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DEL.ICIO.USEloquence, when lubricated, finds its way to many tongues
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We got a lot of calls about last week’s item in which we quoted Mississippi legislator Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat’s 1952 speech on liquor. One that caught our interest came from Alec Poitevint, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.
He’s not claiming right of authorship, Poitevint said, but his grandfather C.T. Lynn, who was born in 1878 and served as a justice of the peace near Bainbridge in the early years of the last century, had a very similar speech, decades before Sweat’s oration.
We suspect Poitevint is right when he says a lot of politicians used similar words in that era, although Sweat copyrighted his speech. Poitevint recalls U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson using a similar speech years ago. His grandfather’s version, which supposedly was an answer to the local Temperance Union, wasn’t as rhetorically sophisticated as Sweat’s, he said, but it got to the same point.
Poitevint recalls that while his grandfather had more liberal views about liquor, his grandmother was a teetotler. But in common with many Southern ladies, she made an exception during the holidays and allowed others in the family to buy whiskey for her eggnog.
As Poitevint remembers it, that eggnog had a heck of a kick.
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