establishing a parallel system within the states...

...In Maryland, the four suburban counties with forty-six per cent of the state's automobile registrations receive back from the state only twelve per cent of the motor vehicle fuel taxes they pay out...

...Conferring veto power upon rural legislators by giving them control of half the legislature would only perpetuate indefinitely inequities suffered for so long by urban residents as a result of inadequate representation...

...This would involve the adoption of a small, one-house legislature, now used only in Nebraska...

...U.S...

...They are afraid, too, that consumer groups may gain enough strength to wipe out special privileges conferred upon business by conservative, rural legislators...

...The question is, Justice Stewart said, whether equal protection requires both houses to be based entirely upon population...

...One evil shared by all but a few states is the disproportionate size, and often the shape, of Congressional districts, many of them gerrymandered in favor of either rural areas or political minorities...

...These vary from state to state, but again Tennessee provides impressive examples...

...Providing protection for "rural minorities" through geographic representation poses the interesting question of similar consideration for racial minorities, whether Negroes, Jews, Indians, Puerto Ricans, or Orientals...

...Moore County, the state's smallest, with a population of 3,454, received $220.64 per pupil...

...The Florida legislature memorialized Congress to limit Federal judicial power in reapportionment cases...

...Supreme Court, summed up in a 1946 decision by Justice Felix Frankfurter in the dictum: "Courts ought not to enter this political thicket...

...I do not mean to suggest how the question should be decided," said Cox, "but it would not surprise me greatly if the Supreme Court were ultimately to hold that if seats in one branch of the legislature are apportioned in direct ratio to population, the allocation of seats in the upper branch may recognize historical, political, and geographic subdivisions provided that the departure from equal representation in proportion to population is not too extreme...

...Representative James C. Davis, another arch-segregationist...

...Justice Tom C. Clark summarized the reasoning behind the Court's change of attitude in his response to Justice Frankfurter's dissent...

...They might as well be merged...

...The results of unbalanced representation is most readily apparent in state aid to local governments...

...A clause in the education law relieves small counties of increasing local school taxes, thereby shifting the burden to the state...

...it should be entitled to at least two representatives in Congress...

...The public, for instance, would have to become accustomed to a bill being passed by, say, 942,303 to 716,918...

...In Georgia, for example, the newly-nominated, business-minded governor has proposed a $3 million program to lure industry and tourists to the state...

...At the turn of the century, only forty per cent of the nation's population was classed as urban...

...Ruth Silva, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University and consultant to the Peck Commission on Constitutional Revision in New York...

...Nebraska, though it has its own malapportionment problem, is widely regarded as one of the nation's most efficient lawmaking bodies...

...Laws enacted by rural-controlled legislatures, often with encouragement from special interests, have frequently stifled freedom and occasionally reached right into consumers' pockets...

...But it was heard in the North, East, and West as well—wherever rural legislators and minority politicians were threatened with the loss of a portion of their power...

...Gus Tyler, director of the Political Department of the international Ladies Garment Workers Union, wryly termed this solution "too true to be good...

...Some $102 million, twenty-three per cent of Florida's tax income last year, was paid by Dade County (Miami), but it got back only $47 million—eight per cent...

...The plan is highly favored by many lobbyists for special interests, who are interested in maintaining the status quo...

...The Detroit Free Press was equally disdainful of a full voice for urban residents, saying two houses elected on population "would be duplicate bodies doing the job twice...

...A New Deal for the Majority by FRED TRAVIS THE national elections this month will go down in history as a watershed in the historical development of the United States from a rural to an urban society...

...Already state and Federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional unfair apportionment laws in Georgia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Maryland, Mississippi, Vermont, North Dakota, and Indiana...

...Shelby County received $4.55 for each registered vehicle, tiny Van Buren County $129.90...

...But the urban vote at the same time usually elects a liberal President— and, in recent decades, usually a Democrat...

...Silva proposed that legislators' votes be "weighted" according to the number of residents in their district, in the same manner corporate stockholders vote, according to the number of shares held...

...nor John B. Swainson to remark: "We can no more tolerate eighty per cent representative government than we can tolerate a police chief who is eighty per cent honest...

...Special protection for rural residents has turned up in other rulings...

...Here was the first fruit of the potential revolution touched off only last March 26...

...Governor John Patterson of Alabama, though admitting his state was badly in need of reapportionment, openly declared against submission to the courts while at the same time he urged his lawmakers to do something—anything— to forestall a court order...

...Georgia's ancient agricultural orientation may become a thing of the past...

...Rural areas also are favored in the distribution of gasoline taxes for road construction...

...The trickiest device rural proponents are exploring in their efforts to "evade, frustrate and stall off" compliance—one which holds a grave threat to the effectiveness of reapportionment—is a "little Federal system," under which one house would be apportioned on the basis of population, the other on the basis of area...

...As cities gain more control over their state legislatures and the distribution of their taxes, the states themselves would be better equipped to handle their own problems, a growing volume of which concern the urban areas...

...If that law is repealed, you can forget about industry coming to Tennessee...

...Ample means are available, through executive and judicial checks, to prevent hasty or ill-considered legislation...

...Relief from the courts was not available to city-dwellers because of the traditional hands-off attitude of the U.S...

...Though the Federal court declined to say whether this was valid, it nevertheless commented: "The state has a right, if it sees fit, to assure that its smaller and less populous areas and communities are not completely overridden by sheer weight of numbers...

...Even the most ardent segregationists were willing to make this sacrifice rather than surrender seats to Birmingham, Mobile, and Montgomery...

...Counter-revolutionaries of the long-dominant rural bloc may halt or slow its progress...

...The National Municipal League estimates that forty-three rural seats in the House would become urban if Congressional districts were fairly apportioned, which might he enough to break the conservative stranglehold on the present Congress...

...In Texas, no change was made in legislative representation while the urban population soared 46.8 per cent against a rural decline of 16.7 per cent...

...I don't know...

...Dallas County in Texas is the largest Congressional district in the country with a population of 951327...

...Michigan's senate districts vary as much as twelve to one in population...

...Tennessee's rural nine-county Eighth Congressional district, with only 221> 840 residents, is among the smallest in population in the nation...

...While the far-reaching importance of the Supreme Court decision was widely recognized at the time it was handed down, few observers guessed accurately how rapidly its effects would be felt...

...In California, for example, the 6,000,000 residents of Los Angeles County elect only one state senator...

...In Tennessee, besides enacting a half-loaf reapportionment, rural lawmakers initiated constitutional changes to distribute seats in one house by area...

...In Tennessee, Lieutenant Governor William E. Baird rammed through an apportionment plan preserving rural control of the senate that flagrantly ignored the state constitution he had sworn to uphold...

...the other 9,700,000 Californians choose thirty-nine...

...A dramatic example of the impact of the potential new equality in voting is provided by Georgia, where the courts threw out the state's notoriously unfair county unit system, under which a primary candidate received one vote for each county in which he commanded a majority, regardless of the population or the number of popular votes cast...

...House of Representatives...

...The evils of malapportionment are by no means limited to state legislatures and legislation...

...But as court action increases, the counter-revolutionaries are also at work...

...Such an arrangement protects the minorities...

...Governor Baird of Tennessee has stated well the suspicion and fear of city power that prevails among the rural minority...

...We are not concerned with the state constitution," he said...

...A "little Federal system" holds the threat of deadlocks in which rural legislators controlling one house could veto actions designed to benefit metropolitan areas, and vice versa...

...City supermarkets were forced to raise cigaret prices at the demand of small-town druggists and grocers who resented the price competition...

...Alabama, where the constitution already guarantees each county one representative before the remaining thirty-eight are apportioned by population, attempted to give each county a senator, too...

...It is well for this Court," said Justice Clark, "to practice self-restraint and discipline in constitutional adjudication, but never in its history have those principles received sanction where the national rights of so many have been so clearly infringed for so long a time...

...But rural-dominated legislatures, responsible for their own reapportionment, have resisted recognition of this population shift and have stubbornly refused to redistrict, frequently in violation of their own state constitutions...

...Judges have set early, strict deadlines for legislative action on reapportionment...

...Liquor dealers traded price-fixing laws with "dry" dairy counties, both at the expense of city-dwellers...

...Yet the eminently conservative magazine Business Week has predicted that a more urban-oriented legislature would attract industry and increase industrial employment...

...Like all revolutions, its course and duration are uncertain...

...A more practical proposal might be reorganization of the legislative branch of state government to bring it into conformity with the age in which we live...

...Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart hinted he might favor considering geography as well as demography in arranging legislative districts...

...In Georgia's first election after the Court's action, the state's voters not only rejected a rabidly segregationist former governor in favor of a racial moderate, but dropped U.S...

...This vexing question is now before the U.S...

...Informed observers estimate that under this court pressure half of the states will have reapportioned by the end of next year—with still others completing action before the 1964 elections...

...The special significance of Davis' defeat lies in his high seniority on the District of Columbia committee of the House, where he has vigorously fought home rule and integration in Washington...

...Distrust of city voters extends into the cities themselves...

...We would not like to see domination of the state by the urban regions any more than we would like to see rural areas remain in the saddle...

...The reaction sounded much like the voice of Southern defiance following the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision...

...The great social changes of the past few decades have received little recognition and less response from the large proportion of state legislators—and members of Congress—whose social viewpoint is still rooted in the rustic life of the Nineteenth Century...

...In fact, at least twenty-seven legislatures have not reapportioned for twenty-five or more years...

...It was into this deepening "thicket" that the U.S...

...Supreme Court as a result of an appeal from a Michigan decision invalidating the present geographic distribution of senators in that state...

...If the courts persist in their determination to unravel the reapportionment tangle soon, the next national elections may well mark the opening of a new era, one in which the urban character of our society will be free to assert itself politically for the first time...

...State and Federal courts, following the leadership of the U.S...

...More equitable distribution of state aid is a primary objective of advocates of fair reapportionment...

...Such a system presents serious practical and psychological hurdles...

...But as urban problems have mounted and have been left unresolved by the rural-minded legislatures, the inequities in legislative representation have grown ever more glaring...

...In practice the Michigan plan is not even eighty-twenty...

...In Maryland, a state court sanctioned area apportionment of one house...

...Supreme Court, have decreed, in effect, that this is the last election in which the minority of people who live in over-represented rural areas may dominate state legislatures at the expense of the majority resident in urban areas...

...If organized labor ever gets control of the legislature in Tennessee, I say they will repeal the right-to-work law quicker than a minnow can swim across a dipper...

...In staying the decision, U.S...

...Frank Boelker, Jr., chairman of the Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, originally set up to combat integration, suggested Congress provide for the recall of Federal judges and enact legislation denying the judiciary jurisdiction over state legislative actions...

...Currently, the rural areas, favored by an apportionment which gives them disproportionate political power, elect a conservative Congress, whether Democratic or Republican...