The Bouncing Corpse

When Democratic Party leaders packed their bags and went home last week after their harmony rallies in Washington (TIME, April 25), they left behind the impression that they had laid away their troublesome loyalty problem. A special advisory committee on rules had unanimously recommended abandonment of the loyalty rule, adopted in 1952 to keep Southern Democrats in line for the party presidential slate. Advisory committee members confidently predicted that the national committee and the 1956 convention would follow their recommendation, and thereby bury the old issue. But within three days the lid of the coffin snapped open, and the body of the loyalty oath bounced out.

"They Will Be Rejected." The lock was blown off by the man who headed the advisory committee, former National Chairman Stephen Mitchell. His committee's proposal, Mitchell pointed out, left plenty of muscle to throw out of the 1956 national convention any Democrat who bolted and supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. If former Governor James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. Governor Robert F. Kennon of Louisiana, Governor Allan Shivers and former National Committeeman Wright Morrow of Texas seek seats as delegates, warned Mitchell, "they will be rejected . . .

''The delegates will not forget that these men participated in the 1952 convention as Democrats." said Mitchell, "and then went home and, as Democratic Party officials, supported the opposition. Ever since Roosevelt's first term, there have been people in the South who tried to be Democrats in the state and Republicans nationally. If those characters lived in Peoria, they'd be Republicans. That's what they ought to be. We've got rid of the shotgun [the loyalty oath]; now we're working with a rifle to pick off the worst ones."

Getting in his kick, Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey, one of the backers of the 1952 loyalty oath, snapped that there will be no room at the 1956 convention for "half-Democrats or phony Democrats." Alabama's Senator John Sparkman, the 1952 nominee for Vice President, jumped in with both feet. "I don't think they have any place in a Democratic Convention until they come back and say they are sorry."

"I Will Never Accept." In South Carolina, old (75) Jimmy Byrnes, who has held some of the highest offices in the land as a Democrat, was satisfied to say that he may not take any par in any political convention in 1956. Texas' Governor Shivers, elected to three terms as a Democrat, answered with a loaded question: "Who's Mitchell?" Louisiana's Governor Kennon was hardly contrite: "Three hundred thousand Louisiana Democrats backed up my stand on Eisenhower. I think the feeling in Louisiana is that the national Democratic Party will control the national Government when the party returns to the principles of Jefferson. If it adopts another anti-Jeffersonian platform, I wouldn't be surprised to see those 300,000 people in Louisiana again put country above party."

The most serious reaction, from the Democratic leadership's standpoint, came from Virginia's veteran (22 years) U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, who was not named by Mitchell. Said Byrd: "A delegate to the national convention owes his allegiance to his state . . . Mitchell's position is that a delegate must surrender his convictions as the representative of his party in the state if his convictions are trodden underfoot by a majority of the national convention. This, in spite of the fact that the convictions of those he used to illustrate his position were well known to the Democrats of their states before they were selected as delegates in 1952. His view of the right and obligation of a national convention to deny credentials certified by the party of a state, I for one will never accept."

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