Chapter 45
Let’s get off Tobacco Road.
—Ellis G. Arnall
Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze,
The best yuh ever poured yuh,
But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes,
For Hell’s broke loose in Georgia.
—Stephen Vincent Benét, The Mountain Whippoorwill*
OF COURSE the first person I wanted to meet in Georgia was Arnall. He was still governor then. We had dinner together in Atlanta, and several substantial talks. Ellis Gibbs Arnall, only forty, is one of the best and brightest of contemporary Americans, and that he will return to public life some day—indeed, in a manner of speaking, he has never left it—is as certain as that Georgia sunshine makes peaches grow.
The staggering imbroglio of January, 1947, when for a time Georgia had two, or possibly three, governors all at once, is still fresh in the national memory. No more obnoxious mishmash has ever attended politics in an American state. To tell the story briefly, a word of background is essential. Arnall served as governor from 1943 to 1947, having succeeded the insufferable Eugene Talmadge, now dead, from whom he differed as day from night. Arnall, by terms of the Georgia constitution, could not run for a second term, and Talmadge, except for the accident of death, would in turn have succeeded him. But the extraordinary fact is that the late lamented Gene, though “elected” governor of the state, did not win the election that was to put him in, so far as actual number of votes was concerned. The candidate who did get the largest popular vote was defeated !1
Georgia has 159 counties, more than any state except Texas (though it is only a quarter the size of Texas), and its vote is counted by county “units”; each county is assigned from two to six units, and the winning candidate in each county gets its total vote. This is the rotten-borough system in excelsis. Fulton County, containing Atlanta, with a population of 392,866, has six “units”; one cracker county (a single example out of several available) has exactly 241 registered voters, and yet is entitled to two units. A candidate may, in other words, by carrying three counties of this backwoods type, with a total electorate of a thousand votes or so, offset the entire city of Atlanta, with 123,000 registered voters. This preposterous system came into being as a weapon to counteract the old city machines, for instance that of Senator Tom Watson; but as manipulated today it gives an overwhelming preponderance to the hard shells and “wool hats” in the hookworm belt, forces of the most violent parochial conservatism, as against what liberal elements may arise in the towns. Talmadge had what was generally conceded to be an irreducible minimum of about 125,000 wool-hat votes. The Georgia peasants and cotton-choppers are called wool hats because, strangely enough, they like to wear wool hats. The sunshine is broilingly hot. But Negroes have sensibly taken to straw hats, and so the white proletariat sticks to wool.
Two people ran against Talmadge in 1946, a former governor named E. D. Rivers, and James V. Carmichael, the Arnall candidate. Carmichael, a thirty-six-year-old liberal, got 313,389 votes to Talmadge’s 297,245 and Rivers’ 67,196. Thus Carmichael had a clear and indisputable popular lead over Talmadge, and “Ole Gene” himself received less than half the total vote. But by the unit system Talmadge was credited with 242 county votes as against Carmichael’s 148, and so was declared the victor. Similarly an able congresswoman, Helen Douglas Mankin, beat her opponent by a popular vote of 33,675 to 26,175. But she was counted out, because she lost by eight to six county unit votes. This is not mere freakishness. It is democracy stultifying itself and committing an absurd form of Dixie suicide.
The wool hats are not, of course, the only folk in Georgia who voted for Talmadge; many otherwise respectable businessmen certainly supported him, though they would hate to have to admit it. One formidable factor state affairs is the heavy concentration of wealth (much of it absentee) represented by the Trust Company of Georgia, headed until his death last year by a tycoon named Robert Strickland, and by Coca-Cola. Another force of great consequence is the Georgia Power Company, a subsidiary of Commonwealth & Southern. A wool hat-Georgia Power coalition put Talmadge in. Clark Foreman, one of the most distinguished of southern liberals, the president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and a member of the family that owns the Atlanta Constitution, said recently as quoted by the New York Times, “Talmadge was supported by the Georgia Power Company and every mill owner in the state of Georgia.”
This situation has even produced poetry. Here is one jingle I heard:
The big bugs courted the hookworms,
And their clandestine embrace
Produced a governor of Georgia
Who raised Hell all over the place.
Talmadge, then, was governor-elect. This was in the late autumn of 1946. But he had been in poor health for some time, his condition grew worse, and on December 20, he died. The Ku-Klux sent wreaths to the funeral. Then the brawl started. Georgia has a new constitution, which was supposed to be foolproof, but it made no provision for such a contingency as the death of a governor-elect before his inauguration. Talmadge had a thirty-three-year-old son, by name Herman, who saw service in the Navy during the war, and who managed Ole Gene’s campaign. He had always been politically ambitious, and long before his father’s death people talked about him as being “trained” for the succession. Now, by extraordinary chance, some few Georgians had written Herman’s name in on the ballot—675 to be exact. This was exactly six more “write-ins” than Carmichael got, incidentally; had Carmichael received a few more, there might have been four “governors” instead of only three.
On the basis of his write-in vote, Herman Talmadge claimed the governorship. He took the position that his father’s death invalidated the election, and that the choice of governor should be thrown into the legislature. The legislature duly “elected” him, and so Georgia found itself with a “governor” whose total popular vote was—675! The state of Georgia contains 3,123,723 people.
Meantime Arnall had conducted himself with the utmost dignity and correctness. He took the line that, according to the constitution, a governor had a right to continue in office until his successor was “qualified.” At this point enters a new character—Melvin E. Thompson. For years he was Arnall’s executive secretary; I met him several times and heard him described as “the best progressive in the state.” He was elected lieutenant governor in the 1946 race, but whether he ran with Arnall’s blessing is not certain. At any rate Arnall announced that, as lieutenant governor, Thompson was the proper person to be certified as governor, and that when this was done he, Arnall, would resign. The legislature elected Herman, however, not Thompson, on inauguration day. So on January 15, Herman strode into the governor’s office and demanded that Arnall get out. Arnall refused to go, stating, “I will not turn this office over to a pretender.” He yielded the next day, however, under pressure of Herman’s state troopers. Previously “his” attorney general had petitioned the courts, which set a hearing for February 7. Herman then announced that he would pay no attention to the courts. He modified this threat later.
On January 17, Arnall, asserting that he was still legally governor, tried to maintain an office in the rotunda of the capitol, and was forcibly kept from using it. One of Talmadge’s men roared at him, “Ellis, you remind me of a hawg. Did you ever slop a hawg? The more you give a hawg, the more he wants.”
Thompson was finally sworn in as lieutenant governor, on January 18, and Arnall then duly resigned. Thompson insisted that he, not Herman Talmadge, was the true governor, but it was Herman who sat in the executive offices, and Herman who moved into the gubernatorial mansion. Obviously the end of this story is not yet. At the moment of writing Georgia has two “governors.” But the real issue and struggle goes far beyond personalities. The contest is one between the old South and the new, between coup d’état and constitutional government, between rule by thuggery and rule by law.
Ellis Arnall: Politics and Personal
Bring Georgia back into the United States!
—Ellis G. Arnall
Arnall was born in 1907 in Newnan, a mill town of about 10,000 population forty miles from Atlanta; it calls itself the “barbecue capital of the world.”2 The family had been prominent in the neighborhood for generations, as attorneys and mill executives; one branch makes a well-known brand of towel, called ARNCO. Arnall’s father is described in an official biography as “merchant, farmer, banker, and manufacturer”; also he is proprietor of the Krazy Kat Supermarket. When Arnall was inaugurated governor, some seventy relatives attended the ceremonies; blood relationships, let it be said in parentheses, probably play a greater role in the South than anywhere else in the United States.
Young Ellis went to the local schools, and hung up a lively record. In high school he was president of his class four times. He went on to the University of the South, at Sewanee, Tennessee; he majored in Greek, and won a master’s degree for a thesis on the English novel. Then he won a law degree at the University of Georgia in 1931. He was the most industrious and enterprising youngster there; he ran everything. He was president of his class, president of most of the students’ organizations, and first chief justice of the school’s “supreme court.” He told me that when he entered the university, he asked classmates what the biggest thing on the campus was. Answer: the Panhellenic Council. Arnall forthwith set out to be president of this; he campaigned for it actively and with subtlety, and won, partly by neglecting his own milieu and cultivating poor students, those in Jewish fraternities, and others in categories usually ignored.
Until college, Arnall spent his life with books. He was timid, so he told me (one would not think so now), and “didn’t operate much with people.” But he wanted a political career. “So I reversed myself, and made books the background.” Also he reversed himself in other ways. Newnan is a well-off town, and Arnall grew up in a wealthily conventional planter-manufacturer-Rotary Club atmosphere. But, when he left college and set up law practice, it was the workers whom he sought as clients. He ran for office almost at once, and became a member of the state legislature; in this first campaign, in a field of five candidates, he won 3,164 votes out of 3,510. Until elected to this post, he had never so much as seen the state capitol. He quickly became speaker of the house, assistant attorney general, attorney general, and governor. He was Talmadge’s floor leader for a brief novitiate, and it was Rivers (then governor) who appointed him to the attorney generalship; thus do personalities in Georgia interlock.
Arnall is a lawyer. The whole South is jam packed with lawyers. It is the lawyers who make politics, and since most lawyers get a fat share of their business from corporations, it is they who are chiefly responsible when a state becomes corporation ridden. In Georgia an overwhelming proportion of state legislators are lawyers.3 But although Arnall was a lawyer he never paid much attention to the corporations, or to the other traditional factors of control in Georgia politics, like the liquor and fertilizer interests, the schoolbook lobby, and the 159 county courthouse rings. He played his own lone game.
Arnall has push, charm, alertness, confidence, and brains; also he has luck as a rule. A gubernatorial campaign traditionally gets under way in Georgia with a barbecue in the candidate’s hometown. Arnall’s at Newnan was a brilliant success. His opponent’s a few miles away was drowned out by a sudden cloudburst.
Arnall told me once, “Politics is simple.” One good rule, he believes, is never to ask for anything directly, which is what everybody else does; instead, simply send your friends around, saying what a splendid and useful person you are, immediately after you have visited a community. The tragedy of most politicians (and of American politics) is, he thinks, that office holders, once they get in, become too fixed in dependence on their jobs financially and otherwise; hence, their overriding mood is caution, and they run with both hare and hounds. Finally, he says, be careful about money; don’t take big contributions from the plutocrats, but try instead for support from a multitude of little people. To become a senator in Georgia, he declares, may cost $150,000. Then the people who put up the big money, i.e., those who wish to exert the real power, make their candidate a prisoner, and he becomes the victim of a machine. Avoid this kind of game, says Arnall. “I’ve been right free,’ he told me. Above all, cultivate the youngsters. “You doan’ have to lead kids by the nose to the ballot box.”
Arnall was one of the best governors Georgia, or any other state, has ever had, but he was almost unknown to the nation at large until 1945. What brought him his first broad million-plus audience was the radio show “Information Please,” which program incidentally performed the same service for Wendell Willkie. Arnall’s broad southern drawl—the way he pronounced “haidgehog” for instance—was heard throughout the country, and he stole the show. The governor of Georgia, it seemed, knew more poetry by heart than John Kieran or F.P.A. When I asked him to account for this, with the question “Do you still have time to read and memorize a lot?” he answered, “Read poetry? Hell, I write it!”
In fact, at dinner after the “Information Please” performance, he quoted a series of stanzas to Clifton Fadiman and the troupe, and demanded to know who the author was. The lines sounded familiar, and guesses took place up and down the centuries, but no one could quite identify them, whereupon Mr. Arnall confessed that he himself was the unknown author.
Arnall is a short, friendly man, very shrewd, earnest, and ambitious. He has a nice sense of phrase; once he called the North “the cold-bread country.” His two greatest qualities are probably cleverness and confidence; he has, indeed, been too clever on occasion, and too confident. He was a strong Henry Wallace man—in fact he “delivered” the Georgia delegation to Wallace at the 1944 convention—but lately the closeness of this affiliation has diminished. He dislikes being tagged as an orthodox “liberal,” and calls himself a “democrat,” with both a big and a little D. What he laments most on the public scene is the dearth of first-class leadership; what he believes in most is the right of the people as a whole “to dignity and contentment”; what he pleads for most is recognition of the essential unity of America.
Arnall is a Baptist, and he says grace at meals, but he likes to have a good time socially (“I’m sort of human”) and he drinks mildly. He thinks that a man of good will can get anything out of life, if he is willing to make sacrifices, but he is always careful himself not to want too much. He has plenty of courage; he told his first legislative session, “There’ll be no pay-offs or shakedowns in this legislature!” He likes to improvise rather than plan, and he works in spurts; he is very mobile, and when I asked him what his political plans were, he said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow mornin’, but come back in the evenin’ and maybe I’ll give you a different answer.” He thinks that politics “is like billiards,” in that you have to know how things lie by instinct mostly, and usually his prescience is remarkable. For instance he guessed, to a man, exactly how the Supreme Court would vote on his railroads case. On his desk rests a motto, ONE MAN WITH COURAGE MAKES A MAJORITY, and when he relaxes, he is capable of reading thirty-two detective stories in seven days. He often disliked the routine of governorship, the necessity of placating people twelve hours a day; he says, “I want to work, but I cain’t work, because too much detail gets in mah way.”
I asked him what was the most important decision he ever had to make; he said first that a good politician should never get himself into a position where any decision was difficult. Then he grinned, adding that the “best” decision he ever made was to go to Orlando, Florida, some years ago, to attend a friend’s wedding. He couldn’t make up his mind, flipped a coin to decide, went, and met there Miss Mildred DeLaney Slemons, who became his wife; he proposed to her the second time they met. She is an exceptionally pretty girl, and for a time attended Lillian Smith’s camp at Clayton, Georgia. The Arnalls have two small children.
What Arnall, jobless at the moment, would seem to need above all today—like Stassen—is a platform, a forum, to give his views official emphasis. Mr. Truman offered him the solicitor generalship of the United States, but he declined it. Perhaps he thinks that it is just as well to keep out of Democratic politics in Washington for a year or so.
Arnall: On the Record
What a man’s sympathies and orientations are does not ultimately matter, until translated into fact; what does matter, for someone prominent in public life, is what he actually did: his record, his accomplishment. Look at Arnall’s—long before the lunatic January fracas.
He came in as governor in 1943 with a ten-point plan; twenty-four days after his inauguration, the legislature had passed each point—unanimously! Some of them were:
(1) Removal of the University of Georgia from political control. Talmadge had ousted several teachers because he thought they were liberal on the Negro issue, and had played politics with the board of regents; we shall find an analogous situation when we come to Texas. As a result, the university was discredited, together with most other educational institutions in the state, and its degrees became valueless outside Georgia. More than anything else, public indignation over this led to Talmadge’s temporary downfall. At once, on becoming governor, Arnall backed and pushed through a measure setting up a new regime for the university; he took it out of politics completely, and made it independent of both governor and legislature by giving it special constitutional status under an autonomous board.
(2) Cleaning up of the “pardons” racket. Previous governors had been famous—like governors in other southern states—for the wholesale pardons they were wont to give; this is a classic procedure for gaining political favor. Arnall set up a nonpolitical parole and pardon board, under a former official of the FBI, which altogether takes pardons out of the governor’s hands.
(3) Further separation of the governorship from functions previously held. For instance new laws abolished the governor’s former right to oust such officers as state treasurer, removed the governor from all boards and commissions operating state departments, and created a new independent system of budgetary control. One result of all this was that, before Arnall’s term was over, the state debt of $35,000,000 was paid off.
Note well that the foregoing points, far from increasing Arnall’s own grip on power, actually served to restrict it. He was doing something unheard of—appealing to the legislature to curtail, not augment, his own authority as chief executive! One should add, however, that he himself was not responsible for all his reformist legislation. Some years before an organization known as the Citizens Fact-Finding Movement was set up; this did a good deal of valuable spade work, and Arnall not only inherited its findings—he introduced no fewer than twenty-two bills that it recommended—but he rode into popularity on the ground swell the committee helped put in motion. He doesn’t particularly like do-gooders, but they have conspicuously helped him.
After the first detail-crowded days, Arnall moved briskly on, as to wit:
(4) He pushed abolition of the Georgia poll tax (with a good deal of help from outside) through the legislature, a really signal accomplishment.
(5) He ameliorated to an extent the celebratedly vicious chain gang system, by a series of penal reforms. When he first took office he appointed a commission to investigate prison conditions, and its report made gruesome reading. “In Tattnell (the state penitentiary) we found an ‘Eight Ball Gang,’ consisting of approximately twenty-five, wearing the most brutal leg irons to be imagined, and complaining of being beaten and whipped almost daily.” Here too sixteen young men had cut their own Achilles tendons, in order to escape the torments of the chain gang, and were found helpless in their bunks. “The punishment at Tattnell … was welding of leg irons with long picks on them on the ankles of the prisoners.” All this has been modified—though it would be foolish to assert that Georgia prisons today are pleasant rest homes, or that they have been taken out of politics completely.
(6) Arnall cut the voting age to eighteen. His theory was that if boys of eighteen were old enough to fight, they were old enough to vote. Georgia was the first state to lower its voting age, and the first to have a soldier-vote law.
(7) He increased the teachers’ year from ten months to eleven (which meant in effect a 10 per cent raise in pay), established a teachers’ retirement system, and set up a state board of education under the constitution, so that in theory at least it could not be tampered with by either governor or legislature.
(8) He introduced and put through the new constitution. Georgia thus became the first southern state to throw off its old constitution; this, written in 1877 and amended three hundred times, had become a hopeless anachronism, unwieldy and contradictory. Arnall won approval for the new one by a typical enough artifice. Good citizens had been yearning for a long time for constitutional reform, but they assumed that this would necessitate calling a convention, which would have meant nuisanceful politics, wrangling, and expense. First, Arnall appointed a committee of twenty-three distinguished citizens who worked for two years to write the new “streamlined” document.4 Second, he submitted this in entirety, except the preamble, as an amendment to the old constitution !—which did away with the need for calling a convention. The new one was then voted upon by the people, at a special election held in August, 1945, and passed overwhelmingly. No one could know—irony!—the role it was to play in the Talmadge eruption later.
(9) Arnall went to the Supreme Court, suing a group of railroads in the name of the state of Georgia, in an attempt to force a reduction in discriminatory freight rates. Explaining the background of this he told me, if I may paraphrase: “We were a conquered and subjugated country after the War Between the States, and so we had to submit to tariff walls. We were relegated to be drawers of water, hewers of timber. Formerly, we could just manage to get along somehow because our labor costs were so cheap. But not now. The South cain’t live so long as it costs us 39 per cent more to ship goods than it costs the Nawth.”
(10) He brought suit in Georgia to dissolve the Ku-Klux Klan.
With Arnall on Decatur Street
When he was governor, Arnall took me for a drive one evening; he wanted to show me how Atlanta stratifies itself. He drove his own modest car—he thought that we would be too conspicuous if a state trooper came along—and we set forth down Peachtree Street, the renowned main thoroughfare of the town, which incidentally has no peach trees. Then, where Peachtree meets four other streets, we turned into Decatur Street and the boiling, teeming Negro quarter.
I have just discovered that Arnall himself, in his admirable and vividly written The Shore Dimly Seen,5 describes this episode. His object was to prove to me that the two communities, white and Negro, amicably live apart in Atlanta of their own volition and free will as well as by force of circumstance, and that no external pressures produce this segregation.
The streets were crowded. I asked Mr. Gunther to notice any Negroes he saw. The only Negro he was able to point out to me (on Peachtree Street) was the Negro doorman at the Henry Grady Hotel. At Five Points we turned into Decatur Street. There were literally thousands of Negroes on the street, visiting, shopping, and fraternizing. I explained to Mr. Gunther that there was no law, no city ordinance, and no prohibition which kept white citizens from going on to Decatur Street. Likewise, there was no prohibition preventing the Negroes from strolling down Peachtree Street. He asked me why it was that they didn’t. The only answer that occurred to me was that whites preferred to windowshop on Peachtree, while the Negroes preferred to visit together on Decatur Street.
Come, come, Mr. Arnall! There is more to it than just this. As anybody who has read Myrdal knows (and I am sure that Arnall knows his Myrdal well), one of the gravest and most disheartening of all aspects of the Negro problem is self-segregation—the fact that so many Negroes, hounded and made desperate if they dare to intrude so much as one inch on white territory, retreat helplessly into the isolation of their own communities. Perhaps there is no formal “prohibition.” But Negroes are walled off by a body of unwritten strictures even more effective. Legally they “could” make forays into Peachtree Street. But they know full well what the cost would be, if only to their own sensitiveness. They might not be stoned. But they wouldn’t feel comfortable.
But I don’t want to labor the point. Arnall has ably explained, in considerable detail, his own attitude toward the Negro in his book. His general line, though more clearly defined than that of most southern liberals, is still a straddle. He has never been a “nigger-baiter,” but nobody—except white fanatics—would be likely to call him a “nigger-lover” either. He stands for full legal rights for Negroes, but he is against FEPC. He still thinks that the Negro problem is primarily “economic,” which, if I may say so in all diffidence, means simply that he does not know why it is a problem.
Arnall told me a little story which I hope he won’t mind my quoting. Talking to Mr. Roosevelt one day he remarked, “We don’t really have any Negro issue in the South; it’s white agitators from the Nawth that make the trouble.” Mr. Roosevelt (who liked him) turned to him with that well-known twinkle: “You mean Eleanor?”
Atlanta is the nearest thing to a capital that the South as a whole has, and that the Negroes in the whole South have. Of the thirty-two accredited Negro colleges in the United States, seven are in Atlanta, and I have already mentioned some of the personalities and achievements of Atlanta University. Also the city has, as we know, the only Negro daily newspaper in the country, the Atlanta Daily World, edited by C. E. Scott.
Another Scott came into the Georgia news recently. He was Aurelius S. Scott, who went variously to Morehouse College in Atlanta and to Ohio State University and the University of Kansas, a former football star and a teacher and educator of prominence, who was so temerarious as to run for coroner in Fulton County in 1946. He could not legally be taken off the ticket. But he was printed on the ballot as “A. S. Scott, Negro.” After a vicious little wrangle (twenty-three different white candidates for the job sought to choose one amongst themselves as the sole candidate, in order to forestall the possibility that Mr. Scott might win as a result of a split in the white vote), he withdrew from the contest, so that it would not be fought on a black-white basis and as a racial issue.
In Atlanta I heard two new details about the Negro problem. One is that the only profession having to do with Negroes that whites don’t touch is undertaking. They are willing to make money off Negroes, alive, in any conceivable manner; but not Negroes dead.6 The other is that the segregation spirit is so strong in some parts of Georgia that white children won’t cross Negro cemeteries, for fear of being “defiled.”
Rapscallion in Red Galluses
This man is darkness. All you have to do is look at him. Lank hair flapping sideways on the forehead; cold malicious eyes full of hate; the strained pouting lips of a Torquemada; a bitter closed tightness of expression and narrowness—above all narrowness: this distinguishes the appearance of Eugene Talmadge, elected governor of Georgia in 1946. Talmadge is the kind of inciter of prejudice that is the curse of the South, that the South must get rid of to be free (but the North need not be unpleasantly smug about this; there are plenty of politically dissolute people in the North too). I wrote the following before Talmadge’s death, and before the hocus-pocus of his son’s accession. I see no reason to change it now.
In July, 1946, after Talmadge had “won” the primaries, a mob of twenty to thirty whites in Monroe, Georgia, waylaid two Negroes and shot them before their wives’ eyes. Apparently one of the women recognized the leader of these knaves; he exclaimed, “Go back and get those bitches,” and the women were then hauled from an automobile and murdered too. This was not merely a lynching; it was bald massacre. The Department of Justice went into action, the FBI began a long investigation, and Attorney General Clark promised that indictments would be returned, if possible. The FBI interrogated more than 2,50O people, and 100 witnesses were called before a federal grand jury. But nobody connected with the crime was ever identified, no further action could be taken, and there as of the moment the matter remains.
Talmadge happened to be outside Georgia at the time. Interviewed over radio station WOR, his comment was, “We have officers in Georgia looking out for people. Sometimes it requires several years. I remember when I was a student at the University of Georgia, they caught a murderer after forty years … The Bible says we will … have crime.” Also he delivered himself of an insouciant comment to the effect that, during his three previous terms, there had been no lynchings in Georgia, and that he “sympathized” with Governor Arnall for what must be his “chagrin and embarrassment.” Mr. Talmadge was wrong about the lynching record. During his years of office fourteen lynchings did take place in Georgia.
In June, 1942, it became known that 30,000 Georgians had been rejected by Selective Service for illiteracy. Talmadge, to take the curse off these figures, and apparently choosing a target at random, announced that “New York” was the most illiterate state in the union, because a lot of waiters there didn’t speak English well. It was Mr. La Guardia who happened to be mayor of New York at this time, and he replied with nice venom, “When it comes to illiteracy, the distinguished governor of Georgia talks as an expert and speaks for his own class.”
Once Talmadge, who had a wool-hat background and hated cities anyway, boasted that he had “never carried a county with a streetcar in it.” He was a relentless New Deal hater, and he once called Roosevelt “that cripple in the White House.” He wrote on one occasion that the movement to give Negroes the vote was promoted by “Asiatic-minded scoundrels and alien-minded perverts,” and after his election in 1946 he boasted openly, “No Negro will vote in Georgia for the next four years.” His entourage was thick with Klansmen, and once during the depression, when he was asked what he would do about the millions of unemployed, he replied simply, “Let ’em starve!”
Georgia is a state with a splendid history; it is quite proud of the fact that, unlike its neighbors Tennessee and Alabama, it was one of the original thirteen. The telephone number at the capitol is 1776. How did Mr. Talmadge fit into this tradition? The question is almost too painful to explore. How much did he learn from Huey Long? He and Long were never close, reports to the contrary notwithstanding. And he had nothing of Long’s undoubted intellectual power, resource, and picturesquely attractive deviltry. There was very little to distinguish Talmadge, the Sage of Sugar Creek, except that he gave his constituents fish fries and took off his coat when making speeches, thus exposing his famous red suspenders.
Georgia is also a state with some statistics to unnerve almost anybody—except possibly the late Mr. Talmadge. Did he know that there are 488,-711 homes in Georgia without running water? Or care? Did he know that Georgia has the highest rate for syphilis among whites in the union, with an average of 145.9 cases per 1,000 as against 4.8 for New Hampshire? Did he know—or care?—that only 170 out of 593 incorporated towns have a public sewer system, and that in a recent three-year period there were 3,000 cases of typhus, a disease almost unknown to civilized communities, and spread by fleas from rats?7 Or, to turn into quite a different direction, did he know and appreciate anything of the able and constructive work done by some Georgians in other fields, for instance the “Better Farm Units” organized by Cason Callaway, a former textile magnate?
I have been reading—a grim exercise—the miserable four-page parody of a newspaper, the Statesman of Hapeville, Georgia, that Talmadge ran. Its masthead read, “Editor … The People; Associate Editor … Eugene Talmadge,” and it carried its heaviest thunder in communications subtly signed, “A. Talmadge Mann.” Each issue contained a meandering and half-literate article by Talmadge himself, plus a few letters, a mass of boiler plate (even the editorials were clipped from other newspapers for the most part), and nuggets of miscellaneous wisdom. Three hot “stories” in the issues I have before me are headlined EXTRA FAT NEEDED IN ROASTING NUTS, SHORT PREPARATION NEEDED IN SERVING BROCCOLI, and TROJAN HORSE ANCIENT DEVICE, HISTORY SHOWS.
Most southern politicians are, as we know, reasonably adult on foreign affairs, but Talmadge took his own special line. As a sample consider the following from his signed editorial on April 5, 1945:
The Dumbarton Oaks conference provided Great Britain to have twice as many delegates or votes in the peace conference as the United States. WHY IS THIS? The United States 3 delegates and Great Britain 6. Every country that goes into a peace conference should have an equal number of votes. I notice that the Senate had something to say about this numerical arrangement of votes. I recall in the League of Nations the fatal point about that [sic] was for Great Britain to have more votes than America.
The leading communication in another issue is a fervid plea from a subscriber asking for information about the number of Georgians serving time for rape.
Marching Through Georgia
The ramshackle house didn’t look very good to me, but my guide said, nodding soberly, “He ain’t done bad for himself. Got him a hoss.”
This was just outside Atlanta, and I was looking at a tenant farm. We had not gone ten miles before I saw expressed, visibly and concretely, all the evils I had ever heard about sharecropping and the tenant system. This is agriculture at its most forlorn and slapstick; actually tenantry is little more than an indifferent substitute for slavery, since it kills hope; almost every year, the small farmer just misses coming out even. For fifty-five years the South has sulked, marked time and staggered while the rest of the nation went forward, at least in agriculture. Farmers in the North got silos, hybrid corn, and mechanization; those in the South got pellagra, hookworm, and malaria.
The first thing I noticed was the outdoor privy. It has a metal ventilator pipe; these were built all over Georgia by the WPA. There is no running water or electricity; an old bedspring leans against a rotting tree; an iron pot—the laundry—sits shakily on burnt stones. We moved on to the house, which is propped up on lumps of rock; if you step firmly on the “veranda,” the gray moldering boards give way. A small, cracked mirror is nailed to one of the outdoor posts, since there isn’t enough light inside to shave by.
But this tenant farmer did have a horse. So he was a step above his neighbors. He works about eighteen acres, and pays a rent of $100 a year ( = one bale of cotton), which is half his total average annual income.
This was a white man’s farm; the next one we saw belonged to a Negro. “Hyah, Uncle,” my guide greeted him. He had five or six acres in cotton, and in addition grows a hundred bushels of corn a year. In the downfallen villages of Paraguay, a thousand years behind the rest of Western civilization, and in some remote and utterly destitute areas in India, I have seen things like this. No bathroom, no radio, no running water, no electric light, no gas—of course. A crude table, a dipper in a cracked white pail, flies buzzing around, hog meat hanging from the ceiling in white sacks, a small hand-turned phonograph, old trunks and tools are features of the two-room house. There are seven old hens in the yard, and two roosters. This Negro tenant has ten children, and he has ambitions for his establishment; he cleared off part of the woods and put a tin roof on one end of the barn. But he had some bad luck lately. His feet got blistered last year and he put turpentine on them as a kind of ointment; he sat too near the stove one evening, and his slippers caught fire. “I’se never heard of a fool man burnin’ up his own feet before!” he exclaimed. Ever since there have been doctor bills and drugstore bills in the village near by. “Costs me a dolluh every time dat doctor write his name!”
Seventeen American states and the District of Columbia have two complete sets of school systems. I don’t suppose one Northerner out of a thousand knows this, or realizes the enormity of its implications. That the Negro schools are infinitely less well-equipped than those for the whites goes without saying.
My guide was Sid Williams, director of the Young People’s Division of the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta. First we visited a white school, one built by the WPA during the depression and called a “consolidated school”; it has five grades and serves several districts in the county. Busses bring the children in; in theory, at least, this obviates the necessity of having a one-room school in every village. Some bigger “consolidated” schools run right through from first to twelfth grades. This one has 285 children, aged six to twelve. The teachers get just under one hundred dollars a month for ten months, and were looking forward eagerly to the impending Arnall reform whereby they would be paid for eleven months instead of ten.
I walked through the library first. A motto stood against the wall: CLEAN HANDS, A GENTLE TOUCH, SURELY WE OWE A BOOK THIS MUCH. There is a Britannica, and also posters urging safety lessons, bowls of roses on the window sills, and a cheerful, well-kept atmosphere. The playground has good modern equipment, slides and swings and so on, and the children (who incidentally pay 12¢ a day for lunch) looked fairly alert and clean.
Then a few miles away we visited a comparable Negro school. Here four teachers minister to 116 students; the difference is almost literally beyond belief. A shaky warped frame building at the end of a red-yellow unpaved road full of mud and rocks; ancient wooden desks (as against the pleasant movable desks in the white school); a dilapidated iron stove (as against steam heat in the white school); no auditorium, and a piano which is only just barely capable of giving out a tune; no library at all and no playground; and, instead of indoor toilets, two miserable privies thirty yards away.
We talked to the Negro girl who was principal. She was a graduate of Spelman, which is practically the local equivalent of being a graduate of Vassar; she was pleasant, efficient, and a little frightened by our visit. Her salary is 71 dollars a month for ten months, and so she has a little over 700 dollars a year to live on. I asked, “Can’t the equipment be improved?” Her answer was, “Well—no!” I walked around and saw a pitiful attempt to build up a science exhibit, looked at signs urging improvement in social behavior like DAILY DUTIES—PASS THE WASTEBASKET and then saw on one blackboard the legend, “The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620.” So in 325 years, I thought, we have come this far.
It happened that when I went to see one of the great cotton mills in the Atlanta vicinity, it was tied up by a sudden strike. The mill had been organized by the CIO the year before.8 Most of its workers come originally from mountain farms in Arkansas or elsewhere in the cracker country; most, when they ask for jobs, are already in their early thirties—having apparently exhausted any possibility of earning a decent living in their own communities. They are then apt to remain mill workers all their lives. They live in a kind of compound, surrounded by barbed wire; they pay the company 50¢ a week per room, with light and water free. Wages are 51¢ an hour for a forty-eight-hour week. “Tain’t enough to eat on !” one worker snapped.
This mill carries cotton right through from the bale to cloth, though it does not cut or finish. I talked to the president and general manager; he was angry about the sudden strike, defensive and embarrassed; he said that the mill had already raised wages 50 per cent as over 1941, and that he couldn’t go higher without going out of business. I asked him if mill work of this type gave any worker a reasonable chance for advancement. Perhaps I had forgotten I was in America, the country of free enterprise and equality of opportunity. He answered dryly that he himself had started work as a mill sweeper at sixteen.
Out in the yard, as sweating policemen watched the lines of workers, one striker slipped me a copy of their manifesto. Here is part of it:
Dear Friends:
We, the members of your General Shop Committee elected by you to represent you before the management of our Company … have reached the end of our rope. We seemed to have reached the end of our rope several months ago when the management refused to sign a contract with our Union. In the interest of the war effort, we refused to agree with you to strike this plant….
We helped our Union representatives carry your case before the War Labor Board panel. … We went before the Fourth Regional War Labor Board and again we were upheld. The Company then appealed to the National War Labor Board in Washington. That Board denied every one of the Company’s appeals, ordering them to get with the Union [sic] and put into a written agreement, every section of the contract … This, the Company has refused to do.
WE ARE ASKING THAT YOU REFUSE TO RUN YOUR JOB IN THIS PLANT UNTIL THE MILLS CARRY OUT THE DIRECTIVE ORDERS HANDED DOWN BY OUR GOVERNMENT “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
Finally, I visited several Negro churches. They don’t seem to differ much from white churches on the same plane, except perhaps that the atmosphere is more joyous, with attention directed to heaven more than Hell. One point is that most Negroes, so far as I could tell, think that God is white.
Home of “Gone With the Wind”
Atlanta, the “Workshop of the Confederacy” and a pleasant city with 302,288 people, may be the “capital” of the South but in some respects it is almost as middle western as Chicago. True, it rests 1,050 feet above sea level (quite unlike Chicago), and it is of course the home of much mellow southern sentiment and tradition. But also it is a very lively entrepot and distributing and mercantile center. Its airport is one of the busiest in the nation; it is the third largest telegraph center in the world and the fourth largest insurance center of the United States; its telephone exchange is the busiest in the South, and it contains more than 2,500 factories which turn out something like 150 million dollars worth of goods a year.
Atlanta, like most cities below the Mason and Dixon’s Line, is packed with contrasts. Two or three hundred yards away from Peachtree Street, in all its immaculate distinction, lies a jungle of empty lots with the underbrush boiling in green fury almost like that of Brazil. Along Ponce de Leon Avenue and in the Druid Hills section are the rich, sheltered homes of the Coca-Cola millionaires. Not far away are some of the worst Negro (and white) slums in the nation.9
As far as Atlanta is concerned, one of the town’s leading businessmen told me, “Sherman is still a cutthroat who was careless with fire.” It isn’t easy to realize that the city was almost completely destroyed, made into a rubble like Coventry, only eighty-odd years ago. But after the war it refused to stay dead, and became the hub of the resuscitated South. Northerners poured in; I heard one Atlantan say frankly, “You Yankees made us.” Like Dallas, it became a chief focus for representatives of northern firms, and its pace today is almost as quick as, say, that of Rochester, New York. One remarkable thing is its continuing capacity to absorb. A Northerner will come in, for instance as local manager for a company like General Electric; he will occupy the house of his predecessor, like as not; in a fortnight he will belong to the right clubs (Atlanta is full of good ones), and in a year will be recognized as a “permanent” citizen of the town; in five he may be president of the Chamber of Commerce, and in ten the mayor. Several times I heard of northern businessmen who, after some years in Atlanta, are offered promotion to better jobs with the parent organization back home. Some choose to stay in Atlanta, even if the salary is smaller, because they like its way of life. Anyway the slogan developed: Atlanta is the city with a southern heart and northern arms and legs.
Atlanta has two first-class newspapers, the Journal and the Constitution, which vie with each other not only in circulation but for the honor of being the more liberal. Both, for instance, claim to have been major actors behind Georgia’s abolition of the poll tax; the Journal has the better case in this regard. The Constitution is more widely known outside Georgia, but the Journal has the bigger circulation; it is, in fact, the most widely circulated newspaper in the nation south of St. Louis and/or Baltimore; it outranks any paper in Washington, D. C., Kentucky, or the whole state of Texas. The Journal is owned by former Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, who is also proprietor of the Miami Daily News; sometimes 100 per cent Atlantans express resentment that their largest paper is “absentee controlled.”
Finally, a word on a unique educational institution, Emory University. This was built on Coca-Cola money. It has (like Duke) an expensive and impressive plant, and is one of the best schools in the South. But it was forbidden by terms of its foundation to engage in intercollegiate sports; hence it has no football team and few people have ever heard of it.
Rococola
I heard it said that the “architecture” of Atlanta is rococola. The pun is bad, but what the city would be like without Coca-Cola is hard to conceive.
This is one of the great “success stories” in American history. In the 1880’s, when there were only four soda fountains in all Atlanta, a man named J. S. Pemberton conceived the idea of a nickel drink. He worked out the formula, which is secret to this day, and his bookkeeper, S. M. Robinson, named it. He scribbled down “Coca-Cola,” and the company’s trade-mark still uses the same script. In 1886 the partners spent $46 advertising Coca-Cola and sold twenty-five gallons of the syrup. Then, a few years later, Asa G. Candler, an Atlanta druggist, bought out Pemberton and Robinson for a song, and organized the present corporation; he ran it into a property which, in the early 1920’s, he sold to Ernest Woodruff, then president of the Trust Company of Georgia, for 25 million dollars. The legend is that Candler thought Woodruff was a fool for paying so much. But when Woodruff, a famously “tight” man, died a few years ago he was worth, according to reliable report, 200 million dollars; he was certainly the richest man in the South. His son, Robert W. Woodruff, is now the chairman of the executive committee. The people who run Coca-Cola are very close-knit. Most have known one another all their lives. In Atlanta alone Coca-Cola has made at least a thousand millionaires.
The present chairman of the board, Harrison Jones, had me to lunch in the central fastness of Coca-Cola. I had half expected to see something like Willow Run. Actually the Coca-Cola building in Atlanta, the heart of the whole vast enterprise over the entire world, is a quite modest structure in a residential district.10
Coca-Cola is as international as wheat or taxes. Before World War II, Mr. Jones told me, it existed in seventy-six different nations; the figure today is probably about the same. Its plant in Paris reopened four days after the Germans moved out, and American troops brought it to places as remote as Attu and New Caledonia. Coca-Cola sells when it’s 78 degrees below zero in Iceland, and when it’s 120 degrees above in Madras; company officials aver that no community has ever been found with a saturation point for it, and only twice in history—both times during a period of sugar shortage—have American sales been less than those of the year before. There is apparently no region of the earth’s surface, no race of people or class of citizens from Boston intellectuals to fuzzy-wuzzies in the middle of Africa immune to its arcane charm.
Coca-Cola consists mostly of sugar and water; a small percentage covers all the flavoring, and of course the formula is closely guarded. What counts, I heard, was the order of mixing of the compound, and it is freely believed that only one man in Atlanta is in possession of the entire technical secret. One gallon of the mysterious inner “essence” will flavor five thousand gallons of syrup, which is manufactured in a number of different factories throughout the United States. Of course Coca-Cola would be a prodigious success nowadays no matter what it contained; you could put almost anything in a Coca-Cola bottle and it would sell, since its vast public acceptance is based on something beyond mere formula.
At first Coca-Cola was sold only in syrup form, and the drugstores and other dispensers mixed it by the individual drink. As a result, since the flavor depended to an extent on the variety of water used, the quality wasn’t always uniform. It happened that two lawyers in Chattanooga missed the taste of genuine Atlanta Coca-Cola many years ago, and they went to Candler and suggested the creation of a bottling company. The huge ramifying complexities of what followed are far beyond the province of this chapter. First there were two small bottling plants, one in Chattanooga, one in Atlanta. Today there are 1,056 American bottling plants in 1,056 American cities, and bottled Coca-Cola represents about 80 per cent of the total business. Reason: a bottle has mobility.
Coca-Cola bottlers buy or are granted a franchise which, under normal conditions, is perpetual. The system is not quite analogous to that of a Ford or General Motors agency, contrary to general opinion. The great automobile companies can close out their agencies. But Coca-Cola encourages its bottlers to stay with the company indefinitely and put everything they have into it. There are six “parent” bottling companies (which, incidentally, never bottle); it is these, intermediaries between Atlanta and the small bottlers, that give out the franchises. The stock of five out of these six is completely owned by the Atlanta parent.11
Coca-Cola, like the New York subway fare at the moment of writing, still costs a nickel; the company has resisted every pressure for a raise in price. Hence among other things it must watch tax legislation carefully since, as I heard it put, “even a tax of a penny plays hell with a kid’s nickel.” South Carolina imposed such a tax for a time, and so, very briefly, did Kentucky. Several people have been loosely called the “Coca-Cola senator from and so on, but the company keeps clear of politics except in tax matters, and in Georgia at least does not even maintain a registered lobbyist. But its indirect power is, of course, very substantial indeed, since it represents as a rule the chief entrenched wealth of a community.
Why the South likes Coca-Cola so particularly and drinks more of it than any other part of the nation is something of a mystery. Every man, woman and child in Atlanta drinks a hundred bottles of Coca-Cola a year (the figure for New Orleans is 120) as against a total of six for New York City.12
Note in Malignancy
The Ku-Klux Klan has been the vulture of America for almost a century…. It is one enemy that has engaged in continual warfare against America since the Civil War. Its ally is hatred.
Its weapon is terror. And its aim is the destruction of our democracy…. The Klan runs like a bloody thread through the noose every subversive outfit was eager to wrap around America’s neck.
—Walter Winchell
I have said that the enmity of the Klan is triple—toward Catholics, Jews, and Negroes. It lives this three-pronged life almost everywhere in the union, though its stronghold is of course the deep South. Georgia has always been its central pivot. But—if I may be forgiven a minor lapse into autobiography—I remember an episode in Chicago after World War I. A photographer on the paper I worked for, with whom I had done several assignments, carefully sounded me out. He knew that I was not Jewish and not a Negro. With great circumspection he asked me if I were a “Cat-licker,” which was Chicago slang for Catholic in those days. When I said no he invited me forthwith to become a member of the Ku-Klux Klan.
The Klan, which represents almost everything repulsive in American characteristics from bigotry to the instinct in otherwise sane people to dress up in costumes that presumably conceal identity and go in for the demonifuge of a secret ritual, has three periods historically. André Siegfried, giving it greater dignity than it deserves, once called it an extreme expression of “Protestant nationalism.” The first Klan was organized in the 1860’s by Confederate veterans in Tennessee; the first leader was a celebrated southern general, Nathan B. Forrest. The idea was of course to agitate against the carpetbaggers and scalawags, put the newly emancipated Negro back in his place, and re-establish “White (i.e., southern white) Supremacy.” Most of the stigmata that distinguish the Klan today date from this period—the burning of crosses on lonely hillsides, the mumbo-jumbo of Klaverns, Kleagles and the like, night riders, intimidation, usurpation of police power, and the whole paraphernalia of a secret terrorist society ostensibly based on a “patriotic” impulse, like the Black Dragon society in Japan.
The first Klan did its work, and by the 1880’s had disappeared. In 1915 an itinerant Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons (who died in 1946) set out to revive it. His cohorts, masked and in white sheets, burned fiery crosses on Stone Mountain (the movement’s Kaaba) outside Atlanta; the new Klan was incorporated in the state of Georgia a few years later, and then had a violent gushing growth. The Klan took in 77 million dollars in this period;13 it reached a nationwide membership estimated at six million; 85 per cent of all Southerners in public life were members at one time or another; it controlled the politics of whole states. But by the middle 1930’s it had broken down again. Three things, in general, wrecked it: (1) a series of internal schisms; (2) a gradual but steady growth of decency in public opinion; (3) racketeers and gangsters got control of it, and the federal government moved in with tax delinquency charges and the like.
The third and contemporaneous Ku-Klux blossoming, if an ulcer may be said to blossom, began surreptitiously in the early 1940’s (each Klan period is closely connected with a war, since war, the prime source and fountainhead of all evil, always gives headway to special kinds of subevil), and became overt in 1946. Once more the organization began to solicit members at ten dollars a head—half price to ministers of the Protestant church!—and summoned the faithful to get out their nightgowns and appear on Stone Mountain to see the crosses burn. Once more, in city after city, in some communities even penetrating to the police force, the Dragons, Kludds, Klokards, Titans, Kavaliers, and Cyclopses got to work.
An illusion exists in the North that the Klan is a “secret” organization. Some aspects of the ritual may indeed be secret; but the fact of its existence, as well as its general functioning and behavior, is not a secret and never was. The words “Ku-Klux Klan,” with notes of Klan activity, are printed in the newspapers; in 1939, Klan detachments marched publicly and in full regalia in cities like Miami, Florida, and Greenville, South Carolina. There is nothing “secret” about the whereabouts or lay activities of “Doc” Samuel Green, the state grand dragon of Georgia, who is an Atlanta obstetrician, or in the fact that Senator Bilbo is a member. It is no secret that, on March 21, 1946, an attorney filed with the secretary of state of Georgia a corporate, registration for the “Knights of the Ku-Klux Klan, Inc.,” and paid the requisite fees covering the years 1943-1946 inclusive,14 or that in May, 1946, the federal government filed a lien against the Klan for $685,303.08 in back taxes, due since 1921.
Many Klan activities aren’t covered up at all. For instance the Ku-Kluxers once presented a flagpole, with tablet, to one of the most illustrious of Virginia colleges. The college accepted the gift and the flagpole is still there, though the tablet acknowledging its Ku-Klux origin has been removed.
The Klan has two new objects of attack these days—Communism (of course) and labor. It has furiously sought to oppose the recent CIO and AF of L membership drives in the South; it has threatened northern organizers, beaten them, and attempted to drive them out of various towns. Who would be a really “ideal” Ku-Klux enemy? Anybody who is at once a Negro, a Catholic, and a member of the CIO.
These are not easy times for the Klan, however. For one thing reputable Protestant clergymen all over the South have risen in opposition; the last conference of the Southern Baptist Convention vehemently attacked it. For another, various state governments have moved against the Ku-Kluxers, and the FBI is watching them with a zealous eye. This goes for the North as well as the South. The state of New York, worried by Klan activity, took a decisive step in August, 1946; four Ku-Klux units had been found operating there, and were forthwith ordered to be dissolved; the names of 1,100 members were turned over to the federal authorities. As of late 1946 the Klan was believed to be operating in a minor fashion in fourteen states, including California (where it used the Nisei as the “enemy”); the FBI, to date, has started investigation of Klan activity in seven, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Indiana.
The most significant anti-Klan action yet taken by any southern state was that of Georgia in the last days of Ellis Arnall’s administration, in the form of a suit to revoke the Klan’s charter. Immediately the Klan said that it was not the Klan. “Doc” Green’s organization, the Association of Georgia Klans, claimed that it had no connection with the Ku-Klux Klan, Inc., led by a worthy who calls himself “His Majesty, Imperial Wizard, Emperor of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku-Klux Klan.” But nobody is fooled by this kind of camouflage inside camouflage.
One factor that prompted Georgia to move, and that is stimulating action elsewhere, is the close association alleged between the Klan and such subversive organizations as the German-American Bund. The Georgia petition to the courts, aiming to clean out the Klan, specifically states that, in 1940, certain local units made “a definite, planned effort” to combine with the Bund in a single “all-Aryan” organization, and in October, 1946, the Department of Justice announced definite proof of collaboration between the two organizations between 1937 and 1941 “to promote racial and religious dissension prior to the war.”
A proposal was made recently that the Un-American Activities (ex-Dies) Committee of the House of Representatives should investigate the Klan. But nothing happened. Congressman Rankin is of course a leading member of this committee, nd he buried the idea by saying that the Klan is, after all, not “un-American” but “American,”15 which remark would seem to be an all-time high in confusion of an issue.
Late in 1946 a “benevolent and patriotic” order known as The Columbians, Inc., sprang up in Atlanta, with a platform to “create voting solidarity among all white American citizens.” The organization, a kind of sub-Klan but with more dangerous and violent tinctures, was avowedly anti-Jewish and anti-Negro; that it should have arisen at all is symptomatic—Talmadge’s election, gave new impetus to all kinds of wrecker groups. The Columbians, however, promptly got into trouble with the law, when sworn statements and documentary evidence became available that this “benevolent and patriotic” association not only had plans to drive the Negro population out of Georgia and lynch prominent Atlanta citizens, but actually to set up a Nazi-like “government” by terroristic means.
* Copyright, 1925, by Stephen Vincent Benet.
1 Man from the moon or Mars, take note.
2 The best sketch of Arnall I know is by John Chamberlain, in Life, August 6, 1945. “Barbecue capital of the world” is from this. Also see articles by Kenneth Stewart in PM, from which I derive the Krazy Kat detail. But my main source for this section and those that follow is conversation with Arnall himself, plus an official gubernatorial biography.
3 Other professions represented are funeral director, turpentine operator, naval stores agent, granite business, cross-tie operator, owner freezer locker plant, roofing agent, disabled World War veteran, tire retreading, and feed and chicken business. From a pamphlet Your Part in Georgia’s Politics, published by the Committee for Georgia.
4 The new constitution contains what are called fifty “major” reforms. But Atlanta liberals point out that it equivocates on the white primary issue; i.e., it makes no mention at all of primaries, which could open the way to evasion (as in South Carolina and Texas) of the implications of the Supreme Court’s white primary decision.
5 The Shore Dimly Seen, by Ellis G. Arnall, pp. 99-100. Published by J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1946.
6 Cf. Myrdal, op. cit., I, p. 638
7 Cf. a recent report, Building Together, published by the Committee for Georgia, affiliated with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and an article in the Atlantic Monthly by David L. Cohn, “Georgia: These Are the Facts.”
8 Incidentally one leading official of the Georgia CIa bears the splendid radical name of Lucy Randolph Mason.
9 An incidental point is that Atlanta is the only city I know in which the leading hotel is named for a newspaperman, Henry W. Grady.
10 Coca-Cola is, like so many American corporations, incorporated in Delaware, but Atlanta is its operating headquarters.
11 During the depression Coca-Cola stock was the “salvation” of Atlanta and several other southern towns, I heard it said. It is held very widely and people used it for collateral. Coca-Cola common paid 5.68 per share in 1945, and 2.52 per share in the first six months of 1946.
12 See Jonathan Daniels’ A Southerner Discovers the South, p. 91.
13 According to Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution.
14 New York Times. May 10, 1946, Associated Press dispatch quoting the State Legislative COtUlcil.
15 According to Drew Pearson, June 11, 1946.