The Three Governors Controversy: Skullduggery, Machinations, and the Decline of Georgia's Progressive Politics

THE THREE GOVERNORS CONTROVERSY

THE THREE GOVERNORS CONTROVERSY

Skullduggery, Machinations, and the Decline of Georgia’s Progressive Politics

* * *

Charles S. Bullock III

Scott E. Buchanan

Ronald Keith Gaddie

* * *

© 2015 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bullock, Charles S., 1942–

The Three Governors controversy : skullduggery, machinations, and the decline of Georgia’s progressive politics / Charles S. Bullock III, Scott E. Buchanan, Ronald Keith Gaddie. — 1st edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8203-4734-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8203-4837-7 (ebk.) 1. Governors—Georgia—History—20th century. 2. Governors—Georgia—Biography. 3. Georgia—Politics and government—1865–1950. I. Buchanan, Scott E. II. Gaddie, Ronald Keith. III. Title.

F291.B924 2015

975.8'043—dc23

2014038947

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

DEDICATION

To the newspaper reporters who prepared the first draft of history of the events we examine and on whom we rely heavily:

Morgan Blake

John Couric

Jim Furniss

George Goodwin

C. E. Gregory

Fred Hixson

Henry Lesesne

Doris Lockerman

Ralph McGill

Rita Saxby McGill

Robert H. McKee

Morris McLemore

L. P. Patterson

Albert Riley

M. L. St. John

Celestine Sibley

Joel W. Smith

Jack Tarver

Ken Turner

Romney Wheeler

Gladstone Williams

And those writers who received no byline

CONTENTS

* * *

Acknowledgments

Cast of Characters

Introduction

1. The Emergence of Bifactional Politics

2. Georgia in a State of Change

3. The 1946 Democratic Primary

4. The 1946 General Election

5. The Legislative Resolution of Georgia’s 1946 Gubernatorial Election

6. Two Months of Two Governors

Epilogue

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

* * *

Many people and institutions have played critical roles in the completion of this project. Our efforts were advanced by a series of research assistants that included Bryan Black, Brett Odom, and Joel Sievert. Some of the early electoral data were collected by Jessica McClelland in the course of work on her honors thesis at the University of Georgia. Buck Levins kindly allowed us to draw on some of the interviews that he conducted.

Bullock’s long-serving and long-suffering secretary, Bridget Pilcher, typed far more drafts of the manuscript than she or the authors would like to remember.

Buchanan would like to thank the Citadel Foundation for a research grant that facilitated much of his research for this book. In addition, the Department of Political Science and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma provided support for this research.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

* * *

THE GOVERNOR-ELECT

EUGENE (OL’ GENE) TALMADGE (SEPTEMBER 23, 1884–DECEMBER 21, 1946), the three-time governor of Georgia and winner of the 1946 gubernatorial election at the time of his death.

THE THREE GOVERNORS

ELLIS ARNALL (MARCH 20, 1907–DECEMBER 13, 1992), governor of Georgia from 1943 to 1947 and former state attorney general.

HERMAN E. TALMADGE (AUGUST 9, 1913–MARCH 21, 2002), son of Ol’ Gene. Herman managed his father’s gubernatorial campaigns in 1940 and 1946 and was chosen by his father’s political backers to succeed to the leadership of the Talmadge machine.

MELVIN E. THOMPSON (MAY 1, 1903–OCTOBER 3, 1980), former state revenue commissioner and the first elected lieutenant governor of Georgia.

OTHER PLAYERS (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

JIMMY BENTLEY, Talmadge associate

D. TALMADGE BOWERS, tombstone salesman from Franklin County

STANLEY BROOKS, brother of W. H. Brooks

W. H. BROOKS, clerk of the Telfair County Superior Court

JIMMY CARMICHAEL, former state representative, executive at Bell Aviation, 1946 gubernatorial candidate

EUGENE COOK, Georgia attorney general

JOHN COWART, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia

WILLIAM DEAN, president pro tempore of the Georgia Senate and a Thompson supporter

LON DUCKWORTH, chair, Democratic Party of Georgia

JIMMY DYKES, state representative from Bleckley County and a Talmadge supporter

ROBERT ELLIOTT, Talmadge floor leader in the Georgia House

GIBSON GREER EZELL, superintendent of the Jasper County schools and Talmadge supporter

BEN FORTSON, Georgia secretary of state

PETER ZACK GEER SR., attorney from Miller County, later member of the state board of education

GEORGE GOODWIN, Atlanta Journal reporter, winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting (on the Telfair vote scandal)

S. MARVIN GRIFFIN, Georgia adjutant general, later lieutenant governor and governor

FRED HAND, Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives

ROY V. HARRIS, former Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, leader of the Augusta Cracker Party, political operative

CLARK HOWELL, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution

PRIMUS KING, black minister from Columbus who challenged Georgia’s white primary in federal court

HELEN MANKIN, U.S. representative from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District

PAT MCCUTCHEN, clerk of the Georgia House, Arnall loyalist

RALPH MCGILL, editor of the Atlanta Constitution

CARLTON MOBLEY, attorney, later chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court

BILL MORRIS, state representative and publisher of the Augusta Chronicle

BENTON ODOM, Talmadge organizer, later Talmadge’s executive secretary

HOKE O’KELLEY, 1946 gubernatorial candidate

CHARLES PANNELL, Talmadge leader in the Georgia Senate

ED RIVERS, former governor, 1946 gubernatorial candidate

FRANK SCARLETT, U.S federal judge for the South Georgia District

H. L. THOMAS, ordinary of Telfair County

RED WILLIAMS, Coffee County attorney active in efforts to strike recently registered African Americans from the voting rolls, later Georgia’s revenue commissioner

THE THREE GOVERNORS CONTROVERSY

Introduction

In 1947, Georgia had three governors.

On January 16, 1947, Herman E. Talmadge walked into the State Capitol on Washington Street in Atlanta, passing through the west-facing portico. The seat of Georgia government had been erected six decades prior, after the carpetbaggers had been run out and white Democratic rule restored. The four-story classical limestone building was topped with a dome made of whitewashed terra cotta and tin and a copper statue of the Goddess of Liberty. The gilding from Dahlonega, so familiar to modern Atlantans, would not be added for another dozen years.

Talmadge made his way to room 203. During the night, locksmiths had outfitted the office doors with new locks. Behind those doors lay a reception foyer and then the office and desk that his father had thrice occupied.

Thirty-three years old and less than two years removed from a tour of duty with the navy in the South Pacific, the broad-mouthed, quick-witted Hummon had returned home to Georgia and immediately set about running the gubernatorial campaign of his father, the legendary Wild Man from Sugar Creek, Eugene Talmadge.¹ The younger Talmadge had managed his father’s winning campaign in 1940 but was in the navy when he lost his 1942 reelection bid. The Talmadges made a comeback in 1946, winning the Democratic nomination and thus the governorship, since the Republican Party did not field statewide candidates in Georgia at that time. But Gene died three weeks before his term was scheduled to start. Through strange transactions involving write-in votes and a previously unused 120-year-old portion of the state constitution, the General Assembly had elevated the younger Talmadge to chief executive.

Elsewhere in the Capitol, Melvin E. Thompson (THOM-son) was operating out of the office of the president of the Senate as he pursued his claim to the governorship. Thompson, a former county school superintendent, had served in the previous governor’s administration as executive secretary and later as revenue commissioner. Forty-three years old, he had run for the newly created office of lieutenant governor in 1946, winning a four-way primary with less than 30 percent of the popular vote. On the death of Gene Talmadge, Thompson claimed that he should become governor, asserting a clause in the recently adopted 1945 state constitution. In the coming days, Thompson would join a superior court suit asking the judicial branch to vacate Herman Talmadge’s claim to the governorship and clearing the way for Lieutenant Governor Thompson to become acting governor.

Outgoing governor Ellis Arnall arrived shortly after Herman Talmadge and found his way to the executive suite blocked. Arnall briefly set up a government in exile in the Capitol rotunda before shifting his base of operation to the fourteenth floor of the Candler Building, the location of his law office. A New Deal liberal and former state attorney general, he had won the governorship after besting incumbent Gene Talmadge in the 1942 Democratic primary. His administration liberalized suffrage by eliminating the poll tax and making Georgia the first state to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. He had ended the state’s notorious chain gangs and taken politics out of the systems governing higher education and prisoner parole. He worked to free Georgia from its competitive economic disadvantages in manufacturing and transportation by successfully challenging unfair northern railroad rates before the U.S. Supreme Court. Railroads charged about 50 percent more to ship goods from the South to the Midwest and Northeast than to ship goods within the Midwest and Northeast.² Arnall won an order barring this disparity in shipping prices, garnering acclaim from the national media for his efforts. He was young (just thirty-nine) and had expansive national ambitions, including hopes that he would be tapped as the 1948 Democratic vice presidential candidate, a goal that he had furthered with a variety of political maneuvers and bargains that he hoped would earn him a place on the national ticket with Harry Truman. Arnall had twice sought unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution so that he could seek a consecutive term of office, and he had also tried to maneuver into the Truman administration as solicitor general, a position he hoped would be a vehicle to the vice presidency.

Had Arnall succeeded in amending the state constitution and winning reelection, the constitutional succession crisis that arose after governor-elect Talmadge’s death would have been averted. Instead, Arnall contributed to the constitutional crisis when he used a provision of the state constitution to continue a claim on the executive power of the state before yielding to Thompson’s claim.

For two months at the beginning of 1947, these three men and various other elected officials, political operatives, lawyers, media journalists, and voters engaged in an intense struggle for control of Georgia’s executive branch. This dispute is known to students of southern politics as the Three Governors Controversy. It was an epic confrontation between traditionalist and progressive forces in Georgia politics. It was the first major modern southern election influenced by widespread black voter mobilization in the Democratic primary, and as a result, it revealed the scope of creative practices used to dilute and disqualify black voters, especially in the rural Black Belt. The fight for political authority in Georgia captured the attention of national and international media—including Fred Allen and Jack Benny, who poked fun at the controversy on their radio programs—and ultimately determined the course of state politics for a generation. At the end of the dispute, 84 percent of Americans polled by Gallup said they had heard about the Georgia succession fight.³

The man whose death triggered the fight, Gene Talmadge, had entered Georgia’s political scene in the 1920s as agriculture commissioner and then spent six years between 1933 and 1943 as governor; when he was not occupying the state’s top office, he made two runs for the U.S. Senate. His name appeared on the statewide ballot every two years from 1926 to 1942. In the process he built up an impressive political organization based on the rural support of his Loyal 100,000 and generated a list of political enemies that counted nearly every other living Georgia governor and senator, all of the major newspapers not only in the state but across the South, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Defeated for renomination in 1942 by Ellis Arnall, Talmadge retreated to his thousand-acre homestead outside McRae, in Telfair County, only to emerge to make one last run for governor in 1946.

The spirited campaign early that summer was one of the most divisive and racially inflammatory in the history of southern politics. Talmadge confronted two formidable opponents—one a former governor, the other a former legislator endorsed by Governor Arnall. Talmadge ultimately won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and the general election, joining Joseph E. Brown, who served as governor from 1857 to 1865, as the only man to win the governorship four times.

But the campaign, combined with the demanding lifestyle Talmadge had led, broke his health. Despite having boasted in the spring that he was in good health and still young, years of heavy drinking and irregular eating had taken their toll on the sixty-two-year-old governor-elect.⁴ After winning a racially charged Democratic primary, Talmadge went on a series of vacations to Wyoming, Mexico, and the beach, trying to recover his health. He even skipped the state Democratic Party convention in the fall, sending Herman to accept the nomination in his place. He entered a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in October 1946 for treatment of a stomach hemorrhage, but his health continued to decline, and Herman effectively became the face of the Talmadge machine.⁵

As Eugene Talmadge’s body weakened in the autumn of 1946, political events conspired to create a unique political controversy. With the rapid decline of the elder Talmadge’s health, his associates and Herman hatched a plan to keep control of state government in the event Gene died before inauguration. Relying on a nineteenth-century law that stated that the legislature could elect a governor from the top two vote getters then in life, the Talmadge forces quietly asked a few supporters to write in Herman Talmadge’s name on general election ballots to make him eligible for election by the General Assembly should the need arise. On November 7, only Gene Talmadge’s name appeared on the ballot for governor, but a few thousand Georgians cast write-in votes, many likely complying with the plan of the Talmadge machine. The name they wrote in would not be known until January, when the legislature certified the election of the governor.

After his release from the hospital, Talmadge returned to Atlanta, but just before Christmas, Ol’ Gene was rushed to Piedmont Hospital, then located in the old Swift mansion on Washington Street in a Jewish neighborhood a few blocks from the State Capitol and for decades the finest medical facility in Georgia.⁶ Although Gene Talmadge described his problem as nothing more than a little ole-bleedin’ vein, he also admitted that the rigors of the 1946 campaign—during which he gave 272 speeches—had taken a decade off his life.⁷ He did not mention how whiskey and cirrhosis resulting from decades of alcohol abuse were harming his health. When he entered Piedmont Hospital, one Talmadge friend quipped, Gene, you’re the only person in Georgia to have everybody praying for you—half that you will live, and the other half that you will die.⁸ On December 21, 1946, half those prayers were answered.

The resulting fight for control of the governor’s chair represented the last act of a larger epic, the last political campaign of Gene Talmadge. But it also constituted more than a campaign and a succession fight. It was the decisive battle between the progressive and rustic forces that had struggled for preeminence in Georgia politics since the onset of the Great Depression. In the wake of this political fight, Georgia’s previously progressive forces would shrink into obscurity for the better part of a generation.

Portions of the Three Governors Controversy have attracted scholarly attention, but the larger story of this long campaign, of the underlying social and political conflict that shaped midcentury Georgia, is often lost—buried in the larger story of postwar southern political change, as in the excellent work of Georgia historian Numan V. Bartley, or treated in small pieces of the story of the Talmadges, the civil rights struggle in Georgia, and/or the rise of modern Atlanta.⁹ Writing closest to the event and stimulated by the events described in this volume, Calvin Kytle and James Mackay, recently returned from World War II, where both men had received Bronze Stars, received funding from the Rosenwald Fund, famous for building schools for black children across the South.¹⁰ As students at Emory University in the 1930s, Kytle and Mackay had taken classes from Cullen Gosnell, an early critic of the county unit system that would deny the anti-Talmadge forces victory in 1946. The two young veterans had not supported Talmadge for governor and in Kytle’s words were terribly disappointed by the breakdown of democratic government they had witnessed. Seeking understanding of the 1946 election and the foundation of political power in Georgia, they spent the spring and summer of 1947 touring the state in a prewar Plymouth, interviewing sixty-four political players and observers. Kytle and Mackay were writing for a liberal audience: the committee overseeing their efforts included Grace Hamilton, who would become the first African American woman to serve in the Georgia General Assembly, and A. T. Walden, a founder of Atlanta’s Negro Voters League. The report Kytle and Mackay generated and the associated interviews are some of the finest primary source material ever collected about southern politics in the 1940s. The results of this research were considered too inflammatory for publication at the time, and more than half a century elapsed before the University of Georgia Press released the volume, Who Runs Georgia?¹¹

Kytle and Mackay were not the only students of politics conducting fieldwork in Georgia in 1947. Political scientist V. O. Key Jr. used field interviews in the aftermath of the election to write his classic work, Southern Politics in State and Nation, in which he called the 1946 primary a critical juncture in Georgia political history, certainly the most important contest in a generation.¹² A Talmadge defeat at the polls would have been the second straight and likely would have signaled the end of Talmadgism as a viable political force. Instead, in the summer of 1946, the old Talmadge vote and the peculiarities of Georgia’s county unit system resulted in Gene Talmadge’s selection as governor in spite of the popular will and sent three other losers of the popular vote to Congress. The 1946 elections saw a government marching away from majority rule and placing land and the virtues of the yeoman farmer above city dwellers and wage earners.

William D. Anderson’s 1973 book on Eugene Talmadge, The Wild Man from Sugar Creek, offers an excellent foundation for understanding the emergence, appeal, and decline of Gene Talmadge.¹³ Anderson recounts the 1946 gubernatorial campaign but does not offer great detail about many of the critical events and turns of the campaign and largely does not treat the succession fight after Talmadge’s death. Anderson focuses on the tenor of Talmadge’s last campaign, on the biting white supremacy that overtook and obliterated Ol’ Gene’s populist rhetoric.

More recent writers have dealt with different parts of the event. Historian William L. Belvin Jr. describes the urban-rural split of the 1946 primary as well as the effectiveness of Talmadge rhetoric in pursuit of renomination. Political scientist Joseph L. Bernd’s extensive reviews of Georgia newspaper accounts, interviews, and collection of precinct-level election data made him the most knowledgeable scholar of Georgia politics of the 1930s–50s, although much of his work was never published.¹⁴ In a 1982 article recounting the Talmadge faction’s systematic effort to keep newly registered black voters from casting ballots in the 1946 election, Bernd relied heavily on eyewitness interviews and the findings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s examination of voter fraud and voter intimidation.¹⁵ His careful effort describes the disfranchisement strategy used to protect the rural Talmadge majorities and identifies many of the players who were also interviewed for Kytle and Mackay’s work. Jennifer E. Brooks explores two of the novel forces operating in Georgia in 1946—returning veterans, many of whom were eager to create a more open political system in which they could participate, and newly enfranchised African Americans, who were just beginning to find a political voice after decades of political exclusion.¹⁶

In Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1946–1996, journalist Frederick Allen uses the racial violence of the summer of 1946 and Talmadge’s role in fanning those flames to offer context for the story of Atlanta’s changing nature and emergence as a national and international city. Historian Stephen G. N. Tuck’s Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980 deals with Talmadge’s historic antipathy toward blacks and postwar black voter mobilization in his prizewinning work on postwar black voter mobilization. And in White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Kevin M. Kruse similarly engages Talmadge in 1945 and 1946 and the role of his campaign in resisting black political mobilization in Atlanta.¹⁷

But the 1946 Georgia election and subsequent controversy are more than the sum of the discrete parts illuminated by others. The 1946 Democratic gubernatorial primary, together with the general election machinations and the succession fight of early 1947, was the beginning of the last great holding action of Georgia’s venerable (in the eyes of country folk), antiquated (for the city folk), or reactionary (for the modern folk) rural political institutions against the forces of political progress and national liberalism. Since 1937, rustic and progressive forces had battled for dominance: during wartime, progressives had ascended in state politics as Atlanta’s economic power grew dramatically. But in 1946, the forces of stasis—the county unit system of election, Jim Crow intimidation of black voters, the Loyal 100,000, and the malapportioned Georgia General Assembly—came together to deny the governorship to progressive political forces. Had any one of these institutions faltered at a critical juncture, the rural reactionary forces would have failed, and the progressive trajectory would have continued. Instead, these elements held the line against progressive politics and placed control of Georgia politics in the hands of rural, racially conservative leaders until the federal courts felled the county unit system in 1962. This volume tells the story of how the political, governmental, and social institutions of Jim Crow Georgia not only defeated progressive politics but forestalled its political effectiveness for a decade and a half.

CHAPTER 1

* * *

The Emergence of Bifactional Politics

I’ve got a Eugene dog, I got a Eugene cat,

I’m a Talmadge man from ma shoes to ma hat.

Farmer in the cawn field hollerin w’hoa gee haw,

Kain’t put no thirty dollar tag on a three dollar car.

—Fiddlin’ Joe Carson and Moonshine Kate

From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Georgia and the rest of the South were one-party states, loyal to the party of Jefferson and Jackson.¹ After the Democrats quashed the Populist revolt of the 1890s, Georgia, like the other southern states, moved to disfranchise both black and poor white voters. This one-party environment in the first half of the twentieth century did not mean there was a lack of political competition.

Throughout most of the South, intense, dynamic competition, often fought out through informal or personal organizations within party primaries, characterized the Democrats. Southern state parties managed an uneasy balance between these factions, which had myriad bases of support for their creation and sustenance. In many southern states, factional divisions involved cultural and economic gaps between the patrician, Bourbon white planters and elites of the Black Belt (the descendants of Jefferson’s noblesse oblige planter class) and the yeoman farmers from the predominantly white hill country (descendants of Jackson’s Scots-Irish freeholders). Sometimes politics centered on friends and neighbors, relations that V. O. Key Jr. describes in Southern Politics in State and Nation; city versus country; or regional rivalries. Whatever the source of division, there was usually competition for control of party nominations. Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi hosted multifactional politics, with different transient factions emerging to compete for brief periods of time. At the other end of the organizational spectrum, in Virginia, the Flood-Byrd machine dominated the commonwealth and quashed political competition for most of the twentieth century. In Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee, stable political organizations emerged to lend shape to state politics. These durable factions caused the opposition to coalesce as a single organization, producing bifactional politics.²

A bifactional political system developed in Georgia as a result of the convergence of the personality and campaign style of Eugene Talmadge and a set of political institutions—specifically, the county unit system, the white primary, two-year terms, and a malapportioned legislature that placed political power in the control of rural counties. This political system favored a rustic segregationist culture amenable to Talmadge’s brand of politics, which fused distrust of government and other large elite institutions with a set of policies designed to advantage the poor dirt farmer.³

COUNTY UNIT SYSTEM

To understand the electoral politics of the state is to recognize that Georgia never had one statewide election for governor but instead had 159 such elections, one for each county in the state, where local politicians were often anxious for political payoffs. The need to conduct 159 separate campaigns made the county more integral to the historic politics of Georgia than to those of any other state. In the Democratic Party primary, nominations were determined not by the votes of the people but by the votes of counties, which under Georgia election law were created more equal than the men and women who voted. The apportionment of political power in the legislature and in statewide elections was based on counties. As a result, political control of the county courthouse and its set of elected offices—sheriff, road commissioner, assessor, probate judge, clerk, coroner—offered the opportunity to wield political power as well as to command economic resources.

Georgia had used some form of county-based apportionment to elect statewide officials as early as 1777, when the original state constitution apportioned lawmakers to counties and towns and then used the counties to pick electors to choose an executive council. The modern system, institutionalized in the Neill Primary Act of 1917, had started in 1874 with Fulton County’s practice of using primaries to choose Democratic convention delegates. A majority of counties had adopted that approach by 1886, and it was later extended to all counties as a Democratic state party rule in 1892. The Atlanta Journal greeted passage of the Neill Primary Act by describing it as contrary to the basic principles of popular government . . . political jugglery in which the will of the people can be thwarted. Other papers saw in the act a mechanism to control the black bloc vote.⁴

Winning nomination in the decisive Democratic primary for statewide offices and in some congressional districts required accumulating county unit votes. The nomination for governor required a majority of the county unit votes, while a plurality sufficed for other statewide offices. With 159 counties, Georgia has more than any state other than Texas. Like the Electoral College, which allocates all of a state’s electoral votes to the plurality winner in the state, the county unit system allotted a county’s unit votes to the recipient of a plurality.⁵ The winner of a plurality in a county received its unit votes. Beginning in 1932, there were a total of 410 unit votes, meaning that a gubernatorial candidate needed 206 to win the nomination (and by default the election). If no candidate reached 206 unit votes, a runoff would be held.

The county unit system was less sensitive to population differences than the Electoral College. The eight most populous counties shown in map 1 had six votes each. While the eighth-most-populous county might vary depending on the most recent census, the counties consistently in this group were Bibb (Macon), Chatham (Savannah), DeKalb (part of Atlanta), Floyd (Rome), Fulton (Atlanta), Muscogee (Columbus), and Richmond (Augusta). Town counties (the next thirty largest in population) each had four unit votes. The town counties included Baldwin (Milledgeville), Clarke (Athens), Decatur (Bainbridge), Gwinnett (Lawrenceville), Hall (Gainesville), Troup (LaGrange), Upson (Thomaston), and Ware (Waycross).

The 121 rural counties had a total of 242 unit votes and, if united, could easily outvote the urbanized counties. Statewide candidates could win with exclusively rural support. Any three rural counties could negate Fulton County’s six unit votes despite having only a fraction of the larger county’s population and voters. The inequity of the system became more exaggerated after World War II. Rural counties accounted for half the state’s 1920 population; by 1960, they had only 32 percent of the population yet still controlled 59 percent of the unit vote.⁶ After several unsuccessful court challenges, the Supreme Court in 1962 struck down the county unit system as violating the Equal Protection Clause.⁷

Rural influence in the Democratic primary, coupled with jealousy and distrust, made it impossible for candidates from Atlanta to win the state’s highest offices. During the forty-five years that the county unit system under the Neill Primary Act determined nominees for governor, one nominee came from a six-vote county, six came from four-vote counties, and ten came from two-vote counties, including four-time winner Gene Talmadge and two-time winners E. D. Rivers and Herman Talmadge.

MAP 1. Urban counties under the county unit system.

Candidates had an additional incentive to concentrate their efforts on rural counties. Joseph L. Bernd estimates that at least twenty-one counties were boss-controlled, while an Atlanta Constitution editor estimated that as many as sixty could be bought.⁸ Some counties consistently supported Talmadge, while others were anti-Talmadge. The members of yet a third group sought to ensure that they were on the winning side. Backing the winner in a gubernatorial election positioned a county to receive funding for highway projects and other programs and might attract state funds to local banks. The presence of a set of counties that could be bought made the task of campaigning even easier. Successfully courting the sheriff or whoever wielded power in three rural counties could take the place of the expensive and time-consuming investment needed to win a six-vote county. Similar negotiations and machining of the vote occurred in other southern states, most notably Tennessee.⁹

Herman Talmadge said of Georgia politics in the 1930s, Those were the days of the courthouse rings and the county unit systems and the politicians wanted governors, when they had to do something in their county, they could be a deputy governor of their particular county.¹⁰ Local bosses or courthouse gangs eagerly exchanged their counties’ votes for a piece of state government power or patronage. A courthouse ring or gang usually consisted of elected county officials, including the sheriff, county ordinary (today called the probate judge), county commissioners, and the tax commissioner, who together controlled local politics. One former legislator commented that the way to know how a county would vote in an upcoming election was to see who supported the sheriff and county ordinary.¹¹ Sheriffs and ordinaries often held broad sway over tax collection, voter registration, and other functions of county government. Georgia’s unique governing arrangement of having a sole commissioner was much more widely used into the 1950s, and when a county had a single commissioner, that individual was usually a key player.

Not all rural counties, however, were bossed. For those that were not, Roy Harris, onetime Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives and political kingmaker, explained, If you’re going to win in Georgia, you’ve got to know the counties. . . . You got to know how the people think, and what they want.¹² For some counties, this meant understanding what local legislative priority needed to be dealt with in the next legislative session. For others, it meant understanding the sort of political appeal that would resonate with voters and local leaders. In southwestern Georgia, where the counties had large black populations, white voters were most open to racial appeals by candidates; predominantly white North Georgia counties were relatively immune to such appeals.¹³

SETTING THE SCENE: GEORGIA IN DEPRESSION

Georgia in the years before World War II was more like 1890 than 1960. Prewar Georgia depended heavily on agriculture and experienced slow population growth. During the roaring 1920s, the U.S. population grew by seventeen million, but virtually none of that growth took place in Georgia, which stagnated, adding only thirteen thousand persons. Georgia’s population grew by less than 8 percent from 1920 to 1940 even as the nation expanded at three times that rate. Atlanta grew, but the rest of Georgia actually lost population through 1930 before topping the three million mark in 1940.

Growth did not mean modernization. Many Georgians lived isolated lives on dirt roads rendered impassable by winter rains. In ninety-three counties, more than two-thirds of residents lived in rural areas, usually with most of them dwelling on plots of less than twenty acres. On Saturdays, the more successful would trek to the county seat to shop and gossip. Poorer hired hands might make it no further than the commissary operated by the landowner who hired them, where they would put some fatback, molasses, and cornmeal on the tab to be settled once the cotton crop came in later that fall. In the textile mill villages of North Georgia, the living was a little better. Mill-owned housing for workers had electricity and sometimes indoor plumbing. However, the wages paid—usually not much more than a dollar a day in 1930—were consumed by rent or credit at the company store.

Children walked to school. City youngsters might have a full academic year, but farm kids often had school for only a few months. Classes might be interrupted for a couple of weeks in September, when all hands were needed to bring in the cotton crop, which accounted for two-thirds of Georgia’s agricultural economy. The white schools in Georgia’s segregated school system (operated under the Supreme Court’s separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson) were often poorly funded but nonetheless might have as much as sixty times the support meted