CHAPTER II. The best politicians money can buy
2: Paragraph 1 A people gets the kind of government it deserves and deserves the kind of government it gets. If you believe in karma, you have to wonder what evil deeds Delawareans committed in former lives to deserve the kind of government they've got.
2: Paragraph 2 Although parts of the story were told to me by various people, the following account of what happened in 1966 and 1976 is taken mostly from Joseph Donald Craven's 1978 book 'All Honorable Men'. There are many parallels between this book about what happened to me at E. F. Hutton and that book about what happened to him in the antiwar movement in Delaware.
2: Paragraph 3 Craven was a lawyer who was elected AG in 1954, the only Democrat to win that office between 1912 and 1974. Despite having been a stalwart Democrat from childhood, by 1966 Craven realized that, no matter whether the players labeled themselves Republicans or Democrats, in Delaware there was only one political party, and that was the Establishment. So he helped start the Constitution Party to run antiwar candidates for the U. S. Senate and House in that year's election. AG David P. Buckson and both Senators then were Republicans, and the Congressman and Governor were Democrats.
2: Paragraph 4 At that time Delaware had no provision for independent candidates or write-in votes, so the only way a person could be a candidate was to be nominated by a political party. Under the law in effect since 1955, to rate a place on the ballot for its nominee a party had to submit petitions signed by 500 citizens of one county and 250 citizens each of the other two counties; that's what minority parties had been doing for a decade to be on statewide ballots, but none of their candidates had gotten as many as 500 votes, so they hadn't been a real threat to the Establishment.
2: Paragraph 5 In March the Constitution Party put an announcement in the newspaper and started collecting signatures door-to-door. In May the Democrats introduced in the General Assembly a bill changing the law to require any new political party to submit signatures of 50 citizens of each senatorial district, and each of those signers had to be registered to vote but not registered as a member of any other political party. There were then only four categories for registration: Democrat, Republican, Independent, and Decline; so the signatories had to be registered as Independents or Declines.
2: Paragraph 6 The last date for changing registrations that year was 23 July. The General Assembly Would adjourn on 17 June, and the state constitution provided that no bill could become law after the Assembly adjourned unless the Governor signed it within 30 days of the adjournment. The senate passed the bill on 6 June, and the house on 16 June; the Governor didn't sign it until 21 July, which was 34 days after the legislature adjourned and only 2 days before the deadline to change registrations.
2: Paragraph 7 Of course the Constitution Party did not have enough signatures of voters not registered as Democrats or Republicans, so the elections clerks refused to include its candidates on the ballots. The Party sued those clerks in Superior Court, which kicked the case upstairs to the state Supreme Court; although by law the AG is required to represent all public officers, in this suit the clerks were represented by William S. Potter who happened to be Delaware's Democratic National Committeeman, and he had also been the lawyer who had won the earlier case ruling that the AG had to represent public officers, so he must have known what he was doing was illegal.
2: Paragraph 8 There were three justices on the panel that heard the case: Chief Justice Wolcott was a friend of Potter's and a former partner in Potter's firm who was appointed by the former governor, the same Democrat who had appointed Justice Carey and was a close friend of Lyndon Johnson's, and Justice Herrman had been appointed by the Democrat who was then governor. On 14 October the court ruled unanimously against the Constitution Party and never addressed the fact that the bill under which the clerks rejected the Party's petitions hadn't ever become law because the governor waited too long to sign it.
2: Paragraph 9 It was too late by then to appeal that decision to the U. S. Supreme Court before the 8 November election. The polls showed the Republicans' incumbent candidates for Senator and AG leading, and the Democrats' incumbent candidate for Representative was ahead of the Republican. On 28 October the Constitution Party publicly asked its supporters to vote for the Republican candidates. The Republicans won all six statewide offices by the largest margins in Delaware's history, ten times what the Democrats' majorities had been in 1960. Ironically enough, in sending that message to the supposedly warmongering Democrats, Delawareans elected to Congress a Republican who campaigned on a platform that LBJ had not been warlike enough in Vietnam: now-Senator Roth.