Great Little State
Sirs:
I am a South Carolinian by inheritance and don't like to see her slandered by such careless statements as you made in your recent [Aug. 24] article on the joint campaigning of Senatorial candidates. Your statements and inferences on the importance of the Nigger and Republican vote are quite correct as evidenced by the total vote of less than 2,000 for Mr. Hoover in 1932. You are surprisingly fair, for a Yankee publication, when you point out that some Niggers do vote and thus infer that none are denied the franchise.
But when you conclude that this type of campaigning is necessary in the State which has the highest percentage of illiterates in its population you flee from logic. With our Niggers not voting, as they don't, our electorate is nearly or quite as literate as your own borough of Manhattan. . . . Wouldn't the joint campaign system be as useful in Tammany's domain as among our good white Democrats?
P. O. WELLAM Pittsburgh, Pa.
Sirs:
Your treatment of the South Carolina political caldron rings true.
I wasted seven years there in a town called Greenville. Unless the honors go to backwoods sections of Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia I know of no more provincial and prejudice-ridden section anywhere.
The moronic faces your candids show fall prey every two years to the guileful exhortations of the Cole Bleases of different shades but all of the same ilk; tickling voters vanity; telling them they are the salt of the earth, the only remaining pure Anglo-Saxons here. . . .
Nevertheless there are a few cultured folks among them.
A. S. VOLPIN Houston, Tex.
Sirs:
Only occasion on which it [TIME] doesn't call a spade a spade is when it lets readers see from photographs and calling would be superfluous—as it reveals those spade-faced, hedge-headed, hookwormed whites of South Carolina to whom the likes o' Jimmy Byrnes has to appeal in order to get reelected to the U. S.
Senate. From a State of once aristocratic South Carolina has certainly come to the other extremes. . . .
RIENZI B. LEMUS Washington, D. C.
Sirs:
Your splendid coverage of politics in South Carolina . . . will delight many a native son and provoke many another. Your statement "the most overwhelmingly Democratic State in the Union" is interesting in light of the fact that your very story of the despond of politics in the Stale proves the contention of recent years that South Carolina has become "a too numerous democracy," which was the very thing that its founders would not have it, and which it was not in the heyday of its great statesmen and leaders.
But I must call you on one point in your story and that is the reference, "this (South Carolina) once aristocratic State." Why once? Although the State is full of riff-raff from the North Carolina mountains, poor white trash from Georgia's Tobacco Roads, and its own degenerate offspring of former plantation overseers and Yankee carpet baggers, there is still plenty of Palmetto aristocracy not only in the low country but in the sand hills and up country as well. True, much of the State's aristocracy is run down, but not all by a long shot. . . .