Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  13

  The Long Way Up

  As Ed Rivers left the governor’s office in early 1941, clouded in controversy, with the public outraged at his massive pardoning of criminals and the state’s finances in shambles, his friend from the Klan, Hiram Wesley Evans, was also witnessing a collapse of power and prestige.

  For Evans, the downfall was triggered, in part, by the Klan’s old nemesis, the Catholic Church.

  The former Imperial Palace of the Ku Klux Klan was purchased by the Catholic Church. The white-columned mansion from which so much vitriol had been generated was torn down. On that ground, a church called Christ the King was constructed.

  By then the Klan, which had once boasted more than a million dues-paying members, which owned universities and real estate and robe factories, which even ventured into the movie business, was fading away, its imperial wizard, Hiram Evans, working in a windowless office in downtown Atlanta. Evans was thriving personally, since he controlled the state’s lucrative asphalt business. But the Klan empire was dying.

  And the Catholic Church was building a brand-new cathedral on the Klan’s former sacred grounds.

  It is difficult to overstate the Klan’s longtime hatred of Catholics. Evans wrote an entire book about the subject in 1930, concluding that Catholics could never be truly assimilated into American democracy because in the end, they answered not to America, not to democracy, but to the pope. This loyalty was enforced through the Catholic Church’s parochial school system, Evans argued. And then there was the fact that Catholics would always steadfastly refuse to accept the tools necessary to purify the white race: eugenics, birth control, euthanasia.

  As the Klan declined over the years, Evans gave a nostalgic interview to the New York Times in 1937, just as his fellow Klansman Ed Rivers became the new governor. Evans cited the defeat of the Catholic Al Smith in the 1928 presidential race as the Klan’s peak and the ultimate reason for its decline. After Smith’s defeat, Klansmen “put their guns on their shoulders and went home,” Evans said. “The battle was over.”1 For the Klan, it could not get any better than that.

  In early 1939, the imperial wizard received an interesting invitation from the Reverend Gerald P. O’Hara, bishop of the Catholic Church’s Savannah-Atlanta diocese. He wanted Evans to attend the dedication of the new cathedral, built upon the grounds of the former Imperial Palace, which the Klan had sold in the 1920s when it moved the national headquarters temporarily from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.

  After meeting O’Hara, Evans accepted the bishop’s invitation to the dedication of Christ the King, which was front-page news in Atlanta.2 It was freezing cold as Cardinal Dennis Dougherty walked around the $350,000 cathedral and blessed the new building with incense and holy water. A Methodist minister in Atlanta, Walter Holcomb, called the dedication “one of the greatest triumphs over intolerance that I have ever seen.”3

  Governor Ed Rivers attended the service along with Evans, his former boss from the Klan, and pronounced it “all so beautiful.”

  Atlanta Constitution columnist Ralph McGill wrote, “This is the South, where intolerance is supposed to reign. And where, it must be stated, it does on occasion, take charge. But not so much as in any other section of the nation.”4

  Yet, the South was still the South. And the Klan was still the Klan.

  By May 1939, there was talk of a revolt within the Klan ranks against Evans not only for his attendance at the dedication of Christ the King, and the front-page newspaper photograph in which Evans appeared consorting with Catholic leaders, but also for “his open friendliness” to Postmaster General James Farley, a Catholic, who was being touted as a possible challenger to FDR in the 1940 election.

  In June the Klan met in Atlanta, and Evans was ousted as imperial wizard, replaced by James Colescott. Evans, the former dentist, had been replaced by Colescott, a former veterinarian.

  When a reporter asked Evans if his home on Peachtree Battle Avenue would go to his successor, Evans snapped at him. “What? What? That’s my home. Turn it over to the next wizard? Why that’s ridiculous.” He told the reporter, “I expect I earn five times the amount you are earning and have been earning it for 30 years. You know I’ve been making big money for a long time and I’m a big spender.” The defrocked Klansman said he planned to stay in Atlanta. “I’ve got plenty of money-making left in me,” he said.5 And indeed he did, since he still had a virtual lock on the state asphalt business. But that too would soon come to an end.

  A federal grand jury in May 1940 indicted Evans and John Greer Jr., the highway department’s purchasing agent, on charges of conspiracy to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act with the blatant asphalt scheme. Three companies were also indicted: the American Bitumuls Company, the Shell Oil Company, and the Emulsified Asphalt Refining Company. According to the indictment, the state of Georgia in 1937 and 1938 purchased $456,427 in asphalt from companies owned or represented by Evans, and paid $90,000 more than it would have paid on “competitive, independent bids.”6

  Greer refused to notify independent bidders—those not represented by Evans—about state asphalt purchases and “suppressed” the bids if other companies somehow managed to find out about the contracts on their own, according to the indictment.

  While purchasing agent for the highway department, Greer had engaged in a mysterious personal purchase of twenty-five acres north of Atlanta. A real estate agent would later testify that he delivered the deed to Greer at the highway department headquarters on a day the building was closed for the holidays. Greer later transferred the property to Rivers, who wanted it for a weekend getaway, according to the testimony.

  Rivers’s wife, Lucille, would later testify that Greer bought the property for the governor so that no one would know the location of the getaway and “the governor could go there and have quiet.”7

  In January 1941, Evans and the three asphalt companies pleaded no contest to the federal criminal charges and were fined $15,000 each. Evans immediately wrote a check for the fine, an obvious sign of his wealth at the time.8

  Greer decided to fight the charges, but a federal jury convicted him after a six-week trial.9 Greer faced three years in prison, but he appealed, and the conviction was eventually overturned.10

  The justice system had failed miserably when Rivers emptied the prisons, freeing scores of killers and gangsters, and it had clearly failed on December 9, 1938, when six black men died in the electric chair at Tattnall Prison, four of them without the benefit of a single appeal, while a white man who had killed his and his daughter’s baby was spared. But now the rule of law seemed to be staging a comeback, because the legal troubles for Evans were only just beginning. The Klan leader apparently did not believe in paying his required share of income taxes. From 1937 to 1941, the years in which Evans was raking in profits from his monopoly on the state’s asphalt business, he paid only $8,105 in federal income taxes, the Bureau of Internal Revenue said. Evans owed $348,069 in taxes, the government said. That is the equivalent of about $5.6 million in 2014 dollars.

  Evans later reached an agreement in federal tax court to pay a staggering $257,763 in back taxes. The Klansman was not exaggerating when he said he had been making big money.11

  Tax court records provide a glimpse if not a complete picture of Evans’s actual income during these lucrative years. In 1937, he had a net income of $100,714. For that year, he owed $49,109 in unpaid federal taxes, indicating a tax liability of about 50 percent. The banner year for Evans was 1940, the last year of the Rivers administration. Tax court records do not indicate his net income for that year, but his unpaid taxes for that year were $236,547.12

  It is likely that with income that high, Evans would have been required to pay income taxes of about 70 percent or more of his net income. That would indicate that for the year 1940, the former imperial wizard had a net income, after all deductions, of more than $300,000. This was at a time when Rivers’s salary as governor was a mere $7,500.

  After reading the tax c
ourt ruling against Evans, newspaper columnist Drew Pearson wrote that the Klan’s true colors were finally revealed. In the end, he wrote, the Klan was more about cash than ideology. “Peddling hate is an extremely lucrative racket,” Pearson wrote.13

  For Hiram Wesley Evans, the legal troubles would continue to mount, particularly after his governor, Ed Rivers, was no longer in office. Georgia attorney general Ellis Arnall sued Evans, Greer, and the three asphalt companies, seeking $270,000 in damages, eventually forcing them to repay $36,827 in overcharges.

  Ed Rivers would soon be dealing with his own set of troubles, starting with a strange, violent attack in his own home on the beautiful shores of Banks Lake in south Georgia.

  Less than a year after he left office, a crazed man knocked on the front door of Rivers’s new home in Lakeland and pulled a gun on the former governor in an apparent kidnapping attempt. Rivers and his wife, Lucille, wrestled with the man, a former Pittsburgh schoolteacher named Horace Bickle. Shots were fired but the former governor and his wife were able to temporarily pin Bickle to the floor. Mrs. Rivers accidentally bit her husband’s thumb, thinking it was the assailant’s. Bickle broke loose and escaped. When police surrounded him in a tourist cabin near Valdosta, Bickle pulled out the pistol and shot himself to death.12

  In a letter to his wife a few days earlier, Bickle had expressed his “growing hatred for our local, state and national leaders who have betrayed the people and fattened by doing so.” Among Bickle’s possessions was a notation on a piece of paper: “1,915 pardons … deputies wrote them out in wholesale lots.”14

  A few months later, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Rivers, his son E. D. Rivers Jr., Hiram Evans, John Greer Jr., and a host of others on corruption charges, many of them involving the sale of asphalt, machinery, and other items to the state. The most serious of the charges alleged that Rivers conspired with Hiram Evans in a “corrupt scheme” to sell the state asphalt at inflated prices.15

  There were other shady deals that Fulton County prosecutor and former Klansman John Boykin either did not know about or chose to ignore. More than seventy years later, George Banks of Rivers’s hometown of Lakeland still had a canceled $5,000 check his father, an insurance agent, wrote to Rivers. It was the governor’s share of the $10,000 commissions the elder Banks received for an insurance policy on the state capitol and other buildings.

  Rivers devised a way to mask the payment, George Banks recalled. As a young lawyer in Lakeland, Rivers found a way to stake a legal claim on the water rights to Backwater Creek, which ran through the Banks family farm. As his $5,000 share of the state insurance policies, Rivers sold the senior Banks the water rights to the creek, even though those rights, under an 1840s law, were awarded to the owner of the land. “The water rights went with our land anyhow,” George Banks said. “We bought the rights twice, once when Dad bought the land and once when he bought the water rights from Rivers.” Rivers as governor had arrangements with “many people” doing business with the state to “share” their earnings, said Banks.16

  Boykin brought Rivers to trial in 1942 but only on the pettiest of charges in the indictment, charges that Rivers used state money for gasoline, flowers, doctor’s bills, and stationery. The jury deadlocked on the charges, voting 11–1 in favor of acquittal.

  In 1921, during one of the Klan’s many sex scandals, Boykin had openly admitted his Klan membership to a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, but said it would have “no effect on his fearless and thorough prosecution” of the Klan it if broke the law. “I am a Mason,” Boykin said, “but I have never hesitated about prosecuting a Mason.”17

  But to this day, the question remains: How vigorously did Boykin prosecute fellow Klansmen?

  * * *

  Hiram Evans met the same result as Rivers when he faced trial in state court on the asphalt conspiracy charges. The jury deadlocked 6–6. Boykin could not seem to get a conviction.18 Finally, in 1943, Boykin gave up, dropping the cases, in part because so many witnesses were overseas fighting in World War II.19 Charges were also dropped against Rivers’ former chauffeur, Albert Chandler, the only person ever indicted in the pardon scandal.

  Eugene Talmadge succeeded Rivers as governor after Rivers was barred by term limits from seeking another consecutive term. Talmadge was back in the governor’s mansion, but this time he finally took his own demagoguery too far.

  In the summer of 1941, Talmadge convinced a state board to fire the dean of the University of Georgia’s school of education, Walter D. Cocking. The dean’s offense: “advocating doctrines tending toward social equality of the races.”20 The board of regents, which ran Georgia’s colleges and universities, actually held a trial for Cocking. A University of Georgia faculty member, Sylla Hamilton, testified that Cocking advocated establishing a racially integrated school about thirty miles from the University of Georgia in order to uplift the state of Georgia.

  Talmadge was quick to point out that Hamilton was a solid witness, born and raised in Georgia, and her father had been a colonel in the Confederate Army. Cocking, however, was born in Iowa, “where the racial question is not the same as it is in Georgia,” said Talmadge.

  For Talmadge, the firing of Cocking might have seemed like just another episode of political grandstanding. But there were real consequences this time. Ten schools in Georgia’s university system, including the University of Georgia, lost accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools because of the governor’s “unprecedented and unjustifiable political interference.”21

  There was outrage at Talmadge among Georgians who were proud of their colleges and universities, particularly the Georgia Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s top engineering schools. The reputation of their colleges actually trumped race, and this time Talmadge had gone too far. Even the governor’s wife, Minnie, warned him not to alienate Georgia’s “education crowd.” Talmadge was wrong to assume that white Georgians would sacrifice anything, even the college educations of their children, to preserve segregation, just as he had misjudged the appeal of FDR’s New Deal programs to a state longing for progress.

  Ellis Arnall, the attorney general, challenged Talmadge in the 1942 governor’s race, sensing Talmadge’s vulnerability.

  Arnall, a patrician, affable lawyer who as a college student majored in Greek, had at times been an ally of both Rivers and Talmadge. As a young legislator, he had introduced legislation to require public whippings for anyone convicted of a misdemeanor. As a private attorney, Arnall had represented “thrill killer” Richard Gallogly in his attempts to win a pardon, and as attorney general he had been willing to kidnap his former client to bring him back to Georgia after an escape to Texas. Arnall called Hiram Evans a friend. But in the end, Arnall repudiated the Klan and the corruption of both Talmadge and Rivers.

  When Arnall campaigned at the University of Georgia, fifteen thousand people attended. Stores and shops closed so that the owners could hear Arnall speak about the “unjust destruction of our colleges and our university.”22

  Included in Arnall’s campaign platform was a proposal to fix a problem that surfaced during the corrupt administration of Governor Ed Rivers. Arnall advocated abolishing the governor’s power to pardon criminals.

  Arnall easily defeated Talmadge. As governor, he restored the state’s college and university accreditation. He pushed through a constitutional amendment creating a new state board of pardons and paroles. No longer would a governor have the right to pardon criminals.

  In a radio speech in September 1942 Arnall said a “pardon racket” had flourished in Georgia for the previous ten years, which encompassed the administrations of two governors: Eugene Talmadge and Ed Rivers.

  If anyone doubted the story, Arnall said, just look up the 1941 Fulton County grand jury presentments that attacked the wave of pardons delivered in the final days of the Rivers administration. The grand jury had cited the case of Rivers’s chauffeur, who had trolled the prison work camps selling pardons, s
igned and sealed, with only the name of the inmate to be filled in. Arnall quoted that grand jury: “Men who class themselves as lawyers, stooped to solicit pardon business by visiting jails, chain gangs and the penitentiary. They sold themselves to their clients by saying that it was only through such as they that anyone could hope to get a pardon, for they stood in with the administration.”23

  Here was Arnall, the attorney general of Georgia, essentially confirming that pardons had been sold under both Talmadge and Rivers. It is uncertain exactly who bought them and how much they paid, no records having surfaced which detailed that list. But it was clear that freedom was for sale.

  It is unlikely, however, that the six black men who died on December 9, 1938, could have purchased reprieves from death. They were all convicted of killing white people. Even if Rivers had been inclined to issue reprieves and even if the defendants could have raised the necessary amount of cash, the political backlash would likely have discouraged the governor from halting the executions. The larger point remains: justice under Rivers was impossible to define, so clouded had it become by corruption, racism, and politics.

  Under Arnall, that began to change. In 1945, Georgia’s new board of pardons and paroles, at Arnall’s request, commuted the sentence of Robert Burns, author of I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, to the time he had already served. Burns, fifty-five years old now and no longer a fugitive, struggled to hold back tears as he thanked the board.24

  As attorney general, Arnall had successfully sued Evans over the asphalt scandal. And as governor, he directed the state in 1946 to sue the Ku Klux Klan, seeking to revoke its Georgia charter, saying it was engaged in “unlawful activities aimed at the destruction of civil liberties.”25 This added local pressure to national pressure because at the same time, the federal government slapped a tax lien of nearly $700,000 on the Klan. In 1947, the KKK voluntarily surrendered its charter. As a nationally chartered organization, it was officially dead, although the group would continue to resurface on the local level throughout the South for years to come and even today occasionally creates controversy.