‘Without Mercy’ airs Georgia’s dirty political laundry

St. Martin’s Press

304 pages, $26.99 hardcover

Georgia’s history is a goldmine of corruption, and David Beasley, a former editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has reached in and grabbed a few glittering chunks for examination. “Without Mercy” is his chronicle of the state’s troubled political scene during the Depression years.

Scrutinizing the sleazy reign of Gov. E.D. Rivers — the Democrat once named a “great titan” of the Ku Klux Klan — the author organizes much of “Without Mercy” around the electric chair executions of six black men in 81 minutes at Reidsville’s Tattnall Prison on Dec. 9, 1938. Beasley describes the event as “an assembly line of death.”

For Georgia’s African Americans, “justice” was sudden: A majority of the six condemned at Tattnall had only two months between their arrests and their high-voltage destiny. Their legal defense was minimal. The executioner, an electrician who worked at the Grant Park Zoo, was paid $75 per prisoner. Some of the convicted accepted their fates with equanimity; one warned ominously, “I’m gonna tell God how you done me.”

Circumstances were different for their various white contemporaries – 2,000 of whom were pardoned, including a country preacher who bumped off his son to collect on a life insurance policy; a brazen gunman who rubbed out the boss of an illegal lottery, known locally as the “bug”; and most sensational of all, the murder of a pharmacist by two millionaire fraternity boys from Oglethorpe University: Richard Gallogly, a grandson of the Atlanta Journal’s owner, and George Harsh, who would one day secure minor notoriety in “The Great Escape” World War II saga. All received commutations from Gov. E. D. Rivers. It was a notorious pardons racket, for those who could pay.

E.D. Rivers aligned himself squarely with the New Deal, slyly describing the influx of Washington cash as “war reparations.” He channeled funds into schools, roads, rural electrification and the construction of Tattnall Prison. Rivers ultimately became “the personification of both good and evil,” Beasley notes. By the latter part of Rivers’ term, Georgia was degenerating into cleptocracy, bankruptcy and eugenics dementia, as Rivers embraced a Reich-style forced sterilization bill.

A chief beneficiary of the Rivers administration was Hiram Evans, the Klan’s Imperial Wizard. The governor made his old pal a “lieutenant colonel” on his military staff, and, more significantly, appointed him the state’s “asphalt king.” It was a position that allowed Evans to rake in a personal fortune through creative price-fixing schemes.

The Klan’s power had begun to wane by the 1920s, but it had properties all over Atlanta. (Readers familiar with the city’s urban geography will appreciate identification of several Klan-owned buildings.) For Beasley, the Anglo-Saxon supermen were gangsters as much as anything else. When they weren’t hurling opponents into “torture machines” and lashing adulterers with bullwhips, they were engaged in lethal internecine feuds. In 1923, Hiram Evans’ PR man burst into an Atlanta firm and gunned down a rival faction’s attorney.

The most heroic figure in “Without Mercy” is Ellis Arnall, successor in 1943 to Rivers. Despite his early flirtation with the Klan, Arnall distinguished himself as a reformer, ending the onerous poll tax and eliminating the state’s inhumane system of chain gangs, any one of which would make Abu Ghraib seem like a luxury resort. Arnall restored accreditation to the state’s university system, abolished a governor’s right to issue pardons and sued the Klan to revoke its Georgia charter.

“Without Mercy” is well researched and Beasley moves along his various plots with a mannered precision that emphasizes the giddy perversities of Georgia life in the ‘30s. He doesn’t attempt anything with the sweep of “Fear Itself,” Ira Katznelson’s 2013 analysis of FDR’s New Deal alliance with Dixie segregationists. Nevertheless, both books are haunted by the specter of some of today’s extremist philosophers.

It isn’t easy for Beasley to explain the need to synchronize the mass executions in 1938. If the electric chair was a way of moving lynching indoors, it’s tempting to view the grotesque Reidsville spectacle as a severe reminder to the black population of its subject status, always one intention of mob action.

In any case, Tattnall, as the Georgia State Prison, crouches in the present day like a concrete toad, just waiting for any one of us to do wrong. Elsewhere, the headstone of Klan kingpin Hiram Evans, who died in 1966, mentions only that he was a Mason. There is a proposal, pending, to name a piece of highway after E.D. Rivers. Ellis Arnall already has one; his stretch is perhaps a bit more scenic.