That year he attended his first Democratic National Convention in Chicago; followed by the DNC in Chicago in 1936, the 1948 event in Philadelphia, during which he was the Chairman of the Speakers Bureau for the Dixiecrats, and the 1960 one in Atlantic City. He served as a Democratic National Committeeman from 1960 to 1964, on the urging of Ross Barnett and State Executive Committee members who wanted an anti-Civil Rights delegate to the Convention, and who thereafter refused to sign any loyalty pledge, describing this obligation as "smack[ing] of totalitarianism".