Frank Porter Graham - United States Senator

United States Senator

In 1948, North Carolina entered a more progressive era of politics. Former state agriculture commissioner W. Kerr Scott extinguished the control of a group including former Governor O. Max Gardner, all of whom hailed from the small city of Shelby. Scott, a pro-Harry Truman Democrat who had supported the New Deal, defeated that group's candidate for governor, the state treasurer Charles M. Johnson, in the party primary.

On taking office in January 1949, Scott brought in his own perceived liberal reformers. Two months after Scott's inauguration, incumbent Junior United States Senator J. Melville Broughton, a former state governor, died in office. Broughton's death provided Scott with a prime opportunity to make a mark in Washington, D.C.

After three weeks of intense speculation throughout March 1949 as to whom the governor might choose for the Senate, attention focused on individuals ranging from the senator's widow, who expressed no interest; Scott's former campaign manager, Capus Miller Waynick; another Scott supporter, Major Lennox Polk McLendon, a lawyer from Greensboro, North Carolina; former Senator Umstead; and the governor himself. Scott appointed Graham, which shocked many in the state.

At the time of his appointment, Graham had never sought nor served in any political office, an unusual phenomenon at the time for North Carolina senators. Also atypical was that the particular Senate seat Graham occupied was in a period of considerable turnover. Beginning with the death of Senator Josiah W. Bailey in 1946, and concluding with the election of B. Everett Jordan in 1958, no fewer than eight men served in the seat in a dozen years.

Graham faced two opponents in the 1950 Democratic primary, including former Senator Robert R. Reynolds and former Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives Willis Smith. Reynolds received only 10% of the vote, but Smith garnered 41%. Graham polled 49%, one percentage point below the threshold of receiving the nomination outright. Smith could therefore decide if he wanted to engage Graham in a runoff, which Smith initially declined; when Smith's supporters rallied outside his house in a show of support for him, Smith decided to participate in the runoff. Years later, North Carolina abolished runoff primaries if the leading candidate had at least 40% of the vote. Had that procedure been in effect in 1950, Graham would have become the Democratic senatorial nominee in the first primary.

In the runoff, Smith ran as an anti-Truman Democrat. According to his staffers, Smith never said anything outright racist, but some of his supporters released unofficial pamphlets stirring up fears of an integrated society. The campaign was considered the most racist for a senate race in North Carolina since the beginning of popular vote for senators. At the time of the election, few African-Americans were voting in North Carolina because of Jim Crow laws designed to disenfranchise them. Those blacks who were registered usually were Republicans who cast ballots only in routine general elections. Graham was hence unable to appeal to many black voters, and he did not call for immediate integration, either. Graham was not a natural campaigner and hesitated to even ask voters for their vote. His political views were different than most North Carolinians'. In the virtually all-white Democratic primaries, the tactics of Smith's campaign supporters (among whom was future Republican Senator Jesse Helms) worked along with these other factors, and Smith prevailed by a narrow 52-48%. Graham's supporters mounted a write-in candidacy for the November general election, but he received only one-half of one percent, and Smith won in a landslide against a desultory GOP opponent.