Word: sparkman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...There," commented an unsympathetic observer bitterly, "is a man who has every quality a Democratic candidate for Veep needs: he's from the South." This comment contained considerable truth. Sparkman was not picked because he has a popular or party following, and certainly not because he has shown qualifications to be the heir apparent to a President. He was put on the ticket to bridge the North-South split. The leaders who picked him hope that Northern liberals will accept him despite his stand against civil rights legislation, and that uncompromising Southern conservatives will not consider him a traitor...
Compared to most Southern Senators, he could be considered a New Dealer. But compared to his colleague Lister Hill, the senior Senator from Alabama, Sparkman is a conservative. By accepting the vice-presidential nomination he has (in theory) accepted the Democratic platform, which favors a federal civil rights program. In the past, however, he has fought such a program. Not a leading filibusterer himself, he has defended the sacred Southern right to make such filibusters. In 1948 he voted (in effect) for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, yet he later played a leading part in wresting control of Alabama from the Dixiecrats...
...cannot be said that Sparkman represents the resolution of the conflict between the South and the New Deal. What he represents is a desperate, often skillful, sometimes comic effort to resolve that conflict...
Cotton & College. Personally as well as politically, Sparkman is a product of the force which once bound the South to the New Deal-the economic hunger of a have-not region. One of eleven children, Sparkman was born in 1899 near Hartselle, Ala., a small (present pop. 3,429) town in the Tennessee Valley. His father, Whitten Sparkman, sharecropped 160 acres, but much preferred dabbling in politics. While Whitten Sparkman discharged the duties of his occasional political jobs -jailer, deputy sheriff or local judge-his sons chopped cotton. Sometimes the family income dropped below $200 a year...
...Sparkman succeeded to the Senate seat of the late John Bankhead.-Here his gift for compromise came into sharp relief when he voted to pass the Taft-Hartley Act and later voted to sustain Harry Truman's veto of the bill...