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The routine of the meetings in each county is the same. On the scheduled day fields and cotton mills are deserted, Fords and Chevrolets, new when AAA bounties were largest, fill the courthouse square, and sunburned countrymen and linty mill hands gather to judge the candidates at first hand. The candidates arrive separately, take separate rooms at the town hotel, generally eat at separate tables. At the appointed hour each, in rotating alphabetical order, mounts the platform with exactly 30 minutes to speak. Afterwards there is hobnobbing and handshaking with admirers outside the courthouse.
To his two touring companions this summer dapper, little Jimmy Byrnes never referred by name. In his speeches they were "a former Mayor of Charleston," and a "retired officer of Marines." The first was Lawyer Thomas Porcher Stoney, who is not a U. S. District Attorney because Senator Byrnes failed to get him the appointment. The Marine is Colonel William Curry Harllee, whose chief service to the service was replacing enlisted men with civilians as servants. Colonel Harllee retired a few months ago without the generalship which he expected, because Senator Byrnes failed to wangle it for him.
Rather better, however, than the average run of disappointed office seekers were Senator Byrnes's two opponents. Candidate Stoney, born 46 years ago on Midway Plantation in Berkeley County, is a fiery stumpster, full of gags and gusto, with an impressive shock of iron-grey hair and a rafter-raising bellow. Candidate Harllee, tall, bald, gaunt and aging, was born in Florida, spent years in the Philippines, China, Hawaii, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti. Because of his South Carolina ancestry, however, he fished for votes by traditionally invoking the shades of the State's particular heroes: John C. Calhoun, Senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Vice President of the U. S.; Wade Hampton, Confederate Gen eral, ("Hampton's Legion"), first Democratic Governor after Reconstruction, Senator; Ben Tillman, Governor, longtime Senator, rabble-rouser. A Harllee invocation: "I am a Democrat of the old-fashioned brand. ... I shall be guided by the beacon lights kindled on the altars of our ancient faith . . . and kept aglow by . . . that paragon among Democrats, John C. Calhoun ... and the noble Wade Hampton who will stand ennobled as long as sacrifice and service to mankind measures the standard of nobility among Christian men and Christian women."
To his roots in South Carolina, Colonel Harllee pointed when he campaigned at Dillon: "Near Little Rock, on the banks of the Little Pee Dee, in our family cemetery, where, to use the words of my beloved kinswoman, Mrs. Hattie Dillon David, for whose father Dillon County was named, the lovely willows and the cypress cast their soft shadows and the dogwood and the plum trees brighten the spot with their wealth of blossom in springtime, rest three preceding generations of my forefathers."