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Born in Charleston 57 years ago to a poor, widowed mother, James Francis Byrnes learned shorthand, served as a court reporter in the Aiken Circuit, was elected to Congress in 1910. Ambitious, he ran for the Senate in 1924, was beaten by Coleman Livingston Blease, whose appeal to South Carolina "red necks" was then irresistible. Moving to Spartanburg to practice law, Byrnes reversed the result on Senator Blease in 1930. Opening his campaign for re-election last June he declared: "What South Carolina needs is not a good political campaign but a good rain."
Senator Byrnes studiously ignored attacks of his opponents, stuck to the proposition "Roosevelt will be elected and so will Jimmy Byrnes." He would not even stay to hear their speeches. At one of the early meetings Candidate Stoney demanded: "Is Senator Byrnes in the house?" Fingers pointed to Byrnes standing in a rear doorway.
"Come and sit down here. Jimmy," roared Stoney, "I want you to hear this." "No thank you," the Senator shot back. "I'll take it standing up."
Nub of the South Carolina fight was the New Deal and the slavish support Senator Byrnes has given President Roosevelt. To charges of New Deal extravagance Senator Byrnes countered at every meeting by repeating the story of a farmer who promised himself to economize but, just as he started, his wife fell desperately ill. She could be saved only by an operation, but her husband went to her and said: "I am economizing. An operation would cost far too much. You'll have to die. Goodby, my love, goodby." Candidate Stoney said he had heard this sad tale so often that he felt like calling a doctor for the poor woman and paying the bill himself.
A prime campaign statistic which Senator Byrnes used to his advantage: South Carolina received $242,000,000 in relief, AAA benefit payments, etc. from the New Deal, while only $10,000,000 of Federal taxes had been collected in the State. This prompted Candidate Harllee to cry: "Who has fouled the nest of the Democratic Party? It is those who would prostitute its good name by such acts as the boasted plundering of the people's treasury on the '250 million for ten million' scale.
... O shame, where is thy blush!" When Senator Byrnes quit the campaign tour in mid-June to attend the closing of Congress and the Philadelphia convention, Candidate Stoney made much of his absence, boasted he could get could him beat back on "Little Jimmy" if he could get him back on the stump. While absent, though, the Senator did some of his most effective campaigning, got Admiral Standley, Acting Secretary of the Navy, to guarantee no reductions of personnel at Charleston's Navy Yard, got Harry Hopkins to raise South Carolina's relief wages $2 a week. But his visit to the Democratic Convention at Philadelphia backfired on him when he returned to the South Carolina campaign.