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All this has required a heavy investment in money and in Eastland's time. The plantation's equipment includes 27 tractors, one caterpillar, 25 cotton trailers, 15 four-row plowing units and a vast assortment of plows, combines, trucks, balers, pickers, etc. Eastland's plantation with its equipment is worth more than a million dollars and grosses about half a million a year in sales. Working the 4,500 acres directly under the plantation manager—520 acres are worked by tenant farmers—are 84 sharecroppers (mostly Negro) and, in this season, about 30 Negro day hands. The material welfare of these men and their families—about 400 people—is directly dependent on Eastland. By Delta standards, he does well by them. Showpiece of the Eastland plantation is Preston Jones, Negro manager of a 360-acre "unit," who last year netted $7,800 after living expenses. Jones is admittedly exceptional, but General Manager Godbold estimates that the 84 sharecroppers probably averaged $800 as their share of the plantation profits last year. Asks Godbold: "How many auto or aircraft workers wound up 1955 by paying all their living expenses and still having $800 left over?"
A Measure of Fame. So strong is the pull of Doddsville on the Eastlands that Libby Eastland was reluctant to have Jim stand for re-election in 1954. Jim, however, liked being a Senator, and his interests had broadened to include Communism as well as cotton. He had even won a certain measure of fame for arrogant behavior as a member of the Internal Security Subcommittee—though nothing like the national attention he was to get later when his investigation of Communist influence on the U.S. press brought down upon him the wrath of the New York Times (TIME, Jan. 16).
Jim decided to run, and with that decision was on his way to becoming a national figure. One month before he started his re-election campaign (which he won handily), the Supreme Court handed down its anti-segregation ruling. Less than a month later, a small group of white citizens of Indianola, Miss., in Eastland's own Sunflower County, founded what they called a Citizens' Council, the first appearance of a movement which Mississippi Editor Hodding Carter describes as "the uptown Ku Klux Klan." Though it lacked—and still does—any kind of interstate organization or direction, the movement rapidly spread through the South. Today Citizens' Councils and similar organizations under other names have an estimated 300,000 members. A few councils have a protofascist tinge; the great majority of them, however, are composed of respectable, middle-class white Southerners who simply believe "there can be no compromise on segregation."