(To the right, a photo of U.S. Sen. James "Big Jim" O. Eastland of Mississippi)
OXFORD, Miss. – A politician friend came up to me at a
restaurant the other day, shook his head slowly, and said in hushed tones,
“Well, that’s the end of the Eastland Machine.”
He was referring to the passing of Brad Dye, who served as Mississippi
lieutenant governor from 1980 to 1992 after stints as state treasurer, other
offices, and back in 1954 driver for U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland during his
re-election campaign that year.
Like his mentor Eastland, whose long stretch of power included
a statewide network of lieutenants, cronies, operatives, and ward heelers that
could make or break a upcoming politician’s career, Dye came out of a different
era, one with some striking contrasts to the politics of today.
As a much-younger columnist who’d covered the state Legislature
in the early 1980s, I once described Dye as “King Brad”, then the state’s most
powerful politician who ruled from his perch in the state Senate and decided
whether missives from the state House or even the Governor’s Mansion down the
street deserved attention.
Guess I’m getting old, but I look back at Dye’s reign with a
hint of nostalgia these days. Yes, cut from the Eastland mold, he was a
conservative Democrat back when Republicans were what his mentor called a
“zero” who offered voters “mighty dern little.” Still, Dye supported Governor
William Winter’s landmark education reform package in 1982, the highway expansion
program of 1987, and decent funding for the state’s universities.
Dye lost power when Republicans began taking over the
state’s reigns in 1991—ironically the same year I called him “King Brad”!--and
that transition has proven Eastland’s words to be prophetic as well as true
when he said them. Mississippi voters still get “mighty dern little” from
Republicans other than an occasion to rail against liberals, minorities and
immigrants.
Sure, politicians like Dye early in his career often took
their cues from Eastland in Washington, D.C.—back then not a good thing if you
were African American--but at least Eastland was a Mississippian with a
constant eye on Mississippi. Perhaps that’s why he finally seemed to soften in
his last years, befriending civil rights leader Aaron Henry, accepting the
reality of civil rights gains, and making his office more responsive to the
concerns of blacks in his state.
Today, the state’s Republican rulers take their cues from
powerful ideological forces far beyond Mississippi with no non-political
interest in the state or its people.
Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, a charter member of the
FOD (Friends of Donald) club, sends Mississippi National Guardsmen to the
Texas-Mexico border in support of President Trump’s immoral immigration
policies. Bryant recently withdrew support for a $70 million three-state plan
involving Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that would have restored Amtrak passenger
rail service from New Orleans through the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Mobile,
Ala. The states would have split the cost with the federal government.
These days the billionaire Wichita, Kansas, and New York
City-based Koch brothers, their Americans for Prosperity organization, and the arch-conservative
American Legislative Exchange Council call the shots for Republicans
politicians across the country, including Mississippi. The Koch brothers, rich
with oil holdings and major producers of gasoline, asphalt, tires, and
seatbelts, don’t like public transit, and they recently helped kill a
much-needed $5.4 billion mass transit plan in Nashville, Tenn. Trump wants to
slash Amtrak funding, something the Koch brothers would applaud.
Oh, well, enough nostalgia. In reality, machine politics
still rule in Mississippi. It’s just that this go-round Mississippi’s
politicians only take orders. They don’t give them.
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