Fielder's Choice
In gracious Charleston, the still midsummer air was broken by the sound of two Southern gentlemen campaigning. Just before South Carolina's Democratic primary, 4,000 voters had crowded into a ball park to boo or cheer the two voices bursting out of the loudspeakers.
The high voice belonged to Governor J. Strom Thurmond; the gruffer one came from Olin D. Johnston. Both men wanted Johnston's U.S. Senate seat.
"Had I been Governor Thurmond," said the deep voice, "I would never have appointed the Nigger physician of Charleston, Dr. T. C. McFall, to displace your beloved white physician [on the Medical Advisory Board]." At that point, sounds of dissent rose from 400 Negroes in the bleachers. Johnston bellowed: "Make those Niggers keep quiet."
With these words, Johnston effectively established the fact that, though not a Dixiecrat like Thurmond, he was just as anti-Negro. Johnston also made it clear that he hated Harry Truman just as much, only he was playing it smarter: by being a Democrat he could sabotage the President better from the inside.
This left the voters of South Carolina only lesser issues to decide upon. Johnston, said Thurmond, was immoral, "because he once entertained Sally Rand in the governor's mansion." Thurmond, Johnston retorted, had once stood on his head for a photographer.
On election day, the voters preferred Johnston, 178,000 to 154,000, a choice which National Chairman Bill Boyle applauded as, from his viewpoint, the lesser of two evils: Thurmond, as Dixiecrat candidate for President, had drawn 39 electoral votes from Harry Truman in 1948.
Aging (71) Jimmy Byrnes, who stayed haughty and aloof during the primary, easily won the governorship. That solved one problem for friends of the ex-Senator, ex-Supreme Court Justice, ex-Secretary of State. Said he: "A lot of folks . . . have been telling me they had a hell of a time figuring out what to call me. But now they can call me governor."
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