by John Egerton
The list of Georgia organizations and individuals speaking out for racial tolerance and against hate groups in 1946 continued to expand. Governor Arnall and Mayor Hartsfield and much of the press led the way, along with the CIO, the American Veterans Committee, the Southern Regional Council, the NAACP, the Urban League, organizations of churchwomen and university professors, Baptists and Methodists and Catholics in their annual state meetings—and each new voice emboldened others. Many small daily and weekly newspapers across the state expressed strong editorial opposition to the reactionary racism of the Talmadge machine. Gradually, people stood up to be identified with the forward-looking philosophy of renewal and reform that Arnall had espoused, and that scattered groups of liberal and progressive Southerners had struggled to give birth to since the early 1930s. Among all of them there stirred the barest glimmer of hope that white and black Southerners would somehow come to a fair and just accommodation with one another as mutually entitled and interdependent residents of the same region, the same country.
But those who were realistic also knew that racial accommodation was an emotional issue for most Southerners in that violent summer of 1946; they knew from the fierceness of the opposition that every step toward equality would be a struggle. Even if a majority of whites could have been persuaded that simple justice for blacks was both a moral and an ethical imperative and a matter of enlightened self-interest, relatively few of them seemed eager to become activists for the cause—and even fewer were clamoring for the hides of terrorists and other reactionary wrongdoers. The surest proof of that was on display to the world in Walton County, Georgia, just then: four young people executed in broad daylight by two dozen men, and no one—not the governor, the state attorney general, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, undercover agents, local prosecutors and grand juries, the U.S. Attorney General, the FBI, or the President of the United States—could get enough hard evidence to charge a single soul with the crime. The conservative elite, the Klan, the terrorists, and the Talmadgeites still held the upper hand.
The charade of final balloting had to be observed, but Eugene Talmadge’s primary victory was essentially his election, there being no Republican Party candidate to oppose him in November. The recording of his automatic victory that fall coincided with some surprising election outcomes elsewhere in the South; altogether they added up to the emergence of a mixed bag of new progressives and old reactionaries in state and local offices. Nationally, the Democratic Party of Harry S. Truman took an unmerciful drubbing, so shattering that when the ballots were counted, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress for the first time in almost twenty years. From the perspective of Southern liberals and moderates, it was a terrible time for the country to turn right; the reactionary South was extreme enough without more encouragement in that direction.
In all the drama and excitement of Arnall’s fall and Talmadge’s revival, few except those closest to him realized that old Gene was a sick man. It thus came as a final shock to emotionally drained Georgians in that topsy-turvy year of 1946 when the governor-elect died of cancer in an Atlanta hospital on December 21—and before the body was cold, a battle royal was raging for the right to fill his shoes. (As if to symbolize the blazing excesses of that year, a fire swept through the Winecoff Hotel on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street one December night, killing 119 people. It was the worst hotel fire in American history—one more outrage in a time and place already burdened with far too much violence and death.)
Among those who did know that the governor-elect was in failing health were his chief political adviser, Roy Harris, the deposed former House speaker from Augusta, and the Talmadge heir-apparent, his thirty-three-year-old son, Herman E. Talmadge, a lawyer and ex-navy officer who had returned to Georgia from the South Pacific in the fall of 1945. Under the provisions of the new state constitution, a lieutenant governor was to be chosen for the first time. Ellis Arnall’s candidate for the post, Melvin E. Thompson, had won in the primary, and like Gene Talmadge, he was unopposed in the general election. If something happened to Gene later on, Thompson would succeed him. But what if something happened to him sooner, before the November election or before his inauguration in January? In that case, the Talmadge advisers concluded, putting their spin on the ambiguous language of the constitution, the state legislature would choose between “the two persons having the highest number of votes” for the office—not the dead governor, obviously, and not the new lieutenant governor either, but whoever had a legitimate majority of write-in votes for governor. Say, for instance, Herman E. Talmadge.
Quietly they put out the word to get Herman’s name written in on a few ballots. “You might call it an insurance policy,” the son explained years later. “If I couldn’t keep Papa from dying, at least I could keep him from dying in vain.” But the secret strategy didn’t remain a secret; others got into the act. All told, thirty-two people received write-in votes, including Gene’s primary foe, James Carmichael, and one D. Talmadge Bowers, a north Georgia tombstone salesman—both of whom, along with Herman, garnered close to seven hundred. To the vast relief of the Talmadge forces, Carmichael said he wanted no part in a subterfuge. Then, as if on cue, Gene died a few weeks later, and “Hummon,” the choice of a few hundred of the state’s three million people, took his case to the friendly court of the Georgia General Assembly.
The lawmakers convened at the capitol in Atlanta on January 13 in an atmosphere of chaos and high tension. Ellis Arnall would be governor until his successor was sworn in—presumably on January 18—and he vowed to hold office until a proper transfer of power had taken place. M. E. Thompson claimed that as lieutenant governor he should be the legitimate successor; the younger Talmadge, of course, was supremely confident that the assembly would give the job to him. Georgia, it seemed, was about to have not one but three governors.
The two houses met in joint session on the fourteenth to settle the matter. Milling about freely among the legislators and jamming the corridors and galleries were hundreds of lobbyists and state employees reinforced by a motley legion of clamorous partisans from around the state—some of them armed, most of them drinking, all of them rowdily disruptive. “Those were right squalid times,” Herman Talmadge later recalled. The session dragged on for hours with hardly a pretense of order. A count of the general election votes showed the deceased Talmadge with 143,279, Carmichael with 699, Talmadge Bowers the tombstone drummer with 637, and “Hummon” with 617, later amended to 675 when an envelope of uncounted ballots happened to turn up at the last minute. Arnall’s forces tried to get Carmichael declared the winner and, failing that, retreated to their former position that Thompson was the only legitimate choice. But a clear majority of the legislature knew from the first how the session had to end. Finally, they sent the chamber into convulsions by designating Herman Eugene Talmadge to be their governor.
It was now two o’clock in the morning of January 15. With a grinning Herman in tow, a delegation of the solons marched downstairs to literally install their man in the governor’s office. Arnall and his lieutenants were holed up there, waiting nervously for the inevitable invasion. Accounts differ on whether the aggressors banged the door in with a battering ram, took it down from the hinges, opened it with a key, or simply turned the knob and walked in. In any case, Herman made a dramatic entrance, flanked on one side by his mother, Mattie Talmadge—“Miss Mitt” to her friends—and on the other by Roy Harris. Standing before the embattled Arnall, Herman said, “I presume you have been informed that I’ve been elected governor by the General Assembly.”
“Herman, you have no claim to the office of governor,” Arnall replied. “I refuse to yield the office to you. I consider you a pretender.”
A scuffle broke out between the teams of seconds; one of Arnall’s men suffered a broken jaw. Herman, fearing a destructive melee that might harm his cause, regrouped his forces in the corridor and told Arnall he’d be back. Finally, an uneasy calm returned to the capitol.
Later,
in the last hour before dawn, a Talmadge hit squad that included a locksmith and an escort of state troopers crept through the darkened halls, broke into the governor’s office, and changed the lock on the door. Another team took over the empty governor’s mansion (Arnall and his family having vacated it earlier) on The Prado, a fashionable north Atlanta residential street. Arnall made an attempt to enter his office later that morning, but he was unceremoniously shunted aside; briefly, he set up a makeshift workstation in the capitol rotunda, but that too was soon denied him. Meanwhile, M. E. Thompson and “Tombstone” Talmadge Bowers, the other claimants, put up only a token protest to the Talmadge takeover.
As bizarre and incredible as it was, this disorderly changing of the Georgia guard—a virtual overthrow by force—stirred more amusement than alarm in the Atlanta press. Ralph McGill “showed a strangely detached, nonpartisan attitude” about the whole affair, his friend and biographer Harold H. Martin later wrote. Inexplicably, McGill seemed almost to favor Talmadge in the affair, much to the chagrin of his friend Arnall, who likened the experience to being ousted “by a military coup d’état.” On the scheduled inauguration date, the ex-governor finally yielded, saying he would step aside “until the courts remove the pretender who by force and storm troopers” had seized Georgia’s highest office.
For sixty-seven days, while the state supreme court pondered the mess, Herman Talmadge ran Georgia. During that time he got the legislature to repeal all laws regarding primary elections, and told the state Democratic Party it was free to make its own rules off the books, like a private club. At hearings on these proposed changes, legislative committees allowed testimony from a surprising number of critical citizens. “Don’t sink back to the period of 1865,” pleaded one of them, R. W. Hayes, a young ex-GI. “Free Georgia from its Reconstruction complex. If the Negro was good enough to carry a gun in the war, and pay taxes, he should vote.” By far the most impressive witness was Helen Dortch Longstreet, the octogenarian widow of Confederate General James Longstreet. In a quavering voice, she came in answer to “the call of duty within my soul,” and then summoned the courage to invite “the scorn of honest men against this monstrous measure,” which she warned would “set up a dictatorship under the lying guise of white supremacy.” Unmoved, the lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to stand fast against the dike and keep democracy out.
By a vote of five to two, the supreme court ruled in March 1947 that the legislature had exceeded its authority, and that M. E. Thompson should serve as acting governor pending a special election in 1948 for the remaining two years of the term. Ellis Arnall would still be ineligible to run under the no-succession clause, but Herman Talmadge would not—and he announced his candidacy even as he vacated the capitol and the mansion to make way for Thompson. Before the smoke finally lifted from Atlanta’s “War of the Governors,” it was already becoming clear that a new Talmadge dynasty would soon begin.
Georgia was a roiling pit of political intrigue in the postwar South, but it was hardly unique in that respect. Almost every state in the region—and many a city, too—found itself whipsawed by the ideological and pragmatic scheming and the undisguised chicanery that characterized the clashing factions vying for power. Every Southern state held at least one gubernatorial election between 1944 and 1947, and the collective outcome of those races seemed to presage a little more of the spirit of reform than reaction. Some of the winners managed to sound downright progressive and forward-looking—compared, at least, with their predecessors.
James E. Folsom, the folksy populist chosen in 1946 to lead Alabama, made the best copy of these newcomers, but Jimmie Davis of Louisiana ran a close second. A sharecropper’s son who became a teacher, Davis also wrote and sang country-and-Western songs. One of his depression-era tunes, “You Are My Sunshine,” became a huge hit in 1940 (Gene Autry, Bing Crosby, and Ella Fitzgerald were among the many vocalists who recorded it), and Davis rode the wave of popularity into the governor’s mansion near the end of the war. He was regarded as a member of the faction that had been trying to wrest Louisiana from the clutches of the Long machine ever since the godfather, Senator Huey Long, was assassinated in 1935. Another postwar reformer, thirty-four-year-old DeLesseps S. Morrison, an ex-combat officer and a lawyer, was elected mayor of New Orleans in 1946 on a promise to throw out the machine crowd and clean up the city.
Earle C. Clements, Kentucky’s postwar governor, was a dependable New Dealer in the Alben Barkley mold. As he had done previously in the House of Representatives and as he would do subsequently in the Senate, Clements almost always stood with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party on the issues his Southern conservative colleagues filibustered to defeat. Wilson W. Wyatt, the wartime mayor of Louisville and President Truman’s housing czar after that, was another conspicuously liberal Southerner of the time, a cofounder of the left-wing, anticommunist pressure group called Americans for Democratic Action. (Kentucky politicians in general were seldom drawn into Southern displays of reactionary bigotry; other, more pressing economic and social problems kept them busy.)
Governors Millard Caldwell of Florida, Jim Nance McCord of Tennessee, R. Gregg Cherry of North Carolina, and J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina all appeared to stick somewhere in the middle between Arnallian reformism and Talmadgeite reaction. Thurmond was billed as a liberal in his 1946 race for governor, even though he denounced the labor movement and the push for racial equality as “communistic” (and two years later he would lead the Dixiecrat mutiny in the Democratic Party).
The other Southern states either stayed in ultraconservative hands or made a turn to the right. Mississippi was one of the former, first under Thomas L. Bailey and then under Fielding L. Wright (Thurmond’s Dixiecrat running mate in 1948). Texas, too, camped out on the far right throughout the forties, with Coke R. Stevenson and Beauford H. Jester tending the fire; Jester defeated Homer Rainey in 1946, two years after Rainey was ousted from the presidency of the University of Texas by its reactionary trustees. Arkansas replaced a middling governor, Homer M. Adkins, with a militant right-winger, Benjamin T. Laney, in 1945. The following year, Virginia gentleman Colgate W. Darden, Jr., a soft-spoken moderate, was replaced by William R. Tuck, a throwback reactionary handpicked by the minions of Senator Harry F. Byrd.
The Byrd machine still kept Virginia in its hip pocket, as it had for nearly two decades. E. H. “Boss” Crump ran Tennessee in pretty much the same fashion from his kingdom in Memphis. From the Carolinas to Texas, white politicians scurried right and left to cover their flanks as federal courts opened the way for black Southerners to vote. Calculating governors such as Thurmond of South Carolina, Wright of Mississippi, and Laney of Arkansas looked to the 1948 election as a looming crucible for right-wing Southern Democrats; at the same time, pragmatic mayors like Hartsfield of Atlanta and Morrison of New Orleans, and even Governor Folsom of Alabama, showed themselves willing and able to broaden the base of their constituency.
Political pundit Stewart Alsop, eyeing the South from a lofty perch in Washington, could hardly make heads or tails of all this. If a political revolution is in progress in the South, Alsop wrote in late 1946, “it is surely an odd and confusing revolution, proceeding rapidly in several different directions at the same time.” How could it be, he wondered, that Alabama (“the liberal oasis”) could elect a progressive senator like John Sparkman and a governor like Jim Folsom—and keep sending Lister Hill to the Senate, too—while its neighbors, Mississippi and Georgia, remained in the grip of raving reactionaries?
It was a fair question—and Alsop didn’t grasp the half of it. Even to those who knew the state intimately, Alabama was inscrutable, precisely as Russia was to Winston Churchill—a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It had those fairly liberal senators, yes, and that flamboyant new governor, true enough, and a few pretty decent House members to boot. It could claim the liberal Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court, and loyal New Dealer Aubrey Williams (back in Montgomery now, publishing a newspaper for far
mers), and highly respected labor leaders like William Mitch of the CIO. It had produced journalists and writers, activists and scholars, teachers and preachers—some white, some black—who believed in and tried their best to live by liberal and progressive humanitarian principles. On the far left, it had had active factions of Communists and Socialists in the thirties and early forties—more of them, perhaps, than any other Southern state.
And yet, as surely as Alabama coal fired the steel mills of Birmingham, Alabama racism and reactionary extremism fueled the political and economic and social machinery of the state. On the same summer day in 1946 that Alabama’s voters chose Jim Folsom to lead them, they also approved the Boswell Amendment, a new provision in the state constitution giving voter registrars broad latitude to judge applicants on the basis of “good character and good citizenship” and on their ability to “understand and explain” any part of the U.S. Constitution. Retiring Governor Chauncey Sparks campaigned hard for the amendment, which he said was needed to prevent “a flood of Negroes” from registering to vote in the wake of recent rulings by the federal courts. Sparks took his stand for “absolute segregation” and admonished Democrats to do everything necessary to maintain an all-white party.
Lined up with Sparks and sounding the racial alarm with him were such prominent Alabamians as former Governor Frank Dixon, former Senator Tom Heflin, state Democratic Party Chairman Gessner T. McCorvey, and Horace C. Wilkinson, a Birmingham lawyer long active in the fight to preserve white supremacy and segregation. The Big Mules of the industrial belt, the big planters of the Black Belt, and the Ku Klux Klan also joined the anvil chorus.