Agrarian Rebel 1938 Biography of Tom Watson

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C. VANN WOODWARD

TOM WATSON

Agrarian Rebel

THE BEEHIVE PRESS

SAVANNAH • GEORGIA

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Contents

I The Heritage I

II Scholar and Poet 10

III "Ishmael" in the Backwoods 27

IV The "New Departure" 44
V Preface to Rebellion 62

VI The Temper of the 'Eighties 7 1

VII Agrarian Law-making 8 1

VIII Henry Grady's Vision 96

IX The Rebellion of the Farmers 1 10

X The Victory of 1890 125

XI "I Mean Business" 143

XII Populism in Congress 163

XIII Race, Class, and Party 186

XIV Populism on the March 210
XV Annee Terrible 223

XVI The Silver Panacea 240

XVII The Debacle of 1896 261

XVIII Of Revolution and Revolutionists 287

XIX From Populism to Muckraking 307

XX Reform and Reaction 320

XXI "The World is Plunging Hellward" 343

XXII The Shadow of the Pope 360

XXIII The Lecherous Jew 373

XXIV Peter and the Armies of Islam 390
XXV The Tertium Quid 411

Bibliography 422

Index i

v

Preface to the 19 j 3 Reissue

THE reissue OF an unrevised biography thirty-five years
after its original publication raises some questions about
the effect that history has on historical writing as well as the
effect that changing fashions of historical writing have on history
written according to earlier fashions.

Among the many historical events of the last three decades
that have altered the perspective from which this book was writ-
ten, perhaps the most outstanding has been the movement for
political and civil rights of the black people. All that was still in
the unforeseeable future in 1938. At that time the Negro was
still thoroughly disfranchised in the South, and no white South-
ern politician dared speak out for the political or civil rights of
blacks. In writing about a Southern politician who had dared to
speak up for their rights in the i89o's, I was dealing with what
was at that time — and even more so at the time I was writing —
a rare and remarkable phenomenon. Under the circumstances it
was natural that I should have stressed the comparative bold-
ness of the effort and such success as it enjoyed rather than its
limitations and shortcomings. From a much later perspective
critics have called attention to the elements of paternalism and
racism intermixed with Watson's approach to his black Populist
allies. Those elements were present, to be sure, but they are more
evident now than they were then, and they have an altered sig-
nificance.

Fewer concessions, it seems to me, are due the changing fash-
ions of historiography that have occurred since this book was
written. One of these was the "consensus" school, which held
that historians have placed too much emphasis on conflict in their
interpretation of American domestic history. According to these

Vll

Preface to the 1973 Reissue

critics, basic agreement, or consensus, was the distinctive charac-
teristic of American history, and historians who stressed themes
of conflict were prone to distort the past. Of course conflict is the
very core and central theme of this biography of a Southern
Populist, conflict in every department — political, racial, sec-
tional, and class conflict, violent and irrepressible conflict. I do
not see how my account of it could have been otherwise and do
not believe that the emphasis was misplaced. Distortion would
have resulted rather from minimizing the theme of conflict.

Another development in historiography that should be men-
tioned in this connection, is the revisionist interpretation of
Populism that emerged in the mid-i950 , s. The revisionists held
that earlier historians had overlooked the seamy and sinister as-
pects of Populism. They attributed to the movement a basically
irrational mentality expressed in paranoidal obsession, conspira-
torial delusions, and nostalgic fantasies. Populist leaders, accord-
ing to this view, were given to demagogic exploitation of racism,
anti-Semitism, and zenophobia. I have set forth my criticism of
the revisionist views elsewhere (in The Burden of Southern His-
tory) and will not repeat them here. It is my belief, however,
that, as in the instance of the consensus interpretation, subse-
quent scholarship has done considerably more to sustain my
views than to support the revisionists.

None of this is intended to suggest that I would have written
the same biography in 1973 that I wrote in 1938, nor that I com-
placently assume this to be the final word on the subject. It does
make bold, however, to suggest to the reader who picks the book
up for the first time in its present cover that the ravages of his-
torical relativism may not have rendered it wholly outdated.

C. Vann Woodward
New Haven, Connecticut

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Preface

After reading this book in manuscript, a friend of mine, a
x\* man of excellent instincts and sympathies, offered what
might have seemed a strange criticism, had I not known his pre-
dilections and half anticipated his reaction. "As I look back," he
writes, "I feel a little unhappy over having come through those
[latter] chapters with so kindly a feeling toward Watson." Be-
lieving that Watson, in some phases of his later life, became the
embodiment of much that was detestable, my friend felt that his
own better instincts had been betrayed into a false alignment of
sympathies. Granting the damaging character of certain chap-
ters, were they, after all, "sufficiently damning" ? Were not the
splendid battles of Watson's early days overshadowed in impor-
tance by his later career, and should he not therefore be blamed
for certain aspects of Southern society that both my friend and
I deplore and condemn? The criticism started an exchange of
philosophies, historical and literary, that led to a result some-
what rare in such transactions — an agreement. Only after I had
explained my position in some detail, however, was my friend
willing to withdraw his criticism and agree with me. In view of
this fact we decided that I had best anticipate similar questions
among readers of like mind. Readers of another class deserve an
explanation. I refer to those whose impressions of Watson were
fixed by the last ten or fifteen years of his career. They will likely
be puzzled by the first part of the book, just as my friend was
troubled by the last — and for much the same reason.

It is usually a truism to say that the life of a man contains
paradoxes. To say this of Tom Watson, however, is to make the
only broad generalization one can make concerning the man.
His life was a paradox. Especially is this true when the two parts

ix

Preface

of his career, divided by the interval of eight years that began
in 1896, are contrasted. One can not arrive at any fair or true
judgment of Watson by considering either of these two aspects
of his life to the exclusion of the other. When a liberal journal
fastens upon Watson the responsibility for "the sinister forces of
intolerance, superstition, prejudice, religious jingoism, and mob-
bism," it is indulging in half-truths as surely as does the veriest
demagogue it denounces. The term "Southern demagogue"
should be recognized for what it is, a political epithet. It does
not contribute anything to our understanding of the men to whom
it is applied. I hold no brief for men of this type, nor for Tom
Watson in so far as he was representative of them. I do insist
upon understanding them clearly. I do not believe it is accurate
to blame Watson for the "sinister forces" already mentioned. To
do so would be to assign him far too important a role, a role that
belongs to the vastly more impersonal forces of economics and
race and historical heritage. To do so, moreover, would be to
miss at the same time the deep meaning of his story. He did not
produce those forces : he was produced by them. They thwarted
at every turn his courageous struggle in the face of them during
his early Populist battles, and they led him into the futility and
degeneration of his later career. This was what made his life a
personal tragedy. Although I have not sought to impose the view
upon the reader, I might confess here my private feeling that his
story is also in many ways the tragedy of a class, and more es-
pecially the tragedy of a section.

To counterbalance various difficulties encountered in writing
this book, I have had several advantages, one of which only a
biographer can fully appreciate. Miss Georgia Durham Watson
has not only permitted but insisted upon my complete freedom
in the use of the wide range of manuscripts, photographs, and
materials which she has made available to me. Had it not been
for her truly rare qualities of intellectual detachment, which
are combined with a genuine devotion to her grandfather, this
work would have presented problems so difficult that I should
never have attempted it. I am deeply grateful to her. In no sense,
however, does she stand as sponsor to this work, nor does she
share responsibility for any views expressed in it.

I have received valued assistance and counsel from many peo-
ple. Foremost among these is Professor Howard K. Beale, who

Preface

has given unsparingly of his time and attention in advising me
in the latter stages of the work. For this aid I am especially
grateful. I also recall with gratitude the many hours I have
spent across a littered desk from Dr. Rupert B. Vance, plunder-
ing that storehouse of knowledge about the South. I gladly ac-
knowledge my indebtedness to Professors A. R. Newsome,
F. M. Green, W. W. Pierson, H. T. Lefler, W. G. Carleton,
M. J. Dauer and J. A. Barnes for their numerous kindnesses,
and to Dr. Howard W. Odum for his consistent encouragement
and support. Part of the work on this book was made possible by
fellowships granted by the General Education Board. Two loyal
comrades have given aid and encouragement that has been in-
valuable — my wife, Glenn MacLeod Woodward, upon whose
shoulders fell the heavy burden of typing the manuscript, and
Mr. Glenn W. Rainey, who has cheered the work along from
the beginning to end.

C. Vann Woodward

XI

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I

The Heritage

One December morning in 1863 a diminutive, red-headed
boy sat astride a large bay mare at the railway station of
Thomson, Georgia. Waiting there for his grandfather's mail, he
watched a locomotive puff by pulling a string of freight cars filled
with Yankee prisoners on their way to Augusta.

"They passed through the town with defiant laughter, with
ringing cheers, and with the resounding song of 'John Brown's
body lies mouldering in the grave, but his soul is marching on.' " 1
The sight of so many Blue Coats was exciting enough for a boy
of seven, but the astonishing thing about these prisoners was
their gayety.

Tom Watson was old enough to remember the gay fanfare of
patriotism and confident gallantry with which his father and his
two uncles had set off to whip the Yankees. Now in December
of the third year of war, months after Gettysburg, he felt in
place of that old buoyancy and debonair confidence a pervading
mood of despondence and melancholy. For him the change was
echoed in the songs the people sang, in the plaintive, wailing re-
frain that repeated itself in the popular songs of 1863 : in "Lo-
rena," in "Kitty Wills," in "Juanita," in "Just Before the Battle,
Mother," in "When This Cruel War Is Over." "It gave one the
shivers," he remembered. 2 The contrast between these songs and
the one the Yankee prisoners sang was too marked to escape his
notice.

Sudden, tearful departures and anxious waiting for the return
of dead or wounded were woven into the texture of the boy's

1 Thomas E. Watson, Bethany, p. 365.

2 Ibid., p. 364.

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

earliest impressions. Indeed, the decline in the fortunes of the
Confederacy seemed to reflect itself in the fortunes of the house
of Watson. Tom's father, John Smith Watson, was twice
wounded, and there remained in the boy's mind the experience
"of going with my mother through all the confusion and dangers
of the time, to find my father and bring him home." 3 The pre-
ceding year Tom's favorite uncle, William Watson, was sent
home with an illness of which he died on December 8, 1862.
Later his Uncle Tom Peter came home to his family an incurable
invalid. Then, in that winter of 1863, his grandfather, in the
midst of the family's woes, suffered a stroke of paralysis that
took away his voice and blighted his mind.

It was the stroke which laid his grandfather low that came
closest to the boy. For while his father and uncles had'departed,
returned wounded to die, or set off to fight again, his grand-
father had always remained — white-haired, stately, imperturb-
able, a rock of refuge in the storm.

The house of Thomas Miles Watson was built on his planta-
tion three miles out of the village of Thomson, then in Columbia
County. The main portion of the house, the original part, built
solidly against the winds of the hilltop, has weathered the win-
ters of a century and still stands, though overshadowed and
hidden from the road by the large frame structure later built in
front of it. Limited in size by the length of the pine logs of which
it was constructed, the house measured only twenty by twenty-
seven feet. The logs, hewn square with the broadax, smoothed
with the foot-adze, and deeply interlocked at the ends, fitted
snugly together without any covering of weather-boards.
Through the center of the log house ran a partition, cutting it
into two rooms, one of which was heated by a cavernous fireplace
on the side. Overhead was a loft, and part of the roof extended
to cover a shed room and a back porch. Sometime before the war
Squire Watson had added an ell to his house, connecting it to
the original structure by a piazza at the front. The addition
served as the "company room."

This was the house in which on September 5, 1856, Tom
Watson, christened Edward Thomas, was born. "It did not in
the least," he once wrote of his birthplace, "resemble a Grecian
Temple which had been sent into exile, and which was striving

8 T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, p. 9.

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unsuccessfully to look at ease among corn-cribs, cow-pens, horse-
stables, pig-sties, chicken-houses, Negro cabins, and worm-fenced
cotton fields."

If the house would never have been taken for that of an
aristocrat, neither would it have been mistaken as the cabin of a
frontiersman, nor the humbler dwelling of the "poor white."
It was "just a plain house," according to Tom. Yet of such was
the Kingdom of Cotton, for Tom Watson's birthplace was more
nearly representative of the Southern Squirarchy than either
colonnaded temple or squatter's hut. Since the relinquishment of
Southern leadership by the Virginians, the South had drawn the
great part of its distinguished statesmen — Calhoun, McDuffie,
Yancey, Stephens, Davis — from homes of just this class. Senator
George McDuffie, born two miles down the road, was pleased
to accept the hospitality of Squire Watson, when, shortly before
his death, he had returned to Georgia to visit his birthplace. 4
Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, riding the circuit to-
gether, could feel equally at home around the Watson table,
when they stopped on their way to Augusta from the neighbor-
ing towns of Washington and Crawfordville, where they lived.
Joel Chandler Harris, growing up about this time in a similar
Georgia community, where he had "every opportunity to shiver
under the chill of snobbism, if such an atmosphere had prevailed
in his native village," spoke of his neighbors as "the most demo-
cratic people the world has ever seen." 6 It was a peculiar de-
mocracy, of course — a "Greek Democracy," the statesmen said.
Squire "Long-Tom" Watson was the master of forty-five
slaves and of 1,372 acres of land, an estate valued at $55,000 in
i860. 6 His possessions would not rank him with the greatest
plantation masters of the state; and yet of the 118,000 white
families in Georgia in i860, only a little more than a third
owned any slaves at all, and of these only 6,363 had twenty or
more slaves. Squire Watson was, therefore, one of that class
whose cause was most closely identified with that of the Con-
federacy, the class that had most to fear from the loss of the
Confederate cause.

Except what he wrote in the form of fiction there are few

4 T. E. W. to V. M. McDuffie, undated copy, Watson MSS.

5 Julia Collier Harris, Life of Joel Chandler Harris, pp. 8-9.

6 Columbia County Tax Returns for i860.

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

hints that remain of the first nine years of Tom's boyhood on the
plantation, other than some random notes made on the flyleaf
of an early diary. 7 Here one learns of such adventures as, "Going
to spit in the Alligator's eye," "Breaking pig down in the loins,"
"Sleeping in the mill house," "Father and Frank Callaher pit-
ting a wounded hawk against Jennie Fuller's rooster." Here,
too, one is presented with a list of his fights, fights with Ben
Perry, with Billy Farr, with Frank Curtis. Then there comes,
"The night of father's departure for the Army," and later, "At
a theatre in Augusta during the War, scenes representing horse
standing by dead master."

As for the slaves, "They were treated well, upon the same
principle that the horses were amply fed." What impressed Tom
about his Negro mammy was her unique virtue: "It was said
among white men, as well as black, that no temptation could
reach her." He recalled also the presence of "a bright mulatto
boy on the place, named Sam, whose mother's color was a
smooth universal black, and whose son Sam bore a distinct like-
ness to my uncle." 8

"All was steady, all was quiet, all was regular," as Tom re-
membered the life of the plantation. "Day followed day with
respectable monotony; and each found its task done, in order,
without haste and without rest." 9 So immutable seemed the mul-
titudinous functionings of his plantation world — each slave with
his task, each field with its crop, each season with its duties —
that to Tom it was all "like some steady law of nature." Cer-
tainly it was a kindly "law of nature" that could produce in
such abundance the peace, and security, and plenty of his grand-
father's plantation. So, at least, it seemed to Tom.

The end of the War, followed almost immediately by the
death of his grandfather, as if by some momentous consequence,
was to mark a change so definite and complete in Tom's scheme
of things that truly it would seem to him as if nature itself had
been perverted. The boy of nine was to find himself rudely
jolted out of his warm nest into a world that was at war with it-
self, where there was no "rock of refuge," where, until he

7 Kept during the years c. 1870-1873, it was more of a journal than a diary, and
is referred to hereafter as "Journal 1."

8 T. E. W., Bethany, p. 17.

9 T. E. W., Prose Miscellanies, p. 79.

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reached manhood, there was little for him but insecurity and
poverty.

Those early plantation years, so intimately associated in his
mind with his grandfather — who seemed to him a figure of
classic serenity and lordly dignity, "tall, venerable, imposing" —
became for Tom Watson a symbol of "the days before the
War." Perhaps it was out of a compensatory urge, induced by
the sidemeat and sorghum diet of the lean years after the War,
that there grew in his emotional life an irrational core of nos-
talgia for a lost paradise of childhood. When, as a middle-aged
man, he came to write about his grandfather and the plantation,
it was with the idolatrous veneration of a boy bereft of an in-
heritance of grandeur :

My grandfather takes his silver-headed cane and walks around and about
the lots, the fields, the orchards, the gardens, the woods — and walks slowly,
with the calm, dignified air of a master who expects to find everything going
as it should ; the settled, confident air of one who is used to being obeyed,
and who has no anxieties; a stately, self-contained, self-reliant man. . . .

As I look back to it now, it seems to me that my grandfather's farm
must have belonged to another world, so complete have been the changes
wrought by two generations. It seems to me that there was neither feverish
haste upon it nor vagrant leisure, fretful exactitude nor slipshod looseness,
miserly gripping nor spendthrift waste. . . .

That old Southern homestead was a little kingdom, a complete social
and industrial organism, almost wholly sufficient unto itself, asking less of
the outer world than it gave. How sound, sane, healthy it appears, even
now, when compared to certain phases of certain other systems ! 10

The old order of agrarian rulership that claimed Tom's boy-
hood loyalties was to retain strong hold upon them all his days,
even through the defeat and ultimate decay of the old order.
Throughout the triumphant rise of the New South, in which
he was to fight his battles, his face remained fixed upon his vision
of agrarian bliss. In the Watsonian economics this vision always
lay beyond statistics and platforms, and unless it is taken into
account there is no understanding the ordeal of Tom Watson in
the New South.

The pioneer generation of Watsons had done its work in
Georgia and moved off the scene a century before. In 1768,

10 T. E. W., Bethany, pp. 10-19.

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Thomas Watson and his two sons, John and Jacob, moved to
Georgia along with forty families of u the people called Quakers"
from Orange County, North Carolina, to which they had "but
lately" come from Pennsylvania. 11 This small colony of Friends
came to take possession of a reserve of twelve thousand acres in
St. Paul's Parish, thirty miles west of Augusta, granted them
by Governor James Wright. The following year, after seventy
more families had joined the colony, the grant was extended, a
town, called Wrightsborough in honor of the Royal governor,
was laid out, and land was allotted to petitioners. Among these
petitioners of 1769 was Thomas Watson, whose name comes
first on the list, with a grant of five hundred acres. 12 Thereafter,
each of the five lineal generations that descended from Thomas,
the Quaker pioneer, to Tom, the grandson of Squire Thomas
M. Watson, made its home on or near the original Quaker
grant.

Colonial Georgia of the later eighteenth century was not the
ideal land in which to found the kingdom of peace and brotherly
love. Forces that had damned one Utopia could as easily damn
another — and still others. The thirteenth colony had put aside
the philanthropic purposes of its founders along with their
Utopian hopes; slavery was officially admitted in 1749; Indians
and Spaniards had to be dealt with frequently in ways neither
peaceful nor brotherly; clashes between colonial and Royal in-
terests did not encourage peaceful neutrality. The first colony
of Friends to appear in Georgia settled in 1754 upon the site
later occupied by the Wrightsborough Quakers. When faced by
the threat of an Indian invasion and the proposal of the gover-
nor to recall all grants of land and issue new warrants on terms
especially hard on non-slave owners, the early Friends gave up
their land and moved on.

The later Wrightsborough settlers exhibited more tenacity
in their attempt, though not without cost to certain of their most
cherished principles. They were frequently warned by their lead-
ers against "superfluity of apparil," "wearing faulds in their
coats," and "such vain and vicecious proceedings as frollicking,
fiddling and danceing." While peculiarities of speech and dress

11 M. A. Candler, "The Quaker Settlement of Wrightsborough, Georgia," Maga-
zine of History, XIV (Aug., 1911).
12 A. D. Candler, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, X, pp. 690-694.

The Heritage

meant raillery and isolation for Quaker children, other convic-
tions in the matter of slavery and physical violence drew con-
tempt and even hostility upon the heads of Quaker elders.

When war with England threatened, the Quakers were quick
to declare their loyalty to the King. Inhabitants of Wrights-
borough, among them Thomas Watson and his two sons, signed
a resolution repudiating the action of the Savannah patriots who
had endorsed the * 'destroying of a quantity of tea" by the citi-
zens of Boston. 13 The Georgia Quakers, as a sect, remained non-
combatants throughout the Revolution, although they disowned
a considerable number of their members for fighting. Their posi-
tion as neutrals and non-combatants seems to have met with little
respect from either side, since in 1780 they complain of "being
opprest by the violent behavior of the Militia in these parts" and
of being "illegally deprived of both liberty and property." No
sooner was the War over than their meeting house, being on
the property of Sir James Wright, a loyal adherent to the
Crown, was confiscated and sold by the state.

Social isolation, military violence, and political oppression
were evils to be endured with prayerful humility and long-
suffering charity by the faithful among the peace-loving Friends.
The constant pinch of economic competition with slave labor,
however, was distressing to the firmest in the faith. Owning few
if any slaves, the Quakers sank into the lower classes, their
frugality and industry degraded by the influence of slavery. As
early as 1786 a Quaker petition was presented to the Georgia
Assembly "respecting some enlargements to the enslaved
Negroes." Much of their feeling in regard to slavery, no doubt,
was due to abhorrence in which their religion held the institu-
tion. In 1802 a certain Zachariah Dicks, thought among Friends
to have the gift of prophecy, visited Wrightsborough and urged
the brethren to remove themselves from the midst of slavery,
prophesying a terrible rebellion among the slaves and a bloody
internecine war within the lifetime of children then living. So
powerful were the effects of his prophecy that it produced a
panic in the town, and the following year Quakers migrated in
large numbers to the free Northwest. 14 Thereafter, Wrights-
borough was destined to become one of the "dead towns" of

13 A. D. Candler, loc. cit.

14 M. A. Candler, loc. cit.

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Georgia, and the Friends' little kingdom of peace and brotherly
love was moribund.

The first two generations of Watsons, whether out of poverty
or piety, owned no slaves. They did not migrate to the North-
west with their brethren, but remained on their land, which had
been greatly diminished by that time. Later, when the Baptist
denomination began to flourish, the Watsons sought consolation
in that faith, whose ministers found divine sanction for the in-
stitution of slavery. Peter Watson, grandson of the pioneer
Thomas, appears to have been the first slave owner. In 1808 his
slaves numbered six, and they increased to fifteen by 1821. 15 To
what extent the family fortunes grew in the capable hands of
Thomas Miles Watson, son of Peter, we have already seen. No
longer were the Watsons set apart from their fellow men by the
peculiarity of their speech and dress and by their ideas of the
ways of God to man : they were right-thinking citizens and God-
fearing Baptists. In no way, however, do the four generations of
Watsons appear to have distinguished themselves from hun-
dreds of other farmers in Georgia, either in service of the state
or the pursuit of the arts.

The three sons of Thomas Miles Watson are said to have
had that lanky angularity and sandy-red blondness common in
the family. One of them, John Smith Watson, born August 15,
1833, became the father of Tom Watson. He is remembered by
one of his sons as "just an average man" and by another son as
"not a religious man," but "what would be called a sporting
man." 16 He acquired the name of a light-hearted good fellow, al-
ways ready to lay a bet on anything from the turn of a card to the
age of a horse, to play his fiddle, "call the dance," or to enter
into an occasional "scrape" of no very serious nature. When
John was in his twenty-first year he met Ann Eliza Maddox, to
whom he was married in January, 1855.

The Maddox family was also of Quaker descent, although
the first settlers spelled their name Maddock. Joseph Maddock,
in whose name the early business of the Friends with the state
was conducted, was the first clerk of the Friendly meeting, and
the leader of the migration from North Carolina. Elected a
member of the Provincial Congress of 1775, he declined to take

16 Tax Records of Columbia County, Georgia, 1808-1821.
16 William A. Watson to C. V. W., Jan. 17, 1934.

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his seat, probably because of the hostility of the members to
England. When William Bartram, the great Philadelphia nat-
uralist, visited the colony in 1773, he was entertained by Joseph
Maddock, whom he mentioned in complimentary terms as "a
public spirited chief magistrate." In the hands of Henry Mad-
dox the fortunes of the family had reached a condition border-
ing on poverty. Henry and his wife, Letitia Maurice, a native
of Wales, lived "in a humble way" on their farm about eight
miles out of Augusta on the road to Thomson. Their family was
large and it was not convenient for children to remain longer
than necessary under the parental roof. So it was that Ann Eliza,
when she was about eighteen, left home unmarried to seek work
— rather an unusual procedure in her day. She became a seam-
stress with a wealthy family in Augusta.

After their marriage Ann Eliza and John shared the home of
Thomas M. Watson on his plantation three miles out of Thom-
son for a few years. A little older than her husband, Ann was
also of a more sober turn of mind. Like her husband, she had
received no more than an elementary school education, but unlike
him she read a great deal and was "fond of books" — a peculiar-
ity that her neighbors often remarked. She did not confine her
reading to her Bible, but read books with strange names, was
"particularly fond of French history," and could entertain her
children and visitors by the hour with stories of great and
glamorous persons. 17

There must have been little time for reading and story-telling,
however, for within the year they were married the first child,
Addie Augusta, arrived, and the next year a boy, whom they
named Edward Thomas. Some two years later, when his family
promised still further expansion, John Watson bought a farm
two miles on the opposite side of Thomson and moved there.
His six hundred acres were worked by five families of slaves.
When John went off to war, Ann Eliza was left not only with the
domestic management, but with the direction of a large farm
upon her shoulders. By the end of the war three more children,
two boys and a girl, had been born, and a fourth was expected.
There were seven children in all.

"William A. Watson to C. V. W., Jan. 17, 1934.

2
Scholar and Poet

A few miles north of Thomson, in the quiet, white-columned
. town of Washington there gathered on May 5, 1865, a
tragic group of men — President Davis and a few of the cabinet
officers of the doomed Confederacy. Washington, the home of
Robert Toombs, was as fit a place as any in the South for the end
of the Confederacy, since it was as near to the heart of the South
as a place could well be. These few men, who had directed the
destinies of a once powerful government through four years of
war, were now helpless fugitives. The last cabinet meeting was
held, the last order was written, farewells were said, and the
Confederate Government was a thing of the past.

Private John Smith Watson, wounded and penniless, reached
home to find his father near the point of death and incapable of
recognizing his own son. On June 4 he died, never knowing
that the old regime was gone. With one brother also dead and
the other an invalid, John, now the head of the house of Wat-
son, traded his farm for his sister's share in the family estate
and moved back to his father's house. Calling the slaves together
one day and telling them they were free, John found that "not
a negro remained on the place the next" and "every house in the
'quarter' was empty." 1 Crops that had been planted in the
spring were now in weeds, and the plantation as a whole was in
sad need of repair. His slaves vanished, his Confederate money
worthless, his state in a condition of turmoil and lawlessness,
John faced an uncertain future. In view of these circumstances,
John's first action, though characteristic, would seem to indicate
that he, like his father, had lived on into the new order unaware

1 T. E. W., Prose Miscellanies, pp. 69-70.

10

Scholar and Poet

that the old one had ended. At a time when many families were
glad enough to salvage from the ruins of their houses enough
to cover their heads, when thousands were destitute, when build-
ing materials were at fabulous prices and money was not to be
had, John began the construction of a mansion such as his fathers
had only dreamed of. Built directly in front of the old place,
the huge new structure reduced his father's rude log house to
the proportions of servants' quarters. The fagade of John's new
house bore all the grandiloquent trappings of a dwelling of the
aristocracy — ornate portico, with balustraded balcony and bee-
tling gable supported by great fluted columns. It was as if John
had triumphed over defeat and, by simply willing it to be, had
not only restored the old order, but realized all it had aspired to.
True, the interior of the second story remained unplastered, 2
but the exterior presented a bold and imposing front to the
world, and up and down the road for miles there was no house
so grand as John Watson's.

In his attempt to maintain a plantation without the foundation
of slave labor upon which the system had rested, John was no
more successful than others who attempted it. His plan of hir-
ing white labor failed miserably from the first, and the ruinous
declines in cotton prices in 1866 and 1867 pi^d more debt on top
of that incurred in building his bepillared mansion. Gazing upon
weed-grown fields from his splendid portico, John came slowly
to realize that the way of his fathers, much less what they as-
pired to, was not for him. On May 5, 1868, his place was sold
under an execution in favor of his creditors for a mere fraction
of its value. 3 John then moved his family to a modest house on
a small farm about a half mile out of Thomson.

By this time John's garment of defiance had worn into bare
threads of apathy and despondence. "My father used to be vir-
tually paralyzed for weeks by what he called 'the blues,' " wrote
his son Tom. 4 John came to depend more and more upon drink
for solace in his attacks of "the blues," and his weakness for
gambling grew upon him. Tom once pointed out to a friend a
room in Thomson in which he said his father had lost fifteen

2 Interview with L. C. Smith, Columbia County, Dec, 1933; Mr. Smith's father
bought John Watson's house in 1S6S.

8 "Book of Deeds, Columbia County," p. 557.

4 T. E. W. to William W. Brewton, quoted in William W. Brewton, Life of
Thomas E. Watson, p. 376.

I I

Torn Watson Agrarian Rebel

hundred dollars in one night. By 1868 he was reduced perforce
to gaming for more modest stakes. In that year he was in such
straits that Tom was forced to drop out of school, until Pro-
fessor Epenetus Alexis Steed, master of a school in Thomson,
agreed to admit him "with the understanding that the tuition
could be paid whenever in the future he might become able."

From the time he came to school there at the age of twelve
until his death fifty-four years later, with the exception of a few
years, Tom Watson made his home in, or quite near, the village
of Thomson. In 1856, the year of Tom's birth, a young man
named B. L. Neal arrived in Thomson to attend the "Green-
way Institute," a school for boys founded in 1853. "Thomson
was then in the woods," he writes. "There were two stores, but
a yoke of oxen could have pulled all the goods for sale in them
at one load." 5 The village had been incorporated only two years
earlier, although it was mentioned as early as 1837 as a "place
of deposit lately begun on the Georgia railroad." Named for a
railroad engineer, the village grew up in the unlovely image of
the typical "railroad town" — a serrated line of one-story frame
buildings paralleling the rails and separated from them by a
wide street.

In Tom's boyhood there still lingered about Thomson some-
thing of an aura of frontier days. "In the grocery which stood on
the flat, called the 'slashes,' they could show you the spot where
Dick Hattaway had cut the life out of Abe McDonald with a
bowie-knife," wrote Watson. "There were places, also, where
equally respectable citizens had shot at others equally respect-
able, but as there were several of these places, and they were
lacking in individuality, nobody cared particularly to see them." 6
His uncle "would ride miles to take part in a gander pulling,"
and his father was an assiduous attender of barbecues, camp-
meetings, and all-day-speakings. Tom, who was frequently al-
lowed to accompany his father, was sometimes the witness of
eye-gougings, knifings, and drunken brawls that marked the
occasions.

The turbulence and violence which characterized the years
from 1868 to 1871, however, could not be attributed to a fron-
tier heritage. In those years the state was in the midst of the

5 B. L. Neal, Son of the American Revolution, p. 43.
6 T. E. W., Bethany, p. 6.

12

Scholar and Poet

most thoroughgoing revolution that ever changed the face of
its society — military reconstruction. Most of the violence, later
investigated by Congress, was confined to two sections, the ex-
treme northwestern counties and a part of the upper cotton-belt,
and was particularly prevalent in Columbia and Warren counties
— the two counties out of which McDuffie County was cut in
1 870, with Thomson as the seat of government. In these counties
"there were several notorious leaders of the blacks, some carpet-
baggers, and some native Republicans, who kept their influence
over the Negroes by inciting them against the whites. This was
the cause of several of the most notorious outrages in the
state." 7 Here the Negroes constituted sixty per cent or more of
the population, white leaders were disfranchised, and the exploi-
tation of ignorant Negro voters by corrupt politicians backed by
Federal guns was so shameless that there grew among white peo-
ple the conviction that the Negroes must be pushed out of politics
by the most effective means that came to hand. Outright payment
of cash for Negro votes was the solution for many counties, but
in Warren and Columbia the method was intimidation. "Warren
County especially was the scene of much lawlessness and great
activity from Ku Klux bands," and two mob murders here figured
largely in the political controversy over the second reconstruction
of Georgia. In Columbia, where the Republican vote was re-
duced from 1,222 in April, 1868, to one vote in November of
the same year, it was judged that "the Ku Klux made their work
thorough." In June of the next year General Terry, reporting
that there was "no civil law in Warren County, that an insur-
rectionary organization terrorized the place," sent a detachment
of troops to take control. 8 These troops, more than anything
else, provoked the native whites to trembling indignation.

The squad of Blue Coats stationed at Thomson was received
with bitter protests and demonstrations. A mass meeting of
citizens was called a few miles out of the town at Union Church.
A Methodist preacher was in the midst of a fiery speech when
a squad of horsemen in uniform trotted by. Striking a defiant
pose, the orator shouted, "We can't even hold a quiet, peaceable
meeting without being spied upon and disturbed by these mili-
tary masters I" His face flushed with excitement, young Tom

7 C. Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, p. 366.

8 Ibid., p. 367.

13

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

stood below the platform with his father. "I remember even
now," he said when an old man, "the flame of wrath that leapt
into the eyes of that preacher, when he saw the Blue Coat
cavalry. ... I actually believe that if the squad of cavalry had
not taken another road on their return to Thomson a great
tragedy would have resulted." 9

Tom attended many such meetings with his father. "It was
in this way," he relates, "that I came to know of such Southern
leaders as Howell Cobb, Ranee Wright, John B. Gordon, Robert
Toombs and Benjamin H. Hill." Politics, as Tom Watson first
knew the art, was an heroic business of mysterious, white-robed
horsemen galloping at midnight, and majestic orators, whose
long hair waved in the breezes as the periods rolled. Politics was
also a potent magic whereby a distraught and oppressed people
might conjure up forgotten, as well as imaginary, grandeurs,
unite with intense purpose, and cast off their oppressors. It was
the political drama that inspired one of his first unhappy at-
tempts at verse, a poem, "To the South," 10 written when he was
about fourteen, which began, "Land of the South, Oh, do not
despair," and ended

Soon will cease the Yankee thy soil to stain,
Soon will thy ruins cease to be seen,
Soon will thy fields again be green,
Yes, soon will come that shining ray
To lead us forth to glorious day!

Influences more subtle and intimate, and yet, at his age, more
important and significant than even social and political revolu-
tion, were at work upon Tom's life at this time. A frail, sensitive
boy in early adolescence, Tom still had to reckon daily with a
mother and father. An insight upon parental influences is gained
through a letter which Watson wrote his wife in regard to the
rearing of his own son. After recommending the practice of
patience, firmness, and sympathetic understanding, he adds :

Had I been trained in this manner, a very different man would be sitting
here tonight. . . . On my heart there would not be the scar which many
a trial has left there; and my memory would be rid of many a bitter
recollection. I have imagined enemies where there were none : been tortured

9 Columbia Sentinel, Aug. 16, 1920.

10 MS. Journal 1.

Scholar and Poet

by indignities which were the creatures of my own fancy, and have magni-
fied the gloom of every reverse. . . .

The better part of me is poisoned. A mistaken training leaves a trace
from which there is no escape. Between the warp and woof of my life its
busy shuttle will carry the black thread till the loom stops.

Had I been firmly governed and not with fitful harshness: had I not
been abused, ridiculed, mocked and scorned there would be sunshine where
now is shadow. I could have joined in the companionship of the world,
shared its loves, laughs, friendships and aspirations. As it is I stand where
my boyhood put me, fed by my own thoughts, led by my own hopes,
scourged by my own troubles.

A sensitive spirit wounded by those who should have nurtured, sees all
things in a false color, is proud of its own isolation, magnifies its defects,
is unfitted for the intercourse of the world and as far as the necessities will
allow retires within itself and imagines that all others are more fortunate,
more deserving and more happy. Words fail to describe such a misfortune.
A presence that poisons every joy, stains every beauty, checks every impulse.
A shadow that follows like a hungry wolf . . . 1X

As an indictment of his parents this letter is indeed a terrible
thing, if taken too tragically. But that Tom was correct in fixing
the entire blame for his unhappy traits upon his parents there
is some room for doubt — if for no other reason than that he
"sees all things in a false color." Of some of the specific charges
he makes against them — harshness, abuse, ridicule, mockery, and
scorn — one or both of his parents were possibly guilty. But the
lot of John and Ann was a hard one; Tom was an extremely
sensitive boy, and it is not improbable that some of the abuse
and scorn he felt were "creatures of his own fancy." The score
that he held against his parents, which he confessed to no one
but his wife, Tom apparently did not allow to interfere with the
discharge of filial duties. One can not be sure which of his par-
ents he held more to account. However, there is perhaps a clue
for the psychologist in the fact that, in writing his autobiograph-
ical novel, Tom makes himself several years older than he was,
and has his father die when he was a baby. It is his uncle who
was the hero of the book. Elsewhere he speaks of his mother
with a passionate devotion which is unquestionably sincere, and
we know that she proved a loyal ally in several crises of his
youth.

Interpreted with discernment and caution, however, this ex-

11 T. E. W. to Mrs. Thomas E. Watson, Aug. 4, 1883, in the possession of Georgia
D. Watson.

15

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

traordinary self-analysis provides a key to the enigma that was
Tom Watson's character, and an insight into the personal
tragedy that was alike implicit in his most fantastic crusade and
his most statesmanlike action. "I have imagined enemies where
there were none: been tortured by indignities which were the
creatures of my own fancy . . ." Had these lines, and those that
follow, been a deathbed reverie instead of the immature reflec-
tions of a young man of twenty-six upon the threshold of a long
and varied career (he was then holding his first public office),
one might credit their author with a retrospective perspicacity
given to few men. He paints his self-portrait exclusively in
gloomy colors, "magnifies its defects," as he puts it, and omits
all the lighter shades of relief. Still, these dark colors, if dis-
proportionately used, all belong to the subject. They speak of the
furtiveness, the vindictiveness, the suspicion of the introvert and
recluse, qualities which crowded his life, particularly his later
life, with delusions — delusions of persecution, of grandeur, de-
lusions of many kinds. But these are all the darker colors, and
there are many grays and blues and yellows.

There is one record of Tom's appearance as a schoolboy, a
"tintype" made when he was about twelve or thirteen. In one
hand a dinner-bucket and book; pulled firmly down over pro-
truding ears a wide, white wool hat; his face one gay patch of
freckles, his nose small and delicate, his eyebrows and mouth
two straight lines, rigidly parallel. Under the wool hat was a
shock of thick sandy-red hair. Perhaps it was because his hair
was a shade too dark that his schoolmates did not call him
"Red," and perhaps it was because of something else. At least
four of his schoolmates, now living, agree that he possessed an
unusually quick temper and a disposition to attack with waspish
fury on small provocation. Tom himself gleefully records num-
bers of his fights in his diary, fights that as a rule turned out the
worse for him. His admirers have it that his combats were
usually undertaken in behalf of the underdog — as indeed some
of them were. Once when Tom — a boy of fourteen — was work-
ing as a clerk in "Dosh" Massengale's grocery store at Nor-
wood, a drunken lout, "of robust size and strength," struck an
old cripple in his presence. Snatching up the huge knife that lay
on the cheese counter, Tom made for the drunk in good earnest,
crying, "Don't you hit him again!" His brother William tells a
story of the boy's championship of a Negro whom his father's

16

Scholar and Poet

overseer had beaten. But there are equally reliable stories that
bespeak a tyrannical petulance at interference with his plans, a
trait sometimes appearing as peevish irascibility, sometimes as
sheer red rage. A schoolmate tells of sitting in school one morn-
ing, head in his book and feet propped up on the stove, while
Tom was adding wood to the fire. Suddenly, without any warn-
ing, a heavy stick of wood came down with a sharp crack across
his shins. Outraged, the boy looked up to see Tom calmly put-
ting in more wood. This same schoolmate later became a strong
political supporter of Watson, following him loyally through
many fights. Then one day Tom passed his friend on the street
and, without apparent cause, refused to speak. His follower was
hurt, but not surprised: "It was like Tom," he said. 12 It is these
latter incidents which better prepare one for the day, when in a
dispute with his brother Forrest over a jointly owned sawmill,
Tom — not figuratively but quite literally — attacked a buzzing
circular saw and demolished it with a sledge hammer.

Epenetus Alexis Steed, pastor of the Baptist Church and, with
his brother, master of the school Tom attended, so captivated
the boy's imagination that he mentioned him again and again in
later life. Graduated from Mercer University in 185 1, Steed had
for several years been professor of ancient languages at a college
at Clinton, Mississippi. Steed, wrote Watson, was an "indolent
giant" with "a great head, fit to bear a crown" ; it also seems that
he was a great chewer of tobacco, a great quoter of the classics,
and, when in the mood, a great orator. Watson pictures himself
watching "through a mist of happy tears" while his master
"would rise, rise into the very azure of eloquence, and hover
above us, like an eagle in the air . . ." Then, after one of these
sporadic flights, "he would sink back into jolly indolence," in-
different and unambitious. Yet it was "he, the unambitious" who
in his pupil Tom "kindled the spark of ambition that will never
die." 18

Professor Steed seems to have taken a special interest in the
boy, arranging for him to defer payment of tuition indefinitely
and encouraging him in his reading. Waiting for classes to begin
one morning, Tom was astonished to see his teacher break into
"a passion of sobs" over his morning newspaper, then arise, and
with the words, "General Lee is dead!" dismiss school. When

^Interview with B. P. O'Neal, Macon, Ga., Nov., 1933.
18 T. E. W., Prose Miscellanies, p. 155.

17

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the day came for "examinations" Tom selected the subject, "The
Character of Lee," for his speech. In a composition book he kept
at the time is a copy of the speech, and at the end, this note :
"This was written soon after the death of Lee. Of course it is a
very poor 'character.' I only chose the subject because I knew it
would engage the sympathies of the audience. This was the first
speech I ever composed." He was awarded the second prize.

In this same composition book — which also served as common-
place book and diary — there are quantities of adolescent versify-
ing. Of this verse there is nothing especially remarkable, except,
perhaps, its author's confession of his own limitations, as in one
stanza from "Glennway Academy," dated January, 1872:

To the left is Watson who tries to ride
Pegasus the steed of the muses

But though he often starts him along
To fly Pegasus refuses.

The other poems are in a much, very much, more serious vein.
One refrains from further quotation in deference to the poet's
maturer judgment, which appears in the comment above the first
poem, written in the bolder hand he adopted when a college
sophomore: "All these rhyming pieces I wrote when laboring
under a severe attack of 'Durn fool.' " However, it is from his
poems that we learn of Tom's first romance, and of the charms
of "Theo. E. Story, The Moon which forces my tides." Their
names and initials are written together again and again, and it
is possible, as has been suggested, that Tom was persuaded to
reverse the order of his given names to correspond with the
initials of his sweetheart, for it was during the affair that he
changed his signature from "E. Thomas" to "Thomas E. Wat-
son." Theodosia, who inspired numerous lyrics, was inconstant
in her affection it seems: on August 11, 1871, one finds the four-
teen-year-old poet imploring the "gentle river" to

Tell her of this furrowed brow; —

Tell her of this sunken eye,

Of youthful vigor too quick fled by.

Yes, hated of all, hating all,

Til tread life's journey till I fall.

18

Scholar and Poet

The romance of Theodosia and Tom, in spite of reverses, flour-
ished for several years. But at the foot of his most languishing
lyric the irreverent sophomore writes in purple, blasphemous
ink: "Puppy Love puke of the most unadulterated kind."

Poetry and romance, however, could never absorb all the in-
terests of a farm-boy who from the age of twelve had owned
a single-barrelled shotgun and a dog. In the earlier, rounded
handwriting are several accounts of fishing parties, hunts, and
camping trips. Leather-bound composition books were appar-
ently not to be had for the asking, for after filling the book
with poems and sketches the boy turns back to the front page and
with scrupulous neatness crowds every fraction of marginal space
with notes from his reading. In and out of the serrate indenta-
tions of quatrains run statistics on insanity in Wales and Eng-
land, wine consumption in France, the speed of meteors, and
from page to page in the interstices of limping iambics a history
of electrical discoveries — a curiously composite picture of the
boy's mind.

To fill out the gaps in the picture of his mental development
there are the scrapbooks which Tom kept from early child-
hood. 14 The earliest of these, made out of what appears to be
one of his grandfather's plantation ledgers, is filled with pictures
and clippings from Godey's Lady Book, newspaper doggerel,
comic drawings, an indiscriminate sprinkling of Father Ryan,
Edgar Allan Poe, Josh Billings, Joaquin Miller, Lord Byron,
Longfellow, and a collection of religious and calendar litho-
graphs of the type entited, "Au Revoir," "The Kiss," and
"Saved." The impression one has is that of a myth-hungry boy
groping for nourishment in an environment that had little to
offer but unpalatable realities.

Still more revealing, perhaps, is his "List of books read up to
1872." 16 As the oldest son in the family, Tom was undoubtedly
needed at the plough and the hoe at this time. For John no
longer sat in the shade and directed his labor through overseers ;
times were terribly hard, debts were pressing, and John had to
work his small farm diligently to make a living for his family
of seven children. Nevertheless, although his younger brothers
were pressed into the farm work, Tom went scot free. This

14 Watson MSS., Chapel Hill.

15 MS. Journal, 1, c. 1873.

l 9

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

exemption, it seems, was brought about through the intervention
of his mother, who was more in sympathy with Tom's love for
books than was his father. 16 Had the devout Ann known just
how her son was employing a good portion of the precious time
she had won for him, she would probably not have pressed his
case so zealously. For at the head of his impressive "List of
books" he remorsefully entered a "List of 'Yellow Backs' I'm
ashamed to say I read long ago." His favorite hero was the
amazingly adventurous "Claude" : Claude in the Convent,
Claude and the Duchess, Claude to the Rescue, Claude's Last
Bullet, and Claude in other promising situations. There are
fifty-six such lurid titles that speak of luxurious afternoons in the
hayloft.

But Tom had other literary interests more remarkable in a
boy of fifteen. By the time he had reached that age, he recorded,
he had read the poetical works (whether complete or not, he
does not say) of Homer, Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, Milton,
Cowper, Wordsworth, Poe, Tennyson, Gray, Swift, Pope,
Moore, Burns, Goldsmith, and several minor poets. His list of
novels is more nondescript, but includes a good portion of Scott
and Dickens and such books as Tom Jones, Don Quixote, Rob-
inson Crusoe, and Gulliver's Travels. Augustus Baldwin Long-
street's Georgia Scenes appears in this list. Apparently, however,
his major concern was with history and biography, for this list
bulked larger. He listed Goodrich's histories of Rome, England,
Greece, and the United States, Goldsmith's histories of Greece,
and England, Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Grote's History of
Greece, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It is not surprising to learn of Tom's early acquaintance with
Alexander H. Stephens' War Between the States and Pollard's
Southern History of the War. Of the biographies the Reverend
John S. C. Abbott is the author of at least five. "The Reverend
Mr. Abbott may have staggered the wise," wrote Watson later,
"but he did not stagger me. I believed it all." 17 His grandfather
had given him Abbott's Napoleon, and the boy had read both
volumes when "the books were almost as heavy as I was." "Had
another boy . . . scouted the unalloyed goodness of Napoleon,
the unsullied virtue of Josephine, and the unrelieved depravity

16 William A. Watson to C. V. W., Jan. 17, 1934.

17 T. E. W., Prose Miscellanies, pp. 67-68.

20

Scholar and Poet

of Napoleon's foes, there would have ensued immediately a
small but interesting case of assault and battery." At the end of
his four-page list of books he adds a list of magazines of which,
presumably, he was a reader: Harper's, Scott's, Burke's,
Wood's, Littell's, Lippincott's, and Arthur's.

One has the feeling in reading this "List of books read up to
1872" that each title written in that round, guileless hand was
set down with a certain flush of pride to mark an accomplish-
ment, another small victory over his world. It is far from clear
where he got the books, much less the incentive to read them.
His father was certainly no book lover, and his grandfather, he
says, "rarely dipped deeper into a book than was necessary to
master the pictures." He records the contents of the family
library, but it consisted apparently of a mere handful of books.
There were doubtless generous neighbors, such as Professor
Steed and Miss Belle Hanson, his music teacher, but there was
no public library, and Thomson was not a reading community.
However cramped the horizons of Thomson, it was at least clear
that Tom was bent on not accepting them as his own.

When the school term of 1872 came to a close, Tom made
known his desire to go to Macon the following fall to enter
Mercer University. He was only fifteen at the time and had not
yet finished the local school. Professor Steed was leaving Thom-
son to take the chair of Latin at Mercer, and it is not improbable
that Tom was influenced more by the desire to follow his idol
than by anything else. His chances of going to college, however,
looked poor indeed at the time. John was on the point of an-
other disaster, the loss of his second farm. After that there
would be nothing. Besides, neither he nor any of his family had
been to college, and he could not see why this son, who had al-
ready been granted more privileges than the others, should be
made an exception. Once again it was his mother who came to
his support. It was difficult to borrow money because of John's
poor credit, but a small loan was obtained, and with the promise
of a scholarship at Mercer to take care of the sixty-dollar tuition,
Tom enrolled as a freshman in October, 1872.

Mercer University, a small Baptist college, was established
at Penfield, Georgia, in 1833. By effecting a "union of agricul-
tural labor with literary study," it proposed "to aid in the educa-
) tion of poor young men preparing for the ministry," which was

21

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

then "almost without education." The school had its humble
beginnings in "two double cabins, with a garret to each, for
dwelling, for dining, and for study for both teachers and stu-
dents." 18 The attempt to unite labor and letters was abandoned,
but the school continued until 1862. In that year it was sus-
pended because of the enlistment of practically all its students;
it did not open again until December, 1865, and then with only
three teachers. Promise of new life came when the city of Macon
offered the college a small endowment and a grant of land, and
in 1 87 1 the Baptist brethren moved from Penfield to Macon.
When the fall term of 1872 opened the faculty was still using
the "Mess Hall" for recitations and "prayers" as well as for
meals.

One of Freshman Watson's first concerns was with his new
masters, the four members of the Mercer faculty. Coolly taking
their measure, he set down his conclusions: Dr. Archibald J.
Battle, the president, was "a man laboriously cultivated rather
than naturally very talented," but still "the best President that
could have been chosen from the Faculty." Professor Woodfin,
the teacher of Greek, Tom found "charitable, kind, affable,"
and Professor Shelton P. Sanford commanded respect as the
"very well known . . . author of the Analytical Arithmetic."
Yet none of these could measure up to Professor Steed, who, "in
brilliancy of intellect," he thought, "far surpasses any man in
the college," although the youngest member of the faculty. Now
that they were at Mercer together, Tom was admitted into such
intimacy with his idol that he speaks of their relationship as
"chummy." 19

"I have just been reading Todd's Student's Manal [jfc],"
wrote Tom on his sixteenth birthday, a few weeks before he left
home for college, "and I am resolved 'after mature deliberation'
to adopt his plan >. . ." Todd's plan was a system of self-disci-
pline that held the student to a rigid daily schedule of study and
self-improvement. The office of "Assistant Librarian for the Phi

18 Dr. R. J. Massey, in Watson's Magazine, Vol. IV (April, 1910), pp. 319-323.

19 A commonplace book, hereafter referred to as "MS. Journal 2." It contains
about 600 pages. Watson acquired it when he went to Mercer, and continued to
use it until his death. Referring to it, he wrote: "It was not intended that these
private records should ever be shown to anyone else. They were just an ambitious
boy's effusions, jotted down partly because there was a vague idea that they might
one day be very interesting to myself."

22

Scholar and Poet

Delta Society" to which he was elected worked the ruin of his
good resolutions. If one may credit his prodigious list of books
read during the fall term, one may conclude that he abandoned
himself to his temptation with a furious sort of zeal. His appe-
tite unsatisfied by reading the new books he found in the library,
he read for a second time a large number of those he had listed
the year before, including Gibbon's Decline and Fall and nearly
all the poets. 20 "Forgot all about Todd at college," he added at
the end of his resolution.

For all his bookishness Tom did not remain an obscure figure
at school. One of his classmates pictures him as he "swaggered
across the campus ... the admiration of less forceful natures,"
one or two worshipful henchmen in his wake. He was sometimes
"bitter" and vengeful, but "a purer piece of grit never inhabited
a slight frame. ... He would have marched up to the Devil
and tweaked his nose." His description of himself at this time
is something quite different: "I was known to be one of the
poor boys, unable to pay the tuition fee of sixty dollars; was
very plainly dressed; and was shy and awkward in manner" and
of "a retiring disposition." a But the incongruity is more appar-
ent than real: the "swagger" and "grit" were ever his means of
covering a feeling of inferiority, which he calls "shyness" and a
"retiring disposition." The numerous accounts of his college
escapades, which he delighted in confiding to his diary, tend
rather to corroborate this view of a duality of character than
not. 22

In Southern colleges of that day it was in the debating so-
cieties, rather than on the gridiron, that fame was won. Here
such questions as, "Would the removal of the Negroes from the
South be beneficial to the people?" and "Does Knowledge exert
more influence upon mankind than wealth?" were periodically
settled. 28 At the Phi Delta Society Tom Watson was in his native
element. Here he could flaunt his learning, brandish in the faces
of astonished opponents the purple quotations which he copied
in his notebooks and memorized, and — above all — here he
could pay devotion to his "Ideal Goddess," Eloquence.

20 MS. Journal x, Sept. 5, 1872, and following.
21 T. E. W., Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Sept., 1910.
22 MS. Journal 2.

28 "Minutes of the Phi Delta Society," October, 1873- June, 1874, Mercer Uni-
versity, Macon, Ga.

23

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Oratory he evidently regarded as one of the major arts, and
it was his most cherished ambition to master it. "Study Elo-
quence as an abstract beauty," he wrote, and his pursuit of the
subject was zealous. He wrote, he read, he practiced. His notes
on the lives of famous men were concerned chiefly with their
oratorical prowess, and he was forever jotting down observa-
tions on the art. For example, there are his twelve "Hints on
Oratory — Taught by experience — not books," of which number
twelve is, "Pay ardent, unceasing adoration to her as an Ideal
Goddess at whose touch the human heart quivers with joy, throbs
with enthusiasm, melts with pity, trembles with fear, droops
with woe, burns with indignation, or stands still in mute horror."
His "Recipe for a public democratical speech" ends with the
ingredient, "a grand 'Spread Eagle,' " and under the admoni-
tion, "Remember This!" one reads: "when the national heart
is heaving with excitement, he who would control its pulsations
and direct its energies, must speak in the language of enthusiasm.
The power of the orator lies in the sympathy between him and
the people. This is the chord which binds heart to heart; and
when it is struck, thousands burst into tears or rouse into pas-
sion, like a single individual." 24 "Pulsations" and "excitement,"
these were the materials of his art, and "the language of en-
thusiasm" and "sympathy" were its instruments.

Later in his college career Tom was once called up before a
tribunal of the Mercerian Republic, an elaborate system of stu-
dent government, and charged with creating a "loud, boisterous,
uproarious disturbance" in the Mess Hall. When the counsel for
the defense had finished, Tom, to the surprise of both himself
and the court, leaped to his feet and addressed the jury in his
own behalf. "I had thought nothing of what to say but when I
opened my mouth there rushed out a torrent of fiery words
which swept the jury right along," he wrote, clearly astonished
at his own powers. "In a few minutes I found myself ridiculing
Cooper. ... I pointed my finger to Cooper and pronounced
the swelling epithets with such a pompous, Ciceronian roll that
Tom Burdet and several others burst into a laugh." 25 A fight
started. "My case," he wrote, "ruined the Mercerian Republic."
He came out of the experience with a new respect for this power

24 MS. Journal 2, pp. x-62.

25 Ibid., p. 129.

24

Scholar and Poet

he possessed. He wrote out the speech afterward, and in the
margin pronounced it "the best speech I probably ever made,"
"entirely extemporaneous," but "wonderfully effective."

Mercer closed on July 3, and the next day found Tom fifteen
miles out from Macon applying for a position as teacher of a
country school. After some hesitation on account of his "juvenile
appearance" the board accepted him on trial. According to the
unequivocal terms (and the spelling) of his contract, adopted
by the trustees of the "Centreal Warrior Academy," the teacher
was required "to keep a good and holsome disciplin at all times,"
but "The said Teacher shal not be alowed to correct no studant
in any way only by a switch the skin not to be cut and not to be
abused otherwise." With these limitations upon penal methods
he was expected to enforce the following rules : *

Rule 1st — There shall be no student admitted into this school that does
not come under these obligations.

Rule 2d — All abusive language such as cursing and swearing is attually
forbiden.

Rule 3d — There shall no student be alowed to carry consealed weppons.

Rule 4th — There shall be no climbing of fences, resling or throwing
rocks at each other alowed. '

Rule 5 th — No student is alowed to fight in school or on there way too
or from school, nor no news to be carraide too or from school.

Opening with five scholars on the first day, the school increased
in attendance by August to forty-four, ranging in age from six
to twenty-seven. There was Jim Tool, "well grown, with a high
narrow forehead and small grey eyes which could look at you
an hour without blinking," who thought nothing of licking an
ink blot off his copy book, and Ella Gates, who "thanks her stars
she has passed her twenty-seventh year." Tom found teaching
"not a task but a pleasure," for "while teaching them I am
teaching myself." 27 In September he closed his school and re-
turned to Mercer for the fall term.

During the summer he had written to his father of his ambi-
tion to become "one of the first men of the State." "It is for this,"
he said, "that I am studying, it is for this that I am working,
and I never mean to stop either the one or the other, until my

^Quoted by T. E. W., Watson's Magazine, March, 1910. Cf. also quoted with
some variation by Walter Wellman, Review of Reviews, XXX (Oct., 1904), p. 419.
27 MS. Journal 2, c. Aug., 1873.

25

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

object is obtained. I have no great wish for money for myself;
I only wish for fame ; but I intend to make money for you and
fame for myself at the same time." *

Fame, he fancied, was quite within his grasp when he clipped
from the Macon Telegraph a favorable notice of his speech
(delivered "in a most remarkable manner") at the annual Sun-
day-school celebration. But his triumph turned to gall and worm-
wood upon the reflection that it had been won in the borrowed
Sunday coat of the Mess Hall matron's husband. 29 No, to enjoy
fame one must have money. Money, however, was not immedi-
ately forthcoming. Indeed, it soon appeared that, for all his
mother's efforts and his own frugality, this would be his last
year in college. The year passed uneventfully.

On June 20 he made a farewell address at the Phi Delta So-
ciety, in which he "tried to efface every hard feeling." The
Recording Secretary pronounced it in the minutes a very "tell-
ing speech." 80 Then he took his leave of college with "barely
enough" to pay his way home.

28 T. E. W. to John S. Watson, Aug. 1, 1873, Watson MSS.

29 MS. Journal 2, undated.

80 "Minutes of the Phi Delta Society," June 20, 1874, Macon, Georgia.

26

3

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

While his son was at college, John, more prone than ever
to the l blues' ' and the indulgence of his weaknesses, had
fallen victim to the general economic collapse of the early 'sev-
enties: His last acre of land went in 1873. Haplessly he joined
the beginning exodus from land to city, moved to Augusta and
there opened a combined boarding house and bar. 1

The change did not please Tom at all. When a friend, whose
father had bought the fine house John had built after the war,
called on Tom at the new establishment, he appeared embar-
rassed and did not ask his friend in. 2 Furthermore, he did not
feel at home in the city. "I was a stranger in the city," he wrote,
"and my clothes and my manner advertised me as a raw coun-
try boy." Vainly he tramped the streets of Augusta that summer
seeking work, but work he could not find. It was the first of
many rebuffs he was to receive from the city. Unlike his father
— he recoiled, as he always did, back to the country. This time
it was to the real country.

Having found no work by September, he gathered up his
books and sold them at public auction. "As each volume was
cried off . . ." he said, "a great gulp rose in my throat." That
night he made some memoranda for a "letter to T[heodosia?]."
"Youth," he said, "is bidding me goodbye forever. . . . Tomor-
row, though only 1 8 years have rolled over my head, I shall go
out into life as a man . . ." He assured "T," however, that he
had "not a doubt of success." 3 But to his diary he admitted

*MS. Journal 2, p. 196.

2 Interview with L. C. Smith, Columbia County, Georgia, Dec, 1933.

3 MS. Scrapbook.

27

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

more privately that the future "seemed robed in gloom," 4 for
it looked as if he were "setting out on a wild goose chase." With
six dollars and a half, proceeds from the sale of his books, he
boarded the train the next morning. At Lawtonville he got off
and walked the remaining eighteen miles through the country
to Screven County, the home of his friend Glenn Thompson.

Thompson was soon able to get up a school for the youth in
the Little Horse Creek community. Boarding with the Thomp-
sons, Tom promptly fell in love with Laura, his friend's sister,
and became engaged to her in less than a month. Fame and for-
tune, however, were still his chief preoccupations: "Fame," he
wrote, was "the Goddess of the Intellectual." Pondering the
question of marriage, he decided to remain a bachelor, since
"there must be a titanic struggle before Intellect can free itself
from the clutches of Poverty." 5 Perhaps it was fame he was
seeking when in November he accepted the invitation of the
Temperance Society to address its members in the Little Horse
Creek Church. The acclaim received for belaboring the demon
rum he found gratifying. But temperance lectures and school-
teaching held small promise of freedom from the "clutches of
Poverty."

January found him back in Augusta in a low state of mind,
"attended by shadows," and writing such poems as "Despair,"
a lugubrious composition, ending :

Ambition, my cherished ambition,
Still comes at my call, — dreary call !

But a mantle hangs over her features
As dark as a funeral pall.

The poem, he noted at its end, was "written on the banks of the
Savannah river while laying [sic] out from home and seeking a
chance to run away to Texas." 6

The Texas adventure was happily averted by his mother, who
gained permission for him to read law in the office of Judge W. R.
McLaws, of Augusta. There he studied until July; then, packing
his Blackstone, the gift of Mr. Thompson, he returned to Screven
County to take another school for three months at Double Head.
He would always remember "those three months with much

4 MS. Journal 2, Nov. 4, 1874.

5 Ibid., an entry entitled "Musings."

6 Ibid., "Augusta, 1875."

28

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

pleasure.' ' He enjoyed another triumph at the Temperance
Convention, and his school closed successfully. "The girls of
course cried," he says, and one of his "large pupils, Miss Jennie
W.," was even more demonstrative.

In the social life of small and middle-class farmers of back-
woods Screven, which centered about the Horse Creek Church,
the schoolhouse, and the Temperance Society, Tom was by no
means the shy lout he described himself in Augusta. On the con-
trary, it seems that he was completely at home at such functions
as schoolhouse dances and barbecues. He pictured himself "lead-
ing into the quadrille a bony, sway-backed damsel," or perform-
ing "the double shuffle, the back-step, the pigeon wing, the heel
and toe, the limber-leg, the slap-jack, the flip-flop." 7 An ac-
complished fiddler, he sometimes played for the dances. His rep-
ertoire, some fifty separate titles, included waltzes, schottishes,
polkas, cotillions, quicksteps, hornpipes, besides "Watson's Med-
ley," made up of "Rosy O'More, Kathleen, Highland Fling,
The Girl I Left Behind Me, Blue Danube, Falling Leaves, and
Elfin Waltz." 8 Moreover, his talent for composing and reciting
such jingles as the following did not detract from his popularity:

He goes to parties and to balls

With fiddle music brimmin'
Who plays in one way for the men —

Another for the women. . . .

By rare good taste and rarer luck

He variegates his fiddling
And whiles away the tedious hours

By heterogeneous diddling.

Whatever there remained of a middle-class agrarian culture
in the post-bellum South, Tom Watson knew at first hand, nor
did he ever forget its language when the right moment came to
use it. "I think that my earnest sympathy for the poor dates
from this period of my life," he wrote. He shared the farmer's
lot completely, and the lot of the farmer at this time and place
was not a perennial barbecue. "Eating at their tables, sitting at
their firesides, sleeping in their beds," he declared, "I gained a

7 Ibid., p. 123.

8 MS. Journal 1, undated.

29

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

knowledge of these people which no books could give me — these
plain, country people — and I love them." 9

Having passed the bar examination in Augusta, "with the
compliments of the Judge," Tom received his license to practice
on October 19, 1875. 10 The clerk of the court issued it on credit,
since Tom, so he wrote, "was not able to pay at that time." The
city proving no more hospitable than before, Tom took himself
"immediately" back to Screven to start his law practice. Business
was so dull by March, however, that even teaching seemed more
lucrative, and he gave up the law. "I couldn't stand the crisis,"
he wrote in his Journal. "I sold my horse and took a small
private school till June." n When June came, nothing better
offered than to begin another school, this time a public school
in the "Call neighborhood."

Time hung heavy on his hands, and to dispel the doldrums
he turned to poetry and love-making — both on his customary
scale, that is to say, extensive. There were Molly ("I take you
upon my lap and feel your little arms around my neck"), and
Fannie ("Oh my! Won't my wife have a heap to scold me
about,") and Sally ("But she is married now, and I'll keep her
secret,") and Lillie, Laura, Amelia . . . and poems to them all !
Particularly there was Jennie, who walked with him under the
cypress trees, where "the long moss hung in tresses, waving and
sighing sadly in the air," and sang to him "when the night that
was around us, no matter how gloomy, was not so dark to me as
the world was." M

At all this philandering his patrons, chiefly of the Baptist per-
suasion, were inclined to look askance. Some were scandalized.
"It didn't require much wisdom to see that profligacy was ruin-
ing me," he reflected. "Those pretty . . . girls of Screven were
dragging my good name into the mire. I had well nigh alienated

all my well wishers by a reckless career with Jennie W ."

In his "Parting Words to Patrons" at the end of school he re-
morsefully asked "only for a generous silence," and that they
"let Forgetfulness with noiseless pinions settle upon every blun-
der." They were indulgent : he was young and full of life. Then

9 T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. n.

10 "Richmond County Superior Court Minutes, 1874-1876," pp. 430-431.

11 MS. Journal 2, "Cameron, Ga., March 4, 1876."

12 Ibid,, c. August or September, 1876 ; undated MSS.

30

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

he began publishing some of his poems. A few, like "The Farm"
and "John Howard Payne," represented respectably domesti-
cated sentiments. There were others, however, in his judgment,
"very Byronical in tone," like "Give Me a Kiss," that "attracted
considerable attention in the County." One gathers that the at-
tention was not all laudatory. "People talk of stern manhood!
Stern fiddlestick!" he exclaimed, and he wrote another poem: 13

Strange tales they tell {they tell forsooth)
About thy wayward froward youth
And lightly do I reck their truth

Thy love is all my care
Let slander hurl her venomed dart
And strive our lives our hopes to part
I'd shrine thee here within my heart

Though hell should say Beware!

Who was this Pan at large in the Baptist fold? "I was un-
happy," he said in his Journal, "and hugged the fancy that I
was an Ishmael of modern times." 14 He played his fiddle, mem-
orized poetry, and "spouted Byron by the hour." He was not
appreciated. He was Byron. He was Don Juan. He was Ishmael.
He was anything but a seedy country school-teacher, and the
world must know about it !

The world and his "Goddess Fame" were still unmoved by
his strivings. When his school (his fifth one) closed in August,
he had hope of getting the State Lecturer's place in the Tem-
perance Society. "I was determined," he said, "to 'go up and
gather lilies.* " But just as the prize seemed in his grasp, the
office was abolished. He was reduced to such circumstances that
he had to trade a silver cup that had belonged to his grand-
father for a "cheap cotton garment," though the cup was "worth
about ten times more." 15 "October, 1876, found me utterly
destitute and working as a plow hand for old Jimmie Thomp-
son," he recorded. "At night, my fiddle waked the silence
among the pines. ... I got morose, moody and sulky as a mad
bull. I used to lay [sic\ down under the pines and try to imagine
where the dickens I was drifting to, and what awful change had

13 MS. Journal 2, p. 191 et seq. t containing also clippings of the poems.

"Ibid.

16 T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. 11.

31

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

come over the spirit of my dream that I was getting so near the
bottom . . ." 16

In this extremity he appealed to Professor R. H. Pearce, one
of his old teachers in Thomson. Professor Pearce wrote that he
would be glad to advance him board until he got a start as a
lawyer. "Riding back home from the Station where I rec'd his
letter," he wrote, "the glad, fierce feeling of a new life opened
to me rose and swelling till the woods rung [sic~] with the
whoop that burst from my lips. It was a glorious feeling and
right there did my destiny turn the corner." 1T He was a little
more than twenty years old.

In 1870 there had been cut out of Columbia and Warren a
county named McDuffie in honor of Senator George McDuffie,
who had been born in its boundaries. Although Thomson be-
came the seat of the new County's government and thereby
gained much in importance, it was still, in 1876, only a village
of seven hundred inhabitants. Nevertheless, in these few years
its bar, situated in an old part of the state and drawing talent
from more established towns, already enjoyed a tradition that
was not to be despised. The presence — even occasional — of Rob-
ert Toombs and Alexander Stephens would have lent dignity to
the tradition of any bar. Although Toombs still carried on an
active practice, both of the old Confederates were in their de-
clining years. More vigorous, if less celebrated, was Judge
H. D. D. Twiggs, who was later pronounced "the greatest crimi-
nal lawyer of Georgia" by a historian who quoted Watson as
saying that "he has never met his equal, and that in some of
his flights of eloquence he has fairly rivaled General Toombs."
There was also James C. C. Black of Augusta, who belonged
"in the front rank of Georgia orators," and W. D. Tutt, a gen-
tleman of remarkably caustic tongue, who "seemed to have
caught some of the sparks from the anvil of Demosthenes." 18
Erudition they undoubtedly had, but eloquence was more im-
portant.

It was natural that Watson should single out as especial marks

16 MS. Journal 2, p. 191.

17 Loc. cit.

18 Lucian L. Knight, Reminiscences of Famous Georgians, Vol. I, pp. 412-421.

32

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

for emulation the two most distinguished men. Throughout his
youth and early manhood he felt strongly the impact of these
two mighty and eccentric personalities. " 'Little Elleck' and 'Bob
Toombs' were the Castor and Pollux, the matchless heroes, in
our neck of the woods," he once wrote. The roads between the
homes of his two heroes and his own formed a triangle : Tom
at the apex, the house of the aristocrat Toombs, at Washington,
and Liberty Hall, plain and ascetic, the very soul of Stephens,
son of the "plain people, ,, at Crawfordville. The houses of the
two friends still stand, decaying symbols of the two classes whose
alliance the Toombs-Stephens friendship represented.

"I came almost from Mr. Stephens' own fireside," Watson
said with evident feeling at the sage's death. He knew him,
visited in his home, as did almost everybody who came to town,
took his advice about law and politics, and fairly worshipped
him. Toombs was farther off in his firmament, but a more bril-
liant star. "I loved Stephens," he said, u but I gloried in Bob
Toombs I" 19 Once during the year 1864 he asked his mother
who caused the war. "Toombs," she answered, and the boy was
satisfied. 20 He considered Toombs "truly a big man." "His
ideas, views, ambitions, passions, methods, excellencies, and
faults were big; his loves and hates, his battles, his triumphs,
his defeats were big; his roar of wrath, his shout of onset, his
bursts of profanity, his explosions of laughter . . ." Further-
more, he was "an Idol of the South because he carried in his
heart the very passions, prejudices, hopes, aspirations, distinctive
traits, habits, strength and weakness of the South; and every
Southern man felt that here was a man who loved the South
with all his mind and soul and heart, hating intensely every-
thing and everybody who hated her" 21 Once, shortly after his
return from exile, Toombs appeared in Thomson. A crowd had
assembled to listen to Stephens, whose address had been some-
what disappointing. When they saw Toombs, it was "As though
an electric current had shot through the crowd, the multitude
sprang to its feet, and there pealed forth a 'Rebel Yell,' and a
roar for, 'Toombs! Toombs I Toombs!' " 22 After the band had

19 T. E. W., Bethany, p. 28.

20 T. E. W., Sketches, p. 15.
21 T. E. W., Bethany, p. 27.
22 T. E. W., Sketches, p. 5.

33

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

played "Dixie," and the delirium had subsided, he addressed the
crowd. Elsewhere Watson describes Toombs in action :

You never saw anything like it ! A torrent bursting through a mountain
gorge ; a wind-storm, with thunder and lightning, tearing through a forest ;
a volcano in eruption — these were the things Toombs* speech reminded you
of ; and when you once heard Bob Toombs 'on the stump* you could speak
of it in the same tone as that used when one said, I saw Jeb Stuart lead a
cavalry charge. It was a thing you could never forget; and nothing else
was like it in elemental grandeur.

The example of Stephens, however, more analogous to his
own origin and circumstances, was ever uppermost in Tom's mind
when he pondered his own future. He observed in his Journal
that "This natural born genius talk is all humbug," and that a
lawyer must "study 36 hours a day." "With Mr. Stephens the
experience was the same. With less of natural talent [than
Toombs] he had more of unfaltering perseverance. He com-
menced poor and worked hard. He lived on eight dollars a
month, made his own room, blacked his own boots, and was
precious glad when he had any boots to black . . ." 23 His emula-
tion of this example, we may conclude, was indefatigable. Fre-
quently such entries as "Didn't go to bed at all last night" appear
in his diary of this period; nor was it because he was an Ishmael
fiddling under the pines nor a Don Juan among the cypresses.
He was "burnishing up" his "legal armor for the Superior
C[our]t," or "up till 2 o'clock studying Kent and the Code and
reading Jean Ingelow." ** He had certain debts that must be
paid: "So I dressed plainly, ate my cold dinner in my office,
diligently attended to what cases came my way, studied hard,
lived cleanly in every respect, and gradually gained ground."

Indeed the move from Screven to Thomson had worked a
regeneration in him, and his every effort was to become a model
of decorum and industriousness. When Mrs. Pearce, in good-
natured raillery, told him that "fiddlers never amount to any-
thing," he put aside his instrument firmly, and nothing could
induce him to play it for some time. 25 Shortly after he arrived in
Thomson, there had appeared in the Sunny South, a literary
weekly published in Atlanta, a story called "Jerome Montemar

23 MS. Journal 2, undated.

24 MS. Diary, 1878, Feb. 19. In possession of Georgia Watson, Thomson, Georgia.

25 Interview with Mrs. Lula Farmer, daughter of R. H. Pearce.

34

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

or In the Days of Napoleon," by Thomas E. Watson. 26 The
story was not given a prominent place, but its appearance here
represented a considerable rise in eminence for its author, whose
only publishers had previously been obscure rural papers. He
does not appear to have followed up his advantage. He was
no longer an author. He was a rising barrister.

When a "revival" came along, he even tried religion, em-
bracing it with the impulsiveness and emotionalism that char-
acterized his conversion to anything from an economic doctrine
to a political platform. The evangelist, he wrote, u got hold of
me in such a way that, I not only cried and 'took on' myself, but
I picked out the hardest old case in the congregation, pried him
loose from his seat, dragged him down the aisle, and landed him
on the mourner's bench." So fervent a convert was he that he
agreed to "make-up" with one of the brethren whom he had
thrashed on the street a few months before. Meeting him in
public he impulsively offered him his hand. The hand was re-
fused. "I had to meekly swallow the affront," 27 he said. He was
never one to swallow affronts in good grace and piety. "I am not
what the French call a religionist," he remarked in later life.
"But I think that a man who underrates the powerful hold of
religion is without reasoning power. ... As Napoleon said : 4 If
we didn't have a religion we would have to make one.' " 28 To-
ward the clergy generally, of whatever persuasion, Watson
nursed an impatience he could not always conceal. The deism of
Voltaire and Jefferson was at the root of the feeling.

Before his first year of practice was over he recorded: "My
practice has been good, yielding me $101.70 in cash. I have met
single handed every member of the Bar and have no reason to
complain of the result." Then later: "Tutt's rough, brilliant
blows have often been galling but I see now I could have had
no better schooling." 29 He was "not such a fool," he says, as to
sign an agreement with established lawyers binding himself to
charge the same fees they charged. He was willing to "work
all day for two dollars" and accept any job, however menial.
On January 19, 1878, he noted in his diary: "Go to Appling to

26 Sunny South, Nov. 18, 1876.

27 T. E. W., in the Jeffersonian, Sept. 30, 1909.

28 Interview with Wat9on in Atlanta Journal, Sept. 26, 1922.

29 MS. Journal 2, pp. 192 and 267.

35

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Justice's Court. I represented Plaintiff B. P. O'Neal. ... get
judgment for $7.00 and costs . . . altogether, I've ridden Little
Nell 50 miles today." His victories were not always won in per-
fect amity and dignity before the bar. For example, this entry
was made a week later: "Go down to Pope Hill in Jefferson
County. Gain my cases but get into a fight. Jim Cardue calls
me a liar in the court room and I slap him. Outside he renews
it. I hit him again and he whips me. Result — on my part, — a
scratched up face, on his a blue brow and split nose. A 55 mile
ride." 30 This altercation is by no means an isolated example.
His gross earnings for the first year's practice were $212.

Heavily upon his pride lay the humiliation of his family's
poverty. The memory of what they had been and the oppressive
consciousness of their present plight was forever haunting him.
Before the year was over he set out to rescue them. First there
was his younger brother, William, eking out a wretched exist-
ence as a share-cropper on the land of "Shep" Wright, a wealthy
planter. William, known as "Top" in the community, had been
to his brother with tales of Wright's mistreatment and sharp
dealing beforehand. When Top later reported that the planter
had beaten him like a slave because he had whipped his son in a
fist-and-skull fight, Tom saw red. He borrowed a pistol and
waited for Wright to come to town. Wright, said to have been
"a noted fighting cock," appeared on horseback one Sunday
morning. Armed with his pistol, Tom wrenched the planter's
riding switch from his hand and in the presence of a dozen citi-
zens administered him a whipping. "The distance which the
noise of the 'cussing' is said to have travelled, that Sabbath
morning, staggers belief," reported the assailant. Tom was ar-
rested, but the prosecutor offered to drop the case if Top would
agree to surrender his half of the crop he had been working.
"We were poor boys," wrote Watson, "and we agreed." 31

The incident sank deep into his conscience. The role of agrar-
ian avenger, when he assumed it again, seemed almost as much
a heritage as it was a conviction. Once in boyhood he recorded
with pride in his Journal how he had browbeaten "one of the
white croppers" on his father's plantation by arrogantly march-

so MS. Diary 1878.

81 MS. Journal 2, p. 195.

36

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

ing up, gun in hand, helping himself at the water bucket on the
front porch, and sauntering off without so much as glancing at
the astonished cropper. 32 Some little turning of the economic
tables had worked a revolution in the attitude of the arrogant
young planter's boy. He now saw croppers in a different light.

During the year he paid his family a visit. The pitiable con-
dition in which he found them gave him a profound shock. His
father had sunk into a "hopeless stupor"; his "energy was gone
and he continued to drift downward . . ." So far had John de-
clined that there was really not much further for him to drift.
He had moved to a wretched shack on a little piece of sandy soil
in Richmond County. The family including his three sisters,
Tom wrote with horror in his Journal, "had lived in a miserable
shanty skirted by a long marsh until the chills and fever entered
and took possession of every one of them." 83 One detail, pos-
sessing a peculiar significance for him, stuck in his mind a long
time, and thirty years later he wrote: "The smoke-house, larder,
pantry, buttery, etc., consisted of a home-made book-case that
had belonged to my stately old grandfather." 84 These things
could not be. He found it all "deeply mortifying and determined
to lose no time in coming to their relief."

By an arrangement of credit whereby he was to make six pay-
ments of $500 each over a period of five years, he was able to
purchase the "Sweetwater Place," a farm of seven hundred
acres that John had left at the death of Thomas M. Watson. In
more than one sense, then, the return of his family was a home-
coming. His responsibilities were now greatly multiplied, but
upon Tom there settled for once (and briefly) a consciousness
of peace and contentment. "It was a curious feeling of gratifica-
tion when I rode over the redeemed 'Homestead,' " he wrote
shortly after buying the place. 35 He often sat on the "piazza"
after an early supper and listened to the hands come in from
the fields, and to "my waggon" rattling along the road from
town. "At such a time," he said, "one drinks in a world of quiet
pleasures — pleasures which leave no bitter taste behind." 38 He
took a particular pleasure in hunting out "old Abe Watson," an

82 Ibid., p. 128.

88 Ibid., p. 196.

84 T. E. W., in the Jeffersonian, Sept. 30, 1909.

36 MS. Journal 2, p. 196.

88 MS. Diary 1878.

37

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

old Negro that had belonged to his grandfather, and served as
plantation foreman. Tom installed him on the place as a tenant.
This was "much to [his] satisfaction," he wrote. Unconsciously,
perhaps, Tom was seeking the restoration of an imaginary para-
dise. It was a more plausible restoration than John's lost man-
sion, from which he had declined so precipitantly to a shanty —
but it was sought from the same motives. "Old Abe" he seized
upon immediately as an authentic architectural detail, one that
his "stately old grandfather" had given his stamp of approval.
"It was a curious feeling of gratification . . ." he wrote. "I gave
him a little money to buy 'Christmas' with. He goes to work as
earnestly this new year as if he had been making money." 8T Of
course, there were other motives than nostalgia, and it was not
to be regretted that Abe was an "earnest" tenant, as well as an
architectural ornament.

But contentment, even of paradisaic fulfillment, was not con-
genial to the Watson temperament, not for any appreciable
length of time at least. Under the date, February 24, 1878, one
finds the following entry in his diary: "I can think of nothing
all day but Georgia Durham. I go to sleep in a pine thicket and
still in my sleep I think of her." 38 His passion for her would
give him no peace: "I suffered I think, as much as human nature
can suffer. For months I lay in my office on a big sofa perfectly
benumbed. My mind was chained down to one subject and it
was utterly impossible to think of anything else. I became
morose and moody and well nigh desperate." 39 Here once again
is the familiar Watson — thwarted, disconsolate, rebellious.

Tom's courtship was ardent and not without romantic inci-
dent. During the sixteen months it lasted there were obstacles
innumerable: Georgia's long engagement to a rival suitor, her
threatening illness, her reluctance to leave her foster-father,
whose heavy drinking made him dependent on her care, Dr.
Durham's own objection to her early marriage. After several
postponements, each of which plunged Tom further into distrac-
tion, they were married on October 9, 1878. 40 His diary is silent

37 MS. Journal 2, p. 196.

38 MS. Diary 1878.

39 MS. Journal 2, undated.

40 MS. Diary 1878.

38

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

for a period and then he writes, "I am as happy as a man ever
can be."

Georgia Durham was the adopted daughter of Dr. George W.
Durham, a physician of Thomson. Around her origin, upon which
there is considerable speculation (some conflicting) but no re-
liable evidence, there remains much obscurity. 41 In a fragmentary
manuscript that is apparently the beginning of a novel, Watson
gave the story current in the family a highly romantic color. He
pictures Georgia as the orphaned victim of sectional hatred that
separated the families of her parents at the beginning of the War
and made her the secret charge of an old slave couple. 42 All that
seems to be unquestionable, however, is the fact that Dr. Dur-
ham, then a young surgeon of the Confederate Army stationed
near Savannah, became attached to the child in some way,
adopted her, and brought her home to his wife during the War.

"If I have a Sister Spirit on earth," Tom wrote during his
courtship, "it is she." All that we know of her character, how-
ever, seems to indicate that it was in many ways the very an-
tithesis of her husband's, for that she was serene, patient, and
reserved seems to be the opinion of those who knew her best.
Never taking an active interest in politics, she rarely accom-
panied her husband on his campaign tours, but when she did she
usually received her share of attention from newspapers. "She
is small and her figure is almost girlish," said one. "Hands,
voice, expression all bespoke the sheltered gentlewoman. Noth-
ing more anomalous than this high-bred daughter of the South
affiliated with the party that held Jerry Simpson, 'Sockless
Jerry,' could be imagined." Another trait of the "sheltered gen-
tlewoman" of the Old South that she possessed to a marked de-
gree was her shrewd business ability. Like many mistresses of
the old plantations, Mrs. Watson, for all her fragile gentility,
became the business executive of several large farms, employing
and discharging scores of tenants, keeping accounts, buying sup-
plies, directing work, relieving her husband of a vast amount of
routine, yet managing to appear quite "sheltered." Watson's let-
ters to his wife put beyond question the ardor of his devotion to
her, an ardor which — until a much later period — seemed to pro-

41 Fide William W. Brewton, Life of Watson, pp. 106-113.

42 MS. in the possession of Georgia Watson, Thomson, Georgia.

39

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ceed out of a deeply romantic passion. 43 It is not often one finds
a husband writing love lyrics to his wife after twenty-seven years
of married life. 44

After living for a short time in the home of the Durhams, the
Watsons moved to a house of their own. Here within the next
seven years their three children, a boy and two girls, were born.
These years, strenuous ones for Tom, were crowded with a
thriving practice, a practice that grew with his reputation, and
grew rapidly. In April, 188 1, he wrote : "I have won a steady and
lucrative practice in four counties. I meet the best men from the
Bar of the Northern as well as the Augusta Circuit, and I am
strong in the faith that nature intended me to be the peer of the
best." 45 Not long after he had returned to Thomson he had
written, "I love my profession strongly." Well he might, for in
the first three years of his practice he had doubled his income
each year, and thereafter it shot up proportionately. At the end
of the year 1887, eleven years after he had arrived penniless at
Thomson, he estimated his "assets" at $30,585, most of which
was in land. 46 Those were lean years in rural Georgia. In four
more years, it is said upon fair authority, his practice "carried
him all over the State, and his income was probably larger than
any other country lawyer in the State, with the exception of Gen-
eral Toombs and Benjamin H. Hill." 4T

It is not the purpose here to trace the progress of Watson's
rise to eminence as a lawyer, nor even to examine the legal prob-
lems involved in his more sensational cases, of which there are
many. What is more important is the fact that his practice was
almost entirely rural, that it was concentrated in his congres-
sional district, that his juries and audiences were usually made
up of farmers who were also voters, and that his practice, as
soon as he could command a choice, consisted very largely of
criminal cases in which he acted as counsel for the defendant.
With these facts in mind, a brief examination of his jury meth-
ods might not be entirely without interest.

^Letters of T. E. W. to his wife between 1883 an d I 9°8 in the possession of Miss
Georgia Watson.

44 "Lines written on the back of a photograph of Miss C. D. in May 1878 —
Copied April 19, 1905," MS. Journal 2, p. 572.

45 MS. Journal 2, p. 287.

46 "T. E. W. Account Book, 1888-1893," Watson MSS.

47 William J. Northen, Men of Mark in Georgia, IV, p. 223.

40

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

One of Tom's happiest gifts was a certain talent for robust
metaphor and Gargantuan simile struck off with spontaneity in
the genuine rural idiom. Judge Twiggs, a distinguished oppo-
nent, several years his elder, was frequently the butt of these
aphorisms. In one case involving the identification of a stolen
hog, Tom said, "Why gentlemen, he wants you to believe that
if a piece of his middling were boiled with collard greens he
could tell that it was his by testing the potlicker." And later, "I
presume from what he says, that he could with all ease tell you
the sex of a hog, male or female, merely by smelling of the
gravy." 48 One of these figures, we may imagine, was sufficient
to set the jury rolling in the aisles, but in the same speech we
find, "The distinguished Judge [Twiggs] has a mind so imagi-
native and a fancy so poetic that he could weave metaphors round
a wheel barrow and draw music from a fence rail." Then, while
cross-examining a witness, "If the truth, the whole truth were
to strike this witness fair and square it would split him worse
than lightning would split a rotten potato." Once after record-
ing one of his gems in his Journal, Tom added, "This little sen-
tence burst out impromptu during a reply of mine to H. C.
Roney. It surprised myself and its effect on the hearers was
electrical." And after another speech, "I almost forgot where I
was and seemed to tread on air." 49

Much less spontaneous and original — and consequently pos-
sessing less real humor — was his collection of anecdotes, also
robust. These were assembled over a number of years, filling at
least two notebooks, and were used in political speeches as well
as before the bar. They are recorded in elliptical phrases which,
nevertheless, make their nature fairly apparent — as in the fol-
lowing samples: "Keeps a stud horse and plays the fiddle,"
"Kissing the wrong place in the dark," "The cricket and the

tumble bug," "Zeb Vance's poor man — p s on the fire and

calls his dog," "Hold up your right leg then — hold something." °°
These anecdotes represent a type of folk humor, as anyone
familiar with the section will recognize, and they did not go
unappreciated.

48 MS. Journal 2, p. 286. In these pages Watson kept many brief accounts of his
cases, complete speeches of some of his early ones.

49 Ibid., c. 1879.

60 Notebooks in the possession of Georgia Watson, and also among the Watson
MSS. at Chapel Hill.

41

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

As an example of his juristic technique and forensic methods,
there is the case of Jack Peavy. 61 This case came fairly early in
his career; in itself it is relatively unimportant and little known;
it is not selected to illustrate Watson's legal skill, but for what
it may reveal about the lawyer himself, his methods, his clients,
his juries.

Peavy, it seems, had boarded a train in an intoxicated condi-
tion and made himself such a nuisance that the conductor had
ejected him from the train. Whereupon, it was charged, Peavy
attempted to shoot the conductor, but instead was shot by the
conductor. Peavy then escaped. Discovered later by a constable's
posse he was again wounded, this time by an incredible number
of buckshot, placed under arrest, and later tried for assault with
intent to murder. Watson was appointed to defend him. It ap-
pears that Peavy did not enjoy an enviable reputation in War-
renton, where he was tried, and that public sentiment was
strongly against him. It was, naturally, Watson's first concern
to propitiate and if possible to convert this prejudicial atmos-
phere into one favorable to the defendant. He began with what
appears to be an unconscious travesty upon Anthony's oration on
the fallen Caesar — baring the wounds of the victim. Pianissimo.

Why, gentlemen, Jack Peavy has been shot till his hide wouldn't hold
shucks. If he was a cow his skin wouldn't be worth tanning. His coffin will
be a lead mine. It's a wonder to me all the little boys who are learning to
shoot don't practice on his carcass. The law certainly would not interfere
. . . No ! Let the brave work go on ! Barnett shot him and the law accuses
Peavy. A constable's crowd shot him without warning till the wife of his
bosom might have tracked him seventeen miles by the life blood as it
drained his veins. And the law makes no complaint.

This having taken effect, he proceeds with another trend.
Crescendo.

The further we go the more clearly will we see one of these cruel class
differences that disgrace the justice of men.

Suppose Gen. Toombs passing on this Washington train had cursed. Is
there a man on the jury who believes that this young conductor would have
collared him and have spoken to him as he did Peavy? How absurd.
Toombs, sacred by reason of his class, his cloth; powerful in the golden
strength of his hundreds of thousands. . . .

But Peavy! That's another matter. Slouch hat and homespun dress
inspire the youth with no such awe. Hear how his conduct speaks : "I will

81 MS. Journal 2, p. 305. The case was apparently tried in 1882.

42

"Ishmael" in the Backwoods

collar him like I would a slave, speak to him as I would to a slave and if
he dares resent either I'll shoot him like a dog. Such men have no rights
that I am bound to respect."

And finally for the "grand spread eagle." Fortissimo.

Peavy answers the shaking of the pistol in his face by saying, "You — .
You damned son of a bitch," and is shot. At least he had endured all he
could and his whole nature rose up in arms. "You have collared me as if I
were a cur. You have talked to me like you would a servant. You have
insulted me before all the passengers — put me off the train after I had
bought my ticket and now you threaten me while I am down. I'll stand
no more. Your rank and your riches give you no right to wipe your feet
on me. God Almighty breathed into my nostrils as well as yours. My blood
came from the dust and so did yours. I throw my defiance in your teeth and
meet you face to f ace —

"What tho on homely fare we dine,
Wear hodden gray and all that;
Give fools their silks and knaves their wine —
A man's a man for all that."

Jack Peavy was cleared. "By the time I had spoken half an
hour," wrote Watson, at the end of the above account, "the
popular tide was with us and many a manly eye was dim."

Out of such victories as this — and it was multiplied a hundred-
fold — was built the legend of his invincibility. It became a
widely prevalent belief that there was a sort of rule, or at least
an agreement of honor, that Tom Watson should not assist in
the prosecution of one charged with murder, for if he did, it
meant certain death for the defendant. His talent was reserved
for the defense. He was a tribune of the people, and hundreds
had found shelter within his voice.

And might not a whole people find shelter there likewise?
Were not they all so many Jack Peavys in "slouch hat and
homespun?" Were they not forever being collared and booted
about by arrogant young conductors of the railroads who
charged them such outrageous rates to carry their cotton ? Or by
some upstart millionaire of Wall Street, "sacred by reason of his
class?" By city folk in general? And might they not, with the
words Tom had put in Jack Peavy's mouth, some day rise in
their wrath and say, "I'll stand no more?" And with such a voice
and such a tribune for their leader, might they not become so
many Jack Cades?

43

4

The "New Departure"

MEN, manners, and events in the South during those
two decades that lie between the restoration of home rule
in the early 'seventies and the agrarian revolt of the 'nineties
have been strangely neglected by historians and men of letters
generally. Perhaps it is because Reconstruction, which imme-
diately preceded this period, and the Populist movement, which
marked its close, have offered materials so rich in tragic and melo-
dramatic appeal that the interlude has been poorly attended. Per-
haps it is because the great circus of the Gilded Age at Washing-
ton completely out-shone it in competitive attraction. Be that as
it may, the South also had its "Great Barbecue." True, it was
somewhat delayed by an ungentlemanly squabble over who
should play the host, and its conviviality was unhappily marred
by a most un-Southern inhospitality in the matter of invitations,
and by a few, a very few, haughty old patricians who contemp-
tuously spurned the invitations and stayed at home to munch
cold victuals. But the Barbecue went on.

Out of the almost unanimous silence on this epoch has grown
much erroneous thinking about the South and Southern history,
particularly about that era in which Watson and the Populists
played an important part. To understand the significance of their
role, one must at least be warned of the more prominent mis-
apprehensions concerning the epoch out of which they arose,
which, in fact, produced them.

After the surrender, as after any war and especially an un-
successful one, there followed a great deflation of political fervor
and moral enthusiasm. Southern leaders had been disfranchised.
Some were in prison, some in exile. Nothing but widespread

44

The "New Departure"

poverty prevented a larger emigration than actually occurred to
Latin American colonies. The South was a "conquered province."
How, then, could its citizens be expected to exhibit a great deal
of interest in the question, "When is a state not a state?" which
was troubling Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania and Charles
Sumner of Massachusetts? A few old heads recognized "Re-
construction" for what it was — a Yankee euphemism for capi-
talist expansion. But their number was small, and their counsel
generally regarded as occult. The last demonstration of political
genius made by the old ruling class was in assisting the overthrow
of the Carpetbagger regime. But that was accomplished in the
guise of Brer Rabbit rather than in that of Brer Lion: "Sir,"
General Toombs is reported to have said to a Federal detective
while the general was engaged in paying off Negro voters, "Sir,
are you not touched by this spectacle of the unbought suffrages
of a free people?" 1 In 1870 he had joined hands with Governor
Joseph E. Brown to overthrow the corrupt Bullock administra-
tion; with unwonted cynicism he had written Stephens, "Rather
a strange conjunction is it not? But you know my rule is to use
the devil if I can do better to save the country." 2

Adversity had minimized old differences and old hatreds mo-
mentarily, and all Southern people felt powerfully drawn to-
gether against a common enemy. Their mood is clearly reflected
in a letter that Augustus Baldwin Longstreet wrote to Stephens :
"When I think of you and Toombs as you are now, and as you
were twelve or fourteen years ago, I feel like killing the fatted
calf, and waking up music and dancing. . . . Well, as Ransey
Sniffle says, 'We are all friends now.' " 3 Whigs, Know Nothings,
Unionists, Secessionists, even some Republicans were all one in a
conservative embrace. It so happened that the common repository
for these generous and powerful emotions of a people was the
Democratic party. But no sooner had the spontaneity of this
impulse begun to pall than the more sensitive souls began to feel
the embrace distinctly embarrassing.

In 1872 Stephens and Toombs, in an ineffectual effort to pre-
vent Southern Democrats from joining with the Northern wing
of the party in a "New Departure" to nominate Horace Greeley,

1 C. Mildred Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, pp. 273-274.

2 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life of Robert Toombs, p. 264.

3 John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, p. 354.

45

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the Liberal Republican of New York, for president, had lost
their fight for the control of the Georgia Democratic party. Re-
newing the struggle upon the same issues the following year,
Stephens was defeated as a candidate for senator by General
John B. Gordon. He then accepted as a sop a seat in Congress,
but his relations with the "New Departure" Democrats remained
estranged. The old invalid was expected to die any day now,
but instead he cheerfully corrected the proofs of his obituary
(just as Toombs predicted), and went on living, an irrepressible
mummy in a roller chair, "An immense cloak, a high hat, and
peering somewhere out of the middle a thin, pale, sad little
face." 4

Toombs, example par excellence of the unreconstructed Rebel,
had returned from his two years' exile abroad in a much more
belligerent mood than Stephens had exhibited upon his release
from prison. In fact he returned as a citizen of Georgia only,
for he never applied for United States citizenship. In 1876 the
old Rebel was no more pleased with the doings of his new party
than he had been four years previously. On October 30 he wrote
Stephens, "The mongrel crew who call themselves Democrats
. . . want Tilden elected for the same reason that Falstaff re-
joiced at Prince Hal's reconciliation with the old King — 'Hal,
rob me the exchequer.' " 6 But Toombs' recalcitrance was not yet
reduced to impotent mouthings. One of his chief abominations
was the Constitution of 1868, the product of "aliens and usurp-
ers." The sanction this document gave to the policy of state aid
to railroads and public corporations was perhaps the main cause
of his displeasure. It was known that he never invested a dollar
in railroad stock, and his vehement denunciation of railroads
was regarded by many at the time as a paranoia. His personal
power in the state was such that he was able to dominate the
Constitutional Convention of 1877 and to force the adoption of
his ideas in the new constitution. "Toombs is attempting a new
revolution" was the cry of hoards of railroad lobbyists, pro-
moters, developers, expanders, and captains of industry who
descended upon Atlanta to stop this "war upon the rights of
property." "It is a sacred thing to shake the pillars upon which
the property of the country rests," one of their number solemnly

4 Louis Pendleton, Alexander H. Stephens, pp. 386-387.
5 Ulrich B. Phillips, op. «V.,.p. 268.

46

The "New Departure"

charged. "Better shake the pillars of property than the pillars
of liberty," thundered the old man. "The great question is, Shall
Georgia govern the corporations or the corporations govern
Georgia? Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve I" In spite of
the powerful opposition of Joseph E. Brown and others, the
convention made its choice at the dictation of Robert Toombs.
His motion to strike out the section against dueling was defeated,
but not his proposals to prohibit state aid to railroads, irrevoca-
ble franchises and immunities, the purchase of railroad securi-
ties by the state, and monopolistic combinations of railroads. 6
Toombs had won the day, but it was to be his last one. Barred
from holding federal office, he constituted himself ex-cathedra
censor of public morals, resorting to strong drink, strong lan-
guage, and blacker prophecies as the years passed. By a stranger
conjunction than Toombs' brief alliance with Joe Brown, young
Henry Grady became almost the amanuensis of the General,
patronizingly jotting down his jeremiads and reporting them
amiably to the public.

Upon the restoration of home rule in 1872 the Carpetbaggers,
it is frequently said, were succeeded by the "Bourbons," the im-
pression being, it seems, that the "Bourbon Democrats," having
overthrown the Reconstruction administration, were able in some
way partially to rehabilitate the old order while paying dubious
respect to the new. Having caught the fancy of a suspicious
North and having been adopted by the South itself (though in a
somewhat different sense), 7 the term Bourbon has enjoyed a
remarkable success as a political epithet. Indeed, in this sense
it has become a part of our language, Webster's New Interna-
tional Dictionary defining the word as, "A ruler or politician who
clings obstinately to ideas adapted to an order of things gone by ;
— sometimes applied to Democrats of the southern United
States." Yet, since the American aborigines were called Indians
there has probably been no more fallacious misnomer in our his-
tory than this term Bourbon — at least when applied to the men
who governed Georgia.

6 Ibid., p. 269-272; Samuel W. Small, Proceedings of the Georgia Constitutional
Convention . . . 1877, passim.

7 Thus, Joseph E. Brown in 1880 refers to "the sentimentality of the South and
the Bourbonism of the past." Herbert Fielder, Life and Times of Joseph E. Brown,
p. 550.

47

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

The nature of the new rulers of the South might be made
fairly plain by a recitation of statistics demonstrating the rapid
advance of industrial development. Some insight should be
gained by a study of the rulers themselves. During the interval
between 1872 and 1890 either Joseph E. Brown or General
John B. Gordon held one of Georgia's seats in the United States
Senate, and after the expiration of his second term as Governor
in 1882, General Alfred H. Colquitt held the other; during the
major part of that same period either General Colquitt or Gen-
eral Gordon occupied the governor's chair. So regularly were
these high offices bandied about among the three men, that they
came to be spoken of as the triumvirate — "the Bourbon Trium-
virate." 8

The career of Joseph Emerson Brown is one of those anom-
alies that render unsafe broad generalizations about the Old
South as well as the New, for his is the story of a self-made man,
one of the first u success-stories" of the ploughboy who became a
multimillionaire and a senator. His rise began in the Old South.
At the age of nineteen he emerged from the primitive, poverty-
ridden backwoods of north Georgia wearing homespun and
driving a yoke of steers. Six years later he was graduated from
the law school of Yale College and returned to Georgia to take
up the career of lawyer, farmer, and politician. At twenty-eight
he was a state senator and shortly afterward a circuit judge. In
1857, at the age of thirty-six, he was advanced to the governor's
chair largely by the votes of the small farmer (whose influence
in antebellum Georgia was by no means negligible). The news
of his nomination reached him in his wheat field, where he was
lending a hand with the harvest. 9

The contrast between the personality of the young governor
and those of such men as his predecessor, Governor Johnson, or
Senator Toombs was striking. His composure, one of his ad-
mirers tells us, was "perfect, though his manners, while not
easy, were not awkward." His face was "pale, bloodless," his
mouth "wide and thin-lipped, something like Henry Clay's,
though not so extensive," his clothes "plain black without at-
tempt at fashionable fit," his voice "very clear and not at all

8 Isaac W. Avery, History of Georgia, pp. 370-372.

9 Herbert Fielder, op. cit,, pp. 91-92; I. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 7-46; U. B.
Phillips, op. cit., p. 171.

48

The "New Departure"

musical." In speaking he showed "no rhetorical finish," was
"disregardful of ceremony," and kept himself "free from any
sentiment of reverence for custom or authority unless his judg-
ment approved." His pronunciation, marked strongly by the
provincial drawl and the rural peculiarity of accenting the last
syllable, won him the name of "Old judgw*«f." Governor
Brown's first regime of four years was said in 1881 to have given
Georgia "the largest measure of material growth she has ever
had." Whether fighting banks, legislature, press, or "custom
and authority," Brown was the same "native-born belligerent,"
relentless, stubborn, self-confident. As war governor he was also
a capable administrator, although his conflict with the Confed-
erate government over conscription and state rights (in which
he took the side of Stephens and Toombs against President
Davis) was a serious matter. 10 Brown's political career did not
end with the War. For a quarter of a century after the surrender
his influence was powerfully felt in Georgia and in the South.
Then, might not this man, farmer, eight-years' governor of
Georgia, ardent defender of state rights, ally of Stephens and
Toombs, with justice be called a "Bourbon"?

After the War, Governor Brown grew a long gray beard of
the sort that masked the faces of a great many statesmen of the
Gilded Age. "The statesman like the business man," wrote Gov-
ernor Brown in his letter of resignation, June 29, 1865, "should
take a practical view of questions as they arise . . ." The ad-
visor in this case profited more than the advised. "We have
never in the South had a more practical man than Governor
Brown," said one of his admirers. 11 For his advice to the South
of entire acquiescence in the abolition of slavery and a cordial
support of the full Radical reconstruction policy, Brown be-
came perhaps the best-hated man in Georgia, bringing down a
tirade of abuse from such men as Ben Hill, who pronounced
him "parricide" and "traitor," though in taking this position,
Brown merely anticipated Hill about three years and Southern
Democracy about five. 12 Governor Brown simply showed more
alacrity in combining profitably the "practical view" of the busi-

10 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 48-49, 167-170, and also Chapters XX-XXXI; H.
Fielder, Chapters III-X, especially pp. 355~398.

11 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 339-340*

12 Haywood Pearce, Benjamin H. Hill, pp. 214-215; I. W. Avery, op. cit., pp.
370-371.

49

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ness man with the duties of the "statesman." He became a Re-
publican temporarily, and was duly rewarded for his practical
views by the Bullock administration with the office of chief jus-
tice of the state supreme court. In the name of "development"
and "progress" the reconstructors (like their brethren in Wash-
ington) drew out of the public treasury munificent doles with
both hands for the industrialists. Some $4,450,000 worth of
such bonds were later declared fraudulent and repudiated, but
not all. 18 Chief Justice Brown was closely associated with many
of the beneficiaries of these policies.

In December, 1870, Brown resigned his office as chief justice
to take charge of the Western and Atlantic Railroad. The lease
of this state road had been awarded the company of which he
was president as one of the last acts of the Bullock legislature,
just before the "Carpetbag" Governor fled the state. Later in-
vestigation declared the obtaining of the lease and the formation
of the company to be fraudulent, but the lease was not broken. 14
During the next decade Brown was occupied largely with a mul-
tiplicity of industrial developments. At one time he was president
of the Western and Atlantic Railroad Company, the Southern
Railway and Steamship Company, the Walker Coal and Iron
Company, and the Dade Coal Company, and part owner of the
Rising Fawn Iron Works. 15 His mineral interests alone covered
a large part of several counties.

The labor supply that Governor Brown used in the Dade coal
mines, one of his larger interests, is worth passing attention as a
commentary upon the rise of the progressive spirit in the South
and the patent advantages of the new freedom over the old feu-
dal system. The practice of leasing state convicts to private indi-
viduals and corporations had arisen during Reconstruction, when
for the first time large numbers of Negro convicts began to ap-
pear. The state, it was claimed, was too impoverished to maintain
them in idleness. Governor Brown was willing to relieve the pub-
lic of a large part of this burden, and pay the state something

18 C. M. Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, Chapter IX; H. Fielder, op. cit,
pp. 465-480; Alex M. Arnett, Populist Movement in Georgia, p. 26.

14 The question of fairness in this lease is still controversial. Cf. C. M. Thomp-
son, op. cit, pp. 251-254, which puts a damaging construction upon the testimony,
and H. Pearce, op. cit, pp. 218-230; which takes a different view; also Fielder,
op. cit., pp. 480-483 ; A. M. Arnett, op. cit, pp. 26-27 J Rebecca L. Felton, Memories
of Georgia Politics, pp. 62-63 5 PP» 68-78.

15 1. W. Avery, op. cit, p. 606; H. Fielder, op. cit., pp. 488-490.

50

The "New Departure"

over six cents per working day for the convicts, whom he worked
in his mines for ten to twelve hours a day, until those limits were
removed in 1876 by a grateful legislature. True, there were a
few ungrateful critics among the Independents, one of whom
denounced the system as "barbarous" : "Juveniles and old, hard-
ened criminals, men and women, black and white, the obdurate
and unconquerable, are all huddled and chained together. You
have a system that is degrading — that is barbarous — that is dev-
ilish." 16 The public, however, was inclined to understand the
viewpoint of Mr. Brown, who admitted that "We make some
profit at the Dade Coal Mines, and there we use convict labor,"
but, he asked, "Is it a crime for a citizen to put his money into
the development of mineral interests, especially if he should
succeed in making money by his energy and enterprise?" The
moral advantage was obviously all on the side of Mr. Brown's
argument, for he had undoubtedly succeeded in making money
by his energy and enterprise, and he had been among the first
to give cordial welcome to the abolition of slavery. The number
of convicts increased from 432 in 1872 to 1,441 in 1877. This
was due, according to the governor, to "increased vigilance and
rigid convictions by the judiciary." 1T

As a citizen, Governor Brown had many other exemplary
moral qualities. He was a devout churchman, strictly temperate,
using neither tobacco nor alcohol. He was a prominent philan-
thropist, donating thousands to charity and education for the
poor. Withal he presented, like his Northern prototype, Jay
Cooke, a grave and deacon-like appearance. His biographer gives
this engaging picture of his hero : "He works with the regularity
of a perfectly adjusted machine; is temperate in the application
of supporting diet, as is a skilled machinist in the application of
steam; and sleeps by the force of controlling will power as
promptly and soundly as the wheels and levers of the machine
stop and rest when the steam is shut off." Among Southerners
this was verily a new type of man, and they watched him, fas-
cinated — as they were fascinated by the new factories and rail-
roads.

A more paradoxical figure than even Governor Brown was

16 R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 437, 458, 583-596.

17 "Report of the Investigating Committee on Convict Lease," Georgia Legisla-
ture, in Georgia Laws, 1908, pp. 1059-1091; H. Fielder, op. cit., pp. 488-489; A. M.
Arnett, op. cit., p. 28.

51

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

General John Brown Gordon, the second member of the "Bour-
bon" triumvirate, who, although unheard of before the War,
was for forty years thereafter the very incarnation of the Lost
Cause and the Old South in the public mind. To his contempo-
raries he was the authentic folk hero, and a much more superbly
cast one than the North had in Grant, for General Gordon
possessed a magnificent figure, a faultless bearing, "especially
when mounted on horseback," a manner that was chivalrous,
genial, and courtly. Upon his face he bore the scar of a wound,
but, happily, "instead of marring his countenance, this sabre-
wound [less poetically, a Minie-ball mark] only intensified its
nobility of expression." Just as his contemporaries were capti-
vated by the man's personality, so the affections of later gen-
erations have been engaged by his Reminiscences. In all its
pages, full of fratricidal carnage as they are, there is not so much
as a fleck of gore: invariably, "the fatal grapeshot plunged
through his manly heart," and the "chivalric chieftan" died
"riding at the head of his regiment, with his sword above him,
the fire of battle in his eye and words of cheer for his men on
his lips

At the time of Georgia's secession, Gordon was in the moun-
tains of the extreme northwestern part of the state engaged in
the development of coal mines. Rumors of war brought this
young Hotspur down from the north hills to Atlanta at the
head of a picturesque company of mountaineers, whose "only
pretense at uniformity was the rough fur caps made of racoon
skins, with long, bushy, streaked racoon tails hanging behind
them." They announced that they were the "Racoon Roughs"
and that they had come to fight. After their services had been
three times refused and they had been loaded into a train to be
shipped back to the mountains, they uncoupled the cars from
the engine, and grimly repeated that they were looking for a
fight. At the head of these men Gordon, only twenty-nine at
the time and entirely without military training, galloped to
fame. At Manassas he was when it was won, and at Malvern
Hill and five times he was wounded at Antietam, but he was
known to have a "charmed life," and on he fought through
Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Monocacy, and he

18 L. L. Knight, op. cit., II, pp. 872-873; John B. Gordon, Reminiscences of the
Civil War, pp. 40, 61, 65.

52

The "New Departure"

had been at Lee's last council of war, and led the last charge at
Appomattox.

When he returned to Georgia, it was with the rank of Lieu-
tenant General and the distinction of being the most important
military figure in the history of the state. Was it not "Georgia's
Gordon that divided with his great chieftan, Lee, the sad celeb-
rity of that heroic but irreparable conclusion of the grand
drama," and was he not "the second figure to Lee in the dismal
glory" ? Anything it was the state's to give was the hero's for
the asking. First it was the governorship in 1868, but that
honor was snatched from him by General Meade, military
governor. Next he busied himself with the exploits of the Ku
Klux Klan, taking a leading part, it is said. In 1872, as a "New
Departure" Democrat, he was elected to the Senate, defeating
Hill and Stephens, who "could not withstand the plumed knight
of Appomattox" — as indeed, who could ! 19

General Gordon, as one historian has slyly put it, was one of
those statesmen, "so prominent in his day, who combined a laud-
able desire to advance the common weal with large personal am-
bitions." 20 But his ambitions, other than political, were not those
of the planter aristocrat his manner proclaimed, but rather the
acquisitive zeal of the rising capitalists and industrialists whom
he served. The General's ambitions were munificently gratified,
for he became one of the leading railroad promoters of the
South. The publication of the Collis P. Huntington letters in
1884, which was then second only to the Credit Mobilier scandal
as a soiler of Congressional names, revealed Gordon pretty
clearly as "one of our men." 21 The New York World com-
mented that "A careful examination of the [Huntington] let-
ters shows that . . . Senator Gordon, of Georgia, who posed as
the representative of everything respectable in the South, was
a servant of the corporation." And yet, in hastily attributing
conscious duplicity to General Gordon's actions, one is likely to
credit him with a complexity of mind of which he was innocent,
for it must be remembered that the General was an authentic

19 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 264, 323 ; Knight, op. cit, II, p. 873.

20 A. M. Arnett, op. cit., p. 29.

21 The letters are quoted by R. L. Felton, op. cit, pp. 82-83, 89, 100, 115; also see
Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 2 Sess., p. 589; Report and Testimony taken by
U. S. Pacific Railroad Commission, Senate Executive Document No. 51, 50 Congress,
x Sess., Vols. II, IV, V; New York Sun, Dec. 29 and 30, 1883.

53

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

hero, and heroes have never been notorious for complex men-
talities. Very probably his conscience was no more disturbed by
the Huntington affair than President Grant's was by the "gift"
of a fifty-thousand-dollar house in Philadelphia, and certainly
the former scandal created no greater ripple on the public con-
science of Georgia than the latter did on that of the nation. As a
further comment upon the times it should be observed that Gor-
don was subsequently elected governor of the state, and later
returned again to the Senate — without so much as a mention of
the scandal on his part. The taste for irony was not cultivated in
the Gilded Age, and the South apparently saw nothing incon-
gruous in the "Hero of Appomattox" helping a buccaneer capi-
talist maraud the nation. As a crowning irony, they elected
Gordon commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veter-
ans, an honor he held from the origin of the Veterans' Associa-
tion in 1890 until his death in 1904; and his mere appearance at
the annual reunions always evoked the effect of a tattered battle
flag. North and South the General went reciting his oration,
"The Last Days of the Confederacy," the burden of which was
that both sides had been "right." As an unveiler of monuments,
the General knew no peer in his latter days.

The personal characteristics of General Alfred H. Colquitt,
the third member of the triumvirate, present by far the most
plausible claim to a legitimate application of the term "Bour-
bon." In the first place Colquitt was a gentleman of "family."
Walter T. Colquitt, his father, was a man of distinction and
many accomplishments, legislator, judge, Methodist minister,
and "magic-working orator." As a "fire-eating" secessionist he
possessed a name that was said to have been a "household word,"
and as a planter he was the owner of many acres. His son Alfred
was said to have been "a worthy son of an honored sire," and
to have continued the planter tradition as the master of one of
the largest plantations in the state after the War. He was a grad-
uate of Princeton. In 1849, the year Brown entered the State
Senate, Colquitt was Assistant Secretary to that body; four years
later he was sent to Congress as a state rights man. After the
War, in which he served as a brigadier general, he was regularly
referred to by orators as the "gallant Hero of Olustee."

Governor Colquitt's connections with Brown and Gordon
were financial as well as political, for besides his planting in-

54

The "New Departure"

terests, Colquitt was an industrial promoter. In one ambitious
venture, the Georgia Pacific Syndicate, with a capital of twelve
and one-half million dollars, he was associated with General
Gordon, who was president of the Syndicate. He was wont to
welcome expanders and financiers from the North and East
with open arms. 22 It is true that his chief interests remained
those of the large planter, but there were certain forces at work
— as will appear later — that were placing a barrier between the
interests of the average farmer and those of the few large-scale
planters who remained after the War. At any rate Governor
Colquitt was not one of those Bourbons, who "clung obstinately
to ideas adapted to an order of things gone by" : his eye was
fixed upon a shining land of the future, the vision that glittered
and shimmered before the dazzled eyes of Mark Twain's Beriah
Sellers when he left home for Washington.

Of the compeers of the "Bourbon Triumvirate," the lesser
rulers of the 'seventies and 'eighties, much could be learned that
is instructive, but for the most part the telling would suffer from
tedious repetition of the three foregoing stories of Brown, Gor-
don, and Colquitt. For however their stories may differ in
certain particulars, the subjects were of a kind, and their pre-
occupations were not primarily with "things gone by." Of the
three governors during these two decades, other than Gordon
and Colquitt, one was a lawyer, the second a merchant, lawyer,
railroad director and banker, and only the third, Stephens, was
personally representative of the great body of small and middle-
class farmers who made up the state. And Stephens served only
six months. Likewise, the other two senators were representative
of the commercial interests. Of the congressmen of the period,
thirty were lawyers, business men, or both ; three were planters ;
and one of the number was a combination of small farmer,
physician, and preacher. Even the state legislature, the members
of which were supposedly in closest touch with the overwhelm-
ingly agrarian constituency of their counties, showed a declining
minority of farmer representatives. 28

It would seem, then, in view of these facts and certain others
that will appear later, that new masters were riding the saddle

22 L. L. Knight, op. cit, II, p. 880; I. W. Avery, op. cit., p. 635; A. M. Arnett,
op. cit., pp. 30-3 1.

23 A. M. Arnett, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

55

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

in the South. Whether or not the Civil War had been fought to
work the ruin of the agrarian power of the South, and whether
or not the Reconstructors had been the advanced missionaries of
capitalism, the results — victory for the industrialists and unim-
peded expansion — were the same. Nor, as has been seen, did the
restoration of home rule mean the restoration of the old order :
there were speedily found in the South willing and ready hands
to carry forward the torch of "progress." These willing hands
were not all recruited in Georgia. A reexamination of the post-
war careers of other Southern leaders of the time, might throw
a new light upon this period.

One is reminded that the new rulers were, and are still, called
"Bourbons." Are we laboring a mere matter of terminology?
"Gov. Colquitt and Gen. Gordon," writes one historian in per-
fect good faith, "stood as striking types of the most cherished
sentiments and practices of our ante-war civilization" 24 Instead
of a mere mistaken terminology, then, might not the confusion
be more fundamental? Might it not be that a golden voice, a
flowing beard, a courtly manner have been accepted at face value
for "the most cherished sentiments and practices"? At any rate,
it would seem wise to avoid the term "Bourbon." In its place,
and with the realization that all political epithets share the fault
of slovenly thinking, the slogan adopted in 1872, the "New De-
parture" Democrats will be employed. For several reasons it
seems more appropriate: the New Departure marked the Demo-
cratic party's first acquiescence in a national platform in the
policy of reconstruction; in Georgia it marked the delayed ac-
ceptance of Governor Brown's advice to combine the "practical
view of the business man" with the duties of the "statesman" ;
and it marked also loss of control of the party by such men as
Toombs and Stephens, and incidentally the defeat of Stephens
by General Gordon in the race for the Senate. It was, indeed, a
"New Departure."

Having been kept away from the table like naughty children,
the South, that is, a small but growing class of Southern men,
now rushed in as if by signal to help themselves at the Great
Barbecue. Some of them forgot their manners and snatched
food with both hands, and all of them forgot that they were
crowding out about ninety per cent of the home folks, the farm-

24 1. W. Avery, op. cit, p. 604. Italics mine.

56

The "New Departure"

ers, who were not invited, and got none of the 'cue. But the New
Departure was tacitly accepted as a blessing to all, and for a
while the South followed behind its leaders, who bravely pushed
forward into the era of progress.

It is important to observe that the feud between the old lead-
ers and the new rulers went on over the heads of the submerged
masses of the state. Neither the old agrarian leader of the type
of Toombs nor the new industrialist Brown was the spokesman
of that forgotten majority. The agrarian masses, still leaderless,
had not yet stirred from their sleep.

The submissive loyalty that the leaders of the New Departure
commanded in Georgia conformed to a pattern found in all
Southern states after home rule was restored. "The 'Solid
South,' " wrote Henry Watterson in 1879, "is a reaction against
proscription, attended by misgovernment, and a protest against
the ever-recurring menace of Federal interference." 25 Thus the
new discipline was feudal rather than democratic. It was based
upon fear — fear of the Negro menace, the scalawag menace, the
Federal menace, menaces real and imaginary. As the price of
protection, it demanded unquestioning allegiance. White men
could not divide on lines of class interest, nor could differences
over measures and candidates be expressed at the ballot box.
Such matters were settled by the small clique that ran the ma-
chine. Democratic forms were observed, but their observance
was entirely perfunctory. Party platforms contained nothing but
such platitudes as all white men could agree upon. Incompetency
and weakness in candidates had to be overlooked for the sake
of white solidarity. Suspected graft in public office could not be
exposed for fear of Negro domination. Ballot-box stuffing had
to be tolerated when white supremacy was threatened. Such was
the moral intimidation of this feudal discipline that it was widely
felt that to scratch a ticket was "treason to the white race," and
to make open declaration of independence was "an effort to
africanize the state." 26 In this atmosphere national issues, to say
nothing of local ones, were almost lost sight of; politics became
a matter of personalities, and public affairs the business of a few
politicians.

25 Henry Watterson, "The Solid South," North American Review, CXXXVIII
(1879), p. 46.

26 Holland Thompson, The New South, pp. 10-12; W. H. Skaggs, The Southern
Oligarchy, passim, esp. pp. 107-108.

57

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

When one recalls the long tradition of independence and
political conflict behind these people, one is surprised that they
submitted as long as they did. For not only had they seceded
from the Union, but threatened secession from the Confederacy,
and even the presence of an invading army could not stop these
incorrigible individualists from casting ballots and debating the
very existence of their state. Now that peace was restored, they
were asked to render a blind obedience that heretofore they had
refused even in war.

The Southern Piedmont, that long peninsula that had always
resisted the tides of Southern opinion, was the place where re-
volt first lifted its head after the War. An isolated region of
small farmers and few Negroes, it was less swayed by the banner
of "respectability" and the bogy of "Negro domination" than
the lowlanders. When the farmers of the Seventh Congressional
District, the western half of the mountain area, were told by the
party convention in 1874 that they must elect L. N. Trammell
as their congressman, a cry of "ring-rule" arose. It was widely
believed that the candidate was a "Bullock Democrat" and that
his nomination had been engineered by Joseph E. Brown. 27 Dr.
William H. Felton, a picturesque figure of fiery eloquence, who
combined the professions of physician, Methodist preacher, and
farmer, entered the race as an independent Democrat. When
Felton, with the help of his wife, exposed his opponent's part
in the fraudulent bond-issue of the Bullock regime, the machine
hastily put forward a second candidate, but neither candidate
nor the influence of Brown's railroad could prevail against Dr.
Felton's fierce attacks upon "the court-house rings" and "su-
preme caucuses." Felton was elected again in 1876 and 1878. In
the latter year the eastern half of the mountain country, which
made up the Ninth District, joined the Independents by sending
to Congress Emory Speer, a more conservative man than Felton,
but still an Independent. 28

To a certain extent these early Independents seem to have
been influenced by the Granger movement. The Grange ap-
peared in Georgia in 1872, and in three years built up a member-
ship of 18,000, the largest in the South Atlantic division. Its

27 R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 144-147; I. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 511-512.

28 R. L. Felton, op. cit. t passim. I. W. Avery, op. cit, p. 513; L. L. Knight, op. cit.,
II, p. 901.

58

The "New Departure"

political influence in the South was much weaker than in the
West, but the Independent leaders used its vocabulary: "Men
talk of the improvement of business, the revival of business, and
all that," exclaimed Dr. Felton. "Do you find it in the homes of
the farmer . . . among the mechanics and wealth-creators of
the country? No, sir! Absolutely, the rich are growing richer
and the poor are growing poorer from day to day." None the
less, in dealing with both early and late agrarian movements in
the South, as distinct from the West, it is important to remember
that they had behind them a longer tradition, and that in many
ways the later movements may be thought of as continuous with,
or growing out of, the old. In Georgia, Toombs and Stephens
served as the nexus between ante- and post-bellum agrarianism.
Both were actively sympathetic with the Independents of the
'seventies, and Toombs in his attack upon special privilege,
corporations, and trusts in the constitutional convention of 1877,
already referred to, sounded remarkably like the Populists two
decades later. 29

Despite the opposition of agrarians, however, the party of the
New Departure won a great victory in 1876. Governor Colquitt
was elected by the largest majority ever given in the state, and
Georgia was presented with a silken banner that signified that
she "led the Democratic hosts of the Union." Nevertheless, it
was only shortly after this victory that insurgency began to take
on the aspect of a state-wide movement.

First of all Governor Colquitt touched the public conscience
upon a point at which it was most sensitive at this time. Despite
the legislation of 1874 seeking to put an end to such practices,
he endorsed the bonds of the Northeastern Railroad. The wave
of protest against his action brought on an investigation that, al-
though vindicating the Governor, merely whetted the public's
appetite for further disclosures. There followed a series of in-
vestigations, embracing the whole executive department, and as
disclosure followed disclosure indignation mounted. As one apol-
ogist of the administration artlessly put it, there seemed to be
a "morbid plethora of public virtue." The comptroller-general
was impeached and convicted on eight counts ; the state treasurer
was also impeached, but, upon restoring misappropriated funds,
was not punished; the commissioner of agriculture resigned fol-

29 R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 193, 253-254; and Watson Scrapbooks.

59

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

lowing less important disclosures concerning his department;
and, on top of these investigations, came the sensational report
on the convict lease system. 30 The temper of public feeling may
be judged from the tone of Ben HilFs "Address to the People
of Georgia," in which he said that the recent scandals threatened
"to disgrace our politics, to impoverish honest people, to enrich
official rogues, and to threaten our popular institutions with
ignominious shame, rottenness and ruin." 81 Up to the year
1880, however, efforts to implicate Colquitt personally in the
scandals of his administration had been successful only in spread-
ing the opinion that he had yielded to corrupt associates, and
that a general house-cleaning was needed. It was after the pre-
convention campaign had started that the event occurred that
brought smoldering revolt to sudden flame.

In May, only three weeks before the end of the session, Gen-
eral Gordon suddenly resigned his seat in the Senate, to which
he had only recently been reelected, and Governor Colquitt im-
mediately appointed ex-Governor Brown, who was on his way
to Washington before the public learned to its amazement what
had happened. The charge of "bargain" and "trade" was the
spontaneous cry of the insurgents ; public meetings were held at
which the transaction was denounced as "base and treacherous
conduct," "eternal infamy," and a "stench in the nostrils of hon-
est men." It was widely believed that a deliberate bargain had
been struck whereby General Gordon, for creating a vacant seat
in the Senate, was to be rewarded with the presidency of Brown's
railroad, and Colquitt, for appointing Brown to fill the vacancy,
was to have the support of Brown in his campaign for reelection.
Although these charges were ridiculed, popular belief in them
was later strengthened by the fact that Gordon, instead of tak-
ing the railroad position in Oregon, which he said had persuaded
him to resign his seat, returned to Georgia to engage in large-
scale railroad promotion. 32

But to understand the intensity of public indignation over
these machinations one must appreciate the odium which at-
tached to the name "Joe Brown" in that day. With the same

80 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 540-552 ; R. L. Felton, op. cit., p. 295.
sl Ibid., pp. 290-292; L. L. Knight, op. cit., p. 898.

32 R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 295-311 ; I. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 561, 635 ; H. Fielder,
op. cit., pp. 522-524.

60

The "New Departure"

facility the Northern capitalist showed in matters political,
Brown had shifted his allegiance from one party to the other;
although he had returned to the Democratic party and rendered
valuable services to the party machine, his old connection with
the Carpetbag Republicans had never been forgotten. A Georgia
novel of the time, while defending Brown, lamented that "It
was currently believed, by some, that he was always engaged
with governors, legislatures, city councils, railroad officials, and
great speculators, in certain mysteries ,, and that "if the mask
could only be torn off, this saint of the church . . . would be
found to be the wiliest hypocrite, the most hardened, skilful,
practiced, unconscionable knave on the face of the earth." 83
Yet it was upon an alliance with Brown that the New Departure
had to stand or fall in the election of 1880.

General Gordon, apparently forgetting the urgency of the
Oregon railroad position that had not permitted him to remain
in the Senate three weeks longer, hurried home to join Gov-
ernor Colquitt in a state-wide campaign of "vindication." "The
coming campaign," observed an editorial in one of the opposi-
tion papers, "will be Colquitt, Brown, and Gordon against any
man who will step to the front. Brown with his money, Gordon
with his buttons, and Colquitt with his religion will make a com-
bination that can not be beaten." 34 As the date of the nominating
convention approached the invincibility of this combination ap-
peared more and more probable.

33 William Dugas Trammell, Ca Ira (New York, 1874), pp. 30-35, 303. The char-
acter called "Malcomb" is easily identified as Joseph E. Brown.
84 Columbus Daily Times, May 25, 1880; R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 276-282.

61

«><»<><»<»«><t><£><e><>«^

5

Preface to Rebellion

When the nominating convention met in Atlanta on
August 4, it quickly became apparent that, although the
votes were divided among five candidates, every one of the 549
delegates had come resolved on one of two purposes — to nomi-
nate Governor Colquitt or to defeat that nomination. From the
first ballot Colquitt was shown to have a large majority, but not
the two-thirds which, according to the rule adopted, was neces-
sary to make him the nominee. Nor would the determined anti-
Colquitt minority be persuaded to yield the handful of votes that
would increase his vote to two-thirds. Throughout barrages of
oratory, appeals to patriotism, and prophecies of the certain
doom of "white supremacy" the opposition held its ranks firm.
Ballot after ballot only served to emphasize its solidarity and to
fix the majority firmer in its determination to nominate Colquitt.
On the third day one of the minority chiefs came forward
with the proposal that a committee of representatives from both
sides be appointed to select a compromise candidate. In answer
to this proposal Patrick Walsh of Augusta, the leader of the
Colquitt forces, rose to speak. An Irishman, though "with noth-
ing in him of the mercurial and flashing," Walsh was repre-
sentative of the new type of Southern leader, the aggressive,
self-made business man. Stocky of body, with a massive head set
solidly upon a stout neck, he was of manner blunt and "as direct
as the course of a cannon ball." In Augusta he managed the
strategic Catholic vote so expertly that he was able to boss the
politics of his district. 1 His speech in answer to the proposed

1 Augusta Daily Chronicle and Constitutionalist, July 2, 1882; Augusta Chronicle,
Sept. 20, 1890; Athens Watchman, Watson Scrapbooks.

62

Preface to Rebellion

compromise was a quick succession of hammer-blow sentences
that were intended to crush out any hope the minority might
have left. He concluded: ". . . and we do not intend to depart
from the city of Atlanta until we have nominated Alfred H.
Colquitt I (Great applause.) We have come here to do that if it
takes us until Christmas to do it. (Renewed cheering.) "

After a ballot had been taken and the excitement over Walsh's
ultimatum had partially subsided, it was discovered that an ex-
tremely young man was addressing the house, his voice, "shrill
and ringing," almost drowned in the ebbing excitement. He
made a second start. It was not his renewed proposal of a com-
mittee to select a compromise candidate that gained him atten-
tion. It was perhaps the striking contrast he presented to the
preceding speaker and to the surrounding graybeards : his boyish
figure, "so slight it seemed you could circle his chest with two
hands," his freckled, immature face, and something audacious
in the way he tossed his shock of red hair. When he paused
after reading a list of possible candidates and mounted his chair
to conclude, he had the attention of the whole house. He was
answering Walsh's ultimatum :

Sir, I am tired of hearing the cry of generosity, when I see no generosity
(applause) ; I am tired of the cry of harmony when I see no harmony. (Ap-
plause.) I have not come here to be fattened on chaff, nor filled with taffy.
You might as well attempt to gain flesh on corn cob soup in January.
(Laughter.)

Mr. Chairman, I have said, and I say now, that I am here with no bitter-
ness of partisan rancor. I have fought this much-named gentleman, A. H.
Colquitt. I have fought him honestly. I have advocated Rufus Lester. I
have advocated him honestly. But high and serene above them both, above
my opposition to Colquitt, above my support of Lester rises my love,
my devotion to my state, like the tranquil star that burns and gleams
beyond the reach of the drifting clouds. (Cheers.) But Sir, under the
course of the gentleman from Richmond [Walsh], I am debarred from
this privilege. He tells us that we must yield to him, and that unless we
nominate Colquitt that this party will permit no nomination. Mr. Chair-
man, this is not the language which a friend addresses to a friend. It is not
the language a brother addresses to a brother. It is the language of a master
to his slave. (Cheers.)

We are the slaves of no man. We haven't come here to bulldoze any-
body and we haven't come here to be bulldozed. (Cheers.)

Sir, a silken cord might draw me, but all the cables of all the ships that
walk the waters of all the seas cannot drag me. (Cheers.)

Sir, the gentleman's position means that we must take Colquitt or the

63

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

party will be disrupted. Sir, if it must come, let it come. (Cheers.) We
love the party, honor it, are devoted to it, but we will not yield when the
gentleman's speech has made it a loss of self-respect to surrender.

If they will split the convention, we will be here to the end (applause) ;
if they will sink the ship, we will remain in her shadow to the last. (Ap-
plause.) We would deprecate it. We would deplore it. But if she can only
be saved on terms as unmanly as these then —

"Nail to the mast her holy flag,

Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,

The lightning and the gale." 2

As he took his seat, the name of Tom Watson flew from lip to
lip, and those who had never heard of the red-headed young
man from McDuffie County were not long in learning who he
was. The noisy demonstration of the minority stopped proceed-
ings while delegates from all over the house pressed around
Watson to congratulate him. Colquitt newspapers, unable to
ignore the news value of "the youngest member of the conven-
tion" — he was not yet twenty-four — creating the greatest sensa-
tion of the day, printed his speech in full, and papers all over
the state took up the story of the young man who "made the
most brilliant speech in the convention" and "gave so many
black eyes to the bulldozing majority and its arrogant leader." 3

Thus Tom Watson made his political debut as a rebel, flying
all the colors of revolt. It was not his last appearance in that
role.

Upon the motion of Walsh, Watson's resolution was promptly
tabled, and a Colquitt man provoked a burst of victorious laugh-
ter by shouting, "I move the molehill now come to the moun-
tain." 4 If the majority was unterrified by prospects of "sinking
the ship," the "molehill" showed no signs of moving. The re-
sponse of the minority to Watson's speech had removed all but
the faintest hope of reconciliation. Four days later the conven-
tion was facing the same stalemate. One delegate, fixing upon
Walsh and Watson as the opposite poles among the irreconcil-
ables, admonished: "I would respectfully ask these gentlemen
what, in this state of things, is to become of the democratic party

2 Atlanta Daily Constitution, Aug. 7, 1880.

8 Clippings from Augusta News, Louisville News and Farmer, Macon Telegraph,
and Savannah News, MS. Journal 2, pp. 282-283.
4 L W. Avery, History of Georgia, p. 580.

64

Preface to Rebellion

whose interests require a nomination ?" Watson, for his part,
protested that he did not occupy the extreme anti-Colquitt posi-
tion; he had come with no personal bitterness against Colquitt,
nor would he have refused to accept him rather than split the
party. He continued with emphasis :

... we were shown from the first that we must take Colquitt. They would
try no other course. We were tied to the names before us. Hemmed up,
penned out, starved out. It was then I said that these gyves being upon me
I could never go to Colquitt, and I never will. (Applause.) Upon this
record I am willing to go back to my people, and if for this record I am
sacrificed I shall always think that I am entitled to a decent burial and
an honorable epitaph. (Applause.)

So formidable was the impasse that the convention adjourned
without making a nomination. Colquitt was "recommended" by
the vote of the majority, but no official Democratic nominee was
put before the state — a circumstance unique in the history of the
party. The minority, resolving itself into a rump meeting, then
"recommended" as its candidate Thomas M. Norwood, a
former United States senator. 5 With the "White Man's Party"
now split, the people, for the first time since the War, were per-
mitted to select their governor at the ballot box.

In the days when Watson began the practice of his profession,
the hustings were as naturally the haunt of lawyers as the bar,
and almost from the time the young lawyer began to ride the
circuit he found himself "in politics." Where the Superior Court
convened, the political lions congregated, and one had to take
sides. Thus, at the session of 1879, in Crawfordville, Watson
noted: "Am introduced to Seab Reese, the Solicitor, and admire
him. He is lordly in bearing, smokes like an engine, and drinks
like a horse. Am in a game of whist with him till a late hour."
The same year he and his partner Johnson attended a banquet
in Augusta to celebrate the victory of Judge Claiborne Snead
over the Augusta "ring." "Here were poets, editors, reporters,
cotton-men, and preachers. ... I was called on, responded,
and was cheered loudly and long." But a more glorious triumph
came at the home of his idol, Alexander Stephens. "Spent the
evening at Liberty Hall," he recorded, "sitting with a party of

5 Atlanta Daily Constitution, Aug. 10-14, 1880.

65

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

gentlemen and Mr. Stephens on the back piazza eating peaches
and talking politics." There had been a great barbecue and much
speech-making. "It was a glorious day to me. My speech took
well. Mr. Stephens complimented me especially." That night
he lay vainly awaiting sleep. "It seemed to me that a thousand
associations of greatness were buzzing around me. I could hear
Mr. Stephens' voice, shrill and clear talking all the while down-
stairs." 6

To the old Confederate Watson looked eagerly for leader-
ship. During a visit in July, 1878, he had watched the aged in-
valid open a copy of the Augusta Chronicle, Patrick Walsh's
paper, glance at the leading editorial, and, flinging the paper
away from his wheel-chair, remark, "Well, I see this fellow
means a fight." 7 Watson supported Stephens against Walsh that
year. In 1880, though taking no active part in the campaign,
Stephens opposed Colquitt's nomination, saying he was "not fit
for Governor." 8 General Toombs, another of Watson's idols,
confessed to Stephens that he felt "deeply humiliated for the
State to have two such Senators as Gordon and Hill, both venal
and corrupt." 9 He joined actively in the campaign against Col-
quitt in 1880. In view of the position of Stephens and Toombs
on the issues of that year, there was little doubt what Watson's
attitude would be.

"For myself," he wrote, "I had never admired Gov. Colquitt
and the appointment of Brown turned me strongly against him."
Watson became a candidate for delegate to the convention: "I
worked with great ardor. The issue was squarely Colquitt and
anti-Colquitt. I was elected — running ahead of my ticket who
were all chosen excepting Hardaway . . ." 10

Because of the hearty endorsement given him by his con-
stituents and the militant and uncompromising position he as-
sumed in his speech before the convention, Watson's secret con-
fession comes as something of a surprise: "After the split," he
wrote, "I hesitated long what to do." After all, there was an
important difference between insurgency against the machine

6 MS. Journal 2, pp. 209-214.

7 Loc. cit.

8 R. L. Felton, Memoirs of Georgia Politics, p. 286.

9 Toombs to Stephens, Mar. 25, 1880, U. B. Phillips, ed., Correspondence of
Robert Toombs, Alexander Stephens, Howell Cobb, pp. 739-740.

10 MS. Journal 2, p. 281.

66

Preface to Rebellion

candidate within the party, and party revolution. More than
one timorous delegate withdrew from the minority convention
when it was decided to nominate a separate candidate. The busi-
ness man's party of the New Departure enjoyed enormous pres-
tige for having overthrown the Carpetbag regime, restored
"home rule," and saved "Anglo-Saxon civilization." Though
fighting under the standard of the same party, the insurgent
wing was seeking the overthrow of the machine that com-
manded and exploited this loyalty. It had also to bear the odium
of "bringing the Negro back into politics," from which he had
been largely eliminated in the early 'seventies at the cost of un-
questioning white solidarity. Now he would be called in to de-
cide between the two white factions. 11 The experience of Recon-
struction was fresh in the minds of the people, and to many the
insurgents represented nothing more than a relapse to moral
anarchy. Still another handicap of the insurgents was the weak-
ness of their candidate, Norwood, who seems to have been in-
effectual as a speaker, deficient in popular appeal, and lacking
in sympathy for the Negroes, whom he had antagonized by
previous utterances. 12 Aside from these there were doubtless
more personal reasons to account for Watson's hesitancy in mak-
ing the plunge. He had to consider his future. At the very out-
set of his political career he was about to enter into open strife
with the most powerful machine politician in his district, Patrick
Walsh. He made his decision: "Finally concluding to go the
whole hog, I took the stump . . ." 13

With young George F. Pierce as his colleague, Watson cam-
paigned county after county. Favorable reports came from his
home. "McDuffie will soon be a grand Norwood Club," it was
said. "The county will strongly endorse the course of Mr. Wat-
son. In fact, we are all Watson men." In Augusta "the brilliant
young orator" was received with great enthusiasm; crowds fol-
lowed him to his hotel for a second speech. He regretted the
split in the party, but the Colquitt faction, because of its failure
to abide by its own two-thirds rule, was alone responsible for the
disruption. The arrogant and dictatorial attitude of the machine

11 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 585-586.

^Atlanta Daily Constitution, Aug. 24, 29, 1880; R. L. Felton, op. cit, pp. 273-

... T \TT A _. ~J. ~1* ~ ---

67

274; I. W. Avery, op. cit., p. 591
13 MS. Journal 2, p. 281

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

politicians more than justified revolt. As for Colquitt, Watson
attacked the numerous scandals associated with his administra-
tion, the high taxes he had levied, and questionable appoint-
ments he had made. He also elucidated the evils of the disgrace-
ful convict lease system, showing the governor's responsibility
for it, and how Senator Brown and others were exploiting hun-
dreds of these state slaves, for whose labor they paid only seven
cents a day. This part of his speech was "well received by the
colored people." One statement of Watson's at this time gains
added significance in the light of later years. "He was a Demo-
crat," he told them, "but when Democratic principles are for-
saken he would seek some other home and there rest his
cause." 14

In addition to its precedence in the field, its well organized
machine, and its possession of office, the party of the New De-
parture had other considerable advantages. On Colquitt's cam-
paign committee was an aggressive group of young capitalists,
"leaders among the business princes of middle Georgia and espe-
cially Atlanta." Chairman of that committee was young Henry
W. Grady, the magic of whose personality already gave him a
widespread influence. Grady "threw himself into the struggle
with his whole heart"; his "enthusiasm was irresistible, and he
finally took the undisputed command." 15 With his paper, the
Constitution, most of the press lined up for Colquitt. Despite his
evil name in the state, Joseph E. Brown, now senator, with his
multiple railroad interests, religious philanthropies, educational
endowments, and hundreds of employees, was perhaps more of
a help than a hindrance. In winning the coveted Negro votes,
Colquitt, as a Republican paper put it, "was assisted by that ex-
cellent man, Joseph Brown, who, having been a Radical at one
time, understood the business." le

Unlike his opponent, Governor Colquitt carried on a vigorous
speaking campaign in all parts of the state in his own behalf. He
was seeking "vindication," he said. One of his chief complaints
was that his opponents abused him "about going to Sunday
schools." 1T He was "being persecuted for Christ's sake, and he

14 Clippings, Ibid., pp. 282-285.

15 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 254, 269.

16 R. L. Felton, op. cit., p. 273.

"Atlanta Daily Constitution, Sept. 29, 1880.

68

Preface to Rebellion

called upon all religious people in the state to rally to the
maintenance of pure religion against infidelity." Always at his
side was the redoubtable "Hero of Appomattox," General John
B. Gordon, whose golden voice was Colquitt's greatest asset.
"Why should Colquitt be questioned?" asked the General. "Is
he not the hero of Olustee! Colquitt is persecuted because he
floated the banner of the King of kings." 18

The state had seen heated campaigns before, but the contest
of 1880, wrote a historian of that period, "was such a tornado
of violence as to make all previous disturbances mere child's
play." Both the corrupt practices of the Carpetbaggers and the
methods of the Ku Klux Klan were again brought into play.
Charges and counter charges of corruption, intimidation, and
violence were made, many of which were unquestionably true.
The Colquitt machine, however, was more successful, for Col-
quitt won by various means the great majority of the Negro
vote. Combined with a minority of the white vote it outnum-
bered the poll of the insurgents. 19 The revolt was crushed, but
the leaders of the New Departure had been seriously challenged
and they were stirred by apprehensions for the future. In spite
of numerous handicaps the insurgents won about thirty-five per
cent of the popular vote.

"Goodmorrow, Tutt, 20 of McDuffie! Regards to Colonel
Watson," taunted Henry Grady's paper, announcing the re-
turns from that county. Watson's ticket had not won a third of
the votes cast in his own county. Watson was remarkably un-
perturbed, even nonchalant. "Jordan White swears that I made
more out of the campaign first and last than any man in the
State," he noted in his Journal. Then he added sententiously,
with the cynicism that is the privilege of the very young,
"Young men are not affected so much by results. They are not
held responsible. They make a certain show-parade. They are
judged by its worth." 21

The episode of 1880 was a proper prologue for the drama of

18 R. L. Felton, op. cit., p. 268; I. W. Avery, op. cit., p. 593.

19 Atlanta Daily Constitution, Sept. 29, Oct. 9, 1880; I. W. Avery, op. cit, p. 591;
R. L. Felton, op. cit, pp. 273-274; W. H. Skaggs, The Southern Oligarchy, p. 141,
quoting Watson, and pp. 107-108.

20 W. D. Tutt, a rival lawyer, had supported Colquitt; both Watson and Tutt
had directed personalities against one another during the campaign.
21 MS. Journal 2, p. 281.

69

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the next four decades in which Tom Watson figured as pro-
tagonist. The theme was clearly announced: the Solid South
against the insurgent rebels, the new capitalists against the old
and new agrarians. The Negro was introduced in his inevitable
role, a black Nemesis. The chorus of shibboleths would remain
the same: race chauvinism, religious superstition, military
fetishism. The action was derived from that of Reconstruction.
The capitalists would become more class conscious, and, as their
alliance with the Northeast was strengthened, more self confi-
dent and ruthless. The agrarians would become much better
organized, and, as their alliance with the West was strength-
ened, more militant, and, with increasing repression, more
desperate. The conflict would multiply a hundredfold in bitter-
ness and intensity.

Looking back wearily from the distance of twice his age at
this time Watson spoke of himself as a "namby-pamby Demo-
crat in 1880." "I was a Reformer, all right," he declared, "and
was going to get the reforms inside the dear old Democratic
party. . . . The burden of my little song was: Bad men have
come into the party and have had things pretty much their own
way; but we must drive these bad men out; put the good men
in control, and thus get reforms inside the Democratic party." 22
Here was speaking the disillusioned man of fifty whose primary
concern was ' 'results." At half that age his preoccupation was
still "a certain show-parade." When the campaign was over he
wrote: "Stump speaking is glorious! The inspiration of the
band, the cheers of the crowd, the ready echo to every blazing
sentiment and sparkling anecdote leads the orator to a brilliant
feast on the Field of the Cloth of Gold." 23

22 Quoted by Sara Lois Gray, "Thomas E. Watson" (Master's thesis, Emory Uni-
versity), p. 32.

23 MS. Journal 2, p. 252.

70

6

The Temper of the ''Eighties

THE COLLAPSE OF THE INSURGENT MOVEMENT in l88o re-
moved the last formidable barrier from the path of the
New Departure for a decade more and marked the beginning of
a new era. The political peace and acquiescence of the 'eighties
contrasted gratefully with the war of the 'sixties and the revolu-
tion of the 'seventies. Energy and imagination, wearied by stale
feuds and recriminations, turned hopefully toward the glittering
prizes promised by capitalists and industrialists. The new decade
afforded no role for the agrarian rebel, whether a Bob Toombs
of the older generation or a Tom Watson of the new. The
career opened so brilliantly by Watson in 1880 was virtually
closed to him for the next ten years, for Watson in any other
role than rebel was miscast. It was during this period of mark-
ing time, however, that ideas that were perhaps the product of
opportunism and temperament took firm root in him and his
class, found nutriment in the soil of rebel tradition, and bur-
geoned into a hardy native growth. It was in this period, too,
that the economic setting was prepared for what Watson in a
moment of optimism pronounced u Not a Revolt; It Is a Revolu-

tion."

In an address before the General Assembly on November 13,
1880, the night before the senatorial election, Joseph E. Brown
frankly interpreted the issues at stake, and unconsciously enun-
ciated the dominant mood of the 'eighties. Reminding his audi-
ence that "The voters of General Toomb's own county decided
in favor of Governor Colquitt and myself by over 700 major-
ity," he candidly announced, "I accept the issue, then ... If
the people of Georgia think that a man should be sent to the

71

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Senate to represent that sentiment of the old ruling class . . .
then I admit that my honorable opponent [Lawton] is a fit
representative." On the other hand if they agreed with him that
"we live in a new era, and the new South must adopt new ideas,
must wake up to new energy," he was their choice. As for Gen-
eral Toombs, since "the country must move forward, we are
obliged to leave him there and let him cuss. (Prolonged laughter
and applause.)" As to the class he represented, he left no ques-
tion: I seek "to build up the manufacturing interest of the coun-
try. . . . We have in the future no negroes to buy; we are mak-
ing money; we shall want investments." With this in view he
had, he explained, during his temporary office in the Senate,
talked to many Northern capitalists: "Again, I stated that we
had the advantage in cheap labor, and that the raw material is
produced in the fields around the factories themselves. . . .
When I told them of the profits made by our Augusta mills,
and the high price the stock bore, some gentlemen of capital
said they desired to look further into the matter . . ." 1

The greatest triumph of Brown's address, which was intended
as a sort of vindication, was his reading of a letter written by
General Robert E. Lee said to have "had the startling authority
of a miracle." According to Mr. Brown, General Lee "enter-
tained the same views and gave the same advice," a coincidence
that proved "the old hero was of good ]udg-ment" "Which
will you follow," asked the candidate, "Toombs ... or Lee?"
One of these gentlemen was disfranchised, and the other was
dead and past denying this strange disciple. Georgia followed
Joseph E. Brown.

It was an unerring instinct that led the new masters to dis-
cern the need for some pageantry of dedication, some ceremony
of fealty here on the threshold of the new order. It was the
Southern way. So it was that "a grand parliament of industry"
was decreed, the International Cotton Exposition, "the first
World's Fair in the South." Senator Joseph E. Brown was the
first president of the Exposition, Governor Colquitt the second.
"Businessmen took hold of it eagerly," and the work moved for-
ward. 2

Atlanta, variously styled by enthusiasts of the time "the off-

1 Herbert Fielder, Life and Times of Joseph E. Brown, pp. 536-559.

2 I. W. Avery, History of Georgia, p. 650.

72

The Temper of the Eighties

spring of railroads," "the Chicago of the South," the "City of
Conventions," or "the Giant Young Metropolis," was thought
of as the capital of the New South. "A nervous energy per-
meates all classes of people and all departments of trade," it was
observed in 1881, "and the spirit of enterprise never sleeps." 8
Appropriately, it was selected as host for the Exposition.

The Exposition opened on October 5, 1881, "with imposing
ceremonies." Senator Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina ex-
tended a "soulful Southern welcome" inviting visitors "to see
that we have renewed our youth at the fountains of industry
and found the hills of gold in the energies of an imperishable
race." Senator D. W. Vorhees, of Indiana, replied by welcoming
the South to "the arena to contend for the first time for the
supremacy in all the industrial pursuits," a strife "over which
the angels of heaven have joy." 4 Through the Exposition build-
ing, with its twenty acres of floor space, its eighteen hundred
exhibits, and its hymns of enterprise, salesmanship, and profit,
Southerners thronged for three months. Young men, recalling
Ben HilFs advice not "to pine away or fret to exhaustion for
imaginary treasures hopelessly lost," but to "reach out their
hands and gather richer treasures piled up all around them,"
saw new careers open to them. Northern capitalists verified
rumors of cheap labor and fat profits. Out of the enthusiasm
engendered the Industrial Review was founded; the very Ex-
position buildings were converted into a cotton factory; between
1880 and 1885 the number of cotton spindles in the Southern
states doubled. 6

Poets, novelists, preachers, educators, journalists, historians
— professionals once in the service of an agrarian state — swung
rapidly into procession behind the new leaders. "Set by the
steam-god's fiery passion free," wrote Paul Hamilton Hayne,
in "The Exposition Ode" : 6

I hear the rise and fall

Of pondrous, iron-clamped machinery

Shake, as with earthquake thrill, the factory halls. . . .

Quick merchants pass, some debonair and gay,

8 E. Y. Clarke, Atlanta Illustrated, passim.
4 1. W. Avery, op. cit., pp. 648-649.

5 P. M. Wilson, Southern Exposure, pp. 141-143 ; Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia,
188 1, pp. 260-271 ; H. Thompson, The New South, pp. 89-90.

6 Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 6, 1881.

73

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

With undimmed youthful locks —

Some wrinkled, sombre, gray ;

But all with one accord

Dreaming of him — their lord,

The mighty monarch of the realm of stocks.

A novelist, through thinly disguised fiction, celebrated the
exploits of Joseph E. Brown, and proclaimed him "the most
representative man of our new civilization" and "perhaps the
richest man in the state." 7 Historians echoed with chapters upon
the "splendid demonstrations of individual management, and
formidable coalitions of capital and genius," "dramatic audaci-
ties of railway enterprise," "enterprise full of romantic event-
fulness."

Fifteen religious institutions of five denominations in the
South were recipients of gifts from Joseph E. Brown ranging
from $500 to $53,000. His smaller charities were "simply in-
numerable." In 1883 the trustees of the University of Georgia,
after some caviling by legislators over "tainted money" and
constitutional questions, accepted a donation of $50,000 from
Brown, with one dissenting vote — that of General Toombs. 8
That same year the General Assembly heard a report on the
proposed establishment of a state school of technology: "In the
development of manufactures, therefore, lies the hope of our
people." Since "Georgia needs some such agency to arouse the
spirit of her people on the subject of manufacturing enterprise,"
a state school should be established in which "everything is
simply subordinate to the leading idea of technical education." 9

By the turn of the decade "the large majority" of the news-
papers of the state was one chorus of approval for the New De-
parture. No other paper, however, approached in this respect
the importance and significance of the Atlanta Constitution. This
was not because it had a phenomenal circulation, four times
greater than the population of Atlanta, but because it was the
organ of Henry Woodfin Grady, whose personality loomed
larger than any paper and pervaded the whole South.

A sword may be surrendered with more grace and dignity
than a point of view. Following the example set by General Lee

7 W. D. Trammell, Ca Ira, passim, especially pp. 303-304.

8 H. Fielder, Life of Joseph E. Brown, pp. 568-587; I. W. Avery, op. cit., pp.
605-606.
9 Georgia House Journal, pp. 230-255, July 24, 1883.

74

The Temper of the 'Eighties

(later institutionalized by General Gordon) Southerners had
bowed to military defeat without serious loss of face, but it was
not until later that they learned from Henry Grady how words
could be swallowed without leaving a brown taste. "The South,"
Grady said and declared he could prove, "found her jewel in
the toad's head of defeat."

The new railroad barons, mine owners, and captains of indus-
try were, generally speaking, a grim and bearded lot, with un-
enviable reputations for sharp dealing, and, as the eulogist of
one of them remarked, "with a narrowed range of thought in
some matters due to lack of early culture." As peerless champion
of that group (yet always with a word for the "Heroes in
Gray"), now stepped forward an almost uniquely clean-shaven
young man of infectious enthusiasm, radiant, eloquent, and
perennially boyish. Grady played the part of an irrepressible
good caliph-at-large in Georgia, dispensing a gospel of optimism,
charity, and fun. His zest for fun-making led to such extrava-
gances as his "leg artist" contests, endurance walking competi-
tions in which his reporters participated. There followed a craze
for such matches in the early 'eighties. It was said that "He was
related by some act of kindness to every individual in his native
state." 10 To question the motives of such a man would be
churlish.

At the young editor's side, though keeping always shyly in
the background, was the most lovable literary figure in the
South — Joel Chandler Harris, chief editorial writer of the Con-
stitution. 11 There was no resisting this partnership of major
prophet of the New South and tenderest chronicler of the Old
South. Southerners generally quite lost their hearts to them.

Grady's services to the new order were manifold. There was
much to be done. It was necessary that the acquisitive instincts
not only become respectable, but that they be regarded as ambi-
tion. Speculation should be awarded the prizes of courage and
valor, and the profit motive mile-posted as the road to the good
life. The lives of those men who traveled that road had to be in-
vested with a glamour that would evoke emulation, their destina-

10 J. W. Lee, Henry W. Grady, The Editor, the Orator, the Man, passim; also
Joel C. Harris, Henry W. Grady, p. 90.

11 Mrs. Julia Collier Harris, Joel Chandler Harris, Editor and Essayist, pp.
3^-37.

75

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

tion recognized as "success," and the changes they wrought be
regarded as "progress." Indeed it was important that the mean-
ing of life be discovered in the vicissitudes and triumphs attend-
ing the competitive struggle for business profits.

"It is a revelation to any provincial to enter the gallery of the
stock exchange and gaze upon the floor below," wrote Grady
from New York. The sight "kindles the blood of an onlooker
as a battle would." Grady delighted in relating such stories as
that of a man who "had gone to Colorado a few years before as
a newsdealer and was now worth not less than $10,000,000, and
owned a bank, a railroad, and the Little Pittsburgh mine," or
that of "the man whose brother's son had bought a mine for
$25 and sold it in a month for $400,000," or one of "a fellow
who had [been] furnished with money to buy his meals with a
few months ago, and was now worth over a million." M

Nor was Grady daunted by more prosaic subjects. "I have the
greatest interest in the history of these self-made men," he
wrote. "Atlanta is the home of this sturdy genus, and I have
thought that this was one secret of her wonderful advancement.
. . . They enrich the blood, quicken her pulses and give her
vitality, force and power." He was wont to dwell on the stories
of their rise from obscurity to wealth — one of "the great dry
goods merchant, who sells nearly a million a year," another of
a business man "now prosperous and rich and growing richer" —
polishing them till they took on the lustre of his imagination.
"They have sunk the corner stone," he declared, "of the only
aristocracy that Americans should know." 18

A more tangible service, perhaps, was the perfect flood of
publicity that Grady gave to Southern resources for industrial
development. His oratorical poems picturing "mountains stored
with exhaustless treasures, forests, vast and primeval, and rivers
that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea" were one long
hymn of invocation to preemption and exploitation. 14 "He did
not tamely promote enterprise and encourage industry," wrote
an admirer; "he vehemently fomented enterprise and provoked
industry until they stalked through the land like armed con-
querors." 15

12 Atlanta Constitution, March 24, x88o.
M Ibid., Aug. 15, x88o.

14 J. C. Harris, Henry W. Grady, p. 182.

15 Quoted by Oliver Deyr in his "Introduction" to Henry W. Grady's The New
South.

76

The Temper of the Eighties

"I am no pessimist as to this Republic," announced Grady.
"I always bet on sunshine in America. . . . The trend of the
times is with us. The world moves steadily from gloom to
brightness." 16 The spell of this radiant optimism spread over
the South like a warm April sun after the season of rain.

Despite the wholesale regimentation of public opinion behind
the New Departure persistent rumors of revolt arose in the
winter of 1881. These rumors centered around Dr. William H.
Felton, the old Independent warhorse. Senator Benjamin H.
Hill, after an attack by Felton for his defection to the New De-
parture, answered with a diatribe against the Independent move-
ment. His argument, published by Grady, is worth attention as
a model of the dialectic employed by the new masters against
dissent throughout the next two decades :

Factories are springing up in all directions. Our industries are being mul-
tiplied as never before. Thousands of the best men of the North have gone
home from the exposition enthused with the brightening prospects of all
business in the State. Our taxes were scarcely ever so low. Our credit was
never so high. Capital and people and machinery are flowing in, and every-
body is brushing away the tears of war, and laughing with a new hope in
a new era! All this, all this has been accomplished under the rule of the
men who are denounced by trading politicians as narrow-minded, intolerant
Bourbons. . . . Must our peace be destroyed, race collisions again pro-
voked, and our budding prosperity arrested merely to gratify a few men
who are willing to run with all parties and be true to none ? 17

Yet this was the woe the Independents would wreak by their
"blatant pretenses of reform, and still more blatant outcries
against that mythical monster — the Bourbon Democracy of the
South."

Hill's diatribe, widely quoted, was considered a severe blow
to the Independents, but it did not deter them from organizing
and issuing a call to all who agreed "that neither the Republican
party nor the Democratic party as at present organized can
subserve the vital interests of the people" to meet them in con-
vention. 18

As time for nominations for the election of 1882 drew near,

16 J. C. Harris, op. cit., p. 156.

17 B. H. Hill, Jr., Life of Benjamin H. Hill, p. 822.

18 R. L. Felton, Memoirs of Georgia Politics, pp. 335-341.

77

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the eyes of Independent and New Departure leaders alike
turned toward the dwarfed invalid of the brilliant eyes in the
rolling chair at Liberty Hall. Alexander Stephens occupied a
strategic place between the rival parties. His pathetic, gnarled
figure, his long public record before, during, and after the War,
and his present position, which was committed to neither party,
commanded a following that might turn the balance one way or
the other.

No one waited more eagerly for the Sage's decision than Tom
Watson. When it was announced that "It is now definitely
known . . . that Mr. Alexander H. Stephens will retire from
politics at the end of the present term of Congress," 19 his young
disciple's emotions overflowed into verse : 20

Hushed in his voice of silver

Its echoes die away
And the clouds of night arise

Around his closing day.

Older politicians were not so quick to despair. Just as Talley-
rand would meet a political quandary by taking to his bed,
Stephens would decline to run and announce his retirement from
politics, ". . . yet [he] never failed to run as soon as the coast
was clear." 21 Even at that time he was corresponding with
leaders of both parties. Following closely the development of
the plans of the Independents, he had given them particular en-
couragement; yet when he was nominated for governor by their
convention of May, 1882, he forgot his letters to their leaders
and declined to run. 22 When it became apparent that he was
giving ear to Brown and Colquitt, it was said that "Mr. Ste-
phens in his mental and physical weakness is a mere tool in the
hands of designing men." 2S The New Departure papers, indeed,
made no secret of their hopes : "The Chronicle believes that Mr.
Stephens' nomination [for Governor] will heal all breaches in
the party and that the very mention of his name will destroy

19 Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1882.

20 MS. Journal 2, p. 73.

21 R. L. Felton, op. ciU, p. 351.

22 Ibid., pp. 343-344, 362. Mrs. Felton writes: "The aged Statesman, under the
influence of continual hypodermics, aided by stimulants which were constantly kept
up, was led along until he actually forgot what he had written to Judge Hook, to
Dr. Felton, to his most intimate friends in Georgia, and to myself — his constant
correspondent."

23 Macon Telegraph quoted by Augusta Chronicle and Constitutionalist, July 4,
1882.

78

The Temfer of the Eighties

all elements of Independent opposition." ** The Democratic
Convention in July would reveal Stephens' position.

Watson, himself a candidate for the Legislature, arrived in
Atlanta before the Convention opened. He was recalled by the
papers as "the young man eloquent of 1880." The fact that he
came from Stephens' district, it was thought, "answers the ques-
tion as to his gubernatorial preferences." Stephens established
himself at the Kimball House, chief headquarters for delegates
and candidates. Young Watson found excuse for loitering in his
room by the hour every day. He thought the old statesman's
"pallid, shrivelled face was beautifully benevolent, and his eyes
were radiant with the tenderness of a noble heart." He listened
as Stephens dictated a letter of reconciliation to his old enemy,
Ben Hill, then on his death bed, and the incident fired his
imagination. 25 The papers reported that "among . . . [Ste-
phens'] many visitors in the early morning was Senator Brown.
They held sweet converse for a lengthy time . . ." 26

Another guest of the Kimball House trod its corridors in no
such benevolent and conciliatory frame of mind. Unregenerate
and unreconstructed, General Robert Toombs made no secret of
his opinion of his old friend Stephens' dalliance with the New
Departure. Puzzled by this difference between his heroes, Wat-
son nevertheless divided his adoration impartially between them.
But never was the hero-worshiper in Tom so evident as when
Toombs was its object. Around and about the lobby and bar of
the hotel he followed the General, an assiduous Boswell. Never,
he noted, did "the inborn, imperial superiority of Toombs
make itself so conspicuously self-evident as it did in his lordly
bearing at the breakfast table." Here, surely, the image he
guarded so jealously in his heart found a living reflection — set
with a seal "To give the world assurance of a man." It was the
way he liked to think of his grandfather, "tall, venerable, im-
posing." Here, too, was a satisfying image of the rebel: "His
hair was iron-gray, abundant, disordered, like the mane of a
lion, but becoming to him as in his prime. Decidedly he was the
most leonine old man I ever beheld. He was a ruin, but majestic
and impressive."

In the evening the General, deep in his cups, entered the bar

24 Ibid., July 4, 1882.

25 T. E. W., Sketches, pp. 282-283.

26 Augusta Herald, July 18, 1882.

79

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

at the head of a procession of admirers, obviously enjoying his
position. "Wherever he stopped," observed Watson, "a group
would gather to hear him talk. ... It was like going to see
Vesuvius in eruption." Spotting a Northerner in his audience,
Toombs seized upon the mention of his late opponents as occa-
sion for an explosion against the North :

"Hate it? Of course I hate it. Why shouldn't I ? Am I more or less than
human? Haven't they given me cause enough? Didn't they drench my
country with blood and sweep it with fire? Haven't they deprived me of
the rights of a free man? . . . But I am an old man. My day is passed.
The people seem to have lost heart. The South is ruled by as cowardly and
venal a lot of place-hunting politicians as ever lived. Like putrid bodies in
the stream, they rise as they rot. . . . They lick the feet of Tammany cor-
ruptionists, and grovel in the dust before Northern money. But Southern
pride and principle will one day assert themselves. . . ."

Someone rashly interrupted to remind the General that his
friend Stephens counseled peace and reconciliation.

"I don't give a damn if he does!" blurted Toombs. "Henry Grady cries
peace too, and so does Jack Gordon and Ben Hill and Lushe Lamar. What
do I care for the talk of politicians and opportunists. They may cry 'Peace'
till the heavens fall . . ." 27

Such quixotic incorrigibility could not fail in its appeal to a
youth of Watson's temperament and predilections: "No matter
how much you might revolt in judgment at what he said, he
carried you with him for the moment." He was attracted and
repelled at the same time : it was magnificent to be incorrigible,
but it was practical to be conciliatory. "Nobody pinned faith to
what he said," he reflected; "nobody altered his course a jot be-
cause of any opinion he expressed . . ." 28

Alexander Stephens was nominated Governor by the New
Departure Democrats, and the Convention adjourned. Toombs
expressed his conviction that his friend was "either the veriest
demagogue in the country or in his old age he has lost his grip."
He believed his Independent opponent would beat him, "and
ought to beat him." 29 Watson, out of personal loyalty, pledged
himself as a "Stephens man," and returned to McDuffie County
to take up where he had left it a particularly warm campaign on
his own account.

27 Conversation quoted by T. E. W., Sketches, pp. 282-287.

2 *Loc. cit.

29 R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 371-372.

80

7

Agrarian Law-making

" Oince the Convention of 1880 I had had a fixed determi-

nation to run for the Legislature this year," wrote Watson
in 1882. This was by no means an unreasonable ambition in a
young lawyer of his attainments. It was rather the conventional,
the expected thing — a step toward the judge's bench. The actual
Representative was retiring at the expiration of his term, with
the hope of being elected the next Superior Court judge. Wat-
son expected an easy victory. An aspirant for office was fre-
quently elected without mention of a single issue of race, class,
creed, or party — simply by agreement in the primary of the
"White Man's Party." At first it seemed that this procedure
might be followed with Watson's candidacy, for no opponent
appeared at the beginning. He did not believe there would have
been any opposition had not his shooting scrape with W. D.
Tutt brought on "various obstacles." Indeed this affair but in-
troduced the first of the issues customarily circumvented — all of
which Watson succeeded in stirring up to a dramatic pitch in
this his first contest for office. 1

Feeling between Watson and Tutt had been brewing for over
five years. The day Watson arrived in Thomson to begin his
law practice in 1876 he was greeted at the railway station by
loud guffaws provoked by a remark at his expense from Tutt.
"If I had had my gun," Watson told a friend, "I would have
shot him right there." 2 Although Tutt was several years his
senior, and was already established as a highly successful lawyer,
Watson's aggressive rise in the profession was not long in chal-

1 MS. Journal 2, p. 292.

2 Interview with Mr. J. L. Cartledge, Augusta, Ga., Aug. 24, 1934.

81

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

lenging Tutt's place of preeminence at the local bar. Watson's
success appears to have been won largely at the expense of his
rival. In the three and a half years preceding March, 1882, his
"Lawyer's Record Book" 8 accounts for twenty-nine cases in
which he and Tutt represented opposing interests, only twenty-
two in which Tutt was not his opponent, and just one in which
they collaborated. Many of these were criminal suits, in which
popular excitement ran high, feelings were strained and taut,
and rivalry bitter and personal. Watson was by far the more
successful of the two in their clashes, and it was but natural for
the older man to resent the impertinence of an upstart's rivalry.
Feelings were not improved during the campaign of 1880,
when both men indulged in personalities in their speeches. In
answer to Tutt's charge that the Independents were only dis-
appointed office seekers, Watson replied that Tutt had himself
deserted the Independents and was

Stiff in opinion, stubborn, always wrong,
Everything by turns and nothing long.

It also appears from his private Journal that Watson had
secretly aspired to a seat in the Senate, but had been forced to
content himself with a candidacy for the Lower House when the
Democrats nominated Tutt for the Senate. 4

In March, 1881, Tom, his brother Julius, and Tutt were
jointly indicted for "carrying concealed weapons." At the trial
the following January the Watson brothers pleaded guilty, Tutt
not guilty. The court fined each of the three twenty-five dollars. 5
Serious trouble was expected almost any day now. The rivals
had already clashed in two cases in March when Watson con-
ceived the idea that Tutt had done him an injury by accepting a
case in his absence that he thought should have been his. At a
chance meeting in a law office in Thomson words were ex-
changed. Watson was insulting. Tutt struck him. Watson drew
a gun and fired, striking Tutt, who had raised a chair before
him, on the hand. Watson was disarmed, and the two were
separated. 6

8 Watson MSS., Chapel Hill. Apparently all cases were not recorded.

4 MS. Journal 2, p. 287; dated April, 1881.

5 "Minutes, Supreme Court, McDuffie County, Sept., 1876 to March, 1884,"
Thomson, Georgia.

6 W. W. Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 152-153.

82

Agrarian Law-making

On March 22 Watson was indicted for "assault with intent to
murder," and only two days later appeared for trial before
Judge Claiborne Snead. He had engaged, from the many who
offered to defend him, three competent lawyers, among them,
James C. C. Black, of Augusta. A jury was impanelled and
sworn, and the case proceeded until the State closed. Then
friends of both parties suggested a "settlement." Watson, ap-
parently seeking a vindication, "opposed it bitterly and only
gave in at the last moment upon condition that I should state my
side of the case." 7 This done, Judge Snead withdrew the issue
from the jury and ordered that "good cause having been shown,
the said case be and is hereby settled." 8

While this unusual, and probably illegal, procedure was ap-
plauded by many, it gave the faction that was organizing against
Judge Snead a live issue to display before farmer voters. Class
consciousness among farmers, promoted by hard times in the
'seventies and fostered by the insurgency of 1880, had not at-
tained the militancy and discipline it was to acquire in the follow-
ing decade, but the feeling was present. It was an anomaly that
Tom Watson, future leader of the movement, should by a trick
of circumstances, become one of its first victims. "People said,"
he observed in his Journal, "had it been anybody but a lawyer
[e.g., a farmer] the case would not have been stopped." Also I
found "a pretty general feeling that on account of the difference
in our ages, I had acted hastily in giving him the lie." Judge
Snead inflamed antagonism further by imprisoning one W. O.
Harrison for misconduct as bailiff, when that gentleman gave
too free expression to his opinion of the court's conduct in the
case. 9

In the midst of the excitement thus provoked there appeared
a second candidate for the Legislature, E. A. Shields. Obviously
he intended to capitalize on the feeling produced by the Watson
case, for he was openly an anti-Snead candidate, out for the
farmer's vote. Watson was now thrust into an extremely em-
barrassing alignment with Judge Claiborne Snead, whom he
had no wish to defend, whom to defend would probably mean

7 MS. Journal 2, p. 292.

8 "Minutes, Supreme Court, McDuffie County, Sept., 1876, to March, 1884," Thom-
son, Georgia.

9 MS. Journal 2, p. 292.

83

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

defeat, yet who, in the eyes of the public, had done Watson a
considerable kindness, and had done it probably at the cost of his
own political ruin. Caught in this dilemma, Watson refused to
pledge himself outright against Snead, but instead resorted to
the expedient of assuring voters that he u was willing to vote
against Judge Snead in the next election if the people so in-
structed but would not run anti-Snead." 10

After canvassing the county "laboriously and thoroughly," he
concluded that the white vote was about equally divided between
him and his opponent, and that therefore the Negro vote would
decide the contest. The black population, indeed, represented a
majority, there being 5,522 Negroes to 3,367 whites in the
county. 11 Though their vote had been intimidated and manipu-
lated, the Negroes were not yet disfranchised. They had been
thoroughly organized by the Republicans, and it was through
the Executive Committee of that party that Watson had to ap-
proach the Negroes. He found that his opponent had been en-
dorsed by one of their meetings, but that, owing to small at-
tendance, final action had been postponed until a later meeting
called for the purpose of deciding between the candidates. At
this meeting Watson spoke, making a favorable impression
chiefly by favoring free schools for Negroes, and by condemn-
ing the iniquitous convict lease system, of which the Negroes
were the main victims. A resolution was adopted endorsing his
candidacy, but it apparently gave the impression that Watson
had endorsed the Republican platform, for after the meeting
was adjourned, but while the crowd was still present, he added
that "he did not endorse their platform, and had not been asked
to do it." Their resolution endorsing him was not changed, how-
ever. 12

The Negro meeting on Saturday was followed by an uproar
created by the charge of the Shields supporters that Watson had
stolen the Negro vote by endorsing the Republican platform.
Thus he faced a second dilemma: he would have to repudiate
the charge completely, but in doing so he would run the risk of
losing the Negro vote. On the following Monday a white con-
vention assembled at Thomson to nominate W. D. Tutt for the

10 ibid.

11 U. S. Census, 1890.

12 Affidavits signed by "S. Norris," MS. Journal 2, p. 295.

84

Agrarian Law-making

Senate. Affidavits signed by a witness of the Negro meeting were
distributed by Watson, and he appeared at the Convention to de-
mand a hearing. His exertions were telling on him. "I was so
sick I could hardly stand up," he wrote, "but I went to the con-
vention . . . and achieved the greatest oratorical victory of my
life. I went out of the Court House with a triumphant and en-
thusiastic majority." Shields then withdrew from the race, but
Watson was given no respite. Dr. James S. Jones, who had twice
represented the county in the Legislature, was forthwith put up
as a second opponent, a formidable one, according to Watson,
for "It was confidently asserted that he would sweep the field." 18

Other issues and more important offices were now forgotten.
"The principal interest of the campaign," it was reported,
"seemed to be who should be our next Representative in the
Lower House." Watson's supreme talent for self-dramatization
was one explanation of the excitement produced by a relatively
insignificant contest. No better example of his use of that talent
can be found than that displayed at a mass meeting held to
decide whether the race between Watson and Jones should be
decided by a nominating convention of white Democrats, or by
an open race with no nomination. Watson favored an open race
before the public, Jones the nomination. "The Watson men," it
was reported, "beyond all question held the day." The meeting
was then adjourned, but the people remained to listen to an ad-
dress by Watson.

What of the charge that he was out to get the Negro vote?
"Colquitt could get it, Stephens could get it, Roney could get
it . . . and it was all right. But when he got it, it was all
wrong." Clearly all the hue and cry against him was persecution,
pure and simple. "I know now," said he, "that 'tis written, Be-
fore the ascension lies Gethsemane's Garden. I know now that
the pathway is lined with brambles, and at each foot step I have
pressed the thorns." By the time he had reached his conclusion,
his cause had acquired for him, and it would appear for his
listeners also, the proportions of a mighty crusade of good
against evil, of right against black injustice. "No, gentlemen,
they are in for anything to put me down. (Cries of That's so.)
But with the fine support I find in your midst they'll never do

13 MS. Journal a, p. 292.

85

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

it. I hear the tread of the people, as aroused up by this crusade,
they come to see that justice shall be done. The whole people
shall decide the contest." 14

As if the campaign thus far had been only a preliminary
skirmish, Watson notes that "From this time the race became
very bitter." However, he was "more completely determined
than . . . [he] had ever been on anything." During the next
two months of campaign there are occasional glimpses of his ac-
tivities : at a barn dance in Wrightsboro, "Standing up fiddling
away for dear life, Willie Hadley bending down in front to
beat the strings with straws, one negro playing second fiddle
and another knocking the agony out of a tambourine." The
girls would "dance with no boy till he promised to vote for
me." Or in Dearing District at the swimming hole: "Like the
balance I climbed the stumps and leapt off for a dive." Or un-
derground in the gold mines on the Ridge: "When Election day
arrived, the mines stopped and Ed Carline voted every man for
me." Campaign adventures fairly intoxicated him: "I stopped
at all kinds of places, got all kinds of treatment, went through
every grade of hope and doubt, elation and despondency; re-
ceived enthusiastic praise, bore malignant abuse ; was devotedly
followed by friends; was desperately opposed by foes" — and,
insatiable romantic that he was, nothing could have pleased him
more. 15

He was elected by a majority of 392 votes.

The new assembly convened November 1, only a few weeks
after the campaign ended and before Watson had recovered
from a summer illness. He complained of being "sick most of
the time," and was incapable of his usual exertions and not a
little unhappy during the winter session. The Constitution, how-
ever, found him "looking as game and handsome as he did when
he 'nailed to the mast her sacred flag,' " in the Convention of
1880 and added that "Tom is a whole team and dog under the
wagon besides." Despite his health, he attended regularly and
spoke frequently. Reports of debates in which he participated

14 Clipping, dated "Thomson, August 16, 1882," in MS. Journal 2, p. 293.

15 MS. Journal 2, pp. 294-295.

86

Agrarian Law-making

almost invariably singled him out for special comment and quo-
tation. At twenty-six he retained much of the appeal of the rus-
tic poet that his earlier pictures carry, and he was described as
"slender," "debonair," "impetuous," and "boyish." He was
given place on four House committees, one of them the General
Committee on Judiciary. 16

Walking to and from the Capitol, Watson daily passed the
entrance to a narrow stairway, on what is now Henry Grady
Square, marked 48 Marietta Street. The address graced the let-
terhead of Woodrow Wilson, attorney at law, licensed all of ten
days before Watson arrived in the city. Of Watson's own age,
Wilson like him had passed part of his boyhood in Augusta and
had turned to law. Yet they now faced different problems.
"Buried in humdrum life down here in slow, ignorant, unin-
teresting Georgia," Wilson complained yearningly of his plight
to a friend "away off there in Europe, surrounded by everything
that is attractive in the old world, deep in the work of a great
university." His every contact with this sterile society, "where
the chief end of man is certainly to make money" was "utterly
disillusioning." He reflected that the practice of law "for pur-
poses of gain is antagonistic to the best interests of the intellec-
tual life" — and anyway not a client appeared. He could watch
from his office windows, "which look out upon the principal en-
trance of the big, ugly building which serves new Atlanta as a
temporary capitol, the mixed crowds going to secure seats in the
galleries of the House of Representatives ..." Having plenty
of time, he occasionally joined the crowd in the galleries him-
self and watched the lawmakers below — "country lawyers, mer-
chants, farmers, politicians, all of them poor, many densely
ignorant. ... As different as the poles from the British Parlia-
ment, wherein a class of men from leisured families, disciplined
for leadership, ruled the state." 1T

Inaugurated on November 4, Governor Alexander Stephens
entered his new office without the satisfaction of having "de-
stroyed all elements of Independent opposition" as the leaders
of the New Departure had hoped. The vote, in fact, came much
nearer justifying General Toombs' prediction of an Independent

16 Georgia House Journal, 1882, pp. 68-72.

"Ray S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson, Vol. I, pp. 150-157. Copyright, 1927, by
Doubled ay, Dor an & Co., Inc.

87

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

victory than had been expected, for in spite of Stephens' per-
sonal popularity his Independent opponent received thirty-two
per cent of the votes cast. Opposition to the New Departure was
reduced but not destroyed. 18

The death of Senator Benjamin H. Hill on August 15 had
left a few months of his term to be filled, and the more impor-
tant question of who was to succeed him in the long term had to
be decided. This question above all others agitated the new as-
sembly during the first two weeks. The statement that the con-
test was "simply unprecedented in its bitterness and passion" is
probably an exaggeration, but it seems true that the issue was
"the same one that has been presented for the last several years"
— namely, the New Departure oligarchy against its more or less
unorganized opposition. If ex-Governor Colquitt's candidacy
proved successful, each member of the New Departure Trium-
virate, Gordon, Brown, and Colquitt, would have his turn in
the Senate in as many years.

Senator Brown, who owed his first entrance to the Senate to
Colquitt, was bringing to bear the multitudinous resources at
his command in behalf of Colquitt's candidacy. Demurring to
the charge that he was "chief boss" of Georgia politics, he added
that if it was true, "then I have a right to be proud of the re-
sults of my labor, and I have a right to expect the plaudit of
Veil done' from the democracy of Georgia." He also expected
the prompt election of Colquitt as his junior Senator. 19

Henry Grady, as might be expected, also marshaled his in-
fluence behind Colquitt. The power he wielded was already for-
midable. 20 Grady opposed particularly the election of J. C. C.
Black, the lawyer who had defended Watson in his trial and who
was now the opponent of Colquitt.

At the election in the assembly Watson seconded with his
most florid oratory the nomination of Black, "a leader whose
plume is as white as the plume of Navarre." As for himself, he
said, he had "rather be a mourner at the defeat of right, than

18 Georgia House Journal 1882, pp. 38-39.

19 J. E. Brown to editor of the Constitution, Nov. 12, 1882.

20 Later it was said: "He was almost an absolute dictator in Georgia politics.
No man cared to stand for election to any place, high or low, unless he felt Grady
was with him. He certainly was the most powerful factor in the election of two
governors and practically gave more than one United States Senator his seat."
Quoted in J. C. Harris, Henry W. Grady, p. 79.

88

Agrarian Law-making

to be king at the carnival of victorious might." He found him-
self among the mourners. Colquitt easily won over his three
opponents. 21

With Brown and Colquitt in the Senate and Governor
Stephens keeping step to the new music, there was little left for
the New Departure to ask that it did not have. "Let us bury all
personal differences," urged the conciliatory Grady, "and have
a general peace. The elections are all over; good men are
elected . . . and there is little cause for complaint, but much
for congratulations." 22 As a personal gesture in this direction,
Grady invited leaders of all factions in the recent contest, Tom
Watson included, to a "unique entertainment" at his home on
Peachtree Street, said to have been "the center of the social life
of the city." Invitations read "Dinner at 6, fiddling at 9." After
dinner Watson and three other members of the House were
announced as contestants for a fiddling prize. In a hilarious
contest Watson was judged winner and awarded "a floral fiddle,
with tube rose body and smilax springs," afterwards sent to
Mrs. Watson. The famous Grady hospitality flowed, and under
the tutelage of this master reconciler, reconciliation went on
apace. It would require all the arts of a master to keep this
champion fiddler in tune with the new music, but until the baton
finally slipped from Grady's hand discord was prevented.

In both his campaign against Colquitt and the New Departure
in 1880, and in his pledges to the Negro voters two years later,
Watson had attacked the convict lease system. Agitation against
the Georgia system of leasing state convicts for exploitation by
private individuals and corporations had been carried on by In-
dependents for several years with no ameliorative result, be-
cause, it was said, "men of high standing and great influence,
governors and United States Senators, were making fortunes
out of it." 23 In 1 880, the state had granted a twenty-year lease.

George W. Cable, the novelist, after extensive investigation
of this penal system in the Southern states, concluded that in
Georgia the system was found "peculiarly vicious." He went
even further to say that, "Here may be seen a group of penal

21 Constitution, Nov. X5, X882; Georgia House Journal 1882, pp. 220-223.

22 Constitution, Nov. 15, 1882.

28 New York Daily Tribune, Aug. 28, 1887, quoted in R. L. Felton, Memoirs,
P- 599-

89

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

institutions, the worst in the country by every evidence of their
own setting forth : cruel, brutalizing, deadly ; chaining, flogging,
shooting, drowning, killing by exhaustion and exposure . . ."
The crushing burden of this injustice was borne by the Negroes :
although they were a minority of the state population, there
were in October, 1880, 1,071 Negroes serving terms, and only
115 whites. 24

Upon this mudsill of human misery and degradation was built
a considerable part of the great fortune of Senator Joseph
E. Brown. As already mentioned, three hundred of the convicts,
leased for twenty years, went to labor in his Dade County coal
mines. For the labor of its prisoners the state received about
seven cents per working day. 25

It would seem that Governor Colquitt could see no crime in
such profitable enterprise. In his final message to the General
Assembly, November 2, 1882, the Governor, referring to the
penal system, said that "in the three great essentials of good
discipline, economy, humanity and reform, Georgia stands pre-
eminent." 2e

Just two weeks later Watson arose in the House to speak on
penal institutions. He advocated the abolition of the convict
lease system, which, he said, "commercialized the State's sov-
ereign right to punish her criminals to money-making companies
whose only interest was to maintain the convict at the lowest
possible cost and to work him at the utmost human capacity."
He also condemned the "very atrocious crimes committed
against the convicts by the whipping bosses of these lessee com-
panies." Instead of proposing the abolition of the system, which
would probably have received no serious attention, he offered a
resolution calling for a special investigation and report by the
Committee on the penitentiary on "whether in the lodging,
chaining and working of the convicts any distinction and classi-
fication is made between males and females, white and colored,
those convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude and those

24 George W. Cable, "The Convict Lease System in the South," Century, Feb.,
1884; Vol. V, pp. 582-599; vide also J. N. Hammond, in an answer to Cable, Con-
stitution, Jan. 13, 1885.

25 H. Fielder, op, cit., pp. 488-489; A. M. Arnett, Populist Movement in Georgia,
pp. 27-28 ; I. W. Avery, op. cit., p. 606. It was admitted by the critics of the system
that the convicts employed by Brown were not as badly treated as were the convicts
of other lessees.

26 Journal of the House 1882, p. 35.

90

Agrarian Law-making

convicted of offenses not so involving moral turpitude." 27 The
resolution was agreed to on November 17.

In December the Committee reported that "The camps at
Dade Coal Mines, under the control of Company No. 1, were
found to be in a healthy condition. . . . Your Committee take
pleasure in commending the management of this branch of the
penitentiary." 28 In less than a month after his inauguration,
Governor Stephens pardoned Edward Cox, General Gordon's
sub-lessee of convicts, convicted of the murder of Robert Alston,
an outspoken enemy of the convict lease system. 29

After the exploited convict, the tenant farmer became Wat-
son's chief concern. The first bill he introduced in the House was
one to amend the Code "so as to allow tenants distrained, if un-
able from poverty to give bond and security, to file a bond in
forma pauperis . . ." 30 As the law stood, once the landlord ob-
tained a distress warrant against the tenant's crop and equipment
in order to collect debt or rent, the tenant was compelled to give
bond of twice the amount sued for in order to contest before the
court the justice of the landlord's claim, or to retain his posses-
sions pending litigations. 31 The poverty of the average tenant,
who was habitually in debt and often possessed nothing but his
labor, did not permit him to give bond and frequently left him
at the mercy of his landlord, against whom he could not even
appear in court. Watson's bill proposed to enable the tenant to
contest the landlord's claim and to retain the property levied
upon until a judicial decision was rendered. While the bill was
recommended by the General Committee on Judiciary, it was
recommitted to the Committee in the next session and failed to
pass. 82

With these and other failures irritating his pride, Watson re-
turned to Thomson at the end of his first session in a mood of
dissatisfaction, if not frustration. In his Journal he wrote that
he "found no pleasure in the Legislature and was not all satis-
fied with my share in the programme." His imagination had

27 MS. House Bill 59, 1882, on file in Georgia Department of Archives and His-
tory, Atlanta, Georgia.

28 Journal of the House 1882, pp. 51 1-5 12.

29 R. L. Felton, Memoirs, pp. 372-373, 491-496.

30 Journal of the House 1882, p. 87 ; MS. bill missing from State Archives.

31 The Code of the State of Georgia (Macon, 1873), Section 4083.
^Constitution, Nov. 15, 1882; Journal of the House 1882, p. 282; Journal 1883,

pp. 132-133.

91

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

been somehow offended, cheated, like that of young Wilson
looking down from the galleries. It was no forum of Periclean
Greeks upon whom he had lavished his periods.

It was between sessions, on March 4, only shortly after Wat-
son had paid the old invalid a visit in Atlanta, that Governor
Alexander Stephens died. Watson's tribute to his boyhood hero
at the memorial day in the Legislature seems a sincere expres-
sion of affection, and he returned to the summer session sad-
dened by the loss. 83 From his office window across the street At-
torney Wilson gloomily watched the crowd file into the galleries
for the inauguration of Henry D. McDaniel, elected to fill the
unexpired term of Governor Stephens : "They were probably not
much entertained," he wrote his friend in Berlin, "though they
may have been considerably diverted, for our new Governor
cannot talk." The state was about to "replace a governor who
could not walk with a governor who could not talk." M

Any special favor that Watson may have won in the eyes of
Negroes and white tenant voters by his championship of convicts
and impoverished tenants during the first session was placed in
jeopardy by two of his actions during the summer session.

According to the chairman of the Committee of Privileges
and Election, "the strongest case" with which he had to deal in
the session of 1882, was a contest for the seat of Camden
County made by Anthony Wilson, Negro, against Daniel R.
Proctor, white, who had been at first awarded the seat. 35 Wilson
contended that, having received a majority of the votes over his
white opponents, he was entitled to the seat. The Committee
supported his contention. Heated opposition to the committee
report was led by Tom Watson. While admitting that Wilson
had a majority of the votes, Watson held that "he did not show
it by strictly legal testimony." 86 So strong was the opposition
that the question was postponed till the next session. Wilson
was then awarded the seat. The charge was later made that
Watson's position was dictated by race feeling, but this is not
supported by evidence.

33 T. E. W., Life and Speeches, pp. 30-31.

34 R. S. Baker, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 1 54-1 57.

35 Printed circular, Northen Scrapbook, Vol. Ill, p. 147.

36 Journal of the House 1882, pp. 372-377; Constitution, Aug. 24, 1882.

92

Agrarian Law-making

The first bill Watson offered in the summer session proposed
a tax of one dollar per head annually on dogs, the proceeds to
go to the support of education. 87 In his defense of the measure
he appealed to "our brother in black" for his support. Wilson
replied that "The colored people don't want this law ..." A
commentator explained that 'The tax payers of the state were
with him [Watson] , but the colored voters at home doubtlessly
overawed the average country member, and the dog and the
Negro is [sic'] still on top. The Negro voter is a power in Geor-
gia politics and the lamb must go." M

Farmers were only beginning to awaken to the injustice
which the general property tax system worked upon them. They
undoubtedly paid out of all proportion to the value of their
property or their ability to pay, while personal and intangible
property of the city dweller escaped with a mere pretense of
taxation. 89 Resentment was also beginning to arise against the
gross thievery of the railroad financiers, and against their rate
discrimination against the farmer in favor of the city. While the
railroads had been made subject to state taxes in 1877, they still
paid no taxes to the county through which they passed. In view
of these circumstances considerable interest arose over a bill to
require railroads to pay taxes to counties in which their property
was located, "just as individuals are now required by law to do."

Watson supported the bill with "fervent argument." Appeal-
ing to the doctrine of Robert Toombs, he contended that "the
convention of 1877 saw the fallacy of the old system of dealing
with railroads and placed them on a footing with other property
in the state. This bill merely carries out the theory of the con-
stitution, and proposes no more than just taxation of the roads."
One member, who denounced the bill as "one of these extem-
poraneous routes of demagoguery," employed an argument then
frequently heard : reform and taxation would discourage capital
and enterprise. "The North has the surplus money," ran the
formula. "Let us encourage its investment in railroads in Geor-
gia and the South." Watson ridiculed the inconsistency of the

87 MS. Bill No. 425, on file in Georgia Dept. of Archives and History, Atlanta ;
Journal of the House 1883, p. 36.

38 Clippings, undated, MS. Journal 2, p. 344.

39 L. F. Schmeckabier, "Taxation in Georgia," Johns Hopkins Studies, Vol.
XVIII, p. 232.

93

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

champions of the railroads; "in one breath making them giants
of power and in the next breath weak subjects for protection." 40

It was only a few days before the railroad bill was taken up
for final vote that "quite a ripple of interest" was created by the
announcement of the clerk of the House that he had free passes
for all members over the Air Line Railroad, good throughout
the session and ten days after adjournment, and it was at that
same session that the House accepted the invitation to the Louis-
ville Exposition, transportation paid, from Joseph E. Brown,
"president of the most powerful railroad corporation in the
South and Senator from Georgia." 41 The railroad tax was de-
feated in the Senate.

Watson fired two parting shots at the railroads in the form
of two bills, one changing the Code to provide that mere pres-
ence upon railroad right of way did not constitute contributory
negligence in case of injury inflicted by the railroad; another
redefining "trespass" to except cases of presence upon the right
of way, unless damage of property or infringement of franchise
were committed. 42 Both bills were introduced toward the end of
the session, and both died in committee. When a bill for in-
corporating a navigation company appeared, Watson obtained
the passage of amendments putting freight and transportation
charges under control of the state, and striking out a clause
giving the company monopoly of navigation on the river. 43

His attacks on the sanctity of corporations, however, were by
no means to be extended to the sanctity of the institution of
private property. When it was proposed to condemn certain
property "in order to complete the symmetry of the new state
capitol," Watson was prompt to object: "It is dangerous to con-
demn private property for the sake of mere symmetry, just to
make the ground look pretty. I am against the amendment."
When the conflict was between the farmer and property, it was
the worse for property : when between beauty and property, the
worse for beauty.

Doubtless Watson derived a certain amount of satisfaction
from clipping newspaper comment and sending it to his wife,

40 Atlanta Journal, July 19, 1883 ; undated clippings, MS. Journal 2, p. 341.
^Augusta Chronicle, July 6, 1883; Journal of the House 1883, pp. 814-816.

42 MS. House Bills Nos. 1048 and 1049, Georgia Dept. of Archives and History ;
Journal of the House 1883, p. 818.

43 Constitution, Dec 6, 1882.

94

Agrarian Law-making

such flattery as the article describing him as "the most brilliant
young man in Georgia," or the one that said, "There was no
more brilliant and brainy young man in the Legislature last
session . . ." But his prevailing mood continued to be restless-
ness and disillusionment. He could review only a brief record
of failure and temporizing and his impatience with time-servers
grew. The same mood was expressed by one of his colleagues, a
young man "of fine intelligence" who complained that he was
"utterly dissatisfied and desirous of quitting the Legislature and
going home to private life," because "there was nothing occur-
ring in which he took an interest . . ." ** Whether for the same
reason or not Watson resigned his seat in the Legislature before
his term expired the next year. 45

"The galleries are deserted and there is a languid dullness
around the capital generally," it was reported a month before
the turgid summer session dragged itself to a close. Watson did
not conceal his impatience. Instead of dashing off to the Louis-
ville Exposition as Senator Brown's guests, the legislators, he
thought, should remain on the job and complete their business.
In a rebuke to the House he announced that he intended to take
his leave if the session were not adjourned on a certain day. On
September 17 he did leave, but the session dragged on — drawing
its per diem pay.

On his deathbed General Toombs was told that the assembly
was still in session.

"Send for Cromwell!" growled the General. 46

44 The young man was Charles R. Pendleton. N. E. Harris, Autobiography, pp.

234-235.

^Constitution, Aug. 14, 1884. His resignation was probably an attempt to
qualify as a presidential elector.

46 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life of Robert Toombs, p. 273.

95

8

Henry Gradf s Vision

As the curtain was rung down on an old era, it had hitched
jljl on a quartet of aged figures taking belated curtain calls.
Awkwardly they bowed off the stage, one by one : Herschel V.
Johnson in 1880, Ben Hill in 1882, Stephens in 1883. General
Toombs, confined to his bed and soon to follow them, continued
to be heard from only as a discordant rumble off stage. As if to
clear the stage drastically of old scenery, the old Kimball House
burned to the ground on August 13, 1883, and that same year a
new capitol was decreed. A new spirit quickly peopled the scene
with new men.

One September morning in 1882 young Wilson was trans-
ported out of his lethargy by the sudden appearance at his office
of a young man with the face of a poet and the breezy manner
of a salesman — Walter Hines Page. They enthusiastically dis-
covered themselves "interested in the same things, with much
the same point of view." Both were "men of the New South,
impatient with old slogans." Page assumed the role of prophet
and mentor. He was touring the South for the New York
World, which belonged to Jay Gould, and scattering glad tid-
ings — the same tidings Grady broadcasted. A recent interview
with Jefferson Davis had moved him to reflect that "Cotton
mills and railroads are of more consequence . . . than constitu-
tional questions irrevocably settled." He fascinated Wilson with
his talk of Johns Hopkins, where the young lawyer was soon
to go. Off to North Carolina went Page to tarry his message
home. "Wake up, old commonwealth," he shouted. "What
North Carolina most needs are a few first class funerals." He
called to witness "any man who has made his own way by his

96

Henry Grady's Vision

own independence and industry in trade or manufacturing, if
these be not true." 1

Walter Page, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Grady — these alert
young men, like hundreds of Tom Watson's contemporaries,
were riding the crest of time's wave, as bright young men are
wont to. They were ingratiating themselves with the great cap-
tains of industry or the new captains of education, making them-
selves instruments of their own Zeitgeist. But the great tidal
wave of Industrial Revolution, while bearing his alert con-
temporaries on its crest, swept over Watson and his class, inun-
dating them silently for a decade. With as bright a mind as the
keenest of them and as much ambition as any, Watson was born
of a certain tradition, and his loyalty to that tradition and to his
class was the most important thing in Tom Watson's life. At the
name of Jay Gould he would shrink, instinctively, perhaps re-
calling something that Bob Toombs had said or done. As for the
captains of education, they were quite out of his reach.

Until near the close of the booming 'eighties Watson re-
mained a hesitant spectator. Sometimes he made timorous ad-
vances, mouthing a phrase of Grady's in a speech or lending a
hand with an election; yet he never did embrace the new creed
for his own. He always recoiled before a gesture became an alli-
ance. There was the case of the state convention of 1884. When
his name was presented for presidential elector from the tenth
district, the objection was raised that his office as a member of
the House would disqualify him. Although he had resigned his
seat beforehand, Watson promptly withdrew his name. 2 The
electoral bandwagon moved on without him.

The victory of Grover Cleveland furnished fresh impetus for
the New Departure. The news of the election brought the people
pouring into the streets of Atlanta "wild with joy." Bloody
shirts saturated with oil were set ablaze in front of the capitol
with "the wildest demonstrations." Henry Grady, as master of
ceremonies, was in his element. At the head of a procession of
drums, he burst into the House of Representatives, seized
Speaker Lamar in his arms, snatched the gavel from his hands,

*B. J. Hendrick, The Training of an American, pp. 146, 158-168; Ray S. Baker,
Woodrow Wilson, Vol. I, pp. 144-145.
2 Constitution, Aug. 14, 1884.

97

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

and declared the House adjourned in the name of Grover Cleve-
land.

At the head of the procession Grady remained, and behind
him it swelled in numbers as the 'eighties advanced. Thousands
were enchanted by his vision of the New South: "I see a South
the home of fifty millions of people; her cities vast hives of in-
dustry; her country-sides the treasures from which their re-
sources are drawn; her streams vocal with whirring spindles
. . ." His journey to Dallas to deliver an address was one pro-
longed ovation, "and his appearance created an enthusiasm that
is indescribable." "No such tribute as this has ever before been
paid, under any circumstances, to any private American citizen
. . ." 3 Grady symbolized to the South a hope that was almost
pathetic in its desperation.

In the North his message was thrice welcome. "We have
sowed towns and cities in the place of theories, and put business
in place of politics," he told the New England Club in New
York. "We have challenged your spinners in Massachusetts and
your ironmakers in Pennsylvania . . . wiped out the place
where Mason and Dixon's line used to be, and hung out a latch-
string to you and yours. . . . We have fallen in love with work.
. . . We are ready to lay odds on the Georgia Yankee as he
manufactures relics of the battle field in a one-story shanty and
squeezes pure olive oil out of his cotton-seed, against any down
easterner that ever swapped wooden nutmegs for flannel sau-
sages in the valleys of Vermont." He rejoiced that the two civili-
zations, which

"Did lately meet in the intestine shock
Shall now, in mutual well beseeming ranks,
March all one way."

"Every train brings manufacturers from the East and West
seeking to establish themselves or their sons near the raw mate-
rial in this growing market," he told eager Southerners, and
with open arms he added, "Let the fullness of the tide roll in." 4
Such hospitality did not go begging. In the middle 'eighties,
along with the profit seekers, came an invasion of journalists,

3 J. C. Harris, Henry W. Grady, pp. 16-17 and 91.

4 Ibid., pp. 88, 114.

98

Henry Grades Vision

whose books and articles poured from the press. A. K. McClure
was delighted with Atlanta, which was "the legitimate offspring
of Chicago," with "not a vestige of the old Southern ways about
it." The "old regulation Southerners in this region . . . have
either died untimely in despair, or have drifted into the current
and moved on with the world." "Here the most advanced lead-
ers of the whole South have their homes," he discovered, young
men who "have learned that 'hardness ever of hardiness is
mother,' " who were contemptuous of "effete pride," who had
"revolutionized Georgia" and were overrunning the South.
"There are more potent civilizers in Georgia than I have met
with in any portion of the South," he declared. "The more in-
telligent young men of from twenty to thirty years" were "the
foremost missionaries of the new civilization in the South." 5

William D. ("Pig-iron") Kelley of Pennsylvania was quite as
enthusiastic. "That they are a prosperous people is attested by
everything you behold in Atlanta," he observed; particularly
by "the elegant residences of Atlanta's millionaires." He was
widely quoted for his saying that the New South was "the com-
ing El Dorado of American adventure" — whatever that may
have meant. 6

But it was the Southerner himself, first and last, who was
most impressed by his own exploits — and for the most part they
were his own. 7 At Vanderbilt University, recently endowed by
the Commodore, a professor observing that "The wealth of the
Southern States has increased forty-one per cent, in the last five
years," blandly prophecied that "Southern millionaires there
will yet be, and not a few, who will use their wealth, righteously
gotten by their own honest labor, to develop their land and bless
the race." 8

Patrick Calhoun, at some risk of raising the ghost of his
grandfather, enthusiastically proclaimed that "The future of the
South is commercial and manufactural. She will exchange the
modest civilization of the country gentleman for the bustling

6 A. K. McClure, The South; Industrial, Financial, Political (Philadelphia,
1886), pp. 58-76.

6 W. D. Kelley, The Old South and the New (New York, 1888), pp. 13-14, 162.

7 Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of the Cotton Mills, p. 102. "The impulse was fur-
nished almost exclusively from within the South, against much discouragement from
selfish interests at the North . . ."

8 W. F. Tillett, "The White Man of the New South," Century Magazine, Vol.
XXXIII (March, 1887), pp. 769-776.

99

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

civilization of the towns." 9 Henry Watterson, most accurately
catching the spirit of his times, wrote, u The South, having had
its bellyful of blood, has gotten a taste of money, and is too
busy trying to make more of it to quarrel with anybody." 10

No one who has pored for months over the mass of pamphlets
and books that issued from the South in the 'eighties can find it
in his heart to condemn utterly the motives and hopes they rep-
resent. 11 For all the greed of gain and sordid acquisitiveness
that animated the average capitalist, his cause was almost en-
nobled when it became the delusion of the mass of impoverished,
defeated, and dispirited Southerners that it was likewise their
cause, their hope, the light that would lead them out of dark-
ness. With pathetic fervor and remarkable unanimity Southern
people of all classes rallied to the new slogans. Most moving,
because most deluded in its unconscious pathos, was the response
of the agricultural masses.

At a meeting of the State Agricultural Society in Atlanta an
unknown farmer rose to speak. He was "chosen from the rank
and file of this society," he said, and he described himself as "no
kid-glove farmer," but the owner of a hundred-acre farm in
Bartow County. "I emphatically earn my daily bread, and hav-
ing no other resource, I support my family on this vast estate."
He confessed to one extravagance, "taking the Daily Atlanta
Constitution, as I am determined to keep up with the times."
That he did so is evident from his address, yet in place of
Grady's cheerful optimism, his farmer disciple embraced the
new creed with something like despair : M

We must get rich! Let the young south arise in their might and com-
pete with them [Yankees] in everything but their religion and morals.
Don't mind old fogies like myself and others of the same age who are sulk-
ing in their tents.

9 Constitution, May 23, 1883.

10 New York Herald, July 19, 1887, quoted in Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland,

p. 323.

11 Of a countless number the following are a few samples : Richard H. Edmonds
(ed. of Manufacturer's Record), The South 3 s Redemption (Baltimore, 1890);
George B. Cowlan, The Undeveloped South . . . (Louisville, Ky., 1887) ; Edward
Atkinson, The Future Situs of the Principle Iron Productions of the World (Balti-
more, 1890) ; South Carolina in 1884 . . . A Brilliant Showing (Charleston, 1884) ;
A Story of Spartan Push. The Greatest Manufacturing Centre in the South (Pam-
phlet from an article in News and Courier, July 28, (?), by E. P. McKissick) ;
J. C. C. Newton, The New South and the Methodist Episcopal Church South
(Baltimore, 1887).

12 Constitution, Aug. 16, 1883.

IOO

Henry Grains Vision

Life is real, life is earnest;
In this modern fight of life,
Be not like your old ancestors,
But let money be your strife.

We have the cotton and can make cheaper goods than they can. We have
the wool, and will have sense enough to use it. We can make iron at less
cost than they can and must manufacture it into implements we are obliged
to have . . .

Get rich! Sell everything marketable and live on the culls. Let every
yellow legged chicken, dozen of eggs and pound of butter look in your eyes
as fractions of a dollar, and act accordingly. Get rich! if you have to be
mean! The world respects a rich scoundrel more than it does an honest
poor man.

Poverty may do to go to heaven with. But in this modern times . . .

Get rich ! and the south will no more beg for settlers ; the sails of your
vessels will whiten every sea; emigrants will pour in; capitalists will
invest. . . .

Get rich! and Georgia . . . will not only be the empire state of the
south, but in less than half a century will be the empire state of the whole
union.

Henry Grady featured this speech prominently in the Con-
stitution, and Tom Watson clipped it for his scrapbook. Watson
was no weathercock in these new winds of doctrine, but he could
not remain wholly insensitive to them. One can follow the cur-
rent of his mind in his Journal. In 1882 he was writing, "The
Past ! No wonder it is seemingly better. There lie our brightest
and purest hopes, our best endeavors, our loved and lost." 13
And in invocation he cried, "Come back to us once more oh
dream of the old time South I" A year later the theme was
different: "In the name of the future let the dead past bury its
dead. The world moves, let us move with it. Let us get out of
our Egypt." Prophets were not wanting, and "Should our path
be blocked by the sea, the master will divide it. Should our lips
grow parched with famine the rock will give forth water, the
desert manna." The South must prepare for prosperity. "It will
come by the stream where the factory moves. It will come
through the streets busy with hurrying feet." That was about as
near as Tom Watson ever came to being seduced by the heady
romanticism of the Southern middle class — and that was pretty
near, indeed, for the future leader of the revolt against it. At the

13 MS. Journal 2, p. 296.

IOI

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

same time he could not stomach the popular nationalism of
"some Southern newspapers and politicians who say they are
patriotic enough to support this Tariff because it builds up the
interests of the Whole nation; because it fosters American
manufactories. If this be patriotism, I am no Patriot." 14

Patriots of the required stripe were not wanting, however. In
1886 a gubernatorial candidate was required. Henry Grady,
with a magician's finesse, resurrected General John B. Gordon
in New York (and somewhat out at the elbows), put him in a
new suit, and presented him as the people's savior. 15 The stage
was faultlessly set. Poor old Jefferson Davis, having dedicated a
Confederate monument in Montgomery two days before, was
brought to Atlanta with Winnie, his daughter, to unveil a statue
of Ben Hill. Longstreet appeared in Confederate uniform. The
rebel yell was lifted, and General Gordon was ushered in — "the
Hero of Appomattox I" It was as simple as that ... in the
'eighties.

Since his questionable resignation from the Senate in 1880
General Gordon had led an adventurous life. There had been
adventures before; the Southern Publishing Company, with its
"Southern books that will not slander our people," and the
Southern Insurance Company, whose "dupes were scattered
from Baltimore to Texas." 16 Only after 1880, however, did the
General really strike his stride. After a vertiginous whirl among
several schemes, in 1883 he resigned the presidency of the
Georgia Pacific Railroad to give his attention to the Interna-
tional Railroad and Steamship Company. It was certain to make
Florida "the great commercial center of the Western World."
Thousands of pamphlets, bearing a full-page picture of the
General, were struck off as advertisements. After a noisy splurge
the enterprise suddenly collapsed; the property was attached,
and the General was off to greener pastures. 17 Meanwhile he
managed to keep a hand in the convict lease game. A contem-
porary thought the General was "the living realistic 'Mulberry

14 MS. Journal 2, pp. 317-331. Speech delivered July 4, 1883. Broadus Mitchell
writes that "The wish for nationalism and for industrialism on the part of the
South were necessarily one." The Rise of the Cotton Mills in the South, p. 237.

15 Information obtained from Raymond B. Nixon, author of Henry W. Grady,
Spokesman of the New South. (New York, 1943).

16 R. L. Felton, Memoirs, pp. 484-485; 494-495, 502.

17 John R. Jones (one of Gordon's engineers) to the editor of the Macon Tele-
graph, in R. L. Felton, op. cit., pp. 538-540.

102

Henry Grains Vision

Sellers' of America," with sufficient "skin games and south sea
bubbles" on his record "to furnish material enough for a dozen
first-class farces." 18 It was not until 1884, only two years before
his race for governor, that Gordon's complicity in the Gould-
Huntington scandal was revealed. Even then, following Grady's
lead, the state papers ignored the revealing letters, and those
who heard seemed unimpressed.

Nothing in such a record recommended the General's can-
didacy to Tom Watson, and it was he who led a victorious fight
against Gordon in McDuffie County, "one of the most valiant
and significant in the campaign." It was Watson who made the
speech in reply to General Gordon when he visited Thomson.
Gordon's opponent in the race was personally unknown in the
county, yet "all the enthusiasm, all the winning strength were
found for him from the ranks of the people of the country." 19
At the nominating convention Watson cast the vote of his county
against Gordon; but the majority of votes were cast in the op-
posite way. The Triumvirate was again in the saddle — both
seats in the Senate and the governor's chair — and Grady en-
joyed another triumph.

The following year President Cleveland visited the Piedmont
Exposition in Atlanta. While Mrs. Cleveland received at Mrs.
Grady's home, and the President dined at Governor Gordon's
and at Senator Colquitt's, throngs of Southerners crowded the
city to cheer Cleveland. Everywhere talk of the New South was
poured into the porches of his ears, "and Grady was at his elbow
to explain the significance of the phrase." It was on the advice
of Lamar and Garland that "Cleveland distributed patronage
in the South in such a way as to discourage the Bourbon or un-
reconstructed element, and bring forward the younger men." 20
Lamar had first learned of Cleveland's election from Gordon,
who wired, "Turn the rascals out." 21

Despite his half-studied detachment in the 'eighties, Watson
managed to command the continued respect of the politicians
and his share of the public's attention. In 1888 he was put at the
head of the electoral ticket of the state. He and his fellow elec-

18 T. M. Norwood, letter in Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 29, 1890.

19 Augusta Chronicle, June 10, 1886.

20 A. Nevins, Grover Cleveland, pp. 3 I 9~323-

21 Wirt A. Cate, Lucius Q. C. Lamar, p. 403.

103

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

tor from the state at large, John Temple Graves, were men-
tioned as "the two most prominent young men in the state."
Their combined weight was 227 pounds, 127 of which belonged
to Watson. Graves, however, was said to have the edge on per-
sonal beauty, for though admittedly homely he was said to be a
"perfect Adonis" when compared to his colleague. Together
they toured the state, whipping up a torpid enthusiasm for
Cleveland. Watson emphasized the tariff question. "The success
I met with was extremely gratifying," he wrote in his Journal.
"The Savannah trip was an ovation — one of the proudest occa-
sions of my life." 22 Indeed, the newspapers outdid themselves to
describe his speech, "its beauty and brilliancy and the marvelous
impression it produced. ... On every hand was heard, 'A sec-
ond Aleck Stephens.' 'I thought Stephens was dead.' "

For an incipient rebel, Watson was singularly orthodox in his
utterances at this time. His prayer, he said, was "Good Lord,
protect the people, and keep the south solid." At Warrenton,
however, he gave solemn pronouncement to a warning that must
have given pause to machine politicians of the New Departure.
"There are certain men in Congress and certain influential news-
papers in the state," he said, "which are advocating principles
diametrically opposed to the sentiment which prevails almost
unanimously throughout the south. And if the seeds of dissen-
sion sown by these parties are not uprooted . . . the result will
be that the solid south . . . will be disrupted and ruin will fol-
low to the party." 23

One who sought confirmation for such dire prophecy on the
surface of the contemporary scene would be largely disap-
pointed. On the other hand, one would find abundant evidence —
on the surface — that the new creed held full sway. Especially
was this true in the cities, and the would-be cities. The urban
South was doing its level best to play the sedulous ape to the in-
dustrial North — succeeding but poorly perhaps, but doing its
best. Jigsaw gingerbread flourished where charred colonnades
had fallen. Cast iron fences triumphed over white wooden pick-
ets; in place of the boxwood an iron stag was planted. Frock
coats and tails were discarded for smart business suits. In Au-
gusta it was said that the New South idea "is as much of a craze

22 MS. Journal 2, p. 407.

23 Macon Daily Telegraph, Oct. 6, 1888.

104

Henry Grady's Vision

as high collars and lawn tennis." Augusta boasted of being "the
Lowell of the South." Columbus aspired to be "the Pittsburgh
of the South." Atlanta was already "the legitimate offspring of
Chicago." A later writer has caught the attitude in an inimita-
ble phrase: " 'Yes sir-ree, it's a regular little old metropolis —
New York of the South we call it, 89,000 people in the last cen-
sus — and Progress? Gen-tle-men, Progress? Vll say Prog-
ress!" 2 * So on down the line: "Sandersville is fast assuming
'big city' proportions. . . . Capitalists are invited to investi-
gate." "That booming town of Wadley . . ." "Even Odum
Booms . . ." 25

To the far corners of the land the ruling genius of the New
South sped on winged feet. At Dallas Grady told hopeful farm-
ers that "plenty rides on the springing harvests," and in Boston,
in the last speech of his life, he told the Bay State Club that as
soon as the carping critics, "those noisy insects of the hour, have
perished in the heat that gave them life, and their pestilential
tongues have ceased, the great clock of this Republic will strike
the slow-moving, tranquil hours, and the watchman from the
street will cry, 'all is well with the Republic; all is well!' " 26

This is what our observer would have found on the surface of
the contemporary scene. None the less, had he looked below the
surface, had he left the railroads and the cities, had he talked to
anyone but Atlanta "boomers" and "sooners," had he listened to
anything but the din of the New South talk in his ears, he would
have discovered beneath these tranquilly oiled waters the seeth-
ing stuff of nascent revolution. Had he met the right men, he
would have discovered that Grady's carping critics had by no
means "perished in the heat," and that they were only beginning
to find their "pestilential tongues."

The earliest critics of the new order in the South raised their
heads amid the first fine flush of their enemy's victory. As a con-
sequence, they were ignored then — as they have been ever since.
Indeed, they were really very few in number. It is not without
significance that the first of them, in Georgia, was a Confederate
colonel. Charles Colcock Jones, the distinguished historian,

24 John D. Wade, "Old Wine in New Bottles," Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol.
XI, pp. 239-252.
25 Macon Telegraph, April 3, 5, 6, S, and 9, 1890; Augusta Chronicle, 1888-1891.
26 J. C. Harris, op. cit, pp. 96, 206.

105

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

whom Bancroft called "the Macaulay of the South," was of the
stripe of Bob Toombs. The Colonel never really laid down his
arms. It was not until 1887, however, that he published his
addresses on The Old South. 21 His elaborate rhetoric and eccle-
siastical tone belong to the man and his day, and were doubtless
smiled at in the bustling 'eighties :

In this epoch of commercial methods — of general and increasing poverty
in the agricultural regions of the South — of absorption by foreign capital
of favored localities, and of the creation in our midst of gigantic corpora-
tions intent upon self-aggrandizement, in this era of manifest modification,
if not actual obliteration of those sentiments and modes of thought and
action which rendered us a peculiar people — I call you to witness that
there is a growing tendency to belittle the influences, the ways, the services,
the lessons, and the characteristics of former years. ... I call you to
witness that by adulation and fulsome entertainment of itinerant promoters
and blatant schemers, seeking to inaugurate enterprises which are designed
to benefit those only who are personally interested in them, the public has
been sadly duped to its shame and loss. ... I call you to witness that a
reign of plutocrats — a subjection of men, measures and places to the will
of millionaires and plethoric syndicates — is antagonistic to the liberty of the
Republic and subversive of personal freedom. ... I call you to witness
that the alleged prosperity of this commonwealth, except in limited localities
is largely a matter of imagination. ... I call you to witness that behind
this fan-fare of trumpets proclaiming the attractions and growth of the
New South may too often be detected the deglutition of the harpy and the
chuckle of the hireling. 28

The second critic of the early period came of a different
school. He was an Independent of the Reconstruction era and
the early 'eighties, Thomas M. Norwood, former Senator from
Georgia. In 1888 appeared his Plutocracy, or American White
Slavery, a Politico-Social Novel, a diatribe against the nouveaux
riches with generous excerpts from Independent hustings. The
following is a sample :

Oh, ye generation of hypocrites and robbers! Spin your false theories;
run your printing presses; buy your scribblers; weave your sophistries;
juggle with figures; falsify balance sheets; delude your victims; rob labor;
roll your millions up to billions; but remember, "for all these things,"

27 The Old South: Addresses Delivered before the Confederate Survivors As-
sociation . . . by His Excellency, Governor John B. Gordon and by Col. Charles C.
Jones, Jr., LL.D., Augusta, Georgia, 1887.

28 "The Old South and the New South" (an address delivered April 26, 1889),
Library of Southern Literature, Vol. VII, p. 2851.

I06

Henry Grains Vision

sooner or later, the People "will bring you to judgment!" And may they
show that mercy they have not received ! 29

Here are clearly represented two traditions of rebellion : the
tradition of the Lost Cause — stately, measured, dignified, con-
scious of righteousness, but fundamentally conscious of defeat,
of irreparable defeat. Second, the tradition of the game Inde-
pendent — shrill, vituperative, a bit febrile, conscious of impo-
tence and frustration. Growing out of the two, organically a part
of both — relying upon its heritage for dignity, yet also a little
shrill with vituperation — now appeared a new and third tradi-
tion, that of the Populist rebellion. But the new rebellion had
something the two older traditions lacked. It had a tough-
minded realism, a fact-encrusted hardness that was modern. It
was not afraid of soiling its sleeves in a catch-as-catch-can tussle,
and it had a gay, half-joking fighting spirit born of an undaunted
consciousness of rags and tatters, a consciousness of nothing-to-
lose and something-to-gain.

In the late 'eighties Tom Watson was already becoming the
embodiment of the new Rebellion. Somehow, with Grady still
at the helm of the Constitution and the other papers following
pretty much in his wake, his speeches, or the parts of his speeches
that were in this vein, very seldom got into print, or were toned
down when they did. So it is that one must turn to his private
journals where he made fragmentary notes for speeches in order
to find the earliest manifestations of the new spirit of revolt.
The following notes were made for a speech delivered in I888. 30
The speaker, be it noted, was no bearded superannuate address-
ing moist-eyed Confederates, nor an embittered Independent in-
dulging in vindictive retrospection. He was a red-headed Popu-
list — in all but name — with fire in his eye and mutiny in his
voice, and he was speaking from the stump to a crowd of ragged,
impoverished farmers with the raw corn liquor of revolt racing
in their veins :

"New South" idea. If it means apology, abject submission — sycophancy
to success — perish the thought, etc. . . .

29 P. 315. The novel was published in New York. It was later said to have been
regarded by the Populists of Georgia "something as Looking Backward is by the
Nationalists." Macon Telegraph, Aug. 26, 1890. Norwood regarded the Alliance
movement as "the grandest since the declaration of independence or the destruction
of the Bastille and the overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty." Constitution, Aug. 30,
1890.

80 MS. Journal 2.

IO7

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Shame to Southern men who go to Northern Banquets & glory in our
defeat. Instances.

Unpaternal. Parricidal. . . .

Mr. Grady in his great Dallas Speech thinks that "Plenty rides on the
springing harvests!" It rides on Grady's springing imagination. Where is
this prosperity? Comment on actual conditions of Farming class.

It seems that Grady was fond of talking about his "dream
farm." He would sometimes retire to his office with instructions
to tell all callers that he had "gone to his farm." "The farm was
a dream," his biographer Joel Chandler Harris explains, "but
he no doubt got more enjoyment and profit out of it than a great
many prosy people get out of the farms that are real." 31 That
was just about what the wool-hat boys calculated. Anyway, it
was little enjoyment and no profit at all they got out of real
farms. Watson could not resist pointing a moral.

It takes these city fellows to draw ideal pictures of Farm life — pictures
which are no more true to real life than a Fashion Plate is to an actual man
or woman. ...

In Grady's farm life there are no poor cows. They are all fat! Their
bells tinkle musically in clover scented meadows & all you've got to do is
hold a pan under the udder & you catch it full of golden butter.

In real life we find the poor old Brindle cow with wolves in her back
& "hollow horn" on her head & she always wants to back up where the
wind won't play a tune on her ribs & when you milk her you get the
genuine "blue milk". . . .

In Grady's farm life — lands all "Rich — richer — richest." Crops "Good,
better, best." Snowy cotton, rustling corn etc.

In reality — barren wastes — Gullied slopes — ruined lowlands, Barn lean-
ing up against crib, Gin house on crutches. Diving down in grass for cot-
ton. . . . Billy goat would have to labor 12 hrs a day for his living.

Grady's speech an indictment against us.

He only comments on our Sins ! Nothing said of those who sin against us.

Plead guilty — Admit errors of one crop system — of carelessness — In-
dolence. . . .

But what of the Trespasses against us?

Banking Laws. Brazil helping her farmers with $6,000,000. Contrast.

We denied access to currency which is life blood of enterprise— cite as
example Bank of Augusta — Lavish loan to Georgetown & Lane R. R.
Bankruptcy.

Yet finest farm in Georgia couldn't have got any of that money which
was poured into a little hippitehop R R commencing in a cabbage patch
& ending in a cow pen — Results.

Tariff laws— 8ij4% on us.

31 J. C. Harris, op. cit., pp. 19-20.

108

Henry Grades Vision

Diversified crops will help — not cure.

These very evils — Bankruptcy laws & Tariff rates are mainly the cause
of these lesser evils of which Mr. Grady speaks. . . .

Carelessness & Indolence largely the consequence of repeated failure,
constant discouragement — Apathy stealing over energies of the people !

Organization needed —

Party for Pompey — Party for Caesar — No Party for Rome.

Henry Grady did not print that speech on the front page — as
he had the speech of his farmer disciple in 1883. He did not
print it at all, in fact. Nor did he print the following speech that
Watson made a year later : 32

And yet the city orators say that the great clock of the Republic will
keep time as usual & that the Watchman upon the Tower will sing out
"All's Well with the Republic, All's Well."

There's no foretelling what the Watchman may say — I would first
wish to know who the Watchman is — if he is floating with the tide which
carries prosperity to certain classes at the expense of others — If he is the
known champion of Rail Road kings, & R. R. combinations. If he is cheek
by jowl with the heretofore dominant influences which have sought to
fasten upon us forever the curse of High Tariff, & has prostituted his paper
& his talents. . . .

Then indeed such a watchman may cry out "All's well."

Rather, O my countrymen, listen to those who tell you of the danger
which threatens — who warn you to put on your armor, & man the
walls . . .

32 MS. Journal 2, p. 409.

109

9

The Rebellion of the Farmers

The Southern farmer had listened apathetically to
preachments on diversified crops, scientific method, and
improvements from Grady and others of his sincere well-wishers
ever since the War. He grudgingly acknowledged the pertinence
of their advice, but he observed that Southern agriculture con-
tinued to sink lower and lower in a morass of despair. Vaguely,
but with mounting conviction, the farmer realized that these
preachments did not touch the heart of his trouble. Indeed, an
eighteenth-century observer, writing of the plight of the metayer
under the old regime in France, came nearer the truth when he
said, "It is as impossible for one of these wretches to be a good
farmer as it is for a galley convict to be a good admiral." *

The Southern farmer had lost his independence, his industrial
autonomy. In the grip of the lien system — which more univer-
sally characterized the post-bellum economy than ever slavery
described the ante-bellum system — the farmer, former masters,
the majority of them, along with former slaves and yeomen, had
been reduced to a state of peonage to the town merchant. The
lien system converted the Southern economy into a vast pawn
shop. Its evil effects did not end when the farmer signed away
his future crop, for that act merely started a vicious circle of
compounded evils. It meant that until he paid the last dollar of
his debt, and his crop was often found inadequate for that, he
was dependent for his every purchase, clothing, food, imple-
ments, fertilizer, everything, upon his creditor merchant, who
charged him from twenty to fifty per cent more than the cash
price and dictated the amount and quality of the purchase.

1 Leo Gershoy, The French Revolution and Napoleon, p. 42.

no

The Rebellion of the Farmers

Moreover, the merchant bound his Hen thrall to the one-crop
cotton system "by a law as inexorable as any ever promulgated
by the most despotic earthly government" in order to insure his
investment by a cash crop, and at the same time to increase the
farmer's dependence upon him for his exorbitantly priced food-
stuffs. By submitting to the one-crop system (and there was no
choice) the farmer further depleted his lands and became more
dependent upon the merchant's high-priced fertilizer and food,
and further increased the surplus and decreased the price of the
very product upon which he staked all. At the same time he
signed away his right to buy in the cheapest market, the farmer
pledged himself to sell in the lowest market. By the very nature
of the system he was made an easy victim of every brand of chi-
canery and false dealing known to business, for the power was
all on one side, and mercy and probity are virtues rarely com-
pounded with absolute power. Such was the strait-jacket in which
from eighty to ninety per cent of the cotton growers, proprietors
and tenants, black and white, normally found themselves. 2

Even "Pig-Iron" Kelley, wearing the rosy glasses of the New
South, admitted that "apart from the New South," that is, away
from the cities and railroads, "the same wretched poverty pre-
vails among the Southern people now, twenty-two years after the
close of the war." 3 The situation was even worse, for hope and
effort and spirit had been all but exhausted by repeated failure.
Finding himself hopelessly entangled, the farmer had almost
ceased to struggle. His land declined in value and washed away,
fences disappeared, buildings became propped ruins, machinery
fell to pieces. The mortgage was foreclosed, and he moved to
a poorer farm, to slide further down the scale of living to the
margin of subsistence.

A Southerner of the period, whose sympathy was with the
farmer, described the life around him: "Each year the plunge
into debt is deeper; each year the burden is heavier. The strug-
gle is woe-begone. Cares are many, smiles are few, and the com-

2 M. B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, pp. 122-123, 145-154, 195; R. P.
Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, pp. 32-36; A. M. Arnett, Populist
Movement in Georgia, pp. 49-59; J. D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 40-49;
C. H. Otken, The Ills of the South, Chapters II and III. Hallie Farmer, "Economic
Background of Southern Populism," South Atlantic Quarterly (Jan., 1930), pp.
406-427; G. K. Holmes, "The Peons of the South," Annals of the American Acad-
emy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. IV (Sept., 1893), PP» 265-274.

8 W. D. Kelley, The Old South and the New, p. 121.

Ill

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

forts of life are scantier. . . . Anxious days, sleepless nights,
deep wrinkles, gray hairs, wan faces, cheerless old age, and per-
haps abject poverty make up in part the melancholy story. . . .
Independence ! It is gone. Humiliation and dependence bow the
head of the proud spirit." 4

This was a drama that Tom Watson had seen acted out to the
bitter end by his own family — from John's bepillared mansion
to the "miserable shanty" on the swamp near Augusta. In it he
had had some lines to speak himself, playing the part of a plow
boy in Screven County — his brother the part of a share-cropper
under a planter's lash in McDuffie. There was no part of the
story he did not know, and there was no part he would not re-
late at the hustings, on the stump, in formal debate or address.
His opponents found something unanswerable about the story.

You were born in plenty and spent your childhood in plenty. I had it
too. Then you lost your houses. The sheriff's red flag was planted at your
front gate. You and yours took down the family pictures from the wall,
picked some favorite flowers from the grave yard and took your weary
march out into a strange, cold world. You walked the roads asking for
work. I have done it too. 5

He knew the proprietor's story and he knew the tenant's :

Here is a tenant — I do not know, or care, whether he is white or black,
I know his story. He starts in and pays $25 for a mule, 1,000 pounds of
cotton for rent, and two bales for supplies. By the time he pays for that
mule, and the store account, and the guano, he has not enough money left
to buy a bottle of laudanum, and not enough cotton to stuff his old lady's
ear.

A voice — "How did you find that out?"

I've been through the mill. I have been between the plow handles as
well as in office. . . .

The land gets poorer year by year and the landlord has no money to
improve it — the tenant has no money to improve it. Thousands of your
Georgia homes are going to decay. I have witnessed it, and it makes my
heart ache with sadness. It is a bad thing for the landlord in another
respect. He cannot command labor. Why? Because by the time he pulls
out a pencil to write an order the laborer is mad. Why? He knows what
an order to the store means. He knows perfectly well that he cannot get
goods as cheap as for cash . . . 6

Watson knew that the lien system merely provided the shack-
les of the farmer's economic slavery. It was only the machinery

4 C. H. Otken, The Ills of the South, pp. 21-22.

5 T. E. W. in The Cotton Plant (Orangeburg, S.C.), Oct. 31, 1891.

* People's Party Paper, Oct. 14, 1892.

112

The 'Rebellion of the Farmers

of exploitation. How was it that cotton had fallen from a dollar
a pound at the close of the War to an average of twenty cents in
the 'seventies, nine cents in the 'eighties, and seven cents in the
'nineties — a level below the cost of production — and had stayed
there? He was capable of some shrewd guesses as to what forces
placed his class in bondage and kept it bound to their own profit.
There were the banks, who refused to lend money on the best
farm in the state ; Wall Street speculators, who gambled on his
crop futures; the railroad owners, who evaded taxes, bought
legislatures, and overcharged him with discriminatory rates ; the
manufacturers, who taxed him with a high tariff ; the trusts, that
fleeced him with high prices; the middleman, who stole his
profit; the city folk generally, with their superior airs, their tax-
dodging ways, and their incomprehensible patter about the New
South; the government itself, with its iniquitous currency laws
and its class favoritism ; and finally his own beloved Democratic
party of so many fond associations — but now the property, body
and soul, of an enemy class. And yet,

We are told in the splendid phraseology of silver-tongued orators from
the city that our country is absolutely smothered under the plenteous flow
of milk and honey of another Canaan. The city of Atlanta [is] especially
noted for that kind of tom-foolery. Listening to the inspired clap-trap of
some of its Politicians & Editors one would suppose that throughout the
South there was no discomfort in the Present & no apprehension for the
future. 7

Men who do not know the difference between a may pop and a rabbit
hunt find a poem in every boll of cotton, a romance in every ear of corn.
. . . And yet our newspapers are absolutely crowded with advertisements
of sheriffs' sales, and in the county of Richmond alone I noticed from the
Chronicle that there were some two hundred [farms] for sale on the first
Tuesday of November. . . . There is no romance in having landed prop-
erty excluded from the banks, and in having twenty-five per cent upon our
money; no romance in being fleeced by a fifty per cent tariff; no romance
in seeing other classes and other properties exempted from taxation, and
realizing fabulous dividends upon their investments, when the lands are
taxed to their uttermost dollar and farming has paid no dividend since the
war. 8

Another thing Watson understood, a poignant, personal
thing, was that essentially the same men or their sons worked
the same land now as had worked it in i860. He had only to
look about him and recall his childhood to see what a difference

7 MS. notes for a speech, Nov. 7, 1889, Watson MSS.

8 Clipping, MS. Journal 2, pp. 433-441.

"3

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

those thirty years had worked. Then the manners, customs,
standards, ideas, and ideals of society were fixed by the cotton
farmer. His ideas and interests were reflected in pulpit, press,
courtroom, legislative halls, classroom — even the cities took
their tone from the farm. Never did a class more completely
dominate a society than then.

And now — the farmer was ignored even by his own party.
Wealth, power, and prestige no longer attached to land but to
stocks and bonds, banks and factories. Now it was the shibboleths
of the city capitalists that the farmer read in every newspaper,
heard from every preacher, legislator, and politician. The
former lord of a thousand acres and most honored squire in his
county could not now ride to town on the back of his mule for a
sack of meal without running the risk of being patronized by any
urbanite from a banker to a bootblack. The mass of small farm-
ers, who once shared the planter's prestige, had become peons. 9
Watson declared:

The contrast between the status of the southern farmer before the war
and at the present time is indeed discouraging. Then their [sic] influence
was felt in every department of business — in commerce, in the legislative
halls, in Congress. But now, while every other avocation has its advocates
and champions in positions of power and importance, the farmer is practi-
cally unrepresented. The entire drift of legislation has been, and is yet,
continuously and persistently against him. 10

Our great trouble has been the carelessness and easy good nature with
which we have allowed others to profit by our toils and allowed the legis-
lation of this land to drift into the infamies of the tariff and the banking
laws, and the chartered exemptions of special enterprises from the burden
of the government which protects them. 11

If his analysis was correct, an "apathy" had stolen over the
energies of his people, "largely the consequence of repeated fail-
ure, constant discouragement." This apathy, and not "careless-
ness and indolence," accounted for the decay Grady described.
His people had lost spirit, fight. And yet he felt that these same
people came of a richer tradition of rebellion than any in the
land. Somehow that deep-lying vein of rebellion must be tapped,
must be made to yield its dark riches in this time of need. It was

9 B. B. Kendrick, "Agrarian Discontent in the South: 1880-1900," Annual Report
of the American Historical Association, 1920, pp. 267-372.

10 Constitution, Sept. 14, 1888.

11 Clipping, MS. Journal 2, pp. 433-441.

114

The 'Rebellion of the Farmers

with some such reflections as these, certainly with no pipe-dream
delusions of restoring a feudal slavocracy, that he invoked the
"dream of the old-time South" — attributing to the old regime,
as he did so, certain virtues that existed only in his imagination :

Fill our souls with thy beauty, our hearts with thy inspiration, till every
man of us shall deeply resolve that our laws shall be so framed, our Govern-
ment so administered that every citizen however rich shall bear an equal
share of its burdens & every laborer however poor, an equal share of its
blessings. . . .

Let there come once more to Southern heart and Southern brain the
Resolve — waste places built up.

In the rude shock of civil war that dream perished.

Like victims of some horrid nightmare, we have moved ever since —
powerless — oppressed — shackled — u

At least there would appear to exist more than a tenuous con-
nection between these musings and the following appeal made
from the stump in the thick of the fight :

To you who grounded your muskets twenty-five years ago I make my
appeal. The fight is upon you — not bloody as then — but as bitter; not with
men who come to free your slaves, but who come to make slaves of you.
And to your sons also I call: and I would that the common spirit might
thrill every breast throughout this sunny land, till from every cotton field,
every hamlet, every village, every city, might come the shout of defiance
to these Rob Roys of commerce and to the robber tariff, from whose foul
womb they sprang. 13

The fact was that Watson's call to arms fell upon the ears of
men who were already mobilizing — enlisting under the banner
of the Farmers' Alliance. The origin of the Alliance, unlike that
of the Grange, had been spontaneous and diffuse: in a frontier
county of Texas, in a log cabin schoolhouse in backwoods Ar-
kansas, in a rural parish of Louisiana. 14 Finding their purposes
the same, these separate societies consolidated under a single
name, and, in one of the most amazing feats of organization in
American history, attained a membership of three millions in the
South alone by 1890. In March, 1887, two organizers from
Texas entered the virgin territory of Georgia, touched a match
to the tinder of discontent, and almost immediately the state was

12 Notes for a speech, Watson MSS.

13 Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 14, 1888. Italics mine.

14 W. S. Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance, pp. 62, 281; A. M. Arnett,
op. ciU, pp. 76-77 ; J. D. Hicks, op. ciU, Chap. IV.

"5

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

aflame. Hundreds of "lodges" sprang into existence, each with
its "lecturer"; organizers rode all over the state; dozens of
papers and journals were founded, or changed their tone and
adopted the new slogans; great quantities of reform literature
were distributed. In less than three years 134 out of 137 coun-
ties in the state sent delegates to the state convention ; well over
2,000 lodges were established with a membership of more than
ioo,ooo. 15

The thing looked innocuous enough at first. Henry Grady
gave it his blessings, and many machine politicians were found
in surprisingly harmonious accord with Alliance principles.
It would doubtless have remained innocuous had some of its
most prominent leaders had their way. In 1877 C. W. Macune
wrote : "Now to sum up : The Alliance is a strictly white man's
non-political, secret business association." 16 But within two
years' time not one of these adjectives could be applied to the
association qualified by the adverb "strictly." Signs of change
were not long in appearing.

The farmers were encouraged by a taste of success in their
cooperative schemes. The Georgia exchange, one of the most
successful, saved its patrons over $200,000 in fertilizers alone in
one year. Cooperatives of many sorts, gins, stores, warehouses,
sprang up all over the South. One farmer answered the charge
of "socialism" with "a few blood-curdling facts" about the sav-
ings on guano, and taunted, "It is a 'socialistic' order and thou-
sands of the best farmers in this and thirteen other states are its
'bomb-throwers.' " 17 The Negro farmer was soon recognized as
too costly a sacrifice to "white supremacy" and was organized in
a parallel Alliance of one and a quarter millions in the South.
Likewise, the Alliancemen were quick to mark out their enemies :
excluded from membership were bank cashiers, railroad officials,
real estate agents, cotton buyers and sellers, practicing lawyers,
and anyone "who buys or sells for gain." M

The conflict between town and country was manifest in many

15 A. W. Ivey, chapter on Georgia in Hand Book and History of the National
Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, pp. 47-49 ; W. S. Morgan, op, cit., p. 295 ;
C. W. Macune, quoted in Progressive Farmer, Sept. 8, 1887; A. M. Arnett, op. cit.,
p. 100; J. D. Hicks, op. cit., Chap. IV.

"^Progressive Farmer, Sept. 8, 1887.

17 Letter in Progressive Farmer, April 17, 1888.

18 R. L. Felton, op. cit., p. 115.

116

The 'Rebellion of the Farmers

ways. The Arkansas Wheel even prohibited the organization of
Wheels u within the limits of incorporated towns." 19 The official
organ of the Georgia Alliance observed that "it is a well known
fact that in many of the Georgia towns there has been manifest
secret, but bitter and most vindictive animosity against the Alli-
ance movement, and every scheme possible has been resorted to
that would bring it into contempt or ridicule. . . . Now, so
long as this spirit of hatred is manifested against this organi-
zation of farmers, is it but natural and admirable for them to
show a spirit of resentment?" 20

As for the "non-political' ' aspect of the Alliance, as early as
February, 1888, one of its national leaders, a Southerner, was
writing, "We are not to be intimidated or frightened by the cry
that 'the farmers are going into polities'. . . . Who in all this
broad land has a better right 'to go into politics' than he who
clothes and feeds the world?" a

This movement, even in its incipient stages, can not be fully
described or understood in terms of platforms and statistics.
There was too much emotion in it for that, and at the source
of that great river of emotion lay something more than crop
failures and windy politicians. Two penetrating students of the
movement have said that "One must go back to Medieval Eu-
rope, on the eve of the First Crusade, for an emotional situation
comparable . . ." 22 This emotional-religious element in the
movement together with the farmers' habit of dramatizing their
enemies in picturesque and pungent epithet — the silver "con-
spiracy," the railroad "tyrants," "the grasp of the gigantic, cold-
blooded money trust" — has been the subject of much rarefied
merriment among superior scholarly circles. During the period,
even Professor Turner apologized for the farmers' "lax finan-
cial integrity" with the remark that "A primitive society can
hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the
complexity of business interests in a developed society." 23

The farmers cared no more for the opinions of the captains of
scholarship than for those of the captains of industry, and they
knew more about the "complexity of business interests" than

19 W. S. Morgan, op. cit., p. 83.

20 Clipping from Southern Alliance Farmer, Watson Scrapbooks.

21 L. L. Polk, in Progressive Farmer, Feb. 16, 1888.

22 Hacker and Kendrick, The United States since 1865, P- 301.

23 Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 32.

117

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

some cared to admit. The movement was rural in origin and
character, and it was but natural that the powerful feelings it
awakened should find expression in religious moods and forms.
Thus, the president of the Alliance in Watson's county, himself
a preacher, said that "the Alliance was born in heaven" ; another
member thought "the Alliance next in importance to the church
of the living God"; while Senator Peffer believed that "the
Alliance is in a great measure taking the place of churches." The
first state convention of the Populists in Georgia was opened
with "the grand old long meter doxology," and Western meet-
ings were "conducted on the same principle as oldtime religious
revival meetings." Of the Populist platform, Watson once
wrote: "It is sacred to us because it gives hope to our despair;
gives expression to our troubles; gives voice to our wants. Our
wives have knelt and prayed for it. Our children have learned
to love it. Not a church in all the land, where God's blessing
has not been invoked upon it."

Still more danger to the business man's regime, the New
South order, lay in the fact that the farmer was beginning to
think as well as to throb. A hostile observer commented that
"The Alliance came into the State a masterful pedagogue — the
Alpha and Omega of all politics, State and National." 24
Thumbed copies of Donnelly's Caesar's Column, Bellamy's
Looking Backward, and numberless pamphlets, tracts, and books
were circulated from hand to hand. 26 Those who did not read
them heard them quoted by those who had. Country school
houses and churches rang with the speeches of farmers who had
never debated or read or thought before. Like water from a
duck's back the hoary platitudes of professional politicians
rolled from heads wrapped in forbidden notions of government
ownership and cooperatives.

Of this bracing intellectual ferment Tom Watson drank
thirstily and responded to it as to an intoxicant. "A new era has
dawned in Georgia politics," he announced. "The old order of
things is passing away. The masses are beginning to arouse
themselves, reading for themselves, thinking for themselves.
The great currents of thought quicken new impulses. At the bar

24 Washington Post, Aug. 3, 1892.

25 Watson's personal library, owned by Judge Uly O. Thompson, Miami, Florida,
contains many such works.

118

The 'Rebellion of the Farmers

of public opinion the people are pressing their demands and in-
sisting that they be heard." 26

Thirty years later, at the age of sixty, as his mind reverted to
those stirring days of '89, he wrote:

What radiant visions lured us toward the future! What noble deeds we
would achieve ! What fame and influence would be our reward !

Were conditions wrong? We would right them. Were laws bad? We
would make them good. Were the weak oppressed? We would crush the
oppressors. Were righteous principles enchained, like captive maidens in
the olden castles of Feudal lands and lords ? We would put on the bright
armor of chivalry, ride forth to the rescue and smite the dungeon-door with
the battle-axe of Lionheart. 27

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" — in 1889, as in 1789, as
in the salad days of any revolution — and to be young, to be
thirty-three, to be a student of the French Revolution, was, one
may surmise, "very heaven."

Watson himself was never a member of the Alliance. He
might have qualified for membership when he ceased active law
practice, but he preferred not to. "I never did enter any council
of theirs," he said. "I did not lead the Alliance; I followed the
Alliance, and I am proud that I did follow it." 28

But Watson followed with works as well as with faith, and it
was such "following" as he did and such works as he performed
that constituted real leadership in the Alliance. There was the
case of the fight against the jute-bagging trust. The official or-
gan of the State Alliance went so far as to state that the farmers'
"reason for banding together is fully explained in the recent
bagging trust." A typical reason rather than the reason was
probably meant. Ben Terrell, national lecturer from Texas, after
visiting 105 Georgia counties, commented upon the fight on the
trust that he had "never seen anything like it." He attributed
the phenomenal growth of the Alliance to the success of this
fight.

In mid-summer, 1888, it was revealed that a trust had been
formed in St. Louis to control the price of jute-bagging. Week
after week the price was pushed up and up until it was increased
more than a hundred per cent. Owing to the Liverpool rules in

26 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 31, 1889.

27 T. E. W., Political and Economic Handbook, p. 453.

28 MS. of speech delivered in Thomson, Nov. 19, 1904, Watson MSS.

n9

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

buying, the bagging was an absolute loss to the farmer, and this
doubling of the burden would mean some $2,000,000 loss to the
cotton producers. This blow on top of a bad season and low
prices was a challenge to fight. Watson pictures the origin of
the fight against the trust as spontaneous : a farmer came to his
office asking him to write a call for a mass meeting. This done,
handbills were printed, and on September 10, 1888, some 800
farmers met in Thomson. Watson himself launched the crusade
in a widely copied speech, said to have been "equal to any that
ever fell from the lips of Toombs or Stephens." *®

It was Watson's wish "to make this jute bagging a symbol of
the wrong they put upon us" :

Well might outsiders say to the "jute combine," as every Monday
morning they raise the price on the Southern farmer, "Hit him again,
he's got no friends!" What shall we do? Grin and endure it? I say no!
. . . The Southern man who can contemplate this outrage and not get mad
hasn't got enough blood to fatten a mosquito. This, as well as all other
combinations of the kind, is clearly illegal, and ought to be promptly and
effectually crushed by Congress. But we know that it is folly to expect
aid from that direction. ... It is useless to ask Congress to help us, just
as it was folly for our forefathers to ask for relief from the tea tax ; and
as they revolted ... so should we. . . . The Standard of Revolt is up.
Let us keep it up and speed it on. 80

The plan was to boycott jute and use cotton and pinestraw
substitutes. Watson urged the farmers to "Listen to no man who
croaks, 'Too late, we must submit F " Such counselors were plen-
tiful. One paper thought, "It seems impossible to defeat the
trust." Another denounced Watson's effort because it would
make the farmers "fail to meet their obligations with the mer-
chants" who "carried" them. Watson promptly answered each
critic with furious onslaughts. His battle cry was taken up all
over the state, and in spite of a multitude of handicaps the farm-
ers won a victory over the trust. 81

The fight was renewed the following year with more thor-
ough organization and preparation. As the result of an invitation
issued by the president of the Georgia State Alliance to a confer-
ence on the bagging-trust fight, Macune, the national president,

20 T. E. W., Political and Economic Handbook, p. 453 ; handbill in Watson MSS.,
Chapel Hill; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

80 Printed in Augusta Chronicle, Sept 14, 1888; also in the Columbia Sentinel,
Sept. 20, 1888, and widely in the rest of the Georgia papers.

31 Constitution, Aug. 22, 1889; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

120

The Rebellion of the Farmers

issued an official call for a meeting in Birmingham "To decide
upon the necessity of all the States' cooperating in this conflict
with the jute bagging trust." 82 No lack of fervor was shown in
the crusade. L. L. Polk told of talking at the Georgia Alliance
convention at Macon to "a regular 'Georgia Cracker,' " dressed
out in cotton bagging, who told him that "Three hundred and
sixty members in his county have uniform suits of it and they
are literally the cotton bagging brigade." On Alliance day at the
Piedmont Exposition in Atlanta, in the presence of 20,000 Alli-
ance delegates from South Atlantic states, a double wedding was
performed, in which "both brides and both grooms were attired
in cotton bagging costumes." That year the jute trust suffered
an admitted defeat and came to terms.

Watson's friends held that "he called the first meeting on the
jute bagging question and was the first public man in the State
to address the people and arouse their indignation and to advise
the Boycott." His own claim that he "led the fight in Georgia"
met with wide acceptance. 33

The results of the victory over the jute trust, except in im-
mediate economic terms, are difficult to estimate. A Populist
novel written in Georgia expressed the view that the fight had
taught Populists "the needed lesson that by uniting they were
sufficiently powerful to overthrow all monopolies and bid de-
fiance to every form of imposition." It had given them "confi-
dence in themselves and in each other, and one of the first fruits
of this great self-confidence showed itself in a disposition to take
a more active part in political affairs and to insist upon nominat-
ing men from among themselves for all offices." 84

Watson echoed that judgment: "New wine of reform is not to
be put into old bottles of ring politicians. If nothing else was
done by the jute fight I would hail it with delight as the resur-
rection trump which aroused the dead hopes and courage of the
Southern people, and brought forth that splendid purpose to
protest against wrong and bring to the future equality and
right." 35

32 Progressive farmer, May 7, 1889, and June 4, for report on meeting.

33 Charleston News and Courier, May 19, 1890; McDuffie Journal, Aug. 16, 1889;
T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. 13 ; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

34 Charles C. Post, Congressman Svoanson, pp. 333-335.

35 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 31, 1889; same idea in the Atlanta Journal, July 31,
1890.

121

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

In December, 1889, two hundred delegates from the South-
ern Alliance and seventy-five delegates from the Northern Alli-
ance met in separate sessions in St. Louis, both with the hope
of effecting a consolidation of the two orders. The Southern
Alliance was much larger than the Northern Alliance; it had
more vigorous, effective, and prominent leaders; it was more
centralized and better organized. And first and last it was more
radical. 36 The history of the Alliance officially adopted at St.
Louis had as part of its title The Impending Revolution. It was
the Arkansas author of this work who wrote, u The spirit of re-
bellion against the many evils is growing stronger. . . . Thou-
sands of men who have already lost all hope of a peaceable solu-
tion of the great question of human rights are calmly waiting
the issue." 87 Whenever this note of revolution — bloodless or
otherwise — was sounded in the movement — and that was not
infrequently — it usually came out of the South. Throughout the
history of the movement a large element among the Western
farmers was afraid of this tendency of their Southern allies. The
Northerners were generally more content with gradual reform.
A hostile Kansas editor warning the G. A. R. of the preponder-
ance of the South exhibited more historical perspicacity than he
knew when he branded the whole Alliance movement a "rebel
yell."

Also present at St. Louis were delegates from the Knights of
Labor, the Colored Alliance, and the Farmers' Mutual Benefit
Association. For various reasons, and despite numerous conces-
sions on the part of the Southern order, the Northern and South-
ern alliances were unable to consolidate. The state alliances of
Kansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota, however, seceded
from the Northern Alliance and joined the Southern Alliance
under the name, Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union. The
new Southern Alliance then united upon one platform with the
Knights of Labor, and to emphasize its friendliness to labor,
amended its constitution so as to permit mechanics to join the
order.

The platform agreed upon by labor and the Southern farmer,
and nearly duplicated by the Northern Alliance, demanded the

30 J. D. Hicks, op. cit., pp. 112-127; W. S. Morgan, op. cit, passim; Handbook of
the Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union, passim.
37 W. S. Morgan, op. cit., p. 769.

122

The Rebellion of the Farmers

abolition of national banks, the prevention of speculation in fu-
tures of all agricultural and mechanical products, the free and
unlimited coinage of silver, reclamation of excessive lands
granted or sold to corporations or aliens; decrease of the tax
burden on the masses, fractional paper currency, and govern-
ment ownership and operation of means of transportation and
communication. 88 Col. L. L. Polk of North Carolina was elected
president by the St. Louis meeting, and Southern leaders pretty
much commanded the national movement all along the line. 39

When the Georgia Alliance delegates returned from St. Louis,
a perceptible sigh of relief went up from the ranks of the New
South. The scare of a third party had been laid. It seemed that
the farmers had declared war only to lay down their arms.
"Everything is serene in Georgia," reported the Constitution, a
little too brightly, "and yet the alliance men of the state were
represented by a number of very prominent men. There is no
sign of political revolt here. ... In the south, whatever may
be the condition of affairs, the farmers and the alliance men are
compelled by circumstances to carry out their views and reforms
through the democratic party. There are some things more im-
portant than reforms that merely affect the pocket." 40 Here in
this appeal to "white supremacy" was raised the New South's
perennial answer to a third party threat.

The Constitution took pleasure in quoting the New York
Herald to the effect that "Northern capital is flowing into the
southern states by the millions ... It is not extravagant, but
the simplest truth to say that the south is just now the most
prosperous or the most rapidly and richly developing part of the
union." 41 From that observation the editor four days later drew
a moral:

Any legislation that would tend to unsettle things and check southern
progress is viewed with unfriendly eyes in Northern commercial centers.

After all, business is the biggest thing in this country. When the princes
of commerce and industry say to the politicians that they must let dangerous
experiments alone they will be heard and obeyed. . . .

38 J. D. Hicks, op. cit., pp. 1 19-125; A. M. Arnett, op. cit., pp. 82-83.

39 Progressive Farmer, Dec. 10, 1889.

40 Constitution, Jan. 13, 1890.

41 Ibid., Jan. 4, 1890.

123

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Politicians may talk, but business men will act, control and dominate the
destinies of this common-sense country . . .

From the urban-industrial South, the New South of all the
eleven states of the former Confederacy, came similar news and
similar deductions. During the first quarter of 1890 it seems
that "The Tradesman's reports from all sections of the South-
ern states indicate the planting of more industries in the South
at present than at any previous time in its history." ** Georgia
headed the list.

With such sugar-plum visions dancing in his head, and with
a certain willful blindness toward a black horizon, the editor
wrote :

The CONSTITUTION spreads this morning the blessed gospel of
sunshine!

Its sails are bellying with the rising winds of trade. Its expanded columns
carry the news of cheerful and hopeful enterprise. On every side things
move well. In politics, in business, the outlook is brightening.

That editorial was written in April, 1890.

42 Macon Telegraph, March 30, 1890.

124

IO

The Victory of i8go

"Shall the people accept orders from Congress?"

"Who shall rule, the politicians, or the people?"

"Shall we allow these, our servants, to dictate to us, their masters?"

"We are sovereigns of this land and we come to our representatives and
not to our lords."

"Shall the agent be allowed to grow too insolent to obey the instructions
of his principal?"

"When your congressmen come home and begin their preconcerted at-
tack on your platform, ask them what better plan they have advocated dur-
ing all these years that they have been enjoying fat salaries." 1

THESE AND SIMILAR CHALLENGES peppered the columns of
the Georgia Alliance papers ; they were flung in the faces
of Congressional committees; they glared from the letters of
constituents. It was in such a mood that the Alliance in 1890
determined to apply its "yardstick," the St. Louis platform. All
candidates must "stand up and be measured." Woe to any office
holder, of whatever military rank or valor, who confessed
doubts as to the subtreasury plan, abolition of the national
banks, or government ownership of the means of transportation
and communication.

Unlike their Western brethren, who were already resorting
to independent political organizations, the Southern Alliance-
men believed themselves powerful enough, by boring from
within, to take over the old party for their own purposes and
thus to work their reforms. Why run the risk of political anarchy
and a Negro-Republican victory, it was argued, when by voting
solidly the Alliance could be the Democratic party. Talk of a

1 Clippings, 1889-1890, Watson Scrapbooks.

125

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

third party was frowned down. The farmers had their candidate
for every office. Revolution was to come from within.

In January, 1889, twenty-two months before the election, the
press had observed that "Watson is actively in the race." But it
was a full two years before the election, during the jute trust
fight, that, so he writes in his Journal, he determined to run for
election to Congress from the Tenth District.

Against him was soon brought the charge that virtually all
Alliance candidates met: He was merely "riding the Alliance
horse into office." He reminded his critic that the pursuit of
his profession would yield him a larger income than the office
he sought. As for the sincerity of his belief in the Alliance plat-
form, he had practiced its principles before they were expressed
in a platform:

My interest is the same as theirs; my grievance as a farmer the same
as theirs ; my attacks on the legislation of the day the same as theirs. Then
why shouldn't we fight side by side to achieve the common victory?

With characteristic whole-heartedness Watson embraced the
entire St. Louis platform. He defended with impartial zeal
every plank in it, unequivocally, along with the additional de-
mands of the state Alliance, as well as free trade, and the sub-
treasury plan. The farmers did not have to be convinced of his
loyalty. He was no over-night convert. His record as an inde-
pendent rebel went back to his revolt against the Grady-Pat
Walsh campaign for Colquitt in 1880. He had fought their bat-
tles against the convict lease system and the railroads in the
Legislature; out of office he had opposed Grady's New De-
parture candidates. His fame as a leader of the crusade against
the jute trust had spread not only over the whole state, but into
other states as well.

The Alliance papers rallied to his support. "It is the plain and
unmistakable duty of every Allianceman, every farmer, every
lover of good government to support him," urged one. Another
thought that, "The combination which is formed to defeat the
Hon. Thos. Watson in the Tenth is shameful." Another that,
"Brave Tom Watson, the young man eloquent, is making a
fight for you in the Tenth District; against him are all the allied
powers of money, with their hirelings, but he will win, for his

126

The Victory of 1 8 go

cause is just and fair and the farmers of the Tenth District are
not white slaves."

Watson's opponent, the incumbent from the Tenth running
for reelection, represented about the best the New Departure
produced in the way of statesmen. At the same time, except that
he was free from any suspicion of corruption, the man and his
career in every respect conformed to the dominant politics and
philosophy of the 'eighties. The Hon. George T. Barnes, called
"the weightiest man in Congress," was a portly gentleman, ami-
able, mild of manner, and rotund of middle, with a broad ex-
panse of shirt front and an impressive presence. His title of
"Major" was honorably won in the service of the Confederacy.
He was a resident of the city of Augusta, "a man of comfortable
fortune, and president of the Augusta Gas Company," which
enjoyed a valuable franchise on street railways. 2

As long as there had been a Tenth District, Augusta had fur-
nished its representative, and that representative had been Major
Barnes. Three successive terms he had served, each time elected
without opposition. The Major was said to have "been in office
or an applicant for office ever since he was twenty-one years old,"
and he was now fifty-seven. 3

A defender of Barnes wrote that "There is really no issue be-
tween Mr. Barnes and his opponent except that Mr. Barnes is
in and Mr. Watson wishes to be in." As proof of the charge, he
appealed to Barnes' record in Congress, presenting evidence to
show him a champion of tariff reform, free silver, moderate in-
flation, and an enemy of the national bank. Furthermore, he had
obtained a federal court building, a liberal appropriation for the
Savannah River harbor, and was engaged in securing a Govern-
ment arsenal — all for Augusta.

For his part, Watson was inclined to take few exceptions to
these claims. What's more, he believed that Major Barnes was
"as nice a man as ever lived" and that he "probably killed as
many Yankees as they did of him." He intended to conduct the
campaign upon a dignified and impersonal level. But there were
other issues. The trouble with the Major was that his record was

2 Charleston News and Courier, May 19, 1890; Biographical Dictionary of the
American Congress, 1774.-1927, p. 672.
8 Augusta Chronicle, July 22, 1890.

127

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

entirely "negative." When he addressed his constituency the year
before, he "didn't say a word about the great revolution that
is taking place among the people," and he had "contributed noth-
ing to the enthusiasm which exists among the people for re-
form." He did not understand the movement; he had lost touch
with the masses and was out of sympathy with them. Further-
more, the Major was closely associated with open enemies of the
Alliance. Particularly, there was Pat Walsh, editor of the Au-
gusta Chronicle, Barnes' "bosom friend" and supporter, who was
bitterly hostile to the Alliance. Nor had the Major stood up pub-
licly to be measured by the Alliance "yardstick." Again, he was
a "defeatist," inclined to point to the Republican majority, throw
up his hands, and wait for the Democratic innings. That atti-
tude would not do these days, Watson assured Barnes. 4

Apart from early decisions and unofficial reports, the first for-
mal announcement of Watson's candidacy was not made until
August, 1889. Shortly afterward Watson sent an invitation to
Major Barnes, then in Augusta, to meet him in a series of de-
bates on the stump. Barnes declined courteously, explaining that
it was fourteen months before the election, and that neither he
nor the farmers had time for debate now. Watson enjoyed read-
ing the Major's reply to crowds of cheering farmers, who were
obviously taking time for debate, whether the Major did or not.

With a speech at Thomson, Watson "fired the first shot" of
the campaign: "It was loaded with bomb-shells. A crowd from
several counties, such as assembles only to a mammoth barbe-
cue, were in range, and the result of the discharge was astonish-
ing. His tones rang out like bell strokes, clear and strong, and
left no doubt as to his stand on the political issues of the day. He
spoke as one of the people talking to the people. There was no
hesitating, no evasion, no concealment. He attacked legislative
evils in the boldest style and testified clearly that, were it in his
power, he would sound the death knell of monopolies, trusts,
and railroad combines." It was the "biggest barbecue ever known
in McDuffie county." Three thousand people were present.
Farmers in their wagons, some having driven a score of crusty

4 Charleston News and Courier, May 19, 1890; George T. Barnes to his con-
stituents, Washington, D.C., June 9, 1890, Watson Scrapbooks.

128

The Victory of 1890

miles, were encamped in and about the village like an invading
army. 6

The campaign thus launched continued intermittently during
the early fall, as long as "politicking weather" allowed. The cru-
sade against the jute trust was still in progress. The real battle
for election would come the next spring and summer.

In early April of the following spring there drew to its climax
an event fraught with a multitude of potentialities, perhaps fa-
vorable, as likely unfavorable, to Watson's aspirations.

The McGregor-Cody feud 6 had a bloody history of more
than two years. The trouble between the two men was referred
to in the stilted phraseology of the day as "the vindication of a
virtuous and pious woman." There was talk about "a breath of
suspicion upon the fair name of a gentle lady." Further into the
Southern adaptation of a feudal code it is not important to go.
On the night of December 17, 1887, Jim Cody shot Charley
McGregor through the body on the latter's front lawn, and es-
caped undetected. McGregor slowly recovered, Cody helping to
nurse his unsuspecting victim to health. Cody later confessed to
the shooting, but remained at large, evading trial. Believing his
life constantly threatened, McGregor armed himself and waited.
On October 12, 1889, meeting Cody in the streets of Warren-
ton, McGregor shot him down with a pistol, killing him in-
stantly.

Major Charles E. McGregor was perhaps Watson's closest
personal friend. Certainly he later came to be. They had served
in the legislature together, and, living in neighboring towns,
saw each other frequently. McGregor appealed to his friend at
once to defend him in his trial for life, and Watson immediately
responded.

Cody and McGregor were two of the most prominent citizens
of Warrenton, the county seat of Warren, a county in the heart
of Watson's congressional district. Both the McGregor clan and
the Cody clan had endless ramifications — a very Southern situa-
tion. Of the seventy-nine traverse jurors summoned for the
trial, twenty were disqualified for kinship to Cody alone. Local

5 Atlanta Journal, Sept. i, 1889; Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 25, 1889.
6 The sources of this story are: Macon Telegraph, April 11-18, 1890; Constitu-
tion. April 13-21, 1890; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks; MS. Journal 2.

129

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

authorities on genealogy were put to task, for sometimes u the
juror himself could not explain the kinship in question." Intense
feeling between the two clans divided the county and pervaded
the district, while the rest of the state watched with intense in-
terest. During the trial, Judge Lumpkin, in handing down a
ruling, remarked that, "If I allow every suit that has originated
on account of this feud between McGregor and Cody to be in-
vestigated, there will be no end to the trial." A news reporter
wrote that were the verdict in favor of the defendant, "a number
of gentlemen have assured me that the friends of Cody will
shoot McGregor down as he shot Cody down." Bulging pockets
were observed in the streets.

The trial opened at eight o'clock, April 10. "From sunrise
there had been a continuous stream of people poring [sic] into
town, and even at this early hour there was not even standing
room in the court house, and a large crowd had gathered out-
side." The Cody clan had provided the best legal talent avail-
able in the state, five lawyers in all. Judge H. D. D. Twiggs, the
main dependence of the prosecution, was a seasoned veteran of
the bar, six feet tall, and still powerful of body and mind. His
merciless handling of witnesses, his searing tongue and pene-
trating power of analysis made him probably the most feared
opponent of the state bar. McGregor employed two lawyers,
Watson and James Whitehead. The day before the trial, how-
ever, Whitehead was called home by illness in his family. Wat-
son was left alone to defend the life of his friend against the
most brilliant talent of the state. "It will be a battle between
giants when Judge D. D. Twiggs and Col. Tom Watson cross
swords," it was predicted. "When Greek meets Greek then
comes the tug of war."

It would be the crucial test of his professional career, and
Watson realized it. It involved not only his professional career,
but something closer to his heart: "Watson went into the case
heart and soul. He had been told that to do so would affect his
chances for the congressional nomination, which he seeks, but
his answer, quick and prompt, was that under any circumstances
he would do his duty." Given the set of circumstances described,
with Tom Watson in the center of the stage, drama was as sure
to follow as night the day. For in dramatizing himself, his

130

The Victory of 1 8 go

personal relations, his struggles, and his aspirations, Tom Wat-
son had few equals.

As an orator, he pulled out all the stops and ran every scale ;
as a stage director he employed every hoary trick of his trade.
He had just begun his argument when — enter grief-stricken wife
and children of the defendant, seating themselves at his side.
Again Mark Anthony's trick was revived, as Watson had em-
ployed it before. Major McGregor was stripped to the waist to
show the wounds Cody had inflicted. Before Watson finished,
each of the twelve jurors had been individually summoned be-
fore Saint Peter to answer in imagination (that Watson stim-
ulated into vividness) for a verdict of "Guilty"; each had been
turned away from the celestial gates; each was made to writhe
at the conjured vision of "poor Charley McGregor" dangling at
rope's end before him, neck stretched.

"What can I say of Tom Watson?" pleaded an impressed
spectator. "Never did lawyer do braver, bolder, manlier battle
for his client. His heart was in his work, for Watson and Mc-
Gregor are warm personal friends. If the spectacle of this little
smooth-faced fellow standing here, seeking with all his power
and all his eloquence to save the life of his friend, was worth
coming far to see, the speech he made was worth coming further
to hear. Weird was that scene at night. Two lamps and two
small candles furnished the light that radiated fitfully over
judge, jury, and spectators as Watson, with words of wonderful
eloquence, presented his case." And no eye was unwet.

The jury was out for five days — lacking only one vote of
unanimity, it was later revealed. During the days of waiting the
state press swelled the celebrity of Watson's name. But on the
fifth day when the jury announced its verdict of "not guilty,"
his fame fairly soared. The warring clans accepted the jury's
verdict and the feud quieted down. Politically, contrary to ex-
pectation, Watson seems to have been the gainer. Everyone now
clamored to hear "the eloquent Col. Watson," no matter what
heresy he uttered.

Not long after the McGregor trial, Judge Twiggs joined two
other prominent Augusta lawyers in a campaign of letter writing
and speech making in behalf of Major Barnes' and against Wat-
son's candidacy. On June 13, in a speech at Waynesboro, Twiggs

131

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

made the charge that Watson was the real author of a letter
appearing in the Charleston News and Courier 7 over the sig-
nature, "J. J. H.," which, according to Twiggs, "painted . . .
[Watson] as almost a political prophet and genius, which letter
was full of detraction and ridicule of Mr. Barnes." Twiggs also
berated the subtreasury plan of the Alliance, adding that Wat-
son had swallowed the scheme just as a "yellow gaping mass"
of fledgling mocking-birds, with eyes shut and mouth open,
swallowed whatever the mother bird brought, nor "did he care
whether it was a grub, a caterpillar or an eel worm."

Watson promptly replied by means of a "card" in the Con-
stitution. He had made no secret of giving a news reporter his
side of the campaign when it was requested, he replied. The
parts of the letter called offensive to Major Barnes were con-
tained in the headlines and parts of the letter that he had not
written. Furthermore, "Judge Twiggs' harangue at Waynes-
boro was simply the vaporings of a soured outlaw, who is so
accustomed to abusing everything and everybody that the re-
straints of truth have no power over him." Judge Twiggs re-
plied the following day with a letter branding Watson's remarks
"offensive" and "intended to convey insult," and requesting an
"explanation." 8 According to approved etiquette this was cor-
rect procedure in opening negotiations for a duel.

Although the long-standing professional rivalry between the
two men had been generally upon a rather friendly basis, rela-
tions had doubtless been strained at times. Watson was responsi-
ble for the widely circulated epigram on Twiggs' phenomenally
keen sense of smell: "he could tell the sex of a hog by smelling
of the gravy." In the reports of the clash between the two in
the recent McGregor case, it had been said that "it was fight,
fight, fight from start to finish." These incidents, however, prob-
ably contributed more to whetting the public interest over the
prospective duel than they did to the challenge itself.

The code of the duel, once so prevalent, had been outlawed
by the Georgia Constitution of 1877, but the practice had not
been stopped. In fact there had been a recent recrudescence of
dueling in the state. The press had carried accounts of three
duels or attempted duels between prominent Georgians in the

7 May 19, 1890.

8 Constitution, June 15-21, 1890.

132

The Victory of 1890

previous year. One paper had run three and four columns on the
front page daily for a week upon one duel. 9 The attitude toward
this popular crime is partly reflected in an editorial of the Con-
stitution: "It was a fine and engaging spectacle — those two
dauntless men confronting each other in that gentle and daunt-
less manner, and it warmed the cockles of the heart to read about
it. . . . We must condemn in the abstract, even where we ad-
mire in the concrete." The Augusta Chronicle claimed to be "the
only daily paper in the state which has denounced the practice
of dueling in commenting upon the recent meeting in Alabama
between two Georgia gentlemen."

The correspondence between prospective duelists — an elabo-
rate knocking of chips from shoulders — was inevitably spread
over the press of the state for the edification of the public. On
street corners, in barnyards, over cotton rows, shrewd judgments
were swapped upon the mettle displayed by the respective chip-
knockers and sharp distinctions were drawn over fine points of
"honor." Thus might a public man's career be forever blighted.
It had happened before. It could happen again.

Watson's reply was delivered to Twiggs by Major McGregor.
In it he curtly refused to withdraw his remarks; he gave his
reasons for making them, then he concluded: "Let me add fur-
ther that I am no duelist. Whether this position be taken from
principle or from want of courage you can form your own opin-
ion and make such experiments to verify it as your judgment
may dictate." Twiggs countered with further justification of his
remarks in his speech, denied Watson's interpretation of them,
and again requested a retraction of Watson's offensive remarks.
In his response Watson merely dismissed Twiggs' letter as "a
practical evasion of the issue." Twiggs' reply ended with his
final decision upon the matter :

In view of your recent statement that you do not hold yourself amenable
to those usages requiring satisfaction among gentlemen, I refrain from
indulging in the empty form of sending you a challenge. In your intima-
tion that I may test your courage anywhere except upon the field of honor,
you imply willingness to meet an attack I may make upon you on the street
or other place of resort where the lives of innocent men and women may
be endangered.

This willingness may be safely expressed, for I shall not descend to the

9 Macon Telegraph, Sept. 7-14, 1889.

!33

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

level of a street brawler, but will leave you to the contempt which you
deserve, and to the judgment of a discriminating public.

Watson's final rejoinder was the most dignified document that
graced the exchange. It was devoted largely to a demonstration
of Twiggs' lack of candor and fairness in his charges, and con-
tained the following statement about dueling: "I have never
intended to spend one moment in studying the code which with
refined and formal lawlessness tramples on all the statutes hu-
man and divine. I have never yet endeavored to fashion my
thought to a belief that deliberate murder was any the less mur-
der because the duelist held a pistol in one hand and a book of
etiquette in the other." He added that "The foreboding of what
would happen when he and I met is needlessly gloomy. We met
in the car shed this morning. And yet it is nevertheless true, that
water still has the weakness to run downwards and steam clings
to the old tendency to go up." 10

What would the people think? Public opinion appears to have
been solidly lined up behind Watson's position on dueling and
on other parts of the controversy. Even the Augusta Chronicle
approved his stand against the duel. Thus the second ordeal of
1890 ended — again to Watson's credit. Neither episode would
merit this much attention were they not both so typical of Wat-
son's public life.

Major Barnes postponed his return from Washington to meet
Watson's aggressive campaign until less than a month before the
primaries, which came around the last of July. Arriving home
ill, he left his bed against the advice of his physician in order
to meet Watson, whose invitation he had this time accepted.

It was clear from the start that Major Barnes was uncom-
fortable in the new political atmosphere. By his own confession
he belonged to the tradition of another day. At Sandersville in
his first engagement with Watson, he said that it was the first
time he had ever spoken in behalf of his own candidacy: "It was
distasteful to him to speak of himself and his own work; he
would rather have his friends do that." Although his weight, his
health, and his age told against him in a contest with a much
younger man (who was also devoid of any inhibitions against

10 Letters published in the Augusta Chronicle, June 21, 1890.

134

The Victory of 1 8 go

speaking in his own behalf), Barnes met Watson several times.
The younger man adopted an attitude of indulgent, good-
natured respect for his elder. Nevertheless, things went rather
badly for the Major from the first. He was no match for Wat-
son in repartee and colloquy, and he was at a disadvantage be-
fore these crowds of rejuvenated farmers, Alliancemen most of
them, saturated by their lecturers, by debates, and by Alliance
reform literature, with facts and figures and queer ideas and
heresies of all descriptions, shouting their slogans and singing
Alliance songs.

One got to Big Creek, Jefferson County, by a slow train over
the narrow gauge railroad to Wrens, and from there by horse-
back or wagon for six miles through the open country to Hud-
son's Ford. Along the dusty road, under a July sun, crawled a
broken caravan of wagons and buggies — two thousand people
approaching the Big Creek barbecue from half a dozen counties.
Under the oak trees it was shady and a little cooler. From the
pits along the creek bank drifted a savory smoke arising from
more than a hundred "carcasses," spluttering crusty brown under
dripping mops plied by the Negro cooks. After dinner on the
ground came the speaking. The sun was merciless, and, u with
the thermometer about 90 in the shade, it was pathetic to see the
perspiration run down the speakers' faces and saturate their
clothes."

If the Major so heartily endorsed the candidacy of William J.
Northen for governor on the Alliance platform, Watson asked,
then why did he oppose Watson's candidacy on the same plat-
form? His position on the subtreasury plan, which Twiggs and
Barnes found so dreadful, was the same as Northen's . . .

Barnes, interrupting — "I would not support Northen for Congress on
that platform."

Watson — "And yet you do support him for governor on it. ... A rab-
bit that is good enough to stew ought to be good enough to fry. (Laughter
and applause.)

"They are all for Northen, but they can't swallow me because I have
swallowed the 'Alliance worm/ To look at me some persons might think I
had been living on that diet for a long time, and that same person looking
at Major Barnes would be forced to the conclusion that Major Barnes lived
on a very different diet." (Laughter.)

Then Watson rapped to order his famous Alliance school-
room, that so painfully discomfited the Major:

135

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Watson — "Now I want to ask Major Barnes how much money there
is in circulation per capita."

Barnes — "There is a difference of opinion among financiers — some say
one amount and some another."

Watson — "But what do you say?"

Barnes — "If you count the money on deposit in banks there is about
$22 per capita. . . ."

Watson — "They count the same money twice."

Carroll (Barnes* colleague) — "We do not. How much do you say
there is?"

Watson — "I say there is about $4.75 per capita."

A hundred voices — "That's right; you're right; hurrah for Watson." 11

Then the lesson would proceed with more catechizing of his
inept and discomfited pupil. How much silver was coined be-
tween 1873 and 1878? How many national bank notes were
redeemed? "Wrong again. Wrong again," Watson would rep-
rimand, and the Alliancemen would roar with laughter and
shout for Watson, or at his command supply the answer to
his question.

At the end of Major Barnes' reply, which in sharp contrast to
Watson's speech, was received in silence, he said, a little plain-
tively, one imagines :

"Six years ago you sent me to Congress and you have reelected me, and
all the time I have served you to the best of my ability. You endorsed me
and sent me back before ; in what have I changed ?"

A voice — "Times have changed and the people have changed."

After a few such unequal engagements Major Barnes ceased
to meet Watson on the stump. But Watson ceased not at all : he
"made speeches, played with babies, talked crops with the men,
discussed fashions with the ladies, and made friends with every-
body." When figures were not at hand, he answered the enemies
of the Alliance with ridicule or humor. The charge that the
farmer needed to "live closer and work harder" was "an insult
to the industry of Georgia farmers." Everyone knew that the
farmer "skimmed his milk on top and then turned it over and
skimmed it on the bottom. (Laughter.) If a fly lit in his sugar
he made him thump his legs on the sides of the barrel for fear
a grain would stick to his feet. (Laughter.) And they stop their
clocks at night to save the wear and tear on the machinery.
(Laughter.)"

11 Atlanta Journal, July 19, 1890; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

136

The Victory of 1 8 go

A loud clap of thunder interrupted his speech at Tenniville.
As the reverberations ceased he continued: "Like the thunder
that shakes yon sky, the voice of the people has shaken the
power from the hands of the political bosses and placed it in the
hands of the masses where it belongs." During a speech at Wad-
ley a drunken man created a panic by brandishing a pistol. After
he was disarmed several people called, "Watson, he tried to
shoot you." His reply was instantaneous : "The man who under-
takes to inaugurate reform must stand, not one fire, but a
thousand." 12

The campaign in the Tenth District was the subject of more
comment and interest than any in the state. It was said to be "as
hot as Nebuchadnezzar's furnace." That was in 1890, before the
Populist campaigns had set a new record for torrid politics. Con-
spicuously missing from this contest with the amiable Major
were the night riders, the herds of "liquored" Negro voters, the
burning ballot boxes, and the deadly gun play that so lamentably
characterized the later elections. Yet the later contests were con-
ducted by essentially the same leaders, for the same votes, upon
the same platforms. It is important to understand this difference
when those later campaigns are described.

During this campaign Watson was observed to entertain an
"irritating confidence and sanguine assurance of every county in
the district except Richmond." Richmond, Major Barnes' home
county, also the county of the highly industrialized city of Au-
gusta, was not even contested by Watson, who conceded Barnes
his home county as a matter of political courtesy. There were
eleven counties in the District. Ten were overwhelmingly rural-
agricultural, and one urban-industrial. In all they had thirty-
four votes at the convention. Of these, eighteen were required
to nominate. Watson and the Alliance insisted upon holding
primaries in each county. Barnes' only hope lay in capturing
Burke, Washington, Johnson, and Warren counties, along with
Richmond.

Returns from the primaries beginning in the last days of July
quickly dispelled any hope for Barnes. In the whole of McDuffie
County he got eleven votes, one only in the Thomson District.
In Warren, the county of the McGregor trial, which the Barnes

^Clipping, Watson Scrapbooks; Atlanta Journal, July 31, 1890.

137

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

papers counted as "conceded" to Barnes, Watson's victory was
four to one ; in Washington, strongly contested by Barnes, Wat-
son's majority lacked nine votes of being three to one; in Glas-
cock only twenty-three votes were reported for Barnes. Colum-
bia, Jefferson, and Lincoln fell in line with heavy majorities for
Watson, and Johnson County ended the contest by giving him a
ten to one majority and enough votes at the convention to nomi-
nate him without waiting to hear from the remaining counties.
Major Barnes withdrew from the race, formally acknowledging
defeat. He carried only one of the eleven counties, Richmond.
Even there the county Alliance passed a resolution endorsing
Watson's candidacy, and he polled a heavy vote in the working
class wards. Watson's victory was unmistakable and complete. 13

"The election passed off quietly" was a phrase used in de-
scribing nearly all the county primaries. The Democratic district
convention, held in the village of Harlem upon the insistence
of the Alliance, instead of as usual at Augusta, was described as
"a quiet body, performing a perfunctory duty," until time came
for nominating Watson. "His hands were shaken on all sides
and by everybody. He was in smiles all day and when the thing
was over the boys went wild." A further endorsement of Watson
was registered when the convention, by an overwhelming vote,
tabled a resolution condemning his favorite measure, the sub-
treasury plan. In November his Republican opponent was
smothered — as such candidates were usually smothered. 14

The triumph of the Alliance was state-wide: "In six out of
ten Congressional districts, the 'Bourbons' lost their seats ; in the
other four, they made their peace with the 'embattled farmers,'
via the less radical element. The Alliance controlled the state
convention, chose the governor, wrote the platform, named
three-fourths of the senators and four-fifths of the representa-
tives." 16 All over the South and West the Alliance enjoyed
victories of greater or less degree than in Georgia. "Before the
Alliance was organized," observed the Macon Telegraph, a
corporation newspaper, "it was a rare occurrence for a farmer,
or a farmer's son to receive honor and recognition. The offices

18 Augusta Chronicle, July 30 to Aug. 3, 1890; Constitution, Aug. 3, 1890; Macon
Telegraph, Aug. 2, 1890; McDuffie Journal, July 11, 1890; clippings from county
weeklies in the Watson Scrapbooks.

14 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 29, 1890.

16 A. M. Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia, p. 116.

138

The Victory of 1890

all went to the towns and to the lawyers. . . . But now the bot-
tom rail is on top . . ." It was a "Farmers' legislature" that
convened in November.

One of the first duties of the new Legislature was to elect a
United States Senator to succeed Joseph E. Brown. It had been
just ten years since Brown had gone to fill the seat vacated by
the sudden resignation of Gordon. Having lately discovered a
remarkable identity between his own principles and those of the
Alliance, General Gordon now decided that duty called him
back to the Senate, and he generously offered his services. Since
there was in prospect "a wrestle of giants," he said, ". . . you
need to call to your assistance the greatest intellects . . . men
self-possessed and prudent, who cannot be shaken." While he
was sure he qualified, he urged that "the unity of the Demo-
cratic party was essential to the supremacy of the white race in
the South," and he could not give his unqualified support to the
subtreasury scheme of the Alliance, since it was a threat to
party unity. 16

"First, a railroad lawyer; second, a railroad promoter; third,
a railroad president; and fourth, the farmer's best friend. . . .
Nothing but your failure to be a railroad president drove you
back to Georgia to be the farmer's friend for the same office you
threw away when you deserted them to join a railroad." 17 Thus
Norwood, himself a candidate, characterized his opponent. The
Chronicle felt sure that the General's charm was fatal, for the
farmers "have been told repeatedly that he is visionary, prof-
ligate, unreliable, and unbusinesslike. But they have declared
that with all his faults they love him." It would seem so.

It was admitted that an Alliance caucus could elect any candi-
date agreed upon. It happened, however, that confusion and
difference existed among Alliance leaders. "Indeed," said one
member of it, "our caucus favored Hammond at breakfast,
Hines at dinner, Norwood at supper, and Calhoun just before
going to bed." 18 For a time it looked very much as if two Alli-
ance "bosses," L. F. Livingston, President of the State Alliance,
and C. W. Macune, a prominent national leader, were going to

16 Augu8ta Chronicle, Aug. 20 and 30, 1890; Macon Telegraph, Aug. 21, 1890.

17 T. M. Norwood to J. B. Gordon, in Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 29, 1890.

18 A scrapbook in the Watson collection devoted entirely to the Senatorial race of
1890 is the source of this and much other information in this account.

139

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

succeed in swinging the Alliance vote to Patrick Calhoun. Cal-
houn, grandson of the great Carolina statesman, was a wealthy
railroad lawyer whose most spectacular accomplishment was the
successful combination of a large number of Georgia railroads
under the Richmond Terminal Company, a heavy investment of
Jay Gould's, with headquarters in Augusta. The Allianceman
was not far wrong who said Calhoun was "Wall Street's biggest
representative in the South." Livingston and Macune were
charged with yielding to corrupt influence in backing him, and
some evidence of their guilt was later produced. 19

Watson, as an Alliance Congressman-elect, was called to At-
lanta and given orders by Livingston to u go into our caucus and
indorse Calhoun." Watson refused to do so, explaining that
Calhoun "is the representative of one of the classes against
which the Alliance and the Democratic party are arrayed. I can-
not indorse the paid attorney of a great railway monopoly. . . .
I will not consent to sell out my constituents." 20 Although Wat-
son had led his county in the fight against Gordon in 1886, he
now, apparently as a choice of the lesser evil, lent him his in-
fluence, though he did not make a public speech. He later
claimed credit for the defeat of Calhoun, though with what
justice is doubtful. 21

General Gordon was elected Senator. The better to consum-
mate the union with his brother farmers he soon joined the
Alliance. We are afforded two painful glimpses of the General's
initiation ceremony through the secret doors: once hoisted to
the roof by the seat of his pants, "dangling in the air, with hands
and feet vainly clutching the floor," and once more, stretched
across a barrel while the "Supreme Spanker" let fall the "sub-
treasury plank" full forty times to "convince the new brother
that it was not a rotten one."

Now that the farmers began to test the fruits of their
victory, they found it spotted to the core and sour in their
mouths. What had become of their class struggle — now that
their enemies had taken to celebrating Alliance victories? How

M A. M. Arnett, op. cit., p. 119.

20 Clippings, Watson Scrapbooks and Northen Scrapbooks, especially from the
Southern Alliance Farmer and Savannah Morning News, Nov. 16, 1890.

21 J. B. Gordon to W. J. Northen (MS.), Sept. 25, 1890, in Northen Scrapbook,
Vol. I, pp. 66-67; clippings, Northen Scrapbooks and Watson Scrapbooks.

140

The Victory of 1890

was it that the Constitution had come to rejoice that "The
Farmers' Alliance is the Democracy party"; that the Managing
Editor of the Constitution had been elected Speaker of the farm-
ers' House of Representatives; 22 that Alliance leaders had sup-
ported a hireling of Jay Gould for Alliance senator ; that Gen-
eral Gordon, of the notorious New Departure triumvirate, had
been elected senator by the farmers' legislature? How was it
that there were two kinds of Alliancemen — the "wool-hat boys"
and the "plug-hat bosses"? How had this come about?

On March 4, 1889, Henry Grady addressed a letter to W. J.
Northen marked "Strictly Confidential." He wrote:

Let me give you an idea. Put yourself in line with the movement to bring
about peace between the agricultural and commercial interests of the state
which is now threatened by the Alliance. The farmers have the sympathy
of the commercial community in their efforts to organize and cooperate,
but there is a danger that these two interests will find themselves in hopeless
opposition unless somebody smooths the friction. The man who does it will
be master of the situation. 23

Being completely in harmony with Northen's conservative
temperament and interest, this suggestion of Grady's seems to
have been religiously followed. During his campaign, Northen
repeated many times that he was the friend of all classes and
the enemy of none, that he would "faithfully serve all classes."
With this understanding he was still able to win the backing of
the Alliance, and consequently the governor's chair. Many other
conservatives (some not as candid about their conservatism)
likewise won office through the Alliance.

On Alliance day at the Piedmont Exposition, Grady, as mas-
ter of ceremonies, addressed 20,000 Alliancemen. "It gave him
the greatest pleasure," he said, "that the Piedmont Exposition
had brought together in harmonious council the business men of
the chief city of the south Atlantic states and the leaders of and
members of the most important farmers' organizations in his-
tory. There is no room for divided hearts in the south . . .
without regard to class." 24 There were those, said Grady else-
where, who believed that "the South should divide, the color

22 Clark Howell, son of Captain E. P. Howell, owner of the Constitution, and
railroad promoter.

23 MS. of letter in Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. Ill, p. 264.

24 Constitution, Oct. z$, 1889.

141

Tom Watson Agrarian 'Rebel

line be beaten down, and the southern States ranged on economic
or moral questions as interest or belief demands." But this was
"The worst in my opinion that could happen." The only "hope
and assurance of the South" was "The clear and unmistakable
domination of the white race. . . . What God hath separated
let no man join together. . . . Let not man tinker with the work
of the Almighty." 25

Henry Grady died in Atlanta on December 23, 1889. Con-
sidering the history of the year following his death, which has
just been reviewed, one might conclude that his creed had
triumphed over death. Yet viewed from a longer range, his
death might well symbolize the end of an era of Southern his-
tory. Grady's creed was the creed of the 'eighties. Briefly sum-
marized, its tenets embraced: industrialization of the South;
glorification of the capitalist and his way of life ; political, eco-
nomic, and cultural unity between the South and the East ; rigid
subordination of class conflict in the South to the maintenance
of the status quo of a business man's regime identified with white
supremacy; and the exclusion of the Negro from political life.

In the way that Henry Grady might be said to have sym-
bolized the 'eighties, Tom Watson might be said to have sym-
bolized the decade that followed. In general, Watson's creed
was the reverse of Grady's : agrarianism for the South ; a glori-
fication of the farmer and his way of life; war upon the indus-
trial East and alliance with the agrarian West ; open and relent-
less class conflict with the enemy classes both without and within
the South; and the enlistment of the Negro in the battle for
the farmer equipped with as many political weapons as Watson
dared give him.

23 Joel C. Harris, Henry W, Grady, pp. 99-101.

142

ii

"I Mean business"

As SOON AS the fight for the nomination was won — a strug-
jLM^gle entirely within the Democratic "white man's party" be
it noted — the state press, until then openly hostile or indifferent
to his cause, rallied behind Watson, promising him support. The
Constitution believed "The Tenth could not have elected a
better man than the Hon. Thomas E. Watson"; the Atlanta
Journal discovered that he was preaching "Sound democratic
doctrine, sterling common sense"; and the Augusta Chronicle
promised solemnly to "forward his cause by every possible
means and sustain him during his Congressional career by all
the power we may possess."

At the same time, curiously enough, these and other papers
with greater or less degree of virulence, continued unabated
their onslaught upon the platform on which Watson was elected.
Patrick Walsh's Chronicle was especially noted for this para-
doxical conduct. It warned that "the Alliance is becoming a
political machine," and that it is "repugnant to free institutions."
It asked desperately: "Throughout the length and breadth of
the land is there no man sound enough and strong enough to
confront the emergency and turn the people from their strange
gods?" The Alliance platform advocated "paternalism," "com-
munism," and "downright socialism." The farmers were "run-
ning after false gods and following false teachers." Like Gen-
eral Gordon and Henry Grady, Walsh reminded them that
"White supremacy is the very foundation of our civilization"
and "no mess of pottage in the shape of a sub-treasury sop should
induce the people to sell their birthright and forsake the party
and principles of their fathers." Besides, in all this talk of the

H3

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

farmer's "miseries" there was "a great deal of clap-trap." The
farmer needed to "work harder and manage better."

Not content with belaboring "the credulity and ignorance of
the people in believing any such nonsense" and such "trans-
parent humbug" as the subtreasury plan, Walsh, along with
other Democratic politicians, did all in his power to discourage
the agreement between South and West that Watson and the
Alliance planned. "There can be no union of agricultural in-
terests of the South and West," said Walsh. "We have no inter-
ests in common with them. Politically they hate the Democratic
party and the South. Let us not be deceived. They will continue
to vote as they shot during the war." Back to the diplomacy of
Henry Grady, was the cry, back to the alliance with the East,
to the friendly New York capitalists. "The richest man in
America," Jay Gould, "has not only put thousands into the
Richmond Terminal. He has put millions into it," argued the
Chronicle. 1

In December, after the elections of 1890, a convention of the
Southern Alliance Supreme Council, together with invited dele-
gates from other farmer and labor organizations, met in Ocala,
Florida. Kansas delegates and others urged immediate forma-
tion of a third party. While some were willing to listen, the
Southerners were generally disposed to test action through the
Democratic party first. A compromise was effected that post-
poned definite action on the third party. The most advertised
result of the convention was the formation of a new platform.
In reality, the Ocala convention made only a few changes in the
older St. Louis platform to conform more to Southern demands.
It emphasized in particular an expanded form of the subtreasury
plan. Thereafter the "Ocala platform" became the rallying cry
of the embattled farmers, evoking more enthusiasm than any
other. 2

To Patrick Walsh the Ocala declaration was the red flag of
revolution. He could not abide for a moment the "reckless finan-
cial scheme of the Ocala platform" with "its impracticality and
unconstitutionality." It was the "greatest fraud of the age."

1 Weekly Chronicle, Oct. 22, 1890; see also the Chronicle, July 5-13, Aug. 3,
1890, Feb. 8, 1890; Macon Telegraph, Mar. 22, July 14, 1890; and clippings, Wat-
son and Northen Scrapbooks.

2 Constitution, Dec. 2-7, 1890; Progressive Farmer, Dec. 9, 1890; New York
World, Dec. 3, 1890; People's Party Paper, Feb. 3, 1893.

144

"I Mean Business"

How was it that one and the same editor could promise every
support to Watson in one breath and damn everything he stood
for in the next? This paradox was implicit in the thinking of
more men than this editor. How did it arise? The fact seems to
have been that the New Departure Democrats relied rather con-
fidently upon the fact that the Alliancemen in the South worked
from within, and in loyalty to, the Democratic party. So long as
the old shibboleths of race, party, and section could be employed
effectively (and had they not always worked?) the state and
national party leaders would be able by means of party caucus,
party whip, and Federal patronage to keep the Alliancemen in
line. Cheerfully the Chronicle wrote of the Alliance-elected state
convention of 1890: it was not "a conclave of Alliancemen. It
was a meeting of Democrats, pure and simple, and it nominated
Democrats upon a Democratic platform and adjourned." Others
whistled the same tune to steady shaken nerves. The paradox
was resolved in the Chronicle's statement that, "The Alliance is
a side issue compared with the Democratic party."

Such was the reactionary attitude. The radical attitude, Tom
Watson's position, might almost be expressed by reversing this
last quotation : The Democratic party was a side issue compared
to the Alliance principles. Watson was not long in revealing this
position.

Indications pointed to a successful candidacy for Speaker of
the next House of Representatives by Charles F. Crisp. Crisp
was one of the four Georgia Congressmen whom the Alliance
had not removed in the previous election. A suave politician of
the old school, smooth of address and popular with his col-
leagues, Crisp was a conservative, a representative from a black-
belt, large-planter district. His election to the Speakership would
greatly enhance the prestige of the Georgia Democratic delega-
tion, and heavy pressure was put upon the new Alliance con-
gressmen to give him their support. 8

Early in 1891 Watson wrote Crisp an open letter asking his
position upon the Alliance demands. Crisp's reply contained
much concerning his tariff record, but "nothing as to the Ocala
platform." Watson's rejoinder was a ringing challenge to the
conservatives and a battle cry to the Alliance :

3 A. M. Arnett, op. cit, p. 129; Watson Scrapbooks.

H5

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

We reformers have for years been patiently, yet ardently, building up a
sentiment which would imperatively demand better laws.

We have succeeded. It makes our hearts thrill with pleasure when we
contemplate our work. . . .

There was never a time when the people looked more hopefully to Con-
gress for help. They have turned out old members by the score. They have
put in new ones. . . .

Now, gentlemen, how can we explain ourselves to the people if we elect
a Speaker of the House who gives us no guarantees ? How does Mr. Crisp
stand upon these questions? Last summer . . . Mr. Crisp wrote flatly
refusing to indorse the subtreasury. Since that time the Ocala convention
has met and put forth its platform. It is the best one now before the people.
Does Mr. Crisp endorse it ? If not shall I vote for him anyhow ?

Suppose Mr. Crisp should be antagonized by some Democrat who stands
on the Ocala platform ; shall I still vote for Mr. Crisp ? If so, would I not
go back on those who elected me?

He would apply the Ocala yardstick strictly, everywhere,
making no exceptions, no allowances for party prestige, none
for self-interest. Only by strict consistency of principle and action
could the movement hope to succeed.

To-day there stands waiting in the South and West as grand an army
as ever brought pride to a warrior. It only needs leaders bold and true.
Leaders who can't be bought, or duped, or bullied. Leaders who knowing
what the enemy is will dash straight against it and take no rest and make
no terms until the enemy is routed. Leaders who do not stand aside and
shirk dangers and avoid responsibilities, but who will dash to the front ; who
by example will dispel doubt and remove hesitation and who by their cour-
age will win the right to say, "let the bravest follow me."

Given leaders like that there can be no retreat. We know what we want ;
let us take nothing else. With this resolution strictly adhered to, we draw
all our energies to a focus . . . any other policy breeds divisions, factions,
malcontents. Our energies will be scattered. . . .

When I entered this reform movement I meant business.

The people who elected me meant business. I mean it yet. So do they.
We never meant to carry the movement a trifling distance and then stop.
We meant to go clear through or die trying. We mean it yet! 4

About Watson's seriousness, his conviction, and his consecra-
tion to his task there can be no doubt. Profoundly and com-
pletely he "meant business." He meant it so thoroughly that
his convictions laid hold upon his naturally intense character and
quite possessed the man wholly, changed his way of life, as
well as his way of looking at life, at past, present, and future.

4 Clipping from Southern Alliance Farmer, April, 1890, Watson Scrapbooks.
I46

cc 7 Mean Business"

Shortly after his election Watson announced his intention to
give up the practice of law, and not long thereafter he sold his
law library and declined new cases. He explained that he wished
to devote his entire time to his new duties. When they ended
he could "find work more congenial than the practice of law."
When the Constitution chose to interpret his action as motivated
by a belief that his profession was degraded, Watson wrote a hot
reprimand :

I am profoundly impressed with the belief that . . . [the people] are
the victims of cold blooded, deliberate villainy, and their homes are being
taken from them through the fraudulent collusion of federal lawmakers;
that industrial and political servitude is coming to them as fast as time can
bring it.

It may be asking too much to expect you to believe that I have gone into
this work with something of the spirit of consecration ; that it is a cause
which commands my devotion and upon whose altar I cheerfully lay all
my time and all my strength. That no crusader ever poised lance or bared
a blade with a more implicit belief that the work was holy and must be
done.

It may be asking too much to expect you to believe this, but the friends
who know me best believe it; my district in its majority believes it; and
the time will come, if I live, when the great majority in the state shall
believe it. 5

Along with the consecrated zeal of the crusader went some
of the unholy glee of the iconoclast. To an audience in Milledge-
ville he said: "You will hear much said about the English com-
mon law. You will hear it praised as if it were some divinely
inspired oracle. Don't believe a word of it. The English common
law was the brutal code of half-naked savages. The truth was
not in it, and it fell. It deserved to fall. Under it a woman was
a serf, and a poor man a slave. Its land tenure was infamous,
its methods of trial were heathenish and idiotic, its punishments
were revolting in their devilish cruelty."

Even in the modern court the judge tried railroad cases with
free passes in his pockets. The lawyer was compelled to exploit
human emotion "that my miserable scoundrel of a client may
gain where he should lose, and that I may have the credit of
winning where I should be defeated." A system of law that
"tears a tenant from his family and puts him in chains and
stripes because he sells cotton for something to eat and leaves

5 Constitution, July 11-18, 1891; also Macon Telegraph, July 15, 1891.

H7

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

his rent unpaid, and which at the same time cannot punish its
railroad kings" was "weak unto rottenness." This system de-
served to die, "and it will die just as certainly as there are
enough brave men left to denounce the system and arouse the
people to tear it to pieces." 6

"Ah, me!" he said in a speech to an audience of Augusta
workers on Labor Day, "how alarmed we all grow when frantic
laborers, ruin staring them in the face, derail some freight car
or thump one of Pinkerton's toughs with a stick. We hold up
our delicate hands in feigned horror, and cry, Tut it down.'
Yet we are the same people who exult in the piracy which our
ancestors committed on the English tea ships. The same people
who acquired this land from its owners by a long series of fraud,
murders, and violating treaties; who made a president out of
Andrew Jackson, the executioner of prisoners." Workers are
eternally hoodwinked, for "History has not been written by the
laborer. It has usually been written by his enemy. Therefore
we only catch glimpses of the truth from time to time." Rapidly
he sketched the history of labor, especially in England, that his
audience might be "astonished at the infinite blackness of the
tyranny with which capital crushed it and fattened on its suf-
ferings."

He, too, had walked the streets of Augusta with the unem-
ployed: "The horror of that dreadful time I shall never forget.
It has left its mark on my mind and on my heart. It has shaped
my convictions and controlled my feelings. When the easy owner
of inherited wealth or position sneers at the warmth of my ut-
terances upon this subject, I beg to remind him that it is the
man who has been burned who can best describe the pain of
the fire." 7

"A great pity swells within me," he once said. And as pity
swelled, rage welled up out of the same fountain and flooded his
spirit. "Men of the country!" he cried to a throng of Jefferson
County farmers, "let the fires of this . . . revolution burn
brighter and brighter. Pile on the fuel till the forked flames shall
leap in wrath around this foul structure of governmental wrong
— shall sweep it from basement to turret, and shall sweep it
from the face of the earth. (Applause.)"

7

T. E. W., Life and Speeches, pp. 48-52.
Ibid., pp. 59-70.

I48

"I Mean Busmess"

In May, 1891, there convened in Cincinnati delegates from a
number of national farmer, labor, and reform organizations,
those from the Alliance of the Northern and Western states
constituting the largest body of delegates. The South held aloof
from official representation, but unofficial representatives,
thought some Alliance members, "did everything within their
power to prevent, or postpone, the organization of a new politi-
cal party." Southern Alliancemen generally felt that such action
should be postponed until election year at least, but at the same
time warned the Democratic leaders to toe the Ocala line, or
expect revolt. The Convention, nevertheless, took steps that
assured the existence of the People's Party. New South Demo-
crats were divided in opinion: the Constitution believed the new
party spelled good fortune for the Democrats, since it would be
entirely Western, and u the Republicans will be demoralized."
The Cincinnati platform, it thought, was "in sympathy with the
general tendency of the Democratic party." The Chronicle, in
more forthright fashion answered, "God help the Democratic
party if the resolutions adopted at Cincinnati are Democratic." 8

It was about this time that Watson seems to have set his sail
in the third party wind. He made no public commitment, and
executed a good bit of tacking during the next several months,
but any close observer could have predicted his destination, for
his course toward that destination was as straight as a shifting
wind and perverse currents permitted. In April, answering Edi-
tor Dana of the New York Sun, who requested that he leave the
Democratic party or the Alliance, Watson could write, "I do
not have to leave the one to be put in harmony with the other.
The Democracy is not yet ostracised by the Alliance." 9 That
was before the Cincinnati convention; but in June, a few weeks
after it, he was in North Carolina conferring with President
L. L. Polk, who was openly sympathetic with the third party
idea as a final resort. While there Watson said in a public speech,
"Our feet are on the Ocala platform and we are not going to
wear any man's collar, be it Democratic or Republican by name.
This third party talk don't hurt us." The same day he is re-

8 Constitution, May 20-23, 1891; Augusta Chronicle, May 26, 1891; clippings,
Watson and Northen Scrapbooks; J. D. Hicks, op, ciU, pp. 211-217.

9 T. E. W. to the Chronicle, quoted by J. C. C. Black in letter to the People* s
Party Paper, Sept. 9, 1892.

149

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ported to have admitted in private conversation that he believed
"the only hope for reform lay in organizing a Third party." 10

Two weeks later President Polk appeared in Atlanta for a
great Alliance rally at Piedmont Park. Speaking from the same
platform were the Western leaders, General James B. Weaver,
and Congressman "Sockless" Jerry Simpson, who had recently
attended the Cincinnati Convention. The Westerners were mak-
ing a speaking tour of Georgia. They had promised not to preach
the third party revolt, but the idea lay behind their every utter-
ance; the rank and file realized this, and their conservative lead-
ers grew restive under their enthusiasm. The "keynote of the
Alliance demonstration" was said to have been President Polk's
warning: "If there is a third party established in the south, it
will be due to the domineering, proscriptive and intolerant spirit
of the so-called democratic leaders." This sentence was said to
have been "the essence of all the speeches made, and the enthusi-
asm which marked its utterance clearly defined the sentiment of
his Alliance hearers." n

That evening Watson addressed the Georgia Assembly and
an audience of Alliancemen. Why all the outcry against the visit
of their Western friends? he asked. "What if Jerry Simpson
does come down here to make a few speeches ... I do not care
whether he has socks on his feet or not." He welcomed his allies.
He also recognized his enemies, in whatever disguise. There
was on foot "an attempt to deliver your vote to Davie Hill and
Tammany Hall. . . . Dave Hill is a miserable little trickster,
a small ward politician," while "Cleveland represents the gold-
bugs of Wall Street and we will not take him."

He then defined his position upon the tense question of party
loyalty and revolt. "Attention was so close," it was reported,
"that the drop of a pin could be heard, and every sentence of
Watson's was cheered by the Alliance audience, including nearly
all of the Alliance members of the legislature. . . . The effect
of his speech was electrical" :

We are in the midst of a great crisis. The war is on. What is the situa-
tion ? We have before us three or four platforms. We have the republican
platform, the democratic platform, and the Ocala platform. I say here and

10 A. L. Levinson, Goldsboro, N.C., in the Progressive Farmer, Sept. 29, 1896.

11 Constitution, July 16, 1891 ; also the Chronicle and the Macon Telegraph and
the Atlanta Journal of the same date.

150

"I Mean Business"

now that the Ocala platform is the best of the three. It is the only one that
breathes the breath of life. The others are so much alike you can't tell them
apart. . . .

Let third party talk take care of itself. I have none of it to do, but my
highest duty is to stand by what I think is right. . . . Let the democratic
party take warning. We have borne your ridicule long enough, we will
bear it no longer. I am going to bear the Ocala platform wherever my
voice can be heard. 12

Watson's speech called down upon his head a barrage of im-
precation. The Augusta Evening Herald called upon him to
resign his seat in Congress. The Chronicle declared he was
preaching u a war of the poor against the rich." The Constitu-
tion undertook "to call him to order in this matter and to pro-
test that he is wronging the very party and people to whom he
owes his present position." The Telegraph admitted that he was
"The most interesting figure perhaps, in Georgia politics to-
day . . . There is no discounting the fact that circumstances
and his abilities have put him in a position of peculiar impor-
tance. Just what he intends doing with it is a matter of general
interest. He types the most advanced form of the third party
idea in Georgia." w

His answer to all critics was the same : Yes, he was elected to
office as a Democrat, but his support of the Alliance platform
was the special reason for his success over Major Barnes, just as
it was the reason for the success of the other Alliance congress-
men. If he left the Democratic party, he would not break faith
with his constituents, but would merely follow his constituents
who were true to their principles. The Democrats "treat our
principles with hatred and scorn and contempt." 14

The cry of "demagogue" continued. Watson thought he was
"the worst abused, worst disparaged, worst 'cussed' man in
Georgia," and he probably was. "My character has been pre-
sented to the people of the state in every form of the kaleido-
scope, and I am glad of it." He was reported to have said that
"he knew he was a demagogue, but he gloried in it." However,
that admission might be better understood in connection with his
laconic observation a few days earlier:

12 Telegraph, July 16, 1891; Constitution, July 16, 1891.

13 July 17, 1891.

14 Atlanta Journal, July 18, 1891.

151

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

By some strange necessity, the pure, unselfish patriots have all gone into
the bucket shops, brokers' offices, speculative companies, railroad combines,
the banks, the warehouses, and the editorial rooms. Outside these charmed
circles no patriot can be found. 15

The Western speakers came in for their share of abuse by the
Georgia Democrats. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lease, the most spec-
tacular and accomplished of the women campaigners of Kansas,
famous for her admonition, "raise less corn and more Hell,"
had recently arrived in Georgia. A woman loose in Georgia poli-
tics! Whispers and indignation . . . The farmers cheered and
cheered again, but in Atlanta an "indignation meeting" was held
when the Alliance condemned a bill to provide a home for dis-
abled and improvident Confederate soldiers. "Did Weaver do
it?" "Was it Sockless Jerry?" "Probably 'twas Mrs. Lease,"
said the speakers. It must have been one of "This trio of com-
munists and south haters." 16

Mrs. Lease was unperturbed: "You may call me an anarchist,
a socialist or a communist, I care not, but I hold to the theory
that if one man has not enough to eat three times a day and an-
other man has $25,000,000, that last man has something that be-
longs to the first." Addressing the Georgia Assembly, she said:
"Georgia and Kansas have clasped hands at last . . . come into
the People's party and help defeat that common enemy, the Re-
publican party. . . . Take off your old party collars. What are
you afraid of?" 17

Meanwhile Watson gave alarmists no rest. He was "making a
sort of triumphal tour through the State"; he was "going all
over the state expressing his convictions." He was explaining
why the Chronicle cried "communism" and "foamed at the
mouth." "Let me show you how communist and paternal it [the
Alliance platform] is. We are the people. We have created the
corporations. They are our legal off-spring. Shall it be said that
the servant is above the master, or the child above the father?"
He was asking, "Will you Knights of Labor help the farmers
and laborers in the field of their fight on the common enemy?"
What of this cry of "class legislation"? "What has this country
ever had but class legislation? The second law Congress ever

16 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 5, 1891.

16 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 28, 1891.

17 Macon Telegraph, Aug. 11, 1891; Constitution, Aug. 9, 11, 1891.

152

"I Mean Business"

passed was aimed to build up commerce and manufactures at the
expense of agriculture. Our statute books are filled with legisla-
tion in behalf of capital, at the expense of labor. ... If we
must have class legislation, as we have always had it and always
will have it, what class is more entitled to it than the largest
class — the working class?" The response of his audiences was
generally like that of a Jefferson County crowd: "And then a
glad shout of approval from a thousand throats rang through
the wood and every eye in the audience flashed with admiration."

The question of drastic railroad legislation was uppermost in
the public mind in August. The legislature had a committee in-
vestigating the leases and another looking into freight rates.
Numerous cahiers from the radical county sub-Alliances were
pouring into the legislators' mail demanding rate regulation,
government ownership, and laws against combinations. Living-
ston, president of the state Alliance, was known to frown upon
such legislation, particularly laws against railroad combina-
tions, and he had taken that position at the state convention of
the Alliance now in session. 18 Watson, on the other hand, was
widely known to favor the most radical railroad legislation. This
issue, dramatizing as it did the more basic conflict between these
two men for ascendency in the movement, lent particular interest
to Watson's address to the Georgia legislature while the Alli-
ance convention was in progress.

"How long has it been," he asked, "since Jay Gould came
South, peering into every nook and cranny of the railroad sys-
tems?" Indeed, it had not been many months since Gould had
toured Georgia. The party of millionaires with him controlled
"over 40,000 miles of railway lines" and their fortunes "bonded
together would make over $250,000,000." The Augusta Chron-
icle hailed the visit as evidence that "Southern development has
enlisted the practical support of the richest man in America. Mr.
Gould has not only put thousands into the Richmond Terminal.
He has put millions into it." 19 The Mayor's council of Atlanta
voted Gould and his party "the freedom of the city" ; the Cham-
ber of Commerce received him, and a well-advertised reception
was given him at the Inman home by Atlanta "society."

18 Macon Telegraph, July 24, 1891; Atlanta Journal, Aug. 24, 1891; A. M.
Arnett, op. cit., pp. 120-121.

19 Feb. 8, 1891.

153

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

"If the devil himself," observed Watson, "were to come to
this town in a palace car and propose to haul the balance of the
state to his infernal kingdom, and to allow Atlanta capitalists
the profits on the transaction, they would cry, 'Hurrah for the
devil. He's going to build up Atlanta ! . . .'

"Fellow citizens, I believe that the only way we can ever set-
tle this railroad problem is by absolute Government ownership."
Cheered to the echo, he then proceeded to enumerate and ex-
pound sixteen reasons why he believed in government owner-
ship. 20

The Alliance convention, then sitting in Atlanta, appeared to
be under the domination of Livingston, who also controlled the
official organ, the Southern Alliance Farmer. This man, known
as one of the "Big Five" in the National Alliance, occupied a
dubious and shifty position in the movement. He was generally
thought of as one of the most radical of Alliancemen, given to
thunderous imprecations against Cleveland and conservative
party leaders. He frequently sounded ominous warnings of re-
volt. Yet it was Livingston who was involved with Macune in
the attempt to deliver the Alliance vote to Patrick Calhoun for
senator; it was he who sought to substitute government "con-
trol" for "ownership" in the Ocala platform; it was he who at
Cincinnati promised to follow the West into the new party, if
only they would postpone action till the next year, and yet in
Georgia hushed and diverted every demand for revolt; it was
he who led in pledging all the Alliance-elected congressmen,
save Watson, to vote for Crisp for Speaker of the national
House of Representatives. For these reasons many Alliancemen
put Livingston down in the "Plug-hat" rather than in the
"Wool-hat" branch of the Alliance. 21

Watson had his own suspicions of Livingston's conduct. On
the eve of the state convention, before setting out to Atlanta, he
was reported to have said to a friend that "the time had come
when the people must choose between him and Livingston."
Although Livingston seemed practically assured of reelection as
president, Watson set forth to the convention with his own can-
didate, C. H. Ellington, of Thomson. The Constitution was

20 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 22, 1891.

21 People's Party Paper, Nov. 26, 1891; Augusta Chronicle, July 18, 1891; J. C.
Manning, The Fadeout of Populism, pp. 16-17; Northen and Watson Scrapbooks.

154

11 1 Mean Business"

pleased to observe that "the apostle of discord" failed in his ef-
fort. His candidate did not even win the vice-presidency; Liv-
ingston was elected president; and the resolution of Watson's
friend C. C. Post, instructing congressmen to vote for no man
for Speaker unless he indorsed the Alliance platform, was de-
feated. Watson did score one point against his rival, however,
for, whether as a result of his speech on the railroads or not, the
convention rebelled at President Livingston's demand that no
action be taken on railroad consolidation. 22

Watson was still supremely isolated in his position, among of-
ficialdom of Alliance and Democracy in Georgia. But it was the
inarticulate battalions of rank and file on which he depended,
and evidence was not lacking that they looked to him as their
leader. There were reports of "an uninterrupted stream of com-
munications for months, all in favor of a third party," — to Liv-
ingston's Southern Alliance Farmer™

Much of Watson's time during these months was spent in
writing long open letters of rebuttal, correction, or rebuke to the
Democratic press. Most of this was necessary to his best inter-
ests, for the city dailies were undoubtedly twisting his meaning
and misrepresenting and discrediting him in a thousand ways.
For example, the Constitution, by slightly twisting a sentence he
uttered in a debate with Senator Butler of South Carolina made
him proclaim himself a "messiah," and printed a ridiculous car-
toon of him over the caption, "Sane or Insane? The Last Mes-
siah Crank." 24 His effort to answer such persecution — imaginary
as well as real — took much precious time. His continuous speak-
ing campaign over the state seems to have been a rather frantic
effort to make his own voice perform the service of a journal of
large circulation. Isolated as was his position, he had powerful
official antagonists, and an enemy in the editorial room of every
Democratic paper. Even the official Alliance organ was in the
hands of an avowed enemy. Watson obviously had urgent need
of a paper of his own. In the fall of 1891 he took the leading
part in the work of establishing one.

The first number of the People's Party Paper 25 appeared in

22 Constitution, Aug. 20, 21, 22, and 23, 1891 ; Journal, Aug. 20, and 24, 1891.

23 Macon Telegraph, July 24, 1891.

24 Constitution, Sept. 12, 1891; Watson's speech in Orangeburg, S.C. Cotton Plant,
Oct. 31, 1891.

25 Hereafter referred to in footnotes as "P. P. P."

155

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Atlanta on October i : Thomas E. Watson, Editor-in-Chief,
Charles C. Post, Managing Editor. It was destined to continue
to appear weekly for some eight years. A form letter, signed by
Watson, announcing the paper's appearance and soliciting sub-
scriptions, stated that "Its purpose is to educate our people upon
governmental questions; to assail official corruption, to oppose
class-rule, legislative favoritism, and the centralizing tendencies
manifest in both old parties." It would champion "the Jeffer-
sonian theory of popular government" and u the common peo-
ple — their grievances, their hopes, their rights." 26

C. C. Post, the Populist novelist ("the atheistic, anarchistic,
communistic Editor of the People's Party Paper" so-called in
the Democratic press) , deserves more than a casual introduction.
Post began his career in Michigan, edited the Chicago Express
in the middle 'eighties, and, with his wife, moved to Lithia
Springs, Georgia, for his health in 1886. He was a young man,
described as "tall and slender," resembling "the fellow 'before
taking.' " He wore "a lean, hungry look as if in pursuit of some-
thing." He was an ardent soul, full of the enthusiasms and the
amiable follies of a generous and sympathetic nature — ready to
break a lance for any good cause. At Douglasville, where he was
known as "Chicago Charlie," he and his wife founded a "School
for Mental Healing," which, if his Metaphysical Essays 2T is
any indication, preached a type of naturalistic Christianity
faintly resembling Christian Science and apparently influenced by
Darwin. In the West he had been connected with reform move-
ments, and in Georgia he soon took up arms for the Farmers'
Alliance. He had attended the Cincinnati convention in May. 28

Post's first novel, Driven from Sea to Sea, published in 1884,
after appearing serially in his paper, was said to have been read
by "over a million people," to have had a sale of 50,000 bound
copies, and in paper covers to have been still selling at the rate
of 2,000 copies a month in 1892. 29 It was an exposure of the do-
ings of Crocker, Stanford, and Huntington in the Southern Pa-
cific Railroad scandal, a picture of "corporate monopoly robbing

26 Copy of letter in Watson MSS., Chapel Hill.

27 Boston, 1895.

28 P. P. P., March 10, 1892; Macon Telegraph, July 15, 1891; and clippings,
Watson Scrapbooks.

29 P. P. P., March 10, 1892.

156

"I Mean Business"

the people under shelter of the law." 30 The book was forbidden
to be sold on the railroads. Post had another novel then on the
press, Congressman Swanson, the story of a young Southerner, a
man of the people, who led a revolt from the old party into the
new People's party. It appeared in December, 1891, at the very
crisis of Congressman Watson's endeavor to perform the same
deed. The novelist tells how u the shackles of party fell from
their [Alliancemen's] limbs, and when the men of Kansas threw
off the yoke of the Republican party and extended a hand in
fraternal greeting to their brethren of the South, that hand was
grasped with quick and ready sympathy and a new political
party . . . redolent of life and eager for action, stepped into
the arena, and offered battle to the plutocracy of the world." 31

Something of the temperament and feelings of Charlie Post
is revealed in his statement that "The thought is in the heart of
the people that violence may have to be resorted to before jus-
tice will be granted," and that "Either peacefully or otherwise
monopolistic systems are doomed to destruction." Post was one
of those who "meant business," and this trait could not but en-
dear him to his editor-in-chief.

The new paper moved off to a slow start. The public, Watson
discovered, "was singularly patient and deliberate and made no
hurry at all to send in names and cash." At the end of six weeks
it was found that the paper had spent $1,500 and received 126
subscriptions, each subscriber costing the owners twelve dollars.
Besides, the bookkeeper exhibited postal cards sent in by post-
masters stating that addressees refused to accept free sample
copies and that they "did not like our politics." "Hundreds of
such postal cards came in every week." Despite such dishearten-
ing experiences, the paper continued, losing about a hundred
dollars a week in the summer of 1892. In July of that year Wat-
son became sole owner. "I had no advertising," he wrote, and
the paper "had to bear as its own expense the brunt of the cam-
paign in Georgia. It did not ask nor receive a dollar from any
candidate. It received no subsidy, directly, or indirectly, from
any source whatever." 82

80 Driven from Sea to Sea, or Just a C ampin' (Chicago, 1884).

81 C. C. Post, Congressman Swanson, p. 336.

32 Clipping from P. P. P., circa Oct. i, 1893, Watson Scrapbooks. Allan Nevins
seems to be mistaken in asserting that Watson's paper was a source of riches
(Grover Cleveland, pp. 594-595).

157

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Bravely the first number announced, "This paper is not an ex-
periment, but starts out on a basis which insures its permanency."
It was the editor's intention that Southern people "shall have a
paper that is not controlled by the politicians and through which
they can learn the truth about this mighty movement of the
masses." Commenting upon the rise of the Populist press all
over the country, the editor said, "The organs of monopoly and
plutocracy are now powerless to deceive the masses." The edi-
torials for the first several months emphasized a defense of the
Ocala platform, warned against compromise with Democratic
half-measures, and appealed for closer alliance with the West.

After the state Alliance convention, Watson's enemies were
glad to interpret the failure of his lieutenants to put through
their resolution instructing Alliance congressmen not to vote for
any candidate for Speaker who did not stand on the Ocala plat-
form as evidence that the third-party revolt was "foredoomed
from the first to miserable and inglorious defeat," and that Alli-
ancemen were merely "old-fashioned Democrats." Watson's
next hope to gain official sanction for his position upon the
Speakership and Democratic caucus control lay with the Georgia
assembly. There the effort failed again. The legislators compro-
mised with a resolution "requesting" the Georgia delegation to
support legislation that would correct evils complained of by the
Ocala platform. Since official sanction from these sources was re-
fused, the last hope for action lay in the convention of the Su-
preme Council of the National Alliance to be held in Indianap-
olis in November. Watson appealed to his readers for instruc-
tions: "It is time they spoke up and let their congressmen know
what they want done." 83

Behind each successive checkmate of Watson's moves to break
the grip of the dead hand of the old party was the skillful strat-
egy of Livingston. Animosity between the two men sharpened as
the realization spread abroad that between them lay the most
dangerous, the most crucial, political issue that Southerners of
that day were capable of envisaging — white solidarity, the Solid
South. National interest developed in the struggle between
them as it became apparent that they were the leaders of oppos-

88 Lois Gray, "Thomas E. Watson: Leader of Georgia Populism," Master's thesis,
Emory University, pp. 40-41.

158

"I Mean Business"

ing national forces : one seeking to keep the reform movement
within the bounds of the two old parties and divided between
them ; the other attempting to unite the movement in a separate
party.

For a long time it was a matter of doubt which flag Living-
ston was following. But now, with the rank and file of his battal-
ions restive, ripening for revolt, and suspicious of betrayal, 84
Livingston, under the relentless fire of Watson's exposures, was
finally revealed in his true colors.

"After all this agitation and the turning out of the old leaders
are the new ones going to fall into the old party ruts?" asked
Watson. "Then what was the use in turning the old ones
out?" 35 He charged Livingston with "trying to ride two horses
at once." He was running with the hare and barking with the
hounds. When cornered with the question, "Will you vote for
Cleveland if he is nominated?" Livingston replied, "I will vote
for the nominee." Yet in July he had said, "The Democrat who
could swallow Cleveland could swallow Harrison." M Since it
was known that Livingston was pledged to vote for Crisp as
Speaker, Watson quoted Crisp as saying, "If the damned Alli-
ance, or the People's Party should carry Kansas this year, all
hell can't hold the Alliancemen of the South ; therefore it is nec-
essary to break up the People's Party of Kansas, in order to pre-
serve a solid South." 87 At the Cincinnati convention Livingston
had asked the Western leaders for only a little more time for
"educational" work before he led the Georgia Alliance into the
new party. 38 In Georgia, however, he had repeatedly deferred
action with the excuse that the time was not ripe. As the day ap-
proached for the Indianapolis meeting, it became evident that
Livingston would be on hand to block all tendency toward re-
volt.

With exactly the opposite intention, Watson set out for In-
dianapolis. It was the first of the National Alliance conventions

34 The air was thick with charges of corruption against Livingston during the
summer and fall of 1891. Vide Northen Scrapbooks; Journal, Aug. 15, 17, and 28,
and Sept. 4 and 5, 1891; Constitution, June 11 and Aug. 14, and 22-28, 1891.

85 P. P. P., Dec. 3, 1891.

86 Augusta Chronicle, July 18, 1891.

87 P. P. P., Nov. 19, 1 891, quoting the Kansas Agitator.

88 New York Voice, May 28, 1891, and a letter from Mrs. Lease stating that Liv-
ingston pledged his support to the new party, both quoted in clipping from Atlanta
Journal, undated, Watson Scrapbooks.

159

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

he had attended; he was not a member, and he had no right to
the floor. With him, however, was his friend and lieutenant,
M. I. Branch, an accredited delegate from the Georgia Alliance.
Branch carried with him for presentation to the convention a
resolution that Watson "highly approved of." Upon Watson's
advice, Branch showed the resolution to Jerry Simpson, who
first agreed to introduce it. This Simpson was unable to do when
he failed to be chosen as delegate. Branch then introduced the
resolution himself. According to him it "appeared like a clap of
thunder in a clear sky." As a matter of fact the sky was by no
means clear of third-party thunder clouds. Livingston's "vigo-
rous" opposition was unavailing this time; the resolution was
adopted "with enthusiasm." It requested all congressmen elected
"by aid of Alliance constituencies ... to decline to enter into
any party caucus called to designate a candidate for Speaker, un-
less adherence to the principles of the Ocala platform are made
a test of admission to said caucus." 89 Watson's views, rejected
in his own state under the coercion of Alliance leaders, were now
the adopted policy of the National organization.

Livingston was further discredited by the election as president
of L. L. Polk, who was strongly in sympathy with the People's
party. When his own views against independence became known,
Livingston's candidacy, thought by some to have been formi-
dable, collapsed. The convention was, on the whole, a triumph
for the People's party. A member of its executive committee
was elected vice-president, and there was no longer any doubt
that a national ticket would be nominated the next year with
Polk at its head. 40 Watson was quoted in Indianapolis as saying
he would not enter the Democratic caucus, but that instead the
Alliance congressmen would hold a caucus themselves and nom-
inate a candidate for Speaker. "Georgia is ready for a third
party," he added, "and will sweep the State with the movement.
The great bulk of the Democratic party will pass into the new
party lines." 41

89 Letter from M. I. Branch in P. P. P., Sept. 9, 1892, and in the Constitution,
March 13, 1892; resolution quoted in P. P. P., Nov. 26, 1891; account of conven-
tion in Constitution, Nov. 17-25, 1891; Ernest D. Stewart in "The Populist Party
in Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. XIV, p. 355, seems to have been in
error in asserting that Simpson introduced the resolution in question.

^Washington Post, Nov. 20 and 26 and Dec. 9, 1891; P. P. P., Nov. 26, 1891;
E. D. Stewart, op. ciu

41 Indianapolis Journal quoted in the P. P. P., Nov. 26, 1891.

l60

"I Mean Business"

It being only a few weeks until his first session of Congress
opened, Watson hurried home. "Realizing the gravity of the
Resolution," he later wrote, "I campaigned my District again,
and took a referendum vote, as to whether I should obey the
Resolution. Without one dissenting voice, the people, by a show
of hands, instructed me to defy the caucus, and stand firm for
the principles." 42 When the Democratic papers sought to dis-
credit his motives by saying that he had written his own instruc-
tions, since the Indianapolis resolution was virtually his own,
Watson replied that it was, with slight change, only a reaffirma-
tion of a similar resolution passed at St. Louis in 1889, upon the
basis of which he had made his race.

Upon his return home, Watson was greeted with a hail of
abuse that was a hint of what was to come later. Patrick Walsh
branded him a "traitor" and read him out of the party. Living-
ston refused to be bound by the resolution passed at Indianapo-
lis. When his paper complained that "sub-alliances are disband-
ing, and members are growing luke-warm and discouraged," the
membership in some counties falling off twenty-five per cent,
Watson observed that it was "not to be wondered at that
they grew suspicious" after Livingston's conduct at the con-
vention and his repeated thwarting of their impulse toward re-
volt. 43

The radical sub-alliances were becoming articulate against
their president. The Howell alliance rather exceeded the bounds
of parliamentary decorum in its resolution: "Whereas, one
Leonidas F. Benedict Arnold Judas Iscariot Livingston" has
committed sundry acts not to their liking, they hereby consign
him to his "proper sphere — among the scum and Wall-Street
pimps of the so-called Democratic party." **

"This is not a political fight," Watson wrote, "and politicians
cannot lead or direct it. It is a movement of the masses, an upris-
ing of the people, and they and not the politicians will direct it.
The people need spokesmen — not leaders — men in the front
who will obey, not command." 45

With Post as its chairman, the Executive Committee of the

42 Watson, Political and Economic Handbook, p. 454.

^Southern Alliance Farmer, Nov. 24, 1891; P. P. P., Dec. 3, 1891.

44 Clipping from Atlanta Herald, Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. II, p. 30.

45 P. P. P., Dec. 3, 1891.

l6l

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

People's Party of Georgia was already at work in December set-
ting up the framework of the new party. As commander of the
new army, Watson was accepted without question, and a capable
general he was. There was also a raw and untried staff of of-
ficers. The rank and file, however, were still unmobilized, in-
deed, not even recruited, much less drilled. It yet remained to
be seen whether they would spring to arms when Tom Watson
raised the banner.

162

12

Populism in Congress

With apparent intention of staying a long while at
Washington, Watson bought a house then under construc-
tion at 129 Fourth Street, S. E., "a handsome four story brick
building,' ' he pronounced it. His family, which now included a
son and a daughter, was no sooner moved in than they and he
were down with grippe. His reaction to the new situation, like
his reaction to his first office ten years before, was one of disap-
pointment. "Being in Congress," he wrote, "does not seem near
so big a thing as when I was campaigning for the place."
Furthermore, "The speaker [Mr. Crisp] is bitterly hostile to
me because I would not support him and will give me no chance
to acquit myself with credit." With so much to do, however,
there was little time for self-pity. "Am organizing a new political
party in Georgia," he noted in his Journal, "because the Demo-
cratic Party has drifted away from true Principles and is only
seeking office. The newspapers denounce me most bitterly but
the people seem to be rallying to me with enthusiasm." 1 "I
worked so hard while in Congress," he later testified, "that
while I am passionately fond of music, I did not once attend the
opera."

Before Congress convened a show-down upon the question of
adherence to the Indianapolis resolution and independence was
forced upon all Alliance-elected and pledged congressmen. A
short while before the Democratic caucus was called, a confer-
ence of Alliance congressmen was held in the office of the Na-
tional Economist. To all of them had been sent a letter signed
by L. L. Polk, president of the National Alliance, including a

a MS. Journal 2, p. 527; National Economist, Jan. 2, 1892.

163

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

copy of the Indianapolis resolution, and reminding them of their
obligation in the matter of caucus and Speakership contest. Upon
these matters the congressmen were clearly divided into two
factions. One, led by Livingston, was made up of eight repre-
sentatives, all from the South, all agreed upon entering the
Democratic caucus. The other faction, led by Watson and Jerry
Simpson, was made up of seven congressmen, all from the West
with the exception of Watson, all determined to adhere to the
Ocala platform no matter where it took them. Here was the
issue that had to be settled before this meeting ended. As dis-
cussion circled near it, the atmosphere became tense.

For a while, financial questions and policies were discussed.
Then Otis of Kansas took the floor and addressed an "earnest
talk" to the Southerners. "We are disappointed," he told them.
"We came here expecting you to work with us for the Ocala
Platform irrespective of Party caucus, and but one of your num-
ber has met us on that ground." Jerry Simpson arose and pro-
posed independent action, and at the same time made an un-
complimentary reference to the Democratic party. Livingston
was on his feet instantly. "The Democratic party is not opposed
to us," he roared. "It is willing and anxious to work for the re-
lief of our people." Furthermore, Simpson had no right to call
his party corrupt. But, replied Simpson, he had heard Living-
ston himself denounce it as corrupt. This rejoinder set the meet-
ing in an "uproar," with several members on the floor at once
talking excitedly at the tops of their voices.

Livingston was a powerful man physically, "a most compel-
ling, commanding personage," said an acquaintance, and a "born
leader of men." It was not often, nor with impunity, that his
will was crossed. Yet he had been compelled to watch a vast or-
ganization, which he had all but fathered, slip gradually out of
his control and under the spell of a puny orator half his size and
several years his junior.

Watson, in spite of the uproar, gained attention by the very
fury of his words and manner. The scene that followed is de-
scribed by an eye-witness :

Tom Watson shouted that it was time to do some plain talking. "You
can't choke Simpson in that way," he cried. "He's right. On what platform
were we elected? What pledges did we make? Then how is it proposed
that we go into the democratic caucus?"

164

Populism in Congress

Suddenly Watson turned full on Livingston. "You and I know," he
cried, "how we came to be here. We could never have been in Congress
but for the reform movement among the farmers of Georgia. These farmers
trusted you, and now you want to betray them for your own personal
interest."

"Sit down," roared Livingston, jumping to his feet and striding toward
Watson, over whom he towered like a giant.

"I'll not sit down," cried Watson, not quailing or budging an inch. "You
can't bulldoze me," he cried. "I'd say what was right, no matter if there
were a thousand Livingstons here."

Livingston was in a rage. Half a dozen men jumped up to hold him
back.

"You needn't hold him," cried Watson. "I guess he's not dangerous."

The men glared at each other, and it took a long time to restore quiet
and order. 2

Simpson was finally allowed to conclude his remarks. Watson
followed him to say that there was an "irrepressible conflict be-
tween factions; that they were like crossed swords; and there
had better be no more meetings." The conference adjourned
after a futile effort by Livingston to "pour oil upon the waters."

While the Democratic and Republican caucuses were in prog-
ress two senators and eight representatives met at Senator Pef-
fer's house, and the first Populist caucus was called to order. It
was unanimously agreed that the Indianapolis Resolution
should be respected. The conference also unanimously requested
Tom Watson to be their candidate for Speaker. He consented,
"knowing of course that it amounted to nothing more than a
compliment and a proof of our consistency." He represented a
wedge with which the Populists hoped to split the Solid South.
"So was formed," declared the People's Party Paper, "the first
distinctive political body known as the People's party." 3

After a long deadlock in the Democratic caucus Crisp re-
ceived the nomination, which, in view of the huge Democratic
majority in the House, assured his election. On the day of elec-
tion, Jerry Simpson rose and nominated Watson for Speaker.
He received eight votes. 4 The party of which he was the House
leader consisted at this point of Jerry Simpson, John G. Otis,

2 Clipping from Washington Post, Vol. II, p. 24 of Northen Scrapbooks ; cf . Wat-
son's account in P. P. P., Jan. 28, 1892.

3 Dec. 17, 1891, quoted by John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, p. 222; clippings
in Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. II, p. 25.

4 Congressional Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 7.

165

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

John Davis, Benjamin H. Clover, and William Baker, all from
Kansas, O. M. Kem and W. A. McKeighan from Nebraska,
and K. Halvorsen from Minnesota.

Hamlin Garland, the young Western novelist, whose Main-
Traveled Roads had just appeared, had taken part "in meetings
of rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and
watched processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as
they filed through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked
plains." 5 Thrilled by the spirit of revolt among his people, he
had now come to Washington in search of material for an arti-
cle. 6

He found significance in the seats assigned the Populist mem-
bers, with Jerry Simpson directly in front of the Speaker's desk,
forming the point of a "wedge," his colleagues spread behind
him — a wedge that would "symbolize the work of splitting the
old parties in pieces." Watson, Kem, and Clover, however, were
unable to obtain seats with their colleagues, and were placed on
the extreme right of the Republican side of the House.

Garland thought Watson, "next to Simpson, the most striking
personality of the group. He speaks with a touch of the dialect
of the South, and wears a soft hat in the southern way . . . He
is small and active. His face is perfectly beardless and quite thin.
His eyes are his most remarkable feature, except possibly the
abundance of dark red hair, pushed back from his face. . . .
Many remark his resemblance to Alexander Stephens, whose
district he has succeeded to. The photographer remarked upon
the striking resemblance, which extends to his ability. Simpson
calls him the 'coming man,' and has a deep regard for him."

"His life of hard work and suffering has made him a com-
moner and a radical, — 'a dangerous man' to some of the South-
ern people, — but a very moderate and fair-tempered reformer
to me. He is simply one more of the scores of similar young radi-
cals and commoners of my acquaintance. He not only types the
best economic thought of the young South, — he leads it . . .
He stands for the further extension of the idea of liberty. His
faith in man and the forward urge of the human mind never fails

6 Hamlin Garland, Son of the Middle Border, p. 423.

6 H. Garland, "The Alliance Wedge in Congress," Arena, Vol. V (March, 1892),
pp. 447-457.

l66

Populism in Congress

him. . . ." Although "one of the youngest members of the
House, he will be found to be one of the ablest when any ques-
tion is being discussed on its merits."

Garland described Jerry Simpson as "about fifty years of age,
of slender but powerful build" wearing "old-fashioned glasses,
through which his eyes gleam with ever-present humor." He
was "full of odd turns of thought, and quaint expressions that
make one think of Whitcomb Riley." Simpson had led a hard
life — a sailor on Lake Michigan and later a farmer in Kansas.
He had no school training. Yet, observed Garland, "he thinks
for himself on all subjects religious, economic, and political," is
"naturally a studious man," and has "a large fund of common
sense and experimental philosophy." Once in debate he referred
to Senator Cullom as an "iniquitous railway attorney" and was
promptly called out of order. "Well," said Simpson, "I will
withdraw that. I beg pardon, I am a new member and do not
know your rules. But that is the way we talk in Kansas. We are
plain-speaking people." 7

The other Westerners Garland described in less detail, noting
in general their "heavily lined" faces and "a sort of smileless
gravity about them that reflects the hard condition of the people
from whom they come." There was, for instance, Halvorsen, the
Swede, with "long red whiskers, cut away at the chin" — "quiet
to the point of reticence." There were doubtless moments when
these Westerners looked upon their volatile and irrepressible
Southern comrade in wonderment.

This handful of Populist leaders, and those who joined them
later, were then, and have been since, the butt of a great deal of
misdirected humor. Henry Demarest Lloyd, one of the keenest
observers of their generation, pronounced the Populist delega-
tion in Congress "men whom the fierce light of opposition never
revealed to be anything but brave, honest, and intelligent."

During his visit to Congress in January, 1891, it seemed to
Hamlin Garland that there was "approaching a great periodic
popular upheaval similar to that of '6i." "Everywhere," he re-
corded, "as I went through the aisles of the House, I saw it and
heard it. The young Democrats were almost in open rebellion

7 Clipping, Watson Scrapbooks.

167

Tom Watson Agrarian "Rebel

against this domineering policy of the old legislators. The Re-
publicans were apprehensive, almost desperate. Placeholders are
beginning to tremble." On the whole, he decided, "the House
is a smoldering volcano." But the Populists, "the men who are
advocating right and justice instead of policy, sat eager, ready
for the struggle. They have everything to win and nothing to
lose in the vital discussion and re-organization which, in my
judgment, is sure to come." 8

Another young member of the House who came to Washing-
ton for his first term was William Jennings Bryan, the only
Democratic member from Nebraska. The other two members of
the delegation were Populists. It is said that some 20,000 fraud-
ulent votes were cast against the Populists in Nebraska in the
election of 1890. 9 Watson told Bryan "that he would have to
abandon his principles or leave the Democratic party." He
hoped "this brilliant young man will choose principle — even
though he lose office by it. There is such a thing in life as paying
too much for office." 10

"Poor Tom's a' cold," chanted the Atlanta Journal on receiv-
ing news that Watson had bolted the Democratic caucus. He
was the "lone fisherman." At Thomson, his home, the Demo-
crats celebrated "with bonfires, brass band, fire works, and
much enthusiasm" the election of Crisp as Speaker. Watson's
own brother was elected secretary of the meeting of Thomson
Democrats that demanded his resignation and condemned his
stand. 11

This was a bitter cup to Watson. To his friend Ellington in
Thomson he wrote, "As for me, I suffer deeply. I felt very
keenly the blow dealt me by my own people at home, but I am
here to do certain things, and I mean to do it if it costs me my
life." To vindicate their leader, the farmers held a mass meeting
in Thomson in answer to the Democratic celebration. The

8 H. Garland, in Arena, Vol. V (1892), p. 457.
9 Paxon Hibben, The Peerless Leader, p. 124.
10 P. P. P., Oct. 13, 1893.

"Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 9, 1891; clipping dated Thomson, Jan. 30, 1892, Wat-
son Scrapbooks.

168

Populism in Congress

weather was foul and roads all but impassable. "If ever elements
conspired against the success of a meeting of men," wrote an un-
friendly attendant, "it did today. ... I dwell thus upon the
weather to . . . emphasize what enthusiasm, and what earnest-
ness of purpose must actuate men who rode from ten to fifteen
miles in wagons and open buggies and on horse back through
sleet and slush, over bad roads, to come here and declare their
faith and confidence in Tom Watson. To me there is something
pathetic in the spectacle ... to witness these grayhaired veter-
ans who have borne the Democratic standard to victory in a
hundred battles, turning their backs upon the colors for which
their sires fought, renouncing and denouncing leaders who stood
by them in troublous times that are past, and swearing allegiance
to strange gods and untried generals. It indicates how serious is
the condition of these farmers at home, how cheerless to them
must be the outlook for the future."

Only a few townsmen were present. Ellington remarked, "It
is the same old fight between the country and the town." Ad-
dressing the farmers, a speaker said, "They say Watson is a dan-
gerous man. It was discontented people who established the
Protestant Church, the Magna Charta and which [sic'] caused
France to run with blood. (Applause.) There are a hundred
precedents in history. Discontent makes us rebels against these
old line parties. If we are united we will win. (Applause.) Let
us stand by each other at any cost. (Applause.) Let us wire Wat-
son our action today and let his heart rejoice to know that his
people are with him."

The meeting voted "unqualified approval" of Watson, "the
only Congressman from Georgia elected on the Ocala demands,
who has not compromised the principles on which he was
elected." It branded "all such charges as 'traitor to party,' 'Ben-
edict Arnold,' etc., maliciously false." 12

Scores of similar meetings endorsing Watson were held in
sub-alliances all over the state. "At the very mention of his
name" the Jonesboro sub-Alliance "arose as one man, making
the welkin ring." For two months Watson spread samples of
these resolutions endorsing his position over the front page of
his paper under the heading, "SPEAKING OUT." 13 It was

32 Augusta Chronicle, Dec. 20, 1891.
13 P. P. P., Dec. 17, 1891-Feb. 11, 1892.

169

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

said by prominent Alliancemen that "Tom Watson is now the
recognized leader of the Alliance as an organization political
. . . This meant that the Alliance is already, or will be as soon
as plans mature, the third party of Georgia. Livingston was too
tame a spirit for the third party emergency. ... It has been
very evident for months past that Livingston had lost his grip.
. . . Livingston and Watson are not even on speaking terms." 14
President Polk commended Watson's action, 15 and the National
Economist thought that the nine Populists with him as leader
"immortalized themselves politically, and made traces in Ameri-
can history which will never be obliterated, by refusing to go
into the caucus of either party." 16

For all the notoriety he received before Congress was organ-
ized, Watson was still a neophyte and had his place yet to win
on the floor of the House. The Chronicle admitted that he "es-
pecially distinguished himself" in his maiden speech, "not so
much by what he said as by his coolness, readiness at repartee
and his easy flow of good solid English words." When he got
the floor the former "Czar" Reed, who sat across the aisle from
him, conspicuously moved a dozen seats away, but returned to
his seat before the Populist leader was half through, and "actu-
ally smiled graciously" when Watson made some humorous ref-
erence to his erstwhile Czardom.

Referring to his committee appointments (the United States
Militia, and the Census) Watson remarked that Crisp had
placed him "just as low as the law allowed," observing that "A
militia which does not exist and a census which has already been
taken are not apt to be subjects of very exciting work. Maybe I
can get the pages to let me help them bring up stationery, pens,
ink, etc. and then keep the rust off. The elevator man seems to be
a good natured outcast and possibly he may let me help him pull
the cord."

The feud between Watson and Speaker Crisp increased in bit-
terness. A reporter in Watson's paper doubted if "there ever
reigned a speaker of the House before this who declined to
speak to one of the members or who refused to recognize him in
his representative capacity because of personal bias." When

14 Clipping dated Dec. 26, 1891, Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. II, p. 24.

15 Progressive Farmer, quoted in P. P. P., Jan. 14, 1892.

16 Dec. 12, 1891.

170

Populism in Congress

Crisp snubbed his effort to get an anti-Pinkerton bill before the
House, a labor paper said, "The Speaker's attitude toward Mr.
Watson must be considered as a direct slap at every union work-
ingman in the country.* '

Watson had delivered some ungloved blows at Crisp. During
the race for the speakership he had written that Crisp's candi-
dacy was "supported by the Machine politicians, by the boodlers,
the subsidy hunters, the protected industries and by Wall
Street." From the floor of the House, too, he had attacked the
Speaker's "autocratic power," saying he did not "any more want
to give it to a man whose name begins with a C, and who comes
from Georgia, than one whose name begins with R, and who
comes from Maine." 17

The preceding summer Watson had publicly charged one
E. W. Barrett, a correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution,
with offering him the chairmanship of an important committee
for his promise to vote for Crisp. 18 The charge was denied. After
his election, Crisp made this same Barrett clerk of the Speaker, a
position he held along with that of correspondent to the Consti-
tution. In the latter capacity he kept up a running political at-
tack on Watson — an attack that some believed emanated from
the Speaker himself. On February 28, he wrote a dispatch that
frankly charged Watson with voting against the Democratic con-
testant and for the Republican contestant in a disputed election
case before the House as "an open play to the Republican
party," because "he expects financial aid from that party in his
next race for congress."

A few days later Watson gained the floor on a question of
privilege. First he sent to the desk the Barrett article, which was
read by the Clerk. Then he addressed his remarks, "direct, per-
sonal, and blistering," to the Speaker himself. Since "the Clerk
of the Speaker of this House denounces through the public print
a gentleman whom he knows to be the political opponent of the
gentleman to whom he is clerk" he felt his reply justified:

In my association with the members of this House, I have felt the em-
barrassment of being in a position open to misconstruction, open to mis-
understanding; but I have attempted to establish here a character for open-
ness, manliness, and fairness, which I thought had in some measure won me

17 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 1 682-1 683.
"^Constitution, Aug. 21-26, 1891.

171

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the confidence of my colleagues upon this floor. Ever since I have been here
the clerk of the Speaker has thought it was his duty to deride me, ridicule
me, and misrepresent me.

All the members, the Speaker, and the author of the article
knew that three Democrats, whose loyalty was unquestioned,
had also voted for the Republican contestant, and the inference
that the vote had been cast corruptly was no more justified in
his case than in theirs. "Mr. Speaker," he concluded, "I de-
nounce that insinuation, cowardly as it is, as a base and infamous
falsehood. (Applause.)" 19

There is no record that relations between the Speaker and the
gentleman from Georgia improved after this.

The arch-enemy, however, was still Livingston. The great
convention of farmer and labor organizations at St. Louis, to be
held on February 22, would settle the fate of the third party as
a national movement. Moving swiftly and silently, Livingston
early in December appointed handpicked delegates to the con-
vention, who were known to oppose the third party revolt, and
elected himself a member and chairman ex-officio of the dele-
gation. 20

Watson immediately denounced his action as "a usurpation of
power," saying he was guilty of "not only appointing delegates
to the . . . convention without consulting the people whom
those delegates represent, but actually canvassing every name
presented for appointment and rejecting every one who was
thought to be favorable to views held by a large majority of the
Alliancemen of the State." He warned the farmers of their "be-
trayal" and urged them to renounce Livingston by "a flood of
letters." The response to his call must have been gratifying. 21
Livingston and his handpicked delegation, of course, refused to
resign as Watson demanded, and set forth to the St. Louis Con-
vention. But another delegation, consisting of Post, Ellington,
and Branch, Watson lieutenants, also set forth with no creden-
tials save a conviction that they, instead of Livingston, repre-
sented the will of the Georgia masses.

The St. Louis Convention, whose members were mainly griz-
zled, hard-handed farmers, was immense, somewhat amorphous,

19 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 1682-1683.

20 Constitution, Jan. 2, 1892.

21 P. P. P., Dec. 17, 1891, Jan. 7, 14, and Feb. 11, 18, 1892.

172

Populism in Congress

and slow to organize due to confusion about credentials. The
credentials committee did not report until the second day and
then refused to rule upon one contest — that between the two
delegations from Georgia. The fight between them was so fierce
that the committee referred the decision to the whole Conven-
tion. The issue was clearly third party versus anti-third party,
and the vote on the Georgia contest would reveal the will of
the Convention on this, the most vital issue before it.

Moses, one of the Livingston delegates, took the floor to de-
nounce the contesting delegates and to assure the Convention
that whatever the West did, the South would remain solidly
Democratic. C. C. Post was on his feet the instant Moses fin-
ished. At his revelation of u the whole scheme by which Living-
ston had sought to betray the Alliance and the reform move-
ment to its death" the audience "broke forth in wildest cheers."
Post's excoriation of Livingston, according to the Associated
Press reporter was "the fiercest speech made in the Convention."
At its close he dramatically unrolled a sheet of paper thirty feet
long covered with some four hundred resolutions endorsing
Watson, and by its side held up a sheet two feet long endorsing
Livingston. With this graphic contrast before them, the Con-
vention enthusiastically voted to seat the Watson delegation. By
that vote the nation knew that this was a third party conven-
tion. 22

Livingston's motion to adopt the proposed platform without
mention of the radical preamble (a masterpiece of political in-
vective by Ignatius Donnelly) was adopted. But one of the Wat-
son delegates saw through the ruse, and moved the adoption of
the preamble also. Of the seven hundred votes, it was said, only
three were cast against the motion — and those were cast by the
Livingston men from Georgia. After this vote Livingston and
one of his lieutenants left the hall. Watson's description of the
incident was not entirely free from an attitude of gloating:

The departure of a couple of spectators from the galleries would have
attracted as much comment as did the departure of these men, one of whom
had once wielded more power over the Alliancemen of the country than
perhaps any other man, but who lost it in a mad effort to prove himself
greater than the people who trusted him.

22 Hicks, The Populist Revolt, pp. 223-226; clippings in Watson Scrapbooks and
Northen Scrapbooks; P. P. P., March 3, 1892.

173

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Livingston, instead of returning to his duties at Washington
(where Watson had remained), hurried immediately to Georgia
to raise a hue and cry against the action of the St. Louis Con-
vention. "The Conference," he shouted, "was composed of a lot
of cranks and men without character or influence." Ignatius Don-
nelly said "the New Order of things would wipe out the color
line in the South." Would his audience want to eat and sleep
with Negroes? The Colonel made other notable observations, all
of the same general trend. 23 The Augusta Chronicle, only lately
wont to refer to Livingston as a "scurvy politician and dirty
political trickster," praised his speech hugely. On the other hand,
Dr. Felton, the old Independent warhorse who had fought
Watson and the Alliance honestly out of conviction, thought
that "Tom Watson's fidelity shines like a star beside Living-
ston's detestable demagoguery and trickery."

A referendum to the 2,200 sub-Alliances of Georgia upon the
action of the St. Louis Convention revealed how clearly Living-
ston had misrepresented them, and how accurately Watson knew
their mood. Issue after issue of the People's Party Paper during
March and April was filled with hundreds of resolutions under
the heading "THE UPRISING: They Will Act with the Peo-
ple's Party." Of 1600 sub-Alliances reporting (their resolutions,
"official, signed and stamped"), only three refused to endorse
the Convention. All the rest did endorse it. The editor of the
official organ of the Alliance reported that "the action of the
sub-Alliances means that the Georgia Alliance is almost unani-
mously committed to the third party." 24 And, instead of com-
plaining of decline in membership as a few months before, the
editor reported the "membership rolls are larger than they ever
have been, and they are steadily increasing."

Despite the multiplicity of fronts to his political battle line
Watson, unlike some of his enemies, stuck to his post, not leav-
ing Washington during the entire session, and attending every
daily session except when he was ill. In the subsequent cam-

23 Constitution, Feb. 26, 1892; P. P. P., March 10, 1892; National Economist,
March 5, 1892; Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. II, pp. 38-39-

24 Southern Alliance Farmer, March 21, 1892; Macon Telegraph, March 22, 1892.

174

Populism in Congress

paign he once made the statement that he had "introduced bills
on nearly every point included in the Ocala platform." This
was virtually the case. These included a bill to levy an income
tax; a bill to prevent the payment in advance of interest on
United States bonds to holders; a bill to abolish duties on jute
bagging, iron ties, and binding twine; a bill to recover into the
Treasury the $100,000,000 of gold reserve held for redemption
of United States notes; a bill to abolish the National Bank; a
bill to control the employment of such strike breakers as the
Pinkerton Detective Agency provided; and a bill to establish a
system of subtreasuries. 25

Of these bills, only two were ever reported out by the com-
mittees to which they were referred. Watson could have had few
delusions about them in the first place; he probably introduced
some of them mainly as a means of getting them before the pub-
lic. For the rest, it is true that his record is singularly free from
the multitude of petty personal-relief, and pension, logrolling
bills that filled the time of the average congressman.

No other plank of the Alliance platform was more discussed,
and from none of their schemes for relief did the farmers expect
greater things than the subtreasury plan. It was also the subject
of more criticism and ridicule, and doubtless the faith of many
farmers was that of despair grasping at a panacea. Yet the plan
had many substantial and intelligent features and was deserving
of a serious consideration that it did not get. Bills to establish
the plan had been introduced in both Senate and House of the
previous Congress; yet the committees to which they were re-
ferred could be induced to make no report, favorable or unfa-
vorable, upon them, despite the flood of petitions from Alli-
ances. 26

Almost three months had elapsed since he had introduced his
bill, without any word from the Committee on Ways and
Means, when Watson, determined to force the issue, asked
unanimous consent for consideration of a resolution requesting
the Committee to report on the subtreasury bill. Whereupon a
member demanded the regular order. Watson then adopted the

26 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 126 (H. R. 83, H. R. 84, H. R. 85, H. R. 86),
p. 303 (H. R. 3611), p. 993 (H. R. 5680), p. 1164 (H. R. 6000), p. 1578 (H. R.
6660).

26 T.E.W., People's Party Campaign Booh, Chap. XVI, "The Sub-Treasury."

175

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

strategy of uncompromisingly objecting to every request for
unanimous consent, no matter who asked it. Every morning he
arose to make his request, was met with objection, and sat down
to await opportunity to block every similar request. Finally the
majority yielded, his request was granted, and the Committee
was asked to report the bill. This was hailed by the National
Economist as "The first victory for the People's Party." An-
other month passed by, however, and still no report. "Give us
one hour," pleaded Watson, "two hours, three hours, one day or
two days" since "we do claim that you are bound to give us a
chance to discuss the bill." When this proved unavailing, he re-
turned to his old tactics, colliding even with his friend Bryan.
Still nothing happened, until the very last day of the session
when the bill was reported. With not a minute allowed for dis-
cussion, it was lost. 27

Upon other Populist demands Watson was ready to lift his
voice. "You take the United States Senate. We demand that its
members shall be elected hereafter by a direct vote of the peo-
ple. Why? . . . We know that the very concentration of power,
the concentration of capital, the concentration of privilege which
we are fighting is enthroned and intrenched in the Senate of
the United States. No man can successfully deny it. Every great
corporation of this land has its agents, its attorneys there." 28

Ever since the 'seventies, a subject of bitter complaint among
labor unions had been the gangs of gunmen and strike breakers
that the Pinkerton Detective Agency hired out to corporations
engaged in struggles with their operatives. The record of their
crimes against labor had been a black one ; yet no effective meas-
ure had been taken against the practice. Watson began an ear-
nest fight upon this "standing body of armed militia which cor-
porations can hire," introducing early in the session a resolution
and a bill calling for investigation and control of such agencies. 29
The bill lay in committee for months. No report was made de-
spite Watson's appearance before the committee, and his pleas
from the floor of the House. Pinkerton, in what Watson thought
"the foulest and most brutal manner," denounced the author of

27 Cong. Record, $2 Cong., i Sess., pp. 4432, 4563, 5455-545^, 5^5-

28 Ibid., Jan. 27, 1892, pp. 598-599-

29 T. E. W., People's Party Campaign Book, Chap. XV, pp. 127-198.

I76

Populism in Congress

the resolution in the press, 30 which only spurred him to renewed
activity. Finally the committee reported the resolution favor-
ably, shorn, said the author, "of its strongest features, and re-
stricted merely to the operation of railroad trains." In this form
the bill passed, but no action came of it. 31

A few weeks later, at four o'clock on the morning of July 6,
a barge loaded with three hundred armed Pinkerton "detec-
tives" was towed up the Monongahela River to the landing of
the Homestead Carnegie Steel plant. The workers met them
with arms, and after a pitched battle that lasted all day, cap-
tured them, with a loss of half a dozen men on both sides killed,
and many wounded. The state militia then moved in, intimi-
dated the strikers and remained for several months. American
union-labor had lost one of the most decisive and disastrous bat-
tles in its history.

On the day following the Homestead battle, Williams of
Massachusetts introduced a resolution calling for an investiga-
tion. It received immediate and favorable attention. Watson
gave the bill strong support, but he reminded the member that:

As far back as February 9 ... I introduced a bill which would have
made the keeping of such a standing body of men, or their employment
illegal, and would then have struck at the source of the trouble, by putting
down this body of men . . .

No action whatever has been taken upon that measure. If this Congress
meant to do anything to protect the laborers it could have been done . . .

Now I want to say this in conclusion. Look at the difference in the con-
duct of the committee at that time and on yesterday.

There is a sound of cannon in the air; there is a sound of Winchester
rifles abroad; there are barricades and forts; there is a vessel in the river
armed and equipped for fight, there is the stain of blood in the street ; there
are dead men being borne to their homes. So the gentleman from Massa-
chusetts introduces a resolution yesterday and, without hearing him, with-
out compelling him to give them evidence, or any facts, or any law, the
committee at once considered his resolution and brought it up here this
morning. . . .

But, now that your Presidential election approaches and you want to
play to the galleries and to pretend friendship for the working men, you

80 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., July 7, 1892, p. 5868.

81 Ibid., Jan. 19, 1892; Feb. 9, 1892, p. 993; May 12, 1892, pp. 4222-4225; P. P. P.,
April 14 and May 6, 1892.

177

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

bring in a resolution at this late hour, when the shedding of blood might
have been prevented. 82

The national convention of the People's party, then in session
at Omaha, denounced the "hireling standing army, unrecognized
by our laws," and passed a resolution demanding the abolition
of the system — the first time the demand had appeared in their
platform. Five days after the Homestead struggle, a bloody
pitched battle was fought between the union miners of the
Coeur d'Alene district of Idaho and professional strike breakers.
Watson's prompt resolution calling for an investigation of the
labor troubles and of the conduct of the Sullivan police therein
was refused consideration. 83 The professional strike breaking
agencies were to enjoy a long period of prosperity thereafter.

Another piece of labor legislation in which Watson interested
himself was the eight-hour labor law. He asserted that he was
"the only man in Congress" who consistently supported the
measure. 84 Upon military and naval appropriations and ques-
tions of foreign relations Watson spoke as if for his party, and
his position did conform to the party policy, in so far as it had
one. But he also spoke out of personal convictions that were as
deeply rooted in him as any he had. Some Quaker subsoil of his
background still clung to the roots of those convictions. Those
principles remained with him after he seemed to have forgotten
many others he now swore by.

When Livingston, shortly before the St. Louis Convention,
began to be quoted by the press as favorable to war with Chile,
Watson took him to task with ridicule. At the same time he
pointed out what war would mean: In the first place, "it would
arouse the military spirit everywhere, and the civil reforms for
which we have labored so hard would be subordinated and side-
tracked." Secondly, "the battles will be fought by the poor,"
those "whom heartless Plutocrats fear," "men who will be got
rid of by the war." War would also mean oppressive taxes on
the poor, and a standing army to threaten their liberties. 85
Speaking generally, he said on the floor of the House: "I be-
lieve the time is approaching when wars — those barbarous settle-

22 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., July 7, 1892, pp. 5860-5869; P. P. P., July 15,
1892.

33 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., July 15, 1892, p. 6216.

34 Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 6, 1892.

35 P. P. P., "Our Washington Letter," Jan. 28, 1892.

178

Populism in Congress

ments of disputes by appeal to arms — will be just as much a relic
of the past ... as are now the old, rude ways of trial by com-
bat and dueling or any other method of personal strife."

On the question of increasing the naval appropriation, he was
opposed "to any $350,000,000 scheme, to build up an American
Navy on a competitive basis with European navies." He believed
that "we have nothing to fear from any European nation what-
soever." "Sir, the real truth is that the enemies we have to dread
in the future are, not Great Britain, not France, not Germany,
not Italy, not Mexico, but our own people. What do I mean by
that? I mean bad laws here at home; I mean class legislation at
home; I mean overgrown and insolent corporations here at
home; I mean the greed of monopolies here at home." He then
cited the "thousands of people in the State of Mississippi . . .
powerless and homeless, destitute, and suffering for food — hold-
ing out their hands and asking the National Assembly to give
them relief." He read into the Record an account of the horrible
destitution in the working class districts of Atlanta, where mill-
workers were being paid thirty-six cents a day, and were at the
moment dying of pestilence so fast that it was impossible to bury
them. No, the "protection" we needed was from corporations
and wage slavery. 86

For diversion, the Populists' dearest delight lay in baiting the
old parties and rankling their sore spots. Watson ran in his
paper a weekly column, "Our Washington Letter," almost en-
tirely devoted to this sport. In it he would describe the "Balshaz-
zar tone" of a Jackson Day Banquet of the "democratic na-
bobs," or give a satirical account of a sham battle between the
old parties over tariff or silver.

But the richest thing to us Third Party men [he wrote] was the way
the Democrats showed up the Republicans and the Republicans showed
up the Democrats.

It was Devil and Witch all the way through; Republican pot and
Democratic kettle, and the People's Party members demurely saying
"Go it boys. Continue to expose your mutual hypocrisy, fraudulent pre-
tenses, tricks and broken promises — and after a while the people will be-
lieve all the bad things you say of one another, and will kick you both

86 Cong, Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., April 16, 1892, pp. 3360-3362.

87 P. P. P., Jan. 21, 1892.

179

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

In spite of the official party attitude of indifference toward
the tariff question, Watson, still an uncompromising free trader,
missed no opportunity to break a lance against the protective
wall, or ridicule the hypocrisy of the Democrats' policy.

He did not spare u our handsome and brilliant friend from
Nebraska, who was put forward as the 'darling' of the Demo-
cratic side of the House." Bryan's famous tariff speech was "the
sum and substance of the old Democratic position in the tariff,
that we will practice what is wrong while we know what is right.
(Laughter and applause on the Republican side.)" Judging
from platform and campaign speeches one would have thought
that "this Democratic majority would crowd over one another
in almost indecent haste to tear the McKinley bill off the statute
books. (Laughter.)" Yet after six months they had done noth-
ing. 38 He stated the position of the two old parties on tariff
thus: "the Republicans come out flatfooted for Protection — with
hypocritical reasons; while the Democrats practice Protection
under hypocritical declarations against it."

Toward the free-silver demand, even during the high-pitched
hysteria over it, Watson always maintained the attitude that it
was "a very mild measure of reform," whose benefit would be
hardly perceptible. He could not, however, endure seeing the
Democrats win hopeful farmers by campaign pledges to silver,
only to vote against silver as soon as in office. In March, he
announced that "the action in the House on the silver bill is the
death knell of the old democratic organization. . . . With a
majority of 148 in the House of Representatives it certainly had
a chance to pass the free silver bill." Yet eighty-two Democrats
voted to table the bill, and it was "only by the help of the nine
People's party members and eleven Republicans that the im-
mense Democratic majority was saved from a Waterloo . . .
Now, no power on earth can keep Georgia from going into the
electoral college with a People's Party delegation." 39 "Speaker
Crisp," thought Watson, "as usual, used what some people call
'Diplomacy' ; what others call Double-Dealing, and what others
call by a still harsher name." *°

In July, during the last month of the session appeared Wat-

88 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., pp. 2338-2339, 4800.

89 Constitution, March 31, 1892.
40 P. P. P., March 31, 1892.

l80

Populism in Congress

son's People's Party Campaign Book, with its sensational sub-
title, Not a Revolt; It is a Revolution. The New York Herald
pronounced it "the first heavy literary gun of the third party."
It was certainly no polished product. Rather, it was a political
handgrenade packed with campaign shrapnel — slogans, excoria-
tions, invective, exposures, denunciation. Watson explained later
that "it was addressed to a certain class of voters and written in
the style of campaign documents since time began." "While I
am prepared to say that no statement in the book is untrue, there
is at the same time a certain tone adopted which you will not
find in any other style of essay." For its purpose it was extremely
effective 41 — too effective for some. For, though there were
bitter chapters on corporations, Pinkerton's strike breakers, and
national banks, his most withering fire was turned on the two
old parties, especially the Democrats.

"A drop of ink, a few strokes of the pen, and whiz, — Bang,
presto, change! We have the showy capitol in mourning and
frenzied congressmen asking one another whether the penalty
shall be boiling oil, expulsion from the floor, or simply a pained
paternal spanking . . ." tt The journalist exaggerated the det-
onation of the explosion, but not its suddenness.

On the preceding afternoon Jerry Simpson's little boy had
been peddling copies of Watson's book about the floor of the
House, doing a flourishing business at a dollar a copy, when
the Speaker, in response to an objection raised, ran the young
money changer from the temple. 43 The new book was well cir-
culated, however, and the halls were ahum with talk of it.

On the morning of July 29, General Joseph E. Wheeler of
Alabama, with whom Watson for several days had been engag-
ing in a series of charges and counter-charges, arose "to a ques-
tion of the highest privilege, affecting the House of Representa-
tives collectively, affecting its dignity." He sent to the clerk's
desk a copy of Watson's book, requesting that a marked passage
be read, as follows :

The Congress now sitting is one illustration. Pledged to Reform, they
have not reformed. Pledged to Economy, they have not economized.

41 Wrote one of Watson's constituents (P. P. P., Dec. 15, 1893): "A serious and
prayerful perusal of Tom Watson's book on the Sabbath will make you wiser and
better."

42 New York Herald, Aug. 1, 1892.

43 Washington Post, July 30, 1892.

181

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Pledged to Legislate, they have not legislated. Extravagance has been the
order of the day. Absenteeism was never so pronounced. Lack of purpose
was never so clear. Lack of common business prudence never more glaring.
Drunken members have reeled about the aisles — a disgrace to the Republic.
Drunken speakers have debated grave issues on the Floor and in the midst
of maudlin rumblings have been heard to ask "Mr. Speaker, where was I
at?" Useless employes crowd every corridor. Useless expenditures pervade
every Department.

Wheeler then continued by making, and repeating at con-
siderable length and variety, the assertion that this was "the
vilest and most malignant falsehood that has ever been uttered
on the American continent. ,, He further said that "There are
other untrue statements in this book," and that "the gentleman
who wrote the book has so little regard for facts that he is con-
stitutionally unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood.
( Applause.)" 44

Watson began his reply in a dispassionate tone. "If Mr. Wat-
son was in the least flustered when he arose to make his explana-
tion, he did not show it," said a reporter. 45 He attempted futilely
to deal first with personal charges of falsehood, and the animus
behind Wheeler's attack, but unruly members kept up a shout
for his explanation of the charge of drunkenness. Finally he
turned to them:

And I stand here to defend every line in the book and will do it against
all comers, whether from North or South.

Instantly "the House was in an uproar." A "storm of hisses
and derisive yells that went up from the Democratic side"
drowned out both Watson's voice and the incessant pounding of
the Speaker's gavel. Excited members surrounded the Georgian
and filled the space before the Speaker's desk, "howling and
gesticulating like so many Comanche Indians." T. V. Powderly,
who happened to be in the galleries at the moment, counted
thirty-three members on their feet while Watson was attempting
to speak, "some with their backs to the presiding officer, others
grouped in knots, others shaking their clinched fists at the per-
sons attempting to address the House, others hissing like adders,

44 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., July 28, 1892, pp. 6931-6940.

45 Washington Post, July 30, 1892.

182

Populism in Congress

and all of them talking aloud or muttering as the spirit moved
them." " During a lull Watson shouted:

I say that every word in that book is literally true, and all men who
have been here keeping their eyes open, and wanting to admit facts, will
admit these facts are fairly stated. (A/ cry of "No!" and hisses on the
Democratic side.)

The provocation was at last telling upon Watson's excitable
temperament. When Crisp cautioned him that he occupied the
floor only "as a matter of grace," he turned sharply on the
Speaker, and shaking his fist at the gentleman's face, he ex-
claimed :

I want no matter of grace from this Democratic majority that seeks
to hiss me down when I am defending my character here on the floor of
the House. Jeffersonian Democracy grants to a man freedom of speech
and freedom of press and if you want to howl me down do it, and I will
appeal from your tyranny to the fair sense of justice that abides in the
hearts of the American people.

Populist members applauded vigorously. Standing on tiptoe,
arms waving and hair flying, he wound up with a "lung-splitting
climax": "I scorn your grace! I scorn your mercy!" The ser-
geant-at-arms, by order of the Speaker, started toward Watson,
who took his seat before he was reached. He regained the floor
to say that the House might take what action it liked; he would
retract nothing.

Boatner, of Louisiana, introduced a resolution, which passed,
calling for the appointment of a committee to investigate the
charges of drunkenness, and "if untrue, whether the said Wat-
son has violated the privileges of the House." Watson observed
that his more serious charges did not seem to trouble the Demo-
cratic conscience.

A considerable public interest attended the hearings of the
committee on "congressional jags," as the press dubbed it.
"Nothing," observed the Washington Post, "has so stirred the
House for many a day as the publication and repetition of these
charges." It was said that "a hundred angry Congressmen" were
prepared to endorse Ex-Speaker Tom Reed's statement that "he

46 P. P. P., Aug. 26, 1892; New York Herald, July 30, 1892; New York World,
Aug. 3, 1892.

183

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

had never understood the force of the biblical reference to the
'colt of a wild ass' until he witnessed the performance by Con-
gressmen Tom Watson on the floor of the House." 4T The com-
mittee listened to much conflicting testimony, including a heated
questioning of Watson himself. The main point at issue was the
degree of intoxication attained by the Honorable J. E. Cobb,
of Alabama, during his speech in a certain debate on the floor of
the House. 48

While the report was awaited there was a good deal of specu-
lation on the probable fate to be dealt out to Watson. Jerry
Simpson was quoted as welcoming Watson's expulsion from the
House as an opportunity for a triumphant vindication of the ap-
proaching election. The report was delayed until the last day of
the session. The majority, consisting of three Democrats, recom-
mended a resolution stating that the charges brought by Wat-
son were "not true, and constitute an unwarranted assault upon
the honor and dignity of the House, and that such publication
has the unqualified disapproval of the House." The Republican
member wrote a concurring report, and Jerry Simpson, the
Populist member of the committee, wrote a minority report
exonerating Watson and upholding his charges. 49 The report
was not voted on that session.

That night at eleven o'clock Crisp's gavel rapped the adjourn-
ment of the first session of the 52nd Congress. Whereupon, the
wags of the press gallery serenaded the departing members with
the following song :

"Oh Watson we are truly grieved, sir,

To see you packing your bag;
Won't you tell us before you leave, sir,

What is a Congressional jag?

What is a Congressional jag?
Is it simply a weakness of knees,

A sip or sup from a bottle or cup,
Or a whoop up and go as you please ?"

"And then everybody fled from the great building." 50

If the intention of the Democratic majority in stirring up the

47 New York World, Aug. 3, 1892.

48 Hearings and reports published in House Reports, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., Vol. 10,
Report No. 2x32; Washington Post, Aug. 2 and 3, 1892.

49 Reports cited above; also vide P. P. P., Aug. x6, 1892.
60 Washington Post, Aug. 6, 1892.

184

Populism in Congress

investigation had been to embarrass Watson and cast ridicule
upon his party, it is fairly plain that plans went awry. Wrote
Mrs. Watson to her husband from Washington: "They [the
committee] raised a racket that has recoiled and it's a little hard
to shuffle off. They are mad enough with Mr. Wheeler, and,"
added Mrs. Watson, who had an eye for practical matters, "it
will make the book sell." 51 "O," sighed one journalist, "that
mine enemy, when I write a book, would advertise it on the
floor of Congress." Two New York newspapers devoted a whole
page to the affair, and the press of the whole country resounded
with it. Observed one of them, "A member comparatively un-
known had been advertised from one end of the country to the
other. Whether he succeeded in proving his charges or not the
Farmers' Alliance people would probably lionize him, and in
case he was censured by the House would make a martyr of
him." 52

Realizing the truth of this prediction, the Georgia Democratic
press countered with the typical attack: "Perhaps some districts
would rather have representatives who sometimes drink too
much than to have a cranky, socialistic agitator who never drinks
at all." »

61 Mrs. Watson to T. E. W., Aug. 4, 1892, Watson MSS.

52 New York Herald, Aug. 1, 1892.

53 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 6, 1892.

185

<frQO<$><><S><><frOOO<c>0^

l 3

Race, Class, and Party

When Watson led the people out,

They marched thro* flood and flame ;
Old Livingston tried to turn them back,

But they got there all the same. 1

SPECULATING UPON THE APPROACHING STRUGGLE for reelec-
tion, Watson wondered whether the people understood the
nature of the conflict before them. It was, he believed, the same
struggle that in the past had been fought "upon the field of
battle, behind barricades, in the streets of cities, about the scaf-
fold and guillotine . . . but never at the ballot box, as it will
next October and November." It was, in his terms, the struggle
between "Democracy and Plutocracy" :

We wonder if the people generally understand the full significance
of this fact? Do our friends understand it? Do our enemies appreciate
its meaning? If so, then the coming contest will be sharp indeed. There
will be neither asking nor giving of quarter, for upon both sides there
will be the consciousness that the contending forces are not unequally
matched, and that as they represent totally different and opposing ideas
and theories, there can be but one settlement of the matter at issue, and
that it must come through the utter overthrow of the one or the other of
the parties to the contest. 2

Before proceeding further it might be well to arrive at some
understanding of the nature of these combatants who had such
"totally different and opposing ideas and theories." Who were
the Populists?

Aside from the new factory proletariat of a few cities (them-
selves of recent rural origin), the Populists were agricultural

1 P. P. P., April 28, 1892.
2 Ibid., March 10, 1892.

186

Race y Class > and Party

and rural. But so were the great mass of people of the state and
of the South; and that mass was divided by class and race lines.
Were they exploiters or the exploited?

In answering such questions the Populists themselves were
confusing. In resolving themselves into the People's party, the
Oglethorpe County Alliance referred to its members as "the
peasantry of America." On the other hand, a Populist of
Douglas County said, "Some of our people were once rich, and
most all were well to do . . . and it is no fault of theirs that
they are reduced to such straights [jfc]." Tom Watson struck
nearer the truth when he said, "You stand for the yearning, up-
ward tendency of the middle and lower classes." Therefore, they
were "the sworn foes of monopoly — not monopoly in the narrow
sense of the word — but monopoly of power, of place, of privi-
lege, of wealth, of progress." Individualist and middle-class in
tradition and aspiration, they accepted the basic capitalistic sys-
tem. Watson summed up their objectives: "Keep the avenues of
honor free. Close no entrance to the poorest, the weakest, the
humblest. Say to ambition everywhere, ( the field is clear, the
contest fair; come, and win your share if you can !' " 3

In general, the Southern Populists were mainly the agrarian
masses, including tenant, small landowner, and a surprising
number of large landowners, together with the industrial prole-
tariat. They were united by their resentment of the crushing
oppression of capitalist finance and industrialism. Watson him-
self recognized the complexity of his ranks. "There is a grada-
tion in servitude," he said. The laborer was the first to feel the
lash, the cropper next, the tenant next, and the landlord next —
in Watson's hierarchy of serfdom. "But," he added, "the livery
of the serf is there all the same." 4 This livery, he believed,
would become the uniform of the army that he led against its
oppressors.

Tom Watson was himself one of the largest landowners in the
state, with more tenants on his land than his grandfather had
slaves. 5 There were other large landowners high in the party
ranks, who fought side by side with small farmers and tenants.
In this regard a remark of Charles A. Beard upon the battles of

8 Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. V (1910), p. 818.

4 P. P. P., Jan. 27, 1892.

6 Tenant record and account books, Watson MSS.

187

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Jefferson's day might be recalled: "It is a curious freak of for-
tune that gives to the slave owning aristocracy the leadership
in a democracy of small farmers, but the cause is not far to seek.
In a conflict with capitalism, the agrarians rallied around that
agrarian class which had the cultural equipment for dominant
direction." 6 There is room for doubt whether there was an
"aristocracy" of the tidewater sort in Georgia. At any rate, the
former slave-owners were divided in the 'nineties. While some
became Populists, many of the larger owners became merchants,
bankers, and small capitalists, and fought the Populists as bit-
terly as did the business men of the towns. 7

It is undoubtedly true that the Populist ideology was domi-
nantly that of the landowning farmer, who was, in many cases,
the exploiter of landless tenant labor. But about half of the
farms in the state at that time were operated by owners, dirt
farmers, and the rank and file of the Populists were of this
poverty-ridden small farmer class. They were surely more ex-
ploited than exploiting, and the Populist contention that the
tenant was in the same boat as the owner had much truth in it.
The southern urban proletariat was yet an embryonic class,
largely of immediate agrarian background. They were not yet
class-conscious, and thought more as farmers than as industrial
workers. Obviously the Populist attack did not strike at the
whole system of capitalist exploitation, as did socialism, but in
its time and section the Populist party formed the vanguard
against the advancing capitalist plutocracy, and its fate was of
vital consequence to the future.

That class contradiction was not magically resolved in the
Populist-agrarian potpourri is indicated by various signs. Once
the Colored Farmers' Alliance proposed to call a general strike
of Negro cotton pickers. The Progressive Farmer, paper of
Colonel L. L. Polk, president of the National Alliance (white),
did "not hesitate to advise our farmers to leave their cotton in
the field rather than pay more than 50 cents per hundred to

e Charles A. Beard, The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, p. 399.

7 A. M. Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia, p. 152. The class alignments
of the party varied somewhat from state to state in the South. Thus, of Alabama it
was said that the movement was "an effort of the masses of the whites to free them-
selves from the rule of the black belt Democratic party of the old slave-owning
type." (Joseph C. Manning, Fadeout of Populism, p. 60.) Compare maps of Arnett
(op. cit., p. 184), showing part of the Georgia black belt as a stronghold of
Populism.

188

Race, Class y and Party

have it picked." The Negro brethren were attempting "to better
their condition at the expense of their white brethren. Reforms
should not be in the interest of one portion of our farmers at the
expense of another." 8

The Populist struggle in the South, moreover, was fought
under such peculiar circumstances as to set it apart from the his-
tory of the national movement, and to call for special treatment.
"Political campaigns in the North," wrote a veteran of Alabama
Populism, "even at their highest pitch of contention and strife,
were as placid as pink teas in comparison with those years of
political combat in the South." 9 Taking into comparative ac-
count the violence of the passions unloosed by the conflict, the
actual bloodshed and physical strife, one is prepared to give
assent to that judgment.

What explained the bitterness and violence that characterized
the Populist struggle in the South? To answer in a word —
"race." And that is much too simple an answer. But if to race be
added the complexities of the class economy growing out of race,
the heritage of manumitted slave psychology, and the demagogic
uses to which the politician was able to put race prejudice —
then "race" may be said to be the core of the explanation.

In later life Watson once wrote a retrospective (and quite
candid) comparison of his own career with that of William Jen-
nings Bryan. In it he said: "Consider the advantage of position
that Bryan had over me. His field of work was the plastic, rest-
less, and growing West: mine was the hide-bound, rock-ribbed
Bourbon South. Besides, Bryan had no everlasting and over-
shadowing Negro Question to hamper and handicap his prog-
ress: I HAD." 10 There is no doubt that Watson thought of the
Negro problem as the Nemesis of his career. He fled it all his
days, and in flight sought every refuge — in attitudes as com-
pletely contradictory and extreme as possible. At this stage, how-
ever, he faced his problem courageously, honestly, and intel-
ligently. As the official leader of the new party in the House,
and its only Southern member in Congress, Watson was the
logical man to formulate the Populist policy toward the Negro.
This he did in a number of speeches and articles.

8 Editorial in Progressive Farmer, Sept. 15, 1891; for same attitude in National
Economist, Sept. 26 and October 10, 1891.

9 Joseph C. Manning, The Fadeout of Populism, pp. 5, 142-144.
10 Jeffersonian Weekly, Jan. 20, 1910.

189

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

The Populist program called for a united front between
Negro and white farmers. Watson framed his appeal this way:

Now the People's Party says to these two men, "You are kept apart
that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to
hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the
arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and
blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a
monetary system which beggars both." n

This bold program called for a reversal of deeply rooted
racial prejudices and firmly fixed traditions as old as Southern
history. In place of race hatred, political proscription, lynch law,
and terrorism it was necessary to foster tolerance, friendly co-
operation, justice and political rights for the Negro. This was
no small task; yet Watson met each issue squarely.

It should be the object of the Populist party, he said, to
"make lynch law odious to the people." M Georgia at that time
led the world in lynchings. Watson nominated a Negro to a
place on the state executive committee of his party, "as a man
worthy to be on the executive committee of this or any other
party." "Tell me the use of educating these people as citizens if
they are never to exercise the rights of citizens." 13 He spoke
repeatedly from the same platform with Negro speakers to
mixed audiences of Negro and white farmers. He did not advo-
cate "social equality" and said so emphatically, since that was "a
thing each citizen decides for himself." But he insisted upon
"political equality," holding that "the accident of color can make
no difference in the interests of farmers, croppers, and laborers."
In the same spirit of racial tolerance he was continually finding
accomplishments of the Negro race at home and abroad to praise
in articles and speeches. 14

Tom Watson was perhaps the first native white Southern
leader of importance to treat the Negro's aspirations with the
seriousness that human strivings deserve. For the first time in
his political history the Negro was regarded neither as the in-
competent ward of White Supremacy, nor as the ward of mili-

11 T. E. W., "The Negro Question in the South," Arena, Vol. VI (1892), p. 548.

up. p. p., Nov. 3, 1893.

**Ibid., May 24, 1894.

14 For example, the work of a Negro member of the Georgia Legislature (P. P.
P., Dec. 2, 1892) and a South African king's resistance to Cecil Rhodes (P. P. P.,
Dec. 29, 1893).

190

Race, Class, and Party

tary intervention, but as an integral part of Southern society with
a place in its economy. The Negro was in the South to stay, in-
sisted Watson, just as much so as the white man. "Why is not
the colored tenant open to the conviction that he is in the same
boat as the white tenant; the colored laborer with the white
laborer?" he asked. With a third party it was now possible for
the Negro to escape the dilemma of selling his vote to the
Democrats or pledging it blindly to the Republican bosses.
Under Watson's tutelage the Southern white masses were be-
ginning to learn to regard the Negro as a political ally bound
to them by economic ties and a common destiny, rather than as
a slender prop to injured self-esteem in the shape of "White
Supremacy." Here was a foundation of political realism upon
which some more enduring structure of economic democracy
might be constructed. Never before or since have the two races
in the South come so close together as they did during the
Populist struggles.

No one was more keenly aware of the overwhelming odds
against his social program than Tom Watson. In an article in
the Arena 15 he wrote :

You might beseech a Southern white tenant to listen to you upon
questions of finance, taxation, and transportation; you might demonstrate
with mathematical precision that herein lay his way out of poverty into
comfort; you might have him "almost persuaded" to the truth, but if
the merchant who furnished his farm supplies (at tremendous usury)
or the town politician (who never spoke to him excepting at election times)
came along and cried "Negro rule!" the entire fabric of reason and com-
mon sense which you had patiently constructed would fall, and the poor
tenant would joyously hug the chains of an actual wretchedness rather than
do any experimenting on a question of mere sentiment. . . . The Negro
has been as valuable a portion of the stock in trade of a Democrat as he
was of a Republican.

Henry Grady's statement in 1889 that "The Negro as a
political force had dropped out of serious consideration"
sounded strange indeed in 1892. The Negro as a political force
was the concern of everybody. The Democrats sought industri-
ously to resurrect the scare of the Republican "Force Bill," in-
troduced in the House and defeated in the Senate in 1890. "All
agree," said the Augusta Chronicle, "that this is the overshad-

15 T. E. W., "The Negro Question in the South," Arena, Vol. VI (1892), p. 541.

.191

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

owing issue," and it was obvious that the Populists were "aiding
the Republicans in their nefarious schemes." "The old issue of
sectionalism is confronting the South," asserted the Constitu-
tion, and White Supremacy is more important than "all the fi-
nancial reform in the world." 16

A Westerner, the most eminent student of Populism, has re-
marked, "Perhaps only a Southerner can realize how keenly
these converts to Populism [in the South] must have felt their
grievances." 1T A Southerner might add, "only a Southerner of
that period" — which followed close upon Reconstruction. The
motives of the most sincere Populists were not above the basest
construction by Democrats, many of whom were perfectly hon-
est in their suspicions. It was widely believed that they were in
secret alliance with the Republicans, and therefore not only trai-
tors to their section, but to their race as well — enemies of white
civilization. The worst slander, however, was the product of
editors and politicians who believed that any means was justified
by the end they had in view. When a responsible editor wrote
that "The South and especially the tenth district is threatened
with anarchy and communism" because of "the direful teachings
of Thomas E. Watson," there were thousands who believed
him literally. Populists were subjected to every type of epithet,
scurrility, and insult Democrats could devise. There is record
of Populists' being turned out of church, driven from their
homes, and refused credit because of their beliefs. Families were
split and venomous feuds started. As already noted, one of Tom
Watson's brothers was secretary of the mass meeting that pro-
nounced him a traitor; a second brother, a merchant, remained
a Democrat, and a third became a Populist. A Southern Populist
leader told a Western writer, "The feeling of the Democracy
against us is one of murderous hate. I have been shot at many
times. Grand juries will not indict our assailants. Courts give us
no protection." M

To overcome the harsh penalties attached to revolt — the com-
pulsions of tradition as well as economic pressure making for
conformity — there must have been tremendous forces at work

16 Augusta Chronicle, July 5, 1892; Constitution, quoted in P. P. P., July 15, 1892;
Macon Telegraph, July 27, 1892.

17 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, p. 243.

18 Henry D. Lloyd, "The Populists at St. Louis," Review of Reviews, Vol. XIV
(Sept., 1896), p. 293.

192

Race, Class, and Party

upon the Southern masses. It is furthest from the intention of
this work to suggest that adequate cause can be discovered in the
eloquence of Thomas E. Watson, or the eloquence of anybody
else. More eloquent than any orator in the cause of revolt were
the hard times of 1 891-1892 that opened the "heart-breaking
'nineties."

After a two weeks' tour of observation in the cotton belt of
Georgia in December, 1891, the editor of the Southern Alliance
Farmer wrote that "the farmer has about reached the end of his
row." The crop was selling at "the lowest price that cotton has
reached in a third of a century," and "hundreds of men will be
turned out of house and home, or forced to become hirelings
and tenants in fields that they once owned. . . . The doors of
every courthouse in Georgia are placarded with the announce-
ments of such [sheriffs'] sales. Hundreds of farmers will be
turned adrift, and thousands of acres of our best land allowed
to grow up in weeds through lack of necessary capital to work
them. . . . The roads are full of negroes begging homes."
There was a veritable "epidemic of distress and foreclosures of
mortgages now sweeping over our state." 19 The president of the
Burke County Alliance wrote Watson: "Our county is in a ter-
rible, terrible condition. Out of fifteen hundred customers at one
store only fourteen paid out; five hundred paid less than 50
cents on the dollar." 20 Mrs. W. H. Felton wrote, "We sold
our cotton crop in 1892 for a little over four cents the pound,
and it did not pay taxes, guano, and farm supplies." a

In the factory slums of the New South, where tenement
houses had hardly weathered gray yet, hunger and destitution
prevailed. The Atlanta Journal reported that just outside At-
lanta in the workers' district of the Exposition Mills — the mills
that occupied the same buildings in which Henry Grady hailed
the birth of the New South just ten years before — "famine and
pestilence are to-day making worse ravages than among the
serfs of Russia." The mill workers are paid "the magnificent
sum of 36 cents a day for their labor, and . . . the average
wage fund in the factory district is 9 cents a head divided among

19 Quoted in the Constitution, Jan. 3, 1892.

20 Read into the Record by Watson, Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., Jan. 27, 1892,
p. 600.

21 Mrs. W. H. Felton, Memoirs of Georgia Politics, p. 656.

193

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the members of the family." The bodies of their dead remain
unburied. One may see "rooms wherein eight and ten members
of one family are stricken down, where pneumonia and fever
and measles are attacking their emaciated bodies ; where there is
no sanitation, no help or protection from the city, no medicine,
no food, no fire, no nurses — nothing but torturing hunger and
death." **

"There is a song in the fields where the plowshare gleams,"
wrote the heir to Grady's editorial chair, "a song of hope for
the harvest ahead, and the man at the plow-handles seems hap-
pier than he has been, as the furrows are formed at his feet."
"Yes," answered Tom Watson, " 'there is a song in the field' —
and it begins, 'Good-by, old party, Good-by,' and ends with a
cheer for the St. Louis platform." Patrick Walsh was more
forthright in his appeal: "We know the farmers of the South
are impoverished and discontented," but "Better, a thousand
times better, suffer the ills of the present, suffer poverty, rather
than . . . division and separation from the Democratic party."

The farmers felt differently about poverty and the Demo-
cratic party. In Watson's district "as well as all over the State
. . . the People's party element have been meeting twice a
month, on Saturday afternoon, in schoolhouses, for two years,
and signal fires are on every hilltop. They are imbued with the
spirit of turning things upside down." M

The Democratic campaign against Watson's reelection, and
against Populism in general, had no beginning. It was simply
continuous with the battle of 1890. Livingston spent a good part
of the spring of 1892 on a speaking campaign throughout Geor-
gia against Watson and Populism. At his home town, however,
the local Alliance met before he spoke and endorsed the People's
party and the St. Louis platform. The same action was taken
in other places where he spoke. At Douglasville the revolt was
dramatized by circumstances. A mixed throng was waiting at
the courthouse yard to hear Livingston meet a Populist cham-
pion in debate, when the president of the county Alliance
mounted the steps, announced that the Democratic speaker
would not abide by the terms of the debate agreement, and
called upon all who counted themselves Populists to adjourn to

22 Quoted in P. P. P., April 14, 1892.
28 Washington Post, Aug. 3, 1892.

194

Race y Class y and Party

the Alliance warehouse across the railroad. "Cross over the
railroad bridge so everybody can see," yelled someone. "With
cheer upon cheer the great crowd swayed and broke — the great
majority of those composing it turned their steps toward the
warehouse," crossing over the high, arched footbridge into the
rebel ranks. 24

The Democratic State Central Committee met and issued an
appeal to the people of the Tenth District. "The chief of the
Third Party in Georgia [C. C. Post] is a Republican and an in-
fidel," they proclaimed. "He believes neither in Democracy nor
in our God." Populism is the work of "selfish and designing
men" who preferred, "like Satan, to rule in hell [rather] than
serve in Heaven. . . . Come back, brethren, to the good old
Democratic ship. . . . Come back, brethren, come back." 25 An
eminent Methodist divine informed the people that a Populist
victory would result in "negro supremacy," "mongrelism," and
the "destruction of the Saxon womanhood of our wives and
daughters." 26 It was reported that merchants were refusing
credit to all farmers who did not disavow the intention of voting
the Populist ticket.

The old party was shrewd in its selection of a candidate to
oppose Watson in his race for reelection. Major James Conquest
Cross Black, an Augusta lawyer, was the very blossom of mid-
dle-class respectability and conservatism. He was a deacon in the
Baptist Church and for years had conducted an adult Sunday
school class. Born in Kentucky in 1842, he had served as a pri-
vate in the Confederate Army. His title of "Major" was hon-
orary, after the Southern manner. 27

His path and Watson's had crossed before — once when the
Major offered his legal services to the latter in the Tutt shoot-
ing scrape ; again when Watson seconded his nomination for the
United States Senate against Henry Grady's candidate, Colquitt.
Since then their paths had diverged sharply. In 1890 Black had
publicly denounced the Farmers' Alliance. He summed up his
political ideology by saying, "He was a Democrat because he
was a Georgian." His eloquence was mentioned in terms of awe.

24 P. P. P., April 21, 1892; Constitution, April 21, 1892.

25 Augusta Herald, April 20, 1892.

26 T. Warren Aiken, quoted in Atlanta Journal, April 7, 1892.

27 Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1^4.-^2^; Augusta Chroni-
cle, Aug. 21, 1892.

195

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

It was reported that "an Augusta lawyer actually and seriously
asked for a new trial in a case when a jury had assessed heavy
damage" on the ground that Major Black's eloquence "had
swept the jury beyond bounds of propriety and practicability."
The Superior Court, however, held that "nobody but God Al-
mighty could fix the bounds or limit the influence of human
eloquence."

Not content to rely upon Black's God-given eloquence, how-
ever, his party rushed its heaviest oratorical artillery to Wat-
son's district. A special election to fill the insignificant office of
county ordinary in Glascock brought Senator Gordon, Governor
William J. Northen, Patrick Walsh, and Major Black down
upon the citizens' heads. Governor Northen informed the vot-
ers that C. C. Post was an "infidel," an "anarchist," and, on top
of that, "an infamous cur." His wife was "an atheist herself,"
who "makes $1,000 a month selling her damnable heresy." It
was no breach of the code of Southern chivalry to attack Mrs.
Post because "she has unsexed [sic'] herself." When Mrs. Post
denied the charge and Mr. Post resented it, the Democratic
press advocated "a sound caning and notice to leave the state,"
for having "cast the lie in the face of Georgia's chief executive."
Mobbing was too good for "the atheistic, anarchistic, communis-
tic editor of the People's Party Paper." 28

A month later the Governor renewed the attack, "setting the
crowd wild" when he asked, "Shall they strike down Gordon
and uphold Post, the foulest of God's creatures?" At this, it was
reported, "Every drop of blood seemed to boil in the veins of
the patriotic audience." The Governor then read what he al-
leged was Jerry Simpson's charge, "that our men sold their
honor and our women their virtue." General Gordon interrupted
to say, "My God! Hear that, Third Party men. Hear that!" It
was said that "A look of solemn thought that could not be mis-
taken spread over the faces of the Third Party division of the
audience." General Gordon, who introduced himself as "a
farmer and nothing but a farmer," also spoke in an informing
manner of "this preacher of atheism, this sympathizer with
bloody-handed anarchy, this shameless defamer of our spotless,

28 P. P. P., May 27, 1892; Macon Telegraph, May 28, 1892; clippings, Northen
Scrapbooks, Vol. II, pp. 89-90.

I96

Race, Class, and Party

pure and peerless Southern womanhood. (Cries of Never,
Never, Never.)" Major Black, said the General, "illustrates
that lofty and chivalric manhood, which next to the South's peer-
less womanhood, is her most flawless crown of immortality." In
discussing Watson's candidacy, he pointed out that he was
"base," "false," "cowardly," and a "self-important little fly." In
answer to Watson's searching article on Gordon's fantastic polit-
ical and business career, the General reviewed his own record in
the Confederate Army. 29

"Senators left the halls of Congress," wrote Watson from
Washington, "and swooped down to the attack; Governors left
the State House and flopped down to the attack; chairmen of
executive committees, editors" joined them in the strife, and
with what result? The Populist candidate for county ordinary
was quietly elected by more than a two to one majority. It was
the first Populist victory over the Democrats at the polls in
Georgia.

An addition to the ranks of the Populist delegation came by
the belated conversion of Thomas E. Winn of the Ninth Geor-
gia District. No radical crusader, he explained with lamentable
deficiency of humor: "I stand ready to go with my people, and
say in the language of Ruth to Naomi, 'Entreat me not to leave
thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou
goest I will go . . .' "

Georgia Democrats were thoroughly alarmed by the pros-
pects, but, because this was presidential election year, they could
not — as they did in 1890 — make sweeping pledges of radical re-
form. Bound to their reactionary capitalist allies of the East,
they obediently chose Cleveland electors at their state conven-
tion. Watson described this meeting: "Protectionists like Pat
Walsh and Evan Howell, sweetly smiled as they swallowed the
pill on the Tariff Question. And the Cleveland men like Hoke
Smith tried to look pretty as they voted for Free Silver, which
Cleveland repudiated. And the 'Alliance Democrats' strove to
appear happy in a convention which scornfully spat upon their
demands." After the national convention nominated Cleveland,
Watson rejoiced: "The Harrison and Cleveland wings of Plu-
tocracy have been driven in upon each other, and are open to an

29 Augusta Chronicle, June n and 15, 1892; P. P. P., May 13 and June 24, 1892.

197

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

aggressive movement. The atmosphere has cleared wonderfully
and the battle is now on." 30

At the national convention of the People's party in Omaha,
Watson's lieutenants, Post, Ellington, and Branch, played prom-
inent roles. 81 The third party, particularly in the solidarity of
the Southern states, suffered an irreparable injury in the death
of Colonel L. L. Polk a few weeks before the convention. His
nomination for the Presidency was practically agreed upon. Be-
ing a Southerner of wide popularity, he would have provided a
powerful opponent of Cleveland in the South. 82 The nomination
of General James B. Weaver, a Western veteran of many re-
form battles, was thought unfortunate by some, particularly in
the South. C. C. Post, in changing Georgia's vote to Weaver,
said his state had been one of the strongest opponents of the
nominee. Watson, along with other Southerners, had been men-
tioned as a possible nominee for Vice President, 38 but the nomi-
nation went to General James G. Field of Virginia to balance
the Union general on the ticket.

The first state convention of the Populists in Georgia appears
to have been a model of harmony. The delegates met un-
pledged, and nominated candidates (none of whom had spoken
in their own behalf) by acclamation, "and without resort to bal-
lot." The main purpose of the delegates, observed a Democratic
paper, seemed to have been "to glorify Watson, and they did it
elaborately and with unction." Enthusiasm and confidence were
boundless. 84

Through all these events Watson had remained in Washing-
ton. The news that he was returning to take personal command
in Georgia was greeted by newspaper men with cheers. "It means
that whatever the rest of the earth may do, the good old tenth
district will furnish its full proportion of news . . . there may
be no news at all, but the night editor sitting at his desk may feel
no fear; the tenth district will be astir. From one end to the
other its political fires will be ablaze and plenty of choice, enter-
taining news will come in every night. . . . The Colonel [Wat-

30 P. P. P., June 24, May 27, 1892; National Economist, May 28, 1892.

81 E. A. Allen, Life and Public Services of James Baird Weaver, pp. 52-120.

32 Joseph C. Manning, op. cit., pp. 32-33; Watson in P. P. P., June 17, 1892; and
Post in P. P. P., May 27, 1892.

33 Constitution, July 19, 1892.

34 Augusta Chronicle, July 28, 1892; P. P. P., July 27, 1892.

I98

Race, Class y and Party

son] has in him those picturesque elements that appeal to the
newspaper mind. He is not prosaic. He is individual. He illumi-
nates his public career with the brilliance of imagination."

Before the train reached the border of his district it was met
at every station by cheering crowds of Populists and boarded by
a delegation who accompanied him home. At Thomson between
four and five thousand "yeomen" met him, carried him on their
shoulders to a gaily decorated carriage, and drew him to a stand
erected for his speech. "Proud Caesar," said the Chronicle,
"never entered the gates of imperial Rome with more pomp and
eclat than did Mr. Watson enter Thomson today." He ad-
dressed them for two hours and a half, giving a detailed ac-
count of his "stewardship," arraigning the Democratic party,
and making a plea to "wipe out the color line, and put every man
on his citizenship irrespective of color." S5

It was observed by several that he looked "pale and emaci-
ated" upon his return. At the end of his speech he was seized
with a violent fit of vomiting. His greatly increased burden was
apparently telling on his strength. C. C. Post had managed
party affairs during Watson's absence, but not long after Gov-
ernor Northen's vicious attack upon him and his wife, a mob at
Quitman attacked Peek, the Populist candidate for Governor,
and Post, striking Post with a rock. Whether because he believed
his life endangered or for some other reason, it was immediately
after this — on the day Watson arrived from Washington — that
Post announced that he was leaving for Michigan. 88

Stranded in the midst of a seething battle without an official
leader, the party now leaned for leadership upon Watson. On
his shoulders also fell the editorship of the People's Party Pa-
per. To these burdens was added the handicap the Democrats
had devised in 1891 by gerrymandering his district so as to ex-
clude two old counties and add two new ones, Hancock and Wil-
kinson. The new counties, observed Watson in his private Jour-
nal, "had not belonged to my District when I was elected and
therefore did not understand the issues upon which I had de-
feated Hon. Geo. T. Barnes." S7 This meant additional cam-

85 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 10, 1892; T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. 13; P. P. P.,
Aug. 12, 1892.

86 Constitution, Aug. 10, Sept. 16, 1892: On Post's prominence in the party, prior
to this, see the Constitution, March 31 and April 15, 1892.

87 MS. Journal 2 (under date 1892).

199

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

paigning and organization. Watson's victory in Burke County,
which was now removed, had been Considered by politicians as
the most important victory of his campaign" in 1890.

Along with these discouragements and handicaps there were a
few happier experiences. On his return he was greeted with the
first number of The Revolution, a new Populist paper pub-
lished in Augusta, bearing under its title the quotation, " 'Not a
Revolt; It's a Revolution' — Thomas E. Watson." This along
with The Wool Hat of Gracewood provided a genuine, if crude,
expression of the feelings of the radical farmer element. His
own paper reported twenty-two Populist papers published in
Georgia in September, 1892. The throngs of cheering rebels
that gathered at county seat and cross roads to hear their hero,
carried silken banners thirty and forty feet long inscribed with
Populist slogans and pictures of Watson. To the tune of "The
Bonny Blue Flag" they sang "The Young Wife's Song," writ-
ten by Watson :

My husband came from town last night

As sad as man could be ;
His wagon empty — cotton gone —

And not a dime had he.
He sat down there before the fire,

His eyes were full of tears;
Great God ! how debt is crushing down

This strong man — young in years !

Huzza! Huzza! It's queer I do declare!

We make the food for all the world,
Yet live on scanty fare. 38

Although Major Black accepted Watson's formal challenge,
and several meetings occurred between them, the three months'
campaign that followed was far from resembling a formal de-
bate. It was a bitter struggle that raged back and forth across
the state, its most intense battles centering in the Tenth Dis-
trict. The "debates" were seldom more than party rallies, where
rival generals reviewed their troops and made a show of force.

At Thomson Black repeated some of the usual charges against
C. C. Post. C. H. Ellington, president of the State Alliance,
leaped up to defend Post. "And we are not ashamed of him!"

38 Broadside, copy in Watson MSS.
200

Race, Glass y and Party

he shouted. The next moment "pistols and knives were drawn
and the adherents of the two parties stood before one another at
bay. . . . Bloodshed and wholesale riot was only narrowly
averted." One fight broke out after the meeting, and the fol-
lowing day Ellington and a Democrat fought in the streets of
Thomson. 39

In providing special trains to the rallies, the railroads were
obliged to set apart separate cars for the two parties. Even then
strife was not prevented. As a train pulled out of Thomson, a
passenger yelled out, "Hurrah for Col. Black I Watson is a de-
serter from the Democratic party and sold out!" "You are a
God damned liar," asserted Watson. The unfortunate Demo-
crat had not reckoned with the vigilance of his man. Over two
passengers Watson leaped, laying his defamer low in the aisles
and bruising him considerably before they were separated. When
the conductor remonstrated the Congressman would brook "no
truckling to petty officials of the Southern Railroad." *°

The audience at Sparta was predominantly Negro, and on the
platform with Watson sat a Negro speaker. On the outskirts of
the crowd a brass band from the Democratic barbecue, in prog-
ress down in the grove, kept up a din. During Watson's speech
a man on horseback pushed his way into the crowd shouting, "A
free dinner for everybody; you are all invited down to the bar-
becue — white and colored." "You may have the trees," shouted
Watson, "but we have got the men; and these men are not go-
ing to be enticed away from free, fair discussion of these great
public questions by any amount of barbecued beef I" The dusky
ranks held firm though dinnerless — even remaining to escort the
speaker to his boarding house.

Major Black's constantly reiterated theme was that "it is un-
American and un-Christian, arraigning one class against an-
other," that he was "a friend of all classes," and that the farm-
er's distress was "exaggerated." Watson's repeated answer was
that there was "an irrepressible conflict between the farming in-
terests and Democracy . . . between the laboring classes and
the old party." As for exaggeration of the farmer's distress:
"when I am addressing people who bend over the cotton rows to

89 Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 22, 23, 1892.

40 Ibid., Sept. 13, 1892; P. P. P., Sept. 16, 1892.

201

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

pick out six-cent cotton which costs them eight cents, there is no
need to dwell on the topic." 41

For forty-five minutes after Black finished his speech at their
joint meeting in Augusta, Watson was unable to make himself
heard. He finally had to give up the attempt. At the Capitol in
Atlanta the following week he was howled down again by an or-
ganized band who kept up the cry of "communism," a charge
recently made by Governor Northen. If Northen called the Al-
liance platform "communism," replied Watson, "he ought to
know, for he helped to frame that platform."

The following morning at eight o'clock General Weaver, his
wife, and their party arrived in Atlanta to fill a speaking en-
gagement. The Populist candidate for President had received a
respectful hearing on his Southern tour until he reached Geor-
gia. There the Democratic press whipped up fury against him
by charges of "cruelty and oppression" practiced on the people
of Tennessee by Weaver during the War. The day before he ar-
rived in Atlanta a gang of Democrats at Macon had rotten-
egged General Weaver while he spoke, striking Mrs. Weaver
on the head. When he learned of the treatment dealt Watson
at the Capitol, Weaver canceled all engagements and abandoned
his campaign in Georgia. Explaining to the state chairman of
the People's party, he wrote :

I find the spirit of organized rowdyism at some of the points visited
within the state so great as to render it unadvisable for me to attempt
to fill the engagements at points not already reached. Personal indignity
was threatened at Waycross ... at Albany we were met by a howling
mob which refused to accord us a respectful hearing ... at Macon . . .
rotten eggs were thrown prior to the introduction of the speakers, one of
which struck Mrs. Weaver upon the head. 42

Watson's reply to these Democratic tactics was stinging. "Re-
member," he wrote, "that for the first time in the history of
the Republic a Presidential candidate has been driven from the
hustings, and his wife found no protection in her sex from the
brutal attacks of 'Southern chivalry' as represented by Bourbon
Democracy! They call us the ragtag scum of creation. Thank
God, we have never yet dreamed we could win our way to pub-

41 Constitution, Aug. 26, 29, 1892; P. P. P., Sept. 2, 9, 23, 1892.

42 Fred E. Haynes, James Baird Weaver, p. 324; Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 24,
1892; Constitution, Sept. 24-25, 1892; P. P. P., Sept. 30, 1892.

202

Race, Class , and Party

lie favor by insulting women, and striking them in the face with
eggs." 43 State chairman Irwin, in a letter "To the Voters of
Georgia," proclaimed that, "The scenes that have been enacted
in Georgia during the month of September are only repetitions
of Revolutionary France before the crisis came. ... It is gen-
erally believed that plans are being perfected to defraud the Peo-
ple's Party of its vote. Vehement rage prevails wherever Peo-
ple's Party speakers obtain a hearing. . . . The times are
ominous. They resemble the days that preceded secession and
civil war. There will be bloodshed and death unless there is a
change." **

To the plea made to Governor Northen by the Populist can-
didate for Governor, that the Governor assist him in obtaining
a fair division of election managers, Northen, after considerable
delay, replied that he could "see no reason now to believe that
the proper authorities desire or intend fraud at the coming state
election." To the Populists, however, it seemed plain enough
that the Democratic machine was bent on employing every de-
vice of terror and fraud it had learned and perfected in Recon-
struction fights — together with a few new ones.

From Washington, Georgia, was issued a circular addressed
"To the Democratic Farmers and Employers of Labor of
Wilkes County," and signed by the Democratic chairman of that
county. It warned of the impending peril of a Populist victory
and advised :

This danger however can be overcome by the absolute control which
you yet exercise over your property. It is absolutely necessary that you
should bring to bear the power which your situation gives over tenants,
laborers and croppers. . . . The success [of the Populists] . . . means
regulation of control of rents, wages of labor, regulation of hours of work,
and at certain seasons of the year strikes. . . .

The peace, prosperity, and happiness of yourselves and your friends
depend on your prompt, vigorous and determined efforts to control those
who are to such a large extent dependent upon you. 45

Other Democratic handbills and circulars flooded Watson's
district: one to prove that he had defeated "a Worthy Colored
Man's Claim in Congress"; another on "Peek's Slavery Bill,"
with illustrations depicting Peek and Watson putting chains on

48 P. P. P., Oct. 7, 1892; Chronicle, Oct. 11, 1892.

44 Ibid., Sept. 30, 1892.

^Circular, dated Sept. 8, 1892, Watson MSS.

203

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

tenants, croppers, and Negroes; another on Watson's oppo-
sition to the colored contestant's claim upon a seat in the Geor-
gia Legislature in 1882; another to prove him in the pay of
Republican bosses. 46

As the day of the state election approached threats became
coercion and coercion turned into bloodshed and open battle.
The Chronicle reported three homicides in Augusta in a few
days preceding the election, which, according to the editor, were
"the natural results of paternal, socialistic and communistic ut-
terances of reckless third party leaders." On election day, Dan
Bowles, Democrat, was "marching a line of 50 negro voters to
the polls" six miles out of Augusta when he encountered a group
of Populists. Isaac Horton, a Negro Populist, sought to disen-
gage one Negro from the line, and a general fight ensued.
Bowles shot Horton through the heart. Verdict, "justifiable
homicide." On the same day, in Augusta, Henry Head, a Demo-
cratic deputy sheriff, was shot through the stomach while at-
tempting to arrest Arthur Glover, secretary of the Populist
Campaign Club in the Fifth Ward, a workers' district. Glover
escaped to the South Carolina woods, a posse after him. 47

At Rukersville, Elbert County, a white man, a Populist this
time, was on his way to the polls with "a squad of negroes and
white men," when encountered by B. H. Head and other Demo-
crats. Head recognized in the Populist "squad" some Negroes
"who had once lived with him and who bore the name of Head."
Becoming infuriated, Head picked up a wagon standard and
struck an old Negro. The Negro's son then struck Head, after
which the latter ran across the street to his home, returned with
a double-barrelled shot-gun, and "deliberately shot down two
Negroes," one of whom died. Another white Democrat drew a
pistol and shot three Negroes, after which the Populists were
driven from the polls. One estimate had it that fifteen Negroes
were killed by Democrats in Georgia during the state election.
"If the law cannot protect us," warned a correspondent of Tom
Watson, "we will protect ourselves with Winchesters." **

Watson professed to be encouraged by the results of the state

46 Circulars, handbills, and clippings, Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. II.

47 Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 6, 1892.

^Farmer's Light, Oct. 20, 1892; P. P.P., Oct. 14, 1892.

204

Race, Class, and Party

election. The Populist candidate for Governor was defeated by
a two-to-one vote. "But three months have passed," Watson re-
minded the Democrats, "between the organization of the Peo-
ple's Party and the election, and in the rock-ribbed state of
Georgia more than one-third of the hosts assembled at the polls
adhered to the People's banner." 49

With the state election out of the way, the Democratic ma-
chine could now concentrate its full attention upon the fight on
Watson. "So intense is the interest and concern felt in the cam-
paign," said the Constitution, "that even here in Atlanta . . .
nothing is talked of except the race between Black and Watson.
Men declared at the democratic headquarters yesterday that
they would much prefer to see Black elected than Cleveland.
They viewed it as the supremest issue in Georgia to beat Wat-
son, for they declare that he will endanger the peace and pros-
perity of the South if his incendiary speeches are not hushed." 60

The election in the Tenth stirred interest in a wider circle.
"The first question asked by everyone when the probabilities of
the South are considered is, What are Watson's chances?' "
"Mr. Watson is now a national character and there is not a sin-
gle congressional contest going on in the nation that is being
looked upon with as much interest as the one in his district." 51
President Cleveland was reported to have remarked to a group
of Georgians after the election that "he was almost as much in-
terested in Major Black's campaign in the Tenth district of
Georgia as he was in his own election." 62

Others in the North made more practical manifestations of
their interest in the defeat of Tom Watson. Augusta business
men made personal appeals to their financial connections, "espe-
cially those in New York City," for campaign funds. They
argued that Watson was "a sworn enemy of capital, and that his
defeat was a matter of importance to every investor in the coun-
try." The New York Tribune reported that, "Insurance and rail-
road companies responded liberally, so that $40,000 was in hand
for use, in addition to the local funds." 53

49 P. P. P., Oct. ai, 1892.

50 Constitution, Oct. 23, 1892.

51 National Watchman, quoted in P. P. P., Nov. 4, 1892.

52 Savannah Press, quoted in P. P. P., April 7, 1893.

53 New York Tribune, Dec. 20, 1892, quoted in P. P. P., Dec. 30, 1892.

205

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

After his experience with his opponents' methods in the state
election, Watson could not face the Congressional election with-
out misgivings. "They have intimidated the voter, assaulted the
voter, murdered the voter," he wrote. "They have bought votes,
forced votes, and stolen votes. They have incited lawless men to
a pitch of frenzy which threatens anarchy." To his private Jour-
nal he confided: "It was almost a miracle I was not killed in the
campaign of 1892. Threats against my life were frequent and
there were scores of men who would have done the deed and
thousands who would have sanctioned it. Fear of the retaliation
which my friends would inflict prevented my assassination —
nothing else." 54 Governor Northen was heard to say that "Wat-
son ought to be killed and that it ought to have been done long
ago." 66

"There is no wiping out the fact that this is a revolution,"
observed a Populist paper, "and it depends upon the enemy
whether it shall be a peaceful or a bloody one. To be candid
about the matter we believe it will be the latter." w

One of the most zealous and effective workers for Watson's
cause was H. S. Doyle, a young Negro preacher. In the face of
repeated threats upon his life, Doyle made sixty-three speeches
during the campaign in behalf of Watson's candidacy. Toward
the close of the campaign Doyle met with a threat of lynching
(called "imaginary" by the Democratic press) at Thomson, and
fled to Watson for protection. Watson installed him on his pri-
vate grounds and sent out riders on horseback for assistance. All
night armed farmers roared into the village. The next morning
the streets were "lined with buggies and horses foaming and
tired with travel." All that day and the next night they con-
tinued to pour in until "fully two thousand" Populists crowded
the village — arms stacked on Watson's veranda. Prominent
among them was the Populist sheriff of McDuflie County. They
marched to the courthouse under arms, where they were ad-
dressed by Doyle and Watson. "We are determined," said the
latter, "in this free country that the humblest white or black man
that wants to talk our doctrine shall do it, and the man doesn't
live who shall touch a hair of his head, without fighting every

54 MS. Journal 2.

55 Affidavit of Mrs. Arrenia Hall, Warren County, Oct. 31, 1892. Watson MSS.

56 Farmer's Light, quoted in Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 23, 1892.

206

Race, Class y and Party

man in the people's party." The farmers remained on guard for
two nights. 67

"After that," testified Doyle, "Mr. Watson was held almost
as a savior by the Negroes. The poor ignorant men and women,
who so long had been oppressed, were anxious even to touch Mr.
Watson's hand, and were often a source of inconvenience to him
in their anxiety to see him and shake hands with him, and even
to touch him."

The spectacle of white farmers riding all night to save a
Negro from lynchers was rather rare in Georgia. So shocking
was the incident to the Democratic press, so clearly subversive of
order and tradition, that their indignation knew no bounds.
"Watson has gone mad," announced the Chronicle, and the Con-
stitution gravely agreed. The whole South was "threatened with
anarchy and communism" because of "the direful teachings of
Thomas E. Watson."

That the danger to Doyle was not imaginary seems indicated
by the fact that the following week, when he was speaking at
Louisville, a shot intended for the speaker struck a white man
in the back and killed him. Two days later when Watson and
Doyle spoke at Davisboro they were accompanied by a guard of
forty men carrying rifles. The following week another Negro
was shot and killed by a white Democrat in the county where
the previous murder occurred. At Dalton a Negro man, who
had spoken for Populism, was murdered at his home by un-
known men. 68

From Watson's town came the report that "nearly all the
ladies whose husbands are democrats have left Thomson, and
many democratic families have moved away, as they feared their
lives were in danger." The mayor of the city appealed to Gov-
ernor Northen for "six or eight hundred soldiers" on election
day, for fear "the third party people would burn the town and
massacre the democrats." A battalion in Atlanta and three com-
panies in Augusta received "orders to march to Thomson at a
moment's notice." 69

67 Contested Election Case of Thomas E. Watson vs. J. C. C. Black (Washington,
1896), pp. 669, 683, 717, 781, 793-794; Constitution, Oct. 25-27, 1892; Chronicle,
Oct. 26, 1892.

68 Watson vs. Black, p. 781; Augusta Chronicle, Nov. 4, 8 and 10, 1892; P. P. P.,
Oct. 26, 1892.

69 Atlanta Journal, Nov. 7, 1892.

207

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

A careful scholar's characterization of the Georgia election of
1892 as a "solemn farce" admits of possible error only in the
choice of the adjective. 60 That it was a farce is clear enough. Re-
construction practices of terror, fraud, corruption, and trickery
were all revived. Democrats found little difficulty in identifying
the "cause" of 1892 with the "cause" of 1872, and justified any
means by calling the end holy. Populists retaliated in kind to
some extent, but they were not nearly so skillful or successful.

Federal supervisors under the direction of United States mar-
shals were in attendance at the polling in Augusta, but against
the Democratic local police they were powerless to prevent
wholesale repeating, bribery, ballot-box stuffing, voting of
minors, and intimidation. Negro plantation hands and laborers
were hauled to town in wagon loads, marched to the polls in
squads, and voted repeatedly. Negroes were hauled across the
Savannah River from South Carolina in four-horse wagon loads
and voted in Augusta. Whiskey was dispensed by the barrel in
Augusta wagon yards, and cash payment made to voters. 61

By such methods as these Watson was defeated. At that, he
carried by ample majorities all counties within his district before
it was gerrymandered, with the exception of Richmond. Of the
two new counties, Wilkinson's vote was nearly a tie, and scores
of Populist votes were "not allowed," while the irregularities in
Hancock were notorious. Most flagrant were the abuses in Rich-
mond County, where Black received 10,776 of the total of
17,772 votes he received in the whole district. The total vote in
Augusta was about double the number of legal voters. 62

The attitude of many Democrats in Georgia was much the
same as that expressed by those of Alabama over the same elec-
tion : "Yes, we counted you out. What are you going to do about
it?" It even crept into unguarded paragraphs of Democratic edi-
torials. At Augusta the victors celebrated by an elaborate funeral
ceremony, in which "Watson was laid out in great state."

"Who believes it?" asked Watson of the result. "Not the
Democratic bosses who stole the ballots. Not the managers who

60 A. M. Arnett, op. cit. t pp. I53-I55*

61 Contested Election Case of Thomas E. Watson vs. J. C. C. Black (Washington,
1893), passim; Contested Election Case of Thomas E. Watson vs. J. C. C. Black
(Washington, 1896), passim; P. P. P., Feb. 10, 1893.

62 New York Tribune, Dec. 20, 1892; P. P. P., Dec. 30, 1892; MS. Journal 2, p.
524.

208

Race, Class , and Party

threw out returns. Not the newspapers who have to 'cook' their
news with such care. Not even the candidates who received the
stolen goods. Nobody believes it. Least of all do we of the Peo-
ple's party." In one month, between the state and the national
election, the Democratic majority dwindled from 71,000 to
31,000. "So we decided not to die. We unanimously decided to
postpone the funeral." 63

He proclaimed himself undismayed at the result. Considering
the fact that not a single daily paper in the state was friendly to
the Populists, that "all the machinery was against us; all the
power of the 'ins' ; all the force of old habit and old thought ; all
the unseen but terrible cohorts of ignorance and prejudice and
sectionalism," as well as "all the money ... all the concen-
trated hatred of capital, special privilege," he refused to take
too tragic a view of the election returns. The national poll of
the third party was truly phenomenal, but its greatest hope —
the breakup of the Solid South — was disappointed. Watson's
work was still before him.

With spontaneous impulse the defeated hordes of Populists
marched on Thomson from all over the district to voice their
feelings against the fraudulent election and commiserate with
their leader. "Four thousand then," announced Watson. "Six
thousand today, and growing stronger and stronger as Demo-
cratic methods and frauds become more apparent." At ten in
the morning the firing of a small cannon, which they brought
with them, announced the arrival of the delegation from Rich-
mond. It had marched from Augusta to Watson's doorstep — a
distance of thirty-seven miles I With much heat and enthusiasm
resolutions condemning the election methods were adopted, and
$877.95 was raised (much of it in small coin) to finance a con-
test of Black's election before the House. 64

Before he returned to Washington for the second term, Wat-
son announced that he would "in all possible and proper ways
carry on the third party fight. I am determined never to give it
up as long as I live." 6B

68 P. P. P., Dec. 9, 1892.

64 P. P.P., Dec 9, 1892.

65 Constitution, Dec. n, 1892.

209

Populism on the March

Few legislative acts in the history of Congress have had
so many willing claimants upon its authorship as that which
established rural free delivery of mails. At least seven public
men have expressed anxiety to be known as the "Father of the
R. F. D." The heated dispute over the paternity of this meas-
ure is to be understood only when the momentous changes it
worked in rural life are taken into account, and when the farm-
er's previous isolation is considered. Not one farmer in three
hundred got a daily paper in the 'nineties, and those who lived
five miles or more from a post office were fortunate to get their
mail once a week. It is not surprising that the rural population
of the country has been confronted from time to time with sev-
eral men to claim their gratitude for initiating the rural free
delivery. 1

When Tom Watson called to witness "every rural free de-
livery box in Georgia and every other state from the lakes to
the gulf, from sea to sea" as evidence of his accomplishment (as
he not infrequently did) , he could back his claim with proof such
as no one of his rival "fathers" could advance. Indisputably, he
had introduced the resolution providing for the first appropria-
tion that the United States ever made for rural free delivery.

Credit for starting agitation for rural free delivery belongs to
John M. Stahl, an Illinois editor, who began his extensive cam-
paign in 1879. Unable to make any impression upon Congress,
though having strong support among farmers, he complained of
the opposition from little postmasters, who formed a body of
some fifty thousand enemies of a change that would jeopardize

1 John M. Stahl, Growing with the FT est, pp. 103-104.

210

Populism on the March

their jobs. Friends of free delivery must therefore "overcome
the indisposition of the Congressmen to abolish a good part of
their political machinery," of which the postmasters were the
framework. "In truth," observed Stahl, "those Congressmen
first to favor farmer mail delivery were conscientious, courage-
ous men." The notorious star route contractors and the rural
merchant who feared competition through the mails were two
other vested interests in the opposition.

In the first session of the Fifty-second Congress both Watson
and Livingston had introduced resolutions to provide appropria-
tions for rural free delivery, but each had been ruled out of
order. 2 Watson asked "whether the delivery of mail matter free
to the people who live near the post office, while those who live
farther away are obliged to go for their mail, is not a false sys-
tem?" He pleaded for "one tax system which treats the poor at
least as fairly as it treats the rich." 8

In February of the second session Watson renewed his effort,
this time evading the House rules that blocked his way before.
His resolution took the form of an amendment to a paragraph
of the Post Office appropriation bill, reducing the expenditure
slightly and directing that $10,000 of the total appropriation be
used by the Postmaster-General in "experimental free-delivery
in rural communities other than towns and villages." 4 In the
galleries when the resolution was read sat John M. Stahl, who
had decided that Watson was "the best man to present to the
House the proposition." After urging this legislation for thir-
teen years, he felt this moment was the most exciting of his life.

Objection to the resolution was immediately raised on the
ground that its purpose was "already provided for." The objec-
tion had reference to a scheme of free delivery sponsored by
Postmaster-General Wanamaker and passed by the preceding
Congress, which provided for experimental delivery in "rural
communities," interpreted to mean small towns and villages.
Stahl thought this plan was being used to "throw dust in the
eyes of those that really wished to aid the farmers." Watson
insisted on his own interpretation. He meant "absolutely rural

2 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 1 Sess., June 1, 1892, pp. 4927-4928.
8 Ibid., May 27. 1892, p. 47^91 May 28, 1892, pp. 4801-4803; P. P. P., June 3,
1893.
4 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 2 Sees., Feb. 17, 1893, p. 1759.

211

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

communities, that is to say, in the country pure and simple,
amongst the farmers, in those neighborhoods where they do not
get their mail more than once in every two weeks . . ." 5

The resolution was passed. Having the backing of John Steele
Henderson, chairman of the Committee on Post Offices and Post
Roads, it was seen safely through the House, escaped debate in
the Senate, was signed by the President, and became law.

In spite of the fact that the language of Watson's resolution
was mandatory, Cleveland's Postmaster-General Bissell, ap-
pointed March 7, 1893, chose to interpret it as "discretionary,"
and refused to expend the money for the purpose indicated. In
this he reflected the opinion of President Cleveland, who re-
garded rural free delivery as a "craze" that made a preposter-
ous drain upon the Treasury. In his message of December 3,
1894, Cleveland said: "The estimated cost of rural free delivery
generally is so very large that it ought not to be considered in
the present condition of affairs." The Administration was se-
verely condemned by members of its own party for ignoring the
will of Congress, and a second appropriation of $20,000 was
added to the first appropriation at the next Congress. It was not,
however, until the last quarter of 1896 that either of the two ap-
propriations was used for the experiments indicated. It was out
of these experiments, provided for in Watson's earlier resolu-
tion, that the modern system of rural free delivery grew. 6

Along party lines Watson renewed the hopeless program of
introducing bills to enact the demands of the Populist platform.
One was a bill "to prohibit further issue of bonds under the acts
of 1875 and 1879"; another sought "to increase the currency
and provide for its distribution through homestead land loans";
and still another renewed in modified form the subtreasury bill.
None of these bills was ever reported out of the committee
room. 7

On labor legislation he took up the fight with the same zeal
he had shown in his attack on the Pinkerton strike breakers. "I
will stay here till the ants tote me out of the keyhole before I

5 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 2 Sess., Feb. 17, 1893, p. 1759.

6 Archibald Henderson, series of articles on R. F. D., in Raleigh News and Ob-
server, Jan. 13 and 28 and Feb. 10, 1935; vide also John M. Stahl, op. cit., pp. 120-
141.

7 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 2 Sess., Jan. 4, 1893, p. 324; Jan. 9, 1893, p. 460; Feb.
2, 1893, p. 1118; P. P. P., May 12, 1893.

212

Populism on the March

will give up this fight," he informed the opposition to the bill
requiring railroads to install automatic car-couplers and air-
brakes as safety devices. He was "tired of this eternal fashion of
the railroads bossing this House," he said, referring to lobbyists
in the galleries. "Mr. Speaker, I appeal to this majority; let us
assert our manhood one time; let us make the corporations re-
treat one time ; let us stand by the people one time, and we will
go home having redeemed in some measure the otherwise dis-
creditable record of the Fifty-second Congress." 8

In the Cutting militia bill Watson discovered what he pro-
nounced a "covert, stealthy" attempt to convert the state militias
into a "national guard, a national body." He condemned it as a
step in the direction of centralization, done in imitation of "old
world militarism." Watson was the most outspoken opponent of
the bill in the House. He later claimed credit for defeating this
attempt to "centralize the military strength of the laboring peo-
ple and the farmers of the country under the heel of such men
as Grover Cleveland." 9

The adjournment of the Fifty-second Congress ended Tom
Watson's career in office for a period that was to last for more
than a quarter of a century — though it by no means ended his
active political life. If anything, he was politically more impor-
tant out of office than in. All his energies were now released for
a more congenial employment, one for which he was better
suited in temperament. It was not in office, but out among the
people preaching a crusade that he found his true role, and that
was the role he played until near the end of his life.

Upon his return to Georgia, Watson immediately opened a
bombardment against the Cleveland administration that was to
continue relentlessly for four years. Personally, he said, he re-
garded President Cleveland as a man of honor and courage. He
also regarded Cleveland as the agent of his sworn enemy, East-
ern capitalism, and as a standing menace to every aspiration he

8 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 2 Sess., Feb. 21, 1893, p. 1972; P. P. P., March 3,

1893.

9 Cong. Record, 52 Cong., 2 Sess., Jan. 14, 1893, pp. 568-569; P. P. P., Sept. 18,

1896.

213

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

entertained for the rehabilitation of agrarian power, economic
and political. The task outlined for Watson, as he saw it, lay in
winning the Southern Democrat over from his bondage to the
enemy. In this regard his instructions to Populist stump speakers
are enlightening:

Dwell untiringly upon the fact that the Eastern and Northern Democrat
is as much our enemy upon all questions of finance and taxation as the
Eastern and Northern Republican.

Explain with all the might that is in you the identity of interests be-
tween the South and West; and the antagonism of interest between the
South and the East and North; — then ask the country Democrat why he
should follow the bosses who allow the South to be plundered in the interest
of the Eastern and Northern plutocrats.

Load your guns in this way, men, and you'll hit the bulPs eye every
crack. 10

Shortly after his return from Washington, the Constitution
printed an interview with Watson that clearly showed he was
taking a long and deliberate view of the crusade he planned. "I
think," said he, "Mr. Cleveland is going to precipitate a conflict
between his views and those of the Southern and Western Demo-
crats on that subject [currency]. He is in favor of a bonded
debt, national banks, gold standard and all that Wall Street
schedule of finance." It was obvious that "Northern and Eastern
Democrats do not talk as we do, and their interests are diametri-
cally opposed to our interests . . . and when Mr. Cleveland
forces the issue, he will get the worst of it. I think he will draw
off into his party all those men up there in the North and East,
while the liberal and truly Democratic elements in the South and
West will gravitate together with the Populists." u

For their part, the Southern Democrats began to view with
increasing alarm the first signs of a fulfillment of the Populist
leader's prophecy. A large majority of the population, the farm-
ers, had known little but depression since the late 'eighties; but
now the panic of 1893 was swiftly spreading its gloom over fac-
tory and city. Banks failed, money disappeared, factories closed,
unemployed workers returned to the family farm to add burden
to its meager larder, and the mortgage foreclosures went for-
ward at an accelerated pace. Families of Negro and white ten-

10 P. P. P., July az, 1893.

11 Quoted in P. P. P., April 7, 1893.

214

Populism on the March

ants walked the roads seeking relief. At no time since the devas-
tation of Georgia by an invading army was acute poverty, hun-
ger, and misery so widespread among the people. 12 Yet with a
Democratic President in the White House — the first since
Pierce whose party was in a position to control both Houses —
they could get no relief. Cleveland's first, indeed his only con-
cern, seemed to them to be to protect the dollar against the
debtor sections' demand for relief and fair treatment.

In vain Southern Democrats pleaded with Cleveland to make
good the campaign pledges. "The only way to head off the dem-
agogue, and nip the flaming red flower of populism in the bud,"
urged the Constitution, "is to reform the evils now so galling
and burdensome. In other words, the speedy action of the new
administration in redeeming the pledges of the Democratic plat-
form will leave the Populists no grievances to complain of." Un-
less silver was remonetized, protection and the whole scheme of
Republican legislation was wiped out, and that "without unnec-
essary delay," discontent would "cause the Hon. Jack Cade to
loom up as a controlling factor in our politics."

The allusion to "poor Jack Cade" Watson found "extremely
unfortunate." Indeed, considering the pitiful price the farmer
was paid for his wheat, "why should not some Jack Cade in
every city rise today and demand that the ha-penny loaves be
sold for a penny?" What of the pretty promises the Democrats
made last fall ? he asked :

Campaign pledges? Where are they? The man who made them can't
be found.

Financial politics are just as Harrison left them. Even more so.

The volume of money grows smaller every day by comparison.

The McKinley Bill sits on the top rail of the fence and crows defiant
self-confidence.

And where is Cleveland? . . .

Cleveland has gone fishing.

Watson reprinted every plaintive appeal the Democratic press
made to the deaf ears of the administration. "It's a piercing, ear-
splitting, insanse howl," he wrote. "Every reverberation be-
speaks awful, agonizing anxiety. . . . Oh, how they howl for
the free silver act. . . . Oh, how they howl for the income tax

12 Alex M. Arnett, Populist Movement in Georgia, pp. 156-167; Charles H.
Otken, Ills of the South, passim,

215

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

law. . . . But why does Democracy foolishly hanker after what
she can't get? Because she sees that the people are awake and
that her future in this State is in jeopardy. The people are no
longer blind, no longer sitting in foolish indifference." 13

The cordial reception given William Jennings Bryan in At-
lanta in June was an important sign of the times. It was not with-
out reason that Populists everywhere viewed the times with
some satisfaction. "The political situation," observed the Na-
tional Watchman, "is one that can be viewed with absolute com-
placency. . . . No change for better or worse can be made from
present conditions without furnishing an object lesson for a Pop-
ulist sermon." 14

On July 4, at Douglasville, Georgia, Watson launched a state-
wide campaign that was to proceed almost without interruption
for three and a half months. "No political party," publicly ad-
mitted the chairman of the Democratic State Central Commit-
tee, "has ever carried on in Georgia so thorough and systematic
a campaign in an off year as has been and is now being carried
on by Mr. Watson . . ." ie

This was not so much campaign as crusade, for the people did
not listen so much as participate. The contemporary accounts of
the enthusiasm evoked by the speeches of Watson border on the
incredible. Throngs of three to ten thousand people crowded
into cross-roads villages from the countryside of a twenty-mile
radius. Riding through the open country from town to town,
Watson and his party not infrequently met with such experiences
as the following: "When within four miles of Sylvania [at six
in the morning] we found the road blocked with vehicles of
every description. The rumbling, muffled sound of wheels,
ploughing through the sand, sounded like the roar of an army
wagon train. The atmosphere loaded with dust and cheers. . . .
At least 6,000 people were in hearing of his voice, while at least
a thousand more wandered around loosely unable to hear a
word."

13 P. P. P., April 14, June 9, x6, 1893.

14 Quoted in P. P. P., May 19, 1893.

15 Constitution, Sept 7, 1893.

2l6

Populism on the March

The Southern masses were on the march, deeply stirred by the
conviction that this was their fight. Watson's party was stopped
by crowds at cross-roads stores, schoolhouses, and churches.
Bridges along their road were decorated with flowers. Three
times during one speech Watson concluded and begged the
crowd to seek shelter from a pouring rain, and each time they
urged him to continue. The meetings were generally opened by
prayer. Watson's speeches were usually begun with long texts
from Jefferson, which he expounded in reference to cotton prices,
government ownership of railroads, national banks, financial
theories of Cleveland, and political equality for the Negro. 16 He
did not neglect to portray the part he played in the movement :

The work I did, somebody had to do. The abuse I took somebody had
to incur. The losses I have sustained somebody had to dare.

I did the work, took the abuse, risked the loss, and I am proud of it.
Proud of my record, proud of my principles, proud of my friends.

Not always was the reception of the Populist crusaders so
cordial. At Washington, Georgia, where during his 1892 cam-
paign Watson was insulted and baited by a crowd of Democrats,
the rumor arose that the Populists were marching on the town
6,000 strong, wagons loaded with Winchesters, to avenge the
insult to their leader. Governor Northen issued orders to hold
a battalion of Augusta troops ready for marching at short no-
tice. The mayor of Washington ordered the local militia "to lie
on its arms" all the night before, as well as the day of the Popu-
list rally. The meeting was peaceful. "Judging from the Wilkes
county meeting of today," observed Major McGregor, "I came
to the conclusion if Governor Northen don't put the militia
'under arms,' and then under lock and key, so as to keep them
from hearing Tom Watson, he won't have a corporal's guard to
rally around his Senatorial banner."

While the campaign was in progress President Cleveland
called Congress together in extra session to repeal the Sherman
Silver Purchase Act. Watson hailed the extra session as "a God-
send to us." "Into the clear light, where all honest citizens can
see, it will bring the schemes of the bosses." He predicted that,
"Democrats who hold Republican doctrines will be driven to the
Republican party, and vice versa. Members of the two old par-

16 P. P. P., July 7-Oct. 27, 1893.

217

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ties who really hold Populist views, finding no support in either
Democrat or Republican ranks, will be driven to the People's
Party." He cheerfully printed the silver speeches of those Dem-
ocrats who were firm in their resistance to Cleveland, and made
great sport of the effort of the Southern wing of the party to
revive the scare of the force bill: "Anything, ANYTHING, to
make the people forget how the Democrats helped the Repub-
licans to carry the plans of Wall Street."

The Atlanta Journal, controlled by Hoke Smith, a member of
Cleveland's Cabinet, suggested that "Editor Tom Watson, of
the People's Party Paper, ought to sue the Atlanta Constitution
for damages for infringing on his patent methods of abuse of
President Cleveland and the Democratic administration." "By
no means," replied Editor Watson. "Let the boys fall into line."

The President was not without apprehensions of the threat of
Watson's growing strength in the South. In the spring a Demo-
cratic paper had reported: "Mr. Cleveland has been impressed
with the idea that the danger in the Tenth district is almost as
great now as last year. . . . The President desires to give the
party in the district all the machinery and leverage in his power,
and he is evidently willing to have government patronage
thrown full and fair against the revival of Watsonism in
Georgia." 17

By fall, however, it was plain that much more than Federal
patronage would be necessary to stop Watson and save the old
party in the state. Economic collapse menaced the Southern
farmer. The appeal of Democratic leaders for redemption of
platform pledges became shameless in its desperation. In pub-
lic interview Governor Northen said that Georgia would de-
mand restoration of silver, despite Cleveland. "How could I be-
lieve otherwise," he asked, "when every democrat who holds
office in this Government today was pledged upon that demand
and upon his personal pledge to that end? The party must re-
deem all its pledges and redeem them at once." W. Y. Atkinson,
chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee, confessed
that he awaited the action of Congress with "great anxiety." "If
it had not been for those pledges," he said, "neither the October
nor the November elections would have resulted as they did.

17 Savannah Press, quoted in P. P. P., April 7, 1893.

218

Populism on the March

. . . We induced these men to remain in the democratic party
by convincing them that the evils of which they complained were
the results of Republican legislation." M

In reply to a letter from Major J. C. C. Black, asking about
political conditions in the state, Governor Northen, in mid-
September wrote: u To be candid with you, I am not only un-
easy, I am alarmed. I have reached my conclusions without
haste." 19 He enclosed a letter he had written to Cleveland, ask-
ing Black to deliver it to the President and emphasizing that no
publicity must be given the letter. His letter to the President was
written with the advice of the party leaders of the state :

Mr. President: Profoundly impressed with the unusual conditions in
this State — political and financial — arising from the long-continued delay
in helpful legislation by Congress, I respectfully but earnestly urge upon
you the expediency of some public expression, somewhat more compre-
hensive than your recent message, as to the proper policy to be pursued by
Congress upon questions affecting the stringency of the times and the
needs of the people.

The conditions of this State are fearful and threatening. The people
have confidence in your ability and your leadership, and no one thing, in
my candid judgment, would go so far towards restoring quiet as a clear
statement made to the public by you.

I agree with you fully in believing that: "It may be true that the em-
barrassments from which the business of the county is suffering arise as
much from evils apprehended as from those actually existing." The result
of such apprehension with us begets a lack of confidence in the party in
power, and we are rapidly losing strength in this State. Every election
held in this State for the past three (3) months has gone against the
Democratic party and in favor of the Populists. Ex-Congressman Watson,
the leader of the Populists, has taken advantage of the conditions, and is
speaking over the State to assemblies never less than 2,000, and sometimes
as many as 5,000 people. . . .

Another reason calling for such a statement from you as I ask affects
the sale of our farm products and our business relations. Our cotton is
now ready for market. There is not sufficient money to handle it. Farmers
are compelled to sell, and the price is necessarily reduced. The cotton must
be given in settlement of obligations incurred during the early spring. If
the stringency remains until these obligations are canceled, and business
improves after the crops have been taken from the control of our farmers
and fortunes are made by speculators upon the fruits of their labor, while
their poverty continues, there can be no hope of holding them to the Demo-

18 Constitution, Aug. 15, Sept. 7, 1893.

19 William J. Northen to J. C. C. Black, Sept. 16, 1893, copy in Northen Scrap-
books, Vol. Ill, p. 278.

219

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

cratic party in the next election. If by any means conditions can be im-
proved, and the farmers receive nine or ten cents for their cotton, the party
will get the benefit of the advance, and the farmers will remain Demo-
cratic.

I beg to assure you of my sympathy in the responsible position you
hold before the people and the obligations put upon you by the political
party whose leader you are. You have had my earnest advocacy and en-
thusiastic support from the beginning of the conflict, because I have had
unquestioned confidence in your statesmanship and your courage. I write
you now because of what I know to be your power to aid us in this state
in perpetuating good government as found in the principles of the Demo-
cratic party, and especially in relation to the distressed condition of an un-
settled and oppressed people. . . . 20

With the letter were sent clippings from the state press telling
the story of Watson's crusade and the result it was having.

President Cleveland's reply, while attempting a conciliatory
tone, carried but cold comfort to Southern Democrats, probably
doing more harm than good. "I hardly know how to reply to
your letter," he began, and continued at length, merely to re-
state and defend his well-known desire for "sound money" and
"the immediate and unconditional repeal of the purchasing
clause of the so-called Sherman law." 21

Cleveland's letter was immediately released to the press, but
Northen's letter to Cleveland was carefully guarded. "I in-
tended it to be a confidential FAMILY communication," ex-
plained Northen to Clark Howell. "It is based upon the facts
that while they are facts, I fear would be hurtful to the general
good of the party if they should be published . . ." 22 Though
he never saw the letter, Tom Watson ventured some shrewd
guesses about its contents. It was a symptom of the Democratic
"Blind Staggers" said his paper. "Cleveland's letter to Northen
goes all over America and does not rest its heavy feet till it
reaches London. But no man knows what Billy said to Grover."
Taunting Northen, he dared him to publish the letter. He can-
didly wrote, "This Northen letter has done us more good than

20 William J. Northen to Grover Cleveland, Sept. 15, 1893, copy in Northen
Scrapbooks, Vol. Ill, pp. 270-272.

21 Grover Cleveland to William J. Northen, Sept. 25, 1893; Northen Scrapbooks,
Vol. Ill, p. 272; also vide, Constitution, Sept. 30, 1893.

22 William J. Northen to Clark Howell, copy, Northen Scrapbooks, Vol. Ill, p.
279.

220

Populism on the March

anything that has happened since our Christian Governor called
out the military at Washington, Georgia."

As he brought his campaign to a close in October, with a huge
barbecue at Thomson, Watson found much to encourage him.
He had visited thirty-seven counties, and addressed crowds esti-
mated to total 150,000 people. After a losing struggle of a year,
the People's Party Paper now boasted a large subscription list.
"We go to every state in the Union," said the paper. "In Kan-
sas, Missouri, and Texas, our list is very large. In Georgia we
stand second to only one weekly newspaper, the Atlanta Consti-
tution. In the Tenth District we stand first." 23 Thirty-five Popu-
list papers in the state were now listed.

Hardly an issue of the People's Party Paper appeared with-
out its specimen of Populist poetry — poems usually in celebration
of the virtues and accomplishments of Thomas E. Watson —
scores of them. He mentioned "a hamper-basket full of home-
made poetry" among one week's contributions. It seemed to him
a "good sign" — for politics, whether for letters or not. "Any
party which at the age of four years, shows a capacity to produce
plentiful supplies of home-made poetry has gum in it," he wrote.
"Bound to stick." It should constitute a warning to the old party :
"We have already published some of this poetry, as a warning
to the Democrats. If they are wise, they will mend their ways,
and not provoke our poets too far." 24

Such optimism did Watson affect that on Thanksgiving Day
he offered a prayer of gratitude: "I am sincerely thankful that
the storm of political hatred is abating; that a Populist is now
considered a shade better than a pickpocket; and that 'Tom Wat-
son' is no longer regarded as a junior partner to the devil." He
suggested to Cleveland that they give Democracy a breathing
spell. "She needs time to collect her scattered mind."

It was not until the second session of the Fifty-third Congress
that Watson's contest of the election of Black in 1892 was
brought before the House. He could expect little, of course,
from the Democratic majority, but could he place before the
public by means of this case a vivid picture of the injustice done

28 Clipping from P. P. P., about Oct. 1, 1893 ; Watson Scrapbooks.
24 P. P. P., Nov. 3, 1893.

221

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

him and his party by corrupt Democratic methods, he would
strengthen his position appreciably before the public and bring
some restraint to bear upon his opponents when they attempted
a repetition of their methods in the next election.

Watson had no friends on the Congressional Committee that
heard the case, and its report was a whitewash. It mildly de-
plored "the excesses of overzealous partisans," but concluded
that since it was "utterly unable to determine how many re-
peaters and illegal voters there were ... or how many of
these votes should be deducted from the majority of the con-
testee," and since the "Democratic Committee, who had charge
of the raising and disbursing of the [campaign] money, were the
very first citizens of Augusta, and were representing every busi-
ness and profession, and were all men of the highest character,
none higher" — Watson was not entitled to the seat. 25

The Democratic majority clamped down the lid tightly upon
discussion and protest of the report, so tightly that neither mem-
bers of his party, nor — for the first time in the history of Con-
gress — the contestant himself, was allowed to speak in his be-
half. In vain, Pence, a Populist Congressman from Colorado,
pleaded that "from the beginning of the history of this House,
this is the first time that an opportunity for a contestant to be
heard has been cut off ; and your rule here will not only cut him
off, but will cut off anybody else from discussing the facts in the
case." 26 The report was promptly accepted.

The old parties had not dared to allow him to gain the public
ear by presenting his own case, said Watson. "They knew per-
fectly well that the sworn uncontradicted evidence in that record
would have stirred honest men everywhere to intense disgust
and indignation and revolt." Yet "here was an election which
nine out of every ten democrats in Georgia believe to have been
fraudulent. The intention to cheat was boldly proclaimed in ad-
vance, and is today a matter of jesting boastfulness after it has
been perpetrated." 2T

Already in the midst of another contest by this time, he could
see no sign which indicated that the men of "highest character,
none higher" intended to mend their ways.

25 House Reports, 53 Cong., 2 Sess., 1893-1894, Vol. Ill, Report No. 1x47.

26 Cong. Record, 53 Cong., 2 Sess., June 30, 1894, pp. 8285-8292.

27 The Daily Press, July 5, 1894.

222

«xX>«><c>0«><X><»«^^

15

Annee Terrible

The twelve months that began in the middle of the year
1894 have been well named "the annee terrible of Ameri-
can history between Reconstruction and the World War." * As
the national depression reached its nadir, a new record was at-
tained in unemployment, in the intensity of organized labor's
struggle for existence, in the brutality of capitalist repression of
labor, and in the distress of the agricultural masses. When the
paralysis the farming sections had suffered so long finally gripped
the vitals of the industrial East, it called forth an expression of
new radicalism which, joined to the older agrarian radicalism,
formed a flood of discontent, protest, exposure, and some astute
analysis of a corrupt capitalist economy.

If his library 2 is any indication, Watson was an enthusiastic
and constant reader, particularly of history, but also of current
radical reform literature. He was plainly influenced by the
novels of Bellamy, and by Henry Demarest Lloyd's superb
exposure of the methods of the great capitalist barons of oil,
meat, coal, sugar, and tobacco, Wealth Against Commonwealth,
which appeared in 1894. In his own publications he reflected
the new spirit, and revitalized his agrarian radicalism at the
same time.

In June he began a long series of articles on "The Railroad
Question." 8 In them he renewed his demand for outright and
immediate government ownership and operation. Along with
that demand went the intimation that the same remedy might

1 Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, p. 649.

2 In the possession of Judge Uly O. Thompson, Miami, Florida.

3 P. P. P., June 15 to August 3, 1894.

223

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

well be applied elsewhere. It seemed to Watson that "Where a
business is so clearly of a public nature that the individual can
only get fair treatment by having the government to act for all,
then individualism ceases to be wise and nationalism [collective
action] becomes necessary." It was "perfectly clear that the is-
sue is national, the danger national, the disease national, and
that the remedy must be national." 4

With gusto he struck out at the hypocrisy of reactionaries.
Congressmen Crisp and Moses — erstwhile Alliance candidates
— opposed an income tax on corporations because they were
"not in favor of taxing orphans." 6 Watson was moved by the
spectacle of those statesmen "agitating the bowels of their com-
passion in behalf of the orphans who own the corporations, the
motherless and fatherless Hetty Green, Russell Sage, Roswell
Flower, W. C. Whitney, Collis P. Huntington, Henry Villard,
Andrew Carnegie . . ." 6

When the anarchist Emma Goldman was jailed for daring
(according to Watson) "to denounce the damnable system which
makes a God-imaged man of less value to society than a St.
Bernard dog," he contrasted her offense with the "immeasurable
disaster which stalks behind the anarchy of Grover Cleveland,
John Carlisle and John Sherman." A cartoon illustrated the
article headed "The Anarchist Who Does the Most Damage,"
which depicted the President surrounded by Gould, Rockefeller,
Vanderbilt, and Carnegie hurling bombs at the crumbling edifice
of "Jeffersonian Democracy." The arrest of the leaders of
Coxey's Army of protest for treading on the Capitol grass re-
minded him that "Carnegie stole two hundred thousand dollars
from the government, and Cleveland did not prosecute him as
the law requires."

He wished to know why a certain lieutenant was going about
from one city in Georgia to another "lecturing the soldiers on
the 'Street Riot Drill?' Is Georgia threatened with any riots?"
He found evidence of a menacing spirit among the ruling class
abroad as well as at home, and printed it prominently in a col-
umn headed "How the Plutocrats Talk" : " 'The best meal to
give a regular tramp is a leaden one' — New York Herald;

A Ibid., July 13, 1894.

5 Constitution, Dec. 4, 1893.

6 P. P. P., Dec. 8, 1893.

224

Annee Terrible

'Hand grenades should be thrown among those who are striving
to obtain higher wages, as by such treatment they would be
taught a valuable lesson, and other strikers would take warning
by their fate.' — Chicago Times; 'He [the tramp] has no more
right than the sow that wallows in the gutter.' — Scribner's
Monthly: 3 7

On July 4, President Cleveland, without consulting Governor
Altgeld, sent 2,000 federal troops into Chicago to enforce an
injunction obtained against the American Railway Union then
on a strike led by Eugene Debs against the Pullman Parlor Car
Company. As Secretary Olney explained, it was clear that the
blow should be struck at Chicago "because that was the center
and headquarters of the strike and that, if smashed there, it
would collapse everywhere else." 8 The strike did collapse after
Debs was jailed, and workers were shot down and killed by
United States troops.

To Watson this new labor tragedy was but an added evidence
that the administration u has shown by its every word and deed
that Cleveland considers but one side of the question (after the
election) and that side is capital. If we press closer every day to
anarchy and bloodshed, this administration is responsible, for it
has repeatedly shown its contempt for law when law stood in
Cleveland's way." "If Grover Cleveland possesses lawfully the
power he has exercised, then the only difference between our
president and a European emperor, king, or czar, consists merely
in the name." Across the front page of one of his papers was
spread a large drawing of federal troops shooting down Debs'
strikers, men, women, and children. It was headed, "Govern-
ment ownership would have prevented this."

With similar denunciations he reviewed step by step, as they
occurred, the long series of Cleveland's offenses against popular
opinion and his favors to capitalism. The silver-purchase repeal,
the first bond issue, the seigniorage veto, the Hawaiian policy,
the rabble-rousing chauvinism of the Venezuelan dispute, and
the tariff bill were mercilessly caricatured by Watson's cartoon-
ist, and satirized by the editor. They were all "repeated proofs
that Cleveland had buncoed the country in a huge confidence
game." "Is it never to end?" he asked. "Is it to go forward from

7 P. P. P., Feb. 23-May 25, 1894.

8 Allan Nevins, Cleveland, footnote p. 616.

225

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

bad to worse until the red stain of civil war again splashes our
national records?" 9

On July 4 appeared the first number of Watson's new paper,
the Daily Press, founded to assist the work of the campaign of
that year and overcome the handicap imposed by the weekly
paper. Stocked at $25,000, the daily was edited by Watson who
owned a tenth of the stock and served as president of the com-
pany at a salary of $25.00 a week. The daily proved a financial
liability. The People's Party Paper continued to appear as usual,
though Watson was now the sole owner. "It has a large circula-
tion," he wrote in his private Journal, "& is a financial success —
tho it cost me immense labor & much money to make it so." 10
He prayed for "an invention which will enable me to edit a daily
paper, manage a State campaign, answer everybody's letter and
make a speech in everybody's county — all at the same time. . . .
No one man can run the schedule."

Watson was willing to boast continuous gains for his party:
"in the county elections since 1892 we have increased our vote in
every instance" winning several new counties and losing none of
the old. At the same time he advised against over-confidence.
"It is my deliberate opinion," he said, "that unless we make very
considerable gains in this campaign it will require almost super-
human efforts to rally the party again." Concerning the rebellion
among the Democrats, he warned, "There's a world of differ-
ence between cursing Cleveland and voting the Populist ticket.
. . . We need candidates who will draw out the full Populist
vote, and who at the same time, will draw the disappointed
Democrats." He was "willing to mix some common sense with
. . . zeal," to attract new recruits. The fact that the Populists
possessed "little or no following among business and professional
men" had been "a source of great weakness." Other things being
equal, his preference was for the veteran Populist, but he wanted
"nominees who will reach elements which heretofore we have
been utterly unable to reach," and was prepared to sacrifice the
old-time dirt-farmer candidate to that end. At the same time
these new "respectable" candidates must "have burned their
bridges behind them and have fallen into our line of march." u

9 Daily Press, July 7 and 10, 1894; P. P. P., July 13, 1894.

10 MS. Journal 2.

11 P. P. P., May 4, 1894.

226

Annee Terrible

For applying such a policy he was denounced by old Populists
for committing dictatorial acts "that the Czar of Russia would
be ashamed and tremble to do." He had "relegated the old-
timers to the rear and allied himself with new recruits for
spoils." M It was true that Watson's power over his party was
great, and might have appeared "dictatorial" at times. Such a
tendency was far from inconsistent with his temperament. He
took some pains, however, to prepare his followers for shifts in
policy through his papers and speeches so that his "dictatorship"
did not seem too highhanded.

One notable example of the new policy of nominating "re-
spectable" candidates was Judge James K. Hines, Watson's
choice as a gubernatorial nominee. Hines was an unusual com-
bination of eminent "respectability" and earnest radicalism. One
of the first professional men to endorse the Ocala platform, he
had, as early as 1890, "staggered" the editor of the Augusta
Chronicle by his public pronouncement in favor of "government
ownership of railroads, steamship lines, express companies, tele-
graph lines, and all other business of a quasi-public nature. Let
them be operated by the government as cheaply as possible for
the public convenience and general welfare." 13 Yet this man was
a highly successful lawyer, trained at Harvard, once Solicitor
General, Alliance candidate for the Senate in 1890, now a Su-
perior Court judge, and president of the Board of Trustees of
Emory College — a Methodist institution of superlative "respect-
ability."

In nominating Judge Hines at the Convention in Atlanta, the
Populist "dictator" assumed a position of self-denial. He knew
that many delegates were pledged to nominate him for gov-
ernor. "But I want to reason with you," he said. "I must not be
nominated for the head of your state ticket. We must recognize
facts, not fancies. That memorable storm of prejudice and hate
that swept over this state two years ago . . . has left me under
a cloud of misrepresentation that will not be blown away for
several years to come." 14 Hines received the nomination. Wat-
son was again nominated for his old seat by a later convention

12 L. P. Barner, editor of the Dalton Economist, quoted in Augusta Chronicle,
Aug. 20, 1894; Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 10, 1894.
18 Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 19, 1890.
14 P. P. P., May 25, 1894.

227

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

in the Tenth District. His nomination was proposed by a work-
ing man from Augusta, and seconded by a farmer from Mc-
Duffie. The latter declared: "I love the Bible. I love Jesus
Christ. I love the People's Party, and I love Tommie Watson. I
rise to second the nomination."

The keynote of the Populist campaign was sounded in one of
Watson's aphorisms at the Convention in May. u We meet under
strange conditions," he said. u One year ago this country was
being fed on the ambrosia of Democratic expectations. (Laugh-
ter.) Today it is gnawing the cobs of Democratic reality. (Great
applause and cries of 'The corn is gone.')"

Throughout the campaign Watson's most telling blows were
directed at Democratic schism and disunity, and the renunciation
of platform pledges. When he was asked to return to the Demo-
cratic party, he would first know which competing faction he was
to return to. "Shall I become an Evan Howell Democrat, or a
Hoke Smith Democrat; a John B. Gordon Democrat, who voted
in the Senate to strike down silver, or a Pat Walsh Democrat,
who spoke out bravely in its behalf on the floor of the Senate
... or a Black Democrat, who voted both ways, or a Turner
Democrat, who voted four ways." The Populists, on the other
hand, all stood squarely on one platform. 15

Criticizing Democratic principles, he told an old-party audi-
ence in Macon, was "like shooting a didapper, you can never
draw your aim." "Now in the Democratic meeting house, if the
preacher takes a free silver text the house is for free silver; if
he takes a gold bug text they are for the single gold standard;
if he lines out an income tax hymn they all sing it; if he lines out
a high tariff hymn they all sing that; if he prays for monopoly
they all say amen; if he prays against monopoly, they all cry
amen; if he pronounces the benediction in favor of national
banks they all bow their heads and go away happy; if the bene-
diction is against national banks they clap their hands and cry
'Hozzannah !' Just put a Democratic tag on it and it don't make
any difference what kind of a dog it is. (Great applause.)" 16

"You used to think," he said, proselytizing an audience of
Atlanta Democrats, "that a northern Democrat was just like
you, but that ain't so. (Laughter.) You used to think that an

15 Augusta Chronicle, July 22, 1894.

16 P. P. P., July 13, 1894; Constitution, July 5, 1894.

228

Annie Terrible

Eastern Democrat was a Siamese twin linked to you, but you
know now it ain't so. You know now if you never did before that
an Eastern Democrat is as much like an Eastern Republican as
a buzzard is like a turkey buzzard. (Loud and prolonged ap-
plause.) You were a little slow about finding it out but you got
there at last. (Laughter.) You know that the North and East
are against you because theirs is a commercial section and yours
is agricultural. Your prosperity is linked to ours ; your store has
its foundation on my farm." 17

The Democratic state convention was reported to be a "love
feast," and it was said to be "difficult to understand how any man
who witnessed the harmony and enthusiasm can contemplate the
remote possibility that Democratic supremacy can be jeopardized
in Georgia." The state platform contained a demand for free
silver, which was said to "satisfy the gold standard Democrats" ;
at the same time it endorsed Cleveland's administration. The
People's Party Paper caricatured the "love feast" convention
with a carton of Howell, the silver editor, and Hoke Smith of
Cleveland's Cabinet, engaged in a hair-pulling fist-fight. Watson
sat at one side at his editorial desk, saying "Gentlemen, fight
as much as you like but please don't spill my ink." The Tenth
District Convention, which renominated Black, on the other
hand, passed an uncompromising demand for free coinage of
silver. "Coming from the Democracy of the Tenth," observed
the Constitution, "this declaration has the deepest significance.
That district is the stronghold of the Populists in Georgia."
They were "crying to their brothers of the State for help. Will
their cry be ignored?" 18

The old party managers, in order to meet the devastating
Populist attack upon their many vulnerable spots, were forced
to adopt an approach to the country voters that was curiously
oblique. Their tactics are revealingly illustrated by the experi-
ence of a candidate for the state Senate, Nat E. Harris, who
was also an autobiographer of guileless candor. He was told by
campaign managers that in all his speeches he "must be careful
never to say a word in favor of Grover Cleveland or his ad-
ministration." This advice he "carefully bore in mind." He was

17 T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. 141.

18 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 2, 1894; Constitution, Aug. 3, 1894; P. P. P., Aug. 3,
1894.

229

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

interrupted in one of his speeches by the question, "What do
you think of Grover Cleveland?" "I turned aside the inquiry,"
he said, u by telling an anecdote, which had in it the suggestion
that the sixteen-to-one in the silver dollar meant sixteen negroes
to one white man, and that this was the contest that the Populists
were waging. Then I started out again on the general questions
of the day." Once more he was asked the same question. "I told
another anecdote and made the people laugh, with some foolish
statement, and then started out on the main questions." 19

Into the fog of Democratic "hush" tactics, and "anecdotes,"
John Temple Graves, a prominent and respected Democrat,
without warning cast a bomb of candid appraisal and fact. Con-
temptuously brushing aside "this boastful prophecy of 70,000
democratic majority," as the "mere bravado of politicians who
realize the possibility of no majority at all," he frankly admitted
that the party was shot through with discord, and had "the most
formidable opposition since the war." It would not dare steal
another election.

Georgia is ripe today with the spirit of revolt! These are bold words,
but they are the truest you have heard since the campaign opened, and
I challenge you to refute them in fact, however much your extreme partisan
loyalty may lead you to deny in boastful and swelling platitudes. . . .

Will you explain it? If not I will. I will tell you where the trouble
lies. It is in the protest of the thinking masses against methods that are
objectionable and a drift in our politics that is dangerous and deadly. . . .

Better monarchy than republican infamy like this. Better depotism or
populism than corruption masked in the beautiful lineaments of law.
Better a king than a prostitute judge! . . .

This is at last a thinking and a reading people. The last four years
— the last two campaigns — have been full of education and the people are
thinking more freely than they have ever done before. You cannot any
longer shake the red flag of negro supremacy in the faces of the masses and
make them think that life and death and salvation depend upon voting the
democratic ticket. They are thinking for themselves now . . . 20

In line with his policy of more attractive candidates, Watson
adopted a conciliatory tone in his speeches. Democratic papers
several times remarked upon the fact that his speeches were
"free from personalities and bitterness," seeming "moderate and
conservative in tone" to those who went "expecting to hear a

19 N. E. Harris, Autobiography, pp. 305-307.

20 John T. Graves, to the Constitution, quoted in P. P. P., Aug. 31, 1894.

230

Annee Terrible

fiery and vindictive speech in bitter denunciation of the Demo-
cratic party." 21

The appeal had little effect, for there seemed to be no abate-
ment of the proscriptive spirit toward Populism, and there was
a wholesale revival of the corruption and terrorism of the previ-
ous campaign. A. S. Clay, permanent chairman of the Demo-
cratic state convention, advised that the Populist leaders "are
anarchists and they must be made odious." As for Watson's
daily, "the dirty sheet should be suppressed." A Democratic
pamphlet was circulated appealing to Negroes to vote for Atkin-
son, Democratic candidate for Governor, because "He pardoned
Adolphus Duncan, a Negro, who had been twice convicted of
rape on a white woman and had been sentenced to hang." When
eighteen sharecroppers disobeyed the orders of a Democratic
landlord not to attend a Watson speech, his foreman received
orders not to issue them their week's rations: they could "go to
the People's Party speaking and get their rations." 22

From a Populist campaign speaker, Watson received a letter
that reveals conditions under which the Populists struggled. He
planned to speak in a hostile county. "I expect the venture will
be fraught with great danger," he wrote. "The bitterest hate
[is] aroused, & the chances [are] at least equal for personal
violence. ... I am at a loss to know what to do that day about
pistols. If I have one I will almost surely be arrested & it found
on me, & if I don't have it I would be in a terrible fix should
they assault me." M

The refusal of the Democratic Executive Committee to per-
mit a division of the managers of the polls between Democrats
and Populists was held up by the latter as proof that foul work
was afoot. From Wilkes County Populists came the hysterical
report that "here human life is as valueless as corn cobs. We are
in a reign of terror. Free speech is denied us." It was a con-
servative Democratic estimate that three men were killed and
many wounded at the polls of Augusta during the state election.
"There were so many shooting, constables and others, that most
anybody's bullet may have taken effect." *

21 E.g., the Constitution, April 20, 1894; Augusta Chronicle, July 22, 1894.

22 A. A. Elders, to T. E. W., Aug. 8, 1894, quoted in P. P. P., Aug. 17, 1894.

23 J. M. Barnes to T. E. W., Oct. 30, 1894, Watson MSS.

24 Augusta Chronicle, Nov. 7, 1894.

231

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Even by Democratic count and poll management the new
party polled 44.5 per cent of the vote in the state election, more
than doubling its vote in the previous election, and reducing
the Democratic majority from about 80,000 to about 20,000.
The Chronicle admitted that "Several of the strongest Demo-
cratic counties in the State have been carried by the Populists
and with but few exceptions every county in the state shows
Populists gains." The returns from some forty counties were
suspiciously withheld for several weeks. There is a substantial
ground for Watson's claim that a fair election would have re-
sulted in a clear Populist victory. 25

The old party leaders were thoroughly alarmed at the results
of the state election, and said so frankly. Watson proclaimed
that "Victory at last is in sight." He felt confident of winning
his contest against Black in November, and with reason, for his
party had polled a majority in that district in October.

The Democratic machine of Augusta, more desperate than
in 1892, determined to win the congressional election in Novem-
ber, 1894, by any means possible. A description of the methods
used — the drunken Negro repeaters, the ballot-box stuffing and
burning, intimidation, bloodshed, and bribery — is unnecessary,
for the scene was merely a repetition of that of 1892 on a more
extensive scale: much more was required to defeat Watson in
1894. 26 A court ruling was obtained that held that registration
was unnecessary in congressional elections, and the Populist ap-
peal for an injunction restraining the allowing of unregistered
voting was refused. 27

Watson carried the counties of McDuffie, Columbia, Lincoln,
Warren, Taliaferro, Jefferson, Glascock, Washington, and Wil-
kinson. Black carried only Richmond and Hancock and was de-
clared elected. The nine Watson counties contained a population
close to 100,000 and polled some 15,000; the two Black coun-
ties, with only 62,000 population, polled over 18,000 votes for
Black alone. Since Black's majority in Hancock was only 1,000,
the secret of his huge majority lay in the Richmond vote. With
only 11,240 possible polls in Richmond, according to the Comp-

25 MS. Journal 2, p. 547; Constitution, Oct. 5, 1894; Chronicle, Oct. 4, 1894.
28 The Contested Election Case of Watson vs. Black (1896), passim; information
on both 1894 and 1895 elections.
27 Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 7 and Nov. 4, 1894.

232

Annee Terrible

troller General's report, and only 4,100 voting in October,
15,980 votes were cast by that county in November. Of these
Watson was allowed only 2,200. Thus out of a possible poll of
11,240, Black received a majority of 13,780! 28

The enormity of this robbery shocked even Democrats of
other parts of the state into protest. The machine and officialdom
remained unrelenting, however. In reply to protest, Boykin
Wright, Major Black's campaign manager, remarked, "Why
they [the Populists] would cry fraud if an angel from heaven
should come down and run on the Democratic ticket. That's
their stock in trade." Another commentator, anonymous but
"quite prominent in official life," was quoted as saying, "a demo-
cratic newspaper has no right to talk about democratic dishon-
esty when democrats are elected." 29 The Chronicle, taking the
same attitude, thought it "exceedingly unfortunate that so good
a cause should have reproach cast upon it at the hands of its
friends." "We have no defense to make." 80

A group of twenty-two Augusta Democrats did sign and pub-
lish a denunciation of the dishonest methods. It was "no secret,
but a reproach to the very manhood of Augusta" that "the offi-
cers of our law stood by and saw worthless negroes vote dozens
of times at ten cents each and run outside the crowd in our court-
house yard and sit right down in their very faces and shoot
'craps' . . . for the money that was so nefariously gained."
Major Black, however, in a public meeting a few days after this
statement appeared said, "I would not parade the frauds that
were perpetrated in the past, if frauds they were ; I would cover
them with a cloak of silence." 31

As news of the Augusta frauds spread among the Populists
of the Tenth District, and resentment swelled with rumor,
hatred between the parties grew more and more threatening.
When the house of a Democratic party official burned to the
ground near a Richmond County factory, the owner immedi-
ately attributed the burning to the Populists. Such incidents
multiplied.

Pointing out the menacing situation that existed between their

28 Constitution, Nov. 7, 1894; P. P. P., March 9, 1895; MS. Journal 2, p. 548;
The Contested Election Case of Watson vs. Black (1896), p. 5.

29 Constitution, Nov. 8, 10, 1894.

80 Quoted in The Contested Election Case of Watson vs. Black (1896), p. 67 5.

81 Ibid., pp. 675-676; the protest was dated Aug. 26, 1895.

233

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

followers, Watson, on November 9, proposed to Black through
the press that "a commission be appointed by the two opposing
candidates to purge the ballot boxes, and to count the legal votes
to determine who had been elected." In his reply Black admitted
that the election was "shrouded in doubt." He declared himself
"in hearty accord with Mr. Watson in his motive for making
the proposition for the purpose of putting an end to the terrible
state of affairs in the Tenth District." Yet he declined to accept
his opponent's proposal to purge the ballot box. He also de-
plored the prospect of a contest under law, because "that course
is tedious." In the same letter he made the counter proposal that,
provided Watson agreed "within the time allowed by law for
notice of contest," he, Black, should take the commission as a
member of the Fifty-fourth Congress, but resign it, effective
March 4, and "refer the matter back to the people to determine
by a new election who shall represent them in the Fifty-fourth
Congress." 82

The apparent magnanimity of this offer is considerably dimin-
ished by a little reflection upon its conditions. In order to accept
its terms, Watson would have to give up his legal right to sub-
mit his case to the House of Representatives, since the limit for
filing notice of such contests would expire before the proposed
election took place. It is true that his experience in contesting
the election of 1892 had been, to say the least, discouraging. But
now the tables were turned. Ruling the new House was a Re-
publican majority who would be happy to deprive its rival party
of one more seat. Then, too, even making allowance for consid-
erable talent in that direction on the part of Congressional com-
mittees, it would seem impossible to whitewash the glaring,
palpable dishonesty of this election — as had been done in the
previous one. In short, it seems probable that he would have
won his contest.

That Watson contemplated making the contest seems evident
from the fact that he had already employed counsel to conduct
it. Yet he accepted Black's proposal of a new election almost
immediately. The only motive he gives for making this ques-
tionable decision was an abhorrence of being indebted to the Re-
publican majority for his seat. Such an aversion was certainly in

32 Augusta Chronicle, Nov. 20, 1894; also P. P. P., Feb, 1, 1895.

234

Annee Terrible

line with his oft-expressed abhorrence of fusion with either old
party, and especially of the taint of Republican connivance. Yet
there were probably other motives he did not reveal. "Most of
my friends think I have made a huge mistake," he wrote in his
private Journal shortly after making the decision. "I cannot be-
lieve it. The event will, I am sure, prove that I have 'done best'
for the party and for myself." 33

In accepting Black's counter proposal Watson had attached
an additional condition — that the new election be held within
thirty days after March 4, 1895, the date his opponent's resig-
nation became effective. He added this condition under the con-
viction that the state law required its governor to call a new elec-
tion within that time, anyway. Major Black neither explicitly
accepted this attached condition nor rejected it. That Watson
was sincere in the assumption that it was accepted seems evident
from his repeated reference to the stipulated "within thirty
days" in his editorials, 34 and from the entry in his private Jour-
nal, dated January 9, 1895, that, "by the terms of our agreement
the special election is to be held within thirty days." 35 A drag-
ging postponement of the special election was decidedly to the
advantage of Democrats, who relied upon inertia, old habits,
and the eventualities of a shifting political and economic scene
to dull the disgust of revolting Democrats and dampen the en-
thusiasm of Populists. On the other hand, the new party had
everything to lose and nothing to gain from a postponement
that could only fritter away its reserve of zeal and resentment
and dissipate the ardor of new recruits.

Major Black resigned according to agreement on March 4,
1895, but as the month progressed it became plain that his party
was stalling on the special election, and had no intention of ful-
filling the thirty-day agreement. Watson, by open letter, re-
minded his opponent of their agreement, of the fact that their
District was without a representative, of the distraught temper
of their respective partisans, and asked him to join in a letter to
the governor urging him to order an early election. Black re-
plied briefly that, "We differ so widely as to facts" that "dis-

83 Jan. 9, 1895, MS. Journal 2, p. 550.

84 The Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 25, 1895, denied the acceptance of the condition,
but not Black.

35 MS. Journal 2, p. 550.

235

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

cussion would be useless and a more detailed and extended reply
to yours is unnecessary."

In his answer Watson abandoned a tone of remonstrance,
habitual with him in addressing opponents, and wrote a stinging
rebuke. He referred to "the disturbance in the Tenth District,
caused by the phenomenal capacity of your county to cast 16,000
votes with 12,000 voters," and to dishonesty "of such a colossal
type that it almost commanded respect." He continued:

You dreaded the consequences of a fair count of the legal votes. You
dreaded the other alternative of an investigation by Congress.

Therefore, to escape both perils, you proposed to me "to resign and
submit the matter back to the people.". . .

You were getting me to part with valuable goods. You wanted me
to surrender by written renunciation, my legal right to put you on trial
before Congress — a Republican Congress at that. . . . Had you ob-
jected to the condition I put upon my acceptance, I could have withdrawn
my acceptance; I would have gone on with the contest, for which I had
already engaged counsel. . . .

I lost my right to contest the election, and to show that I was entitled
to the seat. It is too late for you to restore me to the position and to the
advantage I held last November and December; but it is not too late for
you to loyally stand by your part of the contract — according to its letter, its
reason, and its spirit. 86

Black persisted in his course, however, contending that the
Populists had misconstrued the terms of their agreement, that
more time should be given for feeling to subside, and that he
could not "assume" that he would be the Democratic nominee. 87

In accepting his renomination as candidate in the special elec-
tion, Watson hailed the agreement with Black as marking "a
distinct epoch in the politics of the South," for "The time has
been when any crime committed in the name of the Democratic
party was an act of patriotism in the eyes of the majority of the
people." But Major Black now "confesses, by his resignation,
that a grievous wrong has been done us, and that the time has
come for the honest elements of both parties to put the rascals
under foot." "Without violence and without crime," he boasted,
"you have achieved a moral victory which ennobles you and your
party.

The Populists were allowed ample time to test the fruits of

86 P. P. P., March 29, 1895.

87 Constitution, May 29, 1895.

88 Speech reprinted in Watson's Political and Economic Handbook, pp. 462-463.

236

Annee Terrible

their "moral victory." Instead of the thirty days stipulated by
the agreement, the old party postponed the special election for
seven months after Black's resignation. Taking advantage of an
important political trend in the silver cause (described in the
following chapter), the Democrats turned these seven months
to rich profit, while the insurgent party chafed at the frustra-
tion of its aims.

"Duped again I" was the dismayed cry of the Populists. Their
leader pleaded earnestly for patience and peace. "Don't let the
politicians of Augusta throw the Tenth District into a turmoil
again." Violence would only hurt their cause. "We must have
peace, we must have law and order, we must have an end to
ballot-box corruption, and to the reign of political anarch-
ists. . . ." In the spring a movement for boycotting all busi-
ness with Augusta arose among the angry farmers. The People 1 } s
Party Paper, while expressing gratification at "the loyalty which
actuates Mr. Watson's friends in this matter," argued that "re-
taliation as a means of righting a wrong is a bad policy and
should only be inaugurated as a last resort."

As the October day of election finally approached, however,
and fraudulent use of the new registration law became apparent,
Watson turned from the preaching of patience and peace to
threaten refusals and boycott. "The unblushing frauds practiced
in that city [Augusta]," he wrote, "during the days of registra-
tion just closed, evidences that the thieves have not repented.
The farmers are tired of chucking grass at the thieves in the
apple tree." 39

The new registration law, passed in December, 1894, shortly
after the disgraceful election of that year, set up a powerful
registration committee of three in each county. It was given the
power, from which there was no appeal, to draw up lists of quali-
fied voters. In Watson's district each committee consisted of two
Democrats and one Populist. In case of dispute, read the law,
the decision of two was final. 40 Bearing some similarity to laws
later adopted in all Southern states to disfranchise the Negro, it
could be, and was, employed here to forestall more Populist
voters — but at the same time to make it possible to use the

39 P. P. P., Sept. 20, 1895.

40 The Registration Law is printed as a supplement to the Contestant's Brief, The
Contested Election Case of Watson vs. Black (1896).

237

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Negro vote where controlled by Democrats. Thus the registra-
tion lists of Richmond revealed the amazing fact that of the
3,431 Negroes registered (almost as many as white) 1,333, or
more than a third, were listed as "just attained the age of 21,"
i.e., since the last year's election. This, as the Populists remarked,
was "one of the most remarkable facts in the statistics of popula-
tion." Of the 3,866 whites registered, only 229, or one-fifteenth,
were listed as 21. 41

The Augusta Chronicle expressed surprise that the Populists
were "shocked because Richmond County Democrats are paying
the taxes of negroes and registering them so they may vote for
Major Black," and added cynically that "both parties will em-
ploy the usual methods of securing negro votes." **

The "usual methods" were employed in the special election
on October 2, but the new method — the registration law — was
a vast improvement over the "usual" ones: its effects were less
glaring, more "legal," harder to detect and expose. For the first
time there were no deaths reported, and only a minimum of
violence. The voting was comparatively peaceful. Thus the total
vote of Richmond was reduced from 15,980 in 1894 to 6,435 —
well within the possible poll — yet giving Black a safe majority
of some 5,000, a majority large enough to overcome a Populist
majority in all the other counties. For although Watson, as pre-
viously, carried nine counties with easy majorities, and Black
only two, the Democratic majority piled up in the five wards of
Augusta alone was sufficient to defeat him. The part played by
the Negro vote, the regulation of which was referred to above,
may be seen by the returns from the fourth ward, in which Black
received 989 to Watson's 9 Negro votes. Watson observed that
"Richmond County is so manipulated that no matter whether
Populists carried Hancock or not, the city of Augusta arrogates
to herself the right to rule the District." 48

To his followers, crushed by their third defeat, and convinced
they had been cheated of their victory the third time, Watson
wrote a message :

41 Ibid,, p. 86; also Contestant's Brief, p. 11.

^Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 31, 1895.

43 P. P. P., Oct. 11, 1895; Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 3, 1895; Augusta Herald, Oct.
3, 1895; Atlanta Journal, Oct. 3, 1895; Constitution, Sept. 13, 1895; The Contested
Election Case of Watson vs. Black, passim.

238

Annee Terrible

Discouraged ?
Bosh! Bosh!! Bosh!!!

Let the other fellow get discouraged. His troubles are just beginning
to commence. . . .

Comrades! Let the fight of 1896 begin now! 44

It would be more to the point to know what was really in
the writer's mind at this time. He did not, as was his practice,
commit his inner reflections upon this election to his private
Journal. Yet, unless the very fierceness of his determination had
completely closed his mind to facts, he must have realized, after
his last three experiences — whatever he said to the contrary —
that his was a forlorn cause, that his sacrifice of a successful
career in the old party had been in vain — as had most of the
prolific energy and effort he had poured into the new movement.
He must have realized that his enemies of the old party would
stop at nothing whatever to crush him, and that they had not
left enough substance in the democratic myth to stir hope in
another effort among his followers. He must have entertained
these reflections as he entered the fateful year of 1896.

44 P. P. P., Oct. xi, 1895.

239

16

The Silver Panacea

Henry Demarest Lloyd, like other advanced intellectual
leaders of his day, hoped for great things from the Popu-
list movement. He identified himself with it, fought for it pas-
sionately and courageously, and suffered at its collapse a despair
that was more than the fret of disappointment. Aside from
partisanship, however, he viewed his party as analytically and
intelligently as he viewed the chaotic capitalism of his time.
After a preliminary autopsy upon the defunct Populism, he
wrote :

The free silver movement is a fake. Free silver is the cowbird of the
reform movement. It waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices
and labors of others and then it laid its eggs in it, pushing out the others
which lie smashed on the ground. 1

Looking to Populism for genuine, fundamental reform along
the lines of extensive government ownership and control, Lloyd
deprecated the tendency of right-wing Populists to rely on "spin-
ning-wheel and ox-team remedies" in a dynamo age. He hoped
for the nomination of Eugene V. Debs in 1896. He knew that
the rank-and-file majority of genuine Populists believed free
silver was "only the most trifling installment of reform," or "no
reform at all." It was in them, not in the leaders; he placed his
faith. If there must be a split between free-silver right and anti-
monopolist left, he advised in 1895, "let it be a split that will
be heard far and wide." 2

Frank L. McVey, also a contemporary student of Populism,

1 Caro Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Vol. I, p. 263.

2 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 256 ; H. D. Lloyd, "The Populists at St. Louis," Review of Re-
views, Vol. XIV (Sept., 1896), pp. 293-303.

240

The Silver Panacea

feared the very elements in the party to which Lloyd looked for
salvation, and exaggerated those elements to menacing propor-
tions. The silver plank was merely a "screen" that hid the basic
"socialism" of the radical majority. But, like Lloyd, he felt that
"the presence of the silver faction has obscured the real purpose
of the party." Its only honest course, its only hope, lay in "cast-
ing aside half measures and following the logic of its underlying
tendencies, boldly announcing itself as the socialist party of
America, confessing paternalism as its principle of constitutional
interpretation, the socialization of industry as its economic one
. . ." After all, it was only the leaders of Populism who made up
the silver faction, and they could never hold in check the radical
mass of followers. Writing on the eve of the debacle of 1896, he
thought that the "socialistic" rank and file had gained control. 8

The genuine Populist of the South, the old-time Allianceman
who was educated on the sub-treasury, government ownership,
and fiat money under the tutelage of Tom Watson, was never
seriously befuddled by the free-silver panacea. Neither the St.
Louis platform, the Ocala platform, nor the Omaha platform
of 1892 emphasized silver unduly. Each included the demand,
but only along with several other proposals for more funda-
mental reform — all of which the good Populist swore by with
more or less impartial fervor. Sometimes one, sometimes an-
other reform in their long creed claimed their especial enthusi-
asm, but never silver to the exclusion of the others.

The situation in the West was different. There the third party
leaders were constantly tempted to cash in on the popular clamor
for the silver panacea. It was sometimes easy to purchase cheap
victory and office by sacrificing the great body of fundamental
Populist reforms. Blocking the application of this policy, how-
ever, was the Omaha platform with its wide program of reform
and its many radical demands. Various maneuvers were con-
ducted by the silver schemers to discredit and abandon the old
platform. It was called wild, hastily adopted, and visionary, and
a convention was called to meet at St. Louis early in 1895 to
revise it. The radical ranks held firm, however, and defeated
the coup of the silver propagandists. 4

Encouraged in their subversive aims by the American Bime-

8 Frank L. McVey, The Populist Movement, pp. 176-177, 190.

4 John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, Chap. XI, and pp. 240-243.

241

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

tallic League, the silver-Populists of the West continued their
maneuvers. As Populist candidate for President in 1892, Gen-
eral James B. Weaver had said: "This movement is a protest
against corporate aggression." Yet, in August, 1893, he presided
as chairman over the Chicago convention of the Bimetallic
League, lending his influence to the purely opportunistic policy
of herding together all who would rally to the silver panacea —
regardless of party or principles. 5 A plan was under way in Iowa
to control the next General Assembly in the interest of General
Weaver's candidacy for the United States Senate by a fusion of
Populists and Democrats. In 1895 the General announced:
"While considering fully and unreservedly the great importance
of our other planks, I shall favor going before the people in
1896 with the money question alone, unencumbered with any
other contentions whatsoever." 6

In the summer of the same year, H. E. Taubeneck of Illinois,
national chairman of the People's party, advised the members
in one state to "keep the money question to the front" for it is
"the only living issue before the people." He hoped their plat-
form would make "the 'money question' the great central idea,
unencumbered with details or side issues." 7

Before the People's party was nationally organized, Tom
Watson had drawn his line on the free-silver question. Thence-
forth he hewed to the mark relentlessly, whether the chips flew
to the right or to the left. Like many Populists, he subscribed to
a "quantitative" or "managed" currency theory, partially exem-
plified by the sub-treasury plan. Money was purely the creation
of the government; its amount should be regulated according
to demand, in order to stabilize prices, particularly of agricul-
tural products, and to furnish needed credit. These functions,
because they vitally affected public welfare, should be taken out
of the hands of national banks and given over entirely to the
government. 8 Plainly, free silver was merely tangential to his
money doctrine. "Free Silver is right and we ought to have it,"
he wrote in 1891, "but is a mere drop in the bucket to what we
must have if we are ever to save our people from financial ruin."

5 P. P. P., Aug. 4, 1893.
6 F. L. Hayne9, James Baird Weaver, p. 317.
7 J. D. Hicks, op. cit., p. 344.

8 These ideas permeate all hi9 writings on the money question; e.g., vide
T. E. W., Economic and Political Handbooks, passim.

242

The Silver Panacea

It would mean less than one dollar per capita increase in the
currency, whereas "we need at least forty." 9

He scoffed contemptuously at the Bland silver bill of the
Democrats, which, in his eyes, was a mere sop, a thirty-cents-per-
capita increase. "With this princely addition to the circulation
medium," he said, "they say that we must be satisfied; disband
our Reform Army ; cease to agitate and educate ; cease to ask for
$50 per capita; and go back to our drowsy indifference . . ." 10
Examining the free-silver demand in the Omaha platform of
his own party, he wrote: "I have never claimed that Free Silver
would remedy all our financial ills. It would not do so." How-
ever, he supported the plank on the ground that to some extent
it "would loosen the grip of the Money kings," and take a step
toward a system that was "more just, and liberal, and flexible
than the arbitrary, exacting and monopolistic gold standard of
today." n

Approval of free silver as one plank in an elaborate platform
of his own party was one thing; approval of free silver as a
panacea employed to destroy the integrity of a movement to
which he had dedicated his life was altogether another thing.
Once he was convinced that this end was portended in the
maneuvers of certain Western Populist leaders, Bimetallic
Leaguers, silver-Democrats and Republicans, he struck out
boldly and fiercely in a long pronunciamento against the con-
spirators :

We have known, for some time, that certain wire-pullers in Washington
were scheming to side-track the People's Party by having it surrender
all of its platform excepting the Free Silver Plank. . . .

If newspaper reports are to be credited, considerable progress has been
made with the scheme. . . .

This being the case, we feel that it is time for us to take a position. In
doing so we believe that we have the support of every Populist in Georgia.

Gentlemen, the People's Party of Georgia demands that there shall be
no cowardly surrender of principles!

We favor Free Silver as much as we favor Fiat money — and no more.

We favor Free Silver as much as we favor Income Tax — and no more.

We hate the greed which strikes down silver in the interest of gold —
but we hate just as fiercely the National banks which strike down the right
of all people to obtain money from the government upon equal terms ; and

9 P. P. P., Dec. 31, 1891.

10 Ibid., March 17, 1892.
^Ibid., July 29, 1892.

243

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the High Protective Tariff, under whose shelter Trusts and Combines or-
ganize their forces and exploit the public ; and the Railroad tyranny which
keeps its iron hand laid heavily upon every industry in the Union.

Any political party which ventured to go before the American people
with only one plank in its platform would be hissed off the stage, jeered out
of existence, kicked into oblivion. . . .

In a party whose only test of membership would be the advocacy of free
silver, how could we keep the corporations from coming in and forever
checking our advance toward governmental ownership of railways ?

How could we purge it of these Privileged classes who oppose an income
tax?

Viewed from any standpoint, this single-plank party is fatally objection-
able.

The scheme is a trap, a pitfall, a snare, a menace, a fraud, a crime
against common sense and common honesty.

We are rejoiced to see that Governor Waite, of Colorado, denounces
it.

We cannot believe that Taubeneck, and Peffer, and Simpson favor it.

The People's party has nothing to fear so much as unwise leader-
ship.

Our enemies, seeing us sweeping onward with steady growth of members,
seek to divide us, confuse us, side-track us. . . .

The rank and file are safe. The people, the people, are sound.

The rank and file want to march right on.

The rank and file want no fusion.

The rank and file want no corrupt abandonment of a creed we love,
believe in, hope for — a creed in whose sacred keeping is held the longings
and prayers of an oppressed people. 12

Watson's determination to ride the storm without reefing a
single sail was put to severe test in the hurricanes of the next
two years. Though sailing in the opposite direction, Grover
Cleveland likewise ordered all his canvas aloft and likewise
suffered from the storm. Others did not hesitate to reef, or to
change course.

The most momentous change to which Populism had to ad-
just itself was the remarkable revolution in the Democratic
party. Resulting in the ultimate repudiation of its own adminis-
tration, this party revolution proceeded in three phases: disin-
tegration, revolt and realignment, and finally the coup. Each
phase held its peculiar perils for Populism, and each required
readjustment.

In the summer of 1895 Watson could write:

12 Ibid., Dec. 8, 1892.

244

The Silver Panacea

Never since the "Wonderful One Hoss Shay" went to pieces in one
comprehensive, simultaneous and complete smashup — an epic of utter
annihilation — has there been such an all-round catastrophe as that which
has happened to the democratic party.

It not only managed to do nothing it was pledged to do, but it also
continued to do everything its leaders had fought the Republicans for
doing.

This judgment was corroborated by A. K. McClure, who, after
a tour of the South early in 1896, reported that not a single
Southern state was certain to vote for the Democratic candidate
for President in the approaching election, that a united South
was "quite improbable," and that since "the Populists have rent
the Democracy in twain" it was possible that "all the Southern
states may be lost to the Democracy." 13

Some Southern Democratic papers rivaled the Populists in
the bitterness of their denunciation of Cleveland's administra-
tion. Nothing Watson wrote outdid certain editorials of the
Constitution. "The people have been taken in and done for,"
read one. "They have been made the victims of as corrupt a
conspiracy as ever disgraced the world's political records. They
have been sold out, plastering and furniture, by those whom
they selected to protect their interests." 14 There were those who
protested that such utterance was dangerous and "not regular."
"To the dogs with such false and pretentious democracy!"
shouted the rebellious editor. "It is not worth having or hold-
ing." 15 While this was going on at one side of the Democratic
house, on the other side Hoke Smith, member of Cleveland's
Cabinet and a proprietor of the Atlanta Journal, was touring the
state defending the administration against all comers.

While this confusion of tongues was in progress, and while
what Watson called Cleveland's "regular 'Go to hell' adminis-
tration" pursued its course uninfluenced, Democrats in the South
and West were deserting by the thousands to join the Populist
ranks. The gain in the Populist vote between 1892 and 1894
had been over one hundred per cent in Georgia and forty-two
per cent in the nation. Faced with the glaring probability of a
complete rout in the coming election, Democratic politicians in
the South and West resorted to strategy.

18 Quoted in Joseph C. Manning, Fadeout of Populism, pp. 38-39.

14 Constitution, Aug. 28, 1895.

15 Ibid., July 5, 1895.

245

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

It is a safe estimate to say that no policy among Cleveland's
several unpopular policies made for him more enemies in the
Western and Southern branches of his party than his determined
stand against silver. His repeated bond sales served to keep re-
sentment fanned to flame. Could politicians in those sections
capitalize that resentment, champion silver, win their party to
its cause, and outdo the Populists in denouncing Cleveland — in-
stead of dodging and straddling to defend his unpopular ad-
ministration — they might save themselves. They might win
back the Populistic majority of the Democrats, who were either
already with the third party or ready to join it, and save the
Solid South, along with many profitable offices that had slipped
from their grasp. Some of the more optimistic hoped thus to
absorb the third party and thereby end the Populist "menace"
forever. 16

This was an ambitious program, but it was adopted by men
moved by desperation. There occurred a miraculous mass con-
version among Democratic politicians. By the summer of 1895
the Constitution could contend that a definition of true Democ-
racy which denounced all who condemned Cleveland's "Repub-
lican financial doctrine" as "Populistic" would read out of the
party the governor of the state, the chairman of the Democratic
state executive committee, both United States senators, a former
Democratic speaker of the national House of Representatives,
the president of the Democratic state Senate, and the speaker of
the Democratic state House of Representatives. "These are the
men," boasted the editor, "and this the element that the Cuck-
oos, goldbugs, and postmaster organs are denouncing as popu-
lists." 17

Watson found the antics of these twelfth-hour converts amus-
ing and lost no opportunity to embarrass them. There was his
arch-enemy, Patrick Walsh, editor of the Augusta Chronicle,
who was now "sorry to say" he could see no hope for the country
"until silver is restored to coinage"; and his old opponent,
Major Barnes, "with grief in his ample bosom and conciliation
in his oily dew-laps." Charles Crisp, who "serenely turns up as
the chief mourner at the funeral of Free Silver," had, as speaker
of the House, dealt "the two deadliest blows that were ever

16 Alex M. Arnett, Populist Movement in Georgia, pp. 187-188.

17 Constitution, July 9, 1895.

246

The Silver Panacea

given to Bi-metallism." u As well," he remarked, "might Iscariot
preach the funeral sermon of Christ." The free silver issue was
merely a political ball tossed back and forth between the two old
parties. "Republicans out of office favor free-silver — to get in
on. Once in they take up the gold policy where the Democrats
left it; and the free silver issue is tossed back to the Democrats
for them to use awhile. ... A good many of us common every-
day dunces need lots of light to show us why it is that the Demo-
cratic party loves free-silver and hates the Congressmen who
vote for it." 18 "Gold-bugs," "silver-bugs," "straddle-bugs,"
humbugs — they were all of one species so long as they were
Democrats.

Major Black was renominated for the special election of 1895
on a silver platform. The real significance of that platform is
attested by the public appeal of a self-styled "gold-bug" : "Is it
likely that, if elected, he [Watson] will forgive or forget? Fel-
low 'gold-bugs' — gentlemen so called by those of your brethren
who differ from your financial policy — do not let anything that
has been or may be said or done prevent your loyal support of
Major Black now. . . . We must present a solid front to a wily
and insidious foe." 19 The "gold-bugs" were ready to vote for
silver to defeat Watson.

In July the state Bimetallic League staged a great convention
at Griffin to which were invited all "friends of silver" irrespec-
tive of party affiliation. Patrick Walsh, "acknowledged leader
of the bimetallic hosts of the State," presided over the conven-
tion and was elected president of the state League. As the Demo-
crats hoped, many Populists attended, and though none of them
was appointed on committees they were described as "quiet and
deeply interested." All went smoothly until one ardent but in-
nocent Democrat moved, and urged with embarrassing per-
sistence, a resolution that would exclude all Populists from
participating in the convention. It was quickly explained that "it
would be a breach of propriety to recognize any party or discuss
the political issues of any party." The offender was finally si-
lenced by Chairman Walsh. Senator Morgan of Alabama made
the principal address. Bitter were the words voiced there against
President Cleveland. Sweet were the words spoken there to the

18 P. P. P., Aug. 9 and Nov. 22, 1895.
19 Augu8ta Chronicle, Aug. 30, 1895.

247

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Populists. 20 Said Captain Evan Howell, editor of the Constitu-
tion:

I am an honest bimetallism I believe in the coinage of silver, free, at
1 6 to i. I am willing to join hands with any populist in Georgia, if he
will go with me under the democratic banner. I am in favor of granting
Tom Watson the privilege of being a democratic leader under the demo-
cratic flag. I believe Tom Watson is sincere; I want all populists to come
back under the flag. 21

Realizing the necessity for stiffening the resistance of his
ranks to meet these new tactics, Watson clarified his position in
regard to Democratic overtures to fusion. Stated in parabolical
form his prophecy was, briefly: "The Alliance lamb agreed to
lie down in the same pen with the Democratic lion. Result : lamb
soon dissolved in the gastric juice of said lion. Does the wily old
trickster, Lon Livingston, think he can play that game on us?"
As for the Bimetallic convention at Griffin :

The Populists who were lured into the meeting went away with the
dry grins. It was dinned into their ears that the meeting was a non-
partisan affair, a meeting into which no politics would be admitted. This
made the Populists feel good, but when the time came to make up com-
mittees, the Populists looked a little foolish, as not a member of their
party appeared on the committee on program. ... It looks as if they
might have struck some of the Populists by accident in appointing com-
mittees. . . .

But we are glad this convention was held; glad our men went there;
glad we showed a willingness to harmonize on principle ; glad the meeting
failed through the greed and insincerity of professional wire-pullers and not
through the fault of the Populists. 22

Now that the Democratic party was ripe for internal revolu-
tion, the problem and the temptation of fusion were more than
ever before acute and pressing for Populist leaders. Fusion with
one party or the other had, as a matter of fact, been a problem
of the third party from the beginning. After all, every Populist
recruit had to be won from one or the other of the old parties.
In the South the fusion problem presented itself first with re-
gard to the Republican party. After the death of Colonel L. L.
Polk, the Populist party of North Carolina had effected a fusion
with the Republican under the leadership of Marion Butler, an

20 Ibid., July i, 2, 18, and 19, 1895; Constitution, July 19, 1895.

21 Constitution, July 19, 1895.

22 P. P. P., July 26, 1895, quoted by A. M. Arnett, of. cit., pp. 190-191.

248

The Silver Panacea

astute young politician who won a seat in the Senate at the age
of thirty-three. Seeking to extend his Populist-Republican fusion
throughout the South, Butler attempted in private conference to
persuade Watson (as well as other Southern Populist leaders)
to adopt the same policy. Watson flatly refused to countenance
the plan, contending that it would destroy the integrity of his
party. 23 No accusation called forth such angry denial from the
Georgia Populist as the suggestion that he was cooperating with
the Republicans.

In the West the temptation from the founding of the third
party had been fusion with the Democrats, the minority party
there as the Republicans were in the South. From the beginning
there had been a certain amount of coalition between the two
parties, and in some states outright fusion. As the election year
approached it became plain that if prominent Populist leaders
of the West, such as Weaver and Taubeneck, had their way,
fusion would go the whole way and become complete. The
capitulation to the free silver panacea was merely another way
of advocating fusion. 24

On what basis could fusion between Democrats and Populists
take place in the South ? Henry Demarest Lloyd once observed
that "The line between the old Democracy and Populism in
the South is largely a line of bloody graves." As hyperbole goes,
this strikes near the truth. For six years, during the whole life
of Populism, the Democratic party had been recognized as the
enemy against whose stubborn, and often treacherous, opposi-
tion every gain had to be won. In the bitter struggles of those
six years Democrats had slandered, cursed, ostracized, de-
frauded, and killed Populists, and Populists had fought back
with the same weapons. How could enemies be transformed into
allies by what Populists suspected was a mere verbal change of
heart?

Toward fusion of any kind Tom Watson adopted the policy
then known as "the-middle-of-the-road." 25 Far from designat-
ing a conservative course, this term had come to signify those
radical Populists who refused to compromise any principle in

23 Interview with Marion Butler, Washington, Aug. 7, 1934; Florence Smith,
"The Populist Movement and its Influence in North Carolina," Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago, passim.

24 John D. Hicks, op. cit., pp. 344-348.

25 For an explanation of the origin of the term see Ibid., p. 346.

249

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

order to cooperate with either of the old parties. The "mid-
road" Populists constituted the strictly anti-fusion rank and file
of the party. In answer to a Louisiana Populist who wrote ask-
ing his advice on fusion with the silver-Democrats of that state,
Watson wrote :

In our judgment Populists should keep in the middle of the road, should
make no coalition with either old party, and should avoid fusion as they
would the devil. To meet Democrats or Republicans, acting in their
individual capacities, in a free-for-all mass meeting, where a principle
upon which we all agree can be discussed, and where no man need be
bound by any action which he disapproves, is one thing; to make a barter
and a trade as Populists with the official managers of either of the old
parties to swap a certain number of votes for a stipulated price in Demo-
cratic patronage or Republican spoils, is quite another thing. . . .

This may be an honest transaction; lots of good men in Kansas,
Nebraska, North Carolina and elsewhere have gone into it. . . . It seems
to agree very well with the fellows who squat near the flesh pots. But
our observation has been that the People's Party never grows a single
vote after that flesh pot feast begins . . . but wilts and dwindles away.

We therefore advise our friend to meet and talk with all men — but
fuse with no enemy, compromise no principle, surrender no vital convic-

He continued to warn against the blandishments of the Demo-
cratic advocates of fusion. " 'I am willing,' " he quoted Editor
Howell of the Constitution as saying immediately before the
Democratic National Convention of 1896, " 'to advocate every
principle of the Populist Platform, if it is necessary, in order to
keep the people inside the Democratic party.' " This, according
to Watson, was a perfect illustration of the old party's motto :
"Anything to keep the offices." It had promised the whole Alli-
ance platform, the sub-treasury excepted, in 1890, and it would
not scruple to promise the entire Populist platform, virtually
the same, in 1896. 27

It was this uncompromising rejection of fusion in the face of
repeated defeats, when fusion would have won high office, that
earned Watson the name of "as extreme a mid-road Populist as
ever breathed or wrote." It also earned him the devotion of
Southern Populists from Virginia to Texas, as well as the West-
ern rank and file who had resisted silver and fusion. The radical

26 P. P. P., July 26, 1896, quoted in A. M. Arnett, op. cit., p. 190.

27 P. P. P., June 19, 1896.

250

The Silver Panacea

Southern Populist, to whom fusion was anathema and silver
a "mere drop in the bucket," found his clearest expression
in the voice of Tom Watson, and in Watson he placed his
faith. From the Middle West, the Lower South, and the Far
West Watson received messages commending his stand against
fusion. 28

Upon the maneuvers of Western leaders toward fusion and
silver, on the other hand, radical Populists of all sections looked
with suspicion and misgivings, not to say hostility. From the
West came Senator Peffer's denunciation of the policy of the
National Committee of his own party as "treacherous" ; 29 from
the South came a North Carolina editor's judgment that it was
an attempt to "deliver the entire People's party into the lap of
Wall Street Democracy at one time." so Writing in the Middle
West, though speaking for an intelligent element that was non-
sectional, Lloyd lamented the curious paradox "that the new
party, the Reform party, the People's party, should be more
boss-ridden, ring-ruled, gang-gangrened, than the two old
parties of monopoly. The party that makes itself the special
champion of the Referendum and Initiative tricked out of its
very life and soul by a permanent National Chairman — some-
thing no other party has I" 31

Positions of Populist party leadership had passed from the
South to the West by the middle 'nineties, largely because West-
erners had been more successful in securing national office. It
was a Western policy that was adopted as the strategy for 1896.
The anti-fusionist South wished to hold the national convention
in February, and step boldly forward with its nominees without
regard to what the old party conventions did later. Western
leaders succeeded in postponing the convention, however, until
both old parties had held theirs. The Western argument as-
sumed that the conventions of both opposing parties would be
dominated by their reactionary wings and that the People's
party would profit by gathering bolting silverites from both
sides. 32

28 Correspondence in Watson MSS.; letters in P. P. P., 1895-1896.

29 Quoted in Progressive Farmer, June 30, 1896.

80 Editorial in the Progressive Farmer, June 30, 1896.

81 From a letter written by Lloyd, July 10, 1896, in Caro Lloyd, op. cit, Vol. I.,
p. 359.

82 Henry D. Lloyd, op. cit., p. 300; J. D. Hicks, op. cit., p. 350.

251

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

As time approached for the conventions the fallacy of the
Western theory grew more apparent. In June the Republican
platform presented an outright stand against silver, a position
that pointed more conclusively than ever to a victory for the
silver-insurgents at the Democratic convention. Such an eventu-
ality would put an entirely different complexion upon the
naive Western strategy of gathering in bolters. A complete
revision of tactics was required without delay. H. E. Taubeneck,
national chairman, thrashed about wildly for a new scheme, and
at last settled upon the desperate plan of attempting to induce
the Democrats to nominate Henry M. Teller, a silver Republi-
can who had bolted the national convention. Teller had never
been a Populist and was interested only in silver ; yet Taubeneck
and his cohorts were prepared to deliver their party to his cause
if the Democrats would join them in his nomination. 83 Lloyd
thought that Taubeneck had been "flimflammed" by the poli-
ticians at Washington, who had persuaded him that free silver
was the supreme issue. If the party management had been in
capable hands, he thought, instead of in the hands of " ( Glau-
benichts' like Taubeneck, the full Omaha platform would easily
have been made the issue that would have held us together for
a brilliant campaign, but now that cannot be done."

The Chicago convention did go over to silver, as expected,
but instead of Teller, it nominated William Jennings Bryan of
Nebraska, a man dear to the hearts of Western Populists with
whom he had flirted for years. 34 The platform was likewise
richly baited for Populists. Besides the expected demand for
free silver, it contained denunciation of Cleveland's bond-selling
policy and his action in the Pullman strike; it condemned the
Supreme Court's decision against income tax legislation; it
favored stricter federal control of railroads. It now became the
plain duty of Populists and all sincere reformers, the Democrats
loudly proclaimed, to rally behind Bryan's cause, to renounce
all "selfish" adherence to party in favor of "principle."

This appeal carried weight with the West. General Weaver
had been at work for months promoting Bryan's nomination,

83 Editorial in the Progressive Farmer, June 30, 1896; J. D. Hicks, op. cit., pp.

352-35*

84 Jesse E. Boell, "William Jennings Bryan before 1896," master's thesis, Uni-
versity of Nebraska, passim.

252

The Silver Panacea

and now set out for the Populist convention to make the chief
nominating speech for him. "I care not for party names," said
Watson's friend and former colleague, Jerry Simpson; "it is
the substance we are after, and we have it in William J. Bryan."
Ex-Governor "Bloody-Bridles" Waite of Colorado capitulated,
and even Senator Peffer thought that the West was going for
Bryan, no matter what happened. Ignatius Donnelly remained
to speak for the more inarticulate mass of anti-fusionist, mid-
road Populists of the West. 35

For the South, Watson voiced the practically unanimous
sentiment that to go back to the Democratic party now would
be to "return as the hog did to its wallow." He knew his enemies
too well to be taken in by them again. "The Democratic party,"
he wrote, "realizing that it had lost the respect, the confidence
and the patience of the people, determined to anticipate the
triumph of Populism by a public confession of political guilt, an
earnest assertion of change of heart, a devout acceptance of
Populist principles, and a modest demand that the People's
party should vacate its quarters and surrender its political pos-
sessions. A very staggering piece of political impudence was
this." 36 With his blessings the Georgia delegation to the Na-
tional Convention was sent off with strict instructions "to insist
upon the original Ocala declaration" and fight fusion. 37 The head
of the delegation wired headquarters at St. Louis : "Tell the boys
I am coming — in the middle of the road." M

Delegates from virtually all Southern states grimly chose the
same route to St. Louis. It proved to be the road to their
Waterloo and the Waterloo of Populism.

Declining to comment upon the possibility of his receiving the
nomination, and offering no explanation for his failure to attend
the Convention, Tom Watson remained quietly at home.

The fourteen hundred delegates who gathered at Convention
Hall in St. Louis on July 22 presented a striking contrast to

85 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20, 1896; F. L. Haynes, Weaver, p. 374.

86 P. P. P., June 26, Dec. 13, 1896.

87 Ibid., June 19, 1896.

38 A. M. Arnett, op. cit., p. 197.

253

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

those who had nominated Mark Hanna's friend in that same
hall a month before. City journalists, spotting salable copy, de-
scribed their rustic manners and quaint doings. A group was
found sitting with shoes off. Some took no regular sleeping
quarters and fared upon nickel meals at lunch counters. A part
of one important delegation was found actually suffering for
want of food, as the sessions dragged out longer than planned.
An interview with an "eminent physician of Washington" was
printed in mock solemnity listing insanity symptoms among the
delegates. They were poor men, the majority of them, terribly
in earnest, and therefore, one gathers, rather ridiculous. 39

A sympathetic observer found anxiety written in the face of
everyone, no matter to what faction he belonged. Anxiety in the
mass of delegates lest they be sold out — and there were both
rumors and signs that they would be. Anxiety in the faces of
busily caucusing and whispering managers lest the coveted fruits
of fusion, finally within their grasp, be snatched from them by
the radical middle-of-the-road Southerners. The radicals them-
selves, distrusting fusion and half measures as they did, feared
at the same time lest their radicalism split the force of opposition
to their real enemy — Eastern Capitalism. This might be the last
opportunity for a union of reform forces. Edward Bellamy
thought that the real issue of 1896 — that "between men and
money" — was in the back of all minds. "It was in the air that
there must be a union," wrote Lloyd. "It was a psychological
moment of rapprochement against an appalling danger which
for thirty years now had been seen rising in the sky. If the radi-
cals made a mistake, it was a patriotic mistake." *°

The radical mid-roaders were the most distraught and unor-
ganized group of all. Chiefly Southern in membership, they were
led by the huge, militant Texas delegation, the largest one
present. Their most conspicuous figure was James H. "Cyclone"
Davis, a gaunt giant with a bellowing voice. The radicals de-
clared they would not be "swallowed" by the new Democracy,
and they were out to nominate a straight Populist ticket. While
probably the largest faction present, they were terribly handi-
capped by want of leadership and a candidate. Their chaotic

89 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 21-27, 1896; H. D. Lloyd, "The Populists at
St. Louis," loc. cit, p. 293.
40 Ibid., p. 300.

254

The Silver Panacea

state was made plain when at their caucus only a day before the
Convention opened they were unable to agree upon a candidate.
Debs, Donnelly, "Cyclone" Davis, Van Dervoort of Nebraska,
and Mimms of Tennessee were all discussed but passed over. 41

Despite confusion, the mid-roaders were still intent on not
being sold out to the Democrats. Said one delegate at the caucus :
"They may sell us out here at St. Louis, but before high heaven
they can never deliver the goods. I was originally a Democrat.
We West Virginia Populists left the Democrats never to re-
turn." Another echoed his anxiety: "While we have been shout-
ing the other fellows, with a perfect organization, have been
gathering in the stragglers. It makes no difference how many
men we may have, if we are not organized we will be swal-
lowed." *

The fusionists were not only well organized; they knew ex-
actly what they wanted. Their object was the endorsement of
Bryan and Sewall and the fusion of the two parties into one.
General Weaver, in charge of the Bryan headquarters, was in-
dustriously working toward this end. Three days before the
Convention opened Senator James K. Jones, chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, arrived at St. Louis to remain
throughout, closeted with Bryan Populists or buzzing in and
out of committee room, hotel lobby, and Convention hall. Some
1,000 Missouri Democrats were said to be aiding the plot to
steal the Convention. An additional advantage for the West lay
in the rule of awarding delegates on a basis of Populist successes
in the past three elections. This scheme put a premium upon the
fusion victories of Western states, and accordingly penalized
the South, which had resisted fusion. 43

Following the first day's session, at which they showed a
strength that shook the confidence of the Bryanites, the mid-
road radicals of twenty-one states finally agreed, without especial
enthusiasm for their choice, to support S. F. Norton of Illinois
for President, and Frank Burkett of Mississippi for Vice-
President. Their forces greatly rallied, they planned a mighty
demonstration for the evening session that would sweep the

41 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20-23, 1896; J. D. Hicks, op, cit, pp. 359—
362.

42 St Louis Globe-Democrat, July 22, 1896.

48 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20 and 21, 1896.

255

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Convention to the left. That night they found the hall in com-
plete darkness, with no lights obtainable. A futile attempt to
hold the demonstration anyway only succeeded in producing
scenes "at once weird and picturesque" — the gaunt figure of
"Cyclone" Davis gesticulating under the flickering light of a
candle he held aloft; Mrs. Lease yelling from the platform; the
mob of delegates in the darkness crying out accusations of "ugly
work" against the fusionists. Twenty-five minutes after the at-
tempt was abandoned, the lights were burning brightly in the
hall. It was not the last time the charge of foul play was made
at this Convention, nor the last occasion for the charge. 44

The next day the radicals won the first fall in what was con-
sidered a test of the anti-Bryan strength. The vote was upon the
seating of a contesting mid-road delegation of Eugene V. Debs
supporters backed by Clarence Darrow. The margin was nar-
row, 665 to 642, but the mid-roaders were jubilant. Their hopes
were speedily dashed, however, by the election of Senator Wil-
liam V. Allen of Nebraska, an out-and-out fusionist, as per-
manent chairman of the Convention by a vote of 758 to 564.^

With the nomination of Bryan now seemingly assured, the
threat of a bolt by the mid-roaders that would split the party in
half became more menacing than ever. "Texas is here to hold a
Populist convention," exclaimed a delegate, "and we're going to
do it before we go home. If some of the delegates nominate
Bryan, they, being unpopulistic, will be the bolters." If the nam-
ing of Bryan promised a bolt, then the nomination of his run-
ning-mate, Arthur Sewall, portended a veritable rebellion. Yet
Chairman Allen and his Democratic friends were plotting that
as well.

Whatever case the fusionists might make for the Populist
leanings of Bryan, they were hard put to it to discover like tend-
encies in Sewall of Maine. There could hardly have been pro-
duced in one figure a more comprehensive challenge to ortho-
dox Populist doctrine. Not only was he the president of one
national bank and the director of others, but also a railroad di-
rector, as well as the president of one trust and part owner of an-
other. On top of this he was an Easterner, a man of wealth, and
he enjoyed an evil name among workers for his labor policies.

**Ibid., July 22 and 23, 1896; J. D. Hicks, op. cit., pp. 359-3*2.
45 Ibid., July 24, 189*.

256

The Silver Panacea

Scarcely a plank of the Populist platform was left unfouled. No
Populist could countenance the nomination of such a man with-
out a ludicrous confession of his party's bankruptcy. Yet the
manipulators in control of the Convention demanded Sewall's
nomination.

It was obvious that the hope for any compromise between rad-
ical mid-roaders and extreme fusionists lay in the nominee for
Vice-President. Foreseeing this possibility early in the Conven-
tion, a group of Southern delegates led by Senator Marion But-
ler, who had served as temporary chairman of the Convention,
agreed upon a plan of compromise that would embrace accept-
ing Bryan for Presidential nominee, but substituting a radical
Southern Populist for Sewall as his running mate. 46 As part of
the plan members of the Georgia delegation were prevailed
upon to obtain the consent of Tom Watson for allowing his
name to be used.

Watson had instructed his friends before the Convention not
to allow the use of his name. During the course of the Conven-
tion, he issued the following statement to the press :

I am opposed to the nomination of Bryan and Sewall or either of them
separately.

The Populist party has good material within its own ranks. I would re-
fuse. I would refuse a nomination.

I say this now, as I do not expect it; and it is my present belief that
I shall not change my mind. 47

The messages he received from the Convention described the
chaotic state of affairs and inquired whether he would accept a
nomination for the Vice-Presidency on a ticket with Bryan as a
means of harmonizing all factions and preventing a split in the
party. He was given to understand that an agreement had been
reached with the Democratic managers to withdraw Sewall from
their ticket. He was told nothing of the caucus of mid-roaders
and their candidates, and did not learn of them until after the
Convention. Under these conditions he "reluctantly" wired his
consent. "Yes, if it will harmonize all factions," was his reply.
Later he said that had he known all the circumstances he would

46 Carl Snyder, "Senator Marion Butler," Review of Reviews, Vol. XIV, p.

429.

47 New York World, July 25, 1896.

257

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

never have consented, and the mid-road candidates "would have
received my hearty support . . ." **

Tom Watson's name was a magical one among the disaffected
and intransigent radical Populists. It warmed the imagination.
He had been the first in the South to cut the old ties and step
forward boldly as a Populist. In Congress he had won the ad-
miration of the Western representatives, who elected him their
leader in the House and followed him enthusiastically. He had
burned his bridges behind him, steadfastly resisted the tempta-
tion of fusion, and suffered much for his principles. He was the
hero of thousands of Southern Populists who had followed his
periodic battles over the past four years against Democratic
fraud and violence. The People's Party Paper was nationally
known and frequently quoted, and its editor stood in the popular
mind as the very incarnation of middle-of-the-road Populism,
thorough-going, fearless, and uncompromising. He had been
mentioned as a possible nominee from time to time since 1892. 49

Rapid headway was being made at St. Louis with the scheme
of compromise. The mid-roaders grasped at the suggestion of
resorting to the unusual procedure of nominating the Vice-
President before the President. They might at least dispose of
Sewall. The report that the Democratic managers had promised
that their candidate would withdraw in favor of a Populist nom-
inee if Bryan were nominated for the Presidency was well cir-
culated. Delegates voted with that report in mind. The decision
to nominate the Vice-President first was made by a vote of 738
to 637. 50

Jubilant because of their victory over the determined opposi-
tion of fusionists, the radicals expressed their feelings in a flood
of nomination oratory. Congressman M. W. Howard of Ala-
bama, "a man of enormous stature, tall and swarthy, with raven
black hair that falls to his shoulders," the author of The Ameri-

48 Interview with J. L. Cartledge of Augusta, who wired Watson from St. Louis ;
New York World, July 26 and 27, 1896; editorial in P. P. P., July 21, 1896;
Watson's letter of acceptance in P. P. P., Dec. 13, 1896; Atlanta Journal, July 25,
1896.

49 Release of the National Reform Press, in P. P. P., Nov. 12, 1891; H. L.
Young to T. E. W. in P. P. P., June 24, 1892; Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 26, 1894.

50 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 25 and 26, 1896; New York World, July 25,
1896; P. P. P., July 31, 1896.

258

The Silver 'Panacea

can Plutocracy? 1 nominated Watson. His nominee, said How-
ard, was "a man who has suffered in the cause; a man who has
sacrificed his money and his time for its good; a man who has
borne the cross and should wear the crown." All speeches in sec-
ond to Watson's nomination, of which there were many, stressed
his unshakable loyalty to principle. A Negro delegate from
Georgia expressed gratitude for his courageous defense of Ne-
gro political rights. Ignatius Donnelly, representing the com-
promise idea, said that he was "willing to swallow Democracy
gilded with the genius of a Bryan" but he could not "stomach
plutocracy in the body of Sewall." He hoped Watson's nomina-
tion would be made unanimous. A cautious Texan asked whether
Watson, if nominated, would remain on the ticket till the elec-
tion. "Yes, sir I" came an immediate answer. "Until hell freezes
over I" The reply so completely, so accurately, summed up the
popular conception of Tom Watson's character, and so well ex-
pressed the mid-roaders' feeling in calling upon him in this
emergency, that it brought the Convention to its feet in a spon-
taneous demonstration. On the first ballot he received 53924
votes against 257 for Sewall, his closest and only serious oppo-
nent. It was an impressive proof that Watson's policy was the
real will of the Convention. The lights of the hall were again
being tampered with, flickering out. Votes were frantically
changed to give him a majority, and a motion was passed sus-
pending the rules and nominating Watson unanimously. In
pitch darkness the Watson Populists wildly and blindly cele-
brated their triumph. 62

The midnight darkness of that hall was symbolic of the con-
ditions in which that whole lamentable Convention groped. The
delegates read in the morning papers a telegram from Bryan
asking Senator Jones to withdraw his name from consideration
if Sewall were not nominated. Chairman Allen had refused to
give this information to the Convention. The delegates also read
a letter from Senator Jones, which "underwent a remarkable
change after it was given to the newspapers," denying that he
had made any commitment as to the withdrawal of Sewall. The

51 Published in New York, 1895.

52 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 25 and 26, 1896; P. P. P., July 31 and Dec.
13, 1896; Constitution, July 25, 1896.

259

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

air was again thick with cries of "treachery." "Gagged, clique-
ridden, and machine ruled," pronounced delegate Lloyd. What
had been anxiety was rapidly souring to disgust. 63

Relentlessly the steam-roller tactics were continued by the
managers, still determined to nominate Bryan. Three times,
while the roll call of the states was in progress, Chairman Allen
denied point blank when the question was put to him from the
floor the existence of a further message from Bryan asking that
he not be nominated, despite the fact that he was perfectly aware
of the message. 54 Twice during the roll call the Texas delegation
hurriedly withdrew to caucus on the proposal of bolting. Once
when Bryan stampeders attempted to wrest their banner from
them a dozen Texans reached for their guns — and then looked
sheepish. Once when the Convention seemed wavering Henry
Demarest Lloyd, with a carefully prepared speech in hand
designed to rally the delegates back to their principles, stood hes-
itating while he was urged to speak. He turned to Clarence Dar-
row, who advised against it. Other men of courage and intelli-
gence "stood spellbound, fearing to break the union." While
they "waited for a protest, a halt," the machine rolled on. Bryan
was nominated. Lloyd burst in upon his host late that night "in
feverish excitement" and exploded with the exclamation that the
party was "buried, hopelessly sold out." 55

53 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 25, 1896; New York World, July 25, 1896;
Caro Lloyd, op. cit, Vol. I, p. 261.

64 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 26, 1896; P. P. P., Nov. 13, 1896; J. D.
Hicks, op. cit., p. 366.

56 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 26, 1896; Caro Lloyd, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 262.

260

17

The Debacle of i8g6

Hardly anyone could be found who expressed satisfaction
at the outcome of the St. Louis Convention — least of all
the mid-roaders, and certainly not Tom Watson. The question
naturally arises: why, of all people, should Tom Watson, the
leading advocate of the middle-of-the-road policy, the staunchest
opponent of fusion, have lent his name to this weak compromise
with fusion? After six years of uncompromising resistance at
costly sacrifice, why did he half-way yield at the crucial moment?
Before passing judgment upon his own answer it might be well to
inquire how other national leaders of radical and reform groups
met the test of 1896.

Of the Single Taxers, Henry George himself publicly en-
dorsed Bryan. Edward Bellamy, acknowledged leader of the
more radical "Nationalists," proclaimed that the real issue lay
"between men and money," and swung his support to the silver
champion. W. D. P. Bliss, of the Christian Socialists, took the
same attitude. More surprising was the attitude of Eugene V.
Debs, a recent convert to Marxian socialism. Debs wired Dar-
row forbidding the use of his name as a candidate against Bryan
at St. Louis, and advised union labor to support the Democratic
nominee. Speaking as a Populist, Henry Demarest Lloyd called
the Convention "the most discouraging experience of my life" ;
yet he confessed his own impotence in the face of circumstances
at St. Louis. Twelve days before the Convention he stated the
Populist dilemma of 1896 about as accurately as it could be
stated: "If we fuse, we are sunk; if we don't fuse, all the silver
men we have will leave us for the more powerful Democrats." 1

1 Caro Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Vol. I, p. 259.

26l

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

All things considered, there is not one of these five men with
whose position Watson's course of action does not bear favora-
ble comparison. Being the unanimous nominee of the St. Louis
Convention he was naturally under some constraint in express-
ing his opinion of its work. He did exercise a modicum of re-
straint until after the election, but it was only a modicum. In
the first editorial after his nomination he said :

There will be disappointment throughout the ranks of the People's
Party at the failure of our national convention to nominate a "middle-of-
the-road" ticket.

The position of this paper upon that subject has not been changed.
We thought before the convention met, and we think now, that the welfare
of our party, and of the principles it represents, demanded that we nomi-
nate our own ticket, and put upon that ticket two Populists, tried and
true. 2

The editorial continued with a justification of his consent to
the nomination in view of his earlier decision against it, and in
view of his unaltered mid-road position. His comparative isola-
tion and wretched means of communication with the Convention
delegates should be taken into account. There was no means of
reaching him even from Atlanta during the six hours his name
was before the Convention. The Thomson operator went to bed
at eight o'clock. Watson was not informed of his nomination un-
til the following morning. 3 His decisions were based upon such
information as he received from delegates who were much in the
dark themselves. It is interesting (and profitless) to speculate
upon the outcome of the Convention if Watson, the only South-
ern candidate with a wide personal following and the ability to
direct it, had been at St. Louis to take command of the mid-road
forces. One hesitates to pass judgment, yet it seems clear that
Watson made a mistake in not attending the Convention himself.
Why he failed to do so is not known.

He continues his apology :

As the hours passed away at St. Louis, it became constantly more
evident that our existence as a party hung upon a thread. The West
was committed to Bryan beyond recall. . . . With the West gone away
from us, how could our party live . . . ?

It was in this chaotic condition of things which I witnessed with keen

2 P. P. P., July 31, 1896.
8 Constitution, July 25, 1896.

262

The Debacle of 1896

anxiety, and which caused members of the Georgia delegation to telegraph
me to allow my name to be used to restore harmony and save the party.

Upon that express condition, I consented, and the object was ob-
tained. . . .

If now the Democratic managers should refuse to make any concessions
at all it would show that our efforts toward unity have all been thrown
away. If they continue to demand that the Populists shall go out of
existence as a party, they will prove to the world their object in adopting
our platform was not so much to get free silver as it was to bury the
People's Party. 4

In a series of articles written at the request of the New York
World he further elaborated his position. He had consented to
the nomination in order "to save [his] party from extinction."
"Under no other circumstances would I have agreed to the nom-
ination, and the circumstances under which I did accept were
such as I did not dream one week ago would exist." The Demo-
cratic party had been driven to the left only because of the pres-
sure exerted by an active Populist party. The dissolution of his
party would have removed the pressure and the old party would
have swung back to reactionary leadership as it had in 1892 and
1894. "By nominating a ticket of our own," he continued, "and
upon a platform of our own, we preserve our identity as a party
and we maintain our influence over the Democrats." The Chi-
cago platform did not go so far as the Populists would have
liked, but they were willing to march with the Democrats "as far
as they do go in our direction." If he and Bryan made the race
together, their position would be "that of two men who may
differ upon some subjects, but who act together upon those mat-
ters about which . . . [they] are agreed. He believed that, "by
agreeing to cooperate with them to this extent we [Populists]
do not compromise our principles, stultify our record, or disband
our organization." He was firmly opposed to "any fusion that
would absorb us, annihilate our party and put it in the future
entirely in the power of the Democratic organization." 6

The prospect the new Populist candidate might entertain of
having his principles, his personality, his character, or any aspect
of his candidacy presented to the nation's voters with accuracy
or fairness was slender indeed. The press of the Eastern Repub-

4 P. P. P., July 31, 1896.

6 New York World, July 25 and 26, 1896; Augusta Chronicle, July 26 and 28,
1896.

263

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

lican plutocracy that pictured Bryan as an anarchist, and its pul-
pit, that denounced him as Antichrist, naturally sought more
horrendous adjectives to describe Watson. One of the milder
animadversions of the respectable press was the New York
Times' description of Watson as "a swashbuckling, nagging, vul-
gar scold, indifferent to the amenities," whose nomination should
be treated as "a political joke." 6

Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt of New York City,
who rendered valuable (and well rewarded) service to Mark
Hanna's campaign for McKinley, had his moments of hysteria.
Speaking with "the greatest soberness" he declared that u the
sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can
only be suppressed, as the Commune in Paris was suppressed, by
taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing . . . them
against a wall, and shooting them dead." These leaders are
"plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American
Republic." When the dread hour comes, he promised, "I shall
be found at the head of my regiment." 7 Once when Roosevelt's
brow was somewhat less fevered he wrote an article in which he
dealt at length with Watson's candidacy. "He represents the real
thing," said Roosevelt, "while Bryan after all is more or less a
sham and a compromise." 8

Mr. Watson really ought to be the first man on the ticket, with Mr.
Bryan second ; for he is much the superior in boldness, in thorough-going
acceptance of his principles according to their logical conclusions, and in
sincerity of faith. It is impossible not to regret that the Democrats and
Populists should not have put forward in the first place the man who
genuinely represents their ideas. ... He is infinitely more in earnest
than is Mr. Bryan. Mr. Watson belongs to that school of southern Popu-
lists who honestly believe that the respectable and commonplace people who
own banks, railroads, dry goods stores, factories, and the like, are persons
of mental and social attributes that unpleasantly distinguish Heliogabalus,
Nero, Caligula and other worthies of later Rome. . . .

Altogether Mr. Watson, with his sincerity, his frankness, his ex-
treme suspiciousness, and his uncouth hatred of anything he cannot under-
stand and of all elegancies and decencies of civilized life, is an interesting
personage. . . .

Mr. Sewall would make a colorless Vice-President, and were he at

6 The New York Times, July 26, 1896; quoted by James F. Collins, "Thomas E.
Watson: A Study in the New South" (Master's thesis, New York University), p. 67.

7 Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, A Biography, p. 164.

8 Theodore Roosevelt in Review of Reviews, Vol. XIV (1896), pp. 296-297.

264

The Debacle of i8g6

any time to succeed Mr. Bryan in the White House would travel Mr.
Bryan's path with extreme reluctance and under duress. Mr. Watson
would be a more startling, more attractive, and more dangerous figure,
for if he got the chance he would lash the nation with a whip of scorpions,
while Bryan would be content with the torture of ordinary thongs.

Writing to his friend Lodge, Roosevelt mentioned "a long and
really very interesting letter, from, of all persons in the world,
Tom Watson," which he promised to show him when they met. 9
The letter had reference to Roosevelt's article. "If in Georgia
and throughout the South," wrote Watson, "we have conditions
as intolerable as those which surround you in New York, can you
not realize why I make war upon them ? ... If you could spend
an evening with me among my books and amid my family, I feel
quite sure you would not again class me with those who make
war upon the 'decencies and elegancies of civilized life.' " 10
Roosevelt recanted publicly: "I was in Washington when Mr.
Watson was in Congress, and I know how highly he was es-
teemed personally by his colleagues. . . . He is honest, he is
earnest, he is brave, he is disinterested." 1X Their correspondence
over this incident marked the beginning of a long and interesting
friendship between the two men. Roosevelt's Autobiography
years later contained a flattering tribute to Watson. Watson's
ability to turn animosity into friendship was a gift that he em-
ployed too rarely.

His treatment at the hands of less partisan critics was, on the
whole, more favorable. James Creelman of the New York
World thought: "Of the five candidates before the nation he is
the most picturesque, the most original, and in some respects the
brainiest. He is not afraid of publicity. He is not a sham." Al-
fred Henry Lewis, later known as a muckraker novelist, wrote
for the New York Herald: "Altogether, he is a better man than
either Hobart or McKinley, thinks less of himself and more of
the people, and a syndicate could no more buy Watson or own
Watson than it could buy or own a star. No Hannas go with the
Horoscopes of such as Watson." Henry Demarest Lloyd called

9 Henry C. Lodge, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and
Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918, Vol. I, pp. 234, 236, 249.

10 T. E. W. to Theodore Roosevelt, Sept. 30, 1896, Roosevelt MSS., Washington,
D.C.

11 Quoted by T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 27-28.

265

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

him "a second Alexander H. Stephens in delicacy of physique
and robustness of eloquence and loyalty to the people."

His resemblance to Stephens was frequently mentioned. For
personal beauty the Populist candidate could ill afford compari-
son with his running mate, the handsome Bryan. At forty he
possessed the "old-young" appearance he retained until late in
life. Creelman described it:

The mystery about his face is due to the parchment texture of his skin.
One moment while he smiles and he shows his loosely set small teeth you
think he is a youth of twenty and the next, when he tears up words by
their roots, with some of the soil clinging to them, and draws his brows
down sharp over his eyes, mouth hard set and little ears standing out on
his head, he might be a sage of sixty. His earnestness flames up in a strange
old-young face. . . . Mr. Watson's jaw would interest him [Sewall]. It
is the jaw of a crusader, the jaw of a martyr.

Another thought him "painfully lean and hungry looking, with
a cadaverous, rawboned face and sunken cheeks and dark eyes,
alive with the marvelous vitality and the intense earnestness of a
man who never tires." It is remarkable that, as intense as was
the emotional partisanship he evoked, no one who ever saw him
in that era seems to have questioned Watson's sincerity; the
common view was that he was "a man of sincerity, tragically
earnest in everything." One writer thought he had "no sense of
humor," but that "life is a serious struggle with him." u Humor
he undoubtedly had, but "the jaw of the crusader" completely
masked it for the time being.

His manner of speaking was sometimes contrasted to that of
Bryan. "Bryan's style of oratory is as far separated from that of
Watson as one pole from another," it was said. "Bryan deals in
oratorical flowers ; Watson discards all efforts at embellishment
and cuts to the heart of the subject with keen incisiveness and
unrelenting truth." He had a "Dantonian trick" of gesturing
with whirling arms, swaying body, and tossing head that loosed
a lock of hair which "punctuated his periods with a loppy em-
phasis." Some noticed a "hawkish tendency" in his manner, and
in his "shrill, raspy voice, the power of strong, high flight, the
pinion, the talon, the beak, and withal the swoop of the hawk."

The St. Louis Convention's legacy to its nominee and their
campaign was a beautiful tangle of problems as knotty and per-

12 James Creelman, New York World, Oct. 5, 1896.

266

The Debacle of 1896

plexing as could have been devised. Would Bryan be notified of
his nomination? Would he accept? How could he accept when
the Populist platform in some aspects contradicted the Demo-
cratic platform ? When acceptance implied approval of Watson ?
Would Populists support him if he did not accept, or nominate
another candidate? Would Sewall withdraw, be withdrawn, or
remain on the ticket? If he remained, would Watson be taken
down? If both remained, how could the Populist ticket be ar-
ranged ?

Wildly contradictory answers to these questions flew back and
forth after the Convention. Pointing out that his nomination was
carried in the face of his disapproval, Bryan said acceptance de-
pended on "what conditions are attached." He would not do
"anything unfair to Mr. Sewall." Chairman Jones brusquely de-
clared that Bryan could not accept, and that Sewall would re-
main on the ticket. Senator Stewart gaily announced that Demo-
crats would have gunmen stationed along the road to shoot the
first Populist who attempted to notify Bryan of his nomination.
The New York World, confidently and repeatedly predicted
that Sewall would be withdrawn from the Democratic ticket,
after the Maine election, in favor of Watson. The St. Louis
Globe-Democrat announced as authentic news that the Populist
executive committee would withdraw Watson in favor of Sewall.
Prominent Democrats declared their party must live up to its
contract and withdraw Sewall. A caucus of mid-road Populists
issued an ultimatum to the effect that if Bryan did not accept by
August 5, his name would be replaced by a Populist candidate. 13
Out of this confusion of tongues and clash of council the crazy
pattern of the campaign gradually took shape.

Only a few days after the Convention, Senator Jones, chair-
man of the Democratic National Committee, set the pace of bit-
ter recrimination between the allied parties by an onslaught
upon Southern Populists. The Western and Northern delegates
at St. Louis he had found "broad-minded and patriotic," but,
said the Senator:

As a general rule the Southern Delegates were not a creditable class. They
practically admitted while at St. Louis that they were out for nothing but
spoil. They said that there was "nothing in it" for them to indorse the

13 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 26, 1896; New York World, July 26 and Aug.
3, 1896; clipping, Watson Scrapbooks.

267

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Democratic nominees, and this same spirit will probably dominate their
action in the future. They will do all they can to harass the Democracy
and create confusion, and in the end they will do just as they are doing
now in Alabama, fuse with the Republicans and vote for McKinley. They
will go with the negroes, where they belong. . . .

I suppose that Watson really believes that he can "bluff" us into with-
drawing Mr. Sewall. Just as though such a proposition could be considered
for a moment by any right thinking man ! Mr. Sewall will, of course, re-
main on the ticket, and Mr. Watson can do what he likes. 14

Coming from the man who had so assiduously courted the hand
of Populism, this was a shocking sentiment indeed. The slur
bracketing Populists with Negroes was a fighting word in the
South, and the Senator from Arkansas knew it. The loud de-
mand for Jones' resignation by certain Northern Democratic pa-
pers suddenly hushed when it was whispered about that his state-
ment was deliberate party strategy: an announcement that
nothing would be conceded to Southern Populists. 15

Anyone who knew Watson's temperament must have been
impressed at his victory over his feelings. Without doubt it cost
him many a wry face to swallow Jones' insult. The abnegation
of his reply is little short of pathetic. Jones' remarks, he said,
were "insulting, and were meant to be so. They will arouse re-
sentment, and were meant to arouse it." It was a "clumsy effort
to create discord" between Populists of the West and those of
the South, and was designed u to invoke a bitter reply." It would
fail. He appealed to Southern Populists to "stand by the con-
tract made at St. Louis. Give Bryan every vote you have got and
let Senator Jones say what he likes. Let him insult you at his
pleasure. Make no angry reply; lift yourselves above it; think
of your country; pray for its liberty; work for its best interests;
do your duty and let God Almighty take care of you and your
party." 16

To Senator Jones and the Democrats he replied in the col-
umns of the New York World:

We have conceded everything short of extinction of our party. To
go into the national campaign with no Populist on the national ticket dis-
bands the party. The Democratic managers know this, and they have bent

14 New York World, Aug. 3, 1896.

15 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 5, 1896.

16 Clipping from an Augusta paper, Aug., 1896, Watson Scrapbooks.

268

The "Debacle of i8g6

every energy to that end. It is not so much free silver they want as it is the
death of the People's Party. . . .

Why should the Democratic managers demand of us a complete and
unconditional surrender? They say we must fuse, but their idea of fusion
is that we play minnow while they play trout; we play June bug while they
play duck; we play Jonah while they play the whale. . . .

We are so heartily anxious to see the people of the South and West
come together and act in concert for the good of the country . . . that
we yet hope they will do it, in spite of the efforts of the Democratic
politicians to prevent it. 17

The Atlanta Journal, a Gold-Democratic paper, confessed
that the policy announced by the Democratic managers seemed
to indicate that they believed "a fight against the Populists is
more welcome than a fight with them."

Three days after Senator Jones' attack upon Southern Popu-
lists and their leader, Watson addressed the state convention of
his party. It was a trying occasion for him. He was expected to
point the way, when he could see no way ; to solve problems not
within his power to solve. Five thousand people crowded every
foot of space in the crude Atlanta "Tabernacle." The day was
hot. At the cry of "Off with the calico, boys," coats were shed
and shirt-sleeved Populism waited. Watson appeared, looking
"pale and frightened." The ovation his appearance evoked is de-
scribed by a hostile but keenly observant witness : "It had the
ring of trust and faith in it, and so quick, so sudden, so spon-
taneous, so deep was it that it staggered Watson. He tried to
speak but could not. He muttered his half tearful thanks and
left the stand. . . . An overwhelming sense of all those cheer-
ing thousands expected of him seemed to have fallen upon him
with crushing weight. Little able to help themselves, they ex-
pected all things of him. He was their hope. What could he
do?" 18

Referring to another occasion, he once wrote in his private
Journal, "There was a large crowd, and I never fail when there
is a large crowd." He was speaking to Democrats as well as
Populists. He began with an emphatic reaffirmation of Populist
principles. They could not be prettily trimmed down to a free
silver slogan. "That is not the whole of our grievance." There

17 New York World, Aug. 5, 1896.
^Constitution, Aug. 8, 1896.

269

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

was "never a greater unrest than that which stirs the masses to-
day," he said, and "free silver" was too easy an answer. Govern-
ment ownership of railroads and other public interests, control
of trusts, an entirely new system of money and credit, a ballot
free from corruption, political rights for Negroes: "That is our
case," he said. "Is there anything communistic about it?"

His wish was "to be perfectly honest and make the issue a sec-
tional one." "It is a sectional issue." The East and North were
Hamiltonian, "and they always will be." The South must "cut
loose from Eastern and Northern connection and make an alli-
ance with the great West," her own kind of people. He had
given up an easy berth in the old party in order to "create a com-
mon rallying point," the Populist platform, on which to unite
the two great sections. "Hasn't time vindicated my course?" he
asked. "Southern Democracy is bidding defiance to Wall Street
for the first time in thirty years," and the West has joined hands
with the South. But still the Democratic leaders were not free
of the East so long as they clung to Sewall. "You can't fight the
national banks with any sincerity with a national banker as your
leader," he told them. "You can't fight corporations with a cor-
poration king as your leader."

The only honest course for the Democratic leaders was to
withdraw Sewall from their ticket. Populists would never vote
for him. "They have taken our doctrine, but they don't like our
doctors," he said. "They are fond of our physics, but they don't
like our physicians. They want to run our ship, but they want to
expel our crew. . . . They say they want fusion. So they do. It
is the fusion that the earthquake makes with the city it swal-
lows." There was no consistency in calling this campaign a union
between the South and the West, if the Southern candidate were
ignored. There must be a leader from the South as well as one
from the West. "For thirty years the Democratic party has
acted as if it was ashamed of the South. You elect Democratic
Presidents, and yet you never name any of them. ... I appeal
to Southern pride."

His pledge of loyalty to Bryan despite the bad faith of Demo-
cratic managers was the climax of his address: "We did not put
up a nominee against Mr. Bryan, and we are going to keep the
faith. We are going to vote for Mr. Bryan whether you take
Mr. Sewall out or not. I am going to try to so manage this cam-

270

The Debacle of 1896

paign that William J. Bryan shall get the benefit of every silver
vote, even if Tom Watson goes to the bottom." 19

Prefacing their comments with the assurance that "Demo-
cratic loyalty remained unshaken, ,, the old-party papers never-
theless admitted that many "came away impressed, disturbed
and unsettled." It was "a newer, a stronger, a broader and a
more statesmanlike Watson than has ever stood before a Geor-
gia audience." His speech might be called a complete vindica-
tion; he had won sympathy by his earnestness, and "thousands
of Georgia Democrats will gladly vote for Watson if Sewall
is withdrawn." The demand for SewalPs withdrawal grew
louder in the Democratic ranks, and politicians were plainly
worried. 20

Thomas R. R. Cobb, a prominent Democrat of Atlanta, in
good standing with the party, was busy in New York organizing
Bryan and Watson clubs. Cobb told New York Democrats that
the great majority of Georgia Democrats would vote for Bryan
and Watson because of Chairman Jones' contract with the Popu-
lists at St. Louis. He believed it plain that "morally, legally,
and politically, the Democratic party is bound to carry out the
deliberate contract of its executive head made before the world
and for the valuable consideration of 2,000,000 votes. And I
shall stand by the contract even if the agent renigs [«c]." Be-
sides, "Sewall is a plutocrat, a national banker, a corporation
king; Watson is a statesman and a man of the people." 21

The journalist John Temple Graves, classified as a Gold
Democrat, likewise took a strong position in regard to the "con-
tract, solemn and honorable," which bound the Democrats to
support Watson. He went further :

I support Watson because he represents a party that has educated our
Democratic party to a due consideration of the welfare of the common
people. I say it fearlessly, and it can not be denied, that reforms for which
the masses have been clamoring for years — whether it be silver or labor or
income tax or popular rights or resistance to government by injunction —
had never been written, and might never have been written, into a Demo-
cratic platform, until the Populist party, 1,800,000 strong, thundered in
the ears of Democratic leaders the announcement that a mighty multitude
demanded these reforms. And among the men who have molded, through

19 T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 144-159.

20 Clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

21 New York World, quoted in P. P. P., Aug. 21, 1896.

271

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

storm and struggle, the party that has educated ours to popular liberty,
Tom Watson of Georgia stands easily first and foremost of them all. 22

Secretary Hoke Smith, recently resigned from Cleveland's
Cabinet, grudgingly accepted the official decisions of the Demo-
cratic managers, but his paper, the Atlanta Journal, was openly
sympathetic to Watson's cause. The Atlanta Commercial, an-
other Democratic paper, frankly denounced the course party
managers took against the Populists, and demanded the fulfill-
ment of the St. Louis contract. "We wouldn't give Tom Watson
for the whole state of Maine," proclaimed this paper. "Watson
is in sympathy with every demand made at Chicago; Sewall is
not. Let us be honest with the people. ... It will not do for
Democrats to eat apple dumpling while they give crow pie to
the Populists." 23 Watson's organ reported that fifty-two Demo-
cratic papers in Georgia had expressed their preference for a
Bryan-Watson ticket.

Meanwhile, Watson had locked horns with the chairman of
his own Populist Executive Committee over the submissive atti-
tude the latter had taken toward the Democratic managers. Dur-
ing the last confused minutes of the St. Louis Convention, Sena-
tor Allen pushed through a resolution bestowing upon the
Executive Committee plenary powers to take any action the Con-
vention might take were it in session. It was said that not a hun-
dred delegates heard or understood the remarkable resolution.
The charge was made then that its purpose was to pave the way
for quietly withdrawing Watson from the ticket later. Senator
Marion Butler of North Carolina, head of the compromise
movement, became the new chairman of the Executive Commit-
tee. Watson regarded Butler with mistrust. The young Senator
owed his office to a fusion with Republicans in North Carolina ;
he had proposed a similar fusion in Georgia to Watson ; and now
he was directing a national campaign of fusion with Democrats.
Furthermore, he enjoyed the name (whether deserved or not)
of "getting all that's coming to him," and it had been predicted
in the press that he would betray Watson's cause. 24

22 "Card" in Constitution, Aug. 27, 1896.

28 Atlanta Commercial, quoted in the Progressive Farmer, Sept. 29, 1896.

24 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 26, 1896; Carl Snyder, "Marion Butler," Re-
view of Reviews, Vol. XIV (Oct., 1896), pp. 429-433; Florence Smith, "The Popu-
list Movement and its Influence in North Carolina, 11 Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Chicago, pp. 138-155; Atlanta Journal, Aug. 5, 1896.

272

The Debacle of i8g6

Senator Butler had issued a statement immediately after the
Convention, saying that "The Populist party can not and will
not swallow Sewall." Weeks passed, however, and no steps were
taken to notify the candidates or to demand the withdrawal of
Sewall. After several appeals from mid-roaders, Chairman But-
ler issued the statement on August 18 that Watson would re-
main on the ticket with Bryan and that his committee would
strive as hard to elect one as the other. Still came no move to-
ward notification. A member of the Notification Committee
from Alabama protested to Butler that "we are treating Mr.
Watson wrong," and taking a submissive and "humiliating atti-
tude as we bow the knee before the Democratic throne." It was
but two months until election, "and we are all at sea — not know-
ing whether our presidential candidate will accept — afraid to
breathe for fear he will not." 25 Butler replied that it was "very
probable" that the candidates would be notified in "due time." *

Exasperated and fretting in his humiliating position, Watson
resorted to the extraordinary expedient of a public attack upon
the Committee's submissive attitude. He wrote :

If the National Convention at St. Louis did not mean that Messrs.
Bryan and Watson should be notified, why was a committee appointed to
notify them? Why does Senator Allen, the chairman of the Committee,
refuse to do what the convention instructed him to do? Is he afraid
Mr. Bryan will repudiate our support? If so, our party has a right to
know that fact. If Mr. Bryan is ashamed of the votes which are necessary
to elect him, we ought to know it. 27

Butler complained bitterly to a member of the Executive
Committee of the "great scare headlines as to the lecture that
Mr. Watson is dealing the Committee about not proceeding at
once to notify him." He thought it best to defer the notification,
and was "inclined to have nothing further to do with it." * Nev-
ertheless, Watson's single-handed fight for the mid-road Popu-
list point of view had its effect. The New York Tribune com-
mented: "His courageous and persistent efforts to compel a
serious recognition of his candidacy at the hands of the Altgeld-
Tillman-Bryan managers and their Populist allies are at last to

25 M. W. Howard to Marion Butler, Aug. ax, 1896, quoted in P. P. P., Sept. 4,
1896.

26 Marion Butler to M. W. Howard, Aug. 25, 1896, quoted ibid.

27 New York Tribune, quoted in P. P. P., Sept. 4, 1896.

28 Marion Butler to H. W. Reed, Aug. 27, 1896, Watson MSS.

273

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

be crowned with deservedly substantial success. . . . These spir-
ited and plain-spoken words have evidently had their effect." 29

Out of Maine came word from L. C. Bateman, secretary of
the Notification Committee and Populist candidate for gover-
nor, that he had "positive information" that Sewall would soon
be withdrawn. Furthermore, Bryan and Watson would soon re-
ceive formal notification. "From one end of the country to the
other," he announced, "the Populist war cry is: 'No Watson, no
Bryan.' We mean business. This is no child's play with us. Bryan
cannot be elected without our help." From the other end of the
continent the Southern Mercury of Texas contended that it had
said, " 'No Watson, no Bryan' first, it will say it last. In fact, a
middle-of-the-road ticket is its preference even at this stage of
the game." A North Carolina editor predicted that "A million
Populists will refuse to support Bryan if Sewall is not taken
down."

The mass pressure called forth by Watson's demand for rec-
ognition finally stirred the cautious Democrats and the submis-
sive Populist fusionists into action. Official letters of notification
were sent to both Bryan and Watson by Senator Butler on Sep-
tember 14, and released to the press. 80 Bryan accepted the Popu-
list nomination in a letter dated October 3, saying that he could
do so without departing from the Chicago platform. 31 Watson's
letter of acceptance, dated October 14, was a scathing denuncia-
tion of the bargain-counter fusion policy of the Populist man-
agers, which he considered a degrading swapping of principles
for office. Chairman Butler, who bore the brunt of the candi-
date's wrath, refused to release the letter, and it did not appear
until after the election. 32

It is doubtful whether any candidate ever to appear on a presi-
dential ticket found himself in quite the humiliating position
that Tom Watson occupied in 1896. Not only were he and his
party publicly insulted by his running-mate's representative, but
Bryan himself studiously ignored his Populist running-mate

29 New York Tribune, quoted in P. P. P., Sept. 4, 1896.

30 Marion Butler to T. E. W., Sept. 14, 1896, Watson MSS. The letters of
notification to both Watson and Bryan are printed in P. P. P., Sept. 18, 1896; see
also W. J. Bryan, The First Battle, p. 430. Mr. Hicks is incorrect in his statement
that Bryan did not accept the nomination and that neither he nor Watson was
notified. (The Populist Revolt, p. 369.)

81 P. P. P., Oct. 9, 1896.

32 Printed in P. P. P., Nov. 13, 1896.

274

The Debacle of 1896

throughout the campaign. He was compelled to ask publicly for
his notification, to endure slights from members of his own com-
mittee, and to watch state after state desert its own nominee
for that of another party. He was publicly denounced by fusion-
ists of his own party for his refusal to withdraw entirely from
the race. In short, while acting as its official leader, he was com-
pelled to watch what had been a powerful party disintegrate un-
der his feet. Such an experience could not but leave its perma-
nent effects upon a man.

Before he received his official notification, Watson had left
home for a campaign tour of the West. His object, aside from
supporting Bryan's candidacy, was to win the Populists of that
section back to a straight Bryan- Watson ticket, with no compro-
mise or fusion on Sewall. Watson hoped that by such a policy in
all states, the Democrats would be forced to withdraw Sewall.
Butler and the Committee at first declared this to be their own
policy, but later abandoned it for fusion. Butler explained to
Watson that this abandonment was forced by the action of cer-
tain Western states which, acting on their own initiative, had
made bargains with Democratic managers to support a certain
number, and in some cases all, of the Sewall electors in exchange
for Democratic support of Populist candidates for state and con-
gressional offices. Such a bargain naturally found great favor in
the eyes of local Populist candidates, who were generally also
local managers, although the rank and file as a rule frowned
upon it. Chairman Butler defended the policy as an expedient of
practical politics. 33 Its adoption, however, plainly implied that
the Populists no longer took seriously their own demand that
the Democrats withdraw Sewall. It also implied that they no
longer took seriously their own candidate for Vice-President. So
it was that Watson set forth to stamp out the prairie fires of
fusion in the West, in spite of the wishes of Chairman Butler
and the quite understandable desires of certain Western Popu-
lists of prominence.

His first stop was Texas. The great majority of delegates to
the Texas state convention had admittedly been in favor of a
"no-Watson-no-Bryan" ultimatum to the Democratic managers,

33 Marion Butler to T. E. W., Oct. 15, 1896; M. Butler to H. W. Reed, Aug. 27,
1896, Watson MSS.

275

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

but some of the more conservative leaders had, by shrewd man-
agement and the simple expedient of out-sitting the majority,
blocked the movement and left themselves free to effect a fusion
later on, probably with the Republicans and Gold Democrats. 84

Watson had a powerful personal following in Texas. " Watson
is a modern hero," declared the Southern Mercury. u The char-
acter of the modern politician would look like a mustard seed
beside a mountain when compared to Watson." With an impas-
sioned speech he completely won a throng of five thousand at
Dallas. u You must burn the bridges if you follow me," he told
them. "I am for straight Populism (cheers) and I do not pro-
pose to be carried to one side of the road or the other (wild
cheering)." He asked their loyal support of Bryan, but re-
minded the Democrats that if Bryan were elected it would be
by "Torn Watson Populists." "This is a movement of the
masses. Let Bryan speak for the masses and let Watson speak
for the masses and let Sewall talk for the banks and railroads."
After the speech he received a stream of Populist leaders at his
hotel, and before he left the state had won their pledge to stop
the movement toward Republican fusion and to put out a
straight Bryan-Watson ticket. 86

The situation in Kansas when Watson arrived was a discour-
aging one. In front of the Populist state headquarters floated a
banner bearing the portraits of Bryan and Sewall. Of Watson
there was no sign. The state convention a month before was
said to have "degenerated into a genuine quarrel" between the
mid-roaders, who wanted a straight Bryan-Watson ticket, and
the fusionists who favored Sewall. The Watson men carried
their resolution, but later a fusion scheme was entered whereby
Populist support of Sewall electors was swapped for Demo-
cratic votes for congressional and state candidates of the Popu-
lists. 86 There was still much feeling against Chairman Brei-
denthal's bargain in the state, but he clung to it doggedly.
Although he was a member of the National Committee Breiden-
thal made no arrangements for Watson's campaign of Kansas
and had no committee or demonstration to greet him. The can-

84 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Aug. 8, 1896; Appleton's Annual Encyclopedia for
1896, p. 733.

36 Dallas Morning News, Sept. 8, 1896; P. P. P., Sept. 8, 1896; clippings, Watson
Scrapbooks.

36 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Aug. 8, 1896; Kansas City Times, Sept. 11, 1896.

276

The Debacle of 1896

dictate's reception was chilling indeed. In long conferences be-
hind closed doors Breidenthal pleaded with the Georgian not to
stir up revolt against the bargain, but Watson was adamant.
"We are willing to fuse, but we are not willing to be swallowed,"
he said. H. W. Reed, a Georgia member of the National Com-
mittee traveling with the candidate, told reporters that the Kan-
sas deal had "done more to stir up bitterness in the South and to
intensify the demand that Mr. Watson shall have fair treatment
than any other one act." It showed a disposition among West-
ern politicians to "mislead" and "betray" Southern comrades. 87
Watson's appeal to the Kansans in several speeches was per-
sonal and extremely effective. He knew that there were those
who demanded that he retire from the Populist ticket, but, he
said:

Somebody else must be asked to kill that Party; I will not. I sat by its
cradle; I have fought its battles; I have supported its principles since
organization . . . and don't ask me after all my service with the People's
party to kill it now. I am going to stand by it till it dies, and I want no
man to say that I was the man who stabbed it to the heart. . . .

No; Sewall has got to come down. He brings no votes to Bryan. He
drives votes away from Bryan. . . .

My friends, I took my political life in my hands when I extended the
hand of fellowship to your Simpsons, your Peffers, and your Davises in
Georgia. The Georgia Democrats murdered me politically for that act.
I stood by your men in Congress when others failed. I have some rights
at the hands of Kansas. I have counted on your support. Can I get it? M

He called for a show of hands, as he used to do in Georgia, and
the Westerners swore eternal allegiance. Much pleased, he
wrote his wife after one speech: "The audience was colder than
in Texas but they gradually warmed up and when I closed they
swarmed around my carriage just as the Pops do in Georgia. I
voted the crowd as between Sewall and I [51V], and not a Pop
voted for Sewall. So it is quite apparent that the rank and file of
our party in Kansas are all right and will vote against their lead-
ers if they get the chance. They shall have the chance." 89

The rebellion against the fusionist leaders was reawakened
all over the state. "This Watson crusade in the state, n reported

37 Kansas City Star, Sept. 10, 1896; Kansas City Times, Sept. n, 1896.
3S Ibid.; also clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

89 T. E. W. to Mrs. Watson, Sept. 10, 1896, in possession of Georgia Watson,
Thomson, Ga.

277

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

a Kansas paper, "has aroused the animals and the menagerie is
not sleeping at nights. The straight-out-middle-of-the-road Pop-
ulists are demanding a Bryan-Watson electoral ticket." A stir-
ring call for a mid-road convention of Watson-Populists was is-
sued from Topeka by a former candidate for governor and a
former candidate for chief justice. It read, in part :

Brothers: — The trafficking office hunters who have secured control of
the People's party organization have entered into a shameless bargain
with the Democratic party of Kansas, trading oil our principles and our
candidate for vice president, Thomas E. Watson ... for tie sake of a
chance to capture the state and Congressional offices of Kansas.

It called upon loyal Populists to rally to the cause of principles
and Tom Watson "in preference to the traitors and office hunt-
ers." 40 The Breidenthal faction refused to give way before the
revolt, and Watson left the state with the issue between the
two wings still undecided.

Still without a word of recognition from Bryan, Watson en-
tered the Nebraskan's home state to campaign for him. The
opening words of his speech at Lincoln brought mid-road Popu-
lists to their feet: "I am not here to make a little two by four
silver speech. (Applause.) I am a Populist from my head to my
heels. (Loud applause and cheering.) I am not ashamed of my
cause nor afraid to unfold my banner anywhere and fight un-
der it." He proceeded to reaffirm the important Populist prin-
ciples omitted from Bryan's Democratic platform, and made an
appeal for a sectional alliance between West and South : "Your
interests are agricultural just like ours. ... A community of
interest ought to make a community of principle." tt The speech
was printed in full by the New York World, which pronounced
it Watson's greatest. It was highly praised in Nebraska. The
mid-road Populists, who had not been able to carry the state
convention for a Bryan-Watson ticket against the fusionists, held
a convention of their own after the Georgian's visit and en-
dorsed such a ticket. 42

In commenting upon the assistance he gave Bryan in Ne-
braska in 1896, Watson later remarked that it was the only time

40 Clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

41 T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 160-172.

42 Appleton's Annual Encyclopedia, 1896, pp. 505-506.

278

The Debacle of i8g6

that perennial candidate was ever able to carry his own state. 43
Bryan continued to ignore his running-mate, however, without
acknowledging his assistance in the West. It was not until ten
years had passed that he apologized and explained :

As I did not know that any representation had been made with regard to
withdrawing Sewall, I did not of course know of your disappointment
and I knew nothing of the pressure brought to bear upon you by the Popu-
lists. I appreciated the aid you rendered in the western states and I should
have thanked you. . . . The situation which we had to meet in '96 was a
very trying one and in looking back upon it I think it is surprising that as
few mistakes were made as were. 44

Although he had invitations to speak in seven Western states,
Watson filled only a few more engagements in Nebraska and
Colorado before returning to Georgia. He returned with the
realization that he had failed to halt the stampede of Western
fusionists to board the Bryan bandwagon. He admitted in his
editorial columns that his written protests to Chairman Butler
against his fusion policy had been ignored, and said that his po-
sition had been "humiliating and embarrassing," and that he
had "been compelled to submit to policies he did not approve." 45

Shortly after the Western trip he issued a public statement,
widely quoted, which the New York World pronounced "the
most important political utterance of the campaign." It was, in
effect, a warning to the Democratic managers that fusion had
failed to "fuse." From county tickets up to the Presidency, he
said, "the science of politics has been reduced to the good old
business of, 'How much have you got?' and 'What will you
take?' " Principles had been flung to the wind. He continued:

The menace that endangers Mr. Bryan's success to-day is the profound
dissatisfaction which exists among the humble, honest, earnest Populists
who have built up the People's party.

Through storms of abuse and ridicule these men have fought the battles
of Populism, preached its gospel, paid its expenses and followed its progress
with the hopeful devotion of the Israelite who followed the pillar of fire
through the nights of dreary trial. Deep down in the hearts of men who
want no office and hunger for no pie, is settling the conviction that they
have been tricked, sold out, betrayed, misled. . . .

48 T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, p. x8.
^William J. Bryan to T. E. W., Jan. 24, 1907.
45 P. P. P., Oct. 2, 1896.

279

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

If my statement is true, is it important? To the Democratic "fusionist"
it may not appear so. He comforts his patriotic soul with the assurance that
the deal has been made, and that the people cannot unmake it. Perhaps so,
but the voter can stay at home; and if the Populist voters stay at home,
who is to elect Mr. Bryan ?

This is not said in any threatening spirit and antagonism.

The Populist voters are dissatisfied and suspicious. . . . They feel
that the principles they love are being used as political merchandise and
that the Populist vote is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. They
suspect that Populism has been bought and paid for, and is now being
delivered to those who bought it. . . .

If McKinley is elected the responsibility will forever rest upon those
managers who had it in their power to control by fair means 2,000,000
votes and lost them by violating the terms of the compact. 46

The World found his warning "all the more impressive from
the fact that he has, in letter, speech and editorial warmly
praised and loyally supported Mr. Bryan." It believed that if he
was correct, "Mr. Bryan's only chance is gone." James Creelman
quoted Watson as declaring in an interview: "I'd lay my head
on the block before I'd retire from the race to make way for a
plutocrat, a bondholder, a national banker and protectionist like
Mr. Sewall. ... I have been shamefully treated but I am not
afraid to do my duty. . . . The whole Populist campaign has
been mismanaged. It is outrageous. Georgia and Texas refused
fusion. We pointed the way, but North Carolina, Kansas and
Colorado failed ... If they too, had put Bryan and Watson
tickets in the field, Mr. Sewall would have had to get out." 4T

It had been repeatedly predicted by relatively disinterested
observers that Sewall would be taken off the Democratic ticket
after the Maine state election. That event did nothing to dis-
credit the prophets who said he would not carry his own pre-
cinct, that his nomination was an "illogical mistake," a "dead-
weight upon the ticket." Much was made of the report that
Sewall's son campaigned against him. It was perhaps not with-
out significance that Watson's letter of notification was dated
September 14, the date of the Maine election. There followed a
flurry of conciliatory activities among the Democratic managers.
Senator Tillman of the Democratic National Committee came
straight to Thomson from a New York meeting of Bryan and

46

New York World, Sept. 28, 1896.
47 New York World, Oct. 5, 1896.

280

The Debacle of i8g6

other committeemen, which Sewall had not attended. Tillman
and Watson were closeted together for twelve hours. Watson's
"warning" to Senator Jones renewed the cry of "No Watson, no
Bryan" among the mid-roaders, and there followed more secret
visits of Democratic managers to Thomson. Captain Evan P.
Howell, who came with "several telegrams from Chairman
Jones," was one of Watson's visitors. 48 Nothing came of these
conferences that was announced. The New York Tribune, how-
ever, quoted a "Prominent Democrat" to the effect that Tillman
had offered Watson a cabinet position if he would retire from
the race, and that Watson "flatly refused."

Chairman Butler postponed from week to week a formal de-
mand upon the Democratic managers to withdraw Sewall in ac-
cordance with the alleged contract at St. Louis, although he ad-
mitted that the Democrats had expected the demand to be made
earlier. 49 When the demand was finally made, the Democrats
knew that it came from men who had already approved several
state fusion bargains, whereby Populists had agreed to support
Sewall in exchange for local offices. Their demand, therefore,
could only be regarded as a formality, and it was not surprising
that Chairman Jones, according to Butler's report, "declined
absolutely, unqualifiedly and emphatically to consent to the re-
tirement of Mr. Sewall upon any ground." 60 There was con-
siderable room for Watson's complaint of the "outrageous man-
agement of his campaign. It is only fair, however, to recall that
Chairman Butler was in an extremely difficult position. He was
dealing with an uncompromising idealist.

As the election approached, the People's Party Paper printed
news of the withdrawal of the Bryan- Watson ticket in state after
state. Those Southern states that held out against fusion were
met with the most adamant refusal of concessions on the part of
Democratic machines. Several resorted to fusion with Republi-
cans and Gold Democrats. Alabama and North Carolina
achieved the reductio ad absurdum of fusion by combining with
the Republicans in the state election and with the Democrats in

48 E. P. Howell to T. E. W., Oct. 17, 1896, Watson MSS.; Atlanta Commercial,
Oct. 23, 1896; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

49 Marion Butler to H. W. Reed, Aug. 15, 1896, Watson MSS.

50 Marion Butler to T. E. W., Oct. 15, 1896.

28l

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the national ticket. 51 Remarked Watson: "Suppose I were to go
into North Carolina to speak. What could I say? I could only
repeat the Ten Commandments, say the Lord's Prayer and dis-
miss the congregation." 52

The arrangement of the electoral ticket between Populists
and Democrats in Georgia long hung fire. The state election in
early October, accompanied by as much bitterness, violence, and
fraud as any previous election, did not serve to increase the love
between the parties. A decline in the Populist vote from that of
the previous election served to stiffen the resistance of the old
party managers to Populist demand that the entire vote of the
state be given to Bryan and Watson. The Watsonites decreased
their demand from seven to six of the thirteen electors, but con-
tinued to insist that all thirteen cast their votes for Watson.
Watson would not yield another inch. Although there was con-
siderable Democratic sympathy for him as u the worst treated
man in America," and several old-party leaders wanted to give
him all Georgia's votes, a majority of the committee voted for
the resolution that condemned u the unreasonable and unjust
ultimatum of the Populist committee, clothed as it is in offensive
and unbecoming language." 63 Whereupon, the Populist commit-
tee voted to withdraw the Bryan-Watson Presidential ticket
entirely. It was denied that Watson actively opposed the with-
drawal, but he did resolutely oppose the alternative proposal —
fusion with Republicans — declaring that he had "rather lose an
arm than see it." At any rate, there was no longer any way in
which a Tom-Watson-Georgia-Populist could vote for Tom
Watson. And this was the crowning affliction of all the multitudi-
nous afflictions that fell upon the head of the Populist Job.

His last words of advice to his followers before the election
were : "I am out of the race in Georgia. There are two tickets
you can vote — for Bryan and Sewall, or for McKinley and Ho-
bart; or if you can't stand either you can stay away from the
election next Tuesday and not vote at all." Upon the last words
of this benediction a solemn voice responded "Amen I" M

61 Florence Smith, op. cit., pp. 138-155; Appleton's Annual Encyclopedia, 1896,
pp. zo-zz.

62 Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 3Z, Z896.

63 Ibid., Oct. 2z, Z896; P. P. P., Oct. 30, Z896; Atlanta Commercial, Oct. 23,
Z896; A. M. Arnett, op. cit., pp. 209-2 zo.

54 Augusta Chronicle, Oct. 3Z, Z896.

282

The Debacle of 1896

On October 16 the Washington Morning Times carried a car-
toon on its front page representing Chairman Jones cavorting
with glee as he read the news: "The condition of Mr. Watson's
throat will prevent his making any more speeches in this cam-
paign." He was spotted by reporters while passing through At-
lanta on his way home and plied with questions. "I have nothing
to say," he repeated in a hoarse voice. "I have nothing to say."
"If he feels that insult has been heaped upon injury by the ac-
tion of his people in Georgia by withdrawing the electoral ticket
against his advice he will not say so," remarked one paper. "He
has been deserted by his friends," commented another. 55

It was in a mood induced by this set of circumstances that
Watson sat down to compose his belated letter of acceptance. As
a document it is interesting mainly as the obituary of Populism
written by its chief mourner, and addressed to one whom he con-
sidered a conspirator in its demise. Senator Butler refused to
publish it, and it did not appear until after the election. Watson
explained briefly that he accepted "solely because of my promise
to do so." He stated briefly why he had promised to accept. Then
he continued:

To all unprejudiced and manly men, regardless of party, I submit the
statement that never before has any party, so badly needed as ours, been
so badly treated. Invited to come to the help of the helpless Democracy,
we have received no generous recognition from those who appealed to us,
and whose appeal we heard. We did not go to them for aid — they came to
us. . . . In other words, Populism is allowed to furnish all the campaign
principles, all the self-sacrifice and patriotism, and the two million votes
which the Democrats need, but they are not to be allowed to furnish a
candidate for either place on the ticket ... it appears the Democratic
managers would be willing to make a sacrifice of both Bryan and silver, if
they can but destroy Populism. . . .

For this attitude upon the part of the Democratic managers I believe that
you, Senator, are largely responsible.

You made no effort to have me recognized. You publicly stated that I
would not be notified of my nomination. You went into the fusion policy,
over my written protest, with all the zeal of a man who intended to elect
the Democratic ticket. . . .

Senator, a reform party has no right to exist if it has no valid complaint
to make. Populists cannot denounce the sins of the two old parties, and
yet go into political copartnership with them. The moment we make a
treaty the war must cease . . . and when we cease our war upon the two

88 Constitution, Oct. 24, 1896.

283

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

old parties, we have no longer any excuse for living. ... If we represent
nothing but a contest of the "outs" against the "ins," we are a lot of
humbugs, parading as reformers, and we deserve the contempt of all good
people. . . .

By listening to the overtures of the Democratic managers our party
has been torn into factions, our leaders deceived and ensnared, and the
cause we represent permanently endangered, if not lost. The labor of many
years is swept away, and the hopes of thousands of good people are gone
with it. 66

The election returns provided ample documentation for his
letter. The party that two years before had polled close to two
million votes gave its candidate for Vice-President some 217,000
votes distributed through seventeen states. He received twenty-
seven electoral votes from the following states: Arkansas, 3;
Louisiana, 4; Missouri, 4; Montana, 1; Nebraska, 4; North
Carolina, 5 ; South Dakota, 2 ; Utah, 1 ; Washington, 2 ; and
Wyoming, 1. A Democratic-Populist fusion for the electoral
vote was arranged in twenty-eight states. 67 The figures are of no
value whatever as an indication of Watson's strength as a candi-
date, or of his party's strength in numbers, but they do richly il-
lustrate the ruin that fusion wrought with Populism.

Bryan lost five states west of the Mississippi and four south of
Mason and Dixon's Line. It has been computed that a change of
1 9»436 votes in California, Oregon, Kentucky, North Dakota,
West Virginia, and Indiana would have given him the election.
Kentucky was lost by 142 votes. 68 In view of these figures, Wat-
son's contention that the Democratic managers "lost the case be-
cause they violated the St. Louis compact," that "they sacrificed
Bryan in the effort to destroy Populism," is interesting. Ken-
tucky Populists voted 23,500 strong in 1892, and he believed
Indiana Populists represented at least 28,000 votes. But in each
state, "with true Bourbon bullheadedness the Democrats tried to
bulldoze the middle-of-the-roaders, instead of conciliating them,
and the result was a smash-up — in which Bryan lost the state." 59
Because of the complexity of influences that played upon the
election, however, it is impossible to estimate the value of Wat-
son's contention.

56 p. P. P., Nov. 13, 1896.

67 F. L. Haynes, Third Party Movements, p. 300.

58 Wayne C. Williams, William Jennings Bryan, p. 193.

59 T. E. W., Political and Economic Handbook, pp. 458-460.

284

The Debacle of 1896

In the first issue of his paper to appear after the election, he
discussed with utmost frankness the degradation of Populism :

Our party, as a party, does not exist any more. Fusion has well nigh
killed it. . . . Fusionists sold the national candidate of the People's Party
for the highest price they could get in each state, and the result is that
while the fusionists have succeeded in getting some local pie, the national
organization is almost dead. . . .

Divided into three factions, in this way, National Populism is almost
a dead letter — as a party organization. The sentiment is still there, the
votes are still there, but confidence is gone, and the party organization
is almost gone. . . . Hence the fusionist had better make the most of his
pie, because he will never again have another national nominee to sell. 60

The loudest mourning that was done in 1896 was over the
fallen Silver Knight. Bryan's apparently meteoric rise, the over-
night conversion of Democracy to pseudo-Populism, and the fan-
fare of the campaign had all occupied the brief space of four
months. During that time the fate of Populism was forgotten.
Its passing was the concern of few ; yet in its passing lay the real
significance of 1896. Populism, not the falsely regenerate De-
mocracy of Bryan, furnished the backbone of agrarian resur-
gence, and in 1896 that backbone was broken. Only a Tom Wat-
son Populist could appreciate the irony of Bryan's phrase, "The
First Battle." In 1896 agrarian provincialism made its last ag-
gressive stand against capitalist industrialism. In the West the
movement renewed its vitality to some extent in Progressivism.
It underwent several resurrections in the South — to which the
subsequent career of Tom Watson was an important witness —
but the fantastic shapes it assumed are to be understood mainly
by the psychology of frustration.

There is almost enough evidence to indicate that Watson him-
self grasped the historical meaning of 1896. He could not be-
lieve that "any soldier of the Southern Confederacy carried
away from Appomattox a heavier heart than I took with me into
my enforced retirement." He thought the experience drove him
close to insanity. "Politically I was ruined," he later wrote. "Fi-
nancially I was flat on my back. How near I came to loss of
mind only God who made me knows — but I was as near distrac-
tion, perhaps, as any mortal could safely be. If ever a poor devil

60 P. P. P., Nov. 13, 1896.

285

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

had been outlawed and vilified and persecuted and misrepre-
sented and howled down and mobbed and threatened until he
was well nigh mad, I was he." 61

61 T. E. W., in Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. X (Oct., 1910), p. 818;
Atlanta Journal, Aug. 11, 1906.

286

18

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

After the debacle of 1896, Tom Watson became virtually
JTjl. a political recluse for a period that lasted eight years. Be-
gun when he was barely forty, an age at which the average poli-
tician only begins to enjoy the fruits of his apprenticeship, his
enforced retirement constitutes a remarkable interlude in an
otherwise active career. It was a period about which, although he
was wont to expand upon his tribulations, he had little to say in
later years. When he did refer to it, he did so briefly and always
in the same mood. In 19 10 he wrote, "What I suffered in those
awful years is known to none but the wife who shared my lot
and the God Who gave me strength to endure it."

Partly the period was filled with prolific writing, and partly
by a thriving law practice. Six years of unremunerative political
agitation had plunged him into debt, and it was to law rather
than to letters that he first turned to mend his fortunes. 1 Early in
1897 it was reported that "the lawyers of middle Georgia are
very generally complaining that they cannot secure a conviction
of a man charged with murder." This was attributed to no gen-
eral indifference to the value of human life, but to the fact that
Watson was again "professionally at large" and stood in the
way of prosecuting attorneys. 2

Toward his party and its leadership he continued to maintain
the position outlined in his remarkable Letter of Acceptance.
Asked to say how Populism fared, he insisted upon a division of
the question. "If you mean the organization," he said, "I must
answer that it is in a bad way." For the price of a few offices the

1 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, Aug. 15, 1909; personal account books.
2 Augusta Herald, April 6, 1897.

287

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

party had been sold to the Democrats, whose possession of it was
secure as long as the fusionists who enjoyed those offices re-
tained their grip upon party machinery. "It would be a very con-
temptible person," he said, "who would accept our national nom-
ination in 1900, knowing from the experience of this campaign
[1896] that Butler will trade him off in North Carolina, Brei-
denthal & Co., in Kansas, Pattison in Colorado, etc." There was
only one way to resurrect the People's party: that was to "reor-
ganize from the ground up, and rigidly exclude from. control
every leader tainted with Fusion." That herculean task, he im-
plied, was not for him. 8

"If, on the other hand," he continued, "you mean to ask me
how goes it with the Principles of Populism, I say to you that
they never commanded more respect, never met with the ap-
proval of a larger proportion of you fellow citizens, than they
do to-day [1898]." He was able, even at that time, to list an im-
pressive number of reforms, both state and national, that were
clearly Populist in doctrine. That list was to grow as the years
passed. It was certainly in a moment of inspired optimism, how-
ever, that he put forth the following dubious claims for Popu-
lism :

It has smashed party ties right and left. It has broken the idols of the
market place in a manner beautiful to behold. It has well nigh abolished
the party lash. It has utterly abolished social ostracism for political opinion's
sake. No citizen any longer hesitates to take sides with any party he likes,
or to vote for any candidate he prefers. The day of political persecution is
over — even in the South — and Populism did it ! 4

He continued to keep a hand in the People's Party Paper for
some time, and to proclaim himself a life-long Populist, "unre-
pentant and unreconstructed." Though advocating the over-
throw of the fusionist leaders of the party, he took no part in
the prolonged and futile four-year struggle of insurgent mid-
roaders to recapture the party machinery from the grasp of fu-
sionists. Ignoring his many protests, the state convention of
Georgia Populists named Watson their candidate for governor
in the spring of 1898. The nomination was made with splendid

8 P. P. P., Nov. 13, 1896, and Nov. 19, 1898; Life and Speeches of Thomas E.
Watson, p. 175.

4 Ibid., Nov. 20, 1896; Life and Speeches of T. E. W., pp. 178-179; T. E. W.,
in Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. V (Oct., 1910), pp. 817-819.

288

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

enthusiasm and urged upon him with persistence. 6 He could not
be persuaded to accept it. National events of that spring com-
pleted his discouragement. u The Spanish War finished us," he
later wrote. "The blare of the bugle drowned the voice of the
Reformer." 6 He not only refused the nomination, but ended
his connection with the paper and withdrew from public life en-
tirely.

Perhaps none of his contemporaries, and certainly none of the
Populists, read more accurately than Tom Watson the meaning
of "the splendid little war" upon Spain. Populist congressmen
were vying with Republicans and Democrats in demonstrating
their patriotism. "Bryan stuck a feather in his cap," scoffed Wat-
son, "and vowed that he, too, would become a soldier in spite of
those vile guns." While the War was still in progress he ad-
dressed his party comrades in a speech at his home. Some of his
remarks were a repetition of the arguments he used against the
armament appropriation in the House six years before. "Who
gets the benefit of the war?" he asked. He answered his question
at length: the bond-seekers, the capitalists, the railroads, and
further :

National bankers will profit by this war. The new bonds give them
the basis for new banks, and their power is prolonged.

The privileged classes all profit by this war. It takes the attention of
the people off economic issues, and perpetuates the unjust system they have
put upon us.

Politicians profit by the war. It buries issues they dare not meet.

What do the people get out of this war? The fighting and the taxes.

What was the United States doing in this war with Spain in
the first place, he wished to know. True, Spain was oppressing
Cuba. But so was England oppressing Ireland, Egypt, and In-
dia; France was oppressing Siam and Madagascar; Turkey was
oppressing Armenia. Should we then take up arms against the
oppressors of the world? We would more likely end by becom-
ing oppressors ourselves. "The Spaniards and Cubans were bush-
whacking one another, and killing from three to five men at a
battle. We have gone down there and killed more men in three
months than they would have killed in thirteen years. If they
were starving before, who feeds them now?" And finally,

5 P. P. P., March 18, 1898.

6 Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. V (Oct., 1910), p. 817.

289

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

What are we going to get out of this war as a nation? Endless trouble,
complications, expense. Republics cannot go into the conquering business
and remain republics. Militarism leads to military domination, military
despotism.

Imperialism smooths the way for the emperor. 7

"Loathing the war," he said later, "foreseeing many of the
evil consequences that it has brought upon us, I quit the active
agitation of Populism, and shut myself up in my library to write
books."

The retreat to his library, as he saw it, did not represent es-
cape from the task to which he had dedicated his life. There he
proposed to advocate "the same eternal principles of human lib-
erty and justice and good government in historical works" that
he had preached from the stump. He would, in other words,
write populist history. On February 17, 1898, he signed a con-
tract with The Macmillan Company for the publishing of The
Story of France, to appear in two large volumes. 8 The manu-
script of the first volume, of more than seven hundred pages,
was completed in November.

The origin of Watson's Story of France is to be sought in the
columns of the People's Party Paper, where, during the battles
of the early 'nineties, he printed, when space permitted, sketches
of episodes from French and Roman history. These sketches
were preeminent examples of "history for a purpose." Yet they
were pungent and original and rarely failed to carry home their
point. Caesars and Bourbons were dealt with in the same vigor-
ous prose, and in the same irreverent manner in which he dealt
with Democrats and plutocrats in the adjacent editorial column.
His people should not lack for heroes and villains, past as well
as present. These sketches were altered somewhat and published
in Atlanta in 1896 in a thin volume bearing the same title as his
later work. The larger work, though much more dignified and
restrained in style, still bore a family resemblance to the polemic
sketches.

His history was written largely from secondary materials to-
gether with accessible memoirs and autobiographies. He did all
his work at home, purchasing such works as he used for his own

7 Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 180-182.

8 Watson MSS., Chapel Hill.

290

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

library, which at one time contained over 10,000 volumes. He
took great pride in his collection, pronouncing it the largest per-
sonal library in the South. 9 Such sources as he did use were not
used uncritically. On the other hand, his statements that he
wrote 6,000 words in one Sunday morning, that frequently the
pen proved "all too slow to follow the burning thought," and
that "many a time the page was blotted with tears" give an in-
sight into his methods. Passionate history written at such a pace
could not be free from blunders. Exploded theories, discredited
sources, and exaggerations mar his pages — along with the tears.
The Seine was "choked with bodies" and France was "devas-
tated" with appalling frequency; while the villainies of the
Church, the iniquities of feudalism, and the darkness of the
Dark Ages stagger credulity.

Much criticism is, however, forestalled by a statement in the
Preface to The Story of France. "To mark the encroachments of
absolutism upon popular rights," he explains, "to describe the
long-continued struggle of the many to throw off the yoke of
the few, to emphasize the corrupting influence of the union be-
tween Church and State, to illustrate once more the blighting
effects of superstition, ignorance, blind obedience, unjust laws,
confiscation under the disguise of unequal taxes, and the sys-
tematic plunder, year by year, of the weaker classes by the
stronger, have been the motives which led me to undertake this
work. May it bear fruit." He thought of his book as "aggres-
sively radical in its plea for oppressed humanity." 10

It was popular history, history for the common man, history
with a purpose. As such it meets admirably the demands made
upon it. His style is vivid, crisp, and moves with dramatic power,
particularly in the narration of mass movements. He is at his
best when writing of a figure or event with which he can identify
himself, whether it is Peter the Hermit, Joan of Arc, Voltaire,
or Marat. Consciously he strives to keep before himself and his
reader the mass life of the nation as his central theme, and a
Jacobin passion informs his judgments. Woe to that fame, how-
ever heroic and celebrated, which was earned by trampling upon

9 Now partly in possession of Judge Uly O. Thomson, Miami, Fla., who kindly
permitted the author to use the library.

10 T. E. W., Sketches, p. 164.

291

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the masses. He belabors the Caesarism of Carlyle, the "hysteri-
cal accounts of royalist writers," and the reactionary legislation
of William Pitt.

The first volume carries the account to the end of the reign of
Louis XV, while the second, to which the first might be said to
serve as an introduction, devotes its more than one thousand
pages to the Revolution down to the First Consulate. It was the
Revolution that absorbed Watson's interest, and for him the key
to its complex maze was his radical-republican doctrine. While
he was too near the Confederacy to detect the pseudo-classical
posturing of the Men of '89, he had a sharp eye for the rogue
and an instinct for the intricacies of class contradiction. It was
true that he was prone to express a somewhat indiscriminate en-
thusiasm for revolutionists, whatever their stripe. Yet he discov-
ered the bourgeois joker in the Girondin program. It was de-
signed "only for the good, the educated, the genteel. They were
not in touch with the masses. Their republic was too much of an
abstraction." His admiration for Danton, "something of the
grand gentleman of the masses," is admitted, but he respects the
incorruptible Marat and defends Robespierre. He makes a real-
istic and penetrating study of the Terror, and eloquently de-
fends the Jacobins in page after page of praise for their legisla-
tive accomplishments. Here Populism achieves triumphs in the
study that it never attained at the polls. "If they were not states-
men, if they were not mailed knights in the long, hard battle of
civilization, who are those who deserve the name?" he asks. 11
Especially he admires the Jacobin Law of the Maximum. It is
his conviction that "wherever the valiant soldiers of progress
wage battle for humanity's sake, there the better spirit of the
Jacobin strives." **

Needless to say, many more strictures than have been men-
tioned could be made upon this work. All things considered,
however — its origin, and the unusual circumstances of its crea-
tion — it would seem of more importance to underscore its vir-
tues. Moreover, this was a day when the tradition of the states-
man as historian flourished. The Story of France does not suffer
in comparison with other products of that tradition.

The first volume appeared in January, 1899, the second in the

11 The Story of France, Vol. II, pp. 840-849.

12 Ibid., pp. 955-973.

292

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

latter part of the same year. The publisher complained of a
"conspiracy of silence" against the book among the New York
reviews. One of the great dailies, he said, announced before the
book appeared that it "did not care to review it." Another at
first refused to print an advertisement of it, and then made its
appearance the occasion of a "personal attack upon the author
and the publisher." 13 Looking back over the reviews today,
however, one is more struck by their generosity, their willing-
ness to make allowances, indeed the extravagant praise of some
of them rather than by the partisanship of a few. From the su-
perlatives of the New York Evening Journal, which proclaimed
it "the best history ever written by an American," to the sober
strictures of the learned journals, there seemed to exist a preva-
lent disposition to judge the work upon the terms suggested in
the author's Preface. As one example, the Dial admitted that
"His aggressive truth-telling makes French history superlatively
realistic, and his fertile mind, keen wit, and dramatic power
combine to make a story of absorbing interest." It protested,
however, against his "working upon the feelings of the reader
with the weapons of the emotional evangelist." 14

The book enjoyed a remarkable popular success. It sold some
fifty thousand copies while in the hands of The Macmillan Com-
pany, and then went through several editions after it was pur-
chased by the author's press. 15 A posthumous edition was
published by a third company in 1926. The book was also well
received in London.

At the request of his publishers, Watson laid aside the con-
tract he had signed with them for the preparation of a popular
history of the United States in order to exploit the popularity of
The Story of France with another volume on French history.
This was to be done through a biography of Napoleon. 16 Begun

13 George P. Brett (President of Macmillan Co.) to Clark Howell, Feb. 15, 1899,
Watson MSS.

"^Annals of the American Academy, XV, pp. 466-477; American Historical Re-
view, Vol. IV (1888-1889), pp. 586-587; Dial, Vol. XXVIII (1916), p. 1167; ex-
cerpts from other reviews in W. W. Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 286-
287.

15 Royalty statements from Macmillan to Watson, Watson papers. Watson bought
the copyrights in 191 1.

18 For reviews of Napoleon, see Nation, Vol. LXXIV (1902), p. 490; Atheneum,
Vol. I (1902), p. 562.

293

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

early in 1899, the work was published in February, 1902, under
the title, Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles,
and Achievements, a volume of over seven hundred pages.

In style, in method, and in general character, this work dif-
fers but little from the previous volumes. In fundamental atti-
tude of author to subject, and in basic ideology, however, there
exists a subtle but pervasive difference between the history and
the biography. The change is elusive, and the author would
have been the first to deny it. It exists, nevertheless, and for the
purpose of understanding Tom Watson and Tom- Watson Popu-
lism the difference is worth exploring.

In the first place the book was a labor of love. "It seems to
me," he once wrote, u that there was never a time when Napo-
leon was not a part of my life and thought." From the time his
grandfather had presented him with the Reverend John S. C.
Abbott's Napoleon when he was nine that figure had quite pos-
sessed his imagination. He "knew no better than to devour that
marvelous romance with all a boy's eager delight and unques-
tioning faith . . . the unalloyed goodness of Napoleon, the un-
sullied virtue of Josephine, and the unrelieved depravity of
Napoleon's foes." The reading of many books gradually dis-
pelled the myth, but "interest never flagged." Identification with
his hero was easy enough: the impoverished, under-sized, in-
tensely proud school boy with his overweening patriotism for
despised and conquered Corsica. "Always, Napoleon has had a
friend in me," he once said. "When the rich boys made fun of
him at college, my own little fist would double up, ready to help
him fight." 1T From a naive childhood identification it is no great
step to the biographer's attitude :

As long as time shall last, the inspiration of the poor and the ambitious
will be the Ajaccio lawyer's son: not Alexander, the born king; not
Caesar, the patrician; but Napoleon, the moneyless lad from despised
Corsica, who stormed the high places of the world, and by his own colossal
strength of character, genius, and industry took them ! **

Moreover, that name should inspire "not only the individual,
but the masses also." For wherever it was agreed that "monop-
oly of power, patronage, wealth, or opportunity is wrong, there

17 T. E. W., "How I Came to Write a Life of Napoleon," Prose Miscellanies, pp.
75-86.
"^Napoleon, p. 13.

294

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

the name of Napoleon will be spoken with reverence, despot
though he became, for in his innermost fibre he was a man of
the people, crushing to atoms feudalism, castes, divine rights,
and hereditary imposture."

That Napoleons make perilous heroes for Jacobins seemed to
be one of the implied lessons of his history of the Revolution.
Yet under the spell of the great megalomaniac's history he
seemed to have forgotten his own lesson. In the biography one
gradually loses sight of the unprincipled tyrant of The Story of
France, who "devoted Frenchmen to wars of selfish ambition,
and swindled them out of the 'Principles of the Revolution.' " 19
One's eye is too much filled with "Napoleon the Great." It is
true that Watson readily admits that the Corsican was "a colos-
sal mixture of the good and the bad," that "a more contradic-
tory mortal never lived," and that Napoleon's treatment of
Poland presents "a sorry picture." "The anti-Bonaparte biogra-
phers," however, provoke in him wrath and heated retorts. 20
For an outspoken opponent of American militarism and impe-
rialism he seems strangely serene in the presence of "bleaching
bones on battle-fields," and strangely jubilant over the onward
march of Napoleon's eagles. As an outstanding advocate of ini-
tiative, referendum, recall, and popular election of all officers,
he seems reconciled with remarkable ease to the collapse of a re-
public, and the rise of an emperor — "the necessary man without
whom they might relapse into chaotic conditions." 21 While he
gazes, transfixed by the splendor of Napoleon, the money-
changers creep into the temple of French democracy, unchal-
lenged, indeed unobserved, by Watson. One has the feeling
upon closing the book that an author who can use the term, "the
great Democratic despot," without consciousness of paradox is
reconciled to a union of Caesarism and democracy.

In a different connection Watson once wrote : "There is not a
railway king of the present day, not a single self-made man who
has risen from the ranks to become chief in the vast movement
of capital and labor, who will not recognize in Napoleon traits
of his own character ; the same unflagging purpose, tireless per-
sistence, silent plotting, pitiless rush to victory . . ." M Pre-

19 The Story of France, Vol. II, p. 494.

20 Napoleon, pp. 215, 373, 407, and 423.

21 Ibid., p. 331.

22 T. E. W., "Some Impressions of Napoleon," MS., Watson papers.

295

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

cisely. But what was a Populist doing celebrating the virtues of
the self-made railway king? What was Tom Watson about in
erecting an image of capitalist acquisitiveness for his people to
worship? Could it be that the Israelites worshiped the same gods
as the Philistines ? Could it be that the only quarrel between the
two camps was over a singular disparity in the favors won?

On a fly leaf at the back of a huge ledger he used as a per-
sonal journal is to be found an elaborate drawing bearing the
subscription, "Model Southern Home. ,, The drawing is dated
1884. 23 There is some evidence of subsequent revision and idle
elaboration of detail — for in twenty years even the most cher-
ished dream may expand in magnificence. Yet in essentials the
plan remained the same. It was twenty years before it received
concrete expression in the home he bought, remodeled nearer to
his heart's desire, and named "Hickory Hill."

One recalls the lost mansion of his father, the hapless roman-
tic, John, who built his dream house (with its imposing fagade
and unplastered interior) on the unsubstantial sands of wishes
and credit — and lost it, along with his father's log house which
it screened. Here are the same imposing fluted columns, four
towering ones with Ionic capitals of plaster, supporting the gable
of a portico two-and-a-half stories high. Under it, at the second
story, is a balcony, and around almost three sides of the wide
girth of the house runs an open veranda, partly balustraded. In
style as well as in name, Hickory Hill suggests Jackson's Her-
mitage rather than Jefferson's Monticello: the grandiloquent
pretentiousness of a later Southern tradition, rather than the
chaste graciousness of an earlier.

Set upon a knoll, the house dominates a wide plot thickly
grown with trees, many of which Watson selected for their vari-
ety and transplanted. Up from the road to the pillared portico
ascends a broad concrete walk, interrupted midway by the great
basin of a fountain (faintly reminiscent of Versailles) lit from
each side by ornate wrought-iron electric lamps. Other walks
skirt through grape arbor, orchard, and summer house. Nor

23 MS. Journal 2.
296

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

was expense spared upon the interior, with its imported Italian
marbles for the fireplaces. "Every detail bespeaks the cul-
ture and refinement of the typical Southern gentleman" — so
thought a guest whom Watson was pleased to have write an in-
troduction to one of his books. 24 It seems apparent that he was
not unwilling to be thought of in such terms. In one of his many
asides in his book on Jefferson he wrote :

A democrat, are you ?

Of course you are; and yet, in your heart of hearts, you warm to the
old-time Cavalier who chose for his home the loveliest spot he could find,
reared a costlier house than he could afford, made it as attractive as he
knew how, christened it with some pet name of fond association — and
then threw open its wide doors, and said to all the world: "Come sit
by my hearth, come eat at my table; my house was not built for myself
alone. . . ."

Does such a house speak no word of inspiration to the son? Does it
awaken in him no sense of consecration? Does it lift no high standard
of conduct before his eyes? Does it impose no solemn obligations . . . ?
Has such a house no meaning which thrills the very soul ? 25

The years following 1896 seem to have been prosperous
ones for Watson. At the end of 1904 he placed his "financial
standing" at the figure $121,000, more than double the estimate
he gave for the former date. As a "rough estimate" $70,000 of
this was invested in land — rather a low figure for some 9,000
acres of his several plantations. An estimate not his own men-
tions "$300,000 worth of cotton lands in Georgia," and another
held him "the operator of more plows than any individual farm
owner in Georgia." His own tenant rolls list forty-four names of
men, presumably the heads of families. 26 His Virginia place,
"Mountain Top," was quoted at $15,000, and an enthusiastic
caretaker believed that his island, Las Olas, on the Atlantic coast
of Florida, "could be sold for $50,000" for it was "the prettiest
place in all the world — the natural scenery and tropical groth
[sic] is simply a dream." 27

Life at Hickory Hill had about it the spacious freedom of the
plantation "big-house," and there was much of the ante-bellum

24 Charles Bayne, "Introduction" to Watson's Sketches, pp. v-vi.

25 T. E. W., The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson, pp. 170-172.

26 Personal account books and tenant rolls, Watson papers ; undated clippings, one
by James Creelman in 1905.

27 O. S. Lee to T. E. W., Sept. 7, 1906; unsigned letter, Charlottesville, Va., to
T. E. W., Aug. 12, 1907.

297

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

flavor (rather more encouraged than not) in its privileged "fam-
ily Negroes," its bounteous tables, and its tradition of hospital-
ity. The place took its tone, however, from the master of the
manor. That meant a certain amount of decorum. There were
well-understood rules about the sanctity of the study in which he
spent long hours. The dinner table, virtually the only place the
family saw its reclusive head with any regularity, had its par-
ticular code — that had better be observed. An uncorseted secre-
tary did not go unreproved, and freedom in manners was not
encouraged. However much of a "man of the people" there was
about Tom Watson, there was a pretty well-recognized point be-
yond which familiarity did not venture, even among his inti-
mates. That had always been true, and the grand isolation of
Hickory Hill tended to call attention to the trait. A poor rela-
tion was heard to remark that "Cud'n Tom has studied about
French kings so much that he has taken to acting like them."

His notorious irritation at noises became legendary in the
community, and innumerable stories that illustrate it still go the
rounds. A pair of mischievous little granddaughters could gener-
ally count on a handful of coins flung from the study window to
bribe them into silence. A peacock that squawked out of turn was
unceremoniously beheaded. Neighbors received fabulous offers
for bellowing cows and loud-throated roosters, and aspiring
young pianists were encouraged to develop their talents in dis-
tant lands. Neighbor West, he swore, bursting out of his study
in a rage, was clanging his farm bell with the premeditated pur-
pose of annoying Tom Watson. His love for music, on the other
hand, led him to spend much time in the music room, which con-
tained two pianos, a phonograph, and an old music box. He took
up his fiddle now and again, and later on spent many patient
evenings after dinner teaching his granddaughters to waltz. An
evening of music could move him so deeply that it sometimes
changed his mood for days.

Besides a graciousness of manner that charmed his guests and
a zestful imagination that captured the affections of his family,
those who knew him best are eager to explain in him "a certain
quality of tenderness." The difficulty in understanding it lay in
the equal presence of quite antithetical traits. The very individ-
uals whom he most longed to bind to him, and who were often
drawn to him by this quality of tenderness, were as frequently

298

Of Revolution and 'Revolutionists

repelled by opposite qualities. The psychological tragedy of his
life was just this misfortune. He described it himself earlier : the
misfortune of a spirit that, "proud of its own isolation, magnifies
its own defects . . . retires within itself and imagines that all
others are more fortunate, more deserving and more happy."
His letters to his wife are expressions of genuine devotion, even
late in her life. He is transfixed by tenderness and remorse at
the recollection of the pain he caused her by "an ugly fit of tem-
per" twenty-eight years earlier. "No man," he adds, "has ever
been more cruelly punished by his passions." 28 Between the
lines of these letters one often reads a pathetic struggle to ex-
press a tenderness that his perverse nature was eternally thwart-
ing.

No one who has explored the labyrinths of Tom Watson's
mind can be convinced that his creed and his vital motivation
were the simple products of intellectual conviction. Somewhere
back of the consuming heat of his agrarian doctrine were banked
fires of faith. Somewhere in his complex nature was hidden a
mystic. One feels that on no very citable evidence. In the search
for some tangible evidence the signs point to his agrarianism, but
lead past it to something else. A significant clue lies in his writ-
ings about nature — simple things about planting, growing, and
reaping. Unlike much of his other "literary" writings, these es-
says are usually free from sentimentality. He spent a remarkable
amount of time alone in the woods and fields, afoot and on
horseback, and the lore of forest and field at his command was
vast. His two granddaughters, who sometimes feared him,
never felt any hesitancy in rushing to meet him when he
returned from one of these tramps. They swarmed about his
legs at their game of racing to see which could first get a trou-
ser leg picked free of beggar-lice and Spanish needles. He was
always ready for fun at such times. One of his granddaughters
later wrote: "Whenever I sensed peace and harmony in him,
it seems to me, it was when he was nearest the earth." This re-
mained true even later, when peace and harmony were extremely
rare in him. 29

After his retirement from public life, "respectable" opinion in
the South gradually mellowed, then warmed to Watson. His lit-

28 T. E. W. to Mrs. Watson, Aug. 26, 1908, in possession of Georgia D. Watson.

29 Georgia D. Watson to C. V. W., July 30, 1937.

299

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

erary successes commanded considerable awe in a community
where a man of letters was a rarity. From a respectful "Colonel"
he was overnight — with scarcely a pause at "Major" — pro-
moted to "Sage" — "the Sage of Hickory Hill." It was even said
that he became "the toast of the culture and intelligence of the
State," and was "often referred to as its most distinguished citi-
zen." 30 There was a wide demand for him as a lecturer. During
the first half of 1903 he delivered some fifteen or more, at an
average of $150 a lecture. It was said that in Atlanta, Henry
Ward Beecher and Robert Ingersoll did not attract such houses
as Watson, "either in point of numbers or intellectuality." The
Augusta Chronicle, which so recently trembled before Watson
the "anarchist," now asked: "What is the secret of this wonder-
ful man's fascination, or magnetism, at all times and places.
. . . We feel that back of this man's genius and culture is the
restless beat of a warm, true, great heart." 81

His repertory of lectures included a number of subjects that
hark back directly to the days of the Populist stump speech and
the editorial writing of the 'nineties. For example, in his lecture
on "The Mission of Democracy" he denounced militarism, im-
perialism, corruption in high places, materialistic standards of
progress, concentration of wealth, "education prostituted to the
gospel of wealth and class rule," and the subsidized press and
pulpit. His remedies, too, were much the same, though he would
now expand government ownership to include coal fields, and
perhaps other natural resources. He believed "absolute free-
trade" would make trusts impossible, and the remedy in the
meantime was "control." 32

His most popular lecture, however, was that on "The South,"
or a similar one, "Is the South Glad It Lost?" It is in these lec-
tures that one first meets an important shift in ideology.

Tom Watson's agrarianism was basic (one might almost say
congenital) ; whatever other ideas and principles he professed
were superstructure, whether they were in part populist, social-
ist, or fascist. The first expression of his agrarianism, called
forth in the 'eighties by the aggressive capitalism of Henry

80 Anonymous, Forum, Vol. LVI (Nov., 1916), p. 682.

81 Augusta Chronicle, Nov. 8, 1902.

82 MS. speeches and notes, Watson MSS.

300

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

Grady, found utterance in the Confederate creed, and was in-
distinguishable from the doctrine of Robert Toombs and C. C.
Jones. 83 The South was a vanquished section exploited by its
capitalist conquerors. Caught on the crest of the wave of the Al-
liance movement, he abandoned Confederate sectionalism to
cement a union with the West. There should be "no South and
no North," only a union against a common enemy at large the
nation over. In this period he was capable of such dispassionate
analysis as that revealed in his commenting: "We of the South
are among the politically unhappy, with a great political failure,
which, like all failures, does not get that criticism of judgment
which success always commands." 34 The West-South alliance
collapsed in 1896. Thereafter he reverted for a time to the Con-
federate creed.

A grievous spell had been put upon his people, he decided.
The more he pondered the infamy of it, the more evidences he
found of its reality — everywhere between heaven and earth —
and the more intolerable it seemed to him. So long and so unani-
mously had the South been despised that Southerners themselves
had been persuaded to bow to the verdict of the majority, to
swallow pride, and meekly to accept a status of inferiority. Na-
tional literature was a conspiracy "to put our section upon the
Stool of Repentance," to keep it on "the mourner's bench," in an
"attitude of apology." "Rebels and traitors," the historians said,
and the South had become the "tolerated black-sheep of the
flock," patronized with "much charity and pardon." 35 These
things surely were beyond endurance, and while he had pen to
write and tongue to speak he would not endure them in silence.

The campaign opened along the whole front of American his-
tory. No citadel went unstormed, and above every ungarrisoned
post he hoisted the rebel flag. Away with the notion "that Plym-
outh Rock was the cornerstone of our Republic and the Pil-
grim father the sire of American Democracy." Jury trial, home
rule, representative government, the first legislative assembly,
manhood suffrage, religious toleration — he claimed them all for

38 See above, Chapter VIII.

84 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 29, 1890.

85 "The South," "Is the South Glad It Lost?" Watson MSS. The quotations that
follow are from these speeches.

301

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

the South, and flourished documents in defense of the South's
title. Nor was the Revolution "a tempest in a New England tea-
pot." "Talk about Lexington and Concord I" Their laurels he
claimed for the battle of Alamance. The first declaration of in-
dependence? Mecklenburg. The first organization as a separate
state? South Carolina. He made bold to assert on as good au-
thority that "the lordliest man that ever walked this continent
was the Virginia planter, the Southern gentleman . . . the
highest type of human grandeur." While the South dominated
the Union whoever heard of a food riot, a bread line, a Rocke-
feller, or a Gould?

The next step was a rehabilitation of the Lost Cause. "We
are quite sincere in saying," he asserted, "as we have done be-
fore, that it would have been vastly better for the South had the
Confederacy succeeded." The South had already paid a greater
war indemnity than Germany wrung from France, and half of
the South's annual cotton crop was stolen by the Northern tariff.
The day will yet come when "the Union will be split into four
grand divisions, and this hemisphere will be all the happier for
it." "ABHORRENCE at the suggestion of Southern independ-
ence?" he asked. "Pluperfect bosh! Sickening servility 1 The
quintessence of apostasy! The high-water mark of truckling
self-abasement and lick-log propitiation!" If the truth were
known, "at bottom, we don't love the North much better than
France loves Germany. How well does Ireland love England?
Get that measure of affection, and you will be mighty close to
the feeling of the South for the North."

Moreover, the South was as much a subject section of this
Union as Ireland was a subject province of the British Empire.
The South' s was a colonial status, and her economy was ruled
in the same way in which Britain rules India :

Just as the English maintain their conquest of India by taking into co-
partnership with themselves a certain percentage of Hindus, so the North
holds the South in subjection by enlisting Southern capitalists and politi-
cians. They put their money into our daily newspapers; they subsidize
such organs as The Manufacturer s Record; they buy up our railroads;
they capitalize our mills; they finance our street railways; they supply our
banks,— always taking Southern men in with them to a certain extent,
and they appoint some of our politicians to good positions. United them-
selves, the Northern capitalists divide the Southerners, and thus rule and
despoil the South.

302

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

Watson's most refined contempt was reserved for those South-
ern apologists of the capitalist masters with their glib editorials,
their sleek columns of statistics, and their vaunted boasts of ex-
panding industry, increasing investment, "progress." Those were
borrowed standards, not "Southern" standards. "Who wants a
soulless Commercialism based upon the Havemeyer gospel of
*I don't care two cents for your ethics'?" he asked. "Is that the
gospel to which the future of this Republic is to be dedicated?"
For that matter, "Averages are arrant deceivers" :

You teach me nothing whatever when you tell me that the people have
built more railroads, raised more cotton, manufactured more cloth. To all
your bombast upon that subject I will answer by the query, who got the
increased wealth after it was made?

Your railroad may be a blessing — it may also be a curse. Many a
ruined city, many a ruined industry will rise to damn the railroads. Have
the people more general prosperity? That depends on the laws of distribu-
tion.

What does indicate the progress of a people? Churches? No. School-
houses? No. . . .

The way men and women live and think and aspire. ... If these are
wrong, all is wrong, and the nation will gallop to hell no matter how
many railroads and factories they build.

So full was he of his message that it overflowed its proper
channels and quite flooded his subsequent books, leaving long
marshes of unnavigable sermons. In the midst of a biography of
an early nineteenth-century American he paused for a picture of
a cotton mill running at night. It seemed to him "some hideous
monster, with a hundred dull red eyes, indicative of the flames
within which were consuming the men, women and children
chained to the remorseless wheel of labor." Indeed, "every one
of these red-eyed monsters is a Moloch, into which soulless Com-
mercialism is casting human victims — the atrocious sacrifice to
an insatiable god!" And there were pictures of Birmingham and
Pittsburgh that seemed to him to contain "something more in-
fernal than Dante or Milton could throw into their pictures of
hell." Describing an agrarian Eden of ante-bellum days, before
the serpent Industrialism entered, he reminded his readers :
"Our destitute are numbered by the millions, beggars swarm in
big cities, tramps infest the roads; men, women, and children
perish of cold and hunger in almost every state in the Union.

303

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

The size of our proletariat is prodigious; its condition fright-
ful; 1

In October, 1903, was published his Life and Times of
Thomas Jefferson™ He entered the task with clenched fists in
his Preface, and his pen is not infrequently wrenched by spas-
modic contractions in the text that follows. So embroiled does he
become with dead Federalist historians, as well as "modern out-
croppings of the old Federalist vein" (whose number is legion),
that the serene sage of Monticello is frequently forgotten. Pages
are spent in belaboring the inconsequential biography by Wil-
liam E. Curtis, "which literally swarms with errors." His wrath
is most deeply stirred, however, by the writings of "the learned
President of Princeton," Woodrow Wilson. "Think of it!" he
exclaims in a footnote. "Nearly two thousand pages of alleged
history and just one short sentence to the tragic chapter [Ala-
mance] in the story of the South !" Yet he could spare six pages
for a "Boston street row." And Wilson was a Southerner! For-
sooth ! A Georgian could spare a whole chapter to the glory of
Carolina, and right gladly. Did a Channing of Harvard "perpet-
uate sectional prejudice and injustice" by intimating that the
South was "easier to conquer than the North"? 8T He would de-
vote five chapters to repelling the calumny. Jefferson's fame was
secure enough to spare the space. When he does find time to
examine the history of the Jeffersonian era, his aggressive inde-
pendence of view produces some hard truths and upsets a few
sacred myths. It is nevertheless a poor book, marred by laxness
of style and undisciplined garrulity.

The Dedication of his Jefferson contains a paradox more ap-
parent now than then. 38 "Because he is to-day working with
splendid ability along the same lines which Mr. Jefferson
marked out a hundred years ago," wrote Watson, "I dedicate
this book to WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST."

88 D. Appleton and Company. Also vide Thomas E. Watson, Thomas Jefferson
(Beacon Biographies), Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900, pp. xv, 150. Reviewed
by George H. Haynes, American Historical Review, Vol. VI, p. 842. Reviews of
Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson: Arena, Vol. XXXI, pp. 325-399 (favorable) ;
American Historical Review, Vol. IX, pp. 615-616 (unfavorable).

87 T. E. W., Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson, p. 47, 86, 218.

88 See below, p. 356.

304

Of Revolution and Revolutionists

The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson 89 is cluttered with
the same reckless dogmatism and partisanship. Toward Jackson
himself, he maintains a surprising candor, unsparing in its reve-
lation of cold-blooded ruthlessness and cruelty. On the other
hand, one meets with a contrast between the endearing gener-
osity and chivalry of the Southern Cavalier, and the "monastic
gloom, nasal preachments, kill-joy countenances, lank-haired
bigotry, and censorious intermeddling with everybody's busi-
ness" that characterizes the Northern Puritan. 40 Neither of
these biographies approaches the standard achieved in the books
on French history.

The contract to write a history of the United States remained
unfulfilled, and a proffered contract for a life of General Lee
went unsigned while the historian devoted his energies to an
experiment in novel writing — his first and his last. Bethany: A
Story of the Old South ** is really a hodge-podge of historical
and political essays intermixed with a sentimental love story and
some autobiography. "Part First" presents a picture of the feel-
ings, motives, and reasoning of Southern people on the verge of
the War; "Part Second" alternates chapters of military history
with chapters of a highly episodic romance. It is beside the point
to enumerate its failures in construction, its blunders and banal-
ities as a novel, for if it is of significance, it is not as a novel.

Bethany, the author admits, is "frankly Southern in tone,"
though he hopes "not offensively so." Recalling the way a South-
ern audience warmed to Henry Ward Beecher when he pro-
claimed, "I am a Yankee of the Yankees," he writes : "It is upon
the same generous instinct of human nature that I rely in frankly
putting the Southern case, as though I were c a Rebel of the
Rebels.' " * The first sentence is a promise : "Just as the facts
were I will relate them to you." He is surprisingly successful in
his struggle for intellectual honesty, and scarcely a reviewer fails
to pay tribute to his victory over his feelings. Even the Nation,
of Abolitionist heritage, thought the book "confirmation of the
very primer of abolition knowledge of the disposition, habits,

39 Stated as a serial publication, Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, July, 1906;
published by the author, 1911, in book form.

40 T. E. W., The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson, p. 253.

41 D. Appleton and Company, 1904.

42 T. E. W., Bethany, p. x.

305

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

standards, and tender mercies of the slave holding section." 48
Writing as the confessed apologist for a cause and for a dis-
credited way of life, he steadfastly scorns special pleading and
begging his case. He will borrow no magnolias and moonlight
from Thomas Nelson Page. His grandfather's house did not
remotely resemble "a Grecian Temple which had been sent into
exile" in a cotton field. It was "just a plain house," and log at
that. His mulatto playmate bears an unmistakable resemblance
to his Uncle Ralph, the hero of the romance. Robert Toombs,
his political hero, dashes in and out of his pages roaring drunk.
There are no duels at dawn but plenty of eye-gougings, knifings,
and drunken brawls. There are "gander-pullings" in place of
tournaments, and there are deserters as well as heroes who wear
gray. For all that, he feels about the ante-bellum way of life as
his family felt about their Baptist creed: "whatever it was, it
was ours, and we were for it — strong." And when he thinks of
Pittsburgh and Birmingham his faith is born anew in him and
warms his blood like old wine and new love, and he writes :

That old Southern homestead was a little kingdom, a complete social
and industrial organism, almost wholly sufficient unto itself, asking less
of the outer world than it gave. How sound, sane, healthy it appears,
even now, when compared to certain phases of certain other systems! u

48 Nation, Vol. LXXIX, p. 506.
44 T. E. W., Bethany, p. 12.

306

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19

From Populism to Muckraking

To all who had eyes to see it was plain that plans for a
counter-revolution within the Democratic party were under
way for 1904. Weakened by two successive defeats, the leader-
ship of Bryan was open to challenge. The party of Bryan and
Tillman, of West and South, of agrarianism and Main Street
was likely to become once more the party of capitalism and Wall
Street, of Eastern Big Business and Tammany. In their effort to
overthrow Bryanism and make Democracy "as respectable as
Republicanism," if not a little more so, David B. Hill and Au-
gust Belmont united in putting forward Grover Cleveland as "a
dignified stalking-horse" while they manipulated the nomination
of Judge Alton B. Parker. William Randolph Hearst was easily
the most serious contender for the nomination in opposition to
the conservative combination. 1

"Were I in politics," Watson began a statement in March,
1904, tentatively subjunctive in mood, "were I in politics, I
should heartily approve and support the candidacy of William
R. Hearst." Furthermore, Watson thought Cleveland "the
most distasteful candidate who could be offered to the South."
He admired Roosevelt "the man" very much, but Roosevelt
"the politician" stood for those things he most abhorred — "im-
perialism, extravagance, class legislation, militarism, Hamil-
tonism, of the rankest sort." 2

A conjunction of Watson and Hearst presented no grave
problem of doctrinal adjustment. It was a day in which a

1 Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, pp. 754-755 ; P. Hibben, The Peerless Leader:
William Jennings Bryan, pp. 245-249.

2 Atlanta News, March 7, 1904.

307

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Herbert Croly could write of Hearst as an expression of "the
radical element in the Jeffersonian tradition," to be feared as
"revolutionary in spirit," because he was as unfair to capitalists
as the abolitionist had been to slaveholders. Croly compared him
to Robespierre, and Harry Thurston Peck believed his ambi-
tion was to "bring about a socialistic millennium." 3

After the March statement, Hearst conducted a lively court-
ship of the Georgia Populist. Letter after letter urged him to
come to New York and join the Hearst staff. Arthur Brisbane
suggested that he accept the editorship of one of the New York
papers at $10,000 to start with, at the same time mentioning his
own "very large salary" and suggesting unlimited advancement.
Should Watson accept, he believed, "Mr. Hearst would have
a far stronger man than myself to help him in his fight." 4 He
was finally persuaded to go to New York for an interview with
Brisbane. The offer was repeated and urged upon him then and
later, but nothing came of it.

Watson nevertheless continued his advocacy of Hearst. In
May, Grover Cleveland issued a statement explaining that when
leaders "began to experience alarm over the strength this man
Hearst was seemingly developing," he joined the Parker sup-
porters, because it "appeared necessary to concentrate upon
some available man in order to stifle the Hearst movement."
Watson replied with a type of attack new to him then, but typi-
cal of his tactics in the future. The attack was based upon al-
leged instances of Cleveland's violation of the Southern attitude
on "social equality" with Negroes. Cleveland denied the charges
publicly and Watson repeated them loudly. 5

As the time for the convention rolled around a conservative
victory seemed inevitable. Even Hearst seemed to give up the
fight.

The history of the People's party since 1896 had fulfilled
Watson's blackest prophecies. More amusement than alarm was

8 Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life, pp. 163-167; Harry T. Peck,
Twenty Years of the Republic, p. 711.

4 Arthur Brisbane to T. E. W., June 23, 1904.

5 Augusta Chronicle, April 11 and 28, 1904; Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W,,
April 12, 1904.

308

From Populism to Muckraking

provoked by the party's part in the election of 1900, for it was
split into two quarreling factions. The fusionists, with exemplary
self-denial, nominated a Democrat and a Republican; the mid-
roaders put forward a ticket dedicated to pure Populism.
Neither faction won any victories of consequence. Watson took
no part whatever in the campaign, and seemed to manifest no
personal interest in the future of the party.

The promise of a return to conservatism by the Democrats
in 1904 revived Populist hopes greatly, however, for it was
hoped that the Silver Democrats, and perhaps Bryan himself,
could be persuaded to bolt their party for the sake of principles. 6
With much optimism a call was issued for a convention in
Springfield, Illinois, to meet two days before the Democratic
convention opened at St. Louis. Although the call provided for
over nine hundred delegates, only about two hundred appeared
at Springfield, much to the disappointment of the leaders. The
report of the committee on permanent organization made it
readily apparent that the mid-road faction controlled the Con-
vention, for all convention officers were of that wing. The
Omaha platform of 1892 and subsequent ones were reaffirmed,
and the new platform called for government ownership of pub-
lic utilities and for strict control of corporations doing interstate
business.

Three names were placed before the Convention: that of
Senator William V. Allen, who was present and spoke in defense
of his record at the convention of 1896; that of Judge Samuel
W. Williams of Indiana, also present; and that of Thomas E.
Watson, who did not attend. John J. Hollaway, a Georgia dele-
gate, made public a letter from Watson saying that he did not
want the nomination. Before the balloting there was much dis-
cussion of whether Watson would accept were Hearst nominated
at St. Louis. The first ballot stood Watson 334, Allen 319, Wil-
liams 45. Williams' withdrawal in favor of Watson started the
shift of one delegation after another to his column. Finally the
withdrawal of Allen's name and a motion by Williams made
Watson's nomination unanimous by acclamation. 7 Thomas H.
Tibbies of Lincoln, Nebraska, was named for the second place.

6 William V. Allen, "A Western Statesman's Reasons for Supporting Hon.
Thomas E. Watson," Arena, Vol. XXXII (Oct., 1904), p. 395-,

7 Illinois State Register, July 5 and 6, 1904; New York Tribune, July 6, 1904.

309

Torn Watson Agrarian Rebel

The final scene, as described to Watson by one of the delegates,
recalls some of the religious fervor of the early 'nineties. Men
of all sections joined in a "general handshake with tears of joy
in their eyes which shows the deep love and esteem you have
from the patriotic people of America. " 8

Letters and telegrams poured in upon Watson urging him to
accept. "With me," he asserted, "the only question was: Do a
sufficient number of old line Populists and free silver Democrats
want this fight made. In reaching a conclusion upon that subject,
I was guided by the evidence of general discontent with what
had been done in the Democratic national convention." ° The
work of the St. Louis Convention, following hard upon the Pop-
ulist meeting, was a bitter dose for the Bryan Democrats. Sen-
ator Tillman was seen "swearing and shedding floods of tears
by turns." Judge Parker's famous "gold telegram" reversed the
party's monetary doctrine; the platform was silent on silver;
the demand for income tax was dropped. Cleveland's name was
repeatedly cheered, and it was plain that Eastern Big Business
leadership was in control.

In view of the results at St. Louis Watson's nomination re-
ceived serious attention in some circles. The New York Tribune
thought it "a mistake for political prophets to class him as a
negligible quantity," since he was "distinctly persona grata with
the radical Democrats," and therefore likely to attract the many
discontented of that party. 10

Watson seems to have entertained few illusions. "Our papers
are dead," he said. Indeed, of the fifteen hundred Populist
papers that flourished in 1896, the party secretary could count
only twenty-three in 1904. The nominee admitted that his party
had "almost nothing to start with in the way of party organiza-
tion, campaign funds and newspaper support," and there were
only four months in which to work. 11

Much hurried construction was begun in setting up abandoned
party machinery in the states. The People's party campaign of
1904, however, consisted almost entirely of the stump speeches
of Tom Watson. The field was singularly free from competition

8 John J. Hollaway, to T. E. W., July 8, 1904.

9 Atlanta Journal, Aug. 22, 1906.

10 New York Daily Tribune, July 8, 1904.

"Dalton (Georgia) Herald, Aug. 25, 1904; Atlanta News, Nov. 14, 1904.

310

From Populism to Muckraking

in that respect: Roosevelt, being President, did not take the
stump; Parker remained at home, speaking only to visiting
delegations, and the more voluble and picturesque elements of
the Democracy sulked in silence. Watson was a welcome relief
in the dullest campaign in years. "Everybody with the least
curiosity wants to hear Tom Watson," it was said. "The man
who has no show is putting up the best show in this campaign."
"He is entertaining; he does funny things with language, laughs
himself and gives hilarity to his crowd." He indulged in con-
siderable clowning: "Roosevelt could tie both hands behind
him and run Parker clean out of the ring by shining his teeth at
him," he said, with appropriate gestures. Laughter punctuated
every sentence of some speeches, while in others he employed
the uncanny magic he used in the 'nineties to galvanize demor-
alized farmers into action. "There was no reason for them to
be weeping," wrote a puzzled reporter; yet weep they did.

Opening his campaign in Nebraska, he left no section un-
visited, from Boston to California. He made three speeches in
New York City : his acceptance speech at Cooper Union, another
at a huge Union Labor banquet in his honor, and the third at a
final rally, where he was introduced by Judge Samuel A. Sea-
bury. Undaunted by the advice of his friends who told him
that not a Watson man could be found in Chicago, he insisted on
speaking there anyway. Clarence Darrow introduced him as "a
beacon light to those in doubt," and he kept a large audience of
Democrats doubled in laughter at the stupidities of their own
party. 12

Watson had much to say of the "System," using the word in
the way Lincoln Steffens was using it at the time. "The 'system'
has gotten its nominees; has captured both parties. No matter
which is elected the system stands as it is." What if Morgan was
pouring thousands into Roosevelt's campaign chest? Morgan
partners were investing their money in Parker. It could make
no difference to Wall Street which was elected. Roosevelt and
Parker were "two drinks from the same jug," "two eggs from
the same nest." A prohibition campaign led by the whiskey trust
could be no more preposterous hypocrisy than Parker's "cam-
paign against the corporations, financed and led by the Standard

12 Clarence Darrow to T. E. W., July 17, 1904; T. E. W., Life and Speeches of
Thomas E. Watson, pp. 190-244; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

3"

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, August Belmont and Arthur
Gorman." 13

It seemed to Watson a "colossal piece of effrontery" for the
Democratic party to go before the American people and pro-
claim that "for eight years they have been wrong and the Re-
publicans have been right, and at the same time demand that the
crowd which has been wrong shall be substituted for the party
that has been right." How could the Democrats pretend to be a
party of principle? In 1896 they had stolen his platform, and for
eight years he had stepped aside, refusing to fire on his own
colors. But at St. Louis they dropped his platform and stole the
Republican platform. He picked up his standard where Bryan
had dropped it and called upon all Jeffersonian Democrats to
rally to it. Where else was there for them to go ? He repeated
his cry of the Alliance days: "There is a party for Caesar, a
party for Pompey, but no party for Rome." 14

Watson frankly directed his entire appeal to the Bryan Demo-
crats who were discontented with the reactionary leadership of
their party. Exhaustively he campaigned his own section, laying
every claim he could to Southern pride and allegiance to prin-
ciple. It was not from the South, however, but from Illinois
that a call was issued for a "convention of true Democrats." It
repudiated the St. Louis Convention as a betrayal, "a Wall Street
manoeuvre," and declared that "the true issue is that presented
by Watson vs. Roosevelt." It commended "that distinguished
author, statesman, lawyer, citizen, patriot and true Democrat,
Thomas E. Watson, whose speech of acceptance at New York
was and is the only Democratic utterance of any candidate for
the chief magistracy." Nevertheless, "the only real Democratic
convention of 1904" failed to materialize. 15

Much depended upon the attitude Bryan would take. He had
denounced the Parker movement before the convention as
harshly as any Populist. Would he eat his words and support
Parker for the sake of "regularity" ? At St. Louis Watson quoted
Bryan's earlier statement that "Mr. Parker stands by the New
York platform, which crooked Dave Hill had put together,"

18 T. E. W., ibid,, pp. 190-244, especially pp. 195, 229-230, 234-240.

14 Ibid., pp. 210, 234, 238; MS. speeches, Watson MSS.; clippings, Watson Scrap-
books; New York Tribune, Aug. 19 and Oct. 6 and 25, 1904.

15 The Saturday News (Joliet, Illinois), Sept. 17, 1904.

312

From Populism to Muckraking

and swore that if there was any consistency in the man he would
support the Populist ticket — even as Watson had supported
Bryan in i896. ltt There was little chance that Bryan would turn
Populist, but for some time it seemed that he might refrain
from giving Parker active support.

Thomas H. Tibbies, Populist candidate for Vice-President,
who lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, informed Watson of a deal he
had made with T. S. Allen, Bryan's brother-in-law. Tibbies
agreed to support a Populist-Democratic fusion on the Nebraska
state ticket, while Allen promised that Bryan would go to Ari-
zona "and get sick," and refrain from making speeches for
Parker. Bryan was said to be a candidate for the Senate. He did
go to Arizona and "get sick." Later, however, when Allen went
to New York, Bryan returned and took the stump for Parker. 17
His speeches for the erstwhile minion of Wall Street were not
lyrical in their praise — merely contending, for the most part,
that where Parker's views were questionable, Roosevelt's were
more so. More disastrous to the Populist hopes, however, was
his treatment of Watson. Bryan not only denied Watson's alle-
gation that consistency demanded his support of Populism, but
told his followers that "Every vote for Watson is a vote for
Roosevelt." 18 After a blow like this from a pretended friend,
Populist hopes sank low.

The election returns gave Watson a popular vote of 117,183.
Bryan took pains to point out in his paper that it was "a vote
much smaller than Populists, Democrats, and even Republicans
expected him to receive," and drew the moral that it was "more
charitable" to assume that "the reformers had personal con-
fidence in Mr. Watson, but did not agree with him as to the best
method of securing remedial legislation." 19 As a matter of fact
Watson's vote was more than double that received by the Pop-
ulist candidate in 1900. It was none the less a great disappoint-
ment. Also dejected were the new Democrats, who suffered the
worst defeat their party had had since 1872, failing to carry a
state outside the South — and not all of the South. Discontent
was largely expressed by abstention from voting. What defection

16 MS. speech, delivered at St. Louis, Sept. 6, 1904, Watson MSS.

17 Thomas H. Tibbies to T. E. W., Nov. 16, 1904.

18 P. Hibben, op. cit, p. 257.

19 Quoted by Watson, Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. I (March, 1905), pp. 7-8.

313

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

there was went not to Watson but chiefly to Eugene V. Debs,
whose vote leaped from around 90,000 in 1900 to over 400,000.
Watson confided his feelings to a comrade of the early 'nine-
ties, C. C. Post. "If there ever was a time," he wrote, "when a
Populist had no excuse whatever for voting the Democratic
ticket it was this year, and I feel very keenly the defection of
those who should have been more courageous." Bitterest of all,
however, was the ingratitude of his own South, and of his state.
"A great many of my old friends in Georgia went squarely back
on me . . ." 20 How could such things be . . . not only a Yan-
kee, but a damned Yankee, a Wall Street Yankee at that . . .
He would speak to them, he announced, and they came, as they
used to — by the hundreds to his doorstep. He lashed them furi-
ously first for their apostasy, and then remonstrated rather
hopelessly :

You did not care to know anything about the platform, you didn't read
it, you simply wanted to know if it was labeled "Democratic." Whether
Peruna, or apple jack, or champagne, or cider, it did not matter what, you
put the dear old jug up to your lips and just drank it down all the same. 21

Consolation came from an unexpected quarter. During the
campaign it was not in the South but in New York City that
seven hundred plates were sold to a banquet in his honor. It was
the New York headquarters that were "ablaze with electric and
forensic lights and enthusiasm." General Weaver had made an
unexpectedly good showing in New York in 1892, the peak year
of Populism, but Watson had exceeded his mark in 1904. No
campaigner had worked harder or more gallantly for a forlorn
cause than Watson had that year. His fight, however, won more
admiration than votes. There were more banquets and more
ovations. At Chicago Elbert Hubbard, the eccentric editor of
The Philistine, delivered an address entitled, "Thomas E. Wat-
son of Georgia, a Producer of History as Well as a Producer of
Literature and the Foremost Man of America." President
Roosevelt even invited his erstwhile opponent to the White
House for a conference, though Watson was unable to accept

20 T. E. W. to C. C. Post, stenographers notes undated.

21 MS. speech, delivered at Thomson, Nov. 19, 1904. Watson MSS.

314

From Populism to Muckraking

on account of illness. "You and I do not agree upon some fun-
damental points," wrote the President, u but eight years ago I
made up my mind that you were fearless, disinterested and in-
corruptible ; and with all Americans who possess these qualities
I earnestly hope that I may claim some right of spiritual kin." M

Watson found it as easy to pack Cooper Union after the elec-
tion as during the campaign. Cooper Union was known as "an
edifice of protest" in that day, and the crowds that came to hear
him illustrated the spirit of the times. One meeting at which he
spoke was presided over by James Graham Phelps Stokes, "the
millionaire settlement worker," and a contributor to his cam-
paign fund, shortly to marry Rose Pastor, "the working girl
poetess of the Ghetto." Mayor-elect Edward F. Dunne of Chi-
cago, advocate of municipal ownership of public utilities, also
spoke. Judge Samuel Seabury was present. Single taxers, munic-
ipal reformers, socialists, and "suffragettes" joined in cheering a
Georgia Populist. 23

American democracy was in ferment in 1905, and strangely
varied elements were thrown together by the fermentation.
Municipal reformers, settlement house workers, budget experts,
conservationists, advocates of direct legislation, workmen's com-
pensation laws, mothers' assistance, and a thousand other re-
forms, all became vocal and simultaneously joined in the march.
It was spoken of generally as "the reform movement," and its
proponents were known as "progressives." They had great faith
in what Herbert Croly was pleased to call "the orderly processes
of reform." Although the movement was Populistic in ideology
and in heritage, its members, unlike the Populists, never for-
mulated a platform. They submitted to no party discipline. They
had no recognized leaders.

It was before such a group that Watson analyzed the results
of the election of 1904 and made an appeal for unity. "Who
gained ground by that contest?" he asked. His answer was, "The
radicals."

Suppose Eugene Debs had not made his splendid fight; suppose I had
failed to answer the call of the Springfield convention, does anyone be-

22 Theodore Roosevelt to T. E. W., Nov. 30, 1904; T. E. W. to Roosevelt, Dec. 6,
1904, Roosevelt MSS., Washington, D.C.

23 New York World, April 9, 1905.

315

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

lieve that Congress would now be so eagerly interested in reform . . . ?

What then is the hope of the country?

The union of all the reformers.

We must draw from the Republican party those who oppose class law
and money-bag aristocracy. We must draw from the Democratic party
every true hearted man who puts Jeffersonian principle above party dicta-
tion. We must gather into one compact, aggressive movement all patriots,
no matter what they call themselves, who are broad-minded enough to agree
upon essential reforms which are in the reach of this generation. 24

While he was in New York Watson was approached by W. D.
Mann, the promoter of Smart Set and Town Topics, with the
proposal that Watson assume the editorship of a magazine, the
launching of which Mann would finance. Presumably Mann
was not unaware of the unexploited potentialities of a hundred
thousand Populist voters, since Charles Q. DeFrance, secretary
of the People's Party Executive Committee, was suggested as
circulation manager of the proposed magazine. Watson found
the proposal more attractive than Hearst's offer for a number of
reasons. The magazine was to bear his own name; its policies,
ideas, and politics were to be dominated by his personality. Fur-
thermore, it would be possible for him to edit the magazine from
Hickory Hill. With the understanding that he was to receive
$500 a month and expenses for trips between Georgia and New
York, he accepted the offer. 25

The magazine of exposure, or muckraking, was just attaining
its most sensational development in 1905. Ida M. Tarbell's ex-
pose of the Standard Oil Company began to appear in McClure's
in 1903 ; Lincoln Steffens' Shame of the Cities began in the same
magazine in 1904, and Ray Stannard Baker's Railroads on Trial
in 1905. Everybody's presented Thomas W. Lawson's Frenzied
Finance in 1905. Like the reform movement, of which it was a
part, muckraking sprouted from the seeds of Populism. Whereas
Populism produced only one first-rate journal of protest, the
Arena (to which Watson had contributed), the muckrakers had
a dozen by 1905. There was another difference. Where the Popu-
list literature framed its criticisms in general abstract terms, the
muckrakers called names and exposed specific abuses with docu-

24 T. E. W., Life and Speeches, p. 256.

25 Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. VI, pp. 1-2; Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine,
Vol. I, p. 1.

3l6

From Populism to Muckraking

merited facts. 26 Nowhere is the nexus between the two movements
more concretely illustrated than in their confluence in Watson's
periodical.

The first number of Tom Watson's Magazine bore the date of
March, 1905. The title was boldly printed in large blue letters
upon a red cover decorated with a drawing of the Liberty Bell.
An edition of 100,000 copies, at ten cents each, was sold out in
twenty-four hours, and another had to be printed. In six months
the magazine had a list of 10,000 paid subscribers. 27 It was lib-
erally, and sometimes exorbitantly, praised in a surprising va-
riety of quarters. "Tom Watson, in his magazine, writes the best
editorials that are published in the United States," said the New
York American. 2 * Judge Ben B. Lindsey wrote Watson: "I find
much help in reading your wonderful editorials, in which it
seems to me you more clearly present present-day difficulties than
any editorial writer in this country." Lindsey thought Watson's
"splendid sincerity and courage and pluck in the fight for decency
and right" was an "inspiration for every man in this country." 29
A contemporary Horace Mann was convinced that the editor
was "guided by the everlasting stars of Truth and Right." 30

Theodore Dreiser was a frequent contributor to early num-
bers, and Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Markham, and Maxim
Gorky found their way into Tom Watson's Magazine. For the
most part, however, its literary offerings were third-rate and
worse. There were occasional articles of exposure by such men
as Clarence Darrow and Samuel A. Seabury, but these were not
featured, and were of minor importance.

The soul of Tom Watson's Magazine plainly resided in the
Tom Watson editorials, which monopolized the first thirty
pages, or nearly a fourth, of every number. The policy was Pop-
ulist in creed, of course, but with a hospitable attitude toward
"reformers" and "progressives" of many stripes as well as to-
ward their sundry causes. Watson's editorials dealt with the

26 C. C. Regier, The Era of the Muckrakers, p. 49 ; John Chamberlain, Farewell
to Reform, pp. 128-129.

27 Charles Q. DeFrance to T. E. W., Aug. 25, 1905.

28 New York American, Aug. 6, 1905.

29 Ben B. Lindsey to T. E. W., Jan. 23, 1907.

30 Horace Mann to T. E. W., July 31, 1905; editorial, Buffalo Progress, July 27,
1905.

317

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

same material that absorbed the attention of muckrakers, but in
a different way. Where the muckraker was content to expose,
Watson was moved to flay, and ridicule, and denounce, and
abuse in a manner marvelous to behold. In castigating the frauds
of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, for example, he took
occasion to refer to u a sleek old Oily Gammon, named Chauncey
Depew," and "Thomas F. Ryan, the very embodiment of com-
mercial greed." He proposed to beard such "shameless, unprin-
cipled, lawbreaking robbers," and say to them, "if you don't
drop the stolen goods I will rouse your victims till they rise in
the elemental wrath of human nature and string you up to the
nearest lamp-post." 31 He served similar notice from time to time
upon a host of villains : corporation lobbyists, "the Standard Oil
crowd," "the Gas Trust thieves," franchise grabbers, Wall Street
bankers, "the professional boodler and grafter in both the old
parties." Let them quake in their boots before the wrath of an
indignant people.

The cartoonist, Gordon Nye, admirably caught the spirit of
the editorials, which he illustrated with leering plutocrats (clad
uniformly in suits checked with dollar marks and skull-and-
bones), all of bulging paunch and money bag.

The temperate reformer and the scholarly muckraker doubt-
less viewed with alarm some of the vagaries of their Populist
recruit. Muckrakers had exposed Sam Spencer of Georgia as the
organizer of a systematic scheme of bribing the public press in
behalf of Morgan railroad interests, but it remained for Tom
Watson to suggest that a continuation of the good work begun
by pen and ink might be made with a length of hempen rope :

Sam Spencer calls Rate Regulation by Government LYNCH LAW.
Let Sam Spencer beware . . . !

Revolutions have been; revolutions may be again.

When crime runs riot and courts are powerless, it may be that the
people will rise up in their natural right as a Society, and do swift justice
upon criminals taken red-handed . . Z 2

In regard to political developments of the time, Watson was
alternately elated by the mighty words, and goaded to distrac-
tion by the mild performance of President Roosevelt. "In case
of blood poison," he admonished, "shinplasters for surface ab-

81 Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. II (Aug., 1905), pp. 135 and 139.

82 Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. Ill (Dec, 1905), p. 154.

318

From Populism to Muckraking

rasions never yet saved the patient; and Mr. Roosevelt's plans
for another tribunal to control the railroads are mere shinplas-
ters." 83 Woodrow Wilson was quoted as saying, "Trusts can
never be abolished. We must moralize them." The vials of Wat-
son's wrath, already stirred by Wilson's slight to Southern glory,
were quite overturned:

How will you do it, impractical prig?

Mr. Rockefeller is moral, isn't he? Goes to church every Sunday . . .

Go back to thy gerund-grinding, Woodrow — thou insufferable, im-
practical prig. Among the dead Greeks and the extinct Romans thy labors
may, haply, be useful; but when thou comest among the practical men of
today seeking to master actual conditions and to take part in the great
battle of thought, motive and purpose which rages around us, thou art
but "a babby, and a gal babby at that." 34

Along with other reformers and progressives and muckrak-
ers, however, Watson shared the sanguine faith that "education
and agitation" would in no distant future put to rout the evil-
doers and restore the democracy to its pristine purity. Perhaps
he would at times assist Mr. Croly's "orderly processes of re-
form" with a little lyncher's hemp. For all that, he believed that
"The day of the Common People is at hand, for the Masses are
being educated as never before." 85

88 Ibid., Vol. I (April, 1905), pp. 136-137.

84 hoc. cit.

* 5 Ibid., Vol. II (July, 1905), p. n.

3*9

20

Reform and Reaction

As he campaigned the South in the forlorn crusade of 1904,
jTjl Watson was confronted in state after state with a revival
of the Democratic dialectic of the 'nineties. It varied not at all.
An editor in Houston, Texas, saw behind Populism "the omi-
nous shadow of negro domination," and an editor in Augusta,
Georgia, saw the same apparition and described it in exactly
the same words. u The argument against the independent politi-
cal movement in the South," wrote Watson in 1892, "may be
boiled down to one word — nigger." 1 If twelve years had worked
no change upon his Nemesis, they had had their effect upon Tom
Watson.

In Atlanta he threw before the Democrats a challenge and a
promise. He was "not at all afraid of any negro domination in
the South," and never had been. Furthermore, he believed that
"the cry that we are in danger from 'the nigger' is the most
hypocritical that unscrupulous leadership could invent." What
could the Negro do? He had been disfranchised in nearly every
state in the South except Georgia. There he had been "white
primaried." If the Democrats were honest in their fears, why
did they not write the principle of the white primary into the
state constitution, as other states had done ? He would tell them :
"In Georgia they do not dare to disfranchise him [the Negro],
because the men who control the democratic machine in Georgia
know that a majority of the whites are against them. They need
the negro to beat us with." The white primary, being nothing
more than a party custom, could be shelved at any time the ma-
chine needed the Negro vote. He therefore pledged his support,

1 P. P. P., Aug. 26, 1892.

320

Reform and Reaction

and the support of the Populists, to any anti-machine, Demo-
cratic candidate running upon a suitable platform that included
a pledge to "a change in our Constitution which will perpetuate
white supremacy in Georgia." 2

How Watson managed to reconcile his radical democratic doc-
trine with a proposal to disfranchise a million citizens of his
native state is not quite clear. When South Carolina, under the
leadership of Ben Tillman, changed its constitution in 1895 with
the avowed purpose of disfranchising the Negro, Watson wrote
an indignant editorial :

All this re-actionary legislation is wrong.

There can be no sound principle, consistent with our democratic theory
of government, which says that a negro worth $300 is a better citizen
than one worth $200. ...

The whole scheme of the democrats of South Carolina is to perpetuate
the rule of their party. . . .

Old fashioned democracy taught that a man who fought the battles
of his country, and paid the taxes of his government, should have a vote
in the choosing of rulers and the making of laws. 8

Watson, nevertheless, repeated and underscored his offer to
the Democrats after the 1904 campaign ended. Later he ex-
panded his reasons. "The white people dare not revolt so long
as they can be intimidated by the fear of the negro vote," he
explained. Once the "bugaboo of negro domination" was re-
moved, however, "every white man would act according to his
own conscience and judgment in deciding how he shall vote." 4
With these words Watson abandoned his old dream of uniting
both races against the enemy, and took his first step toward the
opposite extreme in racial views. There was another considera-
tion which he did not mention. With the Negro vote eliminated,
Watson and the Populists stood in much the same relation to-
ward the two factions of the Democratic party as the Negro had
occupied toward Populists and Democrats : they held the balance
of power.

Watson's offer did not long go begging.

Since 1898, when the Populists had last put forth a state ticket,

2 Watson's offer to support a disfranchisement program -was printed by none of
the papers reporting the speech, but vide MS. Speech, Aug. i, 1904, Watson papers.
Constitution, Sept. 2, 1904; Atlanta News, Sept. 2, 1904.

8 P. P. P., Nov. 8, 1895.

4 Atlanta Journal, July 27, 1906; vide also: Weekly Jefiersonian, March 24, 1910.

321

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

a succession of staunchly conservative governors had ruled the
state. They belonged to that wing of the party which, since the
'seventies, had been hospitable toward Northern capital, and
friendly to corporate interests, especially the railroads. Resist-
ance to the dominance of this wing had reached its lowest ebb in
1904, when the candidate had been reelected without opposition.
In the spring of 1905, more than a year before the next election,
Clark Howell announced himself as a candidate for the guberna-
torial nomination. A logical successor in the scheme of office ro-
tation, Howell had back of him a long record of party service
and the support of the conservative machine. His prospects could
hardly have been fairer.

Early in 1905, Thomas W. Hardwick, congressman from
Watson's district, and a representative of the opposition to the
Howell faction, came to Watson to discuss the proposal con-
cerning disfranchisement. Together they worked out a platform
combining that issue with several reform demands for railroad
regulation, and agreed upon Pope Brown as a suitable candidate.
Then shortly after Watson's support of his candidacy became
known, Pope Brown withdrew from the race in favor of Hoke
Smith. It later developed that Brown took this step because he
received from Hardwick the impression that Watson desired it. 5

Watson was left in perplexity after this maneuver, and for
several months he refused to commit himself. There had been
political enmity between Watson and Hoke Smith ever since the
'nineties, when, as a member of Cleveland's cabinet, Smith had
led the gold forces in Georgia. It had not been six months since
Watson had written the editor of the Atlanta Journal, with
which Smith had long been associated, asking that his name be
removed from the circulation list. He explained: "In this cam-
paign you have pursued me with such bitter vindictiveness that
I can no longer accept any favor at your hands." 6 The editor
was doubtless justified in denying the charge. Tom Watson was
ever quick in perceiving injury and ever slow in forgiving.

On the other hand, there were certain forces at work to draw
Smith and Watson together. Since the subsidence of the silver
issue, Howell and Smith had reversed positions with respect to
relative conservatism. The critical issue now was government

5 Pope Brown to T. E. W., Feb. 22, 1908.

6 Quoted in the editors reply: J. R. Gray to T. E. W., Nov. 14, 1904.

322

Reform and Reaction

control and ownership, and Hoke Smith, an anti-corporation
lawyer, was far in advance of Howell upon this question. In
1902 he had joined Watson in speaking before the Georgia legis-
lature in support of a bill prohibiting child labor. 7 For years he
had been fighting the state machine in the columns of the At-
lanta Journal, a rival of Howell's Constitution. He charged that
the machine was owned by the railroads and that the state rail-
way commission served the railroads. He pointed out rate
discriminations, abuses, and corrupting influences. Smith's plat-
form for 1906 might have been written by a Populist. It con-
tained demands for primaries to nominate by popular vote all
officers, including senators ; for the abolition of poll-workers and
the disfranchisement of vote-buyers; for a stringent corrupt
practices act; for making pass-giving and lobbying a crime; for
compulsory domestication of Georgia railroads and their submis-
sion to state courts and to heavier taxation; for an elective rail-
way commission; and for state ownership of railroads. 8

It was the heyday of the reform governor — La Follette of
Wisconsin, Folk of Missouri, Colby of New Jersey — and Smith
of Georgia was hailed by national reformers as one of that num-
ber. Herbert Quick said that Smith wrote "the most radical
platform ever adopted, with perhaps one exception, by a state
convention of either of the two great parties of these times."
Smith "has no corporation collar. He is a successful party revo-
lutionist." 9 There was one plank of Smith's platform that struck
his Progressive admirers as a bit incongruous. Yet it was the one
singled out to appear day after day in bold-faced capital letters
on the editorial page of the Journal: he favored "THE ELIM-
INATION OF THE NEGRO FROM POLITICS ... BY
LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL METHODS . . .
WITHOUT DISFRANCHISING A SINGLE WHITE
MAN."

While Watson hesitated over his decision, James K. Hines,
Populist candidate for governor in 1894, urged him to come out
for Smith. Hines would go even further. "Let us accept the in-
vitation, often extended by both factions, to come home," he
wrote. "Let us take charge of the Democratic Party in Georgia

7 T. E. W., Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 184-189.

8 Augusta Herald, June 29, 1905; Herbert Quick, "Hoke Smith and the Revolu-
tion in Georgia," The Reader, Vol. X (Aug., 1907), pp. 241-247.

9 H. Quick, op. cit., p. 241.

323

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

and make it the People's Party." Again he wrote: "You are
stronger than any man in Georgia. When Mr. Stephens quit the
whigs and joined the democrats he justified himself by saying
that the democrats had come to him. Much more true is it, that
the democrats have come to you." 10 Hardwick served as a zeal-
ous intermediary between Hickory Hill and the Atlanta Jour-
nal. He begged Watson to tell him "exactly what reparation
you think Mr. Smith ought to make" and he would "get Mr.
Smith and the Journal to do the right thing." u It appeared that
a number of "reparations" were required, as well as some changes
in the platform. They were all eagerly made, however : Smith's
in public speeches, the Journal's in an editorial actually written
by Hardwick. 12

On September 12 Watson wrote Smith promising his support,
and in the October number of his magazine, widely circulated in
Georgia at Smith's expense, made public his position. He first
reminded his followers that Smith and Howell "were both rock-
ribbed, moss-backed, unterrified Democrats" and mortal enemies
of Populism back in the 'nineties. "But times have changed," he
said. "If . . . [Smith] can do for Georgia what La Follette has
done for Wisconsin and Folk has done for Missouri, he will be-
come a heroic figure in the eyes of reformers throughout the
land. No matter how faulty his record in the past may have been,
he is hitting the bull's-eye this time." Cautious in his commit-
ments at first, he refused to say he would vote for Smith. Later
he plunged in more wholeheartedly. He was still a Populist, and
he refused to commit himself two years in advance to the Na-
tional Democratic ticket, but he pledged the Populists not to put
out a state ticket, and to abide by the result of the white pri-
mary. "I am going to vote for Hoke Smith," he finally de-
clared. "And I appeal to every Populist of McDuffie and the
surrounding counties, and every Populist throughout the state
... to follow me now; and if it turns out I am wrong then
punish me hereafter by never listening to me with respect upon
any issue." 13

Smith was profuse in his expressions of gratitude. "I cannot

10 James K. Hines to T. E. W., June 8 and Dec. 9, 1905, and July 12, 1906.

11 Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W., June 26, 1905.

12 Ibid., Aug. 9, 1905.
"Atlanta Journal, Aug. 7, 1906.

324

Reform and Reaction

tell you how much I appreciate your cooperation," he wrote,
and he told of how his campaign had undergone a rejuvenation
the moment Watson's support was made public. 14 Continuous
correspondence was kept up between the two throughout the
campaign, and whole pages of the Journal were given over to
Watson's opinions. Was it reported that the farmers of north
Georgia suspected Negro disfranchisement of being a scheme to
disfranchise illiterate whites ? Off went Watson to reassure them.
Were the Populists in the South rebellious at voting for a former
gold bug? Watson was there to tell them that "Hoke Smith is
trying to do what we want done and cannot do ourselves."

The campaign was the hottest since the 'nineties, and judging
from the nature of Howell's attack, one might suppose Watson
was the candidate instead of Smith. Smith was declared to be a
"demagogue" and a "Muckraker" who was "run by Tom Wat-
son." He had "surrendered his convictions and his democratic
allegiance to Tom Watson for the latter's support." In a sur-
prisingly accurate prophecy, the Constitution predicted: "The
spectacle of Tom Watson controlling the machinery of the Dem-
ocratic party — and at the same time remaining an open and
avowed populist — is one which the Democrats of this state may
have to endure." 15 Some of the edge of this attack was taken off
when Watson made public a letter from Clark Howell to him
begging an interview before Watson had sided with Smith. 16

As for Smith, he "wouldn't give Tom Watson for the whole
crowd."

The executive committee of the Democratic party, under con-
trol of the Howell wing, attempted to rule Populists out of the
party primary by requiring that all ballots bear the following
inscription: "By voting this ticket, I hereby declare that I am an
organized Democrat, and I hereby pledge myself to support the
organized Democracy, both state and national." 17 The ruling
was loudly denounced by Watson and Smith, however, and
failed in its purpose.

The foremost issue of the campaign was the question of Negro
disfranchisement. None of Howell's objections to the measure

14 Hoke Smith to T. E. W., Sept. 16, 1905 and Dec. 19, 1905.

15 Constitution, June 24 and Aug. 3 and 5, 1906 ; Macon Telegraph, Aug. 5, 1906.

16 Clark Howell to T. E. W., Aug. 4, 1905 ; Atlanta Journal, Jan. 13, 1906.

17 A. M. Arnett, op. cit., p. 221 ; Constitution, Aug. 3, 1906.

325

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

was aimed at the principle of disfranchisement, but merely at its
effectiveness. It would disfranchise illiterate whites while allow-
ing educated Negroes to vote; it had failed of its purpose in
Alabama, and it encouraged Negroes to climb out of their
"place" into the ranks of the literate.

The most serious tactical blunder made by Howell and his
friends was their attempt to defend the corporations and rail-
roads upon whom Watson and Smith made war. Charles R.
Pendleton, editor of the Macon Telegraph, launched a bitter
personal attack on Watson and undertook to answer his editorial
onslaughts upon Samuel Spencer, president of the Southern
Railroad, a Morgan subsidiary. The attack precipitated a cloud-
burst of railroad-denunciation from Watson. Wall Street's
plundering of Southern railroads — the stock frauds, illegal com-
binations, extortionate rates, criminal negligence — were already
a familiar story. 18 But no one could make these villainies quite so
heinous, nor the villains quite so monstrous as Tom Watson. It
was a specialty with him. Early in 1905 he had pronounced J. P.
Morgan "the absolute king of the railroads in Georgia" "He
makes the Governor," Watson charged, "controls the legislature,
overrides the commission and tramples the Constitution of the
State under his feet." Samuel Spencer's crime, moreover, was
"unnatural as well as heinous." "He is the Sepoy, the hireling of
a foreign master, trained, uniformed, armed and paid to conquer
and plunder his own people. A Southern man, he has looted the
South; a Georgian, he has robbed Georgia." When Watson read
Spencer's report of a 525 per cent increase in net earnings in
eleven years his indignation was "deep and hot," and he wrote:

Those eleven years rose up in perspective before me, and the awful
MEANS by which Sam Spencer had reached that END stalked by
like a procession of spectres. The frightful loss of human life; the bribing
of politicians ; the corrupting of men in power ; the violation of state laws
and Federal statutes ; the disregard for the rights of shippers and passengers ;
the discriminations which have ruined whole communities ; the extortionate
charges which have beggared individuals . . . the defiance of State Com-
missions and of public opinion; the overwork and underpay of the men
who bear the brunt of the toil. . . .

Watson declared that "we lost fewer lives to the invading host
of Sherman's army than we have lost to the railroads" during

18 Lewis Corey, The House of Morgan, pp. 381-382.

326

Reform and Reaction

Spencer's regime. He demonstrated that the railroads owned
considerable stock in the Macon Telegraph, and turned furi-
ously upon the editor: "you hypocrite, you sneak, you corpora-
tion slave . . ." 19

Joel Chandler Harris's Populist character, "Mr. Billy San-
ders," summed up the old guard's response to Watson's cam-
paign: "I'll tell you the honest truth; thar ain't skacely a night
passes that I ain't rid by some red-eyed trust or 'nother, an' ef
'tain't a trust, then it's some villainous railroad corporation; an'
that's lots wuss'n a trust, bekeze the trains is allers late, an'
they've got a habit of switchin' back'erds and forrerds on the pit
of my stomach — I reckon they think it's some new kind of a
turn-table." 20

The primary election resulted in an overwhelming victory for
Hoke Smith. How much of the credit was due Tom Watson is,
of course, difficult to estimate. "To swing 90,000 populists to
your candidate [Smith] required the hardest fighting I had done
since 1892," wrote Watson, and surely his efforts were not
wasted. However the votes were obtained, there is less doubt
about the issues, for they were clearly Watson issues. Some of
the sweetness of victory was soured for Watson by his failure to
carry his own county, after he had made a special effort to do
so. In general, however, he was much elated by the turn events
were taking. Pointing out that Smith was making "the same
fight we used to make," that President Roosevelt had put his
hands to "the same work we wanted to do," and that "the Bryan
boom for 1908 lashes itself to the most radical plank of the Pop-
ulist platform," he concluded that "the skies do verily begin to
redden . . . for the glorious coming of morning." 21

There was a tragic sequel to the election — the Atlanta race
riot of 1906. Its mention gains pertinence in view of the future
history of Watson and of Watsonism. "Everybody knew that
the Disfranchisement issue was the cause of our success," wrote
Watson. During the campaign the papers of Atlanta were almost
daily filled with sensational stories of Negro atrocities. Lynch-

19 T. E. W., "Clark Howell's Defense of the Corporation," Tom Watson*s Maga-
zine, Vol. IV (March, 1906), pp. 1-8; "Sam Spencer," ibid., Vol. IV (April, 1906),
pp. 161-165; Atlanta Journal, July 13 and Aug. 11, 1906.

20 Joel Chandler Harris, "Mr. Billy Sanders," Uncle Remus Magazine, Vol. I,
No. 4 (Sept., 1907)-

21 Atlanta Journal, July 13, 1906.

327

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ing was openly advocated and frequently practiced. A concerted
crusade of race bigotry and hatred was preached. Partly it was
the result of newspaper rivalry, augmented by the recent intru-
sion of Hearst into Atlanta, but the political significance was
readily apparent. An editorial of the Atlanta Journal, one of
the milder papers, indicates the trend. It was printed in bold-
face capitals:

Political equality being thus preached to the negro in the ring papers
and on the stump, what wonder that he makes no distinction between
political and social equality. He grows more bumptious on the street. More
impudent in his dealings with white men; and then, when he cannot
achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to
destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute
did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the
south. . . . It is time for those who know the perils of the negro problem
to stand together with deep resolve that political power shall never give
the negro encouragement in his foul dreams of a mixture of races. 22

Watson employed the same appeal in his speeches for Smith.

A few days after the election the riot broke upon the streets
of Atlanta. It raged for four days. Innocent men and women
were hunted by packs and shot down in the streets of the city.
Destruction, looting, robbery, murder, and unspeakable brutality
went unrestrained. A committee of indignant citizens was
shocked that "the small minority which constitutes the tough ele-
ment was allowed to crucify this community in the eyes of the
world . . ." 28 The "tough element" expressed no regrets. It
wrote no editorials.

Between the role of national reformer and the role of de-
fender of White Supremacy stretched an embarrassing hiatus.
Faithful readers of Tom Watson's Magazine might now find
wedged between a defense of the Russian revolutionists and
an attack on Wall Street such editorials as one entitled "The
Ungrateful Negro." 24 Watson closed an editorial attacking
Booker T. Washington with the remark:

22 Atlanta Journal, Aug. x, 1906.

28 Glenn W. Rainey, "The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906" (Master's thesis, Emory
University), passim; Constitution, Dec. 29, 1906.
24 Tom Watson's Magazine, Vol. IV (April, 1906), pp. 165-174.

328

Reform and Reaction

What does Civilization owe to the negro?
Nothing!
Nothing 1 !
NOTHING! ! I 25

This editorial was more widely quoted in the South, especially
in Georgia, than anything he wrote. The response of the reform-
ers and progressives, on the other hand, ranged from bewilder-
ment to dismay in tone. "It is all so disappointing," wrote a
Southern woman. "I thought I'd struck the magazine, the writer,
and the reformer after my own heart." 26 A Northern reformer
wrote Watson: Your position on the Negro puts you in "the
same category with the men you censure," very close, indeed, to
"a professed politician merely out for his own advantage." 27
Upton Sinclair wrote a long letter of remonstrance. Thomas H.
Tibbies reported that "the Populists are all at sea over the negro
question in the South and are writing to me about it." 28

The tenuous lines that Watson had tied between National
Progressivism and Southern Agrarianism — practically the only
prospect of a bond between them — had snapped under the ten-
sion of the race issue.

The strained lines between Fifth Avenue and Hickory Hill
were burdened with more than ideological tension by this time.
Differences between the editor and the New York office of the
magazine over matters of management and business were con-
stantly arising, and heated disputes were conducted by mail.
Each side had just grievances. Watson was unable to collect
$9,000 of salary due him, and he discovered that Mann's busi-
ness reputation was not what it might have been. 29 He was em-
barrassed when forced by Clark Howell to admit that Mann's
Town Topics, a scandal publication, owned a majority of the
stock of Tom Watson's Magazine. He had endless complaints
to make concerning details. 80 Mann and those of the staff who

25 Ibid., Vol. I (June, 1905), p. 298.

26 Mrs. Martin Singer to T. E. W., May 27, 1905.

27 James F. Morton, Jr. to T. E. W., Jan. 6, 1905.

28 Upton Sinclair to T. E. W., June 25, 1905; Thomas H. Tibbies to T. E. W.,
Oct. 8, 1906.

^Arthur Brisbane to T. E. W., Jan. 12, 1906. Brisbane warned Watson that
Mann was unreliable.

80 T. E. W., "Foreword," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. I (Jan., 1907),
pp. 1-28.

329

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

sided with him said that Watson was "too dogmatic, abusive and
narrow in his relations with other reformers and radicals." Their
more pertinent, as well as more justifiable, complaint, however,
was that he was dictatorial, quarrelsome, and "a difficult person
to work with." They also resented his proclaiming, "I am this
Magazine" 81 The upshot of the dispute was Watson's with-
drawal from the editorship in October, 1906.

In January appeared the first number of Watson's Jeflerso-
nian Magazine. A surfeited public might now choose between
two Watson magazines. The New York competitor, however,
after two more numbers, gave up the attempt to produce a Tom
Watson Magazine without Tom Watson. "Hamlet with the
Prince of Denmark left out!" jeered Watson. He appealed to
all loyal followers to help him "down that brace of rascals in
New York." The appeal was significant, for the new magazine
took a more sectional, as well as a more personal tone. It was
published in Atlanta, and Watson was proclaimed "Editor and
Proprietor." The cover was decorated with a drawing of Monti-
cello and an inset portrait of Jefferson. Gradually, national is-
sues and national reforms gave way in the magazine to sectional
issues and Southern concerns. No issue, whether national or sec-
tional, however, was given precedence over the burning issue of
Tom Watson. One number of the magazine contained seven
pictures of the Editor and Proprietor (two on horseback), and
two pictures of Hickory Hill, to say nothing of a number of
pictures of the Watson household of three generations, and
several Watson servants. 82 Had there been any possible necessity
for it, Watson could now have said without the remotest fear
of contradiction, "I am this Magazine."

In October, 1906, he had begun the publication of a news-
paper, the Weekly Jefersonian. Since it was devoted more to
Watson's editorials than to news, its subsequent change in format
to a three column journal, and the change in name to Watson's
Jefersonian Weekly were not inappropriate.

The use of the mailing lists of the Atlanta Journal was doubt-
less of no little assistance in the launching of two periodicals by

81 "Explanatory," Watson's Magazine, Vol. VI (Nov., 1906), p. 1.

82 Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. I (Feb., 1907), passim,

330

Reform and Reaction

one man within two months' time. The lists were obtained
through the courtesy of Governor-elect Hoke Smith. 33

"You are a hard man to get along with — almost an impossi-
bility," wrote a member of the staff of the original magazine to
Watson. 34 He was not the first to find this so — nor the last. The
complaint recurs again and again in Watson's correspondence:
complaints of "language that was marked by coldness and blunt-
ness," of "the extreme anger displayed in your letter," of "bad
humor," of "an unfriendly spirit." The complainants ranged
from William Jennings Bryan to the secretary of a college de-
bating society. 35 There was something elemental and inexplica-
ble about his wrath that in some instances defies analysis. It was
most regularly provoked, however, when his will was crossed by
one whom he considered under obligation to him. There were
times when he showed remarkable restraint, but these instances
were fewer now than in the earlier part of his career.

Relations between the governor-elect and his Populist ally con-
tinued cordial. Smith acknowledged his obligation and empha-
sized his gratitude to Watson repeatedly by letter. "Your gen-
erous support during this race I can never forget," he wrote.
Again: "I appreciate more than I can tell you the broad line
upon which you planted your position." 86 He also saw to it that
public acknowledgment of Watson's assistance was made in the
Atlanta Journal™ He invited Watson to visit in his home in
Atlanta and discuss plans for the coming administration, and he
sent his son to visit at Hickory Hill. 38 As plans were shaped for
the new legislature they were sent to Thomson with urgent re-
quests for suggestions. "We are trying to have ready a bill cov-
ering every provision of the platform adopted at Macon to meet

33 Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W., Sept. 30, 1906; J. R. Gray (Editor of
Journal) to T. E. W., Aug. 28, 1906.

34 Charles Q. DeFrance to T. E. W., Oct. 15, 1906.
85 Correspondence, 1895-1908, Watson MSS.

36 Hoke Smith to T. E. W., June 29, 1906; July 29, 1906.

37 Editorial, Atlanta Journal, Aug. 23, 1906.

38 Hoke Smith to T. E. W., Dec. 30, 1906.

33 1

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

our promises to the people," wrote Smith, enclosing with his
letter an important bill. 89

In both his publications Watson gave the new administration
his unstinted endorsement. He heralded Smith's inauguration
with enthusiasm:

Last year we fought it out in Georgia, and we whipped the Yankee
corporations.

In spite of their money, and their venal tools, their Hessians and their
Sepoys, their campaign tricks and lies— WE WHIPPED THEM!

And with the passing of Joe Terrell [outgoing executive], ends the era
of Yankee corporations* bossism in Georgia.

With the term of Hoke Smith begins Home Rule. . . .

With Hoke Smith in office, armed with the confidence, and inspired
by the hopes of the people, A NEW ERA BEGINS. 40

Judging from all appearances, Smith the governor was as at-
tentive to the voice from Hickory Hill as Smith the candidate.
He was careful to consult Watson over all appointments that
might involve the latter's interests; he continued to submit bills
for Watson's approval, and to solicit advice. When Watson
showed signs of complaining of the slowness of the wheels of
reform, the Governor sought to calm him. "As to the other mat-
ters about which you have written to me, don't grow impatient,"
he begged, and he carefully outlined the strategy he was fol-
lowing. 41 Smith's complaint that the legislature was not with
him was corroborated by the reports of Congressman Hardwick,
who was likewise in close touch with Hickory Hill. "I am now
quite sure," wrote Hardwick, "that the administration has not
an actual majority in either House that at heart supports it.
Whatever is obtained from them seems to be literally
forced . . ." 42 Leaders of the legislature, some of them ex-
Populists, also asked instructions and advice from Watson. Few
indeed were the coming events at the Capitol that did not cast
their shadows at Hickory Hill.

In spite of persistent obstruction and a large lobby, the reform
governor accomplished wonders. Not since the famous "Farm-
er's Legislature" of 1890 had so many important laws, "reform"
and otherwise, been written. The railroad commission was in-

89 Ibid., June 17, 1907.

40 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, July 4, 1907.

41 Hoke Smith to % E. W., July 30, 1907.

42 Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W., Aug. 8, 1907.

332

Reform and Reaction

creased in size, in power, and in dignity. A wide range of pub-
lic utilities, service and power companies, were brought under its
supervision, and violators of its rulings were made punishable
like other criminals. Moreover, a special state's attorney was
created to assist in prosecuting violators of the commission's
rulings. To this office Smith appointed James K. Hines, Popu-
list candidate for governor in 1894, and a personal friend of
Tom Watson. Under the new dispensation passenger and freight
rates were materially reduced and some discriminations elimi-
nated. Free passes were forbidden, except to railroad employees
and officials.

After considerable debate, the legislature passed a bill sub-
mitting to the people for ratification a constitutional amendment
designed to disfranchise Negroes by the indirect means of regis-
tration requirements. The governor was satisfied with it, and
Hardwick, whose judgment on the measure Watson trusted, as-
sured him that it would disfranchise ninety-five percent of the
Negroes. Caught up on the wave of the reform movement, a
bill providing for statewide prohibition of the sale and manufac-
ture of intoxicating liquors was swept through the legislature.
Prohibition had not been a dominant issue in Smith's campaign,
but it had been the leading issue in the Populist state campaign
in 1896, and Populism was now in the saddle.

While looking askance at the disfranchisement amendment,
the national reform press nevertheless rang with praise for
Smith's accomplishments. u He has done what most of our trust-
busting governors had merely been talking about," wrote Her-
bert Quick. He was u now second only to La Follette, if second
to any, as a trust-busting governor." 4S

The question, "What will Watson say?" was an important one
for the future of the reform administration. He had had some
criticisms to make, but nearly all were made privately. Now, at
the end of the first session of the legislature, his verdict was an
unqualified endorsement :

Under difficult conditions, Governor Smith has done well. No man
could have done better. In spite of lobbyists and obstructionists, he has
wrung from the legislature a sweepingly good law which gives the rail-

43 Herbert Quick, op. cit, p. 241 ; A. F. McKelway, "The Suffrage in Georgia,"
Outlook, Vol. LXXXVII (Sept. 14, 1907), pp. 63-66; editorial, Outlook, Vol.
LXXXVII (Sept. 7, 1907), p. 2; "Georgia^ Example to the Nation," Independent,
Vol. LXIV (Jan. 16, 1908), p. 162.

333

To m Watson Agrarian Rebel

road commission the power of the state in dealing with public service
corporations. He has also secured the passage of a bill which redeems the
main pledge of his campaign — to wit the disfranchisement bill. . . .
Governor Smith ! The Jeffersonian welcomes you to the great class of men
who will battle for an idea . . . !

Some day, our proud old state will send you to the senate !

What may not be done by co-operation . . . !

That Governor Smith has done everything in his power to keep his
contract with the people no one can doubt. 44

Then came the case of Arthur Glover.

Glover, a semi-literate factory foreman of Augusta, was con-
victed of the murder of a woman mill-worker and sentenced to
hang. Of his guilt there was no question. He wrote Watson piti-
ful, illiterate letters imploring his assistance. 45 Watson did not
need to be reminded that Glover had been one of his most loyal
and formidable apostles in the bloody battles of the Augusta
workers' district back in the 'nineties. When last mentioned in
these pages he was fleeing to the South Carolina woods a jump
ahead of a posse, after a Democratic deputy sheriff had been shot
through the stomach at the Augusta polls. 48 When politics
reached the shooting stage — as they not infrequently did in the
'nineties — Glover was generally on hand, his trigger-finger
a-twitch. In the trial for his life he was prosecuted by Boykin
Wright. Wright was the manager of the Democratic campaigns
against Watson in Augusta and Richmond County that dashed
Populist hopes in three elections in the 'nineties. Watson nursed
an intense hatred against Wright and the "Augusta ring" and
could always be persuaded to believe the worst of them. Wright
was said to have mentioned Watson's name in Glover's trial, and
it was easy for Watson to believe that his apostle was a victim
of political persecution. Watson promised that after Smith's in-
auguration he would ask the governor, as a personal favor, to
commute the death sentence to one of life imprisonment.

It was characteristic of Watson that, once he had put his hand
to the task, the saving of Glover's life became a holy cause, and
all who stood in its way stood in the way of righteousness and
therefore constituted a sinister force of evil. He brought to bear
all the powerful forces at his command. When he heard that

44 Watson* s Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. I (Sept., 1907), p. 847.
^Arthur Glover to T. E. W., May 18, 1907.
48 See above, p. 204.

334

Reform and Reaction

Boykin Wright was attempting to persuade the governor against
Glover's cause, a new aspect was given to the cause. It was now
a test of political power between Watson and his most detested
political enemy before a governor whom Watson believed he
had made. In August he wrote Hardwick, who still served as an
intermediary between Watson and Smith, saying: "Boykin
Wright's intense hatred of Glover originated with Glover's fear-
less partisanship in '92, and his gallantry in coming to my rescue
on the night when the Augusta crowd meant to do me up. I
would have been killed that night had it not been for a few such
devoted friends as Glover." He did not wish the matter pre-
sented "in a way that Governor Smith would consider it a
threat." Nevertheless, he added significantly: "Governor Smith
should weigh these matters well, for it will make a world of
difference in the relations between himself and me, if he should
fail to measure up to the size of a full grown man in the emer-

M 47

gency.

The governor could not reasonably be expected to commit
himself before the prison commission made its report on Glov-
er's petition. In the meantime, however, Watson grew impa-
tient. Late in November he published an editorial taking Smith
to task for praising the work of the summer legislature. Watson
severely criticized its work, some of which he had previously
praised. Not long after this appeared, Hardwick arranged a con-
ference between Watson and Smith at the Capitol. Watson later
portrayed himself "with one leg thrown across the corner of
. . . [Smith's] big working desk," pleading for Glover's life for
more than an hour. Pleased with his conference, he wrote Hard-
wick: "Had a long talk with Gov. Smith and everything lovely.
He will stay on the job." 48 A few days later there arrived at
Hickory Hill a handsomely bound set of Voltaire's complete
works — a present from Governor Smith, who sent his best wishes
for the new year. 49 He also invited Watson to accompany him
to Roosevelt's White House conference of Governors.

The report of the prison commission was unfavorable to
Glover's petition, and the final decision now rested with the gov-

47 T. E. W. to Thomas W. Hardwick, Aug. 6, 1907, published in the Atlanta
Journal, Aug. 7, 1910.

48 T. E. W. to Thomas W. Hardwick, Dec. 18, 1907, Atlanta Journal, Aug. 7,
1 9 10.

49 Hoke Smith to T. E. W., Dec. 29, 1907.

335

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ernor. James K. Hines, one of Watson's many intercessors with
Smith, wrote that he believed the governor was "not influenced
by our enemies," and was "sincerely desirous of finding some
good reason for reducing the death penalty," but the case was
a bad one, and he begged Watson to be reasonable. 50 So did
others. The set of Voltaire, however, was promptly ordered re-
moved from Hickory Hill. Governor Smith wrote Watson re-
viewing at length the facts of Glover's case and the report of
the commission. "I am deeply grieved," he concluded, "to see
no other alternative in the discharge of my official duty than to
leave the sentence placed upon him to take its course." 61

Such monstrous proportions had Smith's "betrayal" assumed
in Watson's mind that he made the mistake of bursting into print
with an open letter to the governor full of extravagant conten-
tions. "Pardon me for speaking plainly — " he wrote, "this is a
matter of life and death, and my feelings are deeply stirred."
He denounced capital punishment, pronounced Glover a
"cracked-brained degenerate," and said that his execution would
be "murder." He also repeated the charges of political persecu-
tion. "Boykin Wright wanted me assassinated and Arthur
Glover was one of those who saved my life. I had hoped that
this would have some weight with you, but it seems that I was
wrong." M The governor remained unshaken. Glover was ex-
ecuted. "The Governor has chosen and will take the natural con-
sequences," wrote Watson to Hardwick. "No such cold-blooded
and selfish politician can ever be friend of mine again." w

Watson lost no time in initiating reprisals. Major McGregor
was sent to Joseph M. Brown, of Marietta, with the request that
he enter the gubernatorial race of 1908 as a candidate against
Smith. Watson's promises were not committed to paper, but
Brown wrote his friend Pendleton of the Macon Telegraph in
"strictest confidence" that Watson had assured him of "vigorous
support." M He also wrote Watson expressing his gratitude for
the offer, which, he said, almost persuaded him to enter the race.

60 James K. Hines to T. E. W., Jan. 28, 1908.

61 Hoke Smith to T. E. W., Jan. 28, 1908.

52 T. E. W. to Hoke Smith, Jan. 26, 1908, in the Atlanta Georgian, Jan. 29, 1908;
also Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Feb. 7, 1908.

53 T. E. W. to Thomas W. Hardwick, Jan. 28, 1908, Atlanta Journal, Aug. 7,
1 9 10.

64 Joseph M. Brown to Charles R. Pendleton^ Feb. 29, 1908 (a first draft), Brown
MSS.

336

Reform and Reaction

"But there are two or three considerations of great importance
entering into the question," he continued, "which I scarcely feel
willing to decide without a personal conference with you." w He
proposed a meeting between them in Atlanta, suggesting elab-
orate precautions for secrecy. In less than a month Brown an-
nounced his candidacy.

In heritage, training, occupation, and interest Brown was com-
pletely identified with corporate interests and their point of view.
A son of Joseph E. Brown, the millionaire railroad promoter,
he entered a railroad office after college and remained for
twenty-five years either an employee or an official of railway com-
panies. He was still financially interested in railroads when he
was appointed to the state railroad commission in 1904. As gov-
ernor and during his subsequent career he became known as a
bitter enemy of organized labor, and wrote many pamphlets and
articles to prove that unions were dominated by foreigners, affili-
ated with Negroes, and enemies of public welfare generally. 66

Short of Wall Street, it would have been difficult for Tom
Watson to have hit upon a more thorough representative of the
forces he had fought since the days of Henry Grady than he
found in Joseph M. Brown.

Brown had made himself an issue in the campaign of 1906 by
writing articles attacking Smith's platform of railroad reform.
The latter retaliated by charging that Brown represented the
railroad interests instead of public interests, and he declared that
if he were elected governor he would remove Brown from the
railroad commission. As commissioner, Brown voted against the
governor's rate-reduction measures, and continued to attack in
print the governor and the rulings of the commission of which
he was a member. For some reason Governor Smith did not
suspend Brown until three days after the legislature adjourned,
when it was too late for him to defend himself against the
charges brought. This seemed unfair to many. The conservative
press, the Howell faction, the railroads, and all those who had
opposed Smith in 1906 took up the cry that "Little Joe" was a
"martyr" and should be "vindicated." 5T

85 Joseph M. Brown to T. E. W., Feb. 29, 1908 (a first draft), Brown MSS.

66 Pamphlets, clippings, campaign literature in Brown MSS., e.g., Gov. Brown's
Letters on the Labor Unions (pamphlet, Atlanta, 1914) ; Gompers* Thugs (pam-
phlet, Atlanta, 1921) ; Atlanta Journal, May 3, 1914.

57 Lucian L. Knight, op. cit, Vol. II, pp. 1077-1087.

337

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Many powerful interests had been antagonized by the reform
legislation. The liquor interest, for one, was in arms. Reaction
was in the air. The national panic of 1907, that burst upon the
state in the midst of the reform program, offered a convenient
argument to reactionaries. Railroads reduced wages and services,
and thousands of workers were discharged. It was easy logic to
demonstrate that "Hoke Smith caused the panic." The campaign
slogan became "Brown and Bread: Hoke and Hunger." 68

There was little for Brown to do but join in and lead the
chorus. Wrote Brown:

What was the cause of this paralysis of business? Agitation. Agitation
which denounced the corporation. . . . This agitation seemed to take no
account of the fact that the interests of capital and labor are inseparably
interwoven. . . . The proof was absolute that confiscation, not proper
control, was the logical result of the crusade which had been waged against
capital. . . . Protection of property is the paramount duty of govern-
ment. . . .

Brown revived some of his older themes. The reduction of
freight rates was "an assault by the manufacturers and jobbers,
clients of Hoke Smith, upon the owners of railroad property."
Such measures would drive capital out of the state, and frighten
off Northern capitalists. But always his principal concern was
over the lamentable ravages of the reformers among "widows,
orphans, hospitals, colleges, and church societies" who owned
railroad stock. The "demagogue" had said to "the seamstress, to
the blind boy, to the helpless orphan, to the student in college,
to the aged and indigent minister and all others whose funds are
invested in railroads and like corporations, 'Your income shall
not exceed five per cent.' " B9

There was little Watson could say for his new candidate — as
long as Watson was denouncing the governor for not carrying
reform far enough. There was little he did say. For two months
after he had secretly pledged Brown his support, he did not
acknowledge a partiality between the two. He was for neither of
them, he announced. Gradually his criticisms of Smith became
harsher. "Gentle voter, did you ever, ever, EVER know of a
case of back-sliding equal to that of the Great Reformer whom

58 Cf . ibid., pp. 1088-1093 ; Joseph M. Brown, Reduction of Passenger Rates
(pamphlet, Atlanta, 1907).
69 MS. speeches, 1907-1908, Brown MSS.; Atlanta Journal, July 14, 1908.

338

Reform and Reaction

we elected Governor of Georgia in 1906?" he asked. " 'Fooled
again, 9 is about the size of it." Hardwick pleaded with him: "If
you haven't had enough reform under Hoke's administration —
my God, how much less would you have under Brown's." 60

Watson denied repeatedly that he had turned against Smith
because of the Glover incident. No ! It was because of his "back-
sliding," because of inadequate railroad reforms, broken pledges,
compromises. He hurled one anathema after another with little
regard for consistency. Some of Smith's measures that he had
earlier approved he now damned. He succeeded in making it
plain, however, that he had a score to settle with Hoke Smith,
and that he expected all Populists to uphold his hand. Smith was
a Clevelandite, a bad bargain to begin with, and Watson had
only made the most of it. Besides, the governor had proven an
ingrate and refused to give Populist vote credit for his election. 61

Aside from these fulminations there was one issue of more
validity between Smith and Watson, which the latter urged with
great conviction and effectiveness upon Populists. After the
break occurred between the two men, the Democratic Executive
Committee, dominated by the Smith faction, adopted a rule that
the party nominee for governor would be selected by a majority
of all the votes cast in the primary. Heretofore the nomination
had been made by a majority of the county delegates elected to
the state convention. Under the old "county unit system" the
largest county could have no more than three times the number
of delegates controlled by the smallest, though it might have a
hundred times the number of voters. It was in vain that Smith
pointed out that this change had been a part of his platform in
1906, and that he quoted the Populist platform of 1904 as de-
manding proportional representation and a direct vote for all
offices. Watson was convinced that the new rule was made to
undermine his power:

My deliberate opinion, after the coolest reflection, is that Hoke Smith,
being jealous of me politically, and attributing to me the ambition to go to
the senate from Georgia, deliberately devised this scheme for the purpose of
preventing the country counties from having their influence in elections.

He knew that my following was mainly composed of country people,
and that when he practically disfranchised the country counties he was
putting the knife to me.

60 Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W., April 20, 1908.

61 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, March 5, April 2 and May 7 and 21, 1908.

339

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Under this new rule a few city bosses, using "corporation influ-
ences, the job-lash, money, whiskey and log-rolling," would con-
trol the state, while the Populists of the rural counties, where
virtue and honor still resided, would be powerless. "The evil of
a pure democracy is that the minority have no protection from
the majority . . ." •* Brown and his supporters likewise took up
the cry against majority rule and used it effectively in the rural
counties. 68

"I would be quite untrue to my sense of propriety/' Brown
wrote Watson in the midst of the campaign, "were I to fail to
write and express to you my high appreciation of the kind edi-
torials you have been writing . . ." He begged advice, which he
promised would be "treated and protected as perfectly confiden-
tial." "Some work among the Populists is needed in Carroll,
Milton, Hart, and Franklin counties," he believed. 64 Watson as-
sured him that his editorials on Smith were "adding to your vote
in the country counties steadily." M The business manager of the
Jeffersonian proposed to Brown that, provided enough extra pa-
pers were ordered, he would print a "campaign issue" that would
be "a document of tremendous force." He added: "In making
you this offer we are practically giving you the advantage of a
thorough campaign organization." * The offer was accepted.
The itemized bill presented by the Jeffersonian to Brown, pre-
sumably covering all services during the campaign, amounted to
$2,674.10 in payment for 82,500 extra copies of the paper and
fifty-one two-months' subscriptions. 67

At the primary election in June the Smith landslide of 1906
was reversed, and Joseph M. Brown was nominated by a small
majority of 12,000.

It was not in the election returns, but in his daily mail, that
Tom Watson read the real meaning of the election of 1908. Be-
wildered at the stand he had taken, the old Populists spelled
out their perplexity in hundreds of letters. "Tom be Plain &
don't whip the devil around this way tell us in plain words,"

62 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, April a and May 3, 1908 and Jan. 6, 1910;
Constitution, May 3, 8, and 24, 1908.

63 Joseph M. Brown, MS. Speeches, 1908, Brown MSS.; Clark Howell to
T. E. W., May 14, 1908.

64 Joseph M. Brown to T. E. W., May 2, 5, and 27, 1908.

65 T. E. W. to Joseph M. Brown, May 17, 1908, Brown MSS.

66 James Lanier to Joseph M. Brown, May 15, 1908, Brown MSS.

67 Ibid., May 29, 1908, Brown MSS.

340

Reform and Reaction

wrote a "Vetran Pop." 'Tom it [the new majority rule] only
makes my vote equal yours and yours equal mine." Another pain-
fully listed Smith's campaign pledges, following each with the
comment, "He done it." "Think of it Mr. Watson!" pleaded an-
other, "the Whiskey men, the railroad ring, the Howell ring,
and the old bitter Macon Telegraph fighting Smith, & you fight-
ing him too I It does look like the rocks will cry out if you don't."
Many refused to follow him : "You have lost some of the truest
& bravest Populist [s] that ever wallke Gods green Earth. I
Personally know of six in my neighborhood that will not vote
for you for Prest." [Sic.'] One signing himself "An Old Friend,"
wrote : "The charm of your career, the romance of your life, the
heroic sacrifices you have made for liberty fade from my view in
this mean hour of fate." One of the authors of the Omaha plat-
form, a man who had recently published an admiring sketch of
Watson, wrote a genuinely grieved letter resigning a position he
held under Watson and ending a long friendship: "I did not
dream that the man who so fiercely denounced the alliances
made by trading politicians would himself ever descend to their
level. ... I see now that the 25,000 men who follow you
blindly turned the scale, and you have therefore become a menace
to the state." w

Along with letters of this type, however, came much of the
adoration to which he had been accustomed : "When you lead in
great strides toward the sublime heights of wisdom and justice
we can only follow in possibly faltering and feeble steps." Upon
the unsubstantial foundation of such faith as this man expressed
Watson was now compelled to construct his plans for the future.
At the Populist convention of July in Atlanta he sought to re-
assure his followers :

Boys, it's all right. We've got them by the hair of their heads. We
have them in the hollow of our hands. (Laughter.)

All you've got to do is to sit steadily in the boat and trust me.

And if God spares my life, we will dominate this state during the next
decade . . .

With the election results he professed to be completely satisfied.
The county unit system was now safe. "We hold the balance of

68 Letters to Watson, May-July, 1908. The last quoted is from Bernard Sutler,
June 6, 1908.

341

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

power in the country counties,' ' he said, "and the country coun-
ties rule the state." 69

With Watson, as with many men, a sense of misgiving and a
need of reassurance were often expressed in reassuring someone
else. "I want to be more with you," he wrote his wife after the
campaign. "We cannot expect so very many years of health and
strength and we must make the most of the Indian Summer.
We have lost far too much already." They would ride, walk, or
drive together every afternoon, he assured her. After dinner
there would always be music, while studies would be postponed
until morning. "In other words, I am going to live more for
you, and less for 'the people.' We will be happy, perfectly
happy, and no cloud shall come into the sky for us any more." 70

A turn of life's seasons was upon him, as he clearly foresaw,
but his prognostic of the weather of his soul was lamentably far
from accurate. The plain fact was that the serene skies of Indian
summer, for which he so earnestly yearned, were already men-
aced from half the points of the compass.

69 Atlanta Journal, July 9, 1908; Watsoris Jeffersonian Weekly, Nov. 12, 1908.

70 T. E. W. to Mrs. Watson, August 26, 1908, in the possession of Georgia Wat-

342

21

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

As the leader of a national party, Tom Watson occupied an
jlJL anomalous position with relation to three of his rivals in
the approaching presidential contest of 1908. In the fall of 1906,
while he was dictating from Hickory Hill the reform policies of
a Democratic governor, he received a letter from Bryan, then
touring the South. Bryan expressed his regrets that he was un-
able to return the visit that Watson had paid him at his home,
and added :

It is gratifying to know from what I have learned that we are going
to be able to act together in the coming contest. There has been a re-
markable change in public sentiment, so that things that were formerly
denounced as radical, are now regarded as not only quite reasonable, but
even necessary. 1

Watson's public answer was: " 'Act together,' William? Why
not — if you take our principles for your creed and reorganize
your old party to fit your new faith?"

In the meanwhile President Roosevelt confirmed the predic-
tions of his bitterest critic that "he would next be going to the
noted Populist for advice and inspiration." He invited Watson
to dine at the White House. Watson reported that he warned
the President against the prostitution of the federal judiciary to
the corporate interests, and advised the use of greenbacks as a
remedy for money panics. When Bryan expressed surprise at
the latter suggestion, the Populist put him on notice that if he is
"disposed to sidestep the money question" it is likely "the lead-
ership of the Jeffersonian Democrats will slip out of his hands."

1 William Jennings Bryan to T. E. W., Sept. 22, 1906, Watson's Jeffersonian
Magazine, Vol. I (Jan., 1907), p. 31.

343

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

He found the President u more of a Tom Benton Democrat than
he himself is aware of." 2 Joel Chandler Harris' Populist char-
acter, "Billy Sanders," regretted that he was not also invited:
"I'm mighty sorry we waVt all thar together; if we had V
been you could 'a' retched out your hands an' tetched the only
three ginnywine Democrats in North America, all warranted to
be free from saddle-sores an' things like that."

Shortly after he returned from his visit to the White House,
Watson wrote Roosevelt a flattering letter, comparing the great
power he held over the people with that swayed by Napoleon,
the Kaiser, and Andrew Jackson. He strongly urged the Presi-
dent to run for another term :

Mr. Bryan will be compelled to support you; so will Mr. Hearst;
so will I. For my part, there will be no compulsion about it; I will do
it openly, boldly, aggressively, and to the finish. A victory so won will
take its place in history side by side with the triumphs of the administra-
tions of Jackson and of Lincoln. . . .

To change Presidents now would carry with it the idea that your
policies had received a set-back, for the simple reason that none of your
lien tenants are [sic] identified in the public mind with you; each of
them stands in a class apart. Unless you run, I, for instance, would sup-
port Mr. Bryan, — though no one else knows this but yourself. If you run,
I would throw my open support to you, even though Mr. Bryan himself
should be a candidate and should offer me a place in his cabinet. . . . We
can whip those rascals [Harriman and Rockefeller] if you hold your posi-
tion in the White House . . . 8

During that same interval Watson was corresponding with
William Randolph Hearst, with whom an intermediary thought
"there will be no real trouble in getting together . . ." 4

These gyrations of Tom Watson were illustrative of the
political confusion of the times, as well as of the plight of the
Populist party. With Roosevelt continually stealing Bryan's
thunder, and each party vying with the other as the true pro-
ponent of Populist principles, with no differences between the
old parties over which anyone became excited, the old Populist
party was hard put to it to find unclaimed territory of its own.
As late as January, 1907, Watson was "still hoping that some

2 New York World, Nov. 30 and Dec. 3, 1907; clippings, Watson Scrapbooks.

8 T. E. W. to Theodore Roosevelt, Dec. 18, 1907, Roosevelt MSS., Washington,
D.C.

4 William R. Hearst to T. E. W., Jan. 17, 1907; C. A. Walsh to T. E. W., Jan.
31, 1907.

344

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

honorable plan may be hit upon which will enable all true-
hearted reformers to 'act together.' " Earlier he had invited
Bryan and Hearst to a conference of the three. Bryan was afraid
that "a public conference with you might be construed as an at-
tempt to organize a new party." Hearst was more interested,
but reticent, and the conference failed to materialize. 6 One after
another Watson renounced them : Bryan, when he backed down
on government ownership of railroads; Hearst, because he
favored the ship subsidy; Roosevelt, when he selected Taft. It
was time, he decided to return to his own house. However bar-
ren its comforts and deserted its appearance, it was still his own.

Early in April, 1908, two hundred delegates, grizzled bitter-
enders from twenty-three states, gathered at St. Louis to weep
on each other's shoulders. It was clear to the most sanguine that
it was the last Convention of the Populist party. Jacob Coxey
presided as temporary chairman. Bravely the old mid-roaders
lifted the cry, "To hell with fusion and Bryan." The old malady,
however, was still at work upon the decrepit body of Populism.
The Nebraska and Minnesota delegations bolted because the
majority would not postpone the nomination till after the Demo-
cratic Convention. The Convention nominated Tom Watson for
President and Samuel Williams of Indiana for Vice-President,
and tearfully adjourned. 6

"You ask me what we are to do," wrote Watson after he had
received the nomination. "Frankly, I don't know. The Demo-
cratic Party is chaotic; the Republican Party is becoming so; the
Populist Party is dead, and we are all at sea." He undertook the
leadership of what was admittedly another forlorn crusade, only,
as he put it, "to the end that Jeffersonian Democracy shall
neither lose its identity in Bryanism, be trampled out by Taftism,
led astray into socialism, or be gobbled up in the personal selfish-
ness of Hearstism." 7 He was the first candidate in the field.

For several years the most disheartening reports had been
coming in from old Populists of all sections; especially from
members of the national committee of the party. In the fall of
1905 an enthusiastic secretary undertook the heroic task of "se-

, 5 W. J. Bryan to T. E. W., Jan. 24, 1907; W. R. Hearst to T. E. W., Jan. 17,
1907.

6 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 3, 1908 ; Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, April
9, 1908.

7 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Oct. 8, 1908.

345

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

curing 'Old Guard' Populist clubs in each of the 2862 counties
of the United States — without one cent of expense money on
hand or in sight." 8 He reported religiously to Watson, but
it was plain that his ambition greatly outran his accomplishment.

Watson did not even pretend to pitch his campaign upon a
national scale, and his role in the election was almost entirely a
local one. The nature of his appeal frankly precluded any but a
sectional response. He was the only candidate, he said, who was
* Standing squarely for White Supremacy" By expressing sym-
pathy for the Negro troops whom Roosevelt had punished in
the Brownsville incident, Bryan had proved himself "unworthy
of Georgia's vote." Moreover, the Nebraskan believed in and
practiced "social equality" and had showed his contempt for the
South by saying that he would never vote for a Confederate
soldier. Of course, Watson renewed his familiar denunciations
of the "millionaire plunderers and land-grabbing corporations,"
and "the remorseless greed of capitalism," but somehow they
rang a bit hollow this time. His speech of acceptance in Atlanta
breathed death and destruction to capitalist industrialism, but it
was followed in awkward juxtaposition by Joseph M. Brown's
speech in the same city the next day accepting the nomination
for governor. Brown deplored the "demagogue's war on legit-
imate investment," the "crusade against capital," the "agitation
which denounced the corporation."

Apparently Watson's only real motive in entering the race
of 1908 was to provide some means of rallying his following in
Georgia around its own colors. During the four years in which
he had shifted them from one Democratic faction to the other
as a balance of power, the loyal Populists had not once united on
a ticket of their own. Stray sheep are easily lost in a common
fold. The only reason Watson had given Populists for voting
for Joseph M. Brown — other than as a means of punishing
Smith — was that Brown, "a native Georgian, would probably
not consider the state disgraced" by honoring Watson with the
state's electoral vote, whereas Smith, "not a native Georgian"
might feel differently. He made an earnest appeal for this "com-
pliment," even promising to give up the electoral votes to the

8 H. L. Bentley to T. E. W., Jan. 9, 1906; J. M. Mallet (Treasurer of the Na-
tional Federation of People's Party Clubs) to T. E. W., Nov. 6, 1906. Jacob S.
Coxey to T. E. W., May 17, 1908.

346

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

Democratic candidate should they later prove indispensable to
his success. Some color was given to the suspicion of a bargain on
this matter when Brown later refused to say that he would sup-
port Bryan for president. 9

The tell-tale election returns very nearly stripped Watson of
even the modest pretensions he made before the election. His
national popular vote was a pitiful 29,146 while the votes he
polled in the state amounted to some 17,000. It was the vote of
his native state that he most coveted, and for which he had
worked hardest in the campaign. What had happened to the
once formidable ranks of 90,000 Georgia Populists he did not
attempt to explain. His daily mail was a painful reminder of one
explanation. He thanked u the faithful 17,000 who voted for
Watson and Williams — from no motive in God's world but a
sense of duty," and breathed defiance to his enemies :

Those Hoke Smith editors who are skirt-dancing over my downfall,
have done that before. They should know me better. No man is whipped
until he gives himself up.

And you know me too well to think that I will ever give up. . . .

WE HOLD THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE COUNTRY
COUNTIES, AND THE COUNTRY COUNTIES RULE THE
STATE. 10

As long as Democratic primaries were won by a 12,000 majority
his boast had some validity. His was a badly shaken "dictator-
ship," however, and he knew it.

It was admittedly a time of self-searching for the Populist of
Hickory Hill. At frequent intervals he reviewed and reexamined
"Our Creed" in his periodicals. He assured his followers that
their principles were the immutable embodiment of justice and
right, now and forever, and swore by the ghost of Thomas
Jefferson that he was now, and would be forever more, loyal to
those principles. Surely his enunciation of them still awoke
familiar echoes from the 'nineties. He refused to admit there
was any change. He still preached an alliance between West
and South — yet he found the cement for the union in their re-

9 New York World, July 10, 1908; Constitution, May 14 and July 10, 1908;
Atlanta Journal, July 11, 1908.

10 Watson's Jefiersonian Weekly, Nov. 12, 1908.

347

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

spective race problems. He still denounced the greed of capi-
talist exploiters — yet they all seemed to be "Yankee capitalists,"
and "Yankee corporations." He still called for a union of all
farmers against the common class enemy, industrial capitalism —
yet he disfranchised half his farmers because of their race. He
still called himself the leader of a national party — yet his appeal
was almost purely sectional.

Somehow, through the gradual accretion of what seemed to
him necessary corollaries, the populism of Tom Watson, per-
haps unobserved by himself, had undergone a fundamental
transformation since 1896. It might be that, like John C. Cal-
houn, another renegade apostle of Thomas Jefferson, he had
been betrayed by the exigencies of a perverse sectional economy
into a complete disavowal of his master's creed. Gradually the
Jeffersonian equalitarianism and humanitarianism of the 'nineties
had been exchanged for a patchwork of the garments of Cal-
houn's Greek Democracy: militant sectionalism, fear of majority
rule, racial domination, and perceptible overtones of a landed
aristocracy. There had been a time when he believed that "the
accident of color can make no possible difference in the interests
of farmers, croppers, and laborers," and had said to both races :
"You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your
earnings. . . . You are deceived and blinded that you may not
see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system
which beggars both." n He now advocated the adoption of a
policy of repression so severe and so firm that "the great mass
of negroes would reconcile themselves to a condition of recog-
nized peasantry — a laboring class . . ." M No Southern leader
of post-bellum times ever equaled Tom Watson in his scathing
ridicule of "Negro domination" as the "stock-in-trade" of the
Southern demagogue. Yet few there were who could rival his
later asseverations upon "the superiority of the Aryan" or the
"HIDEOUS, OMINOUS, NATIONAL MENACE" of
Negro domination. 13

In an address to a convention of the Farmers' Union, a new
organization more middle-class and conservative than the old

11 P. P. P., Sept. 16, 189a.

12 T. E. W., "The Negro Question," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. I
(Nov., 1907), pp. 1032-1040.

2 T. E. W., "The Foreign Missions Craze," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine,
Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. Ill (Feb., 1909), p. 97.

348

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

Alliance, in which he professed to see "the reincarnation of the
Farmers' Alliance," Watson threw out one admonition with
especial emphasis : "Your organization must represent your class
interest" 14 It is made obvious by the context that he was still
employing the ideology of the 'eighties and 'nineties, that is, the
assumption that the class struggle lay between industrial and
finance capitalism on one hand, and an undifferentiated class of
"farmers" on the other. When the editor of a Farmers' Union
paper ventured to question the simplicity of this picture and to
mention the growth of tenancy and the concentration of land
ownership in fewer hands, Watson attacked him furiously. He
went to considerable pains to prove "how unfounded are the
statements that poor men can not acquire landed property in
this country." As for the increase in tenancy, some farmers sim-
ply "prefer to rent." He concluded:

Consequently when a certain Farmers' Union editor goes to publishing
articles demanding that land ownership be restricted to his own narrow
notions, I call him

A Contemptible Little Demagogue.

When a certain Farmers' Union Editor got to printing stuff calculated
to sow discord and strife between landlord and tenant, I did not hesitate
to call him

A Contemptible Little Demagogue™

Watson's own experience bore testimony to the significant
differences in the cotton economy that marked the contrast be-
tween the 'nineties and the first decade of the new century. His
own estimate of his "financial standing" in 1908 was placed at
the figure of $258,000, or more than double his "standing" in
1904. 16 He still thought of himself as a "farmer," of course. The
price of cotton was relatively high throughout the decade, and
the value of all farm property in the state increased 154.2 per
cent, as against an increase of 20.7 per cent in the 'nineties. The
average value of farm lands and buildings per acre advanced
from $6.95 in 1900 to $17.78 in 1910, while the average value
of land alone increased 167.4 per cent. During the same decade,
however, the percentage of tenancy increased from 59.9 in
1900 to 65.4 in 1 9 10, and the percentage of owners correspond-

14 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Jan. 24, 1907.

15 Ibid., Feb. 17, 1910.

16 Personal account books, Watson MSS.

349

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ingly decreased. 17 There was evidently a large group of "farm-
ers" — the majority in fact — who had not shared the new
prosperity.

The trend toward increasing tenancy was fraught with fatal
implications for the ideology of populist agrarianism. Yet it was
a trend that Tom Watson's logic never took into account.
Watson persisted to the end in applying to a changed economy
the ideology he employed in the 'eighties — when there really
was some validity to the populist dichotomy of farmers (the
oppressed) and industrialists (the oppressors). The dichotomy
between dispossessed farmers and possessing farmers was one he
chose to ignore.

There were certain signs of a political as well as an economic
rift in Populist ranks that were giving Watson food for reflec-
tion at the same time. Reports were continually coming to him
of Populist defections to Socialism. A Texas editor wrote Wat-
son: u The old populists are all right, but it is the younger who
need looking after. They are sliding into the Socialist party or
what they think is such, but which is really an aggravated case
of Populism." 18 Similar reports came from Alabama, Missouri,
and other Southern and Mid-Western states. The secretary of
the Populist executive committee of Georgia wrote him that
u Most of the leading Populists of this section are Socialists.
They are my friends; but in no way enthusiastic in the work
of keeping Populist papers alive." 19 The national organizer of
People's Party Clubs likewise reported that "some of our late
Populist friends have gone over to Socialism." 20

In the issue of his magazine for October, 1909, Watson began
a series of articles entitled "Socialists and Socialism," which he
featured for nine consecutive months. The style of the articles
was borrowed from stump hustings and the lawyer's brief rather
than from the scholar's study. If, as he said, he "bought pretty
nearly every Socialist book named in the catalogues," he seems
to have contented himself largely with mere possession. His
avowed intention was to "disembowel" Bebel, "explode" Marx,
and "drive Socialists so completely into the corner that they
haven't got room to grunt."

17 Robert P. Brooks, The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, pp. 90, 122.

18 Taylor McRae to T. E. W., Jan. 23, 1907.

19 J. A. Bodenhamer to T. E. W., May 29, 1905.

20 N. L. Bentley to T. E. W., Feb. 4, 1907.

350

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

To a confidant of long standing who complained of his tactics
he explained his purpose. He believed that Socialism "would
sweep the rural districts like a prairie fire if not opposed in
time." If he could compel Socialist leaders "to renounce these
extreme parts of the Marxian program," he hoped to herd
their followers into the Populist fold. "If you will watch the
strategy," he advised, "you won't find it so bad . . . you will
see that there is *a method in my madness.' " 21 To the same
confidant he later wrote: "I am a State Socialist through and
through . . . but the lines of division between public utilities
and private property are just as plainly discernible as are the
lines between murder and arson." 22

For a time Watson's "strategy" ran true to form. "Like a
sheet of flame from hell," he wrote, "Socialism would devour
the Home, and all that is purest and best in Christian civiliza-
tion, — reducing all women to the same level of sexual de-
pravity . . ." Socialism would never "make a white woman se-
cure from the lusts of the negro." Furthermore, "Women have
no business to intermeddle in politics," and there is "no equality
of races or of sexes." It also appears that Karl Marx favored
"the damnable doctrine that gold is the natural and proper
standard of value." Besides, Marx was "a Jew." Friedrich
Engels, it seems, was "another Jew." 23

As he warmed to his task, however, convictions began to get
the better of "strategy," and his tone changed to one of earnest
defense. "I will prove to your complete satisfaction," he prom-
ised in February, "that the origin of private property was not
only just but sacred" By May he had arrived at the conclusion
that "private property is a law of nature — as any one who will
use his eyes can clearly see . . ." Likewise rooted in sacred and
natural law were the institutions of rent, interest, and profit, not
to mention tenancy. Because "competition is inseparable from
private ownership" it followed that "In free competition, the
reward goes to the swiftest runner, the victory to the abler man
. . ." He held that "every one of the terrible conditions which
Marx seeks to relieve by establishing a new order of Society

21 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, April 23, 1910.

22 Ibid., Nov. 19, 1919.

23 T. E. W., "Socialists and Socialism," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol.
Ill (Dec, 1909), p. 914; ibid., Vol. IV (Jan., 1910), p. 4; "Populism vs. Socialism,"
ibid., Vol. IV (July, 1910), p. 537-

351

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

grew out of the abuses of power and privilege, and not out of the
system itself." All that was necessary was reform. 24

Given to frequent autobiographical reference in all cases,
Watson drew almost his entire defense of land ownership and
tenancy from his personal experience : the long struggle up from
poverty, and the fight for land, and still more land. "I toiled
and moiled for thirty years to get that land," he said. And he
meant to keep it, all the theories of Surplus Value to the con-
trary notwithstanding. It was a passionate, personal apologia for
agrarian individualism. Once in the 'nineties he had exclaimed:
"I can put forth the strength of my hand in any field of indus-
try, and whatsoever I earn is mine, mine — and is not carted up
to feed some lazy lout of a robber who calls himself my feudal
chief." It was the historic battle-cry of a class, and Tom Watson
never lifted a new one.

Of the socialist writers who took up Watson's challenge, none
devoted more critical attention to his articles than Daniel De
Leon, the editor of the Daily People, official organ of the So-
cialist Labor Party. In a series of nineteen articles and "open
letters" De Leon subjected almost everything the Populist had
to say on the subject to an attack that came to rival Watson's in
asperity. In answering the articles of his "effervescent, though
oft admired, acquaintance Tom Watson," De Leon proposed to
illustrate "the pitiable wreckage" that a "liberal education in
heels-over-head populistic economics will work even in so bright
an intellect as Tom Watson's." 25 Needless to add, De Leon
found no difficulty in running dialectic rings around his oppo-
nent in a combat over Marxian theory. He read "our Georgia
Don Quixote" elementary lessons in surplus value and class
contradictions, illustrated by such homely examples as the ob-
servation that "Mr. Watson and his 'Niggers' have their hands
in each other's wool." He finally put the Georgian down as a
"feudal junker." "Hit the junker," he said, "and the capitalist
will yell — we are seeing the spectacle in Great Britain in the
matter of the House of Lords; hit the capitalist, and the junker

24 Ibid., Vol. IV (Jan., 1910), p. 5; ibid., Vol. IV (Feb., 1910), p. 93; ibid., Vol.
IV (April, 1910), pp. 276-277; ibid., Vol. IV (May, 1910), p. 360.

25 Daniel De Leon, Watson on the Gridiron, p. 4. De Leon's articles on Watson
were published posthumously under this title.

352

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

will shriek — we are seeing the spectacle in Mr. Watson's de-
portment." De Leon's coup de grace was administered when
Watson innocently quoted a remark literally that Marx intended
ironically. In so doing Watson "immortalized himself as an un-
conscious humorist." 26

Watson showed a disposition to strike back for a time, and
once went so far as to include De Leon by name in a public chal-
lenge to a number of Socialists to come into his magazine and
debate with him. "I just dare any and all of you to come," he
announced. "I am rubbing my fist right under your noses, you
know." De Leon promptly shipped him his articles from the
Daily People and in an open letter dared him to publish them.
Watson recanted. He had discovered that De Leon did not "rep-
resent the true Socialist doctrine." In reprinting the challenge,
he neglected to withdraw De Leon's name. Such conduct, con-
cluded De Leon, was "something worse than the bluster of the
cross between the feudal junker and the bourgeois which you
typify." 27

In concluding his series of articles, Watson called down a
plague upon both houses, industrial capitalism as well as social-
ism. As for him and his household, they would return to a
Golden Age of their fathers. "With a resolution which nothing
can shake," he announced, "I take my stand for the ideals of the
Old South. . . . Here, I choose my ground; here, I form my
line of battle : here, I fly the flag of revolt . . ." He was never
very definite about his ideals or his line of battle, but they all
had something to do with eighteenth-century England: "The
old Whig ideals of England — that's what it was — the democracy
of Charles Fox, of Samuel Romilly, of Henry Vane, of Alger-
non Sidney, of Pym and Hampden." He disposed of the social-
ists, finally as "Goths, Huns, Vandals, who lust for loot," and
who are patently beyond the reach of argument. "These men
cannot be driven back by arguments," he concluded. "The only
method of dealing with such barbarians is to have the guns ready
and the powder dry. And the men behind the guns must be
American-born ; for the time is surely coming when he who is in

26 Ibid,, pp. 20, 31, and 39.

27 Daniel De Leon to T. E. W., May 3, 1910, "An Open Letter," in De Leon,
op. cit., pp. 42-43-

353

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

command must issue the order, Tut none but Americans on
guard tonight.' " 28

The year of 1 910 was pivotal in Tom Watson's career, and on
it more than one issue turned. His announcement of a return to
the Democratic party, though it put a formal period to twenty
years of rebellion, was of more symbolic than real significance.
In May he wrote the national chairman of the People's party
that he had decided it was "impossible to do anything in the
South outside of the Democratic party," and that he would not
join in the effort to reorganize the third party. "I am going to
devote the balance of my life to driving out of the Democratic
party its deserters and do-nothings, and I am going to take
command of the Democratic party myself," he announced pub-
licly in July. There had been a time when such a proclamation
would have created more of a sensation than it did now. Since
he disclaimed all ambition for office, his role in state politics was
little altered by his return to the old party. He still posed as the
foreman of a jury before which the two evenly matched factions
of Democrats must plead their cases. It was true that he had
elected his governor in 1906 and spectacularly defeated him
two years later, but there were those who held that the latter
tour de force had been a costly one. There were even those who
held his power in contempt. Consciously, then, he faced a show-
down in the contests of 19 10.

If he must needs grapple with the Browns and Smiths and
Joneses of an office-greedy world for the restoration of the
Golden Age, he was ready to do it. If scruples, and dignity, and
what some considered honor stood in the way of the necessary
votes, they might have to be doffed, like a frock coat in a combat
of catch-as-catch-can. It was a regrettable concession, to be sure,
and there were those (estimable gentlemen, no doubt) who
might not approve, but he stood ready to be judged in the light
of the Golden Age. "A great uplifting faith wells within me,"
he wrote that year, "and sustains me in the fight that I am mak-

28 T. E. W., "Socialists and Socialism," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. IV
(June, 1910), pp. 451-452; "Populism vs. Socialism," ibid., Vol. IV (July, 1910),
pp. 539-540.

354

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

ing." Such a faith once converted windmills into giants, and it
still commands a sort of respect.

The gubernatorial contest again lay between Brown and
Smith, with the latter as the aggressor this time. The issues were
much the same as in the previous election. Watson promised
Smith he would not oppose him, and let that contest run its own
course without interference 29 in order to mend fences in his own
district. Thomas W. Hardwick, congressman from that district,
had virtually served as Watson's lieutenant for eight years, dur-
ing which they had been in constant correspondence and on the
friendliest terms. In 1908 Hardwick refused to break with Gov-
ernor Smith when Watson did, though he continued to conciliate
his patron in every way possible. The following year, however,
he begged to be excused from giving a petty appointment to a
friend of Watson's on the ground that the man was an enemy
of Hardwick's. On the margin of Hardwick's letter making this
announcement Watson wrote "Why we parted ways." so Such
insubordination could never be tolerated. He had made Hard-
wick, he announced, and would most certainly break him. Hard-
wick proceeded to treat the threat with contempt, contending
that Watson had discredited himself with Populists, that he
"stood convicted of outrageous falsehoods and that he should be
dealt with as a leper, a man unclean, morally and mentally."
The struggle rapidly assumed the dignity of fish-mongers' rep-
artee: each man held a rival rally in the same town, screaming
imprecations at the other to the edification of the multitude.
According to the "Sage," Hardwick "went to bed drunk in
Hotel Lanier in Macon, with a cigar in his mouth, and set the
bed on fire." The appeal he made to his followers was frankly
personal :

I never was more conscious in my life of having reached a crisis. It
must be evident to you, as it is to me, that unless I leave these grounds
today victorious I might as well be laid in my grave. . . .

Now, he [Hardwick] says I have lost out with the old Pops in the
Tenth district and that they are going with him against me. . . . Now,
boys, will you stand by me? I appeal to you. If Hardwick is reelected
I will be considered in disgrace. Don't put that cup to my lips. Stand
by me . . .

29 Hoke Smith to James J. Green, Aug. 8, 1910, Watson MSS.

30 Thomas W. Hardwick to T. E. W., Jan. 1, 1910; also Oct. 16, 19, and 23, and
Nov. 23, 1909.

355

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Somehow everything went awry. The "boys" did not stand
by him. Hardwick was elected, and Watson by his own admis-
sion was "in disgrace." Not only that, but a fickle state elec-
torate again changed its mind : Brown was defeated, and Hoke
Smith won the nomination by less than a two-thousand popular
majority. At the state convention in Atlanta a week later the
victorious Smith-Hardwick forces dominated the entire proceed-
ings, and by "steam-roller" and "gag-rule" methods prevented
the Brown minority delegates from offering the slightest resist-
ance to the platform or any resolutions offered. 81

Watson, in the meantime, had announced that he would de-
liver an address in Atlanta to which he broadcasted invitations
far and wide. He promised that the speech would be pitched
upon a nonpartisan plane and would rise above personalities.
"Night and day it monopolized his thoughts," he wrote of the
speech. "The occasion was to be the turning point of his life."
He rented the largest auditorium in the city, and, according to
one estimate, eight thousand people were attracted to hear him.
His opening sentence, one might suppose, was sufficient to strike
home the gravity of the occasion to the most frivolous. "The
world," said the Sage, "is plunging hellward." He continued:

For nearly twenty years I have been in the Valley of the Shadow,
politically, enduring with what patience and dignity I could the insults
and slanders heaped upon me by my enemies. To-night I have come to
drink with you, if you will let me, the rich, pure wine of reconciliation.
I beg of you a fair hearing and nothing else. . . .

If something isn't done to check the rising tide of discontent in this
country, there will be the bloodiest struggle between the rich and poor
that ever drenched a continent with human blood.

My mission is to tell you what you must do to be saved — to that
high and holy purpose will be devoted the remaining years of my life. I
beg you to listen . . . w

But they would not listen — however high and holy his pur-
pose. So long as his jeremiad remained abstract they were quiet.
But Watson had reached the belated conclusion that the regis-
tration law he had sponsored in 1906 was now being used by
Smith and Hardwick to vote Negroes as a balance of power to
overthrow his influence. When he touched upon that subject, a

81 Constitution, Sept. i, a, 1910; Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Sept. 22, 1910;
L. L. Knight, op. ciU, Vol. II, p. 1108.

82 Constitution, Sept. 3, 1910; Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Sept. 8, 1910.

356

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

pandemonium of hissing and heckling broke loose in one section
of the balcony. The interference appeared to be organized.
Wheeling upon the hecklers "like a tiger at bay," he launched a
furious tirade at them :

Listen to me, I say! You may not hear me now, but you will later.
I am seeking no office. I am representing the thinking masses of the people
of Georgia, and if you do not hear me tonight you will hear me in my
magazine and through the columns of my weekly papers.

The "wine of reconciliation" was badly spilled by this time. In
the momentary inspiration of his rage he hurled one threat after
another. He would "make this insult tonight ring from Rabun
to Tybee and from the Savannah to the Chattahoochee." They
would see. An outraged people would turn upon them. He
would organize an independent ticket, bolt the primary, and de-
feat Smith in the general election in October. Abruptly he
stopped speaking, turned about, and quit the stage. Later he
said that he had had a premonition of assassination.

"Poor old Jeremiah!" commented the Constitution patroniz-
ingly. "Compressing in his lamentations the woe, the pessimism
of all sacred and profane history, he occupied the shining emi-
nence of typifying the One Great Grouch of humanity's story.
Mr. Watson has him 'lashed to the mast' and 'faded to a fin-
ish.' " Instead of "plunging hellward" the world was "getting
purer, better, brighter . . . every hour and every day." Clark
Howell asked: "Is it not a thousand pities that these magnificent
gifts should be diverted to the sordid, picayunish, indescrib-
ably petty arena of billingsgate and fish-mongering politics?" n
Smith's organ, the Atlanta Journal, commented condescend-
ingly: "It may have been a threat; it may have been a prophecy.
Upon the strength of the following remaining to the old sage of
McDuffie — an uncertain quantity of recent years — depends the

answer." 84

Far from forgetting the threats hurled during his temper tan-
trum in Atlanta, Watson plunged seriously into the task of ful-
filling them. He obtained Joseph M. Brown's promise to oppose
Smith in the state election, and urged his followers to "set aside"
the defeat of Brown in the state convention and vote for him

88 Clark Howell, editorial in the Constitution, Sept. s, 1910.
84 Editorial in the Atlanta Journal, Sept. 3, 1910.

357

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

anyway since "frauds annul everything — including rotten nomi-
nations." More "premonitions" haunted his waking hours. Re-
turning to Atlanta to "finish" his speech, he announced: "If
James R. Gray, Hoke Smith and Tom Hardwick kill me they
will find enough of my friends left to kill them. A man who
does not protect himself is a fool."

His desire to bring disgrace upon Hoke Smith became a blind-
ing obsession. He informed Smith that he held him individually
responsible for breaking up his address in Atlanta and charged
him with a long list of political perfidies, which he published. 85
Not content with this, he unearthed a long discredited scandal
against Smith's name and set to work upon it. All was grist for
his mill: anonymous letters, third-handed stories, stale rumors,
anything. His serious attempt to substantiate the charges he
made revealed what had happened to an astute mind trained in
criminal law. "Most of my information came to me originally by
anonymous letters," he admitted, but he had corroborated it
amply. There was a letter from a friend who had the story from
a man who heard it first hand, "or was told of it by a man who
did hear it." If one of his informants turned out to be "an in-
mate of a house of prostitution in Columbus," it only proved her
ingenuousness. 88

On September 27 he wired Smith: "It is closing in on you. I
give you one more chance to save your wife and son. Resign by
two o'clock today, or your crimes will be known to all the
world." 87 In the issue of his weekly for September 29, only a
few days before the state election, he published the sensational
scandal: "Hoke Smith has ruined more than one pure girl, more
than one pure wife." Details were furnished in an anonymous
letter, also printed.

Smith ignored the charges. A few days later he was over-
whelmingly elected. Watson's own county, which had turned
against Smith in 1906, when Watson supported him, now went
for Smith. As compared with Smith's poll of 95,000, Watson's
candidate Brown received 17,000 votes — "the faithful 17,000."

Instead of dropping the charges of immorality against Smith

35 T. E. W. to Hoke Smith, Sept. 4, 1910 (copy), Watson MSS.; Watson's Jeffer-
sonian Weekly, Sept. 22, 19 10.

36 T. E. W. to F. L. Seely, Nov. 12, 1910 (copy), Watson MSS.

37 T. E. W. to Hoke Smith, Sept. 27, 1910 (copy of telegram marked "paid."),
Watson MSS.

358

"The World Is Plunging Hellward"

after the election, Watson renewed them with colorful elabora-
tions, and repeated the demand that Smith resign or refute the
charges. 88 In the meanwhile, F. L. Seely, editor of the Atlanta
Georgian, offered Watson his assistance in exposing Smith and
asked to be directed to the evidence that would substantiate the
charges. Watson sent such flimsy evidence as he had, saying
there was no doubt in his mind of the correctness of the
charges. 39 Rejecting this evidence, Seely printed an authentic
repudiation of the scandal from its source, thereby completely
discrediting Watson. Undaunted, Watson renewed his charges
and viciously attacked Seely. "WHAT IS THE MATTER
WITH THOMAS E. WATSON?" inquired the Georgian in a
streamer across its front page. "Like a hydrophobic animal . . .
he is snapping and biting at nearly everything nowadays." The
editor believed that if Watson was in a sane condition of mind,
he was "the basest, most depraved, most poisonous man in
Georgia today." 40

The sequel to the exposure of Watson's irresponsible charges
against Smith was a ludicrous hoax, of which Watson was the
unmistakable victim. Provided with an insight into Watson's
methods in the Smith case, Seely saw to it that an invented story
of his own complicity in a land swindle fell into the Sage's hands.
Completely duped, Watson rushed into print with the whole
story, only to have Seely expose the hoax upon him before the
Jefersonian reached the news stands. 41 The state rocked with
laughter. It was the lowest ebb for the Sage of Hickory Hill.

The following June Watson put forth all the strength at his
command in an attempt to defeat Governor Smith for the Sen-
ate. The response to his call, "Meet Me in Atlanta, Boys," was
so feeble that it provoked ridicule. Smith was elected to the
Senate shortly after his inauguration as Governor. Calmly ignor-
ing Watson's loud outcry, he continued to occupy the governor's
chair for four and a half months after his election to the Senate.

38 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Oct. 13 and Dec. 29, 1910.
39 T. E. W. to F. L. Seely, Nov. 12, 1910 (copy), Watson MSS.
40 Atlanta Georgian, Dec. 3, 1910.

41 W. W. Brewton, Life of Thomas E. Watson, pp. 354-357; Watson's Jeffer-
sonian Weekly, Dec. 29, 19 10.

359

22
The Shadow of the Pope

ANEW spirit seems to have taken possession of Hickory Hill
. in the fall of 19 10, most clearly manifesting itself in the
master of the house. He confronted the critics who said that he
was sinking into a morbid and misanthropic dotage with a denial
that was disarming in its candor. If he were as bitter and vindic-
tive as they said, how was it that his writings enjoyed "such an
enormous circulation," or that there was u such a tremendous de-
mand" for him as a public speaker? He now spoke, he assured
them, "as easily as the birds sing — and there are no failures." As
usual, when his self-esteem was called in question, he thought of
Bryan. He was a better lawyer than Bryan, a better writer, a
legislator of more enduring works, he asserted. "I can now draw
larger crowds than Bryan can, and no man's gospel is more en-
thusiastically cheered. His sun is setting, and mine is rapidly ris-
ing." There had been a time when he bowed to discouragement.
u But of late a new spirit has taken possession of me," he wrote,
"and I have to obey it. Nothing tires me; nothing discourages;
nothing intimidates." He was convinced, he said, that the peo-
ple were "beginning to believe that I am one of the men whom
God Himself raises up and inspires." 1 Thus everyone was reas-
sured — including himself.

The process begun with his break with the New York maga-
zine was completed in 19 10 when he concentrated his entire pub-
lishing business at Hickory Hill. There he erected what he pro-
nounced "one of the best equipped printing plants in the South."

1 T. E. W., "And Mr. Clark Howell Also Asks Mr. Watson to Change the Law
of His Nature," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. V (Oct., 1910), p. 810.

360

The Shadow of the Pope

The new plant, said to represent an investment of $100,000,
was fitted with machinery for the rapid production of newspa-
pers, magazines, pamphlets, and books. Drawing the skirts of
his estate still more tightly about him, he bought up the copy-
rights of his books (selling better than when published, he re-
ported) and prepared to print them himself. 2

No unimportant part in the new regime was that taken by
Mrs. Alice Louise Lytle. Attracted by her work on a small-town
paper, Watson employed her in his Atlanta office where she
proved of such value that he made her managing editor of both
periodicals in the new organization. A large, vigorous young
woman of Irish extraction, Mrs. Lytle was possessed of great
capabilities and an ingratiating fund of sympathy. She was sep-
arated from her husband. In the eyes of his new employee, Wat-
son was a great man of letters, a genius, and her admiration of
him was unbounded. Moreover, she had a ready Irish wit, a
fund of stories that put guests at ease, and a certain facility with
drinks. She was at home in talk of politics, and was not incapable
of using, in off-hand fashion, the language of the mind. Mrs.
Watson had never been a source of much intellectual comrade-
ship for her husband, and now that she was aging rapidly he
sought compensation elsewhere. Mrs. Lytle soon moved from
the near-by cottage where she was first installed to quarters at
Hickory Hill. There were later times in that tragically dis-
traught household when her robust nature seemed the only an-
chor of sanity that held. Watson's dependence upon her grew
steadily greater as time passed. Their relationship does not ap-
pear to have been what many suspected. At any rate her affec-
tions were centered elsewhere. Her influence upon him, never-
theless, seems to have been strong. Although she was born in
Philadelphia of non-native parents, she was the greater "profes-
sional Southerner" of the two, and was given to strong expres-
sions about "niggers" and Catholics. Though Watson was often
repelled by her laxness of manner, dress, and expression, it is
likely that her influence fostered certain traits and prejudices
already present in him. Of an intensely practical turn of mind,
with an eye for profits and a managerial assertiveness, she made
her personality felt in a pervasive way in the Jefersonians. To

2 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Dec. 29, 1910, and Jan. 5, 1911.

361

Tom Watson Agrarian 'Rebel

Watson's readers she became known as "our Mrs. Lytle," and
he as "the Chief" — appellations of her own invention. 3

Honored guests at the "House Warming" Watson gave at
Hickory Hill and the new plant for the "Jeffs" were "Old Man
Peepul" and "Aunt Sarah Jane" (names he had recently be-
stowed upon his readers), who attended by hundreds. Their host
reported proudly the presence of "more Thomas Watson Every-
things and little girl Tom Watson Everythings and Georgia
Watsons with every known surname, than anyone but the census
enumerators knew about." He launched the Jeffersonian Pub-
lishing Company in a speech, and welcomed purchasers of the
company's stock. The liquor and wine bill (no small item in
Hickory Hill's budget thenceforth) for this occasion amounted
to $232.3 1. 4

The change that took place in the character of Watson's pub-
lications did not occur overnight. Tendencies already manifested,
however, quickly grew more exaggerated. Italics and capitals
and bold-faced type came to sprinkle virtually every paragraph,
and the red-inked headline soon made its appearance. Attacks
upon political personalities were reduced to a fine art of scandal
and slander. Articles on the plutocracy, corporate privilege, and
capitalist legislation dropped out of the Jeffersonian almost com-
pletely, only to be replaced by crusades of a more exciting type.

Frustrated in their age-long, and eternally losing struggle
against a hostile industrial economy, the farmers, together with
a large depressed urban element, eagerly welcomed exciting cru-
sades against more vulnerable antagonists: against anything
strange, and therefore evil. Vicarious as were such easy victories,
they offered some tangible compensations to a people hungry
for satisfactions. A frustrated man and a frustrated class found
that their desires and needs were complementary.

In his magazine for August, 19 10, Watson published the first
chapter of the series entitled, "The Roman Catholic Hierarchy:
The Deadliest Menace to Our Liberties and Our Civilization."
It was not the first time he had boxed with the shadow of the
Pope, but this article marked the beginning of a deliberately
planned crusade. Thereafter no issue of the monthly or the
weekly was complete without its exposure of the "Deadliest

3 From sources that do not wish to be named.

4 Check stubs, Watson MSS.

362

The Shadow of the Pope

Menace." The series on the "Hierarchy" ran for twenty-seven
months, to be followed immediately by "The History of the
Papacy and the Popes," which was followed and overlapped by
others and still others. Upon the completion of each series, it
was published in book or pamphlet form. For seven years, until
his publications were excluded from the mail during the World
War, the crusade continued, sometimes swelling, sometimes sub-
siding in its fury. During those seven years Tom Watson be-
came almost as closely identified in the public mind with the
anti-Catholic crusade as he had once been with the Populist
movement.

The question of personal motivation is rather beside the
point. It was true that in the battles of the 'nineties a small, but
solid and strategically important block of Catholic votes in Au-
gusta under the control of Patrick Walsh had been repeatedly
used against Watson. It also appears that a local organization of
the American Protestant Association made some effort on Wat-
son's behalf because of his Catholic enemies. Nevertheless, Wat-
son himself publicly deprecated the exploitation of religious
prejudice at that time. 5 Later, in writing his Story of France, he
was frankly Protestant, but not exceptionally unfair to the
Church. Still later he placed his daughter in a Catholic school
for a short period. 6 In any case, the personal motivation of a
Martin Luther would not be sufficient to explain Tom Wat-
son's onslaught upon the Pope.

From first to last the Catholic articles were a curious mixture
of erudition and sensationalism bordering upon the pathologi-
cal. Watson was able to persuade himself that he was "emulat-
ing the glorious example of Erasmus," and he undoubtedly lav-
ished considerable work on the articles. "Really I am devoting
as much research and study to the epochal era of Henry VIII as
I gave to the Story of France" he wrote a friend. Indeed, I
have just "slaughtered a long line of Popes for my May install-
ment." 7 Standards of accuracy, and moderation, and fairness
that he at one time undoubtedly cherished as a historian seemed
to disintegrate and quite lose their sway over him. New stand-

5 Atlanta Journal, Oct. 3, 1895; Constitution, Sept. 13, 1895; Augusta Chronicle,
July 22, 1894.
6 T. E. W., in Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Aug. 11, 1910.
7 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, April 10, 1917.

363

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ards prevailed. He admitted privately that the boorish cartoons
illustrating his articles were "too crude to appeal to the schol-
arly taste, but they seem to be effective with many of our read-
ers." Furthermore, the "Hierarchy" series was "making a ten-
strike," and the publications were making "handsome clear
profits." A year before he had complained to the same corre-
spondent that he was "in the hole $20,000" on his publications. 8

At the head of each installment of his first series of anti-
Catholic articles Watson placed an italicized note proclaiming
that the sole object of his attack was the Church organization,
and deploring any offense that might be given to the individual
believer, whose faith he promised to respect. Whatever his in-
tentions were, the performance speaks for itself. His series of
open letters to Cardinal Gibbons was matchless in its insulting
offensiveness. "And there is no discoverable vocabulary which
would adequately express the profoundity [sic] of my loathing
and contempt for that stupid, degrading faith of yours, Cardi-
nal," he wrote. 9 A favorite diversion (presumably another "ten-
strike," since it was so frequently employed) lay in printing pic-
tures of Church dignitaries accompanied by elucidating comment.
"Look at that nose!" he wrote. "Such a proboscis always marks
the sensual man. It is thick, and I shouldn't wonder if it is red.
... It being so manifest that O'Connell eats and drinks deep,
how does he control his other and STRONGER passions?" In-
deed, "How does he keep from it — when so many of the fair sex
are held behind the bars of convent dungeons, where they are
at the mercy of priests?" For the priesthood he evolved an in-
exhaustible number of epithets: "chemise-wearing bachelors,"
"bull-necked convent keepers," "shad-bellies," "foot-kissers."
Theirs was a "jackassical faith."

If half his readers had never set eyes on monk or nun, they
were none the less absorbed by lurid revelations of convent, con-
fessional, and "convenient sacristy," not to mention a hundred
other sinister wonders undreamed of in the rural imagination.
The titles themselves were irresistible: "The Murder of Babes,"
"The Sinister Portent of Negro Priests," "How the Confes-

8 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, Oct. 5, 1910; also Jan. 1, 1910, and July 15,
1909.

9 T. E. W., "Cardinal Gibbons and 'The Guardians of Liberty,' " Watson's Jef-
fersonian Magazine, Vol. XIV (April, 1912), p. igoo.

364

The Shadow of the Pope

sional Is Used by Priests to Ruin Women," "One of the Priests
Who Raped a Catholic Woman in a Catholic Church," "What
Happens in Convents." One example of their contents is per-
haps sufficient :

Through his questions, the priest learns which of his fair penitents are
tempted to indulge in sexual inclinations. Remember that the priest is
often a powerfully sexed man, who lives on rich food, drinks red wine,
and does no manual labor. He is alone with a beautiful, well-shaped young
woman who tells him that she is tormented by carnal desire. Her low
voice is in his ear; the rustle of her skirts and the scent of her hair kindle
flames. She will never tell what he says or does. She believes that he
cannot sin. She believes that he can forgive her sin. She has been taught
that in obeying him, she is serving God. 10

Should the reader like to see for himself "those nasty questions"
of the confessional, they might be obtained in pamphlet form
for twenty-five cents.

If Watson had any legitimate grievance against the Catholic
church, it was a political one. It was true that the Church had
shifted its allegiance to the Republican party in the crucial bat-
tle of 1896. He did advance several valid criticisms and expo-
sures, but they were all drowned in the wild hue and cry he kept
up over imaginary menaces of incredibly horrendous propor-
tions. "Protestants I" he shouted to a complacent, Taft-ruled na-
tion. "Your Government is in the control of Rome. Your White
House is little more than a Vatican annex." The "Hierarchy"
was busily "laying in guns and ammunition; buying control of
papers and magazines," and in fact "working day and night,
spending money like water to 'Make America Catholic.' " They
had already made one dreadnought of the navy il a completely
popish ship," and had even "bought the strategic positions, from
which batteries would hold Washington city at their mercy." n

In 191 1, Watson, together with the Civil and Indian War
veterans, Lieutenant-General Nelson A. Miles, ex-Congressman
Charles D. Haines, and Charles B. Skinner, organized The
Guardians of Liberty. General principles were announced, such
as immigrant restriction and prevention of interference from

10 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Jan. 25, 1912 ; vide also issues of ibid., April
16, 1914, and Dec. 23, 1915.

11 Ibid., Dec. 16, 1909, and Oct. 21, 1915; T. E. W., "Cardinal Gibbons and 'The
Guardians of Liberty/" Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. XIV (April, 1912),
p. 996; T. E. W., editorial, ibid., Vol. XVIII (March, 1914), p. 225.

365

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

foreign ecclesiastical authority. The society did not assume a
predominantly anti-Catholic complexion until 19 12, and then
largely through the influence of Watson, who persuaded Gen-
eral Miles to his way of thinking. Miles toured the country mak-
ing speeches on such subjects as "America's Danger," while Wat-
son's services to the order were given largely through his
publications. Cardinal Gibbons denounced the new organization
as "nothing more than an attempt to revive the bigotry of the
A. P. A., which was presumed to have died of inanition. Surely
no sensible man will be misled by the thin and thread-bare ar-
guments of such people." u The Guardians of Liberty neverthe-
less took root in fertile soil and flourished at least until the
World War. Watson used the organization effectively in state
politics as late as 19 16. According to him it was a "movement
requiring nerve, and the robust American spirit." It seems that
"American Americans" were preferred as members. "The fight
is on!" announced Watson to Cardinal Gibbons. "Your foreign
ruled crowd were the aggressors. You made the first threats." 13
From the beginning of the anti-Catholic crusade the tranquil-
lity of Hickory Hill was constantly menaced by "premonitions,"
"plots," and "assassins." Footprints of snoopers and peepers
were reported; anonymous letters threatened or revealed plots.
Guards were placed about the house for a time, and Watson be-
came virtually a recluse in his own home. When he went to
Atlanta he was protected by detectives. Readers of the Jeffer-
sonian were kept posted on the nefarious doings of the "assas-
sins." "Those persistently daring assassins are not very far off,"
he told them, "nor have they abandoned their murderous pur-
pose. If the same merciful Providence does not continue to throw
its shield over me, you may never see in this paper another edi-
torial of mine." Once he received a letter from an unknown man
who proposed to save his life from assassins. Watson wired him
to come, paid his expenses, bought him a suit of clothes, and
gave him his own revolver. He then suddenly decided that his
would-be protector was himself not above suspicion. He de-
clared that, had the man made a false move, he would have
"shot him without a moment's hesitation, because of those eyes."

^Michael Williams, The Shadow of the Pope, p. 114.

18 T. E. W., "Cardinal Gibbons and 'The Guardians of Liberty/ " Watson's Jef-
fersonian Magazine, Vol. XIV (April, 1912), p. 1000.

366

The Shadow of the Pope

That same night he doubled the guard around his house and had
his "protector" arrested. 14

The pathological, almost maniacal, conduct to which his ob-
session led him was illustrated by an incident that occurred in
191 2. In the lobby of the Kimball House in Atlanta he hap-
pened to notice a man from Savannah whom he knew to be a
member of the Knights of Columbus. "The sight of him was
good to my eyes — as that of a red rag to a maddened bull," he
recounted. Deliberately he bumped into the man, then stood
aside expecting a demand for an apology. "I meant to refuse it,"
he explained, "and then I hoped that we should have a per-
fectly beautiful fight. I was simply spoiling for one." The man
showed no resentment, however, and Watson's friends
"dragged" him out of the hotel. At the railway station he broke
away from his friends and returned to the hotel in a vain search
for the Catholic. Watson proudly related the whole incident in
his paper. 15 He was a man fifty-six years of age at that time.

Catholic organizations undoubtedly undertook measures of re-
prisal against Watson. The national secretary of the American
Federation of Catholic Societies circulated letters to firms adver-
tising in his publications, threatening a boycott against those who
did not withdraw their advertisements, and the American News
Company cut into his news-stand circulation in certain cities. 16
Watson's advertising patronage did decline for some time, and
he privately estimated his loss due to this cause at "about $50,-
000." 1T At the same time, however, an advertisement of his
magazine boasted that he had "gained thousands of new readers
by the publication of these articles on the Roman Catholic Hier-
archy." Every reprisal by the Catholics, real or imaginary, was
dramatically paraded by Watson. "Remember! I am up against
263,000 Knights of Columbus who have sworn to put me out of
business," he wrote, appealing to three hundred Protestants to
send him one hundred dollars each to help "in this great fight."

None of the persecutions to which he was subject, however,
was so much publicized and dramatized as the case of the United

14 Jeffersonian Weekly, June 22, 1911.

15 Ibid., Aug. 22, 1 912.

16 Vide Anthony Matre, National Secretary, American Federation of Catholic
Societies, to an advertiser who patronized Watson, in Watson's Jeffersonian Maga-
zine, Vol. XIII (Aug., 1911), p. 290; Jeffersonian Weekly, Nov. 4, 1915.

17 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, July 14, 1914.

367

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

States against Thomas E. Watson based on the charge of his vio-
lating the postal law against sending obscene literature through
the mails. The offensive matter in question was contained in cer-
tain excerpts in Latin quoted in his magazine articles on the
"Catholic Hierarchy." Watson assumed that the prosecution was
inspired by Catholics : u The Romanists are trying to put me in
the penitentiary, because I quoted FROM ONE OF THEIR
DIABOLICAL BOOKS." He was arrested on June 3, 1912,
but the case was not called until October of 19 13. He won a tac-
tical victory by a motion to quash the indictment. However, the
prosecution was renewed, and, in all, the case was prolonged
over a period of four and a half years. The second attempt of
the prosecution resulted in a mistrial, and it was not until the
third trial, in November, 19 16, that he was finally acquitted. 18
Expertly handling his own defense, Watson proclaimed it his
ambition to make this "one of the celebrated cases of history."
Whole issues of his magazine were devoted to his speeches of
defense, and the proceedings of the trial crowded the columns
of his weekly. Each trial was thoroughly advertised in advance. 19
A hint that his life was imperiled would throng Augusta with
armed followers. "One blast from Watson's horn would put
50,000 men in the field at any central point as quick as the iron
horse could carry them," wrote a loyal Watsonian. 20

"I have forced the popery issue into Georgia politics, where it
is now cutting a wide swath to the consternation of the old-line
politicians," wrote Watson to a friend in 19 14. 21 Since his defeat
at the hands of Smith in 19 10, he had been almost constantly at
work seeking to regain his dominance over state politics. In the
fall of 191 1 he canvassed almost the whole state, making several
speeches a week. He found that "men who had been cussing
Tom Watson for years were seen laughing, crying and cheering
before I was half-way done with my message."

As early as January, 19 12, Watson announced that he had un-

18 Atlanta Journal, May 31, 1912; Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, June 6, 1912;
Jan. 2, Feb. 27, and Oct. 30, 1913; Dec. 2 and 9, 1915; and Nov. 30, 1916; Augusta
Herald, Nov. 28, 191 6.

19 E.g., the entire issues of Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Jan., 1916 (55
pages), and Jan., 1917 (101 pages), were devoted to the trial.

20 Letter published in Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Oct. 28, 1915.
21 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, July 14, I9H-

368

The Shadow of the Pope

dertaken to defeat the Wilson-for-President movement in Geor-
gia. In doing so he had to face the opposition of the dominant
Smith faction, which supported Wilson, and to overcome Wil-
son's primary advantage with Georgians because he had lived in
Georgia during his youth, and had taken his wife from the state.
Aside from the hated Smith faction's support of Wilson's cause,
the main personal motive that seems to have actuated Watson's
fight against the candidate was the bitter distaste he had con-
ceived for the man some ten years before when he had read his
five-volume history of the United States. Watson never forgot
that impression, and his anger flamed out against Wilson several
times before he was thought of as a candidate for President.
That history "showed the Tory all the way through," he
thought, and revealed "a cold cynicism toward popular move-
ments, a deference to wealth and social power." Besides, al-
though he was a Southerner, the Virginian had glorified New
England and neglected the cause of the South. 22 Such an offense
Watson deemed intolerable.

Complaints of a less academic nature were not wanting in the
case he made against Wilson — the sort of complaint he launched
against anyone who dared cross his path in these days. Governor
Wilson, he charged, had "kow-towed to the Roman hierarchy,"
and even employed "a Romanist, as private secretary" More-
over he was "ravenously fond of the negro" and had "SENT
BOOKER WASHINGTON A MESSAGE OF CONDO-
LENCE AND CONFIDENCE WHEN THAT COON
WAS CAUGHT AT A WHITE WOMAN'S BEDROOM
DOOR, AND WAS DESERVEDLY BEATEN FOR IT."
Wilson's conversion from the Cleveland school to Bryanism was
all too recent to be convincing, he thought. "FARMERS ! LIS-
TEN TO ME!" he commanded. "Let Woodrow Wilson alone.
He's another Bill Taft. VOTE FOR UNDERWOOD!" 28
Watson's support of Oscar W. Underwood of Alabama rested
chiefly upon the contention that he was more of a Southerner
than Wilson.

The presidential primary resulted in an Underwood victory,
with a majority of some 15,000. Immediately a movement was

--Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, Jan. 25, April 11 and 25, and Dec. 21, 1912;
Constitution, May 12, 1912; T. E. W. to W. J. Jelks, Dec. 21, 1912, copy in Watson
MSS.

23 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, April n, 1912.

369

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

put under way by the national party leaders to rid themselves of
Watson. Charles E. Murphy, the head of Tammany, Norman
E. Mack, chairman of the National Democratic Committee,
Thomas Taggart, secretary of that committee, and even Sena-
tor J. H. Bankhead, Underwood's campaign manager, all sent
word that Watson would be distinctly persona non grata at the
Baltimore Convention, that he would create "far-reaching dis-
sension and strife." A conference of Underwood leaders and
national party managers was called in Atlanta to plan the over-
throw of Watson at the state convention. Leaders of the "regu-
lar" Democracy declared it unthinkable that u the Red-headed
Person" should head the state delegation, as he promised. "We
will beat him, beat him, BEAT him," declared Thomas B.
Felder, leader of the regulars.

Watson's response to this turn of affairs was an article of im-
perious tone under the familiar heading, "Meet Me in Atlanta,
Boys!" The "city politicians" who were "hogging all the credit
for the Underwood victory" were courting a fight with him, and
they should have it. That victory was "the country man's tri-
umph," he maintained, and he promised that the state conven-
tion would be "a red-headed affair." All delegates friendly to
him were ordered to be present at his caucus the night before the
convention. "I mean to head the Georgia delegation to Balti-
more, or know the reason why," he announced. 24

The arrival of "the red-headed person" in Atlanta was said to
have suggested the return of some Roman conqueror. So dense
was the throng at the station waiting to meet him that police had
to form a lane for him to pass to his carriage. This initial ova-
tion astounded and all but silenced opposition. It was a day of
delirious triumphs for an outcast, and, as an enemy of his ob-
served, he enjoyed it "with all the bluster and arrogance of a
Tartar chief." At his personal caucus that night, overflowing
with delegates, he was cheered to the echo when he announced
with utmost assurance : "I propose to snatch from the hands of
William J. Bryan the leadership of the national Democratic
party. I mean to lock horns with him at Baltimore, and I don't
care who knows it." After the caucus had obediently passed his
resolutions, he said:

21 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, May 9, 1912.

370

The Shadow of the Pope

We've got 'em, boys.

(Voice in the crowd:) Us country fellows?

Yes, we've got 'em. It has taken us six long years of hard work, but
we've done it.

Old man Peepul is on top. Aunt Sarah Jane is on top. We country folks
are on top, and everybody is going to be happy. 25

At the convention the following day his appearance was the
signal for a third and greater ovation. He was continuously on
his feet, offering resolutions, dominating the opposition, and
showing in every way possible that he was the master. The plat-
form adopted was liberally seasoned with Watson principles of
the newer, as well as the older, sort. It advocated disfranchise-
ment of the Negro and other non-Caucasian races, discontinu-
ance of foreign immigration, as well as more stringent regula-
tion of child labor, and tariff reduction. He was obliged to agree
to a compromise on the naming of the delegation to Baltimore
and share the honors with some of his enemies. This he could
do with good grace, however, after his vanity had been thor-
oughly appeased in other ways. 26

One after another the proudest of the opposition trooped to
his headquarters to make their peace and pay obeisance. The
governor, the ex-governor and present candidate for the chair,
John M. Slaton, the aspirant for national committeeman from
Georgia, Clark Howell, and the Underwood campaign man-
ager, who now gave Watson credit for the Underwood victory,
were all reported to have made their visit to Watson's rooms.
u Beyond any doubt,'' admitted a Smith paper, "Mr. Watson
held the whip hand." 27 A more neutral observer remarked that
"He has now succeeded in making both wings of his old enemy,
the Democratic party of Georgia, walk up and eat out of his
hands." "

The Constitution and the Journal, each speaking for its wing
of the party, conducted a penitent colloquy over the state of af-
fairs. The latter paper lamented : "Thomas E. Watson, receiv-
ing the obeisance of the heads of the now dominant faction of
Georgia Democracy — Thomas E. Watson, a Georgia delegate

^Constitution, May 29, 1912; Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, June 6, 1912.
26 Lucian L. Knight, loc. cit.; Atlanta Journal, May 29, 1912.

27 Atlanta Journal, quoted in Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, June 6, 1912.

28 Augusta Chronicle, May 31, 1912.

37i

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

to a national Democratic convention ! It is almost incredible, we
repeat, that such a disgrace has befallen the state." The Consti-
tution reminded its rival that it had been only a few years since
that paper had wanted its candidate's picture "hung in the same
frame with Watson's," and observed: "It's the same old story of
whose ox is gored I" The Journal responded: "We had as well
be frank. Both factions of Georgia Democracy have lain down
with the dog and got up with fleas. Both have had the experi-
ence of falling into the hands of this political pirate. . . .
Henceforth the alliance of Watson with any faction should be
considered, as it truly must be, a badge of disgrace to the cause
that has sought his support." 29

After enjoying his triumph in Atlanta to the fullest, Watson
seems to have lost interest in the high and mighty purpose he
meant to fulfill in Baltimore. He did not even attend the na-
tional Convention. Illness was the excuse he offered for remain-
ing at home, although he later mentioned that he got wind of a
Catholic plot against him should he attend the convention at
Baltimore. 30 From his home he poured telegrams into the Geor-
gia delegation urging them to give up Underwood and support
Champ Clark. After the Convention he wavered for some time,
made a few half-hearted gestures in Wilson's behalf, and then
flatly repudiated his nomination in an article, "Why I cannot
Vote for Woodrow Wilson." 81

In the end he did exactly what the prophets of the regular
Democracy had predicted : he bolted his party's ticket. This time
he turned to Roosevelt and the Progressives. "My correspond-
ence," he reported in August, "indicates a strong disposition on
the part of the old Pops to vote the Bull thing ticket." He
swung his personal support to the new party too late to be of
much influence, but in the issue of his paper immediately before
the election he printed a full page of ballots for the Progressive
National ticket. After the election he opened correspondence
with Roosevelt upon the question of organizing the Progressive
party in the South. 82

29 Editorials, Atlanta Journal, May 30, 191a; Constitution, May 31, 1912.

80 Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, June 27, July 11, and Aug. 22, 19 12. Watson
was arrested on the charge of violating the postal law against sending obscene
literature through the mails only four days after the Convention.

zl Ibid., Aug. 15 and Oct. 24, 19 12.

82 Theodore Roosevek to T. E. W., Jan. 13, 1913, Watson MSS.

372

23

The Lecherous Jew

IT WAS A nondescript army that Tom Watson commanded
after 19 10. That army was no longer a party: it was a "fol-
lowing," and a "following" is a very different thing from a
party. In place of a platform and officers it has prejudices and a
master. It is amorphous, mercurial, and unstable. The "faithful
17,000" still formed an important nucleus of Watson's power,
but its populist character was diluted and lost in the anonymity
of the "following." Besides the residual third party, there were
other organizations of indeterminate strength subject to his con-
trol. He had succeeded in placing a loyal lieutenant at the head
of the powerful Farmer's Union, and The Guardians of Liberty
looked to him to direct their struggle against the sinister machi-
nations of the Pope. An important lever in his machine lay in
the "county-unit system" maintained at his pleasure by the state
Democratic party. The maintenance of his renovated power,
however, depended largely upon the ephemeral recruits attracted
by the crusades conducted in his publications — his "following."
They were the "boys" ; they were "Old Man Peepul" and "Aunt
Sarah Jane" to whom he was wont to address himself as "Your
Uncle T. E. W."

A journalist visiting the state was perplexed at the character
of Watson's weekly now called the Jefersonian. He could
never discover what the editor was "for," and decided that he
was "violently against" everything. "The thistles of chaos are
sweet in him, and order in any department of life is a chestnut
burr under his tail," he concluded. 1 Indeed, the turmoil in the
Sage's soul was reflected in some unaccountable eccentricities.

1 Julian Street, American Adventures, p. 383.

373

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Concomitant with the anti-Catholic crusade was a prolonged at-
tack upon Protestant foreign missions. At the root of his attack
on missions was his hatred of imperialism and his "isolationist"
doctrine, which were also the basis of his opposition to the
Spanish-American War, and later the World War intervention
and the League of Nations. Part of his attack was grounded on
firm economic and political realism. The missionary was the ad-
vance agent of the capitalist and imperialist. Besides, the whole
idea was an outrage to reason : "This idea that missionaries can
go to China, undress it of its civilization, and re-clothe it with
ours, is as crazy a notion as ever found lodgment in the human
brain," he declared. Another feature of the polemic arose out of
his old anti-clericalism. It found fullest expression in his series
entitled "Teasing the Preachers," in which he clearly took un-
fair advantage of the parsons. He ran definite risk of antagoniz-
ing all the powerful evangelical denominations of the country
by this attack. 2

Most of his fulminations ran no such risk: that against the
Negro, for example. Negroes, he observed, "simply have no
comprehension of virtue, honesty, truth, gratitude and prin-
ciple." "In the South, we have to lynch him [the Negro] occa-
sionally, and flog him, now and then, to keep him from blas-
pheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of his smell
and his color." He defended lynching both in principle and in
specific instances. "This country has nothing to fear from its
rural communities," he wrote. "Lynch law is a good sign: it
shows that a sense of justice yet lives among the people" As for
himself, he would no more hesitate to lynch a Negro rapist than
to shoot a mad dog. 8 There was a peculiar malignity that per-
vaded his tirades against the Negro ... A friend betrayed is
the enemy most despised.

Prominently characteristic of the Jeffersonian were the vitu-
perative attacks upon personalities. Some were shrewd and
comic, others vicious, and all irresponsible. A prominent bishop
was a "Coca Cola lobbyist"; "Professor Woodpile" Wilson was
an "arrant liar"; Bryan was a "cheap political comedian, whose

2 T. E. W., "The Foreign Missions Craze," Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine,
Vol. V (Aug., 1910), pp. 629-632; also, e.g., Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, June
17, 1909, May 25, 1911, and Jan. 11, 1912.

8 Jeffersonian, May 15, 1913, Jan. 4, 1917, and Feb. 12, 1914; T. E. W., Sketches,
pp. 39-40.

374

The Lecherous Jew

pose is that of a typical Pharisee." To his crimes of "seduction,
kidnapping, adultery, violation of the oath of office, and rape,
this vilest of rascals [Senator Smith] is seeking to add murder."
Christopher Columbus was a "rapacious and inhuman monster"
whose only object in discovering the New World was in adding
another hemisphere to the dominion of the Pope. The Pope
himself, "Jimmie Cheesy," was a "fat old dago" who lived with
"voluptuous women." State politicians, of no matter what moral
rectitude, lived in constant danger of being revealed in the Jef-
fersonian as keepers of Negro concubines or minions of Rome.

As a political boss of his kind Tom Watson was unique. Stand-
ing virtually outside the party he bossed, he manipulated it
through its own machinery. This was what galled the pride of
Democratic politicians who were, or had been, obligated to him
for favors. They knew him for a party outlaw, openly contemp-
tuous of their party, cynically playing one faction against the
other, and committed to none of the restraints of party disci-
pline, rule, or traditions. He had bolted their primaries, deserted
their nominees, and openly supported a rival national party.
And they knew he would do so again. When they lectured him
on political morality, he replied with instances of Democratic
morality in the 'nineties, and continued to fly his pirate's flag un-
abashed. Yet Democrats of both factions kept a beaten path to
Hickory Hill, and news of Watson's favor or disfavor made or
unmade many a candidate. As a boss his power was not abso-
lute : the power of no boss is absolute. His influence waxed and
waned. Yet there was no governor of the state between 1906 and
the time of Watson's death, a period of sixteen years, who did
not owe at least one of his terms, in a greater or less degree, to
Tom Watson's support. Some of the men whom he elected he as
surely defeated; in fact, that was the rule rather than the excep-
tion, for rarely did he support the same man twice. From those
who were obligated to him he expected a high degree of sub-
servience. 4

The state contests of 19 14 were typical of this era of personal
politics; and Watson played his usual role. The gubernatorial
race being three-cornered, Watson's candidate, Nat E. Harris,
an old Confederate veteran, easily won. In his Autobiography

4 For discussions of Watson as a political boss see editorial, Nation, Vol. CIII
(Nov. 9, 1916), pp. 440-441.

375

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Harris acknowledges his indebtedness to Watson as naively as
he complains of the defeat at his hands two years later. 5 The
senatorial contest, a revival of the perennial feud between Hoke
Smith and Joseph M. Brown, had a different result. An assidu-
ous understudy of Watson, and a convinced believer in his meth-
ods, Brown launched a series of anti-Catholic articles during the
campaign that, it was remarked, might have been dictated by
Tom Watson. As bitter as ever against Smith, Watson attacked
him as a Negrophile, an enemy of u White Supremacy," and a
truckler to Rome. "If you want to strengthen the Protestant re-
ligion and American liberties against Italian popery and the ad-
vancement of a priesthood which believes the church of Rome
should rule all States," he wrote, u you will vote for BROWN
in the race against Hoke Smith' 9 e The method failed this time,
however. Smith was elected, receiving twice the number of pop-
ular votes polled by Brown.

One of the charges Watson brought against Smith during the
campaign was that the Senator was a subsidized supporter of the
cause of Leo Frank, the Jew. This campaign marks the introduc-
tion of the celebrated Frank case into Georgia politics. The case
has a long and sordid history, a history that is inextricably a part
of the history of Tom Watson.

At 3 130 on the morning of April 27, 19 13, the body of Mary
Phagan, a fourteen-year-old girl, was discovered in the basement
of an Atlanta pencil factory. She had been horribly murdered.
The young superintendent of the factory, Leo M. Frank, who
admitted paying the girl her wages when she came to the fac-
tory alone during the holiday on which the murder took place,
was at once arrested. A fateful weight of irrelevant but preju-
dicial fact dogged Frank's case to the end. He was a Jew, a
Northerner, an employer of underpaid female labor. Mary Pha-
gan was a Gentile, pretty, popular, and a working girl. The At-
lanta press immediately assumed the guilt of Frank, and rival
papers vied with each other in exploiting the sensational details
of the story. Irresponsible gossip of sexual perversion and gross

5 Nat E. Harris, Autobiography, pp. 239-240.

6 Jeffersonian, July 30, 1914.

376

The Lecherous Jew

immorality on the part of Frank was printed as "scoops" in bold
headlines of "extras." Whispered rumor supplied unprinted de-
tails. The city police, publicly committed to the theory of
Frank's guilt, and hounded by the demand for his conviction,
resorted to the basest methods in collecting evidence. A Negro
suspect, later implicated by evidence overwhelmingly more in-
criminating than any produced against Frank, was thrust aside
by the cry for the blood of the "Jew pervert." 7

The trial lasted thirty days, attended throughout by manifes-
tations of mob spirit. On the final day the howl of the mob,
packed for many blocks about the courthouse, was continually in
the ears of the jurors. The crowd in the courtroom repeatedly
jeered, laughed, and applauded. Editors of city papers joined
in a petition to the presiding judge to adjourn the case for the
day, because an acquittal would "cause a riot such as would shock
the country and cause Atlanta's streets to run with innocent
blood." The judge advised Frank and his lawyers not to attend
the reading of the verdict for fear of their lives. Threatening
messages were received by court officials: "Hang the Jew or we
will hang you." Under such circumstances Frank was found
guilty and sentenced to die. It was in his dissenting opinion on
this case that Mr. Justice Holmes said: "Mob law does not be-
come due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized
jury." Doubt as to Frank's guilt was expressed by every tri-
bunal before which the case was reviewed: the state Supreme
Court, the federal District Court, the United States Supreme
Court, and the Georgia prison commission were all divided.
Even the judge who presided at the trial expressed doubt, but at
the same time refused to grant a motion for a new trial. Officials
of justice and organs of public opinion seemed cowed before the
mob. The victorious solicitor-general, Hugh M. Dorsey, was
made a popular hero. 8

The Frank case for a time rivaled the European war as a sub-
ject of national attention. Outside the state the conviction was
general that Frank was the victim of a gross injustice, if not

7 Christopher P. Connolly, The Truth About the Frank Case, passim; Files of
Herbert J. Haas & Co. (attorney for Frank) relating to Frank case, in the posses-
sion of Rabbi David Marx, Atlanta, Ga.; Hugh M. Dorsey, The Argument of
Hugh M. Dorsey at the Trial of Leo M. Frank, passim.

8 L. L. Knight, op. at., Vol. II, p. 1166; review of the case, Supplement to Au-
gusta Chronicle, Nov. 25, 1915.

377

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

completely innocent. He presented his own case so eloquently
and so ingenuously, and the circumstances of the trial were such
a glaring indication of a miscarriage of justice, that thousands of
people enlisted in his cause. The case became a cause celebre in
liberal circles the nation over. Such people as Jane Addams
were outspoken against Georgia justice, and ex-Governor Eu-
gene Foss of Massachusetts was among the petitioners who
came to Georgia in person in Frank's behalf. The movement
was not sectional, for the legislatures of both Texas and Tennes-
see passed resolutions asking that his life be saved. 9 A moving
picture was made and exhibited to present his cause to the pub-
lic. The zealous defense committee and the wealthy connections
of Frank in the North made tactical blunders, however, that
fanned the flame of resentment in Georgia against "outside in-
terference." The bringing of William J. Burns, the detective, to
Georgia was especially resented. He narrowly escaped being
lynched at Marietta (Mary Phagan's former home), and re-
sentment broke out anew. 10

For almost a year after Frank was arrested Tom Watson re-
mained silent on the case. He later admitted that he declined an
offer of $5,000 to defend Frank, and said that overtures were
made to him to assist the prosecution. 11 In the early stages of the
case he was heard to express surprise that the defense counsel
did not demand a change of venue, since in Atlanta Frank had
"about as much chance for his life as a snowball in hell." "It
would be like trying a rat before the old cat and a litter of her
kittens," he said. 12

In March, 19 14, the Atlanta Journal dared to break the spell
of cowed silence that had fallen on the state press by printing an
editorial asking a new trial for Frank and contending that his

9 N. E. Harris, op. cit., p. 352.

10 The files of Herbert J. Haas & Co., in the possession of Rabbi David Marx,
Atlanta, Ga., contain letters of Leo Frank as well as hundreds of letters, written by
the committees working in his defense, giving a fairly complete picture of the ef-
forts made in his behalf. Also vide private papers of Rabbi David Marx, Atlanta,
in regard to the Frank case. Also vide, New York Times, Aug. 20, 191 5.

^Jeffersonian, Jan. 11, 1917.

12 This according to a sworn statement by James T. Hudson, who was visiting
in Watson's home when he heard Watson make the remark : vide, Augusta Chroni-
cle, Sept. 22, 1 91 5.

378

The Lecherous Jew

execution without it would amount to "judicial murder." Wat-
son immediately leaped upon the editorial as evidence that
Smith was dragging the Frank case into politics, and promised
to "see to it that the case is taken care of." "If the Atlanta poli-
ticians and editors are crazy enough to make war on Dorsey, be-
cause he did his duty in the Frank case, LET THE WAR BE-
GIN." 18 At that time Dorsey, who led the prosecution of
Frank, seemed a possible candidate for governor; he withdrew,
however, and Watson supported Harris. The Journal suffered a
loss in circulation and quickly dropped its efforts for Frank.
Watson continued to use the Frank case against Smith in the
senatorial race. When that ended, however, Watson's exploita-
tion of the case had only begun. 14

In the first place he assured his readers that there was a "gi-
gantic conspiracy of Big money" organized to corrupt the state's
courts, its governor, its papers in order to save the life of a
wealthy murderer. "Frank belonged to the Jewish aristocracy,
and it was determined by the rich Jews that no aristocrat of
their race should die for the death of a working-class Gentile."
As for Mary Phagan: "Yes, she was only a factory girl: there
was no glamor of wealth and fashion about her. She had no mil-
lionaire uncle; she had no Athens kinsmen ready to raise fifty
thousand dollars for her : no mighty connections . . ." So it was
that, "while the Sodomite who took her sweet young life basks
in the warmth of Today, the poor child's dainty flesh has fed
the worms." 15 Was it not notoriously true that rich Jewish busi-
ness men corrupted the daughters of Gentiles who worked for
them? "Here we have the typical young libertine Jew who is
dreaded and detested by the city authorities of the North for the
very reason that Jews of this type have an utter contempt for
law, and a ravenous appetite for the forbidden fruit — a lustful
eagerness enhanced by the racial novelty of the girl of the uncir-
cumsized." Anyone could tell that Frank was "a lascivious per-
vert, guilty of the crime that caused the Almighty to blast the
Cities of the plain," by a study of the accompanying picture;

13 Jeffersonian, March 19, 1914, and June n, 1914.

14 T. E. W., "The Celebrated Case of Leo Frank vs. the State of Georgia," Wat-
son's Magazine, Vol. XXI (Aug., 1915), p. 222; "The Leo Frank Case," ibid., Vol.
XX (Jan., 1915), p. 156.

15 Jeffersonian, Oct. 15 and Dec. 3, 1914.

379

Torn Watson Agrarian Rebel

" those bulging, satyr eyes ... the protruding fearfully sensual
lips; and also the animal jaw." 16

There was scarcely an issue of his publications for more than
a year without its article on the Frank case. Hundreds of pages
were devoted to it, whole issues of his magazine, page after page
of the weekly. Over and over he reviewed the evidence in the
case : the torn garment, u spotted with virginal blood," the tuft
of hair, the crumpled white form. Rumors, half-truths, special
pleading, merciless slander, every device known to the skilled
criminal lawyer — he employed. He pulled all the stops : South-
ern chivalry, sectional animus, race prejudice, class conscious-
ness, agrarian resentment, state pride. Aside from these re-
sources there were the sociological constants of human cupidity,
ignorance, and gullibility. He was convinced, he said, that Frank
had had as fair a trial as a man could possibly have had. 17

As the months passed and the date for Frank's execution was
successively postponed the tone of Watson's exhortations rose in
a crescendo of threats and alarms. "How much longer is the in-
nocent blood of little Mary Phagan to cry in vain to Heaven for
vengeance? )} he asked. With less provocation, he reminded
them, New Orleans had lynched her Italian murderers. "Now
is the time to have a Vigilance Committee APPOINT ITS
OWN SENTRIES TO WATCH THAT DESPERATE
CRIMINAL — whose money and whose resources seem so inso-
lently determined that his crime shall go unpunished" Later he
warned: "If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this
case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN." A rumor that
the governor might commute Frank's sentence called forth the
headline : "RISE ! PEOPLE OF GEORGIA." 18

The final date for Frank's execution was fixed at June 22,
19 15. All eyes were concentrated upon Governor John M.
Slaton with the question, would he commute Frank's sentence?
His term expired the day before the execution was to take place,
and he would be succeeded by Harris, a "Watson man." Gover-
nor Slaton had himself sought and received the support of Wat-
son in his race for office in 19 12. While the hearings of the peti-

™ Ibid., April 14 and May 27, 1915.

17 E.g., the space devoted to the Frank ca9e in Watson's Magazine during three
months: August, 191 5, 53 pages; Sept., 45 pages; Oct., 42 pages.

18 Jeffersonian, Nov. 19, 1914, and March 25 and June 3, 1915.

380

The Lecherous Jew

tion to commute were in progress Watson sent a friend to the
governor with the promise that if Slaton allowed Frank to
hang, Watson would be his "friend," which would result in his
"becoming United States senator and the master of Georgia
politics for twenty years to come." 19 The governor recalled, he
said, that Watson dated his enmity to Hoke Smith from that
governor's action upon a commutation petition — though in the
former case it was a refusal to save the life of a man who had
unquestionably murdered a working woman that caused the
break. Slaton had received requests from more than 10,000
Georgians, including a recommendation from the presiding
judge at Frank's trial, that he commute sentence. In the face of
Watson's threat and the palpable menace of mob violence Slaton
signed the commutation on the day before his term ended.

Governor Slaton had been elected by one of the largest ma-
jorities ever given for the office, and had been regarded as an
exceptionally popular executive. On the day of his retirement it
was necessary to declare martial law for his protection. A heavy
military guard surrounded his house, and one conducted him to
the capitol, where, after the inaugural ceremony, an attempt was
made upon his life. By night a mob estimated to number 5,000
people gathered and marched on the ex-governor's home armed
with "old fashioned pepper-box revolvers — revolvers with cap
and lock — knives and dirks, saws and hatchets, with some mod-
ern guns and pistols," not to mention "a large basket of dyna-
mite sticks." Before it was dispersed, the mob wounded and
disabled sixteen of the soldiers protecting Slaton. The new
governor found that the news of the commutation and Watson's
incendiary articles had "caused the gathering of mobs in almost
every part of the country and brought about such a state of af-
fairs that no persuasion or remonstrance could control the situa-
tion." Slaton left for an extended trip — virtually exiled from his
native state by the mob. 20

The first issue of Watson's Jefersonian after the commuta-
tion of Frank's sentence amounted to one enraged exclamation
after another:

19 John M. Slaton to Thomas W. Loyless, Aug. 27, 1915, printed in Augusta
Chronicle, Nov. 25, 1915. (Watson admitted this, but said that Slaton had made ad-
vances to him first for support, Watson's Magazine, Oct., 1915.)

20 N. E. Harris, op, ciu, pp. 355-3^-

381

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Our grand old Empire State HAS BEEN RAPED!

We have been violated, AND WE ARE ASHAMED! . . .

The great Seal of State has gone, LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT,
to do for an unscrupulous law firm, a deed of darkness which dared not
bask in the light of the sun. ...

We have been betrayed! the breath of some leprous monster has passed
over us, and we feel like crying out, in horror and despair,

"Unclean! UNCLEAN!" 21

He defended the Atlanta mobs under the headline, "When
'Mobs' Are No Longer Possible, Liberty Will Be Dead." "You
can close your eyes, and see it now," he wrote, picturing a scene
from the early days of the American Revolution. "The 'mobs'
were Liberty Boys in those days — the old days before we be-
came lolly-pops, vegetarians, grape-juicers, and sissy-boys . . ."

It is undoubtedly a tax upon credulity, but it is still possible to
understand how the old Populist — nearing sixty now — could
fancy, for the moment, at least, that he saw in the howling ruf-
fians of Atlanta as noble an army of Jacobins as ever marched to
the strains of the Marseillaise. It appears in his personal let-
ters. "It cost $5000," he wrote, "to save him from the 'mob' —
as fully a respectable mob as those that took the tea from the
British ship in Boston. Slaton had better not come back. 90% of
our people are with us in this Frank case." 22 He could sit at
Hickory Hill, "close his eyes," and see himself as Voltaire, as
Mirabeau, as Danton. It was the degeneration of the dream that
had given form to his chaotic soul.

Addressing himself to the Jewish lawyers defending Frank,
Watson wrote: "You have blown the breath of life into the
monster of Race Hatred: AND THIS FRANKENSTEIN,
whom you created at such enormous expense, WILL HUNT
YOU DOWN!" Proportionally there were in 1920 almost four
times as many Jews to the population of Georgia, as there
were in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Missis-
sippi. Every little town had its "Jew store." An editor of the
state reported that since the commutation of Frank's sentence,
"Georgia has been, we greatly regret to have to admit, a veri-
table hot-bed of anti-Jewish feeling." 23 Handbills were distrib-
uted on the streets presenting the question, "Can't you buy

21 Jeffersonian, June 24, 191 5.

22 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, July 2, 1915.

23 Thomas W. Loyless, editorial, Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 1, 191 5.

382

The Lecherous Jew

Clothing from an AMERICAN?" Or shall your money go "To
buy Governors" ? 24 An editor observed that in the whole state,
"an unthinking, unreasoning passion has almost completely ob-
sessed, not merely the worst but some of the best of her citizens,
until for weeks and months past this matter [the Frank case]
has occupied the public mind almost to the exclusion of all
else." 25 Broadside doggerel on the case found a ready market,
and the ballad of Little Mary Phagan was recorded for the
phonograph.

After an important development in the case, on the streets of
Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and Columbus, great stacks of the
Jeffersonian "melted like snow-flakes." Eager crowds in small
towns met the incoming trains to buy their "Jeffs" as soon as
they arrived. The circulation of Watson's weekly leaped from
around 25,000 at the beginning of the Frank crusade to 87,000
copies for the week ending September 4, 19 15. The price per
copy to dealers increased from one to one-and-a-half and then to
two cents. At this rate a convincing itemized estimate shows
that at its maximum circulation the paper made a profit of
$1,123.75 P er week. 26

The commutation of Frank's death sentence marked the open-
ing of Watson's campaign of abuse against ex-Governor Slaton.
The slander he did not offer directly for the truth, he implied so
artfully that it was widely accepted as the truth. The law firm
of which Slaton was a member had effected a consolidation with
the firm that defended Frank. It was specifically agreed that
Slaton's firm should have nothing to do with the Frank case,
and that Slaton was not to have any interest in the fees of the
consolidated firm while he was governor. 27 Watson charged that
Slaton was actually a part of Frank's counsel when he commuted
the sentence, and that he secretly received fabulous fees for that
action. He freely used Mrs. Slaton's name in his charges, dubbing
her "Chief Justice Sally." He argued that the commutation was
a "nullity" and should be set aside.

Threats of lynching, half-veiled or unveiled, continued to ap-
pear in the Jeffersonian. When a demented convict named Creen

24 Copies in the files of Herbert J. Haas & Co.

25 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 1, 1915.

26 Thomas W. Loyless, in the Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 12, 1915.

27 Judge Samuel B. Adams quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, Sept. 5, 1915.

383

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

made an attempt upon Frank's life at the state penitentiary,
slashing a jugular vein while the victim slept, Watson urged that
a petition be circulated "even into South Carolina, asking for
clemency for Creen." * In his paper for August 12 Watson
wrote: "The next Leo Frank case in Georgia will never reach
the Courthouse. THE NEXT JEW WHO DOES WHAT
FRANK DID, IS GOING TO GET EXACTLY THE SAME
THING THAT WE GIVE TO NEGRO RAPISTS."

On the night of August 16 twenty-five armed men, only two
of them masked, entered the state penitentiary, took Leo Frank
out, boldly drove one hundred and seventy-five miles across the
state in eight automobiles, and hanged him on a tree near Mark
etta. The lynching was faultlessly planned, and executed with-
out a hitch. For audacity and efficiency it was unparalleled in
Southern history. It was after the lynchers had done their work
that the spirit of the Roman holiday prevailed. A heel was re-
peatedly ground into the flesh of the dead man's face, and bits
of his clothing and of the rope were distributed as souvenirs.
"Fiddling John" Carson played the Mary Phagan ballad all day
on the courthouse steps in Marietta to crowds gathered from
miles around. It was estimated that 15,000 people, women and
children among them, filed past the body of Frank in ah Atlanta
morgue, after compelling authorities by threats to display it. 29

At Hickory Hill Watson was waiting for word from the
lynchers with his wife, his son, and Mrs. Lytle at two o'clock in
the morning. The news came that Frank had been taken by the
lynchers. He did not say anything. 80

One feels back of many of his wild utterances on the Frank
case the same pathological state of mind that prevailed in parts
of his anti-Catholic crusade. "I wish it were possible for me to
consult you professionally," he wrote a medical friend in the
midst of his activity on this case. "A baffling nervous trouble re-
turns on me about once a month & for several days I am so
despondent & distressed, about nothing, that it is difficult to
live." 81 Whether his psychological condition was more a cause,
or a result, of his political preoccupations — or whether it was

28 Jeffersonian, July 29, 1915.

29 Constitution, Aug. 17 and 18, 1915; Atlanta Journal, Aug. 17, 1915.
80 Interview with Mrs. Lytle, Baltimore, Aug. 8, 1934.

81 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, Jan. 7, 1915.

384

The Lecherous Jew

either — it is, of course* impossible to say. There may have been
times, many times, in the study at Hickory Hill, when even Tom
Watson — as prone as he was to fall under the spell of his own
hypnotic devices — was unable any longer to identify his howling
mobs and masked lynchers with his Jacobins and u Liberty
Boys." But unless one chooses to interpret the above quotation
in such a light, there is no evidence to support this speculation.
So far as one can judge on the strict basis of what Watson said
and wrote, there is no reason to reject the idea that he looked
upon his work and called it good — all of it.

After an investigation, Governor Harris reported : u The peni-
tentiary was not built to keep people out, but to keep them in
when put there. So the attacking party had little difficulty . . ."
He was flooded with letters threatening his life when he an-
nounced that an effort would be made to apprehend the lynch-
ers. 82 As the New York Times observed, it would have been no
more possible to convict them than it would have been u to con-
vict Wendell Phillips in Massachusetts under the fugitive slave
law for aiding slaves to escape." The mass of the people were in
sympathy with the lynchers, and those who were not seemed
completely cowed. The major of Atlanta, speaking before the
California Mayors' Association at the time of the lynching, de-
fended it, saying that seventy-five per cent of the people believed
that the judgment of the courts had been u set aside by one man,
and the people felt that it was up to them to take the law into
their hands." w

Intelligent men were seen to fight their way to news boys to
pay twenty-five and fifty cents for the first issue of Watson's
paper after the lynching. The event came too late to allow more
than a brief comment in a "box" on the front page. "In putting
the sodomite murderer to death," he wrote, "the Vigilance Com-
mittee has done what the Sheriff would have done, if Slaton had
not been of the same mould as Benedict Arnold. Let Jew liber-
tines take notice. Georgia is not for sale to rich criminals." In
the next issue Watson devoted eight pages to the case. He wrote
a long defense of lynch law based upon the text, "THE VOICE
OF THE PEOPLE IS THE VOICE OF GOD." "If Democ-
racy does not mean just that, let us abandon our Republican form

5 N. E. Harris, op. cit., p. 368.

i New York Times, Aug. 20-23, 1915; Constitution, Aug. 19, 1915.

385

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

of Government, kiss the Pope's foot, and ask him to appoint a
'divine right' king to rule over us." He was sure that "all over
this broad land there are millions of good people, not doped by
Jew money, and lies, that enthusiastically greet the triumph of
law in Georgia. Womanhood is made safer, everywhere"

The state of Georgia stood indicted the nation over because
of the Frank lynching. The crime was compared freely with the
atrocities in "bleeding Belgium." A Boston paper suggested a
boycott on all Georgia products. The New Republic placed the
state "in the category of communities like Haiti, communities
which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized
powers." It deplored the fact that "we are in part composed of
a people as cowardly, as incompetent, as barbarous as so many
people in Georgia have shown themselves to be." w The mass of
Georgians could no more understand such an attitude than the
mass of Germans could understand Allied talk of the "Hun."
They believed what they were told. Watson himself printed at
great length the worst of the condemnation of Georgia from the
national press, along with many cartoons denouncing the lynch-
ing. "The North can rail itself hoarse, if it chooses to do so," he
wrote. "We've already stood as much vilification and abuse as
we intend to put up with; and we will meet the 'Leo Frank
League' with a Gentile League, if they provoke us much fur-
ther . . ." He intimated that "another Ku Klux Klan may be
organized to restore HOME RULE." 35

From California ex-Governor Slaton denounced the lynching
as "a consummate outrage." He proposed the prosecution of
Tom Watson under the section of the criminal code that makes
felonious the publication of literature tending to incite riot. The
mob that attacked him in Atlanta were "recruited from the dives
and gutters of Atlanta." Of course he was not afraid to return to
Georgia. He intended to return within a few weeks. 36 "Oh you
gutter snipes of Atlanta I Oh you denizens of the dives !" jeered
Watson. "Get back to your gutters, and your dives, before
Straus, and Haas and Montag fetch John Slaton home!" He
published a letter from Columbia County admirers addressed to
Frank friends : "If you don y t want to raise H — in Georgia, you

**New Republic, Vol. Ill, p. 300.

85 Jeffersonian, Aug. 26 and Sept. 2, 1915.

36 Constitution, Aug. 19, 1915.

386

The Lecherous Jew

and your Slaton crowd had better keep quiet, for there is no
limit fixed to which the sons of Georgia will not go to protect
her fair women and Watson" Watson suggested more than once
that "It might seriously impair his [Slaton's] health, if he were
to return to Georgia." 37 Slaton's friends implored him not to
return. The ex-governor departed for the Hawaiian Islands.

In January Watson learned that United States Attorney-
General Gregory had plans under way for the Department of
Justice to take action against him for his articles on the Frank
case. The intention was to try his case in a jurisdiction outside of
Georgia, on the ground that the government could not get an
impartial trial of Watson in that state. The government had al-
ready met two defeats at Watson's hands in its prosecution of its
case against him involving the charge of obscene matter in his
Catholic articles.

Watson called a mass meeting of his followers at Thomson to
tell them of the government's intention. "And I tell the Attorney-
General to his teeth," he said, " — you cannot remove me from
the Southern District of Georgia. ... If I have to give up my
life for having incurred the savage hatred of the Roman priests
and the rich Jews, it will be given up right here in the same re-
gion where my ancestors gave up theirs. ... I don't intend to
budge an inch : the cause is yours as well as mine, and I will die
on my threshold, before any officer, State or Federal, shall take
me outside of the legal jurisdiction under whose constitutional
protection my home was made." A resolution was passed con-
demning the Department of Justice. 38

About the same time a "prominent gentleman" came to Gov-
ernor Harris with the request that he petition Attorney-General
Gregory to drop the proceedings against Watson. "The gentle-
man stated to me," writes the governor with his infallible can-
dor, "that he had just come from Mr. Watson and had been
directed to say to me that if I would prevent such a step being
taken he would give me his earnest support as well for my re-
election as for any office that I might seek." Harris agreed to do
all in his power. The "prominent gentleman" then telephoned
Hickory Hill in the presence of the Governor. "I could hear
through the phone Mr. Watson's reply . . ." he said. "Mr. Wat-

37 Jeffersonian, Aug. 19, Sept. 9, and Oct. 7, 1915.

38 MS. of speech, Watson MS.; also vide Jeffersonian, Feb. 17, 1916.

387

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

son expressed his gratification that I took the view that I had
outlined." A few days later Harris made a special trip to Wash-
ington to see the Attorney-General. Later a meeting of the Geor-
gia delegation was called to discuss the same matter. Said one of
its members: u Our old Governor has already gone down to see
the Attorney-General and I am sure the rest of us can afford to
do so." The entire delegation, with the exception of Hardwick,
appeared before Attorney-General Gregory in Watson's behalf.
The case was dropped.

"What kind of politicians have you got in Georgia?" de-
manded the Attorney-General of Governor Harris at their inter-
view. "When you come to me you always denounce Mr. Watson
in unmeasured terms, and yet when I propose to silence him or
punish him for his misdemeanors, you come here and take his
part and urge me to let him alone. Why is this?"

"I did not answer him according to the inquiry," wrote the
governor in his account of the interview, "but contented myself
with telling him that I wanted him to let Mr. Watson alone for
the sake of the honor of my own state and people." 89

More than a year elapsed between the time of the Frank
lynching and the next state election. Watson saw to it, however,
that the case was kept in the public eye until the election.
Solicitor-General Hugh M. Dorsey paid Watson a visit at Hick-
ory Hill after he had disposed of the Frank case, and later an-
nounced his candidacy for the governorship. 40 Forgetting the
promise he had made, Watson turned upon Governor Harris,
who was a candidate for reelection, and denounced him as a
Slaton man. He then came out for Dorsey, whom he recom-
mended as "the fearless, incorruptible Solicitor-General who
won the great fight for LAW AND ORDER, and the PRO-
TECTION OF WOMANHOOD, in the Leo Frank case. . . .
The Jefersonian is for him tooth and nail" Watson also an-
nounced his candidate for prison commissioner: "He is THE
JUROR who was so outrageously DENOUNCED BY
LUTHER ROSSER IN THE FRANK CASE! Henslee
stood firm and true, for LAW, for JUSTICE, for WOMAN-

39 Nat E. Harris, Autobiography, pp. 240-241.

40 Interview with Judge Hugh M. Dorsey, Atlanta, Sept. 2, 1934.

388

The Lecherous Jew

HOOD." tt Watson also had his candidates for comptroller-
general, for state superintendent of education, and for commis-
sioner of agriculture.

The state campaign was fought out largely on the issue of the
Frank case. Watson's candidates were victorious all along the
line. The strategic post of commissioner of agriculture, which
controlled more patronage than any office in the state, was filled
by the vice-president of Watson's publishing company. The chair-
manship of the Democratic Executive Committee was filled by a
personal friend of Watson's. The governor-elect came to Hick-
ory Hill to discuss the matter of appointments. The Democratic
state platform contained a plank condemning all efforts on the
part of the Federal Government to extradite citizens of the state
for trial. That same summer the state legislature, at Watson's
demand, passed a law providing for the strict inspection of
Catholic convents. Even Watson's power was unequal to the
task of forcing a Democratic state convention to denounce its
own party's candidate for president — as he attempted to do. He
forthwith came out as a "Progressive," in favor of the candidacy
of Charles E. Hughes. 42

On a summer night in 19 15, while the hysteria over the Frank
case was at its peak, a strange ceremony was conducted on the
bald top of Stone Mountain, ten miles from Atlanta. That cere-
mony inaugurated the new Ku Klux Klan — of illustrious history
during the next decade. If Watson had any hand in launching
the new organization, no record has been found that reveals it.
Yet if any mortal man may be credited (as no one man may
rightly be) with releasing the forces of human malice and ig-
norance and prejudice, which the Klan merely mobilized, that
man was Thomas E. Watson.

^Jeffersonian, June 8, 15, 1916; editorial in the New York Times, Sept. 14, 1916.
42 Jeffersonian, Aug. 3, 17, and 24, Oct. 26, 1916; New York Times, Sept. 27,
1916.

389

24

Peter and the Armies of Islam

IT WAS axiomatic in Watson's politics that Woodrow Wilson
could do no right. More deeply imbedded in his mind than
axioms was a hatred of militarism. By the dictates of these two
antipathies, more than any other influences, was shaped the tor-
tuous attitude he took toward the nation's part in World
War I.

Ever since he led the victory over the Wilson party in the
Georgia primary of 19 12 Watson had been unremitting in his
attack upon the President. Nothing seemed to please him. Had
Wilson given a death blow to Dollar Diplomacy? "Then what's
our navy doing in Nicaragua?" asked Watson. Had the Presi-
dent secured the passage of anti-trust laws? "Yes; with all their
teeth extracted," he replied. Had not eighteen peace treaties
been negotiated? They were "eighteen lame jokes." Had not
Neutrality been maintained? "Could the administration have
done anything else?" His bitterest attack was reserved for Wil-
son's Mexican policy. The capture of Vera Cruz was a "wanton
piece of criminal stupidity," for which he could see no possible
justification. For sending the "punitive expedition" after Villa
the President "richly deserved impeachment." Intervention
meant that Wilson sought "to complete the bloody work of
Mora, Diaz, Huerta, and Henry Lane Wilson." 1 Like every-
thing else he wrote in this period, the criticisms of Wilson were
highly spiced with the papal menace. The President was the
"pusillanimous tool of a foreign potentate" with "a papal spy"
as private secretary, he assured his readers. It was sometimes

iJeffersonian, Sept. 24, 1914; April 20, July 13, 1916.

390

Peter and the Armies of Islam

difficult to tell where the anti-Catholic crusade left off and the
anti- Wilson crusade began.

For more than a year after the opening of World War I
Watson was so much absorbed in one "menace" or another that
he had time for little else. He took pains, however, to assert a
strong position of neutrality. "It is the most stupendous tragedy
in history," he wrote of the War. "But you have nothing to do
with it. The quarrel is not yours. It is your duty to hands off
[jfc]." He complained of the sham neutrality that lay in the
government's policy of permitting financial intervention on be-
half of the Allies. "What sort of consistency is it that prohibits
a harmless piece of music [a British war song], and then feeds
the titanic fight with food, clothing, guns, ammunition and
horses?" he asked. He demanded commercial as well as military
neutrality. "Come Ahead, Now, and Let Us All Go Crazy about
the Belgians," ran the headline over his editorial on the atrocity
propaganda. 2

Partly because he thought the administration was taking the
side of the shipping interests against Great Britain and her
blockade and partly because of his sympathies, Watson had, by
the end of the first year of war, abandoned his neutrality for a
frankly pro-Allies position. "LET ENGLAND ALONE!" he
demanded, referring to the blockade of Germany. He had two
hundred bales of cotton that he would burn "rather than do a
single thing to hamper France and England while they are
fighting for the rights of humanity." He urged the farmers to
"TELL THAT ATLANTA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
TO GO TO H-LL" when that body demanded an end to the
blockade. On the side he advised his crusaders that "the Pope
and the Kaiser are in co-hoot on the war." Yet at the end of
19 1 6 he still ridiculed the idea of American intervention. Com-
menting on the slogan, "He kept us out of war," Watson wrote:
"What war? Where did we have a chance to get into one? What
did he do to keep us 'out?' . . . We had no cause to go in" Wil-
son's preparedness program called forth a denunciation of "the
insane notion that belligerence of mind, belligerence of prepara-
tion, and belligerence of attitude and conduct lead to peace . . ."
It was Watson's idea that "big armaments, instead of insuring

2 Ibid., Jan. 7, 1915; vide also Aug. 27, 1914, and Jan. 14, 1915.

391

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

PEACE, insure WAR." He denounced compulsory military
training as an effort to have the republic "transformed into a
German military camp" 8

Only two weeks before the President delivered his war mes-
sage, Watson doubled on his tracks and called for intervention.
"If a single vessel of ours is sunk in violation of the Law of
Nations," he urged, "join the Entente, send money, men and
munitions to France, and bend every energy of this greatest of
Republics to aid those who are trying to crush the Prussian idea,
that the only law is MILITARY NECESSITY, to be judged of
by Prussian militarists." 4 Immediately war was declared, how-
ever, he recoiled to his former position. If the government had
been, "from the start, absolutely neutral, as in sound morals it
should have been," there would have been no occasion for in-
tervention. He pronounced the war a result of "the most rav-
enous commercialism that ever cursed a nation." He renounced
the war and all its works, and declared he would have nothing
to do with it. 5

His silence was not of long endurance. The dictatorial powers
demanded by the President, the inquisitorial espionage and sedi-
tion laws, the universal militarism and regimentation — all re-
ceived treatment at his hands. He seemed to assume single-
handedly the task of turning back the tide of war. As he got his
feet planted on the road to this new crusade, he seemed to ex-
perience a reborn sense of responsibility, and something of his
old spirit of courage in the face of overwhelming odds. In June
his paper was refused delivery at Savannah under provision of
the Espionage Act pending a decision of the Post Office Depart-
ment. 6 Early in July he received a notice from the Post Office
Department requiring him to show cause why his mailing privi-
leges should not be revoked. This action merely seemed to in-
tensify Watson's attack.

His first reaction was one of amazement at the universality of
the war madness. "Men who are ordinarily cool and level-headed
are acting like inebriates," he wrote. "A strange intoxication
exalts them, sweeps them off their feet, fastens them and leads

8 Ibid,, Nov. 30 and Dec. 21, 1916; Jan. 4, 1917.

4 Ibid., March 15, 1917.

5 Ibid., April 12, 1917.

6 New York Times, June 29, 1917.

392

Peter and the Armies of Islam

them on, and on, AND ON, until they are mere echoes of slogans
which are sounded in Washington.' ' He attacked the Espionage
Act with the earnestness of a man defending his own life. It
would, he said, "establish the same kind of autocracy in this
country that the Use majestie [sic'] laws create in Germany";
yet it was "Jefferson's Democratic Party proposing this, mind
you!" "Must we begin our war upon European autocracy by
creating one, here at home?" he demanded. "Don't abuse me —
ANSWER ME I" It was his opinion that "no king that ever
lived wielded more autocratic control than President Wilson has
demanded," and he was using that power to "systematize uni-
versal goose-stepping." 7

Treating the "flowers of Wilson's rhetoric" with contempt,
Watson kept asking with embarrassing frequency, "Why are we
fighting?" and "How is it that we got balled up in this Armaged-
don?" The answers he made to his own questions were not those
that one saw upon the great war posters, or read in the "Loy-
alty Leaflets," or the "Red, White, and Blue Books," or heard
from the Four-Minute Men. For example :

Morgan and his associates banked upon the success of England, France,
Italy, and Russia: they have put thousands of millions of dollars on that
side: they now compel the United States to put up billions of treasure and
millions of lives, ON THE SAME SIDE, for fear that Germany will
win, and reduce their war paper to the status of Confederate money.

The Russian collapse had taken place; and American lives by the mil-
lion, must be devoted to the Russian task, else the billions of dollars which
our Morgan banks and Steel Trust combinations had staked on England's
success WOULD BE REDUCED TO WASTE PAPER.

"The World must be made safe for democracy," said our sweetly sin-
cere President; what he meant was, that the huge investment, which our
Blood-gorged Capitalists had made in French, Italian, Russian, and Eng-
lish paper, must be made safe.

Where Morgans money went, your boy's blood must go, ELSE MOR-
GAN WILL LOSE HIS MONEY!

That's all there is to it. 8

At the time he wrote this article Watson was conducting a
drive against conscription and openly encouraging resistance to
enlistment of troops for foreign service. Draft resistance was
wide-spread over the country but poorly organized. While Wat-

7 Jeffersonian, April 26, May 17 and 24, 1917.

8 Ibid., Aug. x6, 19 17.

393

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

son's movement was in progress, the "Green Corn Rebellion," a
pitifully ill-conceived attempt of poor white tenant farmers in
Oklahoma to march on Washington, was crushed by local au-
thorities who made three hundred arrests. Reports of arrests, in-
dictments, and trials for draft resistance came from Texas, North
Carolina, Oregon, Iowa, Ohio, and from Chicago, Philadelphia,
and Cambridge, Massachusetts. 9 Disregarding these many evi-
dences of the War Department's determination to silence and
punish all resistance, Watson pushed his drive well into the fifth
month of the War.

He not only continued his attack upon the war administration
and his aspersions upon the holiness of America's cause, but sug-
gested an interstate convention to meet and consider "the recent
unconstitutional and revolutionary acts of Congress" The re-
sponse "from all parts of Georgia and the adjoining states" was
so favorable to the suggestion that he set a date for the conven-
tion to meet in Macon. "WE ARE THE MASTERS!" read
his call. "By the living God, we must again make that under-
stood." 10

Meanwhile, he announced that he intended to fight the con-
stitutionality of the Conscription Act of May 18, 19 17, in the
federal courts, and appeal for contributions to assist in the con-
test. Checks poured in from all parts of the country, small
amounts most of them, but totaling in the end about $ioo,ooo. 11
Every week he published the names of new contributors, a list
usually several columns long. The case selected to bring the law
to test was that of two Negro men jailed in Augusta for failure
to register as required by the Conscription Act. The hearing, on
August 18, attracted such a large crowd that Judge Emory Speer
held court in the open air. Watson's argument was based upon
four main contentions: (1) that the acts of Congress and the
President's proclamation abolished the independent state militia
and ignored state-rights; (2) that they contravened the clause
of the Constitution that prohibits Congress from making appro-
priations of this character for a longer term than two years;

Charles C. Bush, "The Green Corn Rebellion," (Master's thesis, University of
Oklahoma) passim; New York Times, Aug. 5, 1917.

10 Jeffersonian, Aug. 16, 1917.

11 Interview with C. F. Hunt, Thomson, Georgia, who was cashier of McDuffie
Bank, of which Watson was president, at the time this money was subscribed. His
estimate of the total amount received was $100,000 "or over."

394

Peter and the Armies of Islam

(3) that they destroyed the English common law principle of
ne exeat, providing that the subject could not be sent out of the
realm without his consent; (4) that they violated the Thirteenth
Amendment. 12 Based upon the old creed of strict-construction
and state-rights, it was the same sort of argument that Alexander
Stephens would have used. The speech was one of the most im-
pressive Watson ever made. The constitutionality of the Con-
scription Act was, of course, upheld by the Court.

Local patriots as well as federal authorities busied themselves
with efforts to forestall the Macon convention. Watson found it
impossible to obtain a place of meeting, and on receiving threats
of military violence should the meeting be held, he took the re-
sponsibility of calling it off altogether in order to avoid blood-
shed. "The world must be made safe for democracy, even
though none is left in these United States," he remarked in mak-
ing the announcement. 13

From his own writings it is clear that Watson was well in-
formed on the ruthlessness with which the Espionage Act and
other coercive measures were being enforced by the Administra-
tion. Lesser offenders than he fell victim to the law. A candidate
for Congress in Iowa was sentenced to ten years in the Federal
Penitentiary in Atlanta for violating the Espionage Act. His
offense consisted of publishing and distributing excerpts from
an address against conscription delivered by Watson at Thomson
on June 23, 19 17. It had been less than a year since Watson
was cleared of the charge of sending obscene literature through
the mails — the end of four years' proceedings against him by
the Government. He was well aware that he was persona non
grata to the Attorney-General and that a decision was pending
on the suppression of his paper. In spite of all this, he continued
to court disaster, progressively intensifying his attack instead of
mitigating it. With lance deliberately leveled he charged full
gallop against the inexorable.

"I feel sure that Jefferson would have taken the same posi-
tion . . ." he assured a friend. "Shall I, at my time of life, be-
come an opportunist, a conformist, in order to avoid harsh
criticism? The masses — especially the rural masses — are with
me." The Farmers' Union, in which his influence was strong, had

^Jeffersonian, Aug. 23, 1917.
13 Ibid.

395

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

passed resolutions against Wilson's price-fixing program. 14 In
the course of an interview upon a different occasion Watson once
remarked: "Freedom of speech, within your limitations, as I
have said — I have had a good deal of it. Sometimes I have not
had quite as much as I would like to have had. It takes a good
deal of freedom of speech and press for me, I assure you."

In August Postmaster-General Burleson sent a communication
to the Senate complaining of certain publications that were
"daily accomplishing results clearly in violation of the espionage
law." "Common among these publications," he said, "stand The
Masses and The Jeffersonian. Their respective editors are lead-
ers in this movement." " That same month the Post Office De-
partment denied the use of the mails to the socialist monthly and
to Watson's publications. The same judge who heard his argu-
ment against conscription denied his application for an injunction
restraining the post office from refusing to accept his publications.
There was no other recourse. His parting observation in the last
number of the Jeffersonian summed up his feelings :

Without specification of alleged wrong-doing, and without trial by jury,
and without knowing why it is done, a publisher's business is outlawed and
his property scrapheaped, and his presses stopped: still, this is not press-
censorship.

What is it then?

Evidently, it is a part of "The New Freedom" which Father-in-law
Wilson advocates in his book; which Son-in-law McAdoo employs in his
sales of Liberty Bonds; which the Germans are suffering so badly from the
want of; and which we are spending blood and treasure to establish
throughout the universe. 16

The months that followed were full of tragedy at Hickory
Hill. The loss of his publications drove in upon him a sense of
frustration and defeat. He was reminded that his first paper in
the 'nineties "was killed by the Spanish War of 1898, just as the
war of 19 1 7 — our date — killed my Jeffersonian." 17 A week after
the government clamped down upon his paper, his remaining

14 T. E. W. to Dr. John N. Taylor, May 8, 1917.

15 Constitution, Aug. 23, 1917.

16 Jeffersonian, Aug. 23, 1917.

17 T. E. W. to Robert L. Rodgers, Oct. 6, 1919, Georgia Department of Archives
and History.

396

Peter and the Armies of Islam

daughter died. That blow was "like the crash of an avalanche,"
he wrote. He found it difficult to readjust himself. "It is hard to
feel the same old interest in the same old things," he complained.
"You seem to stand upon one bank of a great stream, and they
upon the other, while a deep, wide current flows between. To
the things on the opposite side, you seem strangely removed and
aloof, as if you had parted from them long years ago." 18 He
sought relief in drugs and in an increased amount of drinking.
His health declined and nervous prostration threatened. Toward
the last of January he left Hickory Hill and moved to Florida.

In April his last child, John Durham, died while visiting him.
Turning back to the pages of his Journal where he had written
of the death of an infant daughter and his second daughter he
described the death of his son. He mentioned an experience of
his son shortly before the end which was "so full of tragedy that
I cannot describe it." Death followed unexpectedly. "Monday
afternoon convulsions set in. At just before sundown he fell out
of my arms — dead. This ends it all !" 19 A little while later a
Negro servant discovered him wandering on the beach out of
his mind. For nine hours he talked incessantly, for the most part
repeating old speeches he had made in the 'nineties. He soon re-
gained control of his mind, but it was not until July that he be-
gan to recover physically. Those who knew him best dated a
decided change from this experience. He drank more heavily,
had less control of his temper, and was never again capable of
the sustained mental exertion he had been accustomed to. 20

Grief unnerved him as it did few men, and this was grief mul-
tiplied by a double calamity that almost at one stroke robbed
him of what was dearer to him, he said, than life. He had faced
death himself once in a serious illness, and the only observation
about the encounter he found worth recording was that he "sim-
ply didn't care." This present stroke, however, was another con-
firmation of the suspicion he had long held. Providence, or what-
ever the parsons wished to name this Force — and he frankly
entertained his doubts concerning Its friendliness — had always
reserved a special malevolence for his head. It was plain enough

18 T. E. W. in The Guard, Sept. 13, 1917.

19 MS. Journal 2, p. 447.

20 Interview with Mrs. Alice L. Lytle, Baltimore, Aug. 8, 1934; also Mrs. Lytle
to Robert L. Rodgers, Jan. 15, 1918, Georgia Department of Archives and History.

397

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

to see. What other ingenuity could have fashioned the demonic
combination that snatched his children from his arms and stopped
his printing presses with one malign gesture ?

One thing he knew — and his rusting presses bore the realiza-
tion in upon him once more — that somehow he had been eter-
nally thwarted in his dearest desires. He felt, and he said, that he
was "one of those men with whom Fortune deals grudgingly,
one of those whom Hope deceives and Success laughs at; one of
those who always has wind and wave against him, and who never
by any sort of chance finds himself in league with Luck." Frustra-
tion, "like a dark thread," to borrow one of his similes, seemed
"woven between the warp and woof of his life, and it never
seemed to tire of repeating the same pattern. Born under the
star of a declining agrarian society he had received at the start
a heritage of defeat. This, along with sundry talents, he had
boldly invested in the adventure of agrarian resurgence in the
'nineties and eventually attained leadership of the movement —
in the very year of its bankruptcy. He had been the heaviest
personal loser in the adventure, and his experience epitomized
the frustration suffered then, as well as later, by the cause for
which he fought — but more especially by Southern agrarianism.
Those struggles of the 'nineties were fought over again and again
in his mind in later years. Even such tangible victories as he had
won for his farmers — rural free delivery, for example — had
eventually been turned to account by his enemies to poison the
minds of his people. His very platforms were bandied among
them after he was all but forgotten. All the while perverse eco-
nomic forces, or perhaps another Force, had widened the rift that
yawned between the possessing and the dispossessed in his own
ranks until it could no longer be bridged by his old platforms and
principles. He had resorted to other devices — devices that con-
trasted strangely with old principles, and could not possibly have
gained his consent at one time. At what dire cost to the harmony
of his soul that consent was purchased may only be surmised.
New recruits in droves took up his cry against the "menaces."
But no sooner had he leveled a lance against a flesh-and-blood
menace than his tatterdemalion army deserted him, and now
they were treading the muck of foreign trenches or marching in
goose-step to the rhythm of Wilson's rhetoric. Such reflections
led back to the beach, where his endless pacings might too easily

398

Peter and the Armies of Islam

become dim wanderings again. Unless he could in some way speak
his mind — at least have his say . . .

In a foolhardy attempt to evade the Government's ban Wat-
son brought out a new paper, The Guard, soon after the Jeffer-
sonian was silenced, but it too was suppressed. In June Eugene
V. Debs was arrested and indicted for violation of the Espionage
Act, and later sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in Atlanta.
Upon learning that the Attorney-General was about to take pro-
ceedings against him, Watson wrote that official recounting the
loss of his children, telling of his physical condition, and promis-
ing to make no further criticism of the administration if he were
not molested. The Attorney-General dropped the proceedings. 21

In August Watson decided to oppose Carl Vinson, candidate
for reelection as Congressman from the tenth district, in the
primary of 191 8. He had no paper now, and his physical condi-
tion prevented him from making more than a few speeches. His
campaign was left largely in the hands of his friends. At his first
public appearance, a speech at the home of Alexander Stephens,
the scene of some of the most heated battles of the 'nineties, it
was noticed that his hair was silvered, his eyes sunken, and his
face deeply lined. There was none of the old fiery invective that
set crowds mad. His voice was seldom raised above a conversa-
tional tone. He said the campaign might "help divert his mind
from morbidness and melancholy." 22

The nation-wide crusade against the Hun was at its highest
pitch during the fall of this campaign. A regimen of meatless
and wheatless days, Liberty Bond drives, spy-hunts, and Hun-
hating held absolute sway. Carl Vinson, who had distinguished
himself as a super-patriot, launched his campaign upon patriotic
war issues. He charged that Watson had "never bought a Lib-
erty bond, nor a war savings stamp and has never given a dollar
to the Red Cross or Y. M. C. A." Furthermore, he had printed
"seditious utterances," and "un-American writings" in his "dis-
loyal incendiary publications" until an outraged administration
had silenced him. In large advertisements Vinson printed excerpts
from Watson's bitterest attacks upon Wilson, the war, and the
Conscription Act. 23 Watson said that he had not changed his

21 Nat E. Harris, Autobiography, p. 242. Harris was told of the incident by Secre-
tary of War Baker.

22 Constitution, Aug. 25, 191 8.

23 Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 27, 1918; Constitution, Aug. 22, 1918.

399

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

views on the righteousness of the War, but recognized that it
must now be fought to a successful finish. As for the Liberty
Bonds, he could see no reason why he should "borrow money at
12 per cent to loan to the richest government on earth at about
4 per cent." He was more interested in the coming work of re-
construction after the War. He promised, if elected, that he
would "work for free speech; reestablishment of the press; re-
guarantee and make stronger individual liberty and personal
rights ; all of which must be built up again."

The election was surprisingly close. According to official re-
turns each candidate carried six counties. Watson's victories were
won in the old Populist counties and in the Fifth Ward workers'
district of Augusta. According to the county-unit system, Vinson
had sixteen and Watson fourteen votes in the party convention.
Convinced that he was the victim of fraudulent practices such as
were used in the 'nineties, Watson contested the election in three
counties at the state convention. He charged that local officials
made a bonfire of ballots cast in one county to prevent a verifica-
tion of the published returns. 24 Under the sway of patriotic ap-
peal, the state convention refused to consider the contests Wat-
son brought. He was denounced as "the miserable creature whose
every word is against his country," and his "political death" was
widely proclaimed.

As soon after the Armistice as seemed reasonably safe, Wat-
son acquired a small weekly paper, the Columbia Sentinel, and
began to edit it on the plan of the Jefersonian — all columns ap-
propriated for his editorials. Still under governmental ban, he
was compelled to post his papers in a neighboring town. Casting
aside other precaution, and ridiculing the outcry of "our 'ioo
per cent' idiots," he launched a running attack on "Wilsonism"
and all its works, foreign and domestic. This new crusade pre-
sents some curious paradoxes, and only against the crazy pattern
of the post-War America of 19 19-1920 does it make sense.

In domestic affairs Watson demanded immediate repeal of all
coercive legislation passed during the War. This included the

24 T. E. W. to J. J. Flynt, Chairman of Democratic Executive Committee of
Georgia, Sept. 14, 1918, Watson MSS. (copy).

400

Peter and the Armies of Islam

Espionage and Sedition Acts, as well as the Conscription Act
and compulsory military training. He called for the restoration
of freedom of speech, assembly, and press and all civil liberties
that Wilson had abridged, as well as amnesty for all political
prisoners. There was Eugene Debs, "one of the greatest, truest,
purest Americans now alive," sentenced to ten years in Atlanta
by a "stone-headed Federal Judge." He encouraged Victor Ber-
ger, the Socialist representative from Milwaukee who was de-
nied his seat in the House by Congress, to "keep up his fight for
the time-honored principle of free choice of Representatives."
"// Milwaukee wants Berger, she has A RIGHT TO HIS
SERVICES." 25

His strictures on Wilson's foreign policy were equally thor-
ough-going. "What sort of peace was imposed upon the German
people — whom Wilson said he 'loved?' " he asked. Instead of a
"peace without victory," the peace of Versailles was an iniquitous
bondage forced on a helpless people by bayonet, and an Ameri-
can blockade still imposed starvation upon German citizens. The
League of Nations he regarded as an unholy alliance of the
victors to enforce the peace of Versailles, to protect their ill-
gotten plunder, and to impose imperial exploitation upon the
subject nations. Under it, he thought, the United States would
be "made security for every bankrupt nation, and pledged to in-
terfere with every squabble on God's earth." "The Irish war is
in bloody progress; the Russian war is a vast welter of blood
. . . Germany rocks and reels under revolution after revolu-
tion; Turks still slaughter Armenians; and Great Britain is using
the gun, the bayonet, and the bomb in every one of her held-
down dominions." He proposed that the United States "get out
of Europe and stay out." 26

What were American troops doing in Russia? he asked.
"Woodrow Wilson cabled his May-I-not congratulations to
Kerensky, when the Czar was deposed; and then, when Lenin
took the place of Kerensky, Wilson himself, sent an army of
American boys to aid the Japs crush Russian Democracy." It
looked to him like a coijspiracy "to prevent Russia from show-
ing the world how a democracy may be established — thus setting
a bad example that may 'infect' other submerged masses."

25 Columbia Sentinel, Sept. 12, 1919, and Jan. 2 and Feb. 9, 1920.

26 Ibid., July 11 and Aug. 8, 1919, and Jan. 2, 1920; Constitution, April 18, 1920.

401

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

"Morality!" he exclaimed. "Woodrow Wilson preaching moral-
ity! He, the man who personally made war on Russian Demo-
crats, and starved their wives and children with a most cruel and
unlawful blockade." 2T

Shortly after President Wilson's breakdown in September,
19 19, Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer, being groomed as
a candidate for President, captured the public eye by taking the
lead in a crusade against organized labor and radicalism. In his
"war on the Reds" the powers of the Espionage and Sedition
acts were invoked to sanction a ruthless purge of dissenters. All
over the nation meetings were broken up, audiences clubbed and
jailed; houses were broken open, desks ransacked; fathers were
torn from their families and shipped around the world without
so much as an explanation. In December, 249 foreigners were
herded aboard a boat and shipped to Soviet Russia. As if this
were not enough, Palmer asked Congress for still more repres-
sive powers. The cry of "Ship them, or shoot them," was taken
up far and wide. Watson commented :

What sort of language is this we hear, roaring at religious conventions,
at peaceable assemblages of Army Hofficers [sic], at quiet sessions of City
Aldermen, at the afternoon meetings of the Eminently Respectable, and in
the confidential conferences of the Better Element ?

Colonel Roosevelt raucously imitates his father, and yells, "SMASH
UM!"

In the Maryland Conference, Brother Samples tore loose and yelled,
"SHOOT UM, OR SHIP UM!"

In the peaceable assemblage of New York Aldermen, Father Kenneally
volcanoed, "SHIP UM, OR SHOOT UM!"

Dear me! this kind of conversation sets me to wondering which one of
us went crazy first.

Of course, we are all crazy now; but the question is, who started it? Who
was the aggressor? 28

He begged to remind his betters that, "Under these same arbi-
trary, autocratic measures the Czars filled Siberia with noble
men and women ..."

Watson's favorite reply to "the 'ioo per cent' idiots," as he
called Palmer and the Red-baiters, was to remind them of the
revolutionary heritage of America. What would they have
thought of their hero, La Fayette (to whom they were so anx-

27 Columbia Sentinel, Jan. 2 and 23 and May 10, 1920.

28 Columbia Sentinel, Jan. 2, 1920.

402

Peter and the Armies of Islam

ious to pay their debt), had they seen him "at the head of a
huge mob of Parisian Radicals" in the march on Versailles?
When the British officers shouted "Shoot urn!" at Lexington
Bridge, "the farmers all ran to their houses, along the road,
came out with their guns, AND SHOT BACK!" He reminded
Palmer of the misadventures of a certain Stuart King who " Vis-
ualized' an imminent danger from another invasion of Danes,
Germans, Bolsheviki, and Emma Goldmans," and levied "Ship
Money." The British Parliament had abolished general war-
rants, but "it remained for Attorney-General Palmer to find a
legal way to throw a spreadnet over a mining community, and
to imprison, starve, and force freemen back into involuntary
servitude."

The gospel Watson was now preaching met with a wide popu-
lar response in the general reaction against Wilsonism. Between
seven and eight thousand people crowded into Thomson to hear
him speak on his birthday, in September, 19 19. There were dele-
gations from six Southern states other than Georgia. Three hun-
dred visitors slept in the printing plant, and many could not find
a place to sleep at all. Watson spoke for three hours, and after-
ward resolutions were passed denouncing Palmerism - and the
League of Nations and demanding the withdrawal of American
troops from Europe and Russia. 29 "Our circulation has taken a
great rise recently," reported Watson shortly after the speech. 30
Mrs. Lytle said that his health was "splendid," that he slept
normally now, "from 7 to 8 hours at night, and doesn't find it
difficult to relax as used to be the case." 31 AH his regained
physical strength he was now bending to the task of rebuilding
his political strength.

Early in 1920 Attorney-General Palmer entered his name as
a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary of Georgia.
He stood as the "Administration candidate," endorsing the
League of Nations, and Wilson's administration "in every
phrase." His candidacy also involved a defense of his crusade
against the "Red menace." "Should we repeal our espionage and

29 Ibid., Sept. 12, 1919; Mrs. Alice L. Lytle to Dr. M. M. Yates, Sept. 18, 1919,
Watson MSS.

80 T. E. W. to R. L. Rodgers, Sept. 10, 1919 (Georgia Department of Archives
and History).

81 Mrs. Alice L. Lytle to Dr. M. M. Yates, Sept. 18, 1919.

403

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

sedition laws and thus voluntarily forgo all protection for the
institutions and the people of this country?" it was asked in his
behalf. "Should we open the country to every red and radical the
world over whose fanatical mind may plot against our liberties,
our democracy, and our prosperity?" 82

Watson endorsed the candidacy of Senator James A. Reed of
Missouri, who ran as a strictly anti-Wilson, anti-League man.
On the eve of the deadline for the entrance of candidates, how-
ever, Reed withdrew from the race in Georgia in favor of Sen-
ator Hoke Smith. Besides being a political enemy of long stand-
ing, whom Watson had fought for twelve years, Senator Smith
fell short of the out-spoken opposition to the Versailles Treaty
that had characterized Reed's platform. He took a rather inde-
terminate, mid-way position, neither favoring the League of Na-
tions wholly nor condemning it wholly. He claimed to have
assisted in the composition of the Lodge reservations ; yet at the
same time he represented himself as a friend to the Wilson Ad-
ministration. 33 With Smith a candidate, the race became another
struggle between the two traditional factions of the party, since
Palmer was supported by the old Howell faction.

At the last minute Watson entered the race. It was a new role
he took, for this time he was not playing one faction against the
other, but running as his own candidate against both factions.
It was the first time he had attempted this, and politicians gen-
erally thought that he had little chance of victory. His presiden-
tial platform included demands for popular election of federal
judges, and for recall. The real issue of the campaign, however,
was that of "Wilsonism." He announced himself the only out-
and-out anti- Wilson candidate, the only thorough-going opponent
of the League, and the only defender of civil liberties. "I am
utterly opposed to any conscription law, any compulsory military
training, any sedition law, any espionage act, or any legislation
giving those in power the authority to banish from this country
any citizen who is not first given a fair, legal trial," he said. 84

He ridiculed Smith for his timidity in failing to take a positive
position: he was "Straddle-bug Smith" who was neither one
thing nor the other. "He wants the League, and yet he does not

82 Constitution, April-May, 1920, especially May 19, 1920.

83 Atlanta Journal, April-May, 1920.

34 Constitution, April 18, 1920; Columbia Sentinel, April 19, 1920.

404

Peter and the Armies of Islam

want it." Watson's chief attack was launched against Palmer,
along the same lines he took before the Attorney-General en-
tered the race in Georgia :

Is this the same Palmer who clamored at Congress, demanding a Sedi-
tion law which would have criminalized this cheerful editorial ? . . .

Palmer would have had me clawed out of bed, at midnight; and I
would have been aboard a steamer, off Brunswick, before my wife would
have known that I was a Red bound for Russia. ...

Is this the Palmer who prevailed upon a Federal Judge to decide that,
if twenty workers become dissatisfied, and quit, at the same time, they are
criminals? . . .

Is this the Palmer who virtually said that 60 cents a ton was enough
for the miners, and that $10 a ton was reasonable for the owners? . . .

Is he the same man who tyrannically used the irresistible force of the
Federal Government to obliterate all newspapers, all preachers, all speakers,
all writers, who stood for American rights and American Independ-
ence. . . .

With these despotic ideas in his head Mr. Palmer, as President, would
out-Wilson Wilson. 35

Though Palmer, a Pennsylvanian, was little known in the
state, and made but three speeches during the campaign, he had
the endorsement of the President and the national party organi-
zation, as well as the backing of the powerful Howell faction
in the state. Smith brought to bear all the force of his own
political organization, which had twice elected him to the Senate.
He was said to have "engaged in the most arduous campaign of
his life, speaking in every section of the state." By contrast, Wat-
son had no tangible political organization, and no campaign
headquarters. He made no speeches. He was opposed by all the
daily papers in the state. Great was the astonishment, then, at
u the amazing vote of Mr. Watson," who received a plurality of
both counties and popular votes : 36

Palmer

48,460 popular votes,

55 counties,

148 convention votes

Watson

51,977 "

56 "

132

Smith

45,568 "

43 "

104

Palmer, however, received a plurality of county-unit votes,
and the state Democratic executive committee ruled that he was,
according to the party rules, entitled to the nomination and all

^Columbia Sentinel, April 19, 1920.

36 Constitution, April 21 and May 12, 1920; Columbia Sentinel, May 3, 1920;
New York Times, April 22, 1930.

405

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

delegates from the state. At the state convention in May, the
Watson forces, through an alliance with the Smith delegates,
repudiated the ruling of the committee, and dominated the en-
tire proceedings. Palmer speakers were shouted down, and a
resolution endorsing Wilson's administration "was hissed to its
overwhelming doom." On the other hand, a series of resolutions
was passed declaring "unalterable opposition to the League of
Nations" and to the Espionage, Sedition, and Conscription acts,
and instructing the delegates to the national convention to sup-
port "no candidate for president of the United States who is not
in thorough accord with the principles announced by this con-
vention." When a Palmer delegate protested against one resolu-
tion as "a veiled attack on the administration," Watson quietly
arose and said: "Let there be no mistake about this resolution.
It is mine. Its avowed purpose is to criticize the administration."
It was promptly passed. The Palmer delegates were not allowed
a single place on the credentials committee. "The shame of it!"
lamented the Constitution, a Palmer supporter. "Watson's mas-
tery was complete. Smith dared not speak."

After the convention adjourned, the Palmer delegates organ-
ized to go to the national convention and contest the seats of the
delegation named by the state convention. Both the Palmer dele-
gation and the Watson-Smith delegations appeared at the San
Francisco Convention. Since the Convention was dominated by
the Wilson administration forces, the Palmer men had little diffi-
culty in convincing the credentials committee that they were the
rightful representatives of Georgia. Watson's offer (sent from
Georgia) to give the contesting delegates one-third of the seats
was refused, and the entire Palmer delegation was seated by a
vote of forty-three to four on the part of the committee. 37

Although several months elapsed between them, the presiden-
tial primary of the spring and the regular state primary of the
summer were virtually continuous campaigns fought upon vir-
tually the same issues. Like the former race the latter was three
cornered — two of the contending forces being led by the same

37 Constitution, June 27-29, 1920.
406

Peter and the Armies of Islam

men as formerly. Smith and Watson were this time rival candi-
dates for the Senate. The Wilson administration and the League
of Nations did not have a champion until Governor Hugh M.
Dorsey also announced his candidacy for the Senate.

Smith's position was obviously weakened by continual trim-
ming. Watson was near the truth when he charged that: "Hoke
has been on every side of this question. He's been for reserva-
tions, and he's been against them. He's been against the whole

d thing [the League] and he's been for it. He admitted,

modestly enough, that he wrote the Lodge Reservations, but he
denied that he was supporting the said reservations." Moreover,
Smith's delegates at the May convention had solidly voted for
Watson's resolutions condemning the Wilson administration,
and when the Senator later proclaimed his harmony with the
national platform of the party, Watson was ready to remind him
of those resolutions. 38

Following the pattern set by his several predecessors in the
same office, Governor Dorsey had broken with Watson after
being elected with assistance from Hickory Hill in 191 6. The
familiar complaint was that Watson demanded too much sub-
servience. In his race for the Senate he was an advocate of Wil-
sonism and the League. Standing in much the same place Palmer
had occupied in the previous race, he received the support of the
Howell faction, the national party, and a large number of state
newspapers. 39

A new factor in this race was the participation of the re-
cently organized American Legion, then in the midst of a mem-
bership drive. The Legion paid Governor Dorsey's entrance fee,
as a candidate in the primary, and supported him as the repre-
sentative of the cause of u ioo per cent Americanism." It also
waged an organized campaign against Tom Watson, who was
denounced as an exponent of all slackerdom, pro-Germanism,
disloyalty, and un-Americanism. Legionnaires appeared in groups
at Watson rallies to heckle speakers and create disturbance. Wat-
son was said to have "affiliations with the Bolshevist representa-
tives to America." 40

The Legion soon discovered to its dismay that it had captured

38 Columbia Sentinel, Sept. 6, 1920; Aug. 9, 1920.

39 Constitution, Aug. i-Sept. 9, 1920, vide especially editorial Aug. 30, 1920.
^Atlanta Journal, Sept. 3, 1920; Atlanta Georgian, Sept. 3, 1920.

407

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

a wild Tartar. Instead of hedging, Watson embraced the oppo-
sition of the Legion and artfully converted it into the main issue
of his campaign. He assured the public that the Legion was "a
gilded brigade of rich young officers who want to tell you whom
to elect to office, and what laws to make in building up, in this
country, the brutal militarism which they practiced on your sons
in the Great War" He was the only candidate to champion the
cause of the private against this clique of officers, he said. It was
just such autocratic officers as these who murdered Rosa Luxem-
burg in Germany when she exposed the brutalities which they
practiced upon privates. Nevertheless he promised to expose the
atrocities of these ex-officers, which had "excited the horror of
the world." There was no lack of returned private soldiers to
supply him with evidence against their erstwhile officers. Great
was the outcry against the Legion, when Watson related the
grievances of ex-privates at his speeches. "Many mothers wept,"
it was said. "Old fathers . . . were moved to the greatest emo-
tion when the speaker described the soldier boy dragged from
the fireside, hurriedly transformed into a cog in a vast war ma-
chine, hurled across the ocean and landed in a foreign country,
to meet the fate of death by gallows by orders of the brutal offi-
cers put over them." 41

This time he did not depend upon an editorial campaign, but
traversed the state three times by automobile to speak to great
throngs who gathered to hear him. Weekly he wrote dramatic
accounts of the campaign for his paper. "We stayed a few min-
utes among the Bolsheviki at these crossroads," he reported, and
were off to meet the next delegation of "Reds." He was not
molested by Legionnaires at Warm Springs — "there being so
many coyotes and Bolsheviki on hand."

Losing his temper when his sleep was disturbed at a hotel in
Buford, Watson appeared in underclothes upon the mezzanine
and hurled a book down at a table of noisy card-players, follow-
ing it with "every possible form of profanity." An officer ap-
peared unceremoniously and without warrant to arrest him, and
Watson put up a violent resistance. "They acted as though the
Reds were upon them," he reported. His underclothes were torn

41 Columbia Sentinel, Aug. 9 and 16, and Sept. 6, 1920.

408

Peter and the Armies of Islam

off; he was roughly handled and bruised. He admitted that he
"became so blind with fury at the outrage" that he could not re-
call u just what happened afterwards." At any rate he spent the
night in jail, and remained locked up until a rescuing party ar-
rived from Atlanta the next morning. He related the occurrence
in his paper and in speeches, pronouncing it u as barbarous a
specimen of Wilsonism as ever occurred in the mine-slave regions
of Pennsylvania." 42

While scoffing at the Red menace that was played up by the
American Legion, and the element which he called "our 'ioo
per cent' idiots," Watson revived the tested and proved Catholic
issue as a competing "menace." In effect, Watson was virtually
mobilizing the Klan to put to rout the Legion. At the same
time, this strange champion of civil liberties was conducting as
plain-spoken a fight for freedom of speech and press as was being
made anywhere. It was clear before the election that he had won
the mass of people to his cause. The paper of a rival candidate
admitted that his speech in Atlanta attracted the largest crowd
ever to gather there. Ten thousand people were turned away,
and the doors closed an hour before the meeting began. A dele-
gation of ex-soldiers sat in front with a banner reading, "We
buck-privates and non-coms are with you, Uncle Tom."

In September Watson was elected by a decisive majority. With
him his candidate for Governor, Thomas W. Hardwick, allied
with Watson again after ten years of enmity between the two,
was also swept into office. The returns showed that Watson had
more than doubled his popular vote since the April ballot : 43

Watson

1 02 counties,

247 county-unit votes,

111,723 popular votes

Dorsey

38 "

103

72,885 "

Smith

14 "

34

6i,729 "

The triumph of Tom Watson was variously interpreted and
appraised. To a writer in the Nation it appeared to be "essen-
tially the victory of the Fifth Estate, of the sinister forces of
intolerance, superstition, prejudice, religious jingoism, and mob-
bism." "Never before," continued this writer, "has so conspic-
uous, so violent, so flaming an apostle of every variety of race

42 Ibid., Aug. 16, 30, 1920; Constitution, Aug. 20, 1920.

43 Atlanta Journal, Sept. 10, 11, 1920.

409

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

hatred been invested with the power and dignity of the Sena-
torial Toga." ** The chairman of the Democratic National Com-
mittee considered his election "something of a blow to the
Democratic party." Watson himself said that his victory was
"won against the attempted dictation of officers of the Ameri-
can Legion, and for the great English principles of free speech,
free press, free assemblage, and complete separation of church
and state." 46 To the old Populists, the faithful old guard, it
meant that Tom Watson had "come back," and that right had
been vindicated after thirty years of defeat. His victory could
have meant still other things, doubtless, for its fund of para-
doxes was illimitable.

44 C. P. Sweeney, "Bigotry in the South," Nation, Vol. CXI (Nov. 24, 1920), pp.
585-586.

45 Atlanta Journal, Sept. 11, 1920; vide also "Seven Reasons Why We Won in
Georgia," Columbia Sentinel, Sept. 13, 1920.

4IO

25

The Tertium Quid

Watson's return to Washington after thirty years was
like the emergence of a hermit, already a little legendary.
Although those thirty years had been filled with intense activity,
Watson himself had been virtually immured at Hickory Hill for
a generation — flashing out with comet-like regularity at inter-
vals, but quickly retiring again. He was regarded as a curious
anachronism from the 'nineties, with "a good deal of the tem-
perament of a French Revolutionist." Amidst the reactionary
element swept into Washington with Harding he was indeed an
oddity.

He and his wife had few connections in the city, and they
found social honors empty after the death of the children. To
prevent his going to a White House reception in street clothes,
Mrs. Lytle bought him a dress suit. There was no "small talk"
in him. A complimentary pleasantry from Mrs. Harding caught
him quite without reply. The old note of disillusionment with
attainment recurs. He made known his disgust with Harding's
inaugural: "replete with oracles, maxims, proverbs, safe gen-
eralities and orthodox truisms." He was never quite reconciled
to finding no Websters in the Senate with whom to match wits.
Moody spells accompanied by morbid drinking and attacks of
asthma interrupted his work, and he was heard to say he was
"ready to die." x

Without observing the probationary period of silence expected
of new members, Watson made himself felt from the start.
Precious little time there was to set aright a world that was con-

1 Interview with Mrs. A. L. Lytle, Aug. 8, 1934; Columbia Sentinel t March 14,
1921.

411

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

spicuously awry. He was heard often and at length on a variety
of subjects. Great deference was paid to his reputation for eru-
dition, and he not infrequently demonstrated his amazing mas-
tery of historical lore. His performances were once compared by
the New York Times with the harangues of John Randolph.
They did, in fact, seem governed by the eccentric Virginian's
maxim, "Let there be justice though the heavens fall." Accord-
ing to mood, he was truculent, gallant, irascible, whimsical, or
downright ferocious ; and always he was guided by impulse. Few
there have been who could more naturally assume the mantle of
the Tertium Quid. He was usually to be seen grinning sar-
donically behind his desk piled high with literature. The Senate
librarian said there was never such a voracious reader. 2

His committee appointments were unimportant, and the bills
and resolutions he introduced extremely few. He argued elo-
quently in behalf of his resolution requesting the President to
free all political prisoners convicted upon charges of alleged
violation of the espionage laws, and to restore their political and
civil rights. He also introduced a resolution specifically request-
ing the pardon of David T. Blodgett, the citizen of Iowa then
serving a ten-year sentence in Atlanta for printing excerpts from
one of Watson's own speeches. "Should he be in the Senate and
I in the penitentiary?" he asked. "He did not say any more in
Iowa than I have said here in the Senate, and I think I am in
somewhat better company than he. That is only an opinion of
mine. (Laughter)" These resolutions, like all his others, failed
to be reported out of the committees to which they were re-
ferred. 3

The first subject on which the new Senator delivered himself
at any length was the proposed treaty with Colombia, intended
to conciliate that country for the Panama affair by the payment
of $25,000,000. Republican senators, rallying to the defense of
Roosevelt, had opposed the treaty as proposed by the Wilson
administration. Now that Roosevelt was dead, and certain new
factors had entered the picture, even Lodge reversed himself to
support the treaty. Much verbiage was perpetrated, but Senator
Lodge let the cat out of the bag by his statement: "We must not

2 New York Times, Sept. 20, 1922; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, quoted in the Columbia
Sentinel, July 17, 1922.

3 Cong, Records, 67 Cong., 1 Sess., Oct. 26, 1921, p. 6780; Aug. 23, 1921, p. 5580.

412

The Tertium Quid

only enlarge our trade, but we must enlarge our source of supply
of oil wherever it is possible to do so, and we can not do it if
we take the position that it is a sin for Americans to make money
and that those who are engaged in foreign investment and for-
eign commerce are to be punished instead of sustained." 4

"Mr. President, are we the agents for the Standard Oil Com-
pany — that and nothing more?" asked Watson. "When did that
infant, protected in all its roots and branches, need our assistance
in securing access to foreign oil fields?" He intimated that all
the fine talk about Pan-American brotherhood turned his stom-
ach. "Let us confess what we are doing — that we are here to
buy property for the Standard Oil Company." If the country
was in such need of oil, why did we voluntarily cut ourselves off
from the richest oil fields in the world — those of Soviet Russia?
"Because we will not trade with the Russian government, be-
cause we do not like their form of government." Did the senators
like the form of government in Colombia any better? "What is
it, by the way? 'Despotism tempered by assassination.' " 5

Watson early constituted himself chief defender of the Soviet
Government, and continued to be an outspoken proponent of
recognition. The stinging rebuffs that Secretaries Hughes and
Hoover administered the Communist government moved him to
indignation, and senators who professed to be horrified at Red
atrocities met with his ridicule. He roundly denounced American
intervention in Siberia, and the blockade, and joined with Borah
in an attack upon Boris Bakmeteff, the Kerensky government's
ambassador, whom the United States continued to recognize.
"Where is the consistency," he asked, "of staying in a state of
war, or at least of nonintercourse, with a great nation which
has always been our friend and at the same time handing out
food to them as objects of charity? We first destroy their com-
merce and then try to replace it by gifts, by doles of food." We
had no more right to dictate Russia's form of government than
we had to dictate Germany's. Non-recognition was more "Wil-
sonism," and the Republicans seemed to him "residuary legatees
of the political will of Woodrow Wilson." He pounced upon one
unfortunate member who ventured a historical analogy with the
French Revolution and lectured him at length on that event,

4 Ibid., April 12, 1921, p. 162.
5 Ibid., April 15, 1921, p. 3x3.

413

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

asserting that the Russians went to no greater extremes than did
the French. Yet President Washington, himself a revolutionist,
Watson reminded them, "not only recognized the French repub-
lic, whose garments dripped with blood, but he put up to Con-
gress in a respectful way an application for a loan." He quoted
a speech of Webster's advocating recognition of the revolution-
ary government of Greece. "Let us not affect too much saintli-
ness," he admonished. "Are our skirts entirely clear of wrong
doing in Hawaii, the Philippines, and in Santo Domingo?" 6 In
a different connection, but in the same trend, he said: "We are
hereditary revolutionists. We are so from instinct, history, and
tradition. We are so by sentiment." Whence, then, all this out-
cry against revolutionists ? 7

On other questions of foreign policy Watson outdid Senator
Lodge in his opposition to anything that remotely smacked of
the League of Nations, which, he said, was as much like the
Holy Alliance of the nineteenth century "as two black cats are
like one another." His most conspicuous fight was waged against
the ratification of the Four-Power Treaty upon insular affairs in
the Pacific. He denounced it as in reality an alliance with the
dominant imperialistic powers, designed to promote imperial-
ism, and to draw the United States into the web of foreign rival-
ries, if not into the League itself. He chided Lodge for "clothing
his thoughts in the classic verbiage of Woodrow Wilson." "Break
the heart of the world I Will it break the heart of Germany if
we do not go into this alliance with France?" Or the heart of
Russia by not entering an alliance with Japan? He thought Presi-
dent Harding "childlike and bland" in his advocacy of the treaty
as a harbinger of "a millennium of brotherly love." 8

A considerable portion of the Senator's time was devoted to
relieving his pent-up feelings. This exercise was doubtless of
great cathartic value to his emotional life, and a source of diver-
sion to spectators, but it resulted in little substantial accomplish-
ment and much waste of time. He spoke frequently and elo-
quently on behalf of the soldier's bonus, directing his remarks
against the American Legion. He finally refused, however, to

e Ibid., Sept. 29, 1921, p. 5580; ibid., 67 Cong., 2 Sess., May 15, 1922, p. 6949;
ibid., May 23, 1922, pp. 7460-7462; vide also, Columbia Sentinel, June 26, 1922.

7 Cong. Record, 67 Cong., 1 Sess., April 15, 1921, p. 313.

8 Ibid., 67 Cong., 2 Sess., Feb. 23, 1922, pp. 2940-2942; vide also ibid., March 8-
15, 1922, pp. 3561, 3852, 3786, 4180-4186.

414

The Tertium Quid

vote for the bill unless it could be "stripped of any feature which
imposes additional taxation [I]" He championed the cause of
Truman Newberry, in the Michigan contested election case, ap-
parently because he disliked Ford's "Wilsonism." But after
speaking frequently along that line, he did not take sides when
the question came to a vote. The police powers for federal en-
forcement of prohibition, demanded by the Anti-Saloon League,
drew from him fulminations against both prohibition and the un-
constitutional infringement of personal liberties and rights, as
well as against federal policing of states. Other subjects upon
which he took occasion to relieve his feelings included the United
States Steel Corporation, the American Legion, Pennsylvania
coal mine operators, and all tariff duties of any description or
amount. 9

Any question involving an encroachment of militarism found
Watson bristling with hostility — just as it always had. He bat-
tled against proposals of increase in naval and military appro-
priation, and against an attempt to increase the standing army.
He admitted that "possibly two or three of our admirals ought
to have ships in which to sail around," but that was enough. A
standing army of 25,000 men he thought sufficient. He attacked
the proponents of an increased army as savagely as he had in
1892. Which among the nations did they fear? he asked, nam-
ing them, and rejecting each as an absurd suggestion. "Whom,
then, do you fear ?" he asked :

You are afraid of your own proletariat. That is what you are afraid of. You
are afraid of the dissatisfied workman, thrown out of employment by these
soulless, these heartless, these insatiable trusts and combinations of capital ;
you are afraid of the millions of men and women and children who do not
have enough to eat in this land of bounteous harvests ; not enough to wear
in the very cotton fields where their hands bring forth the staple that clothes
the world.

I wonder if they think that a hundred million people will meekly starve
while such men as Mellon, and Hoover, and Elbert Gary, and J. P. Mor-
gan lord it over the earth? The American people will not submit. There-
fore, these vast combinations of capital want a standing army in order to
beat down the dissatisfied, who have a right to be discontented. 10

9 Ibid., July 8, 1921, p. 3417, on the American Legion; ibid., 67 Cong., 2 Sess.,
June 28, 1922, pp. 9545-9546, on the tariff generally; ibid, Sept. 15, 1922, p. 12668,
on coal mine operators.

10 Ibid., May 25, 1922, p. 7623.

415

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

In the course of his attack on the "officer castes," which he said
was "building up in this country ... a militarism just like that
of the Kaiser and his staff," Watson alluded to the charges of
cruel treatment of privates during the War, which he had made
in the previous campaign in Georgia. Warming to his subject, he
said that "private soldiers were frequently shot by their officers
because of some complaint against officers' insolence," and he
had a picture of gallows on which men were hanged "day after
day, without court martial or any other form of trial." Senator
Borah interrupted to say that he had received such a picture, but
had been unable to substantiate the charges. Senator Wadsworth
of New York demanded that Watson appear before the Com-
mittee on Military Affairs to prove his charges. Flaring up ex-
citedly at the challenge, Watson answered :

I am not going to be bottled up in any committee room and have the
evidence entombed in some report that nobody will read. When I get
through . . . what I say to the Senator from New York will be read by
millions of people of this country; the newspapers will have to carry it,
because it will be good reading matter. I assure you it will. It will be good
copy. You need not doubt that. 11

The whole incident of the brutality charges recalls the investi-
gation of his charges of drunkenness on the floor of the House
in 1892. The same belligerence and exaggeration characterized
his conduct in both episodes. His language and bearing as he
made the charges were said to have "involved the proprieties of
the Senate." "The dignity of the Senate was aspersed at the
same time that the honor of the army was called into question,"
said the New York Times. Since he refused to appear before the
Committee on Military Affairs, a special committee, headed by
Senator Brandegee, was appointed to investigate his charges.
Watson was correct in his prediction that the accusations would
create a sensation in the press. Letters poured in to him from
ex-soldiers promising to substantiate his charges, and he read
them into the Record? 2 Hearings before the special committee,
dragging out over three months, were a disappointment to Wat-
son. Witnesses modified or retracted statements made by letter
when they appeared to testify, and little convincing evidence was
produced. Watson's temper grew shorter and more violent. With-

u Ibid., 67 Cong., 1 Sess., Oct. 31-Nov. 5, 1921, pp. 7021, 7069, 7172.

12 Cong. Record, 67 Cong., 1 Sess., Nov. 1, 1921, p. 7070; Nov. 7, pp. 7464-7471.

416

The Tertium Quid

out his knowledge, Mrs. Lytle went to Vice-President Coolidge
and asked that the investigation be stopped. 13 In spite of the de-
mand in the press that the conclusions of the committee be
announced, no report was made until after Watson's death, and
more than a year after the hearings. It was found that the
charges were not sustained by the testimony. 14

The "Watson Temperament" became a problem of increasing
difficulty as the months passed. Though sixty-six years of age,
and physically perhaps the smallest man in the Senate, he was
easily conceded to be the most belligerent member of that body.
Within a period of six months he was known to have challenged
three men to physical combat or threatened them with assault
and battery. One of these was Senator Phipps of Colorado, eight
years his junior, who incurred his displeasure by going over his
head to make inquiries concerning Georgia post office appoint-
ments to which Watson had objected. Another was a young and
vigorous major of the United States Army, who crossed the
Senator's path in the investigation of the charges of brutality on
the part of army officers. In an editorial headed "More Watson
Temperament," the New York Times suggested that if the Sen-
ator from Georgia continued to "run amuck among the proprie-
ties and threaten his colleagues with personal violence, something
will have to be done about it." 15 A third such case arose out of
his attack upon Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

Watson plainly disliked the Cabinet appointments of Presi-
dent Harding, and resented the President's personal appearance
before the Senate to request their confirmation. It was not in
him, however, to undertake such patient and painstaking investi-
gation as Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana used to expose
the oil scandals in the Harding Cabinet. Instead, he launched a
series of attacks against members of the Cabinet, based upon
whatever evidence came to hand. There was "Morgan's part-
ner," Andrew Mellon, "richer perhaps than Rockefeller, hold-
ing his office in violation of one of the first laws ever passed by
the first Congress of this Republic." He attacked Attorney-
General Daugherty for defending the millionaire Morse, and
men guilty of frauds against the government during the War.

13 Interview with Mrs. A. L. Lytle, Aug. 8, 1934.

14 New York Times, Sept. 26, 1922.

15 Editorial, ibid., June 2, 1922.

417

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Secretary Fall, he said, was "oiled over with Standard Oil in
Mexico and in Colorado, reeking and dripping with Standard Oil
scandals . . ." 16

Secretary Hoover came in for the major share of his atten-
tion. "Who is Hoover, anyway ?" asked Watson several times,
calling him an "Englishman." "What was the secret influence
which suddenly put him at the head of things in this country.
Who sent him here ? Who appointed him ? What credentials did
he bear?" he asked. The only specific charge he brought against
the Secretary was that he had never published any "accounts or
vouchers" regarding the hundreds of millions of dollars spent
under his direction by the American Relief Administration. 17
This charge called forth a letter of denial from Hoover citing
certain reports published by the Relief Administration. The letter
was read on the floor by Senator Lenroot of Wisconsin, who had
previously crossed swords with Watson on the charges against
army officers. Watson was on his feet immediately, breathing
defiance :

This is about the third time that the insolent junior Senator from Wis-
consin . . . has risen and personally attacked the junior Senator from
Georgia.

On one occasion that Senator in his arrogance demanded that the junior
Senator from Georgia be compelled by the Senate to answer elsewhere
than on this floor to what he had said here in this chamber. I defied him
then. I defy him now. I defy him on the floor of the Senate and I defy him
outside. I am not in the least afraid of him here or elsewhere, and the
sooner the arrogant Senator learns that the better it will be for him and for

Presiding officer Coolidge called him to order for "using words
derogatory to another Senator."

On receiving from Senator Lenroot copies of the reports of
the American Relief Administration Watson promised that if he
were wrong he would admit it. Several days later, however, he
renewed the attack. Referring to statements from the White
House defending Hoover, he asked if the Secretary was above
criticism. Hoover's published reports did not satisfy him, and he
had several pages of one report printed in the Record to support

16 Cong. Record, 67 Cong., 2 Sess., May 25, 1922; p. 7622; May 31, p. 7913-7914.

17 Ibid., May 31, 1922, p. 7913.

18 New York Times, June 1 and 2, 1922.

418

The Tertium Quid

his contention that there was indication of wanton squandering
of huge sums of money. On top of this he charged that Hoover
was an "active member ,, in the intrigue that equipped Kolchak
and Youdenitch with arms and supplies to overthrow the Soviet
government in Russia, and that he had converted part of the
children's relief fund to this purpose. "How will the great
American public feel when they realize that Herbert Hoover
was trying to restore in Russia a system in which a few grand
dukes and vast landed estate owners were ruling the peasants
and grinding the faces of the poor?" he exclaimed. 19 What evi-
dence he possessed for these sensational charges does not appear.
No official notice was taken of them by the Administration.

The triumph of 1920 that was hailed by his followers as his
long-belated vindication had somehow failed to measure up to
that description. Regardless of what he said to the contrary, one
feels that Watson himself did not really share the conviction of
his followers about his "vindication." In the first flush of victory,
perhaps, yes, but after that the old pattern took up where it had
left off. Replete with the paradoxes of his nature, this brief in-
terlude seemed but a recapitulation — an ironic epilogue, added
for no better purpose, apparently, than to assure an ending on
the true theme. There were times in Washington, to be sure,
when he seemed more at harmony with himself than usual. At
picnics with his two granddaughters in Rock Creek Park, or
after long walks there by himself, or again while rummaging in
the book shops in the city. "On such occasions he was actually a
dear," recalled one of the granddaughters. More characteristic
of those months, however, were spells of black melancholy and
morbid drinking. What victory, after all, would someone say,
could "vindicate" the implacable insolence of Fortune?

The summer of 1922 was a particularly hard one on Watson's
health. Suffering from the heat and tortured by chronic attacks
of asthma, he and his household left the hotel life of the city for
a residence in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was taken ill and
remained in such a condition as to require the constant attend-

19 Cong. Record, 67 Cong., 2 Sess., June 6, 1922, p. 8251; New York Times, June
7, 1922.

419

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

ance of a nurse for eight weeks. While convalescing he insisted,
much against his doctor's advice, on going daily to his office and
attending all sessions. On the morning of September 17 he suf-
fered a painful attack of asthma accompanied by severe struggles
for breath. After examining him, his doctor insisted that he
remain in bed for a week. September 22, however, was the last
day of the session, and he was determined to be on hand at the
adjournment. 20 He requested that several letters he had re-
ceived from the striking miners around Brownsville, Pennsyl-
vania, where hundreds of families of workers had been evicted
from their homes, be printed in the Record. That request and
his remarks on the evicted miners closed the Second Session of
the Sixty-seventh Congress. 21

Plans had been made to leave Chevy Chase for Hickory Hill
on the twenty-sixth. Mrs. Watson had returned home six weeks
before. On the night of the twenty-fifth he suffered a hard at-
tack of bronchitis and asthma. "It's my finish," he said at the
beginning of the attack. "I am not afraid of death." He repeated
the last sentence once. After a cerebral hemorrhage he died the
next morning at two-forty. 22

"A strange and vivid public character, that already seems al-
most legendary or fabulous," remarked the New York Times.
Writers of obituaries, with the last years of his career fresh in
mind, uniformly expressed puzzlement upon reviewing his ear-
lier career, and were frankly baffled when they attempted an
estimate of his life. It is likely that Tom Watson would have
cherished above many tributes that of a man he had admired
since the 'nineties. Eugene Debs, recently released from the
penitentiary, wrote in a letter to Mrs. Watson: "He was a great
man, a heroic soul who fought the power of evil his whole life
long in the interest of the common people, and they loved and
honored him." 23

Between seven and ten thousand people were said to have at-
tended the funeral services at Hickory Hill. They were mainly
the sort of people who had thronged the little town to hear him

20 Mrs. Lytte (who was with him at his death) in the Columbia Sentinel, Oct. 2,
1922.

21 Cong, Record, 67 Cong., 2 Sess., Sept. 22, 1922, p. 13141.

22 Interview with Dr. Grant S. Barnhart, Watson's physician in his last illness.

23 Eugene V. Debs to Mrs. Thomas E. Watson, Sept. 26, 1922.

420

The Tertium Quid

speak on his birthday, or rallied at his call during one of his
crusades. Most conspicuous among the floral tributes was a cross
of roses eight feet high, sent by the Ku Klux Klan. A white-
haired farmer on a street corner swore he would not part with
the copy of the Columbia Sentinel he held in his hand for fifty
dollars. "It's Tom Watson's last word," he said.

In backwoods Georgia it is still possible, on occasion, to hear
a mournful country ballad called "The Thomas E. Watson
Song." It tells in endless numbers of "a man of mighty power,"
and of "how he fought and struggled," and, in the end, failed.

421

Bibliography

Newspapers and Journals

Of Georgia papers, undoubtedly the most useful throughout the whole period,
1 880-1922, were the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal. The former led
in the movement for industrialization, and both were usually mouthpieces for rival
factions of the Democratic party. The Augusta Chronicle, generally conservative,
furnishes a more local view of Watson's district, as does the Augusta Herald. The
Macon Telegraph was a consistent spokesman for the industrialist and the capital-
ist investor. The Atlanta News, later the Atlanta Georgian, edited by John Temple
Graves over a long period, was among the most friendly toward Watson. Oc-
casional use was made of the Savannah Press and the Columbus Daily Times. Of
the Populist papers and journals, the more valuable were the National Economist,
published at Washington (incomplete files at the Library of Congress) ; the Pro-
gressive Farmer, published at Raleigh, and edited for a time by Col. L. L. Polk.
Others used were the Southern Alliance Farmer, The Wool Hat, and The Revo-
lution, though only scattered copies were found. Watson's newspapers are listed
below. Especially useful during the periods indexed were the New York Times and
the New York Tribune. Also useful for such events as conventions covered by
them were the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Illinois State Register. The New
York World and the Hearst papers, especially the New York American, were ex-
ceptionally hospitable to Watson's articles and interested in his movements.

Writings and Publications of Thomas E. Watson

(No attempt has been made to collect all the numerous pamphlets and booklets,
on such subjects as anti-Catholicism, that Watson reprinted from his Magazine,
since that material is more readily available now in the files of the periodical.)

Bethany: A Story of the Old South. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904. A novel

reviewed in the text.
Foreign Missions Exposed. Atlanta: Press of the Jeffersonians, 1910. 2d ed. A

polemic.
History of Southern Oratory, T. E. W. editor. South in the Building of the Nation,

volume IX. Richmond, Va., 1909. Watson also contributed a sketch of oratory

in the colonial period, and included one of his orations in the collection.
"Jerome Montomar, or In the Days of Napoleon," The Sunny South (Atlanta),

Nov. 18, 1876. A youthful venture in short story writing.

422

Bibliography

The Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson. Nashville, Tenn., 1908. A campaign
autobiography and collection.

The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson, Thomson, Ga.: Press of the Jeffersonian
Publishing Co., 1912. Reviewed in the text.

The Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903.
Reviewed in the text.

Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, Character, Struggles, and Achievements, New
York, London: Macmillan Co., 1902. Reviewed in the text.

"The Negro Question in the South," Arena, Vol. VI (Oct., 1892), pp. 540-550. A
discussion of the problem of racial cooperation among farmers.

"The People's Party Appeal," Independent, Vol. LVIII (Oct. 13, 1904), p. 829.

People's Party Campaign Book, i8q2. Not a Revolt; It is a Revolution, Washing-
ton: National Watchman Publishing Co., 1892. Campaign tract.

Political and Economic Handbook, Atlanta: Telegram Publishing Co., 1908. Party
histories and personal beliefs.

Prose Miscellanies. Thomson, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publishing Co., 1917. A collection
of literary and personal essays and sketches.

The Railroad Question, Atlanta: Our Publishing Co., 1894. A pamphlet advocating
government ownership of railroads.

Sketches: Biographical, Historical, Literary, Thomson, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publish-
ing Co., 1912. A collection of essays.

Sketches from Roman History. Atlanta: the Author, 1908. Rome from the agrarian
point of view.

Speech Against the Conscription Act , , , at Thomson, Ga., June 27, 1917. Thom-
son, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publishing Co., 1917.

The Story of France; from the Earliest Times to the Consulate of Napoleon Bona-
parte, New York: Macmillan Co., 1899. 2 vols. Reviewed in the text.

A Tariff Primer. Thomson, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publishing Co., 1911.

Thomas Jefferson. (The Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans.) New York:
Small, Maynard & Co., 1900.

Waterloo. New York and Washington: The Neale Publishing Co., 1908. 2d ed.,
1 9 10.

Mr. Watson's Editorials on the War Issues. Thomson, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publish-
ing Co., 1917.

What Are Your Constitutional Rights f Thomson, Ga.: Jeffersonian Publishing Co.,
1917.

"Why I Am Still A Populist," Review of Reviews, Vol. XXXVIII (Sept., 1908),
pp. 303-305.

"Why the People's Party Should Elect the Next President," Arena, Vol. VI (July,
1892), pp. 201-204.

Newspapers and Periodicals Edited by Watson

The People's Party Paper, founded on October 1, 1891, in Atlanta, was published
until 1898. The Daily Press, also published in Atlanta, was founded in July, 1894,
but was discontinued in less than a year. Tom Watson's Magazine was founded
in New York in March, 1905; its name was changed to Watson's Magazine with
the issue of March, 1906, and the magazine was discontinued shortly after Watson
resigned the editorship in October, 1906. He then founded Watson's Jeffersonian
Magazine in Atlanta in January, 1907, which became Watson's Magazine in
March, 1912. The Weekly Jeffersonian was founded in October, 1906. Both publi-
cations were discontinued when the mails were closed to them in August, 1917.

423

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

The Guard was also banned when founded during the War. The Columbia Senti-
nel, his last paper, continued from shortly after the War until after Watson's death.

Autobiographies, Memoirs, Reminiscences, and
Published Correspondence

Ball, William W., The State That Forgot; South Carolina's Surrender to De-
mocracy. Indianapolis, 1932. A skeptical review of Tillmanism by a salty Tory.

Bryan, William Jennings, The First Battle. Chicago, 1897. The Populist alliance
of 1896 is merely mentioned.

Felton, Rebecca Latimer, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth.
Atlanta, 1919.

, Memoirs of Georgia Politics. Atlanta, 1911. A rich source in the Independ-
ent movement, but partisan and rambling.

Garland, Hamlin, A Son of the Middle Border. New York, 1917. Recollections of
Western life during Populist days.

Gordon, General John B., Reminiscences of the Civil War. New York, 1903. An
insight into the General's romantic mind.

Harris, Nathaniel Edwin, Autobiography ; the Story of an Old Man's Life, with
Reminiscences of Seventy-foe Years, Macon, 1925. One of the most remarkable
books ever written: an autobiography that tells the truth — transparently. It is
extremely valuable, for the author knew Watson from his youth until his death.

Knight, Lucian Lamar, Reminiscences of Famous Georgians, Atlanta, 1907. 2 vols.

La Follette, Robert M., Autobiography. Madison, Wisconsin, 1913.

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt
and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-IQ18 . . . New York, 1925. It contains several
references to Watson.

Manning, Joseph C, The Fadeout of Populism. New York, 1928. The reminiscences
of an Alabama Populist.

Miller, Stephen F., Bench and Bar of Georgia. Philadelphia, 1858. 2 vols.

Phillips, Ulrich B., "Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens,
Howell Cobb," Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1911.
Washington, 1913.

Roosevelt, Theodore, Autobiography. New York, 1913. It contains a tribute to
Watson.

Stahl, John M., Growing with the West; the Story of a Busy, Quiet Life. Toronto,
1930. The autobiography of an agitator for rural free delivery.

Biographies and Biographical Articles

Allen, Emory A., Life and Public Services of James Baird Weaver. Cincinnati,
1892. A campaign tract.

Baker, Ray S., Woodrow Wilson; Life and Letters. New York, 1927-1935. 5 vols.
The best biography.

Barnes, James A., John G. Carlisle, Financial Statesman. New York, 1931. Schol-
arly work.

Brewton, William W., The Life of Thomas E. Watson. Atlanta, 1926. A vindi-
cation by a follower.

Browne, Waldo Ralph, Altgeld of Illinois: A Record of His Life and Work. New
York, 1924. A sympathetic portrait.

Croly, Herbert D., Marcus Alonzo Hanna: His Life and Work. New York, 1912.
Thorough and competent.

Fielder, Herbert, Life and Times of Joseph E. Brown. Springfield, Mass., 1883.
A defense, valuable chiefly for speeches quoted.

424

Bibliography

Harris, Joel Chandler, Henry W. Grady: His Life, Writings and Speeches. New
York, 1890. A labor of love, sketchy and faulty.

Harris, Julia Collier, Joel Chandler Harris. Boston, 19 18. The best biography.

, Joel Chandler Harris, Editor and Essayist; Miscellaneous Literary Politi-
cal and Social Writings. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1931.

Haynes, Fred E., James Baird Weaver. Iowa City, Iowa, 191 9. A political bi-
ography.

Hendrick, B. J., Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page. New York, 1924 and 1927.
2 vols.

, The Training of an American. New York, 1928. The early years of Walter

Hines Page's life.

Hicks, John D., "The Political Career of Ignatius Donnelly," Mississippi Valley
Historical Review, Vol. VIII (June-Sept, 1928), pp. 80-132. The work of an
authority.

Hill, Benjamin H., Jr., Senator Benjamin H. Hill: His Life, Writings and
Speeches. Atlanta, 1893. Valuable for speeches quoted.

Johnston, Richard M. and W. H. Brown, Life of Alexander H. Stephens. Phila-
delphia, 1878. Incomplete and unsatisfactory.

Knight, Lucian Lamar, A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians. Chicago,
1917. 6 vols. Chiefly biographical, though the first two volumes contain the
most complete history of the state during the Watson period yet written.

Lloyd, Caro, Henry Demarest Lloyd. New York, 19 12. 2 vols. It contains valuable
letters of Lloyd's during Populist battles.

McElroy, Robert McNutt, Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman; an
Authorized Biography. New York, 1923.

Nevins, Allan, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage. New York, 1932. The best
biography.

Pearce, Haywood J., Benjamin H. Hill, Secession and Reconstruction. Chicago,
1928. A valuable study of the politics of the period.

Pendleton, Louis, Alexander H. Stephens. Philadelphia, 1907.

Phillips, Ulrich B., Life of Robert Toombs. New York, 1913. Scholarly political

Pringle, Henry F., Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. New York, 193 1. The best

book on the subject.
Robinson, William A., Thomas B. Reed: Parliamentarian. New York, 1930.
Shaw, Albert, "William V. Allen: Populist," Review of Reviews, Vol. X (July,

1894), pp. 30-42. A sympathetic study.
Snyder, Carl, "Marion Butler," Review of Reviews, Vol. XIV (Oct., 1896), pp.

429-433. Chiefly on Butler's part in the St. Louis Convention.
Stovall, Pleasant A., Life of Robert Toombs. New York, 1892.
Wade, John Donald, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, A Study of the Development

of Culture in the South. New York, 1924. An excellent work.
, "Jefferson: New Style," American Mercury, Vol. XVIII (Nov., 1929), pp.

293-301. An appraisal of Watson by a latter-day agrarian.
Werner, M. R., Bryan. New York, 1929.
Williams, Wayne C, William Jennings Bryan. New York, 1936. This is the most

complete study yet made, but it lacks detachment.

Controversial and Political Writings of Contemporaries

Alexander, Henry A., Some Facts About the Murder Notes in the Frank Case.

Undated pamphlet, c. 191 5.
Allen, William V., "The Populist Program," Independent, Vol. LII (Feb. 22,

1900), pp. 475-576-

425

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

, "A Western Statesman's Reasons for Supporting Hon. Thomas E. Wat-
son," Arena, Vol. XXXII (Oct., 1904), p. 395.
Atkinson, Edward, The Future Situs of the Principal Iron Production of the

World. Baltimore, 1890. The author was a Northern proponent of Southern

industrialization.
Avery, Isaac W., History of Georgia, 18 50-1881. New York, 1881. Biased in favor

of Brown, but valuable.
Benson, Beny, Five Arguments in the Frank Case. Augusta, c. 191 5.
Bland, T. A., People's Party Shot and Shell. Chicago, 1893. A campaign pamphlet.
Butler, Marion, "The People's Party," Forum, Vol. XXVIII (Feb., 1900), pp.

658-662. The author was chairman of the party's national committee at the

time.
Connolly, Christopher P., The Truth About the Frank Case. New York, 1915. A

convincing indictment of the processes of justice in the case.
Cowlan, George B., The Undeveloped South. Louisville, Ky., 1887. A pamphlet in

behalf of industrial exploitation.
De Leon, Daniel, Ultramontanism, The Roman Catholic Political Machine in Ac-
tion. New York, 1928. A Marxian view of the Church in politics.
, Watson on the Gridiron, Bourgeois Theories Dissected and Hung Up to

Dry. New York, 1926. A critical bombardment of Watson's articles on Social-
ism collected from the Weekly People.
Diggs, Mrs. Annie L., "The Farmers' Alliance and Some of its Leaders," Arena,

Vol. V (April, 1892), pp. 590-604.
, "The Women in the Alliance Movement," Arena, Vol. VI (July, 1892), pp.

161-179.
Dorsey, Hugh M., The Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey at the Trial of Leo M.

Frank. Macon, Ga., 1914.
Edmonds, Richard H., The South' s Redemption. Baltimore, 1890. An optimistic view

of industrialization of the South.
Garland, Hamlin, "The Alliance Wedge in Congress," Arena, Vol. V (March,

1892), pp. 447-457. Sympathetic sketches.
Grady, Henry Woodfin, The New South, and Other Addresses. New York, 1904.
Hand Book and History of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union.

Washington, D.C., 1893. A popular work for the World's Fair.
Hillyard, M. B., The New South. Baltimore, 1887. Published by the Manufactur-
ers' Record Company, this book presents the industrialist's cause along with

much statistical information.
Howard, William H., The American Plutocracy. New York, 1895. A polemic by

an Alabama Populist.
Hutchings, James Key, The Sage of Hickory Hill, A Story of Thomas E. Watson.

No date. In blank verse.
Jones, Col. Charles C, and General John B. Gordon, The Old South: Addresses

before the Confederate Survivors Association . . . Augusta, 1887.
Kelley, William D., The Old South and the New. New York, 1888. The South in

terms of potential profits.
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, Wealth Against Commonwealth. New York, 1894. A

powerful indictment of corporate wealth.
McClure, A. K., The South; Industrial, Financial, Political. Philadelphia, 1886.
McKissick, E. P., A Story of Spartan Push. The Greatest Manufacturing Center in

the South. Charleston, c. 1890.
Morgan, W. Scott, History of the Wheel and Alliance, and the Impending Revo-

lution. Fort Scott, Kan., 1891. The official history of the Southern Alliance.

426

Bibliography

Newton, J. C. C, The New South and the Methodist Episcopal Church South.
Baltimore, 1887. The Church's attempt to readjust itself.

Norwood, Thomas M., Plutocracy, or American White Slavery, a Politico-Social
Novel. New York, 1888. A diatribe by a leader of the Independents in Georgia.

Peffer, William A., "The Mission of the Populist Party," North American Re-
view, Vol. CLVII (Dec, 1893), pp. 665-678.

, "The Passing of the People's Party," North American Review, Vol. CLXVI

(Jan., 1898), pp. 12-23. He admits that the party is done for.

People's Party Campaign Hand Book, 1898. Issued by the Kansas State Central
Committee. Hiawatha, Kan., 1898. 3d ed.

Polk, Leonidas L., "The Farmer's Discontent," North American Review, Vol.
CLIII (July, 1891), pp. 5-12.

Post, Charles C, Congressman Swanson. Chicago, 1891. This is a political propa-
ganda novel with a Populist hero, written by Watson's associate on the Peo-
ple's Party Paper.

, Driven from Sea to Sea, or Just a C ampin'. Chicago, 1884. This novel pic-
tures the Western farmer's struggle against the railroads. It was widely read.

, Metaphysical Essays. Boston, 1895. Populist theology.

, "The Sub-Treasury Plan," Arena, Vol. V (Feb., 1892), pp. 342-353. A

defense.

Public Man of Georgia, A, "Why Frank Was Lynched," Forum, Vol. LVI (Nov.,
1916), pp. 677-693. The author apologizes for the State's disgrace, lauds Gov-
ernor Slaton, and severely condemns Watson.

Review of Reviews, see for caricatures of Watson, Vol. XIV (Sept.-Nov., 1896),
pp. 282, 287, 295, 297, 411, 415, 417, 418.

South Carolina in 1884 . . . A Brilliant Showing. Charleston, 1884. Advertising
industrial progress and opportunity.

Streeter, John J., Populist National Organization United States of America:
Populist Rules and Articles of Agreement. Vineland, N.J., 1907. Proposing a
reorganization of the party.

"Tattler," "Thomas E. Watson; Knight Errant," Nation, Vol. CIII (Nov. 9,
1916), pp. 440-441. A satirical review of his career.

Thompson, W. E., A Short Review of the Frank Case. Atlanta, 19 14.

Tillett, W. F., "The White Man of the New South," Century Magazine, Vol.
XXXIII (March, 1887), pp. 769-776. The South may also have millionaires.

Tourgee, A. W., "Shall White Minorities Rule?" Forum, Vol. VII (April, 1889),
pp. 143-155-

Tracy, Frank B., "Menacing Socialism in the Western States," Forum, Vol. XV
(May, 1893), pp. 332-342. An early Red scare.

, "Rise and Doom of the Populist Party," Forum, Vol. XVI (Oct., 1893), PP-

240-250.

Train, Arthur, "Did Leo Frank Get Justice," Everybody's Magazine, March,
1915.

Trammell, William Dugas, Qa Ira, A Novel. New York, 1874. An autobiographi-
cal novel of a quixotic Georgian who sheds blood on the barricades for the
Paris Commune, returns home to organize the Ku Klux Klan, then joins the
crusade for industrialization.

Washburn, George F., "A Boston Business-Man's View of Roosevelt, Parker and
Watson, and the Ideals they Represent," Arena, Vol. XXXII (Oct., 1904), pp.
396-397. In support of Watson.

Watterson, Henry, "The Solid South," North American Review, Vol. CXXVIII
(Jan., 1879), p. 47.

427

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Weaver, James Baird, A Call to Action, An Interpretation of the Great Uprising,
its Sources and Cause. Des Moines, Iowa, 1892. A campaign tract.

Wise, Stephen S., "The Case of Leo Frank, A Last Appeal," Free Synagogue Pul-
pit, Vol. Ill (May, 1915), No. 5.

Special Studies, Monographs, and Articles

Arnett, Alex Mathews, The Populist Movement in Georgia. New York, 1922. An

excellent pioneer study.
Banks, Enoch M., The Economics of Land Tenure in Georgia. New York, 1905.
Becker, Carl, "Kansas," in Essays in American History Dedicated to Frederick

Jackson Turner. New York, 19 10.
Brooks, Robert P., The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, i86$-iqiz. Madison,

Wisconsin, 19 14. A competent study of changing land tenure.
Buck, Solon J., The Granger Movement: A Study of Agricultural Organization

and its Political, Economic, and Social Manifestations, 1870-1880. Cambridge,

Mass., 1913.
Caffey, F. G., "Suffrage Limitations at the South," Political Science Quarterly,

Vol. XX (March, 1905), pp. 53-67.
Clark, John B., Populism in Alabama. Auburn, Ala., 1927.
Clarke, George Herbert, "Georgia and the Chaingang," Outlook, Vol. LXXXII

(Jan. 13, 1906), p. 73.
"Coming of Industry to the South," Annals of the American Academy, Vol. CLIII

(Jan., 1931).
Dial, Review of Thomas E. Watson's Story of France, Vol. XXVIII (Feb., 1916),

pp. 1 1 6-1 17.
Grady, Henry W., "Cotton and Its Kingdom," Harper's New Monthly Magazine,

Vol. LXIII (Oct., 1881), pp. 719-734.
Farmer, Hallie, "The Economic Background of Frontier Populism," Mississippi

Historical Review, Vol. X (March, 1924), pp. 406-427.
"First Presidential Candidate in the Field," Current Literature, Vol. XIVL (May,

1908), pp. 492-494.
Flower, B. C., Review of Thomas E. Watson's Life and Times of Thomas Jef-
ferson, Arena, Vol. XXXI (March, 1904), pp. 325-329.
Hammond, Matthew B., The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic

History. Ithaca, New York, 1897. The standard work.
Hayes, Arthur Garfield, Trial by Prejudice. New York, 1933. It contains a chap-
ter on the Frank case.
Haynes, Fred E., Third Party Movements Since the Civil War, with Special

Reference to Iowa. Iowa City, 1916.
Hicks, John D., "The Birth of the Populist Party," Minnesota History, Vol. IX

(Sept., 1928), pp. 219-247.
, The Populist Revolt. Minneapolis, Minn., 193 1. The most comprehensive

work on the field.
-, "The Sub-Treasury: A Forgotten Plan for the Relief of Agriculture,"

Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XV (Dec, 1928), pp. 355-373.
Holmes, George K., "The Peons of the South," Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science, Vol. IV (Sept., 1893), pp. 265-274.
Independent, "The Election in Georgia," Vol. LXI (Aug. 30, 1906), p. 526.

, "Georgia's Example to the Nation," Vol. LXIV (Jan. 16, 1908), p. 162.

, Review of Thomas E. Watson's Story of France, Vol. LII (Oct. 18, 1900),

pp. 2517-2518.

428

Bibliography

Kendrick, Benjamin B., "Agrarian Discontent in the South: 1880-1900," Annual

Report of the American Historical Association, 1920, pp. 267-272. Washington,

1925. A provocative and stimulating essay.
Lewinson, Paul, Race, Class, and Party: A History of Negro Suffrage and White

Politics in the South, London, New York, 1932.
Literary Digest, "Senator Watson's Serious Charges," Vol. LXXXI (Nov. 26, 1921),

p. 16. Cruelty of officers during the War.
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, "The Populists at St. Louis," Review of Reviews, Vol.

XIV (Sept., 1896), pp. 293-303. Lloyd participated in the convention.
McKelway, A. J., "State Prohibition in Georgia and the South," Outlook, Vol.

LXXXVI (Aug. 31, 1907), p. 947.
, "The Convict Lease System in Georgia," Outlook, Vol. XC (Sept. 12, 1908),

pp. 67-72.
-, "Suffrage in Georgia," Outlook, Vol. LXXXVII (Sept. 14, 1907), pp. 63-66.

McVey, Frank L., The Populist Movement. New York, 1896. Strongly prejudiced.

Malin, James C, "Notes on the Literature of Populism," Kansas Historical Quar-
terly, Vol. I (Feb., 1932), pp. 160-164.

Martin, Roscoe C, The People's Party in Texas. (The University of Texas Bul-
letin No. 3308). Austin, 1933. A political scientist's view.

Mitchell, Broadus, The Rise of the Cotton Mills in the South. Baltimore, 1921.

Moore, Frederick W., "The Condition of the Southern Farmer," Yale Review,
Vol. Ill (May, 1894), pp. 56-67.

Nation, "Georgia Disfranchisement," Vol. LXXXV (Aug. 8, 1907), p. 113.

, Review of Thomas E. Watson's Bethany, Vol. LXXIX (Dec. 22, 1904),

p. 506.

, Review of Thomas E. Watson's Napoleon, Vol. LXXIV (June 19, 1902),

p. 490.
Nixon, Herman C, "The Cleavage within the Farmers' Alliance Movement,"

Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XV (June, 1928), pp. 22-33. The

South versus the Midwest.
Otken, Charles H., The Ills of the South. New York, 1894. This is an objective

analysis of economic evils with no attention to politics.
Outlook, "Government by Commission in Georgia," Vol. LXXXVII (Sept. 7, 1907),

p. 2.
, "The End of the Convict Lease System in Georgia," Vol. XC (Oct. 3, 1908),

p. 238.

, "Georgia's Convict Lease Law," Vol. XC (Oct., 1908), p. 295.

, "Passing of Tom Watson," Vol. CXXXII (Oct. 11, 1922), pp. 228-229.

, Review of Thomas E. Watson's Napoleon, Vol. LXXI (June 26, 1902), p.

794.
Quick, Herbert, "Hoke Smith and the Revolution in Georgia," The Reader, Vol. X

(Aug., 1907), pp. 241-248.
Regier, C. C, The Era of the Muckrakers. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1932.
Robison, Daniel Merritt, Bob Taylor and the Agrarian Revolt in Tennessee.

Chapel Hill, N.C., 1935. A competent study of a milder brand of Populism.
Rutherford, Mildred, The South in History and Literature. Atlanta, 1906.
Schmeckabier, L. F., "Taxation in Georgia," Johns Hopkins University Studies,

Vol. XVIII (Jan.-April, 1900), p. 217 et seq.
Sheldon, William DuBose, Population in the Old Dominion. Princeton, 1935.

A sectional variation on the theme.
Sim kins, Francis B., The Tillman Movement in South Carolina. Durham, 1926.

A good study of Populism from within the Democratic party.

429

Tom Watson Agrarian Rebel

Skaggs, W. H., The Southern Oligarchy, New York, 1924. An arraignment of
political corruption in the South.

Stephenson, Gilbert Thomas, Race Discrimination in American Law. New York,
1 9 10.

Stewart, Ernest D., "The Populist Party in Indiana," Indiana Magazine of His-
tory, Vol. XIV (Dec, 1918), pp. 332-367; Vol. XV (March, 1919), pp. 53-74.

Sweeney, C. P., "Bigotry in the South; Anti-Catholic Prejudice," Nation, Vol. CXI
(Nov. 24, 1920), p. 585.

Thompson, C. Mildred, Reconstruction in Georgia, Economic, Social, Political,
1865-1872. New York, 191 5. A study by one of the Dunning school.

Thompson, J. Holland, From the Cotton Fields to the Cotton Mills: A Study of
the Industrial Transition in North Carolina. New York, 1906.

Wade, John D., "Old Wine in New Bottles," Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. XI
(April, 1935), pp. 239-252. A study of agrarian recalcitrance from the Civil
War to the great depression.

Wellman, Walter, "Thomas E. Watson — Populist Candidate," Review of Re-
views, Vol. XXX (Oct., 1904), pp. 419-423.

Williams, Michael, The Shadow of the Pope. New York, 1932. An historical
survey of anti-Catholicism in America.

Unpublished Monographs

Boell, Jesse E., "William Jennings Bryan Before 1896." Master's thesis, University

of Nebraska, 1929. A little light on his early traffickings with the Populists.
Bush, Charles C, "The Green Corn Rebellion." Master's thesis, University of

Oklahoma, 1932. A study of draft resistance in Oklahoma.
Collins, James F., "Thomas E. Watson: A Study of the New South." Master's

thesis, New York University, 1936. Based upon limited materials.
Cooper, Fleeta, "The Triumvirate of Colquitt, Gordon, and Brown." Master's

thesis, Emory University, 193 1.
Gray, Sara Lois, "Thomas E. Watson: Leader of Georgia Populism." Master's

thesis, Emory University, 1933. This work makes extensive use of state news-
papers. It ends with the election of 1908.
McCommons, Mrs. W. C, and Miss Clara Stovall, "History of McDuffie County,

Georgia." Bound MS. in the Georgia Department of Archives and History.
Rainey, Glenn W., "The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906." Master's thesis, Emory

University, 1929. Competent work.
Reddick, Jamie Lawson, "The Negro and the Populist Movement in Georgia,"

Master's thesis, Atlanta University, 1937.
Smith, Florence, "The Populist Movement and its Influence in North Carolina."

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1928.
A more extensive bibliography on this subject, including secondary works of a
more general nature and a list of public records and documents may be found in
the Library of the University of North Carolina under the title, "The Political and
Literary Career of Thomas E. Watson," a bound manuscript by this author. Two
items of peculiar interest should be mentioned — "Thomas E. Watson" and "Mary
Phagan," Columbia phonograph recordings of two rural ballads.

430

Index

Abbott, John S. C, 20, 294

Addams, Jane, 378

Agrarianism, ante- and post-bellum va-
rieties, 58-59; versus New Departure,
69-70; three schools of, 105-107; and
Populists, 187-189; frustration of,
285-286; of Watson, 300-303, 306,
348-349, 353; growth of tenancy fa-
tal to, 350; Watson's defense of,
against Socialism, 351-352

Agriculture, condition in South, 110-
115; Watson on, 137, 179; depres-
sion of, in Georgia, 193; Northen
on, in 1893, 219-220; condition of,
between 1900 and 1910, 349-350

Allen, T. S., 313

Allen, William V., 256, 259-260, 272,

273, 309

Alston, Robert, 91

Altgeld, J. P., 273

American Bimetallic League, 241-242,
247

American Federation of Catholic So-
cieties, 367

American Legion, 407-409, 414

American Plutocracy, The, Howard,
258-259

American Protestant Association, 363

Annie terrible, 223

Anti-Saloon League, 415

Atkinson, W. Y., 218, 231

Atlanta, "Chicago of the South," 72-73 ;
as capital of New South, 99; W. D.
Kelley on, 99; receives Jay Gould,
153; race riot of 1906 in, 327-328

Augusta, Watson's boyhood in, 27 ; fac-
tories of, 72; "Lowell of the South,"
104-105; election frauds in, 208-209,
231-232; "ring" of, 334

Baker, Ray Stannard, 316

Baker, William, 166

Bakmeteff, Boris, 413

Bankhead, J. H., 370

Barnes, George T., 127-128, 134-135,
151, 199, 246

Barrett, E. W., 171

Bartram, William, 9

Bateman, L. C, 274

Beard, Charles A., 187

Beecher, Henry Ward, 300, 305

Bellamy, Edward, 118, 223, 254, 261

Benton, Thomas H., 344

Berger, Victor, 401

Bethany: A Story of the Old South,
Watson, 305-306

Bissell, Wilson S., 212

Black, James C. C, as a lawyer, 32;
defends Watson in trial, 83 ; Watson
supports for Senate, 88-89 J sketch of,
195-196; campaign against Watson,
200; victory in 1892, 208; writes
Northen, 219; Watson contests elec-
tion of, 221-222 ; mentioned, 228 ; vic-
tory of, in 1894, 2 32; agrees to resign
and hold new election, 233-234; and
special election, 234-238, 247

Bland, Richard P., 243

Bliss, W. D. P., 261

Blodgett, David T., 412

Boatner, C. J., 183

Bolsheviki, 401, 403, 407, 408, 409, 413

Borah, Senator, 416

"Bourbons," definitions of, 47-48; mis-
apprehensions about, 56

Branch, M. I., 160, 172, 198

Brandegee, Senator, 416

Brett, George P., 293

Brisbane, Arthur, 308

Index

Brown, Joseph E., and Toombs, 45-47;
sketch of, 48-51; Colquitt and, 54-55;
and the New Departure, 56; and the
Independents, 58; appointed to Sen-
ate, 60; reputation of, 60-61; in race
of 1880, 68; advocates industrialism,
71-72; as "chief boss" of Georgia
politics, 88; as convict lessee, 90; as
railroad promoter, 94; retires from
Senate, 139

Brown, Joseph M., sketch of, 336-338;
defends corporate interests, 338; cam-
paign of 1908, 340-341; relations
with Watson, 340, 346; campaign for
reelection, 355, 357-358; as Watson's
understudy, 376

Brown, Pope, 322

Bryan, William Jennings, Watson on,
168; tariff speech of, 180; Watson
compares self with, 189; speaks in
Atlanta, 216; nominated at Chicago,
252; and Populist Convention of 1896,
^55-256; T. Roosevelt on, 264; Wat-
son urges loyalty to, 270-271 ; notified
of Populist nomination and accepts,
274; ignores Watson, 274-275, 278;
apologizes to Watson, 279; Watson
on, 280; defeat of, 284-285; and
Spanish- American War, 289; and
Watson-Populists in 1904, 312-313;
knifes Watson, 313; mentioned, 331;
suggests cooperation to Watson, 343;
Watson on, 344-345; Watson com-
pares self with, 360, 370

Burkett, Frank, 255

Burleson, Postmaster-General, 396

Burns, William J., 378

Butler, M. C, 155

Butler, Senator Marion, urges fusion on
Watson, 248-249; at St. Louis Con-
vention, 257-260; Watson's mistrust
of, 272; and Watson's candidacy,
273-274; refuses to release Watson's
letter of acceptance, 275 ; and Sewall,
280-281; Watson on fusion policy of,
283-284, 288

Cable, George W., 89

Cade, Jack, 43, 251

Caesar's Column, Donnelly, 118

Calhoun, John C, 3, 348

Calhoun, Patrick, 99, 139-140, 154

Capitalist Industrialism, and Recon-
struction, 44; and Constitution of
1877, 46-47; Joseph E. Brown and,
49-5o; John B. Gordon and, 53-54;
Alfred H. Colquitt and, 54-55; and

Capitalist Industrialism {continued)
the New Departure, 56 ; in the 'eight-
ies, 71-76; Ben Hill and, 77; and the
'eighties, 96 ; Grady as spokesman of,
98 ; and the New South, 104-105 ; de-
nounced by C. C. Jones, 105-106;
growth in the 'eighties, 124; Walsh
advocates, 144; Populists aligned
against, 186-188; Cleveland and, 215;
literature on, 223; Watson on, 303;
and agrarianism, 350, 353

Carlyle, Thomas, 292

Carnegie, Andrew, 177, 224

Catholics, vote of, in Augusta, 62 ; Wat-
son on, in Story of France, 290 ; Mrs.
Lytle on, 361; Watson's crusade
against, 361-368; and the Guardians
of Liberty, 365-366; reprisals of,
against Watson, 367; in trials of
Watson, 367-368; Watson makes is-
sue of, in politics, 368, 369, 372, 375,
376, 384, 390, 409

Channing, Edward, Watson on, 304

Clark, Champ, 372

Clay, A. S., 231

Cleveland, Grover, election of, in 1884,
97; visits Atlanta, 103; Watson and,
104; Watson on, 150; Livingston and,
159; and the election of 1892, 197;
quoted on Watson, 205 ; condemns ru-
ral free delivery, 212; Watson's atti-
tude toward, 213-216; as representa-
tive of Eastern capitalism, 215; and
silver issue, 217-218; Northen ap-
peals to, 219-220; answers Northen,
219; and Pullman strike, 225; Wat-
son on, 225; Nat Harris on, 229-230;
and gold, 244; Southern revolt from,
245-250; repudiation of, at Chicago,
252; in the election of 1904, 307-308

Clover, Benjamin H., 166

Cobb, J. E., 184

Cobb, Thomas R. R., 271

Cody, Jim, 129-131

Coeur d'Alene strike, 178

Colquitt, Alfred H., and the "Triumvi-
rate," 48; sketch of, 54-55; misinter-
pretation of, 56; attack on adminis-
tration of, 59-61; candidate for
reelection, 62; Watson on, 63, 85;
race for Senate, 88-89; favors con-
vict lease, 90; entertains Cleveland,
103

Colquitt, Walter T., 54

Columbia Sentinel, Watson purchases,
400

Congressman Swanson, Post, 157

11

Index

Conscription, in World War I, 393, 399

Convict lease, 50-51, 68, 84, 89-91, 102

Cooke, Jay, 51

County unit system, 339-341, 373

Cox, Edward, 91

Coxey, Jacob, "army" of, 224; presides

at Populist convention, 345
Creelman, James, 265-280
Crisp, Charles F., 145, 154, 159, 163, 168,

170, 171, 180
Croly, Herbert, 307, 315
Cullom, Shelby M., 167
Curtis, William E., 304

Daily Press, The, founded by Watson,

226
Dana, Charles A., 149
Danton, 292

Darrow, Clarence, 256, 260, 311, 318
Daugherty, Attorney-General, 417
Davis, James H. ("Cyclone"), 255
Davis, Jefferson, 3, 10, 49, 96, 102
Davis, John, 166

Debs, Eugene V., and the Pullman
strike, 225; Lloyd and, 240; and the
Populists in 1896, 255-256; and
Bryan, 261; in the election of 1904,
314; Watson on, 315; sentenced to
penitentiary, 399; Watson defends,
401 ; writes tribute to Watson, 420
De France, Charles Q., 316
De Leon, Daniel, on Watson, 352-353
Democratic party, after Reconstruction,
44-45 ; and the "New Departure," 46,
55-56; and the Solid South, 57; and
the Farmers' Alliance, 145, 149 ; Wat-
son ridicules, 179; and free silver,
180; persecutes Populists, 192, 204-
205; coerces vote of tenants and la-
borers, 204-205; fraudulent methods
of, 207-208; and Cleveland, 214-215;
impatience with Cleveland, 218-219;
John T. Graves on, 230; uses terror
and fraud against Watson, 231; split
over silver, 246-250; Chicago Con-
vention of, 252-253; counter-revolu-
tion in 1904, 307; Watson returns to,

354
Depew, Chauncey, 318
Donnelly, Ignatius, 118, 173, 253, 255,

259
Dorsey, Hugh M., 377, 379, 388, 407-409
Doyle, H. S., 206-207
Dreiser,Theodore, 3x7
Driven from Sea to Sea, Po9t, 156
Dunne, Edward F., 315
Durham, Dr. George W., 39

Ellington, C. H., 154, 168, 172, 198, 201

Emory College, 227

Engels, Friedrich, 351

Erasmus, 363

Espionage Act, 392, 395, 406, 412

Fall, Secretary Albert B., 418

Farmers' Alliance, organization of, 115-
116; Negroes and, 116; emotional
character of, 117; St. Louis Conven-
tion of, 122-123 ; enters Georgia poli-
tics, 125 ; Watson expounds principles
of, 135-136; victory of, in 1890, 138-
139; Grady and, 141; Patrick Walsh
on, 143-144; Ocala Convention of,
144; Cincinnati Convention, 149;
Watson on platform of, 152; Liv-
ingston and, 154, 158; Indianapolis
Convention of, 159-160; Watson
wins, to Populism, 168-170, 174; and
Farmers' Union, 348-349

Farmers' Union, 348-349, 373

Felder, Thomas B., 370

Felton, William H., independent leader,
58-59; Hill's attack on, 77; on Wat-
son and Livingston, 173-174

Field, James G., 198

Flower, Roswell, 224

Folk, J. W., 323, 324

Force Bill, 191-192, 218

Ford, Henry, 415

Foss, Eugene, 378

Fox, Charles, 353

Frank, Leo M., case of, 376-389. See
also Jews

Free silver, Watson on, 180; in election
of 1892, 197; and the Democrats, 217-
220; Lloyd denounces movement for,
240; true place of, in Populist doc-
trine, 241; in West, 241; Watson's
views on, 243-244; Democratic tac-
tics on, 246-250; Watson on Silver
Democrats, 269

Fusion, Butler and, 248, 270; Watson
on, 249-251, 253, 263, 268-269, 270;
in the West, 249, 251-252, 275-279; at
Populist Convention of 1896, 255;
Watson's failure to halt, 279-280;
progress of, 281-284; and degrada-
tion of Populism, 285, 288; in 1908,
345

Garland, A. H., 103

Garland, Hamlin, on Populists in Con-
gress, 166-167; on Watson, 166
Gary, Elbert, 415
George, Henry, 261

111

Index

Georgia Tech, origin of, 74

Gibbon, Edward, 20, 23

Gibbons, Cardinal, 364, 366

Glover, Arthur, 204, 334-336, 339

Gold Democrats, 217, 228, 245, 247, 271,
276, 310

Goldman, Emma, 224, 403

Gordon, John B., mentioned, 14; defeats
Stephens, 46; and the "Triumvirate,"
48; sketch of, 52-53; Colquitt's con-
nection with, 54-55; misinterpreta-
tion of, 56; resigns from Senate, 60-
62; campaigns for Colquitt, 69; men-
tioned, 88; business adventures of,
102; elected Governor, 103; race for
Senate, 1890, 139-140; mentioned,
143; campaigns against Watson, 196;
mentioned, 228

Gorky, Maxim, 317

Gorman, Arthur, 312

Gould, Jay, and Walter Hines Page, 96 ;
and Tom Watson, 97; and Patrick
Calhoun, 140; investments of, in Au-
gusta, 144; Watson on, 153; carica-
ture of, 224 ; mentioned, 302

Grady, Henry Woodfin, and Toombs,
47; heads Colquitt's campaign, 68;
taunts Watson, 69; role in South, 74-
77; supports Colquitt for Senate, 88;
entertains Tom Watson, 89; com-
pared with Page, Wilson, and Wat-
son, 97 ; vision of the New South, 98 ;
Watson and, 101; supports Gordon,
102; condemns critics, 105; Watson
answers, 107-109; on Alliance, 141;
on White Supremacy, 141-142; doc-
trine of, contrasted with Watson's,
142; quoted on Negro, 191; men-
tioned, 143, 144, 194, 300-301, 337

Granger movement, 58

Grant, U. S., 52, 54

Graves, John Temple, 104, 230, 271

Gray, James R., 322, 358

Greeley, Horace, 45

Green, Hetty, 224

Gregory, Attorney-General, 387

Guardians of Liberty, The, 365, 373

Haines, Charles D., 365
Halvorsen, K., 166, 167
Hanna, Mark, 254, 264, 265
Harding, Warren G., 411, 414, 417
Hardwick, Thomas W., confers with
Watson, 322; urges Watson to sup-
port Smith, 324-332; seeks to pro-
pitiate Watson's anger, 335-336, 339;
Watson attempts to defeat, 355-358;

Hardwick, Thomas W. (continued)
mentioned, 388; elected Governor,
409

Harris, Joel Chandler, 3, 75, 327, 344

Harris, Nathaniel E., 229, 375-376, 379,
385, 387

Harrison, Benjamin, 159, 197

Harvard University, 227, 304

Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 73-74

Hearst, William Randolph, Watson
dedicates book to, 304 ; Watson urges
nomination of, 307; offers Watson
editorship, 308 ; paper of, in Atlanta,
328; corresponds with Watson, 345

Henderson, John Steele, 212

Henry VIII, 363

Hickory Hill, 296-297

Hill, Benjamin H., 14, 40, 49, 53, 60, 73,
77, 79, 88, 96, 102

Hill, David B., 150, 307, 312

Hines, James K., candidate for Senate,
139; candidate for Governor, 227;
for H. Smith, 323 ; appointed to office
by Smith, 333; writes Watson for
Smith, 336

Hollaway, John J., 309

Holmes, Justice, 377

Homestead steel strike, 177

Hoover, Herbert, 413, 415; Watson on,
in Russia, 417-418

Howard, M. W., 258-259

Howell, Clark, and the Alliance, 141
(note) ; Northen writes, on Cleve-
land, 220 ; announces as gubernatorial
candidate, 322; campaigns against
Hoke Smith, 324-327; mentioned, 329,
371, 407

Howell, Evan P., 197, 228, 248, 250, 281

Hubbard, Elbert, 314

Hughes, Charles E., 389

Huntington, Collis P., 53-54, 103, 156,
224

Independent party, attacks Brown, 51;

revolts from the New Departure, 58 ;

and the Grangers, 58 ; convention of,

in 1882, 77-78; characterized, 106
Industrial Review, origin of, 73
Industrialism, see Capitalist industrial-

ism
International Cotton Exposition of 1881,

72-74

Jackson, Andrew, 305, 344
Jacobins, 291, 385

Jefferson, Thomas, 35, 188, 296, 304-
305, 330, 347-348

IV

Index

Jews, prejudice against, 376, 379> 383-

384, 385-386
Johns Hopkins University, 96
Johnson, Herschel V., 96
Jones, Charles Colcock, 105-106, 301
Jones, Senator James K., 255, 259, 267-

269, 281-283
Jones, Dr. James S., 85
Jute-bagging trust, 11 9-1 21

Kelley, William D. ("Pig-iron"), 99,

in
Kem, O. M., 166
Kerensky, 401, 413
Knights of Columbus, 367
Knights of Labor, 122, 152
Kolchak, 419

Ku KluxKlan (old), 13, 53
Ku Klux Klan (new), Watson urges

organization of, 386; Watson and,

389

Labor, Watson on, 148 ; Watson appeals
to, 152; supports Watson, 171; and
the Pinkerton Agency, 176-178; and
the eight-hour law, 178; Watson on
distress of, in Atlanta, 179; in the
Populist movement, 187-188; agrar-
ian background of, in South, 189;
destitution of, in Atlanta, 193-194;
Democrats coerce vote of, 204; Wat-
son presses measures for, 212-213;
repression of, 223 ; Joseph M. Brown
denounces, 337; supports Watson, 400

La Follette, Robert M., 323, 3^4, 333

Lamar, L. Q. C, 103

Lanier, James, 340

Lawson, Thomas W., 316

League of Nations, 401, 404, 407-408,
414

Lease, Mrs. Mary Elizabeth, 152, 256

Lee, Robert E., 18, 53> 7*> 74

Lenin, 401

Lenroot, Senator, 418

Lewis, Alfred Henry, 265

Life and Times of Andrew Jackson,
Watson, 305

Life and Times of Thomas Jefferson,
Watson, 304

Lincoln, Abraham, 344

Livingston, L. F., supports Patrick Cal-
houn, 139; as Alliance leader, 154-
155; struggle with Watson, 158-159;
at Indianapolis, 160; renounces In-
dianapolis resolution, 161; clashes
with Watson, 164-165; loses Alliance
to Watson, 170; attempts to block

Livingston, L. F. {continued)

Populism at St. Louis, 172-173; re-
nounced by Alliance, 174; mentioned,
186; campaign against Watson and
Populism, 194; advocates rural free
delivery, 211; as silver champion, 248

Lloyd, Henry Demarest, on Populists in
Congress, 167; Wealth Against Com-
monwealth, 223 ; quoted, 249, 251, 252,
254; on the Populist Convention of
1896, 259, 261; on Watson, 265-266

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 265, 407, 412-413,
414

Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 24, 45

Longstreet, General James, 102

Looking Backward, Bellamy, 118

Louis XV, 292

Luther, Martin, 363

Lynching, denounced by Watson, 190;
Watson saves Negro from, 206 ; Wat-
son recommends, for J. P. Morgan
representatives, 318; advocated be-
fore race riot of 1906, 327-328 ; Wat-
son advocates practice of, 374 ; of Leo
Frank, 383-384

Lytle, Mrs. Alice Louise, 361, 403, 411,
417

Mack, Norman E., 370

McClure, A. K., 99, 245

McDaniel, Henry D., 92

McDuffie, George, 3, 32

McGregor, Charles E., 129-131, 217, 336

McKeighan, W. A., 166

McKinley, William, 180, 264, 265, 268,
280, 282

Macmillan Company, The, 290, 293

Macune, C. W., 139, 140, 154

McVey, Frank L., 240-241

Main-Traveled Roads, Garland, 166

Mann, W. D., 316, 329-330

Marat, 291

Markham, Edwin, 317

Marx, Karl, Watson on, 351-353

Masses, The, suppressed, 396

Masters, Edgar Lee, 317

Mellon, Andrew, 415, 417

Mercer University, 21-22

Metaphysical Essays, Post, 156

"Middle-of-the-road" policy, 249-250,
254, 262, 274-279, 345

Miles, Nelson A., 365-366

Missionaries, Protestant foreign, Wat-
son on, 374

Morgan, J. P., 311, 327, 393, 415, 417

Morgan, Senator, 247

Moses, Charles L., 173, 224

Index

Muckraker school, 316-318
Murphy, Charles E., 370

Napoleon I, Watson's early interest in,
20-21, 34; Watson on, 292-296, 344

Napoleon: A Sketch of His Life, etc.,
Watson, 292-296

Nation, The, quoted on Watson, 305-
306, 409-410

National banks, 136, 175, 289

Neal, B. L., 12

Negroes, and Reconstruction, 13-14, 45 ;
South's fear of, 57; in the election of
1880, 67-70; Joseph E. Brown on, 72;
Ben Hill invokes menace of, 77; sup-
port Watson for legislature, 84; an-
tagonized by Watson, 93 ; and Farm-
ers' Alliance, 114, 122; Grady on,
141-142; Walsh on White Suprem-
acy, 143; strike of, denounced, 189;
and Populism in the South, 189-191;
Watson champions rights of, 190-191;
Watson urges political equality for,
199; in the campaign of 1892, 203,
204, 208; Watson protects from
lynching, 206-207; Democrats appeal
to vote of, 231; in the election of

1894, 232-233; in the election of

1895, 237-238; Watson proposes dis-
franchisement of, 320-321; but de-
nounces it in 1895, 321, and ridicules
"domination" of, 321-322; and the
race riot of 1906, 327-328 ; Watson on
inferiority of, 329; disfranchisement
of, 333; Watson advocates subju-
gation of, to "peasantry," 348; as
balance of power, 356; Watson
advocates lynching and flogging of,

374

New Departure Democrats, in 1872, 45 ;
term substituted for "Bourbons," 56;
domination of South, 57-58; victory
in 1876, 59; crush Independents in
1880, 69; in the 'eighties, 71; Ben
Hill defends, 77; Stephens' defection
to, 78-80; Cleveland and, 103; and
the Farmers' Alliance, 145

Newberry, Truman, 415

North, Watson on, 302

Northen, William J., mentioned, 135;
and Henry Grady, 141; campaigns
against Watson, 196; and the Popu-
lists, 203 ; advocates Watson's demise,
206; orders militia out, 218; appeals
to Cleveland, 219-220

Norton, S. F., 255

Norwood, Thomas M., candidate of In-
dependents, 65-69; novel of, quoted,
106-107; on Gordon, 139

Nye, Gordon, 318

Ocala Convention, 144
Otis, John G., 164-166

Page, Thomas Nelson, 306

Page, Walter Hines, 96-97

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 402-406

Panic of 1893, 214

P.arker, Alton B., 307, 310-311

Pastor, Rose, 315

Pearce, R. H., 32

Peavy, Jack, 42-43

Peck, Harry Thurston, 308

Peek, W. L., 203

Peffer, William A., 165, 244, 251, 253

Pendleton, Charles R., 95, 326, 336

People's Party Campaign Book, Wat-
son, 181-185

People's Party Paper, launched by Wat-
son, 155-158; circulation in 1893, 221;
Watson gives up, 288

Peter the Hermit, 291

Phagan, Mary, 376-387

Phipps, Senator, 417

Pierce, George F., 67

Pinkerton detectives, 148, 171, 175, 176-
177, 181, 212

Pitt, William, belabored by Watson as
reactionary, 291

Plutocracy, or American White Slav-
ery, Norwood, 106-107

Polk, L. L., quoted, 121; elected presi-
dent of Alliance, 123; in Atlanta,
149; for third party, 160; message to
Alliance congressmen, 163 ; commends
Watson, 170; denounces cotton picker
strike, 188; untimely death of, 198

Populists, in perspective, 44; Southern
antecedents of, 50; and older tradi-
tions of rebellion, 107; at Cincinnati
Convention, 149; at Indianapolis,
159-161; delegation of, in Congress,
166-167; organize at St. Louis in
1892, 172-173; denounce strike break-
ers, 178; class alignments of, in South,
186-188; class contradictions among,
189; and the Negro question, 189-
191; persecution of, in South, 192;
activity of, in Georgia, 194-195;
Omaha Convention of, 198; first con-
vention of, in Georgia, 198; Georgia
press of, 200; violence used against,
202, 205-208; growth of, at Demo-

VI

Index

Populists (continued)

crats' expense, 226; in election of

1894, 231-233; and special election of

1895, 233-239; Lloyd on, 240; McVey
on, 240-241 ; and silver panacea, 241-
244; and fusion, 249-253; leadership
of, in West, 251; Convention of, in

1896, 253 f.; in the election of 1896,
see Fusion; Watson on degradation
of, 285-287; between 1896 and is°^r
308-309; nominate Watson for Presi-
dent in 1904, 309-310; condition of
party in 1904, 310-311; nominate
Watson in 1908, 345; condition of
party in 1908, 345-346; defection of,
to Socialism, 350

Post, Charles C, mentioned, 155; sketch
of, 156-157; as Georgia Populist
leader, 161-162; at St. Louis Conven-
tion, 173; called "atheist," 195;
Northen on, as "Communist," 196; at
Omaha Convention, 198; mobbed,
leaves Georgia, 199; Democrats con-
tinue attack on, 200-201 ; Watson
communicates with, 314

Powderly, T. V., 182

Princeton University, 54, 304

Progressive party, 372

Progessivism, 315, 323, 329, 332-333, 372

Prohibition, 333, 415

Quakers, of Wrightsborough, Georgia,

5-9 ; influence of, on Watson, 178
Quick, Herbert, 323, 333

Railroad Question, The, Watson, 223-
224

Railroads, Toombs' attack on, 46-47;
Joseph E. Brown, and, 50; Gordon
and, 53-54; Colquitt and, 55, 59;
Watson's attack on, 93-94; Gordon
among, 102; Watson on government
ownership of, 153-154; Watson's The
Railroad Question, 223-224; Smith at-
tacks, 323 ; Watson excoriates, 326-
327; Smith's regulation of, 333; Jo-
seph M. Brown and, 337-338

Randolph, John, and Watson, 412

Reconstruction, 12-13, 45, 56, 67

Reed, H. W., 277

Reed, James A., 404

Reed, Thomas B., 170, 171, 183-184

Republican party, identified with Demo-
crats, 77; Watson charged with en-
dorsing, 84; tariff policy of, 180;
Populist fusion with, 248, 275, 281 ;

Republican party (continued)

platform of, in 1896, 252; as "residu-
ary legatee" of Wilson, 412

Revolution, Watson on, 291-292, 295,
413-414

Revolution, The, founded, 200

Riley, James Whitcomb, 167

Robespierre, 292

Rockefeller, John D., 224, 302, 319, 344

"Roman Catholic Hierarchy, The,"
Watson, 362-363

Romilly, Samuel, 353

Roney, H. C, 41

Roosevelt, Theodore, on Watson and
the Populists, 264-265; Watson on,
307, 311; in campaign of 1904, 311-
314; invites Watson to White House,
314-315; Watson on trust busting of,
318-319; mentioned, 327, 335; enter-
tains Watson, 343-344; Watson urges,
to run again, 344; mentioned, 346;
Watson supports, in 1912, 372; and
the Colombia Treaty, 412-413

Rosser, Luther, 388

Rural free delivery, Watson and, 210-
212

Ryan, Thomas F., 318

Sage, Russell, 224

Seabury, Samuel A., 311, 315, 317

Seely, F. L., 359

Sewall, Arthur, 255, 256-259, 266, 267-
281

Shame of the Cities, Steffens, 316

Sherman, John, 224

Sherman Silver Puchase Act, 217, 225

Sidney, Algernon, 353

Silver, see Free silver

Simpson, Jerry ("Sockless"), mentioned,
39; Watson on, 150; mentioned, 152;
at Indianapolis, 160; and Livingston,
164; nominates Watson for Speaker,
165; Hamlin Garland on, 166; on
Watson, 184; mentioned, 196, 244; for
Bryan, 253

Sinclair, Upton, 329

Skinner, Charles B., 365

Slaton, John M., seeks Watson's sup-
port, 371; and the Frank case, 380-
383, 386-387

Smith, Hoke, in 1892, 197; on Silver
Democrats, 218; Watson on, 228, 229;
defends Cleveland, 245; sympathizes
with Watson, 272 ; as reformer, 323 ;
for Negro disfranchisement, 323-324;
thanks Watson for support, 324-325;

Vll

Index

Smith, Hoke (continued)
victory of, in 1906, 327; mentioned,
331; acknowledges indebtedness to
Watson, 331; accomplishments during
administration of, 332-334; loses Wat-
son's support, 335-336; and the race
of 1908, 338-341 ; defeats Brown, 355-
356; Watson's threats against, 357-
359; mentioned, 375; elected, 376;
enters Presidential primary, 404; vote
of, 405 ; race for the Senate, 406-409

Snead, Claiborne, 65, 83

Socialism, compared with Populism,
188; Watson charged with, 203, 207;
Hearst charged with, 308; and the
1904 election, 314; Populist defections
t0 > 35°> Watson's articles against,
251-253; Daniel De Leon on, 352-
353; Watson defends representative
of, 401

"Socialists and Socialism," Watson,

350-353

Son of the American Revolution, Neal,
12

South, between Reconstruction and
Populism, 44-45; under the business
man's rule, 55-57; inspired by
Grady's message, 98 f . ; deluded by
new hopes, 99-102; apes industrial
North, 104-105; rebel tradition of,
114-115; leads Farmers' Alliance,
123; Populists in, 187-189; Watson
in defense of, 301-303; breaks with
National Progressivism on race ques-
tion, 329

Soviet Russia, 401, 402, 413, 418-419

Spanish-American War, Watson on,
289-290, 458

Speer, Emory, 58, 394

Spencer, Samuel, 318, 326-327

Stahl, John M., 210-21 1

Standard Oil Company, 31 1-3 12, 316,
318, 413, 418

Stanford, Leland, 156

Steed, Epenetus Alexis, 12, 17, 22

Steffens, Lincoln, 311, 316

Stephens, Alexander H., War Between
the States, 20; Watson's love of, 33-
34; mentioned, 45; fights "New De-
parture," 45-46; and the "Trium-
virate," 55; as agrarian, 59; Watson
visits, 65-66; joins New Departure,
78-80; reconciliation with Hill and
Brown, 79; administration of, 87 f.;
pardons murderer, 91; Watson on
death of, 92; resemblance to Watson,
166, 265-266; mentioned, 399

Stevens, Thaddeus, 45

Stokes, James Graham Phelps, 315

Story, Theodosia E., 18, 19, 27

Story of France, The, Watson, 290-293,

295, 363
Subtreasury plan, opposed by Gordon,

139; and by Walsh, 144; Watson

urges adoption, 175-176
Sumner, Charles, 45

Taft, William H., 345, 369

Taggart, Thomas, 370

Talleyrand, 78

Tammany Hall, 150, 307, 370

Tarbell, Ida M., 316

Tariff, Watson on, 104, 108; in 1892,
197; Watson on, 244

Taubeneck, H. E., 242, 244, 249, 252

Teller, Henry M., 252

Tenant farmers, among Watson's fam-
ily, 36; Watson speaks in behalf of,
91; Watson on condition of, 112; and
the Populist party, 187-188; at odds
with leaders, 188; Watson appeals to
both races of, 190-191; Democrat
landowners coerce vote of, 203-204;
Watson on increase of, 349-350;
growth of, fatal to populist agrarian-
ism, 350

Terrell, Ben, 119

Thomson, Georgia, early history of, 12

Tibbies, Thomas H., 309, 313, 329

Tillett, W. F., 99

Tillman, Benjamin, visits Watson in
1896, 280; and the nomination of
Parker, 307, 310; Watson denounces,
for disfranchising the Negro, 321

Tom Watson's Magazine, founded, 317

Toombs, Robert, and the Confederacy,
10; mentioned, 14; Watson's worship
°f> 33-34; mentioned, 40; on Joseph
E. Brown, 45; on the "New Depar-
ture," 46; and the Constitution of
I ^77> 47; as agrarian, 59; opposes
Colquitt, 66; Brown on, 71-72; men-
tioned, 74; denounces Stephens and
New Departure, 79-80, 88; and the
railroads, 93 ; invokes Cromwell, 95 ;
as discordant rumble, 96; influence
on Watson of, 97, 301; in Watson's
Bethany, 305-306

Trammell, L. N., 58

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 117

Tutt, W. D., 32, 81-82, 84

Twain, Mark, 55

Twiggs, H. D. D., 32, 41, 130, 131-134

Vlll

Index

Underwood, Oscar, 369-372

United States Steel Corporation, 415

Vance, Zebulon B., 73
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 224
Vanderbilt University, 99
Van Dervoort, Paul, 255
Vane, Henry, 353
Villard, Henry, 224
Vinson, Carl, 399
Voltaire, 35, 291, 336, 382
Vorhees, D. W., 73

Wadsworth, Senator, 416

Waite, Davis H., 244

Wall Street, "pimps" of, 161; wing of,
in Democratic party, 307; Watson
on, 311, 318

Walsh, Patrick, supports Colquitt, 62-
63; clash with Watson, 64; friend of
Barnes, 128 ; denounces Alliance, 143-
144; calls Watson "traitor," 161;
campaigns against Watson, 196;
Watson mentions, 197, 228, 246; as
silver leader, 247; as Catholic boss,

363

Walsh, Thomas J., 417

Wanamaker, John, 211

Washington, Booker T., 328, 369

Washington, George, 414

Watson, John Durham, 397

Watson, John Smith (Tom Watson's fa-
ther), 2, 8-1 1, 15, 27, 36-37

Watson, Thomas E., birthplace, 2-3;
ante-bellum childhood, 4-5; ancestry,
5-9; on his parents, 14-15; temper
and disposition, 15-17, 23, 36, 231;
early love affairs, 18-19, 27-28, 30-
32; reading, 19-21 ; at Mercer, 21-26;
as orator, 18, 24-26, 41-42, 131; as
teacher, 25, 28-32; as poet, 14, 18,
28-31; as fiddler, 29, 31, 34, 86, 89;
as lawyer, 28, 35-36, 40-43; religious
views of, 35, 397-39 8 ; sense °* nu ~
mor, 41, 136, 266; influence of Toombs
and Stephens on, 33-34J whips
planter, 36; restores family, 37; mar-
riage, 38-39; at the convention of
1880, 63-65; campaigns for Independ-
ents, 67-70; follows Stephens in de-
fection from Independents, 78-80; on
Toombs, 79-80; race for Legislature,
81; indicted for attempted murder,
82-83 ; wins Negro vote, 84-85 ; cam-
paign methods of, 86; in Georgia
Legislature, 86 f.; opposes Colquitt
for Senate, 88; entertained by Henry

Watson, Thomas E. (continued)

Grady, 89; attacks convict lease sys-
tem, 89-91 ; proposes relief for ten-
ants, 91; on Stephens' death, 92;
antagonizes Negroes, 93 ; attacks
railoads, 93-94; on property and
aesthetics, 94; disgust and resigna-
tion, 95; and Grady's New South,
97 f.; influenced by the New Depar-
ture, 101-102; opposes Gordon, 103;
for Cleveland, 104; renounces Grady,
107-109; on exploitation of farmers,
111-114; on "apathy" of the South,
114-115; calls for rebellion, 115;
and the Alliance, 119; and the jute
trust, 219-121; enters race for Con-
gress, 125 f. ; defends McGregor, 129-
131; altercation with Twiggs, 131-
134; race for Congress, 134-138; op-
poses Patrick Calhoun, 140; applies
"Ocala Yardstick," 145 ; on his conse-
cration to his task, 146; quits law
practice, 147; on corrupt law, 147-
148 ; on labor and history, 148 ; on the
third party question, 149-151; appeals
to labor, 152-153; on Gould and rail-
roads, 153; clashes with Livingston,
154—155, 158-159; founds People's
Party Paper, 155-158; at Indianap-
olis, 158-160; comes out as Populist,
161-162; in Congress, 163 f.; alter-
cation with Livington, 164; candi-
date for Speaker, 165; Hamlin
Garland on, 166; on Bryan, 168;
wins Alliance to Populism, 168-170;
feud with Crisp, 170-171; repre-
sented at St. Louis Convention, 172-
173; introduces Alliance bills, 174-
176; urges subtreasury bill, 176; on
Pinkerton Detective Agency, 176-
177; supports eight-hour labor law,
178; on free silver, 180; publishes
Campaign Book, 181 ; the "Where
was I at?" incident, 181-185; on the
struggle of 1892, 186; on the com-
plexity of Populist ranks, 187; as
landowner, 187-188; on the Negro
and Populism, 1 90-1 91 ; on the con-
dition of labor, 193-194; on Demo-
cratic perplexities, 197; "news value"
of, 198; returns to Georgia, 199; cam-
paign for reelection, 199 f.; whips
defamer on train, 201 ; howled down
at Augusta and Atlanta, 201-202; on
the state election results, 205; meth-
ods used against, 206; protects Ne-
gro from lynching, 206-207; and the

IX

Index

Watson, Thomas E. (continued)
fraudulent election, 208; on his de-
feat, 208-209; initiates rural free
delivery of mails, 210; urges labor
laws, 212-213; returns home, 213;
on Cleveland and his views, 214;
launches off-year campaign of 1893,
216 f.; Cleveland moves against, 218;
Northen's letter to Cleveland on, 219;
results of the crusade of 1893, 221;
contests Black's election, 221-222;
radical influences on, 223 f.; on Emma
Goldman, 224 ; on Debs and the Pull-
man strike, 225; founds Daily Press,
226; called "dictator" of his party,
227; nominated for Congress, 227-
228; on Democratic schism, 228-229;
adopts conciliatory tone, 230; and the
election of 1894, 231; agrees to spe-
cial election, 234; disagrees on terms
of election, 236; loses special election
of 1895, 236-237; views on free silver
242-243; on Silver Democrats, 247;
Evan Howell praises, 248; on fusion,
248-249 ; nominated Vice-Presidential
candidate, 257-259; opposes nomina-
tion of Bryan, 257; in the campaign
of 1896, 261 f.; contrasted with other
leaders in 1896, 261; on his nomina-
tion, 262; New York Times on,
264; Theodore Roosevelt on, 264-
265; Creelman on, 265-266; H. D.
Lloyd on, 265-266; appearance and
oratory of, 266; Senator Jones on,
267-268; on Democratic deception,
268-269; urges support for Bryan
and withdrawal of Sewall, 270;
T. R. R. Cobb, J. T. Graves, and
H. Smith support, 271-272; clashes
with Butler, 272-273; "No Watson,
no Bryan," 274; humiliation of, 274-
275 ; campaign of, the West, 275-276 ;
in Texas, 275-276; in Kansas, 276-
277; in Nebraska, 278-279; Bryan
apologizes to, 279; letter of accept-
ance, 283-284; ballots of, 284; on his
defeat, 284-286; degradation of Pop-
ulism, 285, 288; retires from politics,
287 f.; rerturns to law, 287; declines
nomination for Governor, 288-289;
on triumph of Populist principles,
288 ; denounces Spanish-American
War, 289-290; writes The Story of
France, 290-293; personal library of,
291; publishes Napoleon, 293-296;
buys Hickory Hill, 296; growing
wealth of, 297; home life of, 298;

Watson, Thomas E. {continued)
emotional life of, 298-299; "respecta-
able" opinion warms toward, 299-
300; as lecturer, 300; agrarianism of,
300-301, 306 ; defends the South, 301-
302, 305-306; and the Lost Cause,
302; on industrial capitalism in the
South, 302-303; urges nomination of
Hearst, 307; nominated Presidential
candidate of Populists, 309; on con-
dition of his party, 310; opens cam-
paign of 1904, 310; on Parker and
the conservatives, 311; appeals to
Bryan Democrats, 312; on his defeat,
314; T. Roosevelt on, 314-315; packs
Cooper Union, 315; calls for union of
all reformers, 315-316; founds Tom
Watson's Magazine, 316; Judge Ben
Lindsey on, 317; editorial policies of,
317-319; on Woodrow Wilson, 319;
proposes Negro disfranchisement,
320-321, but denounced it in 1895,
321; and Hoke Smith, 322-323;
pledges support to Smith, 324 ; attacks
Morgan and railroads, 326-327; op-
timism over Smith's victory, 327; de-
fender of White Supremacy, 328;
loses progressives on race issue, 329;
breaks with publisher of magazine,
329; founds two new periodicals,
330; temper of, 331; cooperation and
cordial relations with Smith, 331-334;
and the Glover case, 334-337; breaks
with Smith and supports Brown, 337;
in the campaign of 1908, 338-339; and
the county-unit system, 339-341; old
Populists turn against, 341; promises
to "dominate this state," 341; cor-
responds with Bryan, 343 ; Roosevelt
entertains at White House, 343-344;
urges Roosevelt to run, 345; nomi-
nated Presidential candidate, 345; as
White Supremacy candidate, 346;
transformations in political creed of,
347-348 ; and the increase of tenancy,
349 J growing wealth of, 349 ; attacks
Socialism, 350-353; defends prop-
erty, interest, and rent, 352; Daniel
De Leon on, 352-353 ; takes stand for
ideals of Old South, 353; returns to
Democratic party, 354; effort to de-
feat Hardwick, 355-356; speech hec-
kled in Atlanta, 356; threatens Smith,
357; Seely's hoax upon, 359; on his
superiority over Bryan, 360; founds
press, 360-361; and Mrs. Lytle, 361;
trend toward sensationalism in pe-

Index

Watson, Thomas E. {continued)
riodicals, 362; anti-Catholic crusade
of, 362-368; helps organize Guard-
ians of Liberty, 365-366; has "premo-
nitions," 366; attempts to provoke
fight with a Catholic, 367; Catholic
reprisals against, 367; obscenity case
of United States against, 367-368;
campaign of, against Wilson in 1912,
368-372; the "following" of, 373; on
Protestant foreign missions, 373 ; ad-
vocates flogging and lynching Ne-
groes, 374; as a political boss, 375;
in the election of 1914, 375-376; in the
Leo Frank case, 376-389; suggests
vigilante action, 380; defends Atlanta
mobs, 382; and the Frank lynching,
384-385; "baffling nervous trouble"
of, 384-385 ; urges revival of Ku Klux
Klan, 386; and of "Gentile League,"
386; and the Department of Justice,
387; uses Frank case to swing elec-
tion of 1916, 388-389; and the Ku
Klux Klan, 389-390; on World
War I, 391 f.; on Wilson's adminis-
tration, 390-391 ; urges neutrality,
391; denounces War madness, 392-
393 ; opposes conscription, 393-394;
denounces militarism and War meas-
ures, 395 ; government suppresses pa-
pers of, 396; loses both children, 397;
suffers mental collapse, 397; and the
theme of frustration, 397-398 ; threat-
ened with prison, 399; runs for Con-
gress, 399-400; and Wilson's foreign
policy, 401; denounces Palmer and
Red-baiters, 402; defends civil liber-
ties, 402 ; enters Presidential primary,
404; against League of Nations, 404-
405; defends striking miners, 405;
"amazing" vote of, 405; enters sena-
torial race, 406 ; attacks American Le-
gion, 407-408 ; jailed at Buford, 608-
609; elected to Senate, 409; Nation on
victory of, 409 ; on victory of self, 410 ;
in the Senate, 411 f.; compared with
John Randolph, 412; demands release
of political prisoners, 412; denounces
Colombia treaty, 412-413; defends
Soviet Russia, 413; on revolutionary
traditions of the United States, 414;
on League of Nations and Wilsonism,
414; denounces militarism, 415; on
fear of proletariat as cause of mili-
tarism, 415; on cruelty of Army offi-
cers, 416; challenges three men to
combat, 417; attacks Mellon, Daugh-

Watson, Thomas E. (continued)

terty and Fall, 417; attacks Hoover's
record in Russia, 418; illness of, 419-
420; on striking miners, 420; death
of, 420; Eugene Debs' tribute to, 420

Watson, Mrs. Thomas E. (Georgia
Durham), 39-40, 185, 277, 342, 361,
411, 420

Watson, Thomas Miles, 2, 3-4, 10, 20,
306

Watson, William, 36

Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine,
founded, 330

Watson's Jeffersonian Weekly, founded,
330

Watterson, Henry, 57, 100

Wealth Against Commonwealth, Lloyd,
223

Weaver, James B., in Atlanta, 150;
mentioned, 152; nominated for Presi-
dent, 198; rotten-egged in Macon,
202; in Atlanta, 202; and free silver,
242; and fusion, 249, 252, 255

Webster, Daniel, 411, 414

West, and the South, 144; Watson on
difference between South and, 189;
Watson preaches alliance with, 214;
silver panacea in, 241 ; fusion in, 249,
251-252; Watson on common interest
of, with South, 270; Watson's cam-
paign of, in 1896, 275-279; Watson
proposes unity with, on race prob-
lems, 347-348

Wheeler, Joseph E., 181-182, 185

Whitehead, James, 138

Whitney, W. C, 224

Williams, Samuel W., 309, 345, 347

Wilson, Henry Lane, 390

Wilson, Woodrow, as Atlanta lawyer,
87; watches Georgia Legislature, 91;
meets Walter Hines Page in Atlanta,
96; Watson on historical writings of,
304; Watson pronounces, an "imprac-
tical prig," 319; Watson's campaign
against, in 1912, 368-372, 374; Wat-
son's complaints against, 390; and
World War I, 391-396, 399-400;
Watson on policies of, 401-410, 413-
414

Winn, Thomas E., 197

Wool Hat, The, 200

World War I, 390 f.

Wright, Boykin, 233, 334~33*

Yale University, 48
Youdenitch, 419

XI

C. Vann Woodward is now professor of history
at Yale University. Tom Watson was first pub-
lished by The Macmillan Company in 1938. This
book was planned and produced at Savannah,
Georgia, by The Beehive Press, which publishes
sources and studies of southern history and litera-
ture. Its pressmark, which appears above and
pictures bees busy at their hive, expresses the en-
thusiasm of this work; the source of the press-
mark — an early colonial pamphlet entitled An
Impartial Enquiry into the State and Utility of
the Province of Georgia, London, 1741 — sug-
gests a spirit of free intellectual endeavor. This
book was printed at Kingsport, Tennessee, by
The Kingsport Press.

THE BEEHIVE PRESS

321 Barnard Street
Savannah, Georgia