In Florida's stucco State Capitol last week, the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the great American roughneck, looked down on a scene that would have delighted his old frontiersman's eyes. Assembled there was the Southeastern Governors' Conference. Ostensible subject: the South's perennial freight-rate problem. Actual subject: the political rebellion seething below the Mason Dixon line.
Most Southern Democratic leaders have liked the pork but not the principles of the New Deal. Now, with the political pendulum swinging away from those principles, and the pork scarce, they were prepared to speak their minds. In their minds were two questions : 1 ) How far were they prepared to carry their revolt? 2) How far would the rank-&-file Southern voters follow them?
Now up rose Georgia's young (36) Governor Ellis Gibbs Arnall, to say how far the rebellion of the leaders should go. Up-&-coming Governor Arnall campaigned last year as an all-out supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Now he was restive. Said he: "I think the time has come for us to stand together politically. Soon we will be choosing our national leadership. Those who love the national Administration and those who hate it are all so confused among themselves that the influence of the South may well be the deciding factor in national politics. . . .
"It is time for discrimination against the South to be eradicated. I hope we can obtain something for our section and break down the shackles so long imposed on it. . . .
"The nearer we get to the convention, the more pressure will be put on us. So far as Georgia is concerned, we are going to go to those who offer us the most."
Third Party? Governor Arnall's political price-fixing was strong enough medicine for some delegates, but not for Louisiana's Governor Sam Jones. Said he:
"For 75 years there was good reason for the South to stick to the Democratic Party, because of the party's stand on States' rights, the tariff and race relations. These reasons are gone. There is no material difference in the treatment of the race problem by the Republican Party and the present Democratic Party. . . .
"I want somebody to do something. . . . If the job cannot be done by the party we have so long maintained in power, then it is time for us to do some constructive thinking. Each will have to follow his own light. . . ."
"Sad Sam" did not have to elaborate. He and Alabama's ex-Governor Frank Dixon, vociferous champion of States' rights and white supremacy, had joined for months in urging the South to secede from the New Deal and form a "Southern Democratic Party."
The Governors moved their session behind closed doors, to mull over their gripes, distrusts, hopes, ambitions. Before they went to dinner that night, they had made a solemn agreement: they would join forces, keep their ammunition dry, would make no commitments on a 1944 Presidential candidate until they had conferred again.