53 Facts About Eugene Talmadge

Eugene Talmadge was an attorney and American politician who served three terms as the 67th governor of Georgia, from 1933 to 1937, and then again from 1941 to 1943.

Eugene Talmadge was born on September 23,1884, in Forsyth, Georgia, the second of two children to Thomas and Carrie Talmadge.

Eugene Talmadge attended the University of Georgia and graduated from the university's law school in 1907.

Eugene Talmadge started his legal career in Montgomery County where he owned a farm.

Eugene Talmadge was the county attorney for Telfair County between 1920 and 1923.

Eugene Talmadge joined the Democratic Party and twice ran for the Georgia state legislature, losing in 1920 and 1922.

Eugene Talmadge was elected as the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture in 1926, defeating JJ Brown.

Eugene Talmadge maintained widespread support among Georgia's rural white communities.

The State Senate concluded that Eugene Talmadge violated a state law requiring that fertilizer fees collected by the agriculture department be deposited in the state treasury.

Eugene Talmadge 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.

Eugene 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.

Eugene Talmadge won a majority of the county unit votes and therefore the primary.

Eugene Talmadge 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.

When Georgia textile workers went on strike on September 1,1934, Eugene Talmadge declared martial law during the third week of the strike.

Eugene Talmadge directed four thousand National Guard troops to arrest all picketers throughout the state.

Eugene Talmadge 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.

When Eugene 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.

Eugene Talmadge's 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 Eugene 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 Eugene Talmadge toward a possible presidential run in 1936.

In December 1934, when Roosevelt decided to spend Christmas at Warm Springs, Georgia, Eugene Talmadge sent a note requesting a private meeting with the president.

Eugene Talmadge's 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.

But, Long had a low opinion of Eugene Talmadge's intelligence, saying: "That Eugene Talmadge ain't got the brains to match his ambition".

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 Eugene Talmadge was essentially an old-fashioned Southern conservative.

Long criticized Roosevelt for not going far enough with the New Deal, while Eugene Talmadge had felt he had gone too far.

Eugene Talmadge objected to policies favorable to black people, the farm programs, and relief-work programs such as the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps.

Eugene 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".

Eugene Talmadge tried to build a region-wide coalition, making a national speaking tour in preparation for a challenge to FDR in 1936.

Eugene 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.

The populist platform that Eugene 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.

Eugene Talmadge pledged to defend the "sovereignty of our states and local self-government" at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

In 1936, according to a United Press article printed in the Atlanta Constitution on August 21,1936, titled "Gene Selects Hitler as Favorite 'Author'", Eugene 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 seven times.

In 1938, Talmadge challenged incumbent US senator Walter F George.

Eugene Talmadge was elected again as governor in 1940 and returned to the governor's office in 1941, emerging as the leader of racist and segregationist elements in Georgia.

Eugene Talmadge said that money spent in aiding Britain, China and the Soviet Union would have been better spent on helping the poor farmers of Georgia.

The fact that Eugene Talmadge had an admiration for Hitler and voiced such strong support for Japan's war against China that the Japanese government invited him to visit Japan on all-expenses paid vacation led to allegations that he was an Axis-sympathizer.

Some commentators felt that Eugene Talmadge was merely naive, a man who knew nothing about the affairs of Europe and Asia, while others charged that his authoritarian style of leadership made him naturally sympathetic towards fascist regimes.

Arnall charged that Georgia's universities losing their accreditation, which Eugene Talmadge presented as an achievement on his part, put at risk the futures of all the students attending the universities.

The students at Georgia's universities and colleges campaigned vigorously against Eugene Talmadge, putting on skits that mocked the governor as a power-crazed buffoon just before football games.

Eugene Talmadge was so unpopular with students that his campaign workers in the university town of Athens urged him not to hold a campaign rally there, predicting that more people would come out to boo him than cheer him.

At one campaign rally, Eugene Talmadge stated: "We in the South love the Negro in his place-but his place is at the back door".

The fact that Arnall had declared himself a supporter of segregation, albeit not in quite the same crude terms as Eugene Talmadge had, meant that for many white Georgians there was no difference between the candidates on "the Negro question", and therefore neutralized Eugene Talmadge's advantage as a defender of white supremacy.

Just after Eugene Talmadge left office in January 1943, it emerged that since 1940 he had been receiving food grown on the state prison farms for free, an allegation that he admitted to, saying he was saving the state of Georgia money by not paying for his food.

The isolationist Eugene Talmadge deplored the United States fighting in World War II, all the more so as the social changes caused by the war were threatening Eugene Talmadge's vision of what an ideal America should be.

In particular, the first tentative gains made by the Civil rights movement in the war years enraged Eugene Talmadge, who predicated that even the modest gains being made by black Americans during the war would eventually lead to the end of white supremacy in the South.

Eugene Talmadge convinced himself that Roosevelt had deliberately engineered the United States's entry into World War II because he wanted to create the social changes that would end white supremacy, causing him to engage in long tirades against Roosevelt, the New Deal, World War II and black Americans.

Anderson wrote during the war Eugene Talmadge became a "total cultural isolationist", a man who saw the world outside of the United States as a dangerous, menacing place and believed increasing American involvement with the world beyond would destroy everything that he held sacred.

Eugene Talmadge alone anchored the old consciousness, the tenacious culture, the old consciousness.

Gene Eugene Talmadge knew if this one tie was uprooted, his world would be gone forever.

Eugene Talmadge promised that if he were to be elected, he would restore the "Equal Primary".

Eugene Talmadge's campaign was noted for its violent racist rhetoric as he boasted about assaulting and flogging the black sharecroppers who worked for his family as a young man and he claimed to have chased a black man down the street with an ax because he sat next to a white woman.

In June 2007, previously sealed FBI files revealed that Eugene Talmadge was investigated by the FBI over suspicions he sanctioned the Moore's Ford lynching.

Several witnesses stated that they overheard Eugene Talmadge speaking to George Hester, the brother of a white man stabbed by a black man named Roger Malcolm, outside of the courthouse in Monroe, Georgia, promising he would "take care of the Negro" in exchange for the Hester family using their influence to help win Walton County.