Georgia (state)

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5

Reconstruction

Within a few months of the surrender, white Georgians regained their political rights: President Andrew Johnson permitted them to elect delegates to a state constitutional convention. Johnson’s plan of restoration, or Reconstruction, of the Union was to reestablish the state governments and then readmit the states to Congress. The delegates duly repealed the 1861 ordinance of secession and recognized the abolition of slavery. They failed, however, to give blacks the right to vote or to testify against whites in court. In general, the new constitution maintained white supremacy. Constitutions drafted in the other Confederate states were similar. The legislatures of Georgia and the other states also passed black codes, a series of laws severely restricting the liberties of the newly freed blacks.

Partly because of these acts by the Southern states, the radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson and imposed the harsher regime called Radical Reconstruction. In March 1867 Congress put all the ex-Confederate states except Tennessee under military rule. Readmission to the Union was made conditional on their adoption of new constitutions acceptable to Congress. They were required to extend the vote and basic civil rights to all men, regardless of race. The Republican Party now gained control in Georgia, based on a coalition of blacks, businessmen, and white small farmers from the northern mountain counties. This coalition in 1868 elected a Republican governor, Rufus B. Bullock, and a legislature that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment extended citizenship to anyone born in the United States and promised all people the equal protection of the laws. Georgia was readmitted to the Union in 1870.

Republican rule was soon undermined, however, by the violence of a secret terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, which acted as a clandestine arm of the state Democratic Party. In 1868 alone, more than 300 Georgia blacks were murdered or assaulted by white terrorists. It was soon apparent that most white Republicans in Georgia were not strongly committed to equal rights. Several months into the 1868 legislative session, many Republicans joined with the Democrats in expelling black legislators although they had been fairly elected. The following year the legislature failed to ratify the 15th Amendment, which prohibited race from being used as a requirement for voting.

Despite a feeble attempt by the U.S. Army to restore order, the Republican Party in Georgia was finished. When a new legislature took office in 1871, Governor Bullock fled the state to avoid being impeached. Despite charges of corruption against the Republicans, it is clear that Democrats were also involved in dirty dealings; and corruption did not end with the return of Democratic rule. The state was under one-party rule by the Democrats for almost the next 100 years.

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6

Recovery and Growth

Economically as well as politically, Georgia was greatly disrupted by the war and its aftermath. The state slowly recovered during the latter part of the 19th century. With the aid of Northern as well as Southern capital, new banks and businesses were founded, and railroad and business facilities were restored. After Reconstruction, almost all prominent politicians in Georgia were Democrats. One faction was known as the New Departure, or Bourbon, Democrats, who encouraged industrialization. The cotton textile industry was expanded; the production of cottonseed oil, cattle feed, and fertilizer was undertaken. In the 1870s, Georgia became a major source of naval stores, and other natural resources were developed. Atlanta, which became the state capital in 1868, grew into a prosperous manufacturing and commercial center.

The hands of the Bourbons were tied, however, by a new constitution in 1877, which prohibited state debt, limited state funding of public schools to the elementary grades, prevented most forms of aid to business, and guaranteed rural control of the legislature. In general, farmers wanted low property taxes and few government services, so the state was prevented from doing much to attract industry. Southern businesses were further handicapped by discriminatory railroad rates, which favored Northern over Southern shippers. Not surprisingly, Georgia and the South lagged far behind the rest of the country economically.

Agriculture remained the chief economic activity, but many large cotton and rice plantations, formerly dependent on slave labor, were broken up into smaller farms operated by tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Rice production ceased, but the production of cotton, emphasized under the sharecropping system, continued to increase. A modest trend toward diversified farming began in the 1890s with the introduction of peach trees. Soon Georgia was noted for its peach, apple, and pecan orchards. Still, Georgia remained dependent on the cotton crop. A symptom of Georgia’s agricultural stagnation was the high rate of sharecropping and tenant farming. By 1910 half the white farmers and 87 percent of the blacks did not own the farms they operated.

Sharecropping and tenant farming were substitutes for paid farm labor where little cash was available to pay wages. A sharecropper raised part of the landlord’s crop and was paid a share of the profits after deductions for living expenses and the cost of tools and supplies. A tenant farmer sold what he raised and paid the landlord a share of the profits as rent. The landlord chose the crop to raise and either owned it (in sharecropping) or had a lien on it (in tenant farming). If the profit was low, the landlord’s share was paid first. The cropper or tenant took what was left or, if none was left, got an advance to keep going for another year.

In the effort to recover financially, landowners relied almost exclusively on their traditional cash crop, cotton. However, the price of cotton was low through the rest of the century, while living costs rose. Mounting debt forced small farmers to give up their land and become tenants or sharecroppers. Once in that system, they were forced to remain because they could seldom earn enough to pay off their yearly advances. Not until World War II (1939-1945), when widespread mechanization of agriculture made sharecropping unprofitable, did the system begin to disappear.

Some impoverished whites were able to escape from the fields to the factories. However, Georgia industry demanded low skills and paid low wages. Company paternalism protected workers to some degree, as mill owners typically provided housing, schools, hospitals, and churches. Nonetheless, even young women in the Georgia mills were described in 1891 by an observer as carrying “the weight of a century on their bowed backs ... a slouching gait; a drooping chest ... yellow, blotched complexion; dead-looking hair; stained lips, destitute of color and revealing broken teeth—these are the dower of girlhood in the mills.” During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, industry offered little opportunity for Georgia workers to rise in society.

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7

The Agrarian Revolt

As elsewhere in the nation, small farmers suffered as wealth created by commerce and manufacturing was concentrated in the hands of a few business barons. Among the causes of unrest were the declining prices of farm products, the growing indebtedness of farmers to merchants and banks, and discriminatory freight rates imposed on farmers by the railroads. In the 1870s and 1880s American farmers in the Midwest formed self-help groups such as the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance. The movement spread nationwide and was called populism. When these organizations decided that agricultural grievances had to be addressed with political action, they formed an important third political party, the People’s Party.

A leading spokesperson for both the Alliance and the People’s Party was Congressman Thomas Watson of Georgia. His radical views, his willingness to appeal to black farmers, and his outspoken attacks on the two major parties made the 1892 election in his Tenth District a focus of national attention. The dominance of the state Democratic Party, which stood for white power, was seriously threatened, and they stole the election using a variety of methods. Watson’s opponent, Major James Black, publicly warned of the specter of black “domination.” Newspapers inveighed against “anarchy and communism.” Ballot box stuffing, intimidation, and bribery were used flagrantly. In one county the election judges accepted a total vote, overwhelmingly for Black, that was far beyond the number of registered voters in the county. Watson fought through several bitter losing campaigns for the People’s Party, running for vice president and president, among other offices, before the party faded in 1908. Ironically, in his embittered old age, when he had turned into an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic white supremacist, he was finally elected a Democratic U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920. He died in office in 1922.

The populists’ coalition of black and white farmers had fallen apart after 1896 as a result of intimidation and white susceptibility to racist Democratic appeals. Segregation of the races, through separate public facilities for whites and blacks, became a basic rule in Georgia and all Southern society in the last two decades of the 19th century. Blacks had to live in different parts of towns, go to separate schools, eat at separate restaurants, and use different laundries, restrooms, and even drinking fountains. The facilities provided for blacks were never as good as those provided for whites. The poll tax and other devices were instituted to prevent most blacks from voting.

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The 20th Century

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1

World War I and After

During World War I (1914-1918) the country’s needs stimulated growth in Georgia’s industries, and Georgia farmers profited from high wartime prices for their crops. Good times continued into the 1920s for Atlanta, Georgia’s largest city. Atlanta’s growth was largely a product of Georgia’s excellent network of railroads, which brought trade and tourist dollars to Atlanta. The Coca-Cola Company, started in the 1880s, was the city’s best known industrial concern. Under the leadership of Robert Woodruff, Coca-Cola in the 1920s began to expand its markets throughout the world. Atlanta was also a banking and insurance center. During the early part of the 20th century, Atlanta became a premier cultural center for the Deep South. It was the home of a symphony orchestra, numerous blues and country music performers, and a number of colleges for blacks and whites.

In rural areas, however, prosperity did not last long after the war. During the early 1920s much of the state’s cotton crop was destroyed by the boll weevil. In addition, the soil in many areas was exhausted by overproduction and erosion. Thousands abandoned the farms and migrated to cities and towns. So many blacks left the region for Northern cities that their exodus is called the Great Migration. The hard times of the 1920s were followed by the even harder times of the Great Depression, which lasted through the 1930s. By the 1940s, the old plantation system was gone. The number of farms had declined and the remaining farmers consolidated their holdings and began to operate increasingly with machinery. Diversification became a necessity, with peanuts, soybeans, cattle, poultry, and tree farms replacing cotton.

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2

Political Developments, 1930s-1940s

During the early 1930s, Governor Richard B. Russell, Jr., was instrumental in reorganizing some branches of the state government. One major change was the placing of all of the separate state-supported institutions of higher learning under the administration of a single state board of regents. Eugene Talmadge, who succeeded Russell as governor in 1933, was the major figure in Georgia politics for the next 12 years. In his first two terms he strenuously opposed the attempt of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to establish its New Deal programs of economic relief in the state. However, Talmadge’s successor, Eurith D. Rivers, was a Roosevelt supporter, and various federal and state relief programs were carried out in Georgia during his two terms. The state’s revenues failed to meet the cost of its relief services, however, and Talmadge was elected again in 1940 on a platform of economy in state government. He continued most of Rivers’s programs despite his past opposition to them.

After Governor Ellis Arnall took office in 1943, Georgia entered a period of progressive change. It became the first state in the nation to lower the voting age to 18. Before most Deep South states, Georgia in 1945 abolished the poll tax. A merit system was instituted for jobs in state government, and a new constitution was adopted. Arnall went to the U.S. Supreme Court with a case against the railroads, forcing them to charge the same freight rates in the South as they did in other parts of the nation. Between 1943 and 1947, Arnall achieved the most remarkable record of progressive reform that Georgia had seen to that time.

Rapid change, however, was not favored by all, and provoked a backlash in “Gene Talmadge country,” the rural areas of south Georgia. Talmadge was elected governor for the fourth time in 1946, but died before inauguration. The legislature then chose his son, Herman, as governor on the grounds that he had received the largest number of write-in votes in the election. Arnall, maintaining that the governorship should go to the lieutenant governor-elect, Melvin E. Thompson, refused to leave his office on inauguration day. Talmadge then forcibly occupied the office. Thompson set up a government in exile in downtown Atlanta, and for 67 days Georgia had two governors. Finally the state supreme court ruled in favor of Thompson, and he was sworn in. In a special election in 1948, however, Herman Talmadge defeated Thompson and served the last two years of his father’s term. Talmadge was reelected in 1950, and later represented the state in the U.S. Senate for 24 years.

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