1946

(This July 13, 1946 piece, again, is another perspective on the Blacks’ role in the voting culture, a perspective which lays bare the hypocrisy which ran practically unabated at that time)

“Politics do indeed makes strange bedfellows.  So baffling, in fact, is this present-day phenomenon that one never knows who will team up with who, what cause a given politician will espouse—and at what time—or when conventional party lines will be ignored, for the sake of political expediency.

Tagged as Exhibit ‘A’ among the mass of evidence submitted in support of this argument is the strange case of Senator Olin D. Johnston, erstwhile governor of South Carolina, and the late Senator Ellison Durant ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith, also of the Palmetto State.

It will be recalled that it was Governor Johnston who threw a political monkey wrench into Senator Smith’s try for re-nomination for a seventh term in the Senate in South Carolina’s Democratic primary back in July, 1944.  The fact that, in so doing, voters of the Palmetto State sort of ‘swapped the devil for the witch’ in repudiating Smith and nominating Johnston is not particularly important now. 

But, what is important—highly important now in retrospect—and constitutes the point of our story, is the fact that recent happenings throughout the South with reference to the active participation of Negro Southerners in politics, have served to throw a new light on the former Governor Johnston’s nomination and subsequent election to the Senate of the United States.

Make no mistake about it—in July, 1944, while votes—not Negro—led to ‘Cotton Ed’s’ defeat, the inevitable result of South Carolina’s lily-white Democratic party rules, and by the same token, resulted in Johnston’s nomination by a substantial majority.

But while Johnston was serving as governor of South Carolina during President Roosevelt’s first term, he made the unprecedented move of permitting colored South Carolinians to contribute funds to the Democratic State Committee. Authority for this disclosure is Drew Pearson[13], of ‘Washington Merry-Go-Round’ fame. 

‘With pathos in his voice, the then Governor of South Carolina used to tell visitors how these fine folks stood in line to contribute 25 cents or a dollar to Democratic campaign funds,’ Pearson writes.  ‘Some of them can spare only 10 cents,’ Johnston told this columnist.  ‘But we don’t care how much it is.  We want ‘em in the Democratic party, just the same.  It’s a fine thing.’

This may explain why the South Carolina legislature subsequently found it expedient to hold a special three-day session for the express purpose of enacting legislation designed specifically to bar Negroes from participating in the Democratic primary.

Senator Johnston has always campaigned as a great friend of the workingman, and incidentally, as a friend of Negro South Carolinians, as witness his solicitude about their meager contributions to Democratic campaign funds.

But last week, however, during an executive session of the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, the Gentleman from South Carolina did what amounted to a complete ‘about face.’  It was during discussions of a complaint voiced by Senator Glen Taylor, of Idaho, against Senator Bilbo’s threats of physical violence to Negroes in Mississippi if they dared to vote in the primary which he was a candidate for reelection.

Senator Johnston was quoted as saying angrily:  ‘Now, look here.  You people are playing around with dynamite.  N….rs just don’t vote in the South and they never have.’ When several of his colleagues started to argue, the erstwhile friend of Negro South Carolinians corrected himself:

‘Yes, they vote, but they have their own party and we have ours.  They just don’t belong in the Democratic primaries.’ Politics do, indeed, make strange bedfellows.”

= Albert L. Hinton