GEORGIA: Death of the Wild Man

Last autumn, just before he got elected Governor of Georgia for the fourth time, turkey-necked, 62-year-old Gene Talmadge was taken with a stomach hemorrhage and went to the hospital. The doctors made him eat poached eggs and he began to recover. Then he rebelled against the doctors. During the Thanksgiving holidays he drove 200 miles to his farm at McRae, Ga. to get some fresh air, healthful exercise and belly filling vittles. He ate fried chicken, ham and grits with red gravy and plenty of hot biscuits. Then he went out with a dog and gun and hunted birds. He drove back to Atlanta and collapsed again.

Last week, in Atlanta’s rambling Piedmont Hospital, Gene Talmadge grew terribly ill—he was suffering from hemolytic jaundice and cirrhosis of the liver. When the word got out, scores of policemen and firemen lined up at the hospital to offer blood. The Governor-elect was given transfusions. But he sank into a coma. One night at week’s end he hiccuped loudly. Then his breathing stopped.

Thus, three weeks before he was to “have supplanted Governor Ellis Arnall in office, the controversial career of Georgia’s “Wild Man from Sugar Creek” came to its end. No contemporary politicians except Louisiana’s Huey Long and Mississippi’s Theodore (“The Man”) Bilbo had appealed so successfully to ignorance and bigotry. Gene Talmadge had been vehemently for keeping “the nigger” in his place. He had opposed high wages and labor unions, and had taken a dim view of education for the masses.

Red Galluses. He was an attorney and an educated man (University of Georgia, ’07) and could talk quietly and well. But he never made the mistake of allowing the voters to discover it. He overflowed with leg-slapping rustic humor. Once, when a heckler asked if a man should be punished for beating his wife, he cried: “Depends on how hard you hit her.” He chewed tobacco and smoked at the same time, sometimes dressed up in cowboy clothes to ride a mule. As Governor he built barns behind the executive mansion, kept cows, hogs and hens in them. When he shouted campaign speeches he took off his coat to disclose the bright red galluses which became his trademark.

Early in his career, as Georgia’s Commissioner of Agriculture, he gambled $11,000 of state funds in the Chicago livestock market. He wanted to prove that Georgia’s peanut-fed hogs were as good as the Midwest’s corn-fed animals. He failed. But he bayed: “Sure I stole the money, but I stole it for you,” and as a result was elected governor in 1932.

During his three terms he ruled autocratically, fought the New Deal, and brought Georgia education to a low estate with his witch hunts in schools and colleges. His rallying cry was “white supremacy.” This week as his body lay in state under the state capitol dome, there stood nearby a huge floral wreath with the inscription “K.K.K.”

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Gene Talmadge’s death set off one of the biggest, oddest political rows in U.S. history. The new Georgia constitution provided no clear-cut method of determining his successor. Backers of incumbent Governor Arnall believed that he should continue in office, even though he was constitutionally barred from a second candidacy, and had not run in 1946. Others wanted the General Assembly to choose between the two highest general election write-in candidates: James V. Carmichael and Talmadge’s son, Herman (pronounced Hummon to rhyme with summon). Still others tried to make a case for M. E. Thompson, Georgia’s newly elected lieutenant governor. At week’s end no way had been found of resolving the dilemma.