POLITICAL NOTES: Tarheel Rebel

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When North Carolina's Senator J. Melville Broughton died early this month, after only four months in office, the pressure squads closed in fast on Governor Kerr Scott to push their favorite candidates. But last week Kerr Scott tore up their lists and shook Tarheel professionals to their political roots. The man he chose for the seat was the University of North Carolina's scrappy little President Frank Porter Graham (TIME, Jan. 3), who has made a career of fighting old Southern prejudices.

For beleaguered Administration leaders, 62-year-old Dr. Graham would provide a dependable, much-needed vote right where it counted most. He had helped write the Administration's basic civil rights program. He had gone down the line for everything else in Harry Truman's Fair Deal. For a good 20 years he had been the outspoken sparkplug of scores of liberal and left-wing groups.

Though Communists had sometimes sneaked in behind this respectable façade and made Graham look a little silly, he himself still commanded the respect of many Southerners. Ohio's John Bricker last week brought up the old, discredited question of Graham's fitness to handle confidential information as an atomic adviser. The first Senator on his feet was North Carolina's conservative old Clyde R. Hoey. He disagreed, Hoey admitted, with many of Graham's principles. But, orated frock-coated, windy old Senator Hoey: "He is as loyal as any American who walks this earth ... no one who knows him would hesitate to trust him with any secret this nation might have . . . he is a great American." In his interim appointment, new Senator Graham will serve until 1950, may then try to be elected for the rest of the term.