Word: eastlands
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...Without a Pitchfork. This last charge does not express the whole truth about James Oliver Eastland. There can be no doubt that he consciously exploits the tensions created by the Supreme Court's anti-segregation decision to advance his political fortunes. ("As far as Jim and segregation are concerned," says an Eastland aide, "none shall walk before him.") In almost every other respect, however, 51-year-old Jim Eastland is a far cry from the traditional Southern demagogue...
...Tillman, who won the voters' hearts by announcing his determination to go to Washington and plunge a pitchfork into the rump of President Grover Cleveland. Where Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo embarrassed respectable Southerners with personal peccadilloes, ranging from a particularly messy divorce to brazen bribe-taking, Eastland is the epitome of respectability-a devoted family man and a prosperous landowner for whom politics is a passion rather than a livelihood. And even in his most intemperate outbursts, Eastland never descends to the kind of semi-obscene, anti-Negro venom displayed by Mississippi's late Senator James Vardaman when...
...precisely his restraint and respectability that make Eastland a far more dismaying phenomenon than Vardaman and his ilk ever were. When an old-style Southern politician made an unvarnished appeal to racial hatred, it was possible to dismiss it as a coldly cynical maneuver to get the poor white vote; it was obvious that the decent, educated white people of the South did not feel that way. But when James Eastland soberly proclaims his undying opposition to integrated schools, he is obviously speaking from a profound conviction, and his voice is the authentic voice of most of the South...
...courts "practical flexibility" in enforcing the decision. In the word flexibility, diehard Southern segregationists saw room for maneuver and delay. And in Southern eyes, the existence of the possibility of delay inevitably put a premium on the politician who would do the most delaying-a politician like James Oliver Eastland...
...Else Is It Done?" Until last year few people outside Mississippi were really conscious of Jim Eastland's existence. In the Magnolia State itself, however, Eastland was born a power to be reckoned with. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Richmond Austin, came from one of the state's most blue-blooded families, and rode as a cavalry officer under General Nathan Bedford Forrest (later one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan). His paternal grandfather not only made a pile out of a drugstore chain, but also had the foresight to buy, at $1 an acre, 600 acres...