Four Degrees of Separation

         “Four Degrees of Separation: Psychological factors in Georgia

Politics from Leo Frank to Jimmy Carter”



         In the last seventy years, there have been several major political events that changed the face of Georgia politics; the election of 1966 which culminated in Lester Maddox’s tenure as governor, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which resulted in the conversion of southern Democrats to the GOP, and the election of 1946. This last, now considered an anecdote, was in fact a pivot point in Peach State history, a bridge between the early twentieth century racism, anti-Semitism and politics and the post World War II era.                              

      Nineteen forty-six was an interesting year. Boston played in the first post-war World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Republicans swept both houses of Congress and dealt a stinging rebuke to Harry Truman and the Democrats. My sister was born, and Eugene Talmadge was elected to his fourth term as governor of Georgia.

         The Red Sox lost as they usually did in the twentieth century. The Republicans learned what it meant to rile Truman. My sister is a grandmother now and Georgia soon had three governors.

        Ellis Arnall, M. E. Thompson, and Herman Talmadge were the actors in this bizarre episode. These three men all claimed to be governor at the same time, not sequentially. The resultant period has been called a crisis, a controversy or a southern cartoon. Several northeastern news outlets sent reporters who, in many cases had been covering the European theater of war to observe the potential violence of the Georgia “theater.”

      The strange antics began after the 1946 gubernatorial primary in July.  Eugene Talmadge won the Democratic nomination, and thereby the subsequent general election, as there was no viable Republican party in Georgia or anywhere else in the south at that time. Ol’ Gene won election to his fourth term by virtue of the county unit system, a byzantine scheme to maintain white rural domination of the state. The popular vote counted only in the general election.

        Talmadge was a sick man, suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding and cirrhosis, a fact known only to his inner circle. One of them, Gibson Ezell realized that it might be a good idea to have some insurance and he suggested a secret write-in campaign for Herman, the scion of the Talmadge dynasty and just discharged from the Navy.

      Talmadge pere died 0n December 21.  The next day over ten thousand people passed by his coffin at the state capitol in six hours. Ezell was right. Insurance was needed. Legal opinions flew. How can Talmadge be inaugurated as a dead man? Should the incumbent remain in office, as maintained by Governor Arnall, or should the Lt.-Governor elect (M.E. Thompson) take office? The Talmadge forces wanted the General Assembly to select the winner from the next two candidates “then in life”. The legislature was dominated by Talmadge supporters and could be counted on, when awake.

      On January 4, 1947, the attorney general issued an opinion that Arnall was the governor until Thompson was sworn in on January 11. The incumbent then announced that he would “resign” on the 18th, ceding the office to Thompson. The Talmadge loyalists held fast that there could be no transfer of power until the General Assembly met and voted on the 13th.

The next day chaos erupted.  Talmadge supporters packed the legislature and gallery, drinking heavily as was their wont, only to be drugged by drinks sent out by the Thompson supporters. A conscious quorum couldn’t be gathered until late that night, a small fire was set in the capitol and guns were checked for the vote. It was then the vote totals were announced:

                   Eugene Talmadge          143,279

                   David Bowers                        637

                   Herman Talmadge                617

      The shock of the vote was palpable, but in an extraordinary and quick development, a missing envelope from Telfair County (the Talmadge family home site) was “found.” It contained 58 votes for Herman, putting him over the top. At two o’clock in the morning, Hummon (as he was known to the rural base of his supporters) was elected Governor of Georgia.

The heir immediately made a speech and marched to his new office, only to find it locked and in the possession of Governor Arnall. The mob surrounding Hummon attacked the door, smashing it open and fractured the jaw of Arnall’s chief aide. 

Knives were drawn in the office of Lieutenant-Governor Thompson and tensions were escalating. Talmadge suddenly turned and implored his friends to go home as he did. The next morning, with a Smith and Wesson as his new chief of staff, he had the adjutant general of the National Guard, Marvin Griffin, change the locks on the governor’s office and escort Arnall back home to Newnan, Ga. about forty miles away. The putsch was essentially complete.

        Arnall returned to the capitol and attempted to set up office in the rotunda, until Talmadge supporters began dropping firecrackers down onto his “office.” He left to run the state from his law offices, appointing directors to the State Guard, highway department, parks department and others. Simultaneous appointments were being made by the other governor. Arnall also had his attorney general sue Talmadge in state court, although the “pretender”, as Arnall called him, claimed the courts had no jurisdiction over him. The Secretary of State, Ben Fortson, actually took the Great Seal of the State home with him and hid it, so that none of the claimants could do anything official. Banks refused to cash state checks because no one was in charge.

      On the 18th, Thompson was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor by an Arnall leaning Supreme Court justice. He immediately called himself “Acting Governor” and Arnall “resigned.” Seven lawsuits were filed over the next six weeks for Talmadge or Thompson, but little occurred until March 2, when the Atlanta Journal printed a dramatic and well documented story about the Telfair votes.

      It seems certain discrepancies were noted. All 58 signatures were in the same handwriting and 34 were in alphabetical order. The home address of these “voters” was the Telfair cemetery. Of the remaining 24, two were also dead, five didn’t live in Telfair County, five swore they hadn’t voted and twelve were never found. Hummon later admitted some of the “boys were too aggressive in their ‘get out the vote’ tactics.”

      On March 19th 1947, the Supreme Court ruled 5-2 in favor of Thompson, and Talmadge moved out of the mansion and capitol building. The court ruled another election was to take place in 1948 for the remainder of the original term. Herman began to run almost as soon as he returned to Telfair County, and in that election, he won a landslide. He was re-elected in 1950 to a full four year term and subsequently to the U.S. Senate, an office he held until 1980, when saddled with a messy divorce and a denunciation from his Senate colleagues, he lost to the first Republican ever to win a Senate seat from Georgia. The old Talmadge machine had gradually become members of the GOP, but Herman couldn’t make that change. The anti-Talmadge forces never again won an election.

         The Talmadge dynasty lasted for 74 years, a run matched only by the Lafollette’s of Wisconsin, Long’s of Louisiana and Taft’s of Ohio. Eugene Talmadge a college educated man adopted the folksy ways of his hero, Thomas E. Watson, another literate man who relied on Populism for a while, then vituperative bigotry for his hold on the state. Talmadge was born in 1884, shortly after the end of Reconstruction. During this period of political Redemption, the Democratic Party sought to reverse the gains and objectives of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments by effectively disenfranchising Blacks and legalizing segregation, rigidly. Talmadge grew up and matured during a period of realization for southern Democrats that they could have slavery without the cost of ownership. He was molded and driven by the words of sons of Confederates, especially Watson.

         Talmadge obtained his law degree from the University of Georgia in 1907, but failed to build a successful career in Atlanta. He moved to rural Telfair County where he married and did well as a horse trader and farmer, though Ms. Mitt (his wife) was always the major wage earner on her thousand acres. He tried twice to begin a political career at the county level, but was thwarted by the bosses, the Georgia equivalent of the Bourbon plantation leaders of Mississippi and Louisiana. This taught him to rely on the rural poor, the “Wool Hat” boys, and the elite became his life long political enemies.

         In 1926, two years after Watson’s death, Talmadge decided to take on the mantle of the Sage of Hickory Hill (Watson) and attack the leading political boss in the state, J.J. Brown, whose day job was Commissioner of Agriculture. When Brown offered to debate this disheveled upstart, Talmadge readily agreed. He had been a debate champion at university and studied at the feet of Watson, a fiery speaker. Brown was destroyed at the first meeting and Talmadge won in a landslide.

         Talmadge knew the legislature would oppose him, so he waited until they adjourned before he cleaned housed at the Agriculture department. He emptied it out so quickly, that by golly, he had to hire his own relatives to fill the jobs.  He won the office as a reformer, a man of the people. His clothes were shabby and he wore bright red galluses. He talked fast and he talked like they did. The wool hat boys loved it and reelected him, even if he did have to apologize for some errors, mistakes “…of the head, not the heart.”

         During his second term, he was much more at home. He felt so good, he bet on peanut-fed livestock to beat out Midwestern grain-fed animals to the tune of$80,000.00 of department funds. When it was disclosed by the Atlanta newspapers, that the commissioner had racked up $14,000.00 in losses, he explained, “Yeah, it’s true. I stole, but I stole for you.” He was re-elected for his third term overwhelmingly.

      Talmadge firmed up his reputation by his appeal to the basest of constituency, the rednecks, the poor whites (only) and the country folk. Atlantans were put off by his attacks on commerce. A move to impeach him because the state happened to have funded the Talmadge family vacation to the Kentucky Derby failed when his friends had a petition signed by a majority of the legislature swearing never to vote for impeachment. He floor leader of the Talmadge forces was Roy V. Harris who was quoted that “Gene was a good boy and we knew it.” Harris later managed Gene’s son Herman’s secret gubernatorial campaign.

      The Attorney General of Georgia  said, “Mr. Talmadge acts and talks as if the general assembly and the courts of Georgia were mere sideshows when compared to his power and authority.” It was just the beginning. In 1932, Ol’ Gene declared for governor.

      “The poor dirt farmer ain’t got but three friends on this earth; God almighty, Sears Roebuck, and Gene Talmadge.” The Wild Man from Sugar Creek became Governor, succeeding one of the few politicians who were able to escape the tar pit of the Talmadge clan, Richard Russell. Once he entered the Governor’s Mansion, Gene built a barn for pigs and chickens in the back and had cows graze on the front lawn. He then proceeded to claim extraordinary powers for himself.

      He lowered the price for license plates to three dollars, a moved loved by his farmer friends, and adored by truckers. When the Highway Department opposed this he removed the commissioner and his cohorts. They refused to go, so Talmadge declared martial law and replaced the department with the National Guard.

He told his followers that “the only way to have honest government is to keep it poor.” He did his best when he cut county health department budgets to three dollars a year and pardoned more prisoners than any of his predecessors in the governor’s chair.

      There were complaints about the pardons, but Talmadge kept his eye firmly on the wool hat crowd. “A good strong man has got no business sittin’ around a jail… What we need is a whippin’ post in a man’s home town in case of smaller crimes, such as gaming or wife-beating.” He was re-elected in a landslide.

      The second term was much more volatile than the first. Gene Talmadge had moved away from Roosevelt nationally and closer to Huey Long, though these two men hated each other on a personal level. Long was the radical ultra liberal according to Talmadge who moved further right throughout the 1930’s. The Wild Man was thinking about running for President in 1936, even more so after Huey’s assassination in 1935.

      State politics remained tumultuous, especially after he replaced the Public Service Commission and vetoed old age pensions, keepin’ them poor. He removed the state Treasurer and Comptroller after they refused to honor his budget decisions, especially after the legislature failed to deliver an appropriations bill. When those two men refused to relinquish authority, Talmadge ousted them with the help of the National Guard again and opened the locks to the vault with the help of a safecracker.

      He was not allowed to succeed himself in 1936, so he embarked on two losing Senate campaigns, only to come back strong in 1940, bringing back visions of Tom Watson. He became the only man ever elected to a third term as governor, a position he began to think of as his own. He temporarily solidified his control of the state during the Cocking Affair, ironically costing him the 1942 election against a reform minded Ellis Arnall.

      In the summer of 1941, word was brought to Talmadge from a disgruntled, recently discharged instructor at the University of Georgia, that the Dean of the College of Education, Walter Cocking, wanted school integration. Talmadge went to the Board of Regents to get him fired. The board reneged on the decision after appeals from the university president, forty-three faculty members, and the president of Emory University. Talmadge was enraged and attacked Cocking for taking money from a fund he described as “Jew money for Niggers.” He removed three members of the Regents who then fired Cocking. Ten more professors were removed, including the president of the Georgia State Teachers College (now Georgia Southern University), and libraries were purged. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools removed accreditation from all Georgia colleges and Universities. Students marched on the State Capitol and hung Talmadge in effigy from the statue of Tom Watson.

      Eugene Talmadge traded on the name of Tom Watson. He had his son Herman study Watson’s work.  Who was he, this stalwart of Populism and man of letters, this landmark for bigotry?

    Thomas E. Watson was born in 1856, nine years before the end of the Civil War. His grandfather had forty-five slaves and over 1300 acres pre-war, but after the freeing of his slaves, the old man had a stroke and young Tom’s father couldn’t keep the property. He suffered what today might be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was not able to hold the land or his liquor. Tom went off to Mercer, but had to leave after two years due to insufficient funds. Already a poet, compulsive reader and diarist, Watson became a schoolteacher while he studied law.

      Admitted to the bar in 1875, he became successful in short order, especially as a defense attorney. His skills as an orator were honed before rural juries and audiences who attended his trials as an entertainment. He was sent to the legislature in 1882 and established his bona fides as a champion of the poor by proposing to abolish the convict-lease system, which allowed industrialists to enlist forced labor of state prisoners. He wanted to require railroads to pay county taxes and tried to strengthen rights for tenant farmers. In a pattern he would repeat over the years, he lasted only one term and nothing he advocated passed. His encouragement of these measures however alerted the entrenched of his opposition and the deprived of his support.

      He returned home and frustrated with politics, he built his reputation as a lawyer and his holdings as a farmer. As his assets grew, the wealth of his neighbors and followers deteriorated. By the 1890’s, the strength of Populism began to be felt in the South.

      Tom Watson heard the call from the Farmer’s Alliance, then from the Populist Party. He was elected to congress in 1892 as a Populist and threw himself into promoting their demands, essentially enlarging the role of government. He wanted public ownership of the railroads, a progressive income tax, and was the first congressman to endorse Rural Free Delivery. He attempted a minor coup d’état by running for Speaker in his first term, failing by a huge majority. Again nothing that he proposed was passed and ignominy was heaped on humiliation when Democrats managed to fraudulently block his re-election.

      Two years later, he was blocked from a return by bribery, deception and chicanery. By this time, he had a national reputation enhanced by his speeches, orations in the classic southern style--bombast, bible and bull. In 1896, the national Populist Party nominated William Jennings Bryan for president with Watson as his running mate. Attempts were made to have a fusion ticket with the Democrats who refused to put the wild southerner on the ticket. McKinley was elected and Watson retreated to Hickory Hill, his new home.

      Watson had long advocated for an egalitarian approach to the rural poor, which obscured his racial feelings. He never stood for integration and the brazen use of paid African-American voters by the Democrats brought the true Watson position into the open. His anger at the party became a festering sore for the next twenty years, all the while increasing his attacks on Blacks. He inserted a plank in the Populist platform for their disenfranchisement, using the paternalistic rationale that this would protect them from lynching and punishment. 

      Watson retreated over the next several years, appearing to support or attack various politicians, often the same one. These years were never dull for the Sage.  He was more productive in literary output than any other time in his life. He wrote at an almost manic rate producing a two-volume history of France, a novel Bethany: a Story of the Old South, and biographies of Jefferson, Jackson, and Napoleon. He seemed to be drawing parallels between ancient French virtues of honor, pride, warrior spirit and hospitality and those he imagined residing in the ante bellum South.

        He fell into frequent bouts of melancholia, brooding about the Lost Cause and the old South. His fulminations against Northern industrialists and Henry Grady sycophants supporting an industrial future for the New South became increasingly shrill, while his law practice flourished.

            When he returned to politics in the 1906 gubernatorial election, he supported his once and future foe, Hoke Smith. The major issue in the campaign was the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. Shortly after the victory, at least twenty-two Blacks in Atlanta were killed over four days of rioting over an alleged insult to white women’s honor. Lynching was discussed casually and Watson called for its use “occasionally…to keep (the Negro) from blaspheming the Almighty by his conduct, smell or color.” He later wrote that, “Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”

There were those who were surprised by the fury of his attacks, which now extended to the Roman Catholic Church. They didn’t know his reputation in the courtroom, where he rarely lost a capital case and very few outside Georgia had seen him on the stump. Even as his daughter attended a Catholic school in Savannah, he ripped the Church for interfering in politics and alleged sexual perversions of priests. A law he demanded requiring all Catholic schools to be searched every three month for signs of degeneracy was not repealed until 1966.

        His diatribes were full of descriptions of this so-called depravity and he was arrested for sending pornography through the mails. The case lingered for four years and he won or had dismissed the charges over three trials. The government finally did ban his newspapers and magazine from the mails during WWI which he bitterly opposed. His primary interest had already passed by then to the case of Leo Frank.

          Leo Frank, born in Cuero, Texas and raised in New York City, was Jewish. A graduate of Cornell, he first worked as a mechanical engineer, but in 1908, he moved to Atlanta to help his uncle run the recently established National Pencil Company.  Two years later he married Lucille Selig from a prominent Atlanta Jewish family. He was by all descriptions, a thin, nervous man, a chain smoker, but well enough liked to be the president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith by 1913.

          On April 27th, the night watchman discovered the body of 13-year-old Mary Phagan when he went to the basement to use the toilet. She had come to town to see the Confederate Memorial Day parade and pick up her paycheck. Over the next three days, newspapers became hysterical with rage over the violation of southern womanhood. The agrarian fury with northern industrialists was added to the mix, which was then stirred by the identification of Leo Frank as the killer by the police.

          The three Atlanta newspapers vied with each other using sensational headlines for rumor and back pages for truth. The prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey coached the African American janitor, Jim Conley in at least four versions of his testimony until he got it right. He declared (dubiously) that he had written the noted found at the site of the body, but only when Frank had dictated them. He carried the body from Frank’s office, which accounted for the blood on his hands and clothes, only after Frank told him to. When these and other charges were countered, the stories were hidden, not printed or “forgotten,” only to resurface over the years.

          The Frank family knew of Tom Watson’s reputation as a defense attorney and approached him to take Leo’s case. Watson declined and at first took solely an observer’s role. The trial proceeded with violent crowds fueled by hate growing daily. The trial judge, Leonard S. Roan, pleaded with Frank’s attorney’s to keep him out of court for sentencing in order to protect the court and defendant. On August 26, 1913, after four weeks of testimony and four hours of deliberation, Leo Frank was sentenced to death by hanging. According to Albert Lindemann in The Jew Accused, “the jubilation in the streets of Atlanta was extraordinary. When Solicitor Dorsey exited the courthouse and reached the sidewalk, he was physically lifted in the air by the cheering crowd and passed across the street to his office with tears rolling down his cheeks, his hat raised over his head, his feet never touching the ground.”

          Over the next two years there were appeals through the state courts all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the Georgia court by a vote of 7-2. The dissenting justices were Charles Evans Hughes and Oliver Wendell Holmes based on their interpretation that due process had not been present. Their dissent famously stated, “Mob rule does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.”

          Hanging was set for June 22, 1915. At 2:00 AM on the 21st, Governor John Slaton ordered the sentence commuted. He had spent weeks reviewing the trial record and the thousands of letters he had received, including one from Judge Roan asking for clemency based on his own doubts about the verdict. The attorney for Jim Conley, the janitor whose coached testimony proved to be effective against Frank, also came out to say he believed his client (Conley) was guilty.

        Governor Slaton also went to the pencil factory and visited the site where the body was found and in he end, he told his wife, “… It may mean my death or worse, but I have ordered the sentence commuted.”  Reportedly, Mrs. Slaton kissed her husband and said, “I would rather be the widow of a brave and honorable man than the wife of a coward.”

          The state exploded. The National Guard had to be called to protect Slaton and his wife, escorting them to the railroad station as they left office the next day. Sixteen soldiers were wounded by the mob. The Slaton’s didn’t return to Georgia for ten years.

          Tom Watson, who had offered his support to Slaton for the U. S. Senate if he let the sentence ride, went into overtime with attacks. He claimed Slaton had been bought and paid for by Jewish industrialists. Frank was a “lascivious pervert” and the sentence was just. Virtually every issue of Watson’s paper, the Jeffersonian, was filled with vilification of the Jew, Frank. Even the hint of doubt by anyone in the public eye was proof of “the conspiracy of Big (sic) money” corrupting Georgia’s leaders and people. Frank “belonged to the Jewish aristocracy and it was determined by the rich Jews that no aristocrat of their race should die for the death of a working class Gentile.”

          The mobs that lusted after the blood of Leo Frank and the Slaton’s were defended and exhorted to continue. In the pages if his paper, Watson cried “When ‘Mobs’ are NO Longer Possible, Liberty Will Be Dead.” The Jeffersonian became filled with exclamation points and capital letters as Watson became more livid in his anger. Don’t buy clothes at Jewish stores, buy Clothing from Americans!” When a Negro convict named William Creen slashed Frank’s throat, Watson rose to his defense and    demanded clemency.

          On the night of August 16, three weeks later, 25 men, members of the Knights of Mary Phagan, office holders and other citizens of Marietta, Georgia, broke into the prison “holding” Leo Frank. In eight cars, they drove 177 miles, without interference and lynched him. They granted him one statement. He asked that they return his wedding ring to his wife Lucille.

          After he stopped moving, he was left hanging until the next morning when a crowd gathered and the spirit of a holiday prevailed. He was cut down and kicked, stepped on and his face was crushed. Someone them removed his ring and sent it to Mrs. Frank. Watson waited for word back at Hickory Hill. He said little at the time, having fallen into one of his periodic bouts of “nervous trouble” when he became despondent and dejected over nothing.

            Rapidly recovering, he launched into defense of the Vigilance Committee “putting the sodomite murderer to death.” The pages of his newspaper screamed, “Let the Jew Libertines take notice. Georgia is not for sale to rich criminals.” Womanhood was thus safe forever.

              In the aftermath of what has been called the “Frank Affair,” the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, was elected to two terms as governor of Georgia. Tom Watson was elected to the Senate. John Slaton returned in 1925 and never held elective office again, although his peers selected him as president of the state Bar. He wrote of the episode, “Two thousand years ago, another Governor washed his hands and turned a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor’s name has been accursed. If today another Jew were lying in his grave because I failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice.” In 1964, a dramatization of John Slaton’s experiences was shown as the opening episode in the TV series, “Profiles in Courage.”

        Lucille Frank never remarried and always referred to herself as Mrs. Leo Frank. Amongst her possessions was found Leo’s wedding ring. William Creen, the inmate who slashed Frank’s throat was pardoned in 1938 by Eugene Talmadge. The Knights of Mary Phagan morphed into the Ku Klux Klan, which had been moribund since the end of Reconstruction. Ironically, the Anti Defamation League was formed a few weeks later.

        In 1982, an elderly Black man gave a deathbed confession that he saw Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan’s body to the basement of the National Pencil Company. His mother and her friend, Jim Conley, had terrified him about telling anyone. The next year, the Georgia State Prison Board pardoned Leo Frank on the basis that he was not afforded a fair trial. Leo Frank has never been declared innocent. 

        The Jewish community was traumatized. They withdrew and ramped up efforts to assimilate, to hide in broad daylight. Christmas trees bloomed in Jewish homes. This rush to anonymity was led by David Marx, Rabbi at the Temple, the oldest congregation in Atlanta.

        The comfort of obscurity was ended by Marx’s successor, Jacob Rothschild, a Civil Rights activist in the street and from the pulpit. On October 12, 1958, fifty sticks of dynamite blew up and severely damaged the Temple’s sanctuary. No one was hurt, but the explosion brought an outpouring of support by the Atlanta community.

        The Mayor, William B. Hartsfield, arrived within minutes and denounced the attack in no uncertain terms. “Every rabble-raising politician is the godfather of the cross-burners and the dynamiters who are giving the South a bad name.” Ralph McGill, the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorials condemning the bombing. Over the ensuing years this episode became known as “the Bomb that Healed,”

          Although this case has been written about in books and essays for years, it has remained a blot on Georgia. In the 1940’s, Governor Arnall wanted to ask the pardon board to consider the Frank case, much as he had in the case of Robert Elliott Burns, the subject of the old Paul Muni movie, '"I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. When Arnall approached Jewish friends, they convinced him not to bring up the case. The Jewish community was traumatized and remained so until the civil rights era of the sixties.

            Ellis Gibbs Arnall was an extraordinary figure in Georgia history, although now largely forgotten.  He was the first Georgia governor born in the Twentieth Century and he was the first to serve a four-year term, but was unable to succeed himself due to a term limitation. He made his time count.

            He served in the state legislature for only two terms but became Speaker Pro Tempore in both sessions. In 1938 he became the state attorney general, the youngest in the United States. Fours later, in the wake of the Cocking Affair, Arnall attacked the Talmadge machine and won, becoming governor in January 1943. Over the next twenty-four days, the legislature passed his entire ten-point reform program.

          The day after inauguration, he introduced bills to reform the University Board of Regents, removing the governor from the board, giving it and seven other agencies constitutional status and thus out of reach from predatory governors. He had the terms of the board rotate, to further distance the members from the reach of any given governor. The parole system was reorganized, pardons were removed from the governor’s control and prison chain gangs were ended. A State Finance Commission was established to control the budget; a department was set up to oversee the state’s wildlife and a retirement system for teachers was created. Funding for schools, black and white was equalized and the poll tax was repealed.

Arnall was successful in getting the voting age lowered to eighteen, a first in the country. He also implemented a system for soldiers to register and vote, a move that stimulated the temporarily moribund Talmadge machine back to life. They screamed “Nigger Lover” when they realized that this would allow Black soldiers and sailors to exercise the right to vote they had been fighting to preserve. Arnall wasn’t through. He directed the Attorney General to revoke the charter of the Ku Klux Klan. When a federal court declared the “whites only primary” unconstitutional, he was the only southern governor to refuse to defy the court.

            A standard rallying cry of the populist and anti-Bourbon southern politician was to fight the railroads. Arnall not only agreed, but actually carried the campaign further. He went to court to stop the monopolistic practice of higher charges for southerners to ship goods north and lower prices for southern raw materials. Arnall personally pled the case before the Supreme Court. He won.

            The curious election of 1946 again placed Georgia under a cloud and Arnall under stress. He left the state for a job in the Truman administration, Director of Price Stabilization. He refused a later offer to be the Solicitor General and went west for a while, pursuing a less contentious fortune. He served as President of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers from 1948 to 1963, while building a very profitable career in life insurance back in Atlanta.

            By 1966, the political bug was causing a severe itch and he threw his hat into the gubernatorial ring. The leading candidate was Ernest Vandiver, a former governor known for the peaceful integration of the state university system during his term in office. The only other major candidate was Lester Maddox, a high school dropout. He owned a cafeteria where he handed out ax-handles to use against integration and paid for two column tirades against integration in the Saturday Atlanta Constitution. Vandiver dropped out in the spring after a heart attack and an obscure state senator named Jimmy Carter entered the race. Carter running a Kennedy-esque campaign, pulled young liberal voters from Arnall who had been out of the limelight for twenty years. The phenomenal growth of post war Atlanta further diluted his name recognition by a population that had no memory of the ‘40s.

              Arnall won the primary, but without a majority, forcing him into a run-off with the surprise second place finisher Maddox, who had been able to mobilize the Talmadge voters and the residual Democratic rural vote. Carter refused to endorse or campaign for Arnall. Maddox won the run-off over the surprisingly lackluster Arnall who assumed his prior service would carry him to victory.

          In a general election reminiscent of 1946, Arnall finally attacked with a write-in campaign. The first Republican to ever mount a credible electoral fight, Howard Callaway, actually won the general election with a plurality.  Under Georgia law, he was denied victory, which required a majority. Arnall’s write-in votes were the difference and the election was again sent to the Georgia legislature, a solidly Democratic body. They voted for Maddox without the bedlam of twenty years earlier. Arnall withdrew from public life and Jimmy Carter revamped himself as a conservative.

          Carter won in 1970 (with Lester Maddox running for lieutenant-Governor). He became deeply depressed after his loss but he had learned a lesson. His image transformed, he ran for four years as one of the rednecks. He pledged to bring George Wallace to his inauguration and allied himself with the rural vote. Secretly, he promised David Rabhan, a Jewish supporter from Savannah, that he would renounce segregation and racism in his inaugural if he won. Rabhan provided free air travel for the campaign and it is not clear if this decision was “payback” or a reflection of a deeply felt belief.

        James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in 1924, the first American president born in a hospital. The offspring of a long time Georgia family, Jimmy’s father was a large land owner and early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, only to abandon him over the role of depression era farm policies. Jimmy’s mother, Lillian Gordy, was an unusual and outstanding woman who entertained black children in her home and later became an R.N. Her brother, Jim Jack was active in Democratic politics and was the local postmaster for decades. Enamored of Tom Watson, he named one of thirteen children for the famed populist, turned bigot. The family legend has it that Jim Jack was the one who suggested to Watson the idea of supporting Rural Free Delivery, though at least eight other congressmen introduced the same bill over the years and Watson never had it passed during his one term in Congress.

          The complex personality of Carter reflects much from this background. He was the first in the Carter family to finish high school, while the Gordy family encouraged schooling and another Gordy uncle was a physician. The future president was influenced to enter the navy by his uncle, Tom Watson Gordy. His mother, the redoubtable “Miss Lillian,” who served in the Peace Corps, at the age of 68, appears to be the guiding force to the beneficent side of the thirty-ninth president, while the more malevolent turns in his career seem to be driven by an intense drive to succeed where his father and uncles fell short.

          He had Jews as mentors and advisors, from Hyman Rickover to Rabhan and Stuart Eizenstadt, yet he has enraged much of American Jewry with his approaches to the mid-east. He is one of

only two living Democratic presidents, but has embittered former colleagues by his “lone wolf” approaches to world affairs. He has worked with many former world leaders in a ‘Council of Elders,” and yet rarely acts within the group. He remains a restless and often enigmatic figure on the world stage.

            There are statues to Tom Watson and Eugene Talmadge on the grounds of the state capitol in Atlanta. Ellis Arnall was voted the most effective Georgia governor in the twentieth century. Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. John Slaton is memorialized only at his gravesite. Leo Frank is buried in Brooklyn, New York and his wife Lucille was buried in an unmarked grave in Atlanta, buried with her husband’s ring.



         

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Bibliography



“1946 Georgia Election.” New Georgia Encyclopedia. 2002



“Three Governors Controversy.” State of Georgia Secretary of State Archives.



Anderson, William. “The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Talmagde.” Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1975.



Luthin, Reinhard. “American Demagogues of the twentieth Century.”  Boston: Beacon Press, 1954



Duffy, Bernard K. “American Orators of the Twentieth Century.” Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987.



Woodward, C. Vann. “Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel.” Savannah: Beehive Press, 1938.



Lindemann, Albert S. “The Jew Accused.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991



Henderson, Harold Paulk. The Politics of Change in Georgia: A Political Biography of Ellis Arnall.” Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991



Bourne, Peter G. “Jimmy Carter: A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency.” New York, NY: A Lisa Drew Book/Scribner, 1997



Hayward, Steven F. “The Real Jimmy Carter.” Washington, DCV, Regnery Publishing, 2004





































Leo Frank Bibliography





Aiuto, Russell. “The Case of Leo Frank.”  Crime Library. Trutv.com,



Dinnerstein, Leonard “The Leo Frank Case.” Columbia University, 1968



Golden, Harry. “A Little Girl is Dead.” Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company, 1965



Lindemann, Albert S. “The Jew Accused.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991



Mamet, David. “The Old Religion.” New York: Free Press, 1997



McMurtry, Larry. “The Murder of Mary Phagan.” National Broadcasting Company, 1987. 



Oney, Steve. ‘And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.”  New York: Pantheon, 2003