Do you want to do away with unlimited debate (filibuster) which is the only protection the South has against laws that big cities of the North will force upon us? If so, vote for Stevenson and Kefauver who unalterably oppose freedom of debate.
Do you want the Right-to-work law in South Carolina repealed? If so, vote for Stevenson and Kefauver who are dedicated to repeal of the Taft-Hartley law.
Do you want a President who would stop tests of H-bombs and enable Russia to dominate the world? Then Stevenson is your man. He and Bulganin want to stop these tests in America.
Do you want Socialism to replace the free and independent form of government under which America has become the greatest nation in the world? Then vote for either national party. Both are dedicated to Socialism.
Do you want to live under the domination of political machines? Then vote for and with the politicians who place party label above principle.
The prominence given economic issues is significant. Independent leaders had two goals: to sound the tocsin for reactionaries and to show to the country that their movement was premised on grounds other than racial. Economic policies advocated by Stevenson and the national Democrats were smeared as “a new America built on Socialistic and Communistic theories.” In view of the wide use of the term “socialism,” the News and Courier’s definition is interesting. Socialism, it said, “would give bigger ‘benefits’ to farmers, old people, veterans, little business men, workers, unemployed persons, the disabled and children.” This would mean “more handouts for everyone, except the big corporations—and the government would run them.” Inflation, controls and higher taxes accompanied such a program. The Independents also criticized Kefauver’s advocacy of “World Government under which the United States of America would become a satellite nation under Communist control.”[439]
The Independents never attracted the active support of prominent Democrats in the state. An important exception was James F. Byrnes. In an address which the News and Courier considered “the speech of a statesman,” the former governor, senator, war mobilizer, secretary of state and Supreme Court justice, urged South Carolinians to desert both national parties and to back the Independents. He criticized Eisenhower’s support of integration in the District of Columbia and pictured the Democratic Party, whose nomination for the vice-presidency he had once coveted, as being “dominated by the bosses of the big cities, the Americans for Democratic Action, the CIO and the NAACP.” The Independent received Byrnes’ speech less sympathetically. The up-country paper declared that “the spectacle of this aging and embittered politician trying to explain unsuccessfully how he arrived at this dead-end would merit sympathetic pity were it not part of a calculated effort, based upon hatred for the Democratic Party that fed and clothed him for over 50 years, to reelect a Republican president.”[440]
During the course of the election campaign, the Morning News, Record, News and Courier and Independent each took a different position on the question of political revolt. With the exception of the Morning News, which changed editors, the papers continued the positions which they had taken in the pre-campaign period. The Morning News, under Editor Rogers, was sympathetic to the Independents but refrained from advising its readers as to how to vote. Rogers’ proposal for an independent movement to support the Republican candidate went unheeded. The Record, too, was sympathetic to the Independents but ultimately endorsed the Republicans. It considered a vote for the Independents as a less effective protest than one for the G.O.P. The News and Courier, which luxuriated in its own world of perpetual political frustration, gave unqualified endorsement to the Independents as “a grass roots protest without professional leadership.” It represented “the people of South Carolina standing up for their rights, in a spontaneous movement which could overthrow the forces controlling the State Democratic Party.” Out of it might “come a force to redeem the Republic and reshape United States history.”[441]
The Anderson Independent attacked the movement, its leaders and its motives. The “agitation” was described as “another effort to give aid and comfort to the Republican Party and its millions of Negro adherents.” The Independents included “an unusually high proportion of rejected office-holders and worn-out political hacks,” “tub-thumpers” who were using the race issue as a screen for other issues, mainly economic. When the Independents issued a statement decrying “the perversion of taxation to a tool of social reform for the redistribution of wealth,” the Anderson paper concluded that they opposed “such laws as social security, old age pensions, federal wage and hour laws to protect workers, federal funds for school lunches, and numerous other activities designed to benefit the vast majority of citizens who are not blessed with the status of the independently wealthy.”[442] This statement was not without irony in view of the Independent’s violent opposition to labor unions and to the repeal of the state’s right-to-work law.
The same paper was no less critical of the Republicans. A vote for either the Republicans or the Independents was “a vote for sending South Carolina school trustees to jail.” Its editorials contained such loaded and politically indelicate phrases as “‘Put’em in Jail’ Eisenhower,” “‘jailing judges,’” “Richard M. (for Mixer) Nixon,” “naming Negroes to the South Carolina federal bench,” and “a vote for Ike is a vote for integration.”[443]