You've survived the turkey, the relatives, and the Georgia-Georgia Tech fracas. December looms, with an even larger hurdle: What do you get the Southern geek in your life?
Here’s your easy answer: The best piece of Georgia political scholarship to happen in a decade or so — the tale of how your state may have been cheated of a chance to escape the harshest excesses of the fight over civil rights and segregation in the 1950s and ’60s.
The slightly unwieldy title you're looking for is "The Three Governors Controversy: Skullduggery, Machinations and the Decline of Georgia's Progressive Politics." (University of Georgia Press, $32)
This is the history book we weren’t allowed to have as kids. Schools would have banned it. County libraries would have refused to stock it. Certainly, Southern professors would have been discouraged from writing it.
“As we dug more and more into it, it got more and more interesting,” said Chuck Bullock, the longtime UGA political scientist who made up one-third of the authorship team. The other two are former students and fellow academics: Scott Buchanan at The Citadel and Ronald Keith Gaddie at the University of Oklahoma.
One scholar per claimant. A fair ratio.
If you know anything about Georgia history, you’re at least slightly familiar with the “three governors” episode of 1946-47, long treated as an embarrassment that respectable people shoved by without looking.
That January, on his nationwide radio program, comedian Jack Benny picked up his "phone" and listened. "I certainly will think it over. And it was nice of you to consider me," he said, then hung up. "They want me to be governor of Georgia."
It was a killer laugh line.
For the uninitiated, here’s the thumbnail: Former governor and demagogue Eugene Talmadge successfully makes a comeback and wins the ’46 Democratic primary. But even as he wins, he’s dying. Talmadge supporters sponsor a secret write-in campaign for his son, Herman Talmadge, in the subsequent and meaningless general election, knowing that — with enough ballots — the Legislature could then elect the son to replace the father.
(In Telfair County, write-in votes for Herman Talmadge come from voters who lined up in alphabetical order and, in some cases, were dead.)
The complication is a new state constitution that creates the position of lieutenant governor, which will be held by Melvin E. Thompson.
So Gene Talmadge dies before he’s sworn in. The Legislature taps Herman Talmadge to be governor in his place. Thompson says he’s the governor. And Ellis Arnall, the liberal incumbent governor, refuses to leave.
All this would have made for an ideal Marx Brothers plot, save for the fact that Arnall and Talmadge had two separate armies at their backs. Arnall had the Home Guard, a World War II-era security force. Talmadge had the National Guard.
This is an era when, to get their way, Georgia governors would declare martial law “at the drop of a hat,” Bullock noted. “You’ve got a seven- to eight-year period where it becomes pretty common. It’s something we associate with Third World countries.”
Thompson is ultimately declared governor by the Georgia Supreme Court. But Talmadge ousted Thompson in a 1948 special election. The Talmadge father-son dynasty would extend to 1980.
Though well told, none of this is particularly new. Where the three authors break ground is in the prequel. They focus on the 1946 Georgia Democratic primary that Gene Talmadge won. Or, perhaps, stole.
Georgia business interests lined up behind Jimmy Carmichael, a former state lawmaker and general manager of the Bell Bomber plant in Marietta. The third candidate was former Gov. Ed Rivers.
Federal courts had just declared Georgia’s white-only Democratic primary to be illegal, raising the prospect of black participation.
Talmadge, whose statue now graces the state Capitol, vowed to restore the segregated primary. He openly sought support from a re-emerging Ku Klux Klan — and made it part of his get-out-the-vote effort. “The Harlem-Moscow-Zoot-suiters, with the aid of white Quislings, will strike the death blow to our segregation laws,” he thundered.
Carmichael was no fan of social equality. But he secretly reached out to black voters — and may have been the first candidate for governor to do so, the trio of authors write. It actually worked.
“What I didn’t realize before I got into this was how extensive black participation was. It was not happening across the rest of the South, either,” Bullock said. “There was some effort in Southern states for a few black veterans to become politically active, but in Georgia you had 150,000 who were registered. One hundred thousand cast votes. That’s the best guestimate.”
Carmichael won a plurality of the popular vote. But ‘twas Talmadge who won the primary outright. For Georgia elections were determined not by the mass of individual votes, but by how many of Georgia’s 159 counties a candidate carried. The county unit system, designed to preserve rural clout in the state, wouldn’t be deemed unconstitutional until 1962.
One of the keys to Talmadge’s primary victory was a quiet campaign to purge newly registered black voters from the rolls in those highly valued rural counties. Suspicions of a vote-rigging conspiracy were strong enough for the FBI to open an investigation. Agents identified 15 rural counties where black voters were eliminated.
In Wilcox County, one of the test questions asked of black registrants: “What white person asked you to vote?” In Houston County, local lawyer Sam Nunn Sr., father of a future U.S. senator, offered the proper legal advice for ditching black voters, according to the files obtained by the authors. The federal investigation was never finished. It died with Talmadge.
“The extent of voter fraud that occurred is a matter of debate, but the evidence of black voter suppression and intimidation is compelling,” the authors write.
This was a crucial turning point in Georgia history, a consolidation of the conservative forces that would guide white political response to desegregation over the next two decades in Georgia.
“If Jimmy Carmichael had become governor, he would have owed his governorship to stronger black support,” Bullock said. “If you have a governor that’s dependent on black voters, I would think that you would have taken some steps to protect them.
“So we might have had a larger, much more active black electorate going into the 1950s, which would have then made it harder for white politicians to turn their back on them.”
Bullock and his compatriots have uncovered one of the great what-ifs in Georgia history. To all you Southern political geeks who will be unwrapping it next month: You’re welcome.
About the Author
