Eminentoes/Hummon Talmadge of Georgia

...Are they getting adequate medical care to rid themselves of hookworm, rickets and social diseases...

...annals, one protagonist called it...

...He forced the aging Senator George to retire and won his seat in 1956, serving until 1980 when an Indiana-born carpetbagger Republican defeated him in the Year of Reagan...

...So much for the "will of the people...

...a Clemson University English professor edited them into the book...

...Constitution...

...Under an old Roman legal maxim, to suggest the false while suppressing the true is to lie—and by that rule Hummon is as guilty as if he murdered his mother with a rusty ax in broad daylight in a downtown department store...

...Just weeks after the bitter 1946 election twenty masked men seized two black men and their wives on a public road in Walton County, about fifty miles east of Atlanta, marched them out into the woods, and shot them to pieces...

...Gene Talmadge served as Georgia's governor in 1933-37 and 1941-43...

...And hostilities aren't going to cease merely to give American Spectator readers an objective account of what this arch-scoundrel of Southern politics has to say in his self-styled "memoir," which might more accurately be labelled an apologia...

...Supreme Court handed down a decision that looks shocking today, but was hardly remarkable given civil rights jurisprudence of the time...

...Army...

...A Ku Klux Klan resurgence began with the end of World War II and the return of black and white veterans...

...He omits mentioning that Old Gene came in second in that primary election...

...But after two years of rampant Ku Kluxery Thompson challenged Talmadge to a rematch, made law and order the cutting issue, and nearly won...

...The defendants got maximum sentences...

...The local newspaper—edited by my parents—termed it "a political tumble as surprising as a Republican victory in Georgia would be...

...1988 51/2 x 81/2 160 pp...

...Eugene Methvin is a senior editor at Reader's Digest...

...Total enclosed Payment Method: ^ Check enclosed (payable to G. K. Hall) ^ Visa ^ MC ^ AmEx Card # Exp...

...Thompson polled 279,137 to Talmadge's 287,637, and Hummon actually got only 49.6 percent of the total since minor candidates polled 13,300...

...One Georgia political wag announced that he too wanted to be buried in Telfair County when he died, "so's I can remain politically active...

...As they took their handcuffed prisoner out of their car on the courthouse square, the man apparently said something provocative, whereupon they proceeded to beat him with fists and an eight-inch solid-bar blackjack weighing two pounds...

...One of the men had just been discharged after five years' service in the U.S...

...He ran for the U.S...

...we'll pass the anti-Klan bill...

...The mob marched on Arnall's office, and when his chauffeur tried to bar their way, somebody slugged him and broke his jaw...

...To Georgia's moderate and liberal whites, the fight against the Talmadges seemed a contest of civilization versus savagery...

...The impasse was resolved when the state supreme court ruled that Thompson was the lawful governor, and Talmadge yielded the office...

...No one was ever prosecuted...

...Quoting politicans, lobbyists, journalists and intellectuals — including Burke, Buckley, Kirk and many others —scholars Gottfried and Fleming clearly outline the characteristics of conservatism: an anti-Soviet stance, advocacy of unlimited material opportunity, and exaltation of custom as the protector of social morality...

...Talmadge reversed his stand only after five years of the bitterest political trench-fighting any state has ever seen, and only after Georgia's voters gave Talmadge the scare of his political life by almost throwing the rascal out...

...They also knew that the state constitution, under an archaic clause dating from Revolutionary War times, provided that, in case of the death of a governor-elect, the legislature should choose from the two candidates having the next highest number of votes who were willing to serve...

...Senator Herman E. Talmadge's book, Talmadge: A Political Legacy, A Politician's Life—A Memoir.' Now 74 years old and married to a much younger wife (his third), "Hummon" Talmadge is living quietly in Atlanta...

...oday, forty years later, Herman 1 tries to palm this episode off on us as his earnest effort to carry out "the will of the people" who, in 1946, gave his father "the largest vote in his entire career...

...Table of Contents 1. Forming a Worldview: The Conservatism of the Fifties 2. Before and After Goldwater: Conservatism in the Sixties 3. Ivory Tower/Ivory Gate: The Conservative Mind on Campus 4. Revolt of the Intellectuals: The Neoconservatives 5. Populist Rebellion: The New Right 6. Postscript: Reagan and Beyond Bibliographic Essay Index Feb...

...Folsom, who died last November, was re-elected in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling...

...Legend has it that Talmadge himself, on election night, remarked when he saw the Dooly County return: "That does it...

...And both Talmadges, father and son, stood astride that rift like howling witch doctors rattling and by Eugene Methvin chanting to bring on the great earthquake—as long as there were votes to be gained by the performance...

...In 1948 Talmadge ousted Acting Governor Thompson, a lackluster but courageous ex-schoolteacher, by a vote of 357,865 to 312,035...

...A significant contribution of this study is its exposé of the movement's fragmentation...

...It is the first objective critical approach to the conservative movement, clarifying its ideologies, goals, impact, differences with liberalism, and growth from 1945 to 1987...

...The best way in the world to break this down is to lend our ears to the teachings of Christianity and the ways of democracy...

...These were violent times in Georgia race relations...

...0-8057-9723-8 Cloth S 18.95 0-8057-9724-6 Paper S 7.95 ^ Yes, please send me The Conservative Movement by Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming at $18.95 Cloth (ISBN 797238) or $7.95 Paper (ISBN 797246) You must enclose payment with order...

...Old Gene won the gubernatorial race that year, but died in December before his inauguration...

...To this curmudgeonly critic, Hummon Talmadge was a quintessential political chameleon who deftly changed color as the electorate changed...

...A nosy Atlanta Journal reporter later earned a Pulitzer Prize for showing that Herman's extra fifty-eight votes.came from people who rose up out of the cemeteries, marched to the polls in alphabetical order, cast their write-in votes for the Talmadge son, and presumably went back to their graves...

...He waited until the lieutenant governor, M. E. Thompson, was inaugurated, and resigned, whereupon Thompson claimed the governorship, there being no occupant of the office...

...The U.S...

...Herman Talmadge's pappy, Gene, first ran for public office in a race for the Georgia senate in 1922, and my grandpappy, a country weekly editor in the next county, helped whip him...

...This was the case for me when a friend recently placed in my hands a copy of former U.S...

...Today he claims he considered the end of segregation inevitable and all the while worked and aimed for the reduction of racial barriers to roughly the open society we enjoy today...

...Georgia's governor at the time, Ellis 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 Arnall, cited another constitutional clause saying the governor should serve until his successor was duly qualified...

...Herman quietly passed word to the boys to organize a little write-in campaign so he would have enough votes to lay claim to a legislative candidacy...

...from half the stumps in Georgia, stirring theworst dragons of men's souls with promises of "white supremacy" and "segregation forever...

...Herman summoned crowds of rowdy Talmadgistas to Atlanta, and in the midst of a mob-like atmosphere, the legislature elected him...

...NEW FROM TWAYNE The Conservative Movement Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming Appearing in a crucial presidential election year, this is a timely analysis of one of the most powerful political and social forces in America...

...Like a crown prince, he reasons, "I had inherited my daddy's support...

...What was possible for a Southern politician of that day...

...then he won an election in 1948 to complete his 'By Herman E. Talmadge with Mark Royden Winchell, Peachtree Publishers (Atlanta), $17.95...

...They got him 617 votes, and when that was not enough to put him ahead of an obscure tombstone salesman who polled 637, they found another fifty-eight votes that had been "placed in the wrong envelope...

...M. Claude Screws, sheriff of Baker County, Georgia, had had a grudge against a black man and with two deputies went to a bar one night, tanked up, and then went to the man's home to serve a warrant charging theft of a tire...

...They shouted "nigger...

...Let's get one thing straight right here: I am hardly an unbiased observer...

...To anyone familiar with the record, the pose is preposterous...

...Then as the nation watched gaga-eyed, for sixty-three days Georgia had two governors...

...Had he exercised a little Burkean leadership, the nation's racial travails of the next fifteen years might have been vastly eased...

...The Talmadges were racist demagogues who gave leadership only in the wrong direction when it mattered...

...H erman Talmadge first burst upon the national scene in 1946 in one of the great tragicomic episodes of American political history—the first "armed coup d'etat" in U.S...

...In their thought-provoking chapter on conservatism's future after Reagan, the authors predict that this fragmentation may be the movement's demise...

...The Supreme Court ruled the system unconstitutional in the 1964 Wesberty v. Sanders decision...

...Talmadge was crippled before the election by his alcoholism (which to his credit he has controlled), by a messy divorce from a popular wife, and by an office scandal that resulted in his administrative assistant going to prison for embezzlement and a Senate "reprimand'!—the lightest possible tap since the case was thin—for Talmadge himself...

...T he tragedy of Herman Talmadge is 1 that he had so much political talent and such a devoted following that he might have moved mountains, and yet he accomplished so little...

...First, a few undisputed facts...

...There has been too much "stirring of old hatred andprejudices and false alarms," Folsom said...

...But in Washington the justices said the law required proof of specific intent to deprive a victim of federal rights, an interpretation that as a practical matter freed Southern mobs of fear of federal intervention...

...They changed the locks, and Talmadge admits that on his first day he strode into office with a .38 Smith and Wesson tucked in his belt...

...His opponent, James V. Carmichael, actually outpolled him by 9,000 votes but was denied the Democratic nomination by the peculiar Georgia "county unit" system, akin to the electoral college, that favored South Georgia pine trees over urban voters in Atlanta and other population centers...

...They drew their support from the people who regarded blacks as little more than draft animals, and from many more who were simply so desperately poor and bent by deprivation their only claim to human dignity was that they were "white men" and therefore "superior" under the Jim Crow system...

...Date Signature Name Address City State Zip Send to: Twayne Publishers (A division of G. K. Hall) 70 Lincoln St...

...Boston, MA 02111 or call TOLL-FREE 1-800-343-2806 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 29...

...The women, sisters, were killed because one of the mobsters thought he had been recognized...

...On May 7, 1945, the very day the Nazi high command surrendered in Europe, the U.S...

...Awhile back, this latter-day survivor of the bygone era of Southern racist demagogues sat down with a couple of history professors and recorded some reminiscences...

...In my home county, Dooly, in 1948 Talmadge rang up a 499-vote majority out of about 2,000 cast...

...But the rest of us are entitled to remember what he leaves out, and that may be more fun as well as more illuminating...

...His son Hummon laid claim to the office via a peculiar political machination which the state supreme court nixed...

...The Talmadges also drew support from a lot of wealthy "power structure' denizens for whom they kept income and property taxes low, since the poor whites were encouraged to pay more attention to their governor's support for "white supremacy" than his position on matters like free school books, regressive sales taxes, and such...

...Those votes happened to come from the Talmadges' home county, Tel-fair, in the Great Ocmulgee Swamp country, a region noted for bootleg whiskey, felonious assault, and vote stealing...

...Senate in 1936 against Richard B. Russell and in 1938 against Walter F. George and lost both times...

...father's unexpired term and re-election to a full four-year term in 1950...

...While Hummon was stirring the worst racist passions, over in Alabama Governor "Big Jim" Folsom delivered this Christmas message in 1949: "Negroes constitute 35 percent of our population...

...Today Talmadge boasts: "When I was governor we passed a bill unmasking the Klan...

...Herman and his dad's cohorts knew their man was dying of cancer before the November general election, which in those days of the one-party South attracted little interest since everybody voted for the nominees selected in the knock-down, drag-out Democratic primaries...

...after two years of night-riding and cross-burning, voters in that usual Talmadge stronghold gave Hummon only a thirty-vote majority...

...Attorney, a distinguished lawyer from my hometown and a former law partner of Senator Walter F. George, prosecuted and a Georgia jury convicted Screws and his cohorts under the old 1872 anti-Klan law making it a felony to deprive a person "under color of law" by reasons of his race of rights secured under the U.S...

...Are they getting 35 percent of the fair share of living...

...He won a 1946 election for governor, but died before his inauguration...

...The man died anhour later...

...Herman's term ended the following January, and two years later he went to the Senate, but even after he was safely ensconced, he continued to preach "massive resistance" and stump the state for the segregationist front, the States Rights councils...

...The anti-mask bill passed the legislature in 1951 with a silent nod from Talmadge, but two years before, in January 1949 when Talmadge was in complete control of the legislature, his gang had tabled an anti-mask law...

...What the San Andreas Fault is to California geology, the Talmadge/antiTalmadge rift was to Georgia politics for thirty years...