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"How Else Is It Done?" Until last year few people outside Mississippi were really conscious of Jim Eastland's existence. In the Magnolia State itself, however, Eastland was born a power to be reckoned with. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Richmond Austin, came from one of the state's most blue-blooded families, and rode as a cavalry officer under General Nathan Bedford Forrest (later one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan). His paternal grandfather not only made a pile out of a drugstore chain, but also had the foresight to buy, at $1 an acre, 600 acres of cotton land near the hamlet of Doddsville in the Mississippi Delta. Today Delta land fetches up to $200 an acre.
Jim Eastland was born on the Doddsville plantation, and throughout his youth his father, Woods Eastland, steadily increased its size. "Judge" Woods Eastland was a lawyer by profession, and his practice was in Forest (pop. 1,500), in the hill coufitry about 100 miles from Doddsville. It was there that Jim grew up—a wellborn Delta planter's son set down amongst planter-hating "rednecks." Jim and his father were inseparable, but somehow Woods Eastland's rollicking geniality never rubbed off on his son, and Jim grew up cold, reserved and somewhat arrogant. Said a clerk in a Forest general store last week: "I hear folks say what a grand job Jim Eastland is doing and what a fine man he is, but I don't know. I always remember him as an uppity kid."
After Forest High School, Jim went to the University of Mississippi, where he began to display some of the zest for politics he had acquired from his father, one of Mississippi's bigger, behind-the-scenes political operators. Once, remembers Jim, "I had to arrange for a whole board to get elected in order to elect myself business manager of the paper." On another occasion he broke open a ballot box for two strong reasons: 1) to fix the election of a friend as prettiest girl; 2) to filch ballots proclaiming him (as he recalls) biggest liar in the class.
Jim spent three years at "Ole Miss," then transferred to Vanderbilt, where his father felt he could get better legal training, and after one semester there switched to the University of Alabama. While still a senior at Alabama, he passed his bar exams ("I made the highest grade") and promptly dropped out of school to run for the Mississippi state legislature. With his father's backing, 24-year-old Jim Eastland had no trouble in getting elected, and for four years he was one of then Governor Theodore Bilbo's leading supporters in the house of representatives. In 1932, when Bilbo left office under a cloud of financial troubles, Eastland also got out of politics and began to practice law. The same year he married attractive Elizabeth Coleman, daughter of a Delta doctor. Says Libby: "We got engaged in a swing on the front porch, naturally. How else is it done in the South?"