During the hearing, the well-dressed Gallogly was nervous, his hands twisting.24 He told the Texas governor that he had been mistreated while behind bars in Georgia, beaten by guards and denied proper medical treatment. On cross-examination, however, Gallogly admitted that he’d had the soft job of being prison trusty for the last six years. In fact, for all but two weeks of the last year, Gallogly testified, he had not been in prison at all but in a hospital.
Arnall presented affidavits from the clemency hearing earlier in the year before Rivers detailing Gallogly’s privileged treatment behind bars, the gambling, the special food, living in the warden’s office. Reporters noted that O’Daniel apparently had little interest in the case, gazing at the ceiling and scratching his head.
Gallogly’s mother, Frances Yankey, told O’Daniel that the family had been promised her son would serve only three to five years if he pleaded guilty. Governor Eugene Talmadge, she added, had told the family he would have pardoned Richard if only the Atlanta Journal had not accused him of operating a “pardon racket.”25
As Georgia officials waited for O’Daniel to rule, they had a bold backup plan in case of an unfavorable decision by the Texas governor. The state of Georgia would kidnap Gallogly, Arnall recalled in a 1971 interview. Georgia had forty state troopers in Texas with machine guns and tear gas. Every morning during the extradition hearing in Austin, the heavily armed Georgia troopers would follow Dallas County sheriff Smoot Schmid and his deputies as he drove Gallogly from the county jail to the Texas state capital, Arnall remembered. “I said, ‘Smoot, if the governor doesn’t let me take this fellow back, I’m going to kidnap him,’” Arnall said.26 Under the kidnapping laws, Arnall said, Georgia would be free and clear with its cherished prisoner if the troopers could make it across the Texas state line. The larger question was why Gallogly was considered such a valuable prize that he would be retrieved even if that took a gunfight, when, after all, he had been so laxly guarded in Georgia.
In the end, a kidnapping was not necessary. O’Daniel flatly refused on October 18 to block Gallogly’s extradition and warned that “people who think Texas is a haven for criminals are mistaken.” Gallogly appealed in the courts, remaining in the Dallas jail.27
Two days later, Lon Sullivan, Georgia’s public safety director, issued a report on Gallogly’s escape, concluding that the two guards had assisted him, “either through collusion or gross negligence.”28
Meanwhile, members of the Gray family, including Gallogly’s grandmother, Mary Inman Gray, announced plans to sell the Atlanta Journal and WSB radio station to James M. Cox, the former governor of Ohio and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1920.29 Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been Cox’s running mate in that election, which they had lost in a landslide, in large part for supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a League of Nations. After the election, Cox withdrew from politics and focused on business, turning down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s offer in 1933 to become the U.S. ambassador to Germany, now under Nazi rule.
Along with the Atlanta Journal, Cox also purchased the Atlanta Georgian from William Randolph Hearst. Cox promptly closed the Georgian. He did not publicly disclose the purchase price of the two newspapers, but it seemed abundantly clear now that members of the Gray family, Gallogly’s family, would soon be coming into a large amount of cash. Yet, the windfall from the Journal sale would not be so great as many believed. Gallogly may not have been a “millionaire in prison” after all. The Grays owned the majority of the stock, but not all of it, and the ownership was divided among many members of the family and others, including the late editor John S. Cohen’s widow. And the Journal, struggling during the Great Depression, had been losing money for years. “Between the years 1934 and 1939 its losses were $926,512,” a Cox Enterprises authorized history states.30 The Journal’s losses, however, were not generally known, so the inflated perception of Gallogly’s wealth was likely only heightened by the sale of the Journal.
Within days of Cox’s purchase of the Journal, Atlanta celebrated with great fanfare the premiere of the film Gone with the Wind, another movie glorifying the Confederacy, in a way that had not been matched since the 1915 premiere of the silent movie The Birth of a Nation. There would be Confederate veterans on hand for this premiere, as there had been for The Birth of a Nation. But the veterans were now much older and fewer in number.
When the stars, including Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, arrived at the Atlanta airport, there was a parade escorting them downtown. Governor Ed Rivers rode in car 16 with Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara, and the film’s producer, David Selznick, who likely had no idea how authentic an Old South experience he was enjoying, as the governor sitting next to him was a former great titan of the Ku Klux Klan.31
An estimated three hundred thousand people lined up to greet the stars, a number that equaled the population of Atlanta at the time. “Crowds larger than the combined armies that fought at Atlanta in July 1864 waved Confederate flags, tossed confetti till it seemed to be snowing, gave three different versions of the Rebel yell, whistled, cheered, goggled,” Time magazine reported.32
At the Atlanta city auditorium the night before the premiere, the Junior League held a ball, with members dressed in hoop skirts. On the wall were portraits of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and Alexander Stephens, vice president. The stars were all there, including Gable and Leigh. There was polka music. A choir from a black church, Ebenezer Baptist, sang Negro spirituals, and among the children dressed as slaves was a ten-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., whose father was the pastor at Ebenezer and whose mother was the choir director.33
The Atlanta Daily World, the city’s black newspaper, reported that three hundred black people would be allowed to attend the Junior League ball, but only if they were willing to serve as ushers. “Boys of high school age are preferred,” the newspaper wrote. The Daily World also noted that “none of the colored actors who are a part of the famous Gone with the Wind film will participate in the colorful premiere.”34
The Junior League ball raised nearly $20,000 for charity, but a black minister, the Reverend John Clarence White, was not encouraged by the festivities that swept Atlanta, a city with one hundred thousand black citizens, a third of the total population. “The celebration of the last three days,” he wrote in the Daily World, “tends to confirm what thousands have firmly believed, that at heart the South is still the Confederacy,” White wrote. “The stars and bars are still dear to them. Dixie is still their national anthem; and the black man is most acceptable to them when he approximates most nearly the role of the white man’s chattel.” Instead of the music of the black church choirs, White heard “nothing but the hiss of the slave driver’s whip and the clanking of the chains that held their forefathers in bondage.”35
On January 6, 1940, just a few weeks after the premiere, Gallogly’s grandmother, Mary Inman Gray, died at age seventy-seven of a heart attack after climbing the stairs of Graystone, the family’s Peachtree Road mansion.36 She was a young child in 1864 when her family fled Atlanta to escape Sherman’s army. Her funeral would be held at Graystone, where so many of the family’s momentous events, happy and sad, took place.
Mary Inman Gray’s estate, including her proceeds from the sale of the Atlanta Journal and WSB radio station, was valued at $270,000.37 Each of her four living children, including Gallogly’s mother, Frances Yankey, would receive one-fifth of the estate. The last fifth would go to the heirs of another of Mary’s daughters, Jennie Gray Pearce, who died in 1928. Gallogly’s mother inherited Graystone as part of her share of the estate. It was certainly no small estate, equivalent in today’s dollars to about $4 million. But while Mary Inman Gray was wealthy, she was not so wealthy as many believed. Split five ways, the estate would be even less impressive, although some of the downtown Atlanta property in the estate would gain value as the Great Depression waned.
Newspapers noted that Gallogly, whom his grandmother had worked for years to free fr
om prison, was not mentioned in the will. A funeral notice listed Gallogly as living in Dallas, Texas, not mentioning that he was there appealing his extradition back to Georgia and that his address was a jail cell on “murderers’ row.”
11
A Bankrupt State
The director of the Georgia Welfare Department, formed by Rivers in 1937 shortly after he was inaugurated as governor, was a former congressman named Braswell Deen, a tall south Georgian. He did not take kindly to ridicule of the South, particularly by a native son like the novelist Erskine Caldwell. As a congressman, Deen put pressure on the National Theater in Washington to halt a theatrical production of Caldwell’s controversial novel Tobacco Road, calling the book “infamous, wicked and damnable” for its portrayal of impoverished Georgia families.1 Tobacco Road features a character named Ellie May, an eighteen-year-old white woman with a harelip, daughter of the book’s protagonist, a poor white sharecropper named Jeeter Lester. Ellie May is sexually promiscuous, but men will not marry her or even kiss her on the lips because of her harelip. Jeeter figures that it would cost more to get the harelip fixed than he would receive from a suitor in exchange for Ellie May.
In one scene, Ellie May tries to seduce a character named Lov, who is married to her thirteen-year-old sister. Ellie May slides across the sandy yard of the Lester home toward Lov like “an old hound dog used to do when she got the itch.” As Ellie May tries to seduce Lov, Jeeter steals a bag of turnips from his son-in-law.2
It was understandable that southerners would be embarrassed by Caldwell’s fiction, particularly since Tobacco Road was not just a book but a very popular play on Broadway and other stages. You can imagine the shame and anger at the very thought of sophisticated northerners laughing at the South nightly in a Broadway theater.
It was common, acceptable, for whites to ridicule blacks in minstrel shows, movies, and books, even in that massively successful novel Gone with the Wind. And some white southerners even tried to believe back then that blacks didn’t feel the pain of poverty. There was a coffee table book on Georgia, published in 1936, that had a picture of black men on a nighttime possum hunt, and the caption said, “Possessed of a cheerful philosophy unmatched by any other racial group, the negro, free today to live where he will, lingers contentedly in Georgia.”3
But Caldwell had changed the narrative and was making fun of poor, ignorant white people. And that could not be tolerated.
But the sad truth was that Tobacco Road was in some aspects more realistic than Gone with the Wind and many other works of literature that glorified the Old South.
And Deen had to know this, particularly as the head of the Georgia Welfare Department, which dealt firsthand with the sheer desperation of poverty that was still rampant in the late 1930s. Despite his grandstanding in Congress about Tobacco Road, Deen overruled a Georgia county welfare board when it refused to grant benefits to a white woman who gave birth to a mixed-race child. “The child could not help its color,” Deen told historian Jane Herndon in 1971. “The child was helpless.”4
Under the administration of Governor Ed Rivers, Georgia quickly found itself helpless to help anyone, including the poor rural Georgians who had been the inspiration for Caldwell’s Tobacco Road.
State spending greatly exceeded revenue after Rivers vastly expanded the scope of government, including Social Security pensions for the elderly, welfare payments for families with children, a minimum seven-month school year, free textbooks, and expanded public health services. He built a new tuberculosis hospital in Milledgeville and new buildings at the state psychiatric hospital complex, replacing “archaic” structures that were firetraps.
New Deal money covered many of these programs but not all the costs, with state matching funds required from Georgia. Even a portion of the costs of administering Social Security fell back on the states and counties. But there was no assurance of where the money would come from. The state’s general appropriations in 1939 topped $21 million, while revenue was only $12.5 million.
Rivers could not convince the legislature to raise taxes to cover the shortfall, in part because growing charges of corruption eroded the governor’s political capital. In particular, revelations that Rivers had installed the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Hiram Evans, as the state’s asphalt king, and that the state was therefore paying far more than it should for road building, did not help relations between the governor’s office and the legislature as money became tighter and tighter.
In February 1939, as federal investigations swirled under the direction of Lawrence Camp, whom FDR had backed for the U.S. Senate in the 1938 “purge primaries,” the Georgia legislature finally decided to hold a hearing on Evans’s asphalt business. The grinning, affable ex-dentist and imperial wizard testified at the hearing.
One legislator simply could not understand the business logic: Why would Evans, who owned an asphalt company himself, receive commissions from the three companies that competed with him?
“They understand the setup and it is satisfactory to them,” Evans replied.5
The imperial wizard then excused himself from the legislative hearing and rushed out to attend to urgent Klan business.
The previous Saturday night, six men in downtown Atlanta had been snatched from street corners and roughly shoved into cars by hooded Klansmen as part of an initiation ceremony, terrifying onlookers. Evans apologized for the incident, said it was unauthorized, and promised that something like that would not happen again. He said he had ordered an estimated fifteen thousand Klansmen in Fulton County to turn in their robes to headquarters, although that number was likely an exaggeration given that the Klan could muster only a few hundred members to its annual “Klonvocation” each year. “When a member pays for his robe, he pays for the privilege of wearing it,” Evans told reporters. “The robe itself remains the property of the Ku Klux Klan.”6
It was an odd juxtaposition. On the same day, Evans testified before a legislative committee at the state capitol about lucrative state asphalt contracts while also fielding questions from reporters about staged kidnappings in downtown Atlanta. Reporters never asked the larger question: what kind of organization incorporates kidnapping into its initiation rituals?
Eventually, the asphalt “setup” apparently became too much to stomach for Lint Miller, the highway department board chairman from Lakeland. In 1939, Miller imposed a cap on the amount the state would pay per pound of asphalt.
Rivers was quick to react. He tried to oust Miller in December 1939.7 When the highway board chairman refused to leave his office, Rivers’s assistants literally picked up the 125-pound man and carried him out of the building, breaking Miller’s eyeglasses in the process. Rivers then declared martial law and posted National Guardsmen to prevent Miller from returning to his office. The highway board chairman filed suit in state and federal courts and won, but Rivers defied the rulings, still refusing Miller entry into the highway department offices. “I do not propose to abdicate as the governor of Georgia,” Rivers said.8
His defiance of the courts had real consequences. In the spring of 1940, a U.S. marshal arrested Rivers on a contempt citation after the governor delivered a speech to a meeting of educators at the Macon City Auditorium. The governor was released on his own recognizance and ordered to return to a hearing the next week. Miller, the highway board chairman, would label Rivers a “dictator.”9
The Atlanta Constitution in April 1940, citing Rivers’s defiance of state and federal court rulings in the Lint Miller controversy, said the governor had come “dangerously close” to “extra-legal means”—operating outside the law—to achieve his goals.10
After the Georgia Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of Miller, Rivers backed down, and the highway board chairman resumed his post, but Miller later complained that there was no work for him to do, there were no papers for him to sign, and highway department employees avoided him.
During the Miller controversy, Rivers asked Jim Gillis, a highway board memb
er, if the state was paying too much for asphalt, and Gillis replied, “Yes.” The next day, Gillis received an angry phone call from Hiram Evans. “What do you mean by meddling in my business?” the imperial wizard and asphalt king asked. “Another man meddled in my business. See what happened to him?”11 It was clear that Evans was referring to the recent physical ouster of Miller, the highway board chairman.
With Miller neutralized, Evans’s asphalt extravaganza boomed. His profits increased from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands.
It was becoming increasingly clear that the Rivers administration had taken corruption to a new level.
Meanwhile, as early as 1938, the state of Georgia found itself no longer able to pay schoolteachers. Rivers was forced in February 1939 to seek a $2.1 million loan from the Fulton National Bank, but that would cover only six weeks of teacher back pay, he said. Teachers at that point had not received a state check in two and half months. Later in the year, after the legislature refused to raise taxes, the situation deteriorated further and the state again stopped paying teachers, forcing some schools to close early for the year while others survived on local funds only.
In his zeal, Rivers had embraced the major programs of the New Deal, but there were added costs to the state of Georgia with each of these federal programs. During Rivers’s first two-year term, Georgia’s spending on public health increased from $125,000 a year to more than $1 million, with only $400,000 coming from the New Deal. For instance, the new hospital buildings at Milledgeville cost $5 million, but the New Deal paid only $4 million and the remainder was required to be paid with state funds. Georgia temporarily suspended Social Security payments to sixteen thousand recipients in the spring of 1939 because the state could no longer make its required contribution.
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 15