Star Stories  

Philadelphia, City of Caucuses, Finds Dixie Puts on Best Show

When Delegations Get Together to Weld Links in Their Anti-Truman Chain, the President Receives Some Highly Indignant Southern Criticism.

Philadelphia, July 11 – For a man who likes caucuses, admittedly an acquired taste, this was quite a day.

A real caucus fan could have kept himself busy all afternoon and into the night trotting around to Philadelphia’s hotels and listening to caucuses ranging from routine meetings in which state delegations elected their officers to a full-scale assemblage where Harry Truman was blistered in rich, southern voices for “stabbing the South in the back.”

The Dixie bloc put on the best performance. The ballroom of the Benjamin Franklin was filled with southerners in seersucker suits and a high degree of indignation.

Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia were represented. There was even one man from Oklahoma, and a displaced rebel from Indiana.

It was a caucus that knew what it wanted – two planks in the Democratic platform, one directed at President Truman’s civil rights program and the other reserving ownership of Tidelands resources for the individual states. In both issues the southerners see a threat to the rights of sovereign states.

What it didn’t have was a candidate or any place to go. It had a committee which was hunting a candidate and still is. And it had such forlorn hopes as the suggestion by Gov. J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina that it might be possible to prevent either Truman or Dewey from getting a majority in the electoral college, thus throwing the choice of a President into the House of Representatives.

But it had plenty of zing in its orators. The pace was set by the little, fiery governor of Arkansas, Ben Laney, who told those there assembled that they were present to work out the details of a protest against Harry Truman and his civil rights program, to strike a blow for “the democracy we were raised by.”

“We are not leaving the party; the party has left us,” was a line that more than one speaker found useful. “If I participate in this caucus,” one puzzled delegate from Alabama wanted to know, “do I have to vote against Harry Truman in November?”

The chair was not particularly interested in his problem, and its answer was further complicated by a bustle attendant upon the photographers’ discovery that James Roosevelt, son of the late President, had come in and was occupying a rear seat.

Humorist of the occasion was James Arrington of Mississippi, who stepped to the microphone to allow as how he hadn’t seen so many folks in one place since the Red Cross distributed free flour down his way in 1931.

“I’m a Democrat, I certainly am,” he said. “And I’m not leaving the party. No suh, the party’s done left us, it certainly has.”

He told a story about a man he knew who was a heavy drinker (“He certainly was”) and whose wife nagged him but only made him worse (“It certainly did”). So she went to a neighbor, who was an outstanding woman (“There are that kind of women, there certainly are”) and was advised to try kindness on her erring spouse.

When he came home the next Saturday night his wife was very tender with him, aided him in lying down on the couch, took off his shoes and loosened his necktie. (“She certainly did”). Then she said, ‘Honey, do you want me to kiss you?’ and he said, “You might as well, I’m gonna catch the devil when I get home anyway.”

The speaker said that like the man in the story, the administration “doesn’t know where it’s at.” He was the caucus’s only comedian, he certainly was.

A delegate from Kentucky, pointing out the political truism that you can’t beat somebody with nobody, put before the caucus the name of Alben Barkley. The response was as tepid as it was to a similar proposal to the name of Dwight Eisenhower. The latter was put forward by a forthright gentleman from Tennessee, who admitted he was no politician, but had been named an alternate because he wanted to see the show.