When former Representative Charles Longstreet Weltner of Atlanta, the 39-year-old great grandson of the author of the Confederate Constitution, gave up his Democratic nomination for a third term in Congress rather than abide by a party loyalty oath that would have required him to support Lester Maddox, a colleague in the House commented, "We may have to wait another 50 years before we get another Charlie Weltner."

That was in 1966, when Weltner was known as one of the South's leading moderates, a man who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the first time around, changed his mind and voted for the final version, and was reelected. He was assigned to the House Un-American Activities Committee and then startled its members by calling for an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan.

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Currently, Weltner is spending a month at Harvard as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Politics.

Young and handsome of aristocratic birth, Weltner has managed to combine Southern courtliness with a Northern education (Columbia Law School) and temperment.

Yet the only people who seemed very

impressed by Weltner's dramatic announcement were the editorial writers of the New York Times who called him a "candidate of conscience." They urged his constituents to write in his name that November.

Weltner was soundly beaten by Republican Fletcher Thompson when he tried to win back his old Fifth District seat in 1968. He decided against running again in 1970, and the Democratic nomination went to Rev. Andrew Young, a former aide to Martin Luther King who lost to Thompson by an even wider margin last November.

Aside from speculation that he was going to run for Mayor of Atlanta in 1969, Weltner dropped out of active Georgia politics, and spent his time practicing law and writing a column for the Atlanta Constitution.

Most recently, Weltner was in the news as defense attorney for Sgt. Esquiel Tonres, who was charged with murder in connection with the Song My massacre of March 16, 1968.

Although Charles Weltner was out of step with the South in the 1960's, the results of last fall's Congressional elections indicate a new era of Southern politics where Weltner's moderation would be right at home. Last November, unknown moderates like South Carolina's John West, Florida's Lawton Chiles and Georgia's Jimmy Carter defeated their more conservative Republican opponents, and the national press once again heralded the emergence of a new South.

But Charles Longstreet Weltner is no more at home in the South today than he was five years ago. The optimism with which he might once have looked on last November's gains is not there, nor is his faith in liberalism or the Democratic Party. He has come to Cambridge, he says, to try to find some answers about what to do next.

"I just tend to think that things aren't much different in the South," he said in an interview last week. "You can make a case that things are getting better, but the case you can't make is that Southern whites are willing to change their lives. When people start talking about all the line things that are happening down South, they're not happening for the reasons they think.

"The people who won last fall didn't do it by talking about the new South," Weltner said, "but because they were expressing dissatisfaction with government institutions. The results of those elections bespeak a sense of frustration over national institutions."

He is pessimistic about building any political majority of poor whites and blacks that would appeal to this dissatisfaction. "I don't think that any Southern majority is going to be based on blacks and poor whites," he said. "They don't mix. It will be the man who conveys that sense of frustration with their lack of control over their lives who's going to have a majority."