Talmadge for President

Gathering one night last week at Augusta's Bon Air Hotel, just two miles from Dwight Eisenhower's vacation cottage, 700 Georgians and South Carolinians sat down to roast sirloin of baby beef and a large serving of the kind of speech-making that Ike deplores. Firing up the faithful: Democratic Senator-elect Herman Talmadge and his longtime mentor, Georgia Political Boss Roy V. Harris, who was being testimonialized for 35 years of service to his state.

To an audience graced by his cousin, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Herman lamented that "your parents and mine had to live under Yankee bayonets and occupation rule, and resist the same fight we are going through at the present time . . . Yankee rule, carpetbagging." Then, dropping the toga of statesmanship that he has recently stitched up for use in Washington (TIME, Oct. 15), Herman added: "The time has come when the people of the South must appeal from those damnable decisions of the Supreme Court to the court of last resort, the decent white people of America."

For his part, Roy Harris recounted 20 years of U.S. brainwashing by "the propaganda that segregation is unconstitutional, un-American and un-Christian . . . If we'd had more people in the United States Senate like Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond, we wouldn't be in the situation we are in tonight."

Counting his Georgia chicken before it had been nationally hatched, Roy Harris clucked: "I propose in 1960 to have me a candidate for President. So far as I'm concerned, Herman Talmadge is my candidate for President in 1960."

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