Alabama's John Sparkman, 65, is a shambling, soft-spoken man who ought to feel about as safe in his seat as any member of the U.S. Senate. After all, he is one of those "entrenched" Southern Democrats, with 28 years on Capitol Hill, including the past 18 in the Senate. He is the No. 2 man on the Foreign Relations Committee and, more important, has sponsored all sorts of legislation vital to his state's economy, like help for housing and small businesses. He shares with his colleague Lister Hill, also a TVA liberal, major responsibility for the fact that Alabama gets a more-than-generous cut of federal aid. Sparkman even had his day on the national scene, as Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1952.
But as of last week, the talk of the Senate cloakrooms and the Alabama county courthouses was that Sparkman is in desperate trouble in seeking reelection next year. His problem is civil rights.
Too Mild. Not that John Sparkman is an integrationist—far from it. Over the years he has voted against more than 100 civil rights bills. But to diehard segregationists, he has never sounded as though he really meant it. Last week, in a Senate speech against an anti-poll-tax amendment to the voting rights bill, Sparkman said stolidly: "Legislation such as this, which is not designed to be applicable to the whole nation at large, is not sound, and Congress should think long and hard before it plunges emotionally into promulgating an extreme measure."
More privately, Sparkman expresses his feelings: "I've never tried to stir up emotions. I've fought all of the civil rights fights here alongside the Southern Senators—but on constitutional and practical grounds. I've always contended that race problems weren't solved by legislation, but by economic improvement."
This sort of sentiment has little in common with that of such other Southern Senators as Mississippi's Jim Eastland, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, Georgia's Herman Talmadge, or even Georgia's Richard Russell, whose sometimes courtly, sometimes acid-tongued combativeness has been badly missed by the Senate's Southerners in their fight against the voting rights bill. Russell has been out for almost four months with emphysema, a lung ailment, but last week he announced that he felt fit enough to run for a seventh term next year.
More than anything else, Sparkman's brand of segregationism sounds namby-pamby when compared with that of Governor George Wallace. Explains State Democratic Executive Committee Chairman Roy Mayhall: "John has been a pretty good supporter of the Democratic Administration, and he's done a lot for the people of Alabama. But they don't think about that. They've got just one thing on their minds: segregation. They hated Kennedy. They hate Johnson. And they hate John Sparkman."