Surprise Ending

Prime scandal of the 1938 primary season was--on the basis of excited statements last fortnight by the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee (TIME, Aug. 8)--the knockdown, drag-out fight in Tennessee between the team of Senator George L. Berry & Governor Gordon Browning and the team of Senator Kenneth D. McKellar & Boss Ed Crump of Memphis. Coercion of WPAsters, ballot-box stuffing, martial law, shootings, sluggings, kidnappings and general mayhem were anticipated when Chairman Sheppard of the Committee rushed extra agents into Tennessee and announced that whoever won this Senate race would probably have his seat challenged on the floor of the Senate.

Yet last week after the voting was over in Tennessee, Chairman Sheppard calmly announced: "Up to date, no candidate himself has been connected sufficiently with any charges to justify an election contest before the Senate." And after preliminaries that had promised real gore, only one Tennessean lay dead, though scores were injured in remote McMinn County.

One reason for this surprise ending was that Tennessee's voters, even outside of Crump-controlled Shelby County, clearly indicated their repudiation of Senator Berry and Governor Browning. Pluralities of 86,000 and 74,000, respectively, were returned for the Crump-McKellar candidates, Lawyer Arthur Thomas Stewart of Winchester and Lawyer Prentice Cooper of Shelbyville. In politically amoral Memphis the Crumpsters could afford to conduct themselves so that there was nothing amiss for the Senate watchers to see. In the Crump precincts, normally delivered practically in toto to Crump candidates, Governor Browning was allowed to poll 9,000 votes against 56,000 for Lawyer Cooper, Senator Berry 6,000 against 64,000 for Lawyer Stewart.

The latter, who will now appear in the Senate almost automatically unless Senator Sheppard & colleagues change their minds again, is the tall country prosecutor, now heavier and greying, who 13 years ago, with the aid of the late William Jennings Bryan, beat the late Clarence Darrow in court and convicted John Thomas Scopes of the crime of teaching evolution in a Dayton, Tenn. public school. (Another figure in that fantasy was Defense Attorney John Randolph Neal of Knoxville, who last week was defeated in his own forlorn race for the Senate.) After the Dayton furor, Tom Stewart returned to obscurity and to repeated re-election as attorney general in Tennessee's 18th judicial district. A competent trial lawyer, fanatical bird hunter, Methodist, he campaigned under Crump-McKellar direction simply as a Roosevelt New Dealer who would be sure to vote right. WPAdministrator Harry Hopkins, in Memphis attending a WPA conference, coolly declared: "WTPA workers have the right to vote and have civil liberties like anyone else. I don't see anything wrong in soliciting their votes." Getting the WPA vote out for Tom Stewart had been half the Crump-McKellar strategy.

P: In Knoxville, having exhibited great delicacy by waiting until the primary was over, the Congressional committee investigating TVA announced it would review the queer-looking claim suit lost by Senator Berry against TVA for an alleged fortune in marble drowned under the waters of Norris Dam. During his campaign, rich Senator Berry had continued to protest his claims were valid, not chiseling. Cried he: "I was in the marble business long before there was a TVA or a President Franklin Delano Roosevelt!"

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