In the 1963 election for governor of Mississippi, a strange thing happened. The Republicans offered a credible candidate. How improbable! There had been only one Republican gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi since 1881, and he had won less than 3 percent of the vote. The last Republican presidential candidate to win Mississippi's electoral votes had been Ulysses S. Grant.
Rubel Phillips had been a Democrat once elected to the state Public Service Commission, in a statewide race. Now newly arrived in the Republican camp, he predicted that Barry Goldwater would clearly carry Mississippi in 1964, so why not elect a Republican governor who could work closely with a Republican president?
Predictably, one of the hottest issues in the campaign was whether Mississippians should allow a two-party system to develop. Democrats argued the state was under attack by the nation's liberals and civil rights activists, and that only 100% unity by white Mississippians, within the state Democratic party, could protect segregation from outside interference. Rubel Phillips scoffed at the Democrats' arguments, saying that if Mississippi's goal was to defeat civil rights initiatives, Mississippi should get out of the liberal Democratic party. After all, every proposed civil rights law had originated with the Democrats.
One recent event would play a very large role in the 1963 campaign for governor of Mississippi. This had to do with the Kennedy administration's efforts to integrate the University of Mississippi. President Kennedy, working with his brother Robert (the Attorney General) had won a court order forcing the University to accept its first black student, James Meredith.
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Governor Ross Barnett and his Lt. Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. bragged about the role they had played in trying to block the integration. Both men, on different occasions, had physically turned James Meredith away. Under Mississippi law Governor Barnett could not succeed himself, but Barnett was backing Lt. Governor Johnson in the 1963 race. Johnson won the Democratic nomination in a bitter primary campaign, as he told voters how he had "Stood Tall" to deny Meredith's admission. The campaign slogan "Stand Tall With Paul" proved as successful as Barnett's 1959 slogan, "Roll With Ross." Johnson defeated several candidates, including the relatively moderate former governor, James P. Coleman. Johnson won the Democratic nomination, but made a great many enemies in the camps of Coleman and his other rivals.
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Traditionally in Mississippi, after the two Democratic primaries the Democratic nominee had no further campaign work to do. On the day of the general election the Democratic nominee's name would stand alone on the ballot, and a handful of voters would turn out to actually vote him into office. Paul B. Johnson, Jr. was infuriated by Phillips' forcing him to run yet another campaign, after the grueling two primaries. Johnson said he didn't like having to run in this "third primary," and that after he was elected governor he would make sure "This never happens again." Rubel Phillips warned that his opponent wanted to secure new legislation that would kill all opposition parties, leaving Mississippi with a political system not unlike that of the Soviet Union.
Although a number of issues surfaced in the 1963 general election campaign, only one mattered: Which candidate hated the Kennedys the most? Whichever one had the stronger anti-Kennedy credentials was likely to win. John and Robert Kennedy were hated not only for their role in the University of Mississippi integration. They had intervened a number of times to protect black civil rights activists in the South. They also sought new congressional civil rights laws.
Rubel Phillips said if you hated the Kennedys (and most Mississippi voters did) then you should not vote for the Kennedys' party, but should vote for the Republican candidate instead. Once again, he predicted the 1964 presidential election would pit John F. Kennedy against Barry Goldwater, and so Mississippians should get used to voting Republican. The party of Paul B. Johnson, Jr., Phillips argued, was the party of Hubert Humphrey and other liberals.
Paul B. Johnson, Jr. responded that the Republican party was the original party of black voting rights--at least back in the 1870s. While he admitted the current national Democratic party was out of touch with Mississippi, he urged that the state Democratic party was the best bulwark against federal intrusion into the state's affairs. To prove it, he pointed to his work with Governor Barnett to keep James Meredith out of the University of Mississippi.
Just before the election, the Paul B. Johnson, Jr. campaign was hit with a bombshell. Newsweek magazine, as well as a number of Mississippi newspapers, published a transcript of tape-recorded phone conversations between the two Kennedy brothers, Governor Barnett, and Lt. Governor Johnson. In it, at Barnett's and Johnson's insistence, the Kennedys agreed to act out a public drama where it would look like Mississippi's leaders were resisting integration to the bitter end, and finally giving in only when absolutely forced to.
Robert Kennedy: I will send in the marshals, and I will have the head marshal pull a gun and I will have the rest of them have their hands on their guns and their holsters.
Ross Barnett: I was under the impression they were all going to draw their guns...
Robert Kennedy: I hate to have them all draw their guns as I think it could create harsh feelings.
Paul B. Johnson, Jr.: It is absolutely necessary that they all draw their guns.
Both Barnett and Johnson issued weak and vague denials of the transcript's validity, though many of their spokesmen proclaimed more loudly that it was a fake. In the closing days of the campaign, the question now was: Taking into account the transcript, which candidate hates the Kennedys the most? Rubel Phillips said the transcript showed that Barnett and Johnson did not really hate the Kennedys, but in fact had cooperated with them. Paul Johnson said that even if you assumed the transcript was genuine, it could only have come from the White House, and thus the Kennedys were trying to help the Rubel Phillips campaign.
On election day, Rubel Phillips did far better than any Mississippi Republican candidate (for any office) since the 1870s or 1880s. He won more than 138,000 votes, or 30 percent. If he had been able to prove the transcript genuine, it might have been a very close race. As it turned out, the transcript was genuine, but unfortunately for Phillips this became clear only after the election. For his part, Paul B. Johnson, Jr. was not as much of a die-hard segregationist as had been Barnett. While no civil rights advocate, he did try to prevent bloodshed during his term--secretly infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan with his state police, for example.
As for the Mississippi Republicans, Rubel Phillips had been the prophet in the wilderness. The following year Mississippi voted as overwhelmingly for Goldwater as the rest of the U.S. voted overwhelmingly for LBJ. Fully 87 percent of Mississippi's vote went to the Senator from Arizona. It was the first time Mississippi had voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 92 years. Also in 1964 Mississippi elected a Republican member of Congress for the first time since 1882.
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Rubel Phillips tried again for the governor's office in 1967, at GOP leaders' request, but he won fewer votes the second time around. Later Phillips got into legal trouble involving real estate sales, and served time in prison.
Buttons of all kinds from Mississippi are scarce. Buttons from the 1960s and 1970s are scarce because there are so few political collectors in the state. The most recent APIC roster shows only six members there. With few political collectors present, few items enter the hobby. Of the various buttons used to illustrate this article, only the Roll with Ross appears with any regularity, and even it is not a common button.
The Coleman button (pictured earlier) is probably from the 1963 primary, although Coleman had waged a successful election campaign in 1955. The Roll with Ross button is from the 1959 primaries.
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The Phillips litho that appeared at the top of this article is shown here at its actual size, approximately 7/8 inch. It features the slogan Phillips borrowed from boxing: "K.O. the Kennedys." It is extremely scarce, and if it did appear at auction would almost certainly attract interest from both locals collectors and Kennedy specialists. The second Phillips button, with only the candidate's name, seems likely to be from the 1967 campaign.
Since I was unable to locate a "Stand Tall with Paul" button, I'll close with a portrait of Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. He helped keep the Mississippi governor's office in Democratic hands until finally Kirk Fordice won for the Republicans in 1991.
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What fun is a political campaign without music to go along with it? Rubel Phillips enlisted the support of a number of popular musicians to aid his 1963 bid for the governor's office. These included Tex Ritter, Chet Atkins, Carl Perkins, and Porter Wagner, all of whom helped attract crowds for Rubel Phillips rallies.
The Phillips campaign also had a theme song, sung to the tune of the folk song "Reuben, Reuben":
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| © 1997 by Stephen Cresswell |
Sources: This article was based on a number of Mississippi newspapers from 1963, also on the author's interview with Rubel Phillips conducted a couple of years ago. Illustrations are from the author's collection, except the portrait of Paul B. Johnson, Jr., which is reproduced from the book Politics Mississippi Style by Erle Johnson.
