by John Egerton
Barely thirty-five years old, he took up his chosen role as a progressive reformer with eager enthusiasm. He had close ties to Ralph McGill, who had written some campaign speeches for him, and to William Hartsfield, with whom he had collaborated on some novel state and local government initiatives. With admirable skill and a flair for publicity, Arnall coaxed the legislature or acted on his own to rack up one success after another—paying off the state’s debt, restoring academic freedom to the university, reforming the penal system, lowering the voting age to eighteen, abolishing the poll tax, rewriting the state constitution, suing the railroads for their discriminatory freight rates, revoking the Ku Klux Klan’s charter. Most impressive of all, wrote Gerald W. Johnson in 1946, “he has done it without ever using the word ‘nigger’ and without denouncing the Pope, the Elders of Zion, Stalin, or the reptile press.”
When he was pushing to get the vote for eighteen-year-olds, Arnall packed the legislative galleries with wounded young soldiers. As part of his prison-reform effort, he stunned a joint session of the legislature by introducing to them an escaped convict, Robert E. Burns, whose exposé of medieval brutality against Georgia convicts had been made into a sensational film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, Arnall even managed to hold the Georgia delegation solidly in line behind Henry Wallace in the bitterly fought vice-presidential contest. So completely had he captured the state political machinery from the Talmadge forces that he was able to persuade a substantial majority of statehouse members in January 1946 to amend the new constitution’s rule against gubernatorial succession and make way for him to run for another four-year term.
But that crucial vote, 126 to 74, was just eight shy of the two-thirds majority he had to have, and Ellis Arnall, instead of being a shoo-in for reelection, was suddenly a lame duck in troubled waters. Seeing his career in jeopardy, the governor made known his interest in being Harry Truman’s running mate in 1948. (Gerald Johnson, writing in the American Mercury, strongly touted him for that post.) His hope of retaining a political base in Georgia was gone, though, and Arnall, an outsider while still in his thirties, would never return to power. His final departure from the state capitol in 1947 would stand out in the minds of those who witnessed it as perhaps the most bizarre and spectacular episode in Georgia’s political history.
One clear sign of Arnall’s determination to break the shackles of the past was his aggressive pursuit of right-wing terrorists. As attorney general under Talmadge, he had sued Hiram Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Klan and owner of an asphalt company, for manipulating prices in his dealings with the state. Then, as governor, Arnall chose Daniel Duke, the Klanbashing former prosecutor for Atlanta Mayor Hartsfield, to serve as an assistant attorney general with the primary mission of putting terrorists out of business. The governor and his attorney general, Eugene Cook, gave Duke wide latitude to accomplish that task—and for the first time in memory, Klan leaders found Georgia’s government harassing them instead of giving them protection.
“When you’re trying to break open a conspiracy,” said Duke, recalling his role years later, “you have to play rough. We used some dirty tricks, including planted evidence and fake confessions, to smoke some of those guys out.” In 1945, Duke hired Stetson Kennedy, a twenty-nine-year-old Florida journalist who had infiltrated the Klan in Atlanta, to work for him as an undercover agent. (Calling himself John S. Perkins, Kennedy had used a deceased uncle’s Klan membership in a daring ploy to gain an audience with Eugene Talmadge, and that had opened the way for him to join a local Klavern.)
Duke had other informers in the Klan, and so did William Hartsfield and Ralph McGill. One occasional supplier of inside information during the war was James R. Venable, a lawyer whose family owned Stone Mountain near Atlanta and staged Klan cross-burnings there for years. Venable was later to be the Imperial Wizard of a national KKK organization. But no other secret agent would ever make a public splash like Kennedy, Duke’s man in the sheets.
Raised in middle-class comfort in a conservative Jacksonville family, Stetson Kennedy had found himself at odds with the tenets of race and class discrimination during his college years, and because of that he was ostracized by his closest relatives. His dissenting views were further shaped during a stint with the Florida unit of the Federal Writers’ Project just before the war. While still in his mid-twenties he wrote Palmetto Country, a volume in the American Folkways Series edited by Erskine Caldwell. By the time he got to Atlanta in 1944, he was freelancing for several magazines and had developed close ties with Washington political columnist Drew Pearson and the Southern leadership of the CIO—to both of whom, in addition to Daniel Duke, he was soon supplying inside information on the Klan. The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Southern Regional Council also came to rely on Kennedy’s insider reports.
Hounded and bedeviled by the leaks inside their rickety gunboat, the Atlanta Klan and other cells of the terrorist organization in Georgia would lash out with deadly force in 1946. But before that happened, alarm bells were sounded in every stronghold of white supremacy after federal court rulings in Texas and Georgia cracked open the ballot box for Southern blacks. A coalition of respected black leaders in Georgia used those decisions to test both the conservative will of the reactionaries and the liberal mettle of the progressives.
The U.S. Supreme Court had opened the way for electoral reform with its ruling in the Texas case, Smith v. Allwright, in April 1944. To get around the constitutional directive that no citizen shall be denied the right to vote because of race, Texas Democrats had claimed their all-white primary was not a state function but a private organization’s mechanism for choosing candidates. Dr. Lonnie Smith, a Houston dentist, sued for damages in 1941 after he was turned away from the polls because of his race. The lower courts upheld his exclusion, but Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastie of the NAACP finally prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court. In an eight-to-one decision written by Justice Stanley F. Reed of Kentucky, the court said in effect that the preliminary round of voting was an essential prerequisite of the general election, and had to be conducted under the same rules. Thus, “the right to vote in such a primary … is a right secured by the Constitution.” Years later, Marshall would call this his most significant victory—not excepting the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The day after the court handed down its ruling in the Texas case, an Atlanta NAACP official urged Georgia blacks who were already registered to go to the polls and vote in the state’s July primary. Some tried, but they were turned away. One of them, a Columbus minister named Primus E. King, subsequently sued in federal court, asking monetary damages for the denial of his right to vote. Governor Arnall decided that he was not yet ready to add the voting rights of African-Americans to his list of reforms; he instructed his attorney general to defend the white-primary law. The legislature, when it convened in early 1945, omitted all references to primaries in the new state constitution and left in place several provisions designed to restrict the access of blacks to the ballot. Arnall went along with them. In speeches and comments to reporters, he said he was opposed to an open primary that put no limits on the right of Negroes to vote.
Federal judge T. Hoyt Davis of Macon heard the Primus King case, and the NAACP provided counsel for the plaintiff. In Atlanta, a delegation of black leaders called on Arnall to disavow the white primary, but the governor avoided a direct response.
When the judge decided the case in October 1945, he followed the precedent of Smith v. Allwright. The primary was an integral part of the election process, he ruled, and withholding the right to vote was a violation of the Constitution. The decision was upheld on appeal in March 1946. After the Supreme Court declined to consider it further, Arnall finally spoke out in support of an unrestricted ballot. Whether he liked it or not, he said, this was the law of the land, and Georgia would abide by it. He rejected the demands of many politicians that he call a specia
l session of the legislature to circumvent the ruling.
The leaders of right-wing extremism in Georgia turned on the governor with a vengeance. House Speaker Roy Harris and Agriculture Commissioner Tom Linder, two outspoken racists in his administration, publicly denounced and deserted him. Gene Talmadge, his old adversary, quickly declared that he would be a candidate for governor in the July primary, and vowed that no blacks would vote in primary elections after he resumed control of state government. The Klan promised to punish blacks who dared to vote.
For the time being, though, the federal court decision opened the 1946 primaries to blacks—to those already registered for the general election, at least, and any others who could sign up—and they quickly showed the power of their numbers. (In one-third of the state’s counties, there were more blacks of voting age than whites.) In Augusta and Richmond County, Roy Harris’s home district, more than seven thousand blacks went to the polls and helped an independent candidate defeat Harris by almost two to one. Later in the summer, more than fifty thousand blacks voted in the statewide primary for the first time, causing Talmadge to lose the popular vote to his main challenger, James V. Carmichael—but the former governor squeaked through with enough county-unit-system points to claim the office once again.
That spring and summer of 1946 was a pivotal season in Georgia’s postwar history, a seesaw time of highs and lows. It was then that the CIO launched its million-dollar “Operation Dixie” drive to bring a million Southern workers, white and black, into the labor movement. The federation also hired George S. Mitchell to head a political action committee aimed at making voters out of those new union members. The American Veterans Committee chapter in Atlanta (one of about twenty in the Southeast), took an activist stance on a wide range of public issues, including desegregation of the city police department and the libraries.
The significance of the open primary ruling was underscored by Roy Harris’s defeat in Augusta and the collapse of his budding Cracker Party, a militantly anti-black political group that never really got off the ground. Mayor Hartsfield, viewing the potential of the black vote with a realistic politician’s steely eye, told the minority leadership of Atlanta that if they could register ten thousand new voters before the July primary, he would listen carefully to any concerns they had about public programs and services. In fifty-one days they put eighteen thousand new names on the rolls, and Hartsfield responded promptly by initiating a series of administrative moves designed to lower the Jim Crow barriers.
The newly empowered black voters of Atlanta were instrumental in former legislator Helen Douglas Mankin’s win over several conservative opponents in a special election to fill a vacant seat in Congress early in 1946. (She again won a popular plurality in the regular election that fall, but the notorious county unit system tabbed her an eight-to-six loser, and she was turned out of office.) In spite of their gains, though, the statewide total of adult blacks who actually registered and voted still amounted to only a small fraction of the whole. Nevertheless, white politicians alarmed by the increases bent to the task of planning new ways to prevent the masses, black or white, from entering freely into the political process. With the return of Eugene Talmadge, they fully expected to succeed.
Governor Arnall, his state power almost used up but his national hopes still alive, continued to walk a liberal tightrope, balancing his reformist aims with a racial view that affirmed legal rights but also the principle of social segregation. During his last months in office, he put the finishing touches on a book, The Shore Dimly Seen, that would be published in New York late in 1946 as both a summation of his experiences and beliefs and a platform for his future candidacy. (Most of the spadework on the book and on numerous magazine articles published under his byline was done by De Witt Roberts, a former south Georgia journalist and trusted Arnall cadreman.)
The return of Eugene Talmadge to political power that summer was at least coincidental, if not somehow correlated, with the surge of extremist posturing and violence that swept across the state. The quadruple lynching in Walton County happened just before his campaign visit there and his subsequent primary victory; the Klan was marching and burning crosses in almost every section of the state, even as Arnall’s informants and prosecutors nipped at their heels; and in Atlanta, the Nazi-style group that called itself the Columbians had suddenly burst upon the scene just in time to climb aboard the Talmadge bandwagon.
Two young toughs—Emory Burke, up from a life of poverty in Alabama, and Homer L. Loomis, Jr., down from the patrician comforts of Princeton University and his father’s Wall Street law firm—were the spotlighted bosses of the Columbian cult. They and their followers, dressed like Hitler’s brown-shirted youth gangs, could be seen goose-stepping in formation on the city streets. They sounded like Nazis too, glorifying “Anglo-Saxon purity” and heaping vilification on Negroes, Jews, Communists, and the rich. Undercover agents for Daniel Duke (including an attractive blonde named Renée Forrest, a young Jewish woman from New York, who posed as a secretary) soon provoked the leaders into clashes that landed them in jail on charges of assault and incitement to riot.
Duke was closing out his tenure in the attorney general’s office with a flourish, pursuing several lines of legal attack against terrorist groups. “The Klan and the Columbians are one and the same thing and ought to be tarred with the same brush,” he said. Focusing specifically on the Columbians, he added, “The Klan and Gene Talmadge are the hens that hatched this biddy.” At a court hearing on Duke’s petition to revoke the Columbians’ charter, Emory Burke so angered the prosecutor with interruptions and insults that Duke suddenly hauled off and floored him with one punch. He apologized to the court for his “inappropriate behavior,” but the judge professed not to have seen the offense. “I must have looked away for a moment,” he said with a straight face. A short time later, Burke and Loomis were found guilty and sent to prison, and the Columbians joined the Crackers in quiet oblivion.
Stetson Kennedy also climaxed his undercover work in spectacular fashion, publishing Southern Exposure early in 1947 and shedding his “John S. Perkins” alias when he appeared as a witness at the trial of the Columbians. Some of the terrorists whose secret sanctums he had infiltrated were present when he was called to the stand, but they could only watch in shocked and silent rage as the mole calmly surfaced. It took a special escort to get Kennedy past his betrayed Klan “brothers” when he left the courtroom.
In February 1947, Kennedy and Ellis Arnall met in person for the first time while promoting their books in Manhattan. Arnall subsequently wrote a favorable review of Southern Exposure for the New York Times. Both men, and Dan Duke too, had shaken Georgia’s reactionary establishment to its heels, but now the old guard was coming back to power. In later years, Duke would become a judge and Arnall would run again for governor (without success); as for Kennedy, two later books of his, 7 Rode with the Klan and Jim Crow Guide, would be published overseas in the 1950s. None of the three reformers would have as much of an impact later as they had had during and after the war.
Kennedys Southern Exposure was the first nonfiction volume by a white Southerner to confront what he called “the Squalid South” in all its white-supremacist disarray. In tone and focus, the book was cast in the mold of a muckraking expose. Kennedy hammered especially hard at the forces that denied black Southerners their constitutionally guaranteed right to full and fair treatment in the workplace and the political arena.
In a chapter called “Total Equality, and How to Get It,” Kennedy noted that all but the most rabidly anti-black reactionaries were at least giving lip service to equal opportunity, while still holding firm against what they called “social equality”—that is, any hint of lowering the barriers of segregation. In stating his own opposition to Jim Crow laws and his belief in full equality, Kennedy conceded that “the means for the forcible overthrow of segregation are not at hand,” but he went on to lay out a strategy for “the real Southern liberals, white and black,”
to follow. “So long as white supremacy remains an economic and political reality,” he said, “no amount of education or agitation can bring about the abolition of segregation in the South by the South.” He added:
Short of another civil war, the Southern Negro must be emancipated economically and politically before he can be emancipated socially. This means that he must first join democratic labor unions and beat a democratic path to the polls. Once these two things have been accomplished … the abolition of Jim Crow will be as inevitable as was the abolition of chattel slavery after Civil War broke out. … If this strategy is not followed, there may be no progress in any direction, but reaction in all directions. Hence this is not at all a strategy of appeasement, but the most radical of practical programs for achieving total equality without abortive violence.
Kennedy went on to reiterate his belief that blacks were “entitled to total equality now,” but that “by suffering segregation another decade (no more),” they would do much to ensure that equality, once it came, was more than an empty gesture. In any case, he warned, social change would never come easily: “White supremacy is going to die a hard death—almost as hard as slavery’s. It will take the South approximately as long to get over the death of Jim Crow as it is taking to get over the passing of Old Black Joe, the slave.”
Drew Pearson, the liberal columnist, was yet another nemesis of the right wing in 1946. He spoke from the steps of the state capitol in Atlanta that summer. Governor Arnall introduced him to a huge throng and a national radio audience, and Pearson, sensing the tensions that divided the region, tempered his critical remarks with some words of praise for the South. But his main topic was the curse of terrorism. He drew catcalls and boos from some in the audience—and cheers from others—for his blunt denunciation of Talmadge and his characterization of Klansmen as latter-day carpetbaggers. Later in the fall, when the state’s Democrats convened in Macon and turned the party machinery back to Talmadge, Pearson published the names of seventeen Klansmen among the governor-elect’s delegates—a list, he said, that reads “like a roll call of the nightshirt brigade at Stone Mountain.”