Lynch Logorrhea

In the weary closing days of the last session, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley was filling the calendar for the session to follow when his distracted lieutenant, Utah's William H. King, hesitated too long getting to his feet with a District of Columbia airport bill. Up jumped New York's Robert Wagner with his Federal Anti-Lynching Bill which had already passed the House. So fearful of a last-minute filibuster by Southern Senators was Leader Barkley that he promised to make anti-lynching the first order of business after the Farm Bill in the next session, if Senator Wagner would withdraw it at that time. As the special session was sitting last week both Leader Barkley and slow-footed Lieutenant King had ample cause for regret.

When the Senate reconvened after hearing the President's message it found South Carolina's old Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith still sweating to get the farm bill out of committee, the calendar wide open. Senator Smith's junior colleague, Jimmy Byrnes, tried to stave off the inevitable by arguing that in default of the Farm Bill the Senate should proceed to another item on the President's program, his executive reorganization proposals. But anti-lynching advocates led by Missouri's stocky Bennett Clark, one of the Senate's sharpest parliamentarians, protested that this would violate their agreement. At this juncture Vice President Garner, who like his chief had an aching tooth and wanted no part of the headache that was to follow, surrendered his gavel to Senator Clark. No sooner had Anti-Lyncher Clark recognized Anti-Lyncher Wagner to introduce debate on his bill than Texas' old Tom Connally got the floor to touch off the filibuster that the Senate had managed to postpone last summer.

Although Tom Connally is supposed to belong to the group of Southern Senators who would like to weaken Franklin Roosevelt's Southern popularity by making him sign an anti-lynching bill, rarely is there a Southern Senator who does not feel bound to talk against the measure at length on the floor or who does not enjoy himself hugely doing so.

"The President wants the Congress to address itself first to farm legislation," drawled Senator Connally, who likes to talk even more than most. "The Senator from New York wants to go off on a vote-catching expedition in Harlem. The Senator from New York has his mind and eye on the future." New York's lumbering senior Senator Royal Copeland then rose to explain unnecessarily, as he was to do many times as the day progressed, that Tom Connally's scorn was directed not at him but at his colleague in name only, junior Senator Wagner.

"Thank God," intoned Tom Connally, trying a new tack, "the old Court is over in its beautiful building and when Mr. Justice Black was put on that Court a man was appointed who is going to hold this bill unconstitutional, because he said so here on the floor of the Senate, and I have his speech before me." Before anti-lynchers had a chance to object, Tom Connally sent up to the desk a five-hour anti-lynching filibuster delivered by Hugo Black in April 1935. This already long address seemed to stretch so in the reading ("Is this a speech with a rubber terminal . . . ?" inquired Leader Barkley bitterly at one point) that the clerk did not finish droning it to a restless chamber before adjournment.

Next day the Black speech ran out but Tom Connally did not. Wagging his finger at Senator Wagner two seats away, the Texan cried: "The Senator is our outstanding labor agitator. Why, John L. Lewis is just one of the pupils of the junior Senator. Of course he exempts violence during picketing or boycotting in connection with labor disputes. Join the union and it is all right to mob people." Senator Barkley also felt his lash: "The Leadership--and when I say 'Leadership' I do not mean simply the Senator from Kentucky, I mean the little group that rather try to make him appear to be a Charlie McCarthy--this little group get together, and they say, 'Well, we want this lynching bill up.' ... I understand they had this colored man* in the meeting, . . . a fellow named White. . . . What the colored man wanted done was done, and the President's requests were thrown into the wastebasket." Having talked himself dry, Tom Connally yielded the floor to North Carolina's equally logorrheic Josiah W. Bailey, whose chief point was: "We have undergone the experience of a very severe recession. And I do think it is a strange gesture, a most discomforting gesture--I could almost say that it will be in the public mind a most disgusting gesture--for the Congress to sit here and fiddle away with legislation of this sort."

One of Filibusterer Connally's chief time-wasting devices was a flowery historical catalog of every Southern State from his native Texas to Tennessee, "the old Volunteer State," ostensibly meant to show that lynchings were already well in hand in Dixie.* But on the third day of the filibuster, while Senator Bailey was still talking, impish Bennett Clark brought into the chamber a placard on which were mounted pictures of the two blowtorch lynchings at Duck Hill, Miss, this year. Tom Connally testily accused his friend Clark of "turning the Senate into a sewer," but Mississippi's Bilbo walked over to give the pictures (TIME, April 26) a five-minute inspection, turned around smiling broadly. Remorselessly on & on went Senator Bailey and when he was too weary to continue, Georgia's George talked about taxes and Florida's Pepper talked about farmers.

That even a filibusterer can make an effective speech, however, was demonstrated when Alabama's Dixie Graves rose for her maiden Senate effort. Apologizing for her forwardness by explaining that the term to which her Governor husband appointed her would probably expire before the Anti-Lynching Bill was voted on, slender Mrs. Graves put her protest on record with ladylike dignity. Said she: ". . . If this bill is passed, you will say not merely to America but ... to the world, we have in our Union a group of Southern States that cannot or will not enforce the law. I cannot believe that any Senator . . . would thus violate the indestructible sovereignty of a sister State."

By the weekend adjournment any hope that the Wagnerites could break through the Southern barrage to bring their bill to a vote had grown dim indeed. It disappeared altogether as the Senate reconvened this week when, with the filibuster going into its sixth successful day, "Cotton Ed" Smith abruptly closed it to his colleagues' intense and unanimous relief by producing his farm bill.

*Secretary Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. *Total for 1936, ten, for 1937, seven.

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