New Georgia

Reviewed by Calvin Kytle

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 33-35

The Politics of Change in Georgia: A Political Biography of Ellis Arnall , by Harold Paulk Henderson (University of Georgia Press, Illustrated, 1991, 345 pages)

When World War II ended, my generation came home to a Georgia in which for the first time in our memory gallus-snapping Eugene Talmadge did not personify the state’s politics, “Woolhats” and “Rednecks” did not constitute the voting majority, and appeals to white supremacy did not dominate State Capitol rhetoric. In letters from the States, in the pony edition of Time, and occasionally from bulletins on Armed Forces Radio, we had learned bits and pieces of what had been going on in our absence. (That most of the news from Georgia, unlike that of only few years before, was of a kind to be read with pride rather than embarrassment had been especially appreciated by those of us quartered overseas with Ivy League Yankees.)

It was not, however, until after conversations with older friends who’d been on the home front and seen the reforms roll out of the Capitol that we began to realize just how and to what degree Georgia had changed, and in what ways it had not. However briefly, we were exhilarated by the assurance that the change were permanent and all to the good, and that the climate was receptive for more.

The man largely responsible for this “new” Georgia was Governor Ellis Arnall, whose rise and rejection are documented in this overdue and welcome biography by Harold Paulk Henderson.

Ellis Arnall’s honored place in Georgia history is confined to a period of about six years. In 1942, at age 35, he was the beneficiary and aggressive exploiter of the worst political mistake Eugene Talmadge ever made—a quarrel with the Board of Regents that brought loss of accreditation of the university system. Elected governor shortly after a constitutional amendment extended the term from two to four years, Arnall proceeded to push through a legislative program without precedentfor sweep and reform. With the help of an obliging General Assembly, he restored accreditation and established a teachers retirement system, incidentally increasing salaries by 50 percent.

He lowered the voting age to 18, abolished the poll tax, paid off the state’s debt, created Georgia’s first comprehensive planning agency (the State Agricultural and Industrial Board), and, as the centerpiece of an entrepreneurial approach to economic development, led an ultimately successful battle against regionally discriminatory freight rates. Although considerably short of his objective, since it left the state’s basic political structure in place, he also won approval for a new state constitution. On the platform and in the press, he conveyed the impression of a confident, intelligent, generous-spirited, refined but scrappy young politician, in such contrast to his predecessors that national media inevitably embraced him as the spokesman for a New South, as they had Henry Grady a half century before. In 1946 Northern liberals began to promote him seriously as a contender for the vice presidency.

During this time, it was tempting to sentimentalize Arnall’s achievements and, particularly on the race issue, to extrapolate expectations that were in fact little more than wishful thinking.

It was commonly said, for instance, that his victory over Talmadge once again proved the decisive role of gubernatorial leadership; that the same electorate that could respond to “one of us” could respond even more enthusiastically to a leader “better than us.” It was also widely assumed that Arnall’s acceptance of a 1945 federal court decision invalidating the white primary would open the political process to re-consideration of all forms of racial discrimination.

In 1947 a series of bizarre events shocked us back to

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the old Georgia. Thanks to the then operative county unit system, Eugene Talmadge won the gubernatorial primary, despite the fact that his chief opponent, James Carmichael, got 16,000 more popular votes. Then, a month after the general election and only a few weeks before the scheduled inauguration, Eugene Talmadge died. The constitution made no provision for the death of a governor elect and in the ensuing controversy Talmadge’s son Herman, backed by leaders of the legislature, forcibly claimed the governor’s office. Anticipating his father’s death, Herman had managed to get 600-odd faithfuls to write his own name on the general election ballot.

By this time, Ellis Arnall’s political career was over. His last official act, performed with as much dignity as he could muster in an appallingly humiliating circumstance, was to resist the Talmadge takeover by filing for a Supreme Court ruling; it finally came after 63 days of chaos and effectively seated the lieutenant governor-elect, M.E. Thompson, as the legitimate successor.

Ellis Arnall moved to the sidelines and into the shadows. The conventional wisdom held that he had become too liberal, that he had catered to the national media and enhanced his own image at the state’s expense.

But Ellis Arnall went on, of course. He was president of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers from 1948 to 1963.

At President Truman’s invitation he served for six months as chief of the Office of Price Stabilization during the Korean War. He founded an insurance company, thrived on the national lecture circuit, and enjoyed a prosperous law practice. In 1966, at 59, he decided to run again for the governorship. As Professor Henderson points out, “the county unit system, segregation, and black disfranchisement had collapsed under the pressure of federal intervention,” and Arnall was convinced that his progressive record would now win popular support. He lost in a runoff to segregationist Lester Maddox. His error, according to a columnist for The Atlanta Constitution, was that “he assumed that Georgia was basically different from the state of twenty years ago; it simply had not altered that much.”

Henderson, a professor of political science at Abraham Baldwin College in Tifton, Ga., has told Arnall’s story with faithful attention to the record and in a prose style that departs from the academic mainly by being blessedly free of jargon. The book’s structure is one common to textbooks, which is to say that every chapter ends with a summary of what the reader has just been told, often in the same words, a formula that may verge on the boring, depending on the reader’s attention span, but one that has the virtues of clarity and emphasis.

Despite an annoying amount of redundance (for one thing, Professor Henderson seems to be mortally afraid of losing antecedents, so that names are repeated in too many places where the reader is anticipating a pronoun), this is an easy book to read. It can be recommended as a modest but valuable contribution both to our understanding of twentieth-century politics and to the increasingly impressive list of titles from the University of Georgia Press.

In fairness to Dr. Henderson, I have to remind myself that this is “a political biography,” as he is careful to make clear in his sub-title. I take this to mean that he has sought to deal almost exclusively with Arnall’s influence on the political process and public policy.

Therefore, except for early references to his well-to-do-family, readers can expect to find in these pages very little about the influence that other individuals had on Arnall himself, and even less about his indebtedness to various civic, religious, and public interest groups that in the mid-thirties served in their separate ways to promote more rational and humane consideration of social problems.

There is, for example, no mention of the campaign led by John A. Griffin and Glenn Rainey to abolish the poll tax, or of the so-called [Philip] Weltner movement in 1936 that, by advancing the anti-Talmadge candidacy of Judge Blanton Fortson, became an early warning of those deficiencies in the university system that exploded so dramatically five years later. Josephine Wilkins’s Citizens’ Fact Finding Movement is mentioned only in passing, whereas Arnall himself once credited his election and many of his administrative reforms to the spirit the movement evoked.

Similarly, an exclusively “political biography” leaves one to wonder what really moved Arnall, who majored in Greek as an undergraduate at Sewanee, to become a politician in the first place and, perhaps more important, what made a liberal of him. Henderson says only that Arnall’s family background “preordained” him to be a

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politician, that his father was pleased when young Ellis decided to get a law degree, and that before he was many months at the University of Georgia Arnall was telling his classmates he expected to be governor one day. There are in Henderson’s telling a few clues to Arnall’s personality (which inclined to the cocky), and enough episodes to suggest that one of his problems in the exercise of leadership was that, like many bright and privileged people, he found it hard to suffer fools gladly. There is, too, enough here—particularly in those passages dealing with Arnall’s treatment of the race issue—to illustrate how agonizingly difficult it was in the milieu of his times to stay ahead, but not too far ahead, of his followers. But for any true and indepth insight into motives and character, a reader will have to look to a biography as yet unwritten.

Regrettably, Dr. Henderson’s otherwise splendid work does not satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions: Was Ellis Arnall a political opportunist or was he instead—that rarest of activists—a skillfully practical idealist? Was he a sincere, committed progressive with a coherent program whose behavior in office introduced a new and higher standard for political conduct in Georgia, or was he essentially an intuitive and expedient reactor to issues as they surfaced?

Was his 1966 defeat attributable to the tenacity of old racial fears or was it rather the result of some flaw of personality, a matured arrogance perhaps, that made it impossible for him to recognize and appeal to the no less real changes in the Georgia electorate? Some, all, or none of the above?

In 1948, as Governor Arnall departed and the Talmadge era resumed, Calvin Kytle wrote for HARPER’S magazine a prophetic article titled “A Long Dark Night for Georgia.” Educator, businessman, acting head during the Johnson administration of the Community Relations Service, and publisher, Kytle now lives in Chapel Hill.

The Continuum of Struggle

Reviewed by Calvin Kytle

Vol. 17, No. 2, 1995 pp. 21-22

Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950, edited by John C. Inscoe (University of Georgia Press, 1994, 312 pages).

If, like me, you went to school during the South’s long Age of Denial, and if, like me, your introduction to Southern history came years before it was corrected by C. Vann Woodward, this book will come as a revelation.

Georgia in Black and White is a collection of eleven essays written by graduate students in history at the University of Georgia. Together, the essays constitute a survey of the state’s racial history from the end of the Civil War until the first sparks of the civil rights movement 95 years later.

Foremost, this book is an example of a trend in Southern historical research that, as editor John Inscoe explains in his introduction, “challenges the earlier assumption of W.J. Cash, Lillian Smith, and others as to the rigidity and perpetuity of the racial order of the pre-Civil Rights South.”

What the authors give us, among other things, is confirmation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ observation that “the color line” during this period was far less rigid and absolute than most of us have been led to believe. The Georgia after Emancipation it describes is no less violent, no less spiritually rent, than in previous accounts. Nor is there any effort to make the case that it was anything other than a society in which, to quote the dying words of a black bishop, “no matter what social or political changes might appear, the white man would be on top.” Still, by focusing on specific individuals, many of whom would qualify as heroes, as well as showing them in action and interaction during critical episodes in illustrative settings, the authors move us into a new dimension and give us sometimes startling new insights. They identify a culture in which relations between the races were intricate and ambiguous, in which attitudes shifted imperceptibly with the exigencies of time, place, and human nature. The cumulative effect of their work is to explain, better than any other history to come to my attention, the twists and turns in the continuum of struggle that preceded the civil rights victories of the 1960. It deserves a place on the shelf right next to John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day.

There is material here that one writer with a gift for narrative could shape into a popular piece of literary non-fiction. But as is almost inevitable in any anthology by writers of varying talent, the prose is of uneven quality, and there is more redundancy in the collected pieces than a less kind editor would have permitted. This is not a book to be valued for style. Its importance and its utility derive from the richness of its content, almost all of which is

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enlightening and much of which has the fascination of fresh discovery.

I, for instance, had never before heard of Abram Colby, a freedman from Greene County. Colby was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1868, was beaten by Klansmen and left for dead, and survived to be reelected to a second term in 1870 following another attempt on his life two days before the election. When a group of merchants had earlier offered him $2,500 to resign his seat, he refused; Colby wouldn’t do it, he said, “for all the wealth in Greene County.” I long ago rejected the version of Reconstruction sopped up from repeated viewings of Birth of a Nation in my childhood (it was one of my father’s favorite movies), but even so, I had never quite seen the Reconstruction period so clearly as the tragedy of human betrayal it was until I read the story of this idealistic and steadfast black man.

Similarly, I now see Governor Rufus Bullock as a political figure of considerably more substance than Margaret Mitchell represented him to be in Gone with the Wind. To draw from the evidence in Georgia in Black and White, Bullock was a man of principle who on more than one occasion stood by his black constituents at great personal cost.

I read Georgia in Black and White with admiration and appreciation for everybody who had anything to do with it–especially the eleven students (who are, I hope, continuing to look into other neglected corners of Southern history) and their professors, Numan V. Bartley and William McFeely. I consider it one of the more validating signs of basic social reform, of which we have too few, that students in a publicly-supported Georgia institution are now free to pursue research into matters that less than two generations ago were taboo. It seems only yesterday that the president of Georgia Tech was prohibited by an act of the legislature from using state funds to pay the salary of Glenn Rainey, an outspoken English professor; Rainey’s chief credentials as a radical were that he opposed the county unit system and the poll tax, and thought blacks had a right to vote.

My other reactions were more personal than I find it comfortable to admit. Reflecting on the depth and direction of contemporary scholarship exemplified in these essays, I have been embarrassingly alerted to my ignorance, particularly of what really went on immediately after the Civil War and during the early years of Jim Crow. As one the “white Southern liberals” of the 1940s whose collective experience is now a subject for such scholarship, I can’t quite account for my failure to have learned more about the source and eddies of the current that moved me.

This book also made me feel deprived, for on almost every page was something to remind me how, in the classroom of my youth, Southern history was taught–or rather, how it was sanitized, romanticized, bowdlerized, and significantly suppressed.

The Georgia public schools in my day–say from 1926 to 1937–were tacit agents of a culture in which the Confederacy was celebrated and white supremacy was the governing theology. I can still hear Miss Bolton in our civics class at O’Keefe Junior High: “You will not speak of the Civil War in this room. It was not a civil war, and no true child of the South ever calls it that. It was…” a significant pause here until she’d satisfied herself that we were listening, and then, almost reverentially, “…it was the War Between the States.”

At no time was I taught anything about the origins of the war, by whatever name (my Uncle Ray unfailingly called it “The War of Northern Aggression”). Aside from the dirty pictures in my head implanted by D.W. Griffith, I knew nothing about Reconstruction other than what I inferred from Henry Grady’s “New South” speech, which I’d had to memorize for a declamation contest.

I entered Emory at a time when Hitler was rising and our minds were turned to events abroad. History, as I recall, was an elective, and European history was generally preferred. The sum of my knowledge of the Civil War obtained there was from a course in American biography that dealt chiefly with Robert E. Lee. In sociology, I remember much talk about community and individualism, and nothing about race relations. When members of my class auditioned for the Glee Club, we were asked to sing a few bars of “01′ Black Joe.”

Whatever civilized feelings I had about race during my teens can be credited not to my teachers but to an experience one summer at an Epworth League leader-ship training institute, which in the detached setting of Lake Junaluska, dared raised the possibility that segregation might be un-Christian. What I’ve learned of the hard facts about the biracial society I was born into began a few years later when, sometime in the 1940s, an older friend thrust upon me a copy of Vann Woodward’s mind-opening biography of Tom Watson.

How I wish that in those formative years somebody could have given me a copy of Georgia in Black and White.

Calvin Kytle is a retired publisher living in Chapel Hill, N. C. He was the author of “Race in the News” (1950), the Southern Regional Council’s first study of discrimination in the press, and served briefly as deputy director of the U.S. Community Relations Service in the 1960s.

In Memoriam: Philip G. Hammer (1915-2000)

By Calvin Kytle

Vol. 22, No. 1, 2000, p. 34

Philip Gibbon Hammer, a pioneering urban planner and an influential figure in the movement to end segregation in the South, died January 21 in Edgewater, Maryland. He was 85.

Philip Hammer served as an organizer and supervisor of the ad hoc team that produced the research material from which Pulitzer-Prize winning editor Harry Ashmore fashioned “The Negro and the Schools.” Published in 1954 one day before the U.S. Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision, the book gave Southern leaders indispensable and immediate policy guides for desegregation of the public schools.

In Atlanta during the fifties, Hammer served on the boards of the exclusively-white Chamber of Commerce as well as interracial organizations like the Urban League and the Southern Regional Council.

Phil Hammer belongs to a generation of Southern progressives who fought for equality and justice at a time and place when for a white person merely to shake hands with a black American was to rick social ostracism and the loss of a job,” said presidential adviser Vernon Jordan Jr., a friend since their days together in Atlanta. “The civil rights movement of the sixties owes more than historians can ever document to the courage and political skills with which he and the other members of this white minority attacked institutionalized race prejudice after World War II.”

Hammer was born on September 18, 1914, in Philadelphia, but five years later the family moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. He went to public schools in Wilmington and grew up in a typical white middle class Southern environment. He attributed his social awakening to his experiences in the mid-thirties as a political science major at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, then under the gentle presidency of Frank Porter Graham, an early civil rights advocate.

Hammer successfully pursued interwoven careers in business and public service. He moved to Atlanta in 1947 and became chief staff officer of a commission to study the extension of the city limits and the merger of municipal and county facilities. He launched his own firm in 1954 and became an urban adviser to successive, politically disparate administrations in Norfolk, Savannah, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Washington, and St. Louis. In 1968 President Johnson appointed him chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, a position he also held under President Nixon.

To many of his friends, Phil Hammer’s most significant work occurred out of the spotlight, as a facilitator and quietly effective mediator. In 1960 he introduced Harold Fleming, then executive director of the Southern Regional Council, to a client, philanthropist Stephen Currier. The result was the formation of Washington’s Potomac Institute, the first of whose many achievements in race relations was to develop the strategies that ended workplace discrimination in defense industries during the Kennedy administration.

Phil Hammer is survived by his wife of 63 years, Jane Ross Hammer of Edgewater, Maryland, three sons, and four grandchildren.