Eugene Talmadge (September 23, 1884 – December 21, 1946) was an American politician and attorney who served three terms as the 67th governor of Georgia, from 1933 to 1937, and then again from 1941 to 1943. Elected to a fourth term in November 1946, he died before his inauguration, scheduled for January 1947. Only Talmadge and Joe Brown, in the mid-19th century, have been elected four times as governor of Georgia.
A member of the Democratic Party, he was known for promoting racial segregation and white supremacy, and for advocating for racism in the University System of Georgia.
Early life, education and early career Eugene Talmadge was born on September 23, 1884, in Forsyth, Georgia, the second of two children to Thomas and Carrie (Roberts) Talmadge. He attended the University of Georgia and graduated from the university's law school in 1907. While at UGA, he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society and Sigma Nu fraternity. In 1909, he married Mattie Thurmond Peterson and the couple had three children, including Herman Talmadge.
He started his legal career in Montgomery County where he also owned a farm. From 1918 to 1920, he started his political career as the solicitor for McRae, Georgia. He was the county attorney for Telfair County between 1920 and 1923. He joined the Democratic Party and twice ran for the Georgia state legislature, losing in 1920 and 1922.
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture
He was elected as the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture in 1926, defeating J. J. Brown. Talmadge was re-elected commissioner in 1928 and 1930. As commissioner, Talmadge used the newspaper of his department to give advice to farmers and promote his political views, extolling the virtues of a laissez-faire economic policy and individual action to improve the well-being of farmers. He maintained widespread support among Georgia's rural white communities.
The State Senate concluded that Talmadge violated a state law requiring that fertilizer fees collected by the agriculture department be deposited in the state treasury. He was criticized for paying himself and family members more than $40,000 in salaries and expenses, and using department funds to make trips to the Kentucky Derby. Accused of "stealing" $20,000 in order to raise the price of hogs, Talmadge told one group of farmers, "Sure, I stole it! But I stole it for you."Current Biography 1941, pp. 850–52 The State House declined requests to impeach Talmadge but agreed to sue him to recover state funds spent on the hog price manipulation scheme. When Governor Richard B. Russell Jr. referred the suit to the state attorney general, however, the request to sue Talmadge was rejected.
Governor
In 1932, Governor Russell ran as a candidate for the United States Senate. Talmadge ran for governor, appealing to white rural Georgia by idealizing the small farmer, and preaching what he said were the true values of rural America, such as rugged individualism, frugality, governmental economy, segregation, limited government, and low taxes. Talmadge won a majority of the county unit votes and therefore the primary. Winning the nomination of the Democratic Party was tantamount to automatic victory in the general election. He was sworn in on January 10, 1933.
Because all counties were given equal weight, the County Unit System gave outsized power to the rural counties, which were Talmadge's base. He boasted, "I can carry any county that ain't got street cars."Current Biography 1941, p 851 He made twelve campaign promises, the most controversial of which was to lower the price of an automobile license to $3, putting them within reach of the poorest farmers. The state legislature intensely debated the $3 license fee issue, but did not pass it. After it adjourned, Talmadge fixed the $3 fee by proclamation.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt developed the New Deal with programs to hire unemployed men to work on various public works projects. These were often for needed infrastructure identified by the states. In the South, these jobs offered higher wages than men could obtain in the private sector, and black men were paid the same rate as white men. Many of the wealthy white land-owning families in Georgia soon complained to Talmadge that their sharecroppers preferred to work on the better-paying New Deal public works projects rather than as sharecroppers, and asked the governor to intercede with the president.
In 1933, one sharecropper wrote to Talmadge: "I wound't [wouldn't] plow nobody's mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH". A disgusted Talmadge forwarded the letter to Roosevelt, together with his own letter that stated: "I take it that you approve of paying farm labor 40 to 50 cents per day". Roosevelt wrote back: "Somehow I cannot get into my head that wages on such a scale make possible a reasonable American standard of living".
For all his populism and his self-image as the defender of the small white farmers of Georgia, Talmadge tended to side with the interests of the wealthier land-owning families of the state. He was strongly opposed to Roosevelt's efforts to raise wages in the South, believing that this would undercut the South's only economic advantage, namely of having the lowest wages in the United States. Roosevelt by contrast believed that raising wages would increase consumption and hence spur the economy out of the Great Depression.
When Georgia textile workers went on strike on September 1, 1934, Talmadge declared martial law during the third week of the strike. He directed four thousand National Guard troops to arrest all picketers throughout the state. He ordered the prisoners to be held behind the barbed wire of a former World War I prisoner of war camp for trial by a military tribunal. While the state interned about one hundred or so picketers, the show of force effectively ended picketing throughout most of the state. When Talmadge discovered that one of the employers had hired the notorious strikebreaker Pearl Bergoff, he had Bergoff and his two hundred men detained by the Georgia National Guard and deported to New York City.F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South, pp. 167–68
Although often tied to both controversy and corruption, Talmadge was re-elected in 1934, carrying every county but three in the state's Democratic primary. When the Public Service Commission, a body elected by the voters, refused to lower utility rates, he appointed a new board to get it done. When the Highway Board resisted his efforts to control it, Talmadge declared martial law and appointed more cooperative members to the board. When the state treasurer and comptroller general refused to cooperate, the governor ordered state police to remove them physically from their offices in the state capitol. Critics denounced him as a dictator, a demagogue, and a threat to the tranquility of the state. His supporters considered him to be a friend of the "common man" and one of the state's most outstanding governors.
In October 1934, Talmadge ousted John S. Cohen, the pro-New Deal chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, and replaced him with Hugh Howell, a Talmadge partisan. Roosevelt met with Talmadge to ask him to save Cohen's job, a request that was refused, leading the president to suspect that this was the first step by Talmadge toward a possible presidential run in 1936. By late 1934, Talmadge's relationship with Roosevelt was fraying. In December 1934, when Roosevelt decided to spend Christmas at Warm Springs, Georgia, Talmadge sent a note requesting a private meeting with the president. His staff responded by a note apologizing for Roosevelt not having the time to see the governor, and vaguely promising him a private meeting at the White House sometime in 1935.
By early 1935, Talmadge was working on an alliance with US Senator Huey Long (D-Louisiana), who was planning on running against Roosevelt in 1936. When asked what was discussed at his meetings with Long, Talmadge replied: "We both cussed Roosevelt". But, Long had a low opinion of Talmadge's intelligence, saying: "That Talmadge ain't got the brains to match his ambition". Beyond a shared antipathy to Roosevelt, the two had almost nothing in common politically. Long, a left-wing populist, had the slogan of "share the wealth", promising if elected president he would confiscate all the wealth of the richest Americans and redistribute it to the poor, whereas Talmadge was essentially an old-fashioned Southern conservative. Long criticized Roosevelt for not going far enough with the New Deal, while Talmadge had felt he had gone too far. Finally, both men wanted to run for president and wanted the other to serve as vice president, which proved to be the issue that ended their alliance and made them enemies.
Talmadge governed as a Southern conservative, vehemently attacking the nationalization of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. He objected to policies favorable to black people, the farm programs, and relief-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. Talmadge believed the New Deal relief programs were encouraging people to be lazy, telling a reporter: "The way to handle a relief program was like how Mussolini was handling it in Italy, namely to line these people up and take the troops and make them work".
Talmadge tried to build a region-wide coalition, making a national speaking tour in preparation for a challenge to FDR in 1936. Talmadge's main allies were the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who had been the principal organizer of Long's Share Our Wealth Clubs; John Henry Kirby, a wealthy Texas businessman who had been a leading Long supporter; and novelist Thomas Dixon Jr., a white supremacist whose books glorifying the Ku Klux Klan were very popular at the time. Talmadge's bid was being financed with some $41,000 contributed by Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors, together with money from the Raskob and du Pont families.
His Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution organized a convention in Macon, Georgia, in January 1936 that brought together fragments of the old Huey P. Long coalition. The Macon convention turned out to be a media disaster that ended Talmadge's presidential hopes. The populist platform that Talmadge drafted at his Macon convention, with its call for more silver to be mined to support the silver standard, more protectionism, more states rights, more isolationism, and less immigration was widely mocked as more appropriate for the 19th century than the 20th.
Talmadge pledged to defend the "sovereignty of our states and local self-government" at the upcoming Democratic National Convention. However, Roosevelt, who visited Warm Springs, Georgia, often because of his past polio, was more popular with the poor farmers. Unable to run for re-election in 1936, Talmadge chose to challenge Senator Russell in the primary, but Russell defeated Talmadge by a landslide and Talmadge's presidential hopes collapsed. Talmadge's handpicked candidate for governor, Charles Redwine, lost the 1936 Georgia gubernatorial election to pro-New Deal Democrat Eurith D. Rivers by an overwhelming margin.
In 1936, according to a United Press (UP) article printed in the Atlanta Constitution on August 21, 1936, titled "Gene Selects Hitler as Favorite 'Author'", Talmadge reportedly told a Los Angeles newspaper that while he didn't have time to read many books, he read Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") seven times. The Nazi publication Die Bewegung reprinted the interview with Talmadge and praised him, stating that "Governor Eugene Talmadge, of Georgia, is obviously a very intelligent man.""Gene Selects Hitler As Favorite 'Author'", The Atlanta Constitution (1881–1945); August 21, 1936; ProQuest pg. 1