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Man Without a Pitchfork. This last charge does not express the whole truth about James Oliver Eastland. There can be no doubt that he consciously exploits the tensions created by the Supreme Court's anti-segregation decision to advance his political fortunes. ("As far as Jim and segregation are concerned," says an Eastland aide, "none shall walk before him.") In almost every other respect, however, 51-year-old Jim Eastland is a far cry from the traditional Southern demagogue.
His thinning grey hair is worn at ordinary, not Claghorn, length, and he shuns the string tie and the diamond stickpin. Taciturn and humorless, he has neither the gift nor the inclination for the vivid rhetorical attacks on opponents that were the stock in trade of such old masters as South Carolina's Ben Tillman, who won the voters' hearts by announcing his determination to go to Washington and plunge a pitchfork into the rump of President Grover Cleveland. Where Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo embarrassed respectable Southerners with personal peccadilloes, ranging from a particularly messy divorce to brazen bribe-taking, Eastland is the epitome of respectability—a devoted family man and a prosperous landowner for whom politics is a passion rather than a livelihood. And even in his most intemperate outbursts, Eastland never descends to the kind of semi-obscene, anti-Negro venom displayed by Mississippi's late Senator James Vardaman when he declared: "I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning."
It is precisely his restraint and respectability that make Eastland a far more dismaying phenomenon than Vardaman and his ilk ever were. When an old-style Southern politician made an unvarnished appeal to racial hatred, it was possible to dismiss it as a coldly cynical maneuver to get the poor white vote; it was obvious that the decent, educated white people of the South did not feel that way. But when James Eastland soberly proclaims his undying opposition to integrated schools, he is obviously speaking from a profound conviction, and his voice is the authentic voice of most of the South's 30 million whites, including the respectable and the educated. -
"I'll Choose Mississippi." Even "moderate" Southerners for whom segregation was an indefensible evil are warning the North to keep hands off. Mississippi's Nobel Prizewinner William Faulkner, whose novels eloquently express the thoughtful Southerners' sense of moral guilt toward the Negro, recently told a British newspaperman: "I don't like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I have to choose between the United States Government and Mississippi, then I'll choose Mississippi ... If it came to fighting, I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes."