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By Root 1907 0

Berry of Tennessee, had gotten crossways of Memphis boss Ed Crump, and the Shelby County organization rendered the coup de grâce. Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana outmaneuvered his opponents and was renominated by acclamation at the Indiana Democratic convention on July 12. That left three in the president’s sights: Walter George of Georgia, “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, and Millard Tydings of Maryland. George had voted against the New Deal one third of the time since 1933; Smith almost half; and Tydings a whopping 77 percent—an opposition record among Democrats exceeded only by the eighty-year-old Carter Glass of Virginia, who was not up for reelection.89 In the House, Roosevelt focused on the Rules Committee and targeted three members for defeat: John J. O’Connor of New York, Howard Smith of Virginia, and Eugene Cox of Georgia.90

On August 11 FDR journeyed to tiny Barnesville, Georgia (1930 population 5,392) to dedicate a new rural electrification project. The little hamlet was jammed with more than 50,000 people who had come by car and wagon and pickup truck to see and hear their Warm Springs neighbor, the president of the United States. On the platform of notables with FDR were Senator George and his two primary opponents: Lawrence Camp, the young U.S. attorney from Atlanta who was the administration’s candidate; and the gallus-snapping, race-baiting Eugene Talmadge, the state’s former governor. Roosevelt wasted little time before he jumped into the primary fight. As an adopted son of Georgia, the president said, he felt “no hesitation in telling you what I would do if I could vote here next month.” The issue was liberal versus conservative. Senator George “is a gentleman and a scholar. He will always be my personal friend. [But he] cannot possibly in my judgment be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought.” Roosevelt said he had known former governor Talmadge for many years. “I am very certain in my own mind that his election would contribute very little to practical progress in government.” FDR said his candidate was Lawrence Camp: “a man who honestly believes that many things must be done and done now to improve the economic and social conditions of the country.”91 When Roosevelt finished, he and George shook hands. “Mr. President,” said the courtly senator, “I regret that you have taken the occasion to question my Democracy and to attack my record. I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”92

For the next month Walter George, a charter member of the Senate’s inner club, carried the fight to every crossroads and creek bottom in the state. Roosevelt’s intervention was “a second march through Georgia,” he told rapt audiences from Valdosta to Mountain City.93 When the votes were counted, George won easily, with 141,235 to Talmadge’s 103,075. FDR’s candidate finished a distant third, with 76,778.94

In South Carolina the race turned ugly. Smith was the Senate’s senior Democrat, elected when Taft beat Bryan in 1908. As longtime chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he had earned the sobriquet “Cotton Ed” for the solicitous care he bestowed on the South’s plantation economy. The political scientist V. O. Key, Jr., once said of Smith that he was “unrivaled as a critic of the New Deal, unmatched as an exponent of white supremacy, and without peer as a defender of southern womanhood.”95 But Smith was long in the tooth and suffered from Potomac Fever—the disease endemic to legislators who spend too much time in Washington. Of all those earmarked by FDR for defeat, he seemed the most vulnerable. To challenge Smith, the administration convinced Governor Olin D. Johnston to make the race. Johnston announced his candidacy from the steps of the White House, and that gave Smith a tailor-made issue to excite the unreconstructed sentiments of his South Carolina constituents: Washington can’t tell the people of the Palmetto State how to vote! Arguing states’ rights and “New Deal Reconstruction,” Smith resorted to one of the most vicious racist campaigns in South Carolina history and beat Johnston by 10 percentage