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Two familiar items in most South Carolina campaigns are "Niggers" and "Catholics." Senator Byrnes's mother, was a devout Catholic, as is his first cousin, famed Washington Lawyer Frank Hogan. Though Byrnes was never an out-&-out Catholic, his early connections with that faith were used against him in 1924 when pamphlets saying, "Remember when Jimmy Byrnes was an altar boy" flooded the State. Now, to the great disgust of South Carolina's few Catholics, the Senator is a thoroughgoing Episcopalian.
This year the "Nigger issue" has been raised against Byrnes, who once in Aiken unsuccessfully tried to get a grand jury to indict a white man for shooting a blackamoor. At the Philadelphia convention South Carolina's Senior Senator Ellison D. Smith made headlines by walking out in protest when a Negro preacher prayed over the assembled Democrats (TIME, July 6). Senator Byrnes, busy on the Resolutions Committee, did not walk out. Back in South Carolina Candidate Stoney on his tour passed around pictures of the Negro preacher, paid tribute to "courageous Senator Smith," declared, "Little Jimmy Byrnes is not the man we sent to Washington as a Senator, else he would have walked out too."
Croaked Candidate Harllee, "Our State has had plenty of experience with the kind of harpies who consort with colored people to control the Government."
*Because of South Carolina's topnotch rate of illiteracy, Tillman realized many a voter could be reached only by the spoken word.