The Sold South

When Postmaster Peterson of Douglas, Ga., committed suicide this spring (TIME, April 16), people said it was because he had gone broke paying the politicians for his job. It aroused a Senate investigation of how Federal patronage is dispensed in the South, an investigation which got afoot last week under the leadership of Iowa's Brookhart. Georgia's George was on the committee, too, and Ohio's newly-seated Locher.

The Peterson scandal--he was supposed to have paid his political overlord some $2,000--soon evaporated. Not to malign a dead man, it seemed sufficient to say that Postmaster Peterson's bankruptcy was his own fault and not political. But there were other cases.

Postmistress Esther McCollum of Conyers, Ga., told that she had always understood she must pay 5% of her salary, or some $100 per annum, into the campaign chest of the Republicans responsible for her appointment.

Postmistress Hattie Giddings of Doles, Ga., said that before and after Benjamin Jefferson Davis, Negro Republican, got her her post, she was requested to give money.

Georgia's Republican politicians rebutted these tales, and many another like them, with instances where candidates for office had offered to buy their way in. One G. F. Flanders, G. O. Patronage man cr Georgia's Twelfth District, declared he could sell every postmastership, if he wanted to, which he didn't. "I am not a grafter," he said.

The investigation was all anti-Republican in tone, what with Federal patronage having been Republican for eight years and the Senate investigators being mostly Democratic. So Postmaster General New asked to be heard. The Senators returned from digging up fresh dirt in Georgia, to hear some old dirt in Washington. Postmaster General New read letters and affidavits showing how postmasterships had been sold and levied upon in the Wilson days of 1917-20. The system, he implied, dated back to Civil War times and was common to both parties. Democrats demurred that the campaign contribution law had been changed since Wilson days and that the Georgia Republican State Central Committee had refined the illegal sale of patronage to the point of card-indexing its customers. Mr. New was requested to produce more information. The investigation continued.

Meantime, forestalling Senate action, Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Assistant U. S. Attorney General, spurred a Grand Jury investigation of Mississippi's postmasters, 75 of whom were summoned last week to Biloxi to be scrutinized. As everyone knows, Mississippi's Negro Republicans, headed by National Committeeman Perry W. Howard, control their fair share of the South's 25,000 Federal jobs, which aggregate $35,000,000 per annum in salaries. Indictments began, arrests followed for "purchase and sale of public offices."