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The Big "If." Many of Dick Russell's Georgia friends believe that he reached the apex of his national reputation and personal political ambition when he declared himself a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. "If Russell had been from Indiana or Missouri or Kentucky," wrote Harry Truman in his memoirs, "he may very well have been the President of the U.S. ... He had ability, integrity, and honesty . . . But being from Georgia, where the race issue was so heated, he did not have a serious chance . . ." In any event he settled down more seriously than ever to serve his nation in the Senate, working twelve-to 14-hour days, six and seven days a week. He now lives frugally in a small apartment in Washington's Woodner Hotel—a bachelor wedded to his cause—and often he cooks his own breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits.
Dick Russell leaps forward whenever the South is challenged, whether it be Truman on FEPC or Eisenhower in civil rights. "Am I a white supremacist?" he said one day last week amidst his rearguard action. "I don't know what you mean. If you mean that any white man is superior to any Negro, no, I can't agree. There are some very distinguished Negroes. Negroes have made gigantic progress in 90 years. Whether they are entitled to the credit, or whether the white people are entitled to the credit, is something I have never weighed. I don't know."
New Carpetbaggers. It is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he went on, that is the new kind of "carpetbagger." As for the White Citizens' Councils, "the N.A.A.C.P. gave birth to them." He added: "I'm as interested in the Negro people of my state as anybody else in the Senate. I was brought up with them. I love them. But I know what's going to happen if you apply force —there'll be violence. We've had our troubles, but we've solved them pretty well.
"I hear Paul Douglas and these fellows speaking up here, and feel I am in a dream. I don't know those people they're talking about. I just don't know the South they talk about. I have no greater rights because I am a white man. I'm proud of being a white man and I'll do all I can to encourage any other race to be proud of itself." Dick Russell says: "I'm not going to change my convictions."
Even though Dick Russell's convictions are unchanging, his South is changing, and rapidly. Negroes are moving north. Whites are moving south. Beyond that, thousands of Southerners—along with thousands of Northerners and Westerners—are moving off the land and away from all its feudal and racial dreams (the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis made a point of hailing "the people of the Southern states . . . whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture") to the smoky cities and the slamming machines that the Old South was inclined to scorn as a baser, egalitarian culture.