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. - le - you-snow?” By ROBERT C. RUARK - m, The Soul. to Make’ a Joan of | Arc. Henry. EMPHIS, Sept. 6—Over in the little4#8wn of Monroe, La., a t. - grizzled old man strode up to Henry Wallace’$ red aute and pushed his face right onto Henry’s, like as if he was going to kiss him spang on the mouth. “Don’t you bother te hurry pack,” the old man growled. He stepped away, Henry’s car whizzed off, and a fat ripe tomato splat- tered on its stern. That was the sum of the violence received by Mr. Wallace in the three sup- posedly toughest states—Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Those were the_states that. were _hope-_ fully regarded by the Progressive Party as stage props to build persecution prestige for Henry. If those states mobbed Mr. Wal- Jace—if they upset his car, if they slapped him in the clink, if they rode him on a rail, if they treated him to some sorghum-and-feath- ers—then Henry’s brief barnstorm would be a screaming success. If, by chance, his presence touched off a riot, with the police swing- ing billies and maybe the Klan ~ riding around in bed sheets, then the junket would be a triple stroke of genius, because it would’ afford Mr. W. scads of docu- mented horror to feed the North- ern press. Th, = * * TEP ee could have come home “2 ving Joan of Arc, battered, bloody, unbowed and al] busted out in a rash of selfless nobility. It would have made fine grist for his peculiarly lopsided mental mill. It would have dignified the man, who stands sorely in need of dignity. But the selid South dceuble- crossed Henry. He was largely treated with cold disdain, as a minor annoyance with some freak value. He received only token boos and infrequent scallions. Alabama and Mississippi just didn’t have time to truck with him. Here in Memphis he was received without enthusiasm by an unsegregated audience. “He ain’t important enough te hate,” one Mississippian told me. “We just despise to have him around.” The word “despise” in those parts carries no animosity. It means a sort of condescending tolerance, mixed with careless pity. -The violence Mr. Wallace sought, toe stitch his doak of mar. tyrdom was administered in North Carolina, which has held fiself aloof from the corn pone and “sweet-tater belt as the “enlight- ened” Southern sister, pleased te sneer sophisticatedly at is neigh- bors. It greatly pleased the black- ~ belt states to show up North Car- olina with their studied politeness to Mr. Wallace. It was a lesson in manners, administered te the Colonel’s lady by Judy O’Grady. * * * R. WALLACE was guilty ef the worst bad taste, and of deliberate attempt to rabble-rouse, when he flaunted his Negro assc- . ciates in the face of a sector which has maintained a. certain social pattern for going on itwe centuries. It was political insult, and was coldly shaped to start trouble. It easily could’ have re sulted in murder, single or mass, with Mr. Wallace as culpable ef © fomenting it as if he had pulJed a trigger. himself. And it was com- mitted not out of love of al] man- kind, but as a callou political gimmick. The record shows that Henry never concerned himself over-much with the plight of the Negro until Harry Truman’s civil- rights legislation made a convenj- ent football out of the Negro. Henry was somewhat chagrined, in Birmingham, to find himself picketed by Negroes, whe asked him with their signs to “Please segregate yourself from us,” and “Stop using us as a football.” They also: mentioned that the Southern Negro had-come a con- siderably farther piece, in a shert time, than al] the Russians In al] ‘the centuries.