The Pittsburgh Press (May 6, 1944)
Background of news –
The South stays in line
By Jay G. Hayden
Washington –
The prospect of Southern opposition to a fourth term for President Roosevelt, either in the Democratic nominating convention or the November election, all but vanished when Senators Claude Pepper of Florida and Lister Hill of Alabama won easy renomination this week.
Anti-Roosevelt leaders in the South, including a majority of its businessmen and editors and a fair sprinkling of top-flight Democratic officeholders, have insisted that their section was thirsting for New Deal blood if only it could find a way to express itself, short of going Republican.
The significance of the Florida and Alabama senatorial contests was that they squarely met their specification. Senator Pepper had stuck to the New Deal line, even to the point of favoring enfranchisement of Southern Negroes, and Senator Hill had done likewise, with the single notable exception of the race issue.
Participants in these primaries, both candidates and voters, all were Democrats. The sole difference was that Messrs. Pepper and Hill stood squarely on their pro-Roosevelt records and their opponents just as definitely opposed the President and all of his domestic works.
Both clear-cut winners
In a straight two-man contest against James A. Simpson, president pro tempore of the State Senate and a leading Birmingham lawyer, Mr. Hill won with approximately 55% of the votes cast.
Mr. Pepper’s victory is even more decisive in that he appears to have won the clear majority of votes necessary to insure his reelection as against four opponents. With three-fourths of the state heard from, Mr. Pepper had an overall majority of 10,000 and was 46,000 ahead of the next best runner, Judge J. Ollie Edmunds.
In addition to these senatorial results, Roosevelt adherents are crowing over the lead in Florida of delegates pledged to the President, as against a slate entered in the name of Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, and the defeat of Rep. Joe Starnes for renomination in Alabama’s 5th district.
Incomplete returns indicate that a minority of Byrd delegates may have been elected in Florida, but in light of the Pepper and Hill victories, nothing short of a Byrd sweep of the state could have given encouragement to the Southern anti-fourth term movement.
Rep. Starnes has been known chiefly as the first assistant of Rep. Martin Dies in the much-controverted Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. His votes in the House have frequently been anti-New Deal.
What Alabama likes
One of Mr. Starnes’ Alabama colleagues, asked the reason for his defeat, said he thought it was not so much that his constituents disagreed with the findings of the Dies Committee as that Mr. Starnes’ name was printed so frequently in connection with it.
He said:
You know, folks down in Alabama don’t want their representatives to be bothering about any of these big national things. When they hear their man talk about things going on in New York, they just think it would be better if he tended more to getting things for his home district.
In their overall meaning, the present Southern primary results seem to beat out the notion, held by any political observers all along, that while the upper crust elements in the South are violently anti-Roosevelt, this sentiment has not penetrated very deeply into the voting mass.
Also, the administration still has its vast civilian bureaucracy, numbering into the hundreds of thousands in single states, now supplemented by the military and naval bureaucracies. There is no doubt that the Washington administration did everything in its power to marshal these forces in behalf of Mr. Hill, Mr. Pepper and all others of its recognized supporters in Alabama and Florida.