WHO RUNS GEORGIA?

BY KRISTA REESE

The death of Governor-elect Eugene Talmadge set off a political free-for-all that left observers wondering if Georgia was being run by wild, gun-toting yahoos.

More than fifty years ago, in the wake of a legendary political crisis, two alumni painted a dark portrait of a state in turmoil

"The historian is a prophet in reverse."

--Friedrich von Schlegel, 1798

THE CONTEST THAT WOULD DETERMINE the next governor of Georgia stunned political observers nationwide. A highly factionalized electorate had watched and listened as the conservative candidate hammered home such popular issues as low tag taxes and traditional Southern values. Painting his adversary as too liberal for Georgia, he broadcasted his views to audiences of thousands and fought to overcome his opponent's endorsement from the popular, progressive incumbent governor.

No one could have predicted the surprising effect of a record number of black voters, spurred to the polls by what they perceived as race-baiting. They made the difference against the better resources of the conservative, overwhelming him in the popular vote.

Roy Barnes and Guy Millner? No. The year was 1946, and the story, though familiar, has a very different ending.

Though reform-minded James V. Carmichael '33C-'34L had beaten Eugene Talmadge by sixteen thousand votes, the conservative Talmadge was headed, quite legally, to the governor's mansion, thanks to Georgia's unique process of vote tabulation, the county unit system. Talmadge's victory set off a tragicomic series of events that spurred a constitutional crisis, still notorious today as the "Three Governors" conflict.

Georgia progressives were left reeling. In 1947, still smarting from postelection events that resembled a banana-republic coup, an interracial, interfaith committee commissioned a report from two young Emory graduates and WWII veterans. The pair observed the legislature and toured the state's 159 counties, asking the question "Who runs Georgia?"

WE NEVER INTENDED IT TO BE A BOOK," says one of the report's authors, Calvin Kytle '41C, now seventy-nine, from his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Who Runs Georgia? remained a private document, known only to scholars and historians, until its publication last year by the University of Georgia Press.

"We never intended it to be a book," says Calvin Kytle '41C.

Kytle and James Mackay '40C-'47L, a second-generation Emory graduate, spent the summer of 1947 in Kytle's five-year-old Plymouth, driving the hot, dusty roads of rural Georgia, talking to members of the "courthouse gang," writers, preachers, and small-town businessmen. In cities, they tracked corporate executives and lobbyists through office buildings. They watched as members of a fractious, greedy legislature fought to protect the interests that had elected them.

"The format [of the report] was so loosely designed, we were able to do just about whatever we wanted with it," says Mackay, eighty, now living in a home perched on the brow of Lookout Mountain, at the corners of Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Their fifty-two-year-old report is that rarest of historical texts, breathing life into a difficult, too-easily forgotten past. A dark portrait of postwar Georgia emerges, with a few brushstrokes of light.

"I was astonished," says Dan T. Carter, William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor, who wrote a preface to the work, "at how prescient and insightful they were."

The South had clung to a number of peculiar institutions after the end of the Civil War, including the cruel Jim Crow laws that excluded African Americans from virtually every facet of white public life. Many states from the old Confederacy carried voting laws that favored rural areas, where most blacks were intimidated from voting. But even in the South, Georgia's county unit system of elections was singular. In this funhouse-mirror reflection of the electoral college, rural county votes counted as much as one hundred times more than urban votes.

Despite the popular-vote majority for Carmichael, the philosophical successor to the progressive then-Governor Ellis Arnall, rural counties had gone overwhelmingly for Eugene Talmadge, the infamous "Wild Man from Sugar Creek," whose name is now nearly synonymous with racist demagoguery. Talmadge, who often bragged that he wouldn't campaign in any county with a streetcar, easily carried the county unit tally and became governor-elect.

But this was only the beginning of the strange saga. Talmadge died before he could take office. His son and campaign manager, Herman, knowing his father was ill, had thoughtfully entered himself as a write-in candidate in several counties. Talmadge forces then argued before the legislature that constitutional law should be interpreted to mean that they should now choose a governor from among the write-in candidates. The heavily rural legislature was pleased to have such an option, ignored Lt. Governor-elect M. E. Thompson, and promptly proclaimed Herman Talmadge governor.

Governor Arnall battened down the hatches at the capitol, refusing to hand over power to Herman, who arrived posthaste at the governor's office to claim it. (Secretary of State Ben Fortson hid the state seal under the seat of his wheelchair.) Talmadge returned the next day, armed with a pistol. With an army of supporters, he changed the locks to the governor's office and took over the mansion. Arnall, undeterred, continued doing business in the capitol lobby. Thompson took up an office downtown.

In the next jaw-dropping twist, Atlanta Journal reporter George Goodwin broke the story that somehow, the critical batch of write-in votes from Telfair County that had given Talmadge his edge had come from dead folks, who'd apparently arisen in alphabetical order to go to the polls.

Weeks later, the state Supreme Court declared Herman Talmadge's appointment unconstitutional, ordered a new general election and declared Thompson interim governor. Herman Talmadge easily carried the second, bitter primary contest over Thompson.

The free-for-all left observers wondering if Georgia was being run by wild, gun-toting yahoos. But the Supreme Court decision left intact the same problems that created it: the influence of corporate money, a white majority eager to protect its privileges, and a county unit system that profited both.

Mackay and Kytle say their politics were formed early. Mackay's father was a Methodist minister born in Northern Ireland; his mother was born in Shanghai, China, the daughter of missionaries. They passed on strong religious beliefs, marked by tolerance of others' differences.

"The format [of the report] was so loosely designed, we were able to do just about whatever we wanted with it," says James Mackay '40C-'47L.

The Methodist church also played a role in Kytle's political education. At a Methodist youth leadership program at Lake Junaluska, the fifteen-year-old Kytle saw and participated in thought- provoking one-act plays on pacifism and equal opportunity. But when Kytle tried to put on the plays in his own church, "the next thing I knew, I was being called to the pastor's office." Kytle was told he could do the play on pacifism, but not on race relations. The pastor told him, "Someday you'll understand."

At Emory, both students found an important mentor in Cullen Gosnell, professor of political science, whom Mackay called "a tiger in the ivy." This quiet scholar was "almost obsessed with the county unit system, which he saw as a prime evil of Georgia politics," says Kytle. "He pursued that like a fanatic." As a result, the academic was ridiculed by the pro-Talmadge faction, who called him "Goose Gosnell."

Other faculty also shaped the young me's careers. Mose Harvey, who taught international affairs, "made me realize how important the pursuit of facts was," says Kytle. "I was impressed with the need for facts, just by the weight of his own scholarship." Kytle also cites sociologists Luke Clegg and Hugh Nelson Fuller, English professor Garland Smith, ethics professor Leroy Loemker, and journalism professor Raymond Nixon. Mackay was president of the student body, and Kytle edited the Emory Wheel.

"Jamie and I were molded by Emory," says Kytle.

World War II followed, searing its impressions on the children of the Depression. As a Coast Guard Reserve officer on the U.S.S. Menges, a destroyer escort in the Mediterranean, Mackay saw nearly five hundred men incinerated by a torpedo attack before his own ship came under fire. "You begin to understand that some things can't be settled in a bull session," he says quietly. Mackay and Kytle (who served in the U.S. Army in Australia and the Philippines) both earned Bronze Stars. Back home again, the generation who'd fought overseas against Hitler's "master race" looked at Georgia in a new light. "With their horizons lifted," says Carter, "many veterans realized Georgia was out of step with the modern world."

AFTER WRITING THEIR REPORT, Mackay and Kytle formed Georgia Veterans for Majority Rule, which raised funds for a court test of the county unit system. They lost their case, but the U.S. Supreme Court eventually dissolved the county unit system by ruling on another case, Gray v. Sanders, in 1962. By then, the authors had embarked on careers in journalism, law, and public service.

In 1964, Kytle went to Washington, eventually becoming acting director of the U.S. Community Relations Service, a conciliation agency created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Later, he formed a consultancy group for Washington-based nonprofit public-interest organizations and founded a publishing affiliate, Seven Locks Press. He also wrote periodically for Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, and Saturday Review, and is the author of Gandhi, Soldier of Nonviolence.

Mackay decided he couldn't be just a "drawing-room liberal" and served six terms as a state representative, as well as a term in the U.S. Congress, where he was one of two Southerners who voted for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Both say the end of segregation and the county unit system were hallmark developments in Georgia but suggest many of the problems still remain, in only slightly different forms.

"Georgia politics in 1946, in some ways, simply went national," says Kytle. "The system of campaign finance in this country is functionally equivalent to the county unit system. It has disfranchised enormous numbers of people."

Kytle and Mackay watched as years passed and only a few of their goals were accomplished. Yet anyone who meets them is impressed with their buoyant optimism.

"Look at these guys," says Carter. "They end up far from being dispirited. This is a struggle they recognize may not be won in a few years, or even in their lifetime.

"This book will never be a bestseller, but I would hope that people will read Who Runs Georgia? and bring to their current political world the same kind of tough-minded questions Kytle and Mackay asked: 'Who calls the shots? Who is benefiting? Who is being most hurt?' These are fundamental issues."

"Every generation," says Mackay, "encounters things that need to be changed."

Krista Reese profiled Georgia Governor Zell Miller in the Winter 1999 issue of Emory Magazine.