Rubel Phillips - Two-party Political Dissent

Two-party Political Dissent

In its endorsement of Paul Johnson, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger urged voters "not to play with fire" and ignite the birth of a two-party system, which would lead to a political division among whites along partisan and economic lines. Johnson called the two-party concept "a political rendezvous with death." At a pre-election rally in Jackson, Barnett urged Mississippi Democrats to "push out this Republican threat" and added that he was "fed up with these fence-riding, pussy-footing, snow-digging Yankee Republicans."

The Hattiesburg American echoed the Democratic contention that the primary beneficiaries of a two-party system would be the then "920,000 Negroes who dwell here." The American denounced Republican leaders Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, rivals for the party's 1964 presidential nomination, for their common membership in the National Urban League and the NAACP. The American also criticized then freshman U.S. Representative Robert Taft, Jr., son of the late conservative U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, for having remarked that "no segregationist belongs on a Republican ticket or even in the party." An advertisement carried in the Jackson Daily News linked white Republicans with "modern scalawags," a reference to southern whites who cooperated with carpetbaggers during Reconstruction."

Phillips defended the two-party format on the grounds that competition can produce excellence and questioned how competitive general elections would be "dangerous" because white voters had for years been divided in contentious Democratic primary runoff elections. Phillips stressed that in the 1850s, when Mississippi Democrats faced competition from Whigs, the state ranked fifth nationally in per capita income. Like Johnson, Phillips felt compelled to denounce the Radical Reconstruction policies of the 1860s and 1870s.

Gil Carmichael, a Meridian businessman who managed Phillips' 1963 campaign in Lauderdale County and was later the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in 1972 against James Eastland and then for governor in 1975 and 1979, said in a civic club debate that he found it:

peculiar to defend something I have always taken for granted ... Who, a few years ago, would have thought it possible to have reached the point ... where it is necessary to defend the human right to a choice? ... I fear that the state Democratic Party is unwittingly being used as a tool for the same goals of the national party. ... Today, the majority of whites of this state are not one-party Democrats but true independents -- and they are glad that there is the beginning of a second party -- so they can have a real choice.

The Vicksburg Evening Post in Vicksburg in Warren County deplored the campaign invective and claimed that "demagoguery is replacing logic, and that appeals to passion and prejudice far outweight any effort to discuss intelligently the problems and future of our state."

The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, then published by Hodding Carter, II, a Kennedy supporter but a critic of the state Democratic Party, endorsed Phillips:

Democrats see clearly that the Republican Party, once it gains power in Mississippi, will offer the kind of effective outlet for the feelings of most Mississippians that the isolated state Democrats (who renounce any connection with the national party) can never hope to produce. All that the state Democratic Party can offer is another four years of frustrated political impotence in national affairs and a never-never land existence within the state's borders.

The New York Times concluded that Phillips' potential for an upset rested with "an unlikely coalition of Goldwater Republicans and Democrats who range in viewpoint from middle-of-the-road to liberal." The state AFL-CIO, then with some fifty thousand members, endorsed Phillips despite his support of the Mississippi right-to-work law. Labor president Claude E. Ramsay of Pascagoula denounced the Barnett-Johnson administration as "the most corrupt and irresponsible in the state's history" and supported Phillips' proposed educational reform, civil service merit system, and opposition to an increase in the state sales tax. Johnson said he was not disturbed by Ramsay's "false prophet" endorsement: "Everyone has known Ramsay to have a tendency toward integration."

Several moderate Democrats endorsed Phillips, many of whom had supported former Governor James P. Coleman, Barnett's predecessor in the office, and a loser to Paul Johnson in an attempted comeback in the 1963 Democratic primary. When Phillips resigned from the Public Service Commission in 1959, Coleman appointed Phillips' older brother, the author Thomas Hal Phillips, to the remaining portion of the term. Hal Phillips was his brother's gubernatorial campaign manager in the 1963 election.