“Georgia,” as Ray Charles sings in a classic recording, today, had been on my mind “the whole day through.”
So, perhaps, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the somewhat random process that generates #stampoftheday candidates today produced a 4-cent stamp honoring one of the state’s most important and influential politicians in the mid 20th century. Issued on November 5, 1960, the stamp features Walter George, who represented Georgia in the US Senate from 1922 until 1957 and who served as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and also the Finance Committee. Though somewhat forgotten today, in the 1950s, Life Magazine called him “one of the most distinguished legislators of his time and the most revered man in the Senate” while Collier’s called him “the solemn, dignified, and well-nigh unassailable senior Senator from Georgia.”
George’s career, including the forces that drove him out of the Senate, illustrates the many ways Georgia has changed, particularly the transformations that brought the state to point where it is tonight, when it could be the place that settles (at least theoretically) this drawn-out presidential election.
George began his career as a conservative, isolationist senator who often tangled with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who actively campaigned against George in 1938. “Let me make it clear,” Roosevelt explained. “He is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question a scholar and a gentleman…but he is a man who cannot in my judgment be classified as belonging to the liberal school of thought.”
George did come around and support some aspects of the New Deal and in the 1940s he also became a fervent supporter of internationalism, including playing an important role in the Senate’s 1945 approval of the United Nations Charter. Although he was not one of the Senate’s leaders on segregation, George actively opposed civil rights legislation. In his obituary, the New York Times quoted him as saying “we have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution. But we have been very diligent and astute in violating the spirit of such amendments and statutes as would lead the Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man. And we shall continue to conduct ourselves in that way.”
But, because of his respect for the Supreme Court, George refused to publicly criticize the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a stance that led then Governor Herman Talmadge, a staunch segregationist, to challenge him in 1956. Concluding he was likely to lose, George decided not to run for a seventh term. That departure was lamented not only by conservatives but also by leading liberals, such as then-Senator Hubert Humphrey, who said George “represented the finest of traditions of this great deliberative body . . . a profound and effective statesman . . . when some of us felt too timid to speak up, this brave man spoke up.”
Talmadge’s election foreshadowed the political changes that transformed Georgia over the latter half of the 20th century and the start of this century. Like most southern states it once Democratic, backing every Democratic presidential nominee between 1868 and 1960 (including Harry Truman in 1948 when four Southern states – South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi backed Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat bid). But the state backed Barry Goldwater in 1964, George Wallace in 1968 and Richard Nixon in 1972 before twice backing native son Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in 1976 and 1980. But since then the state has been reliably Republican voting for only once for a Democrat (Bill Clinton in 1992) in every Presidential election since 1984. If, as appears likely, Georgia turns blue tonight, it will be a major reversal. And, of course, that victory was fueled in large measure by the votes of Blacks, who backed by Joe Biden by an 87/11 margin (particularly Black women who backed him by a 91/8 margin).
So tonight, I honor Walter George’s contribution and lament his shortcomings. But most of all, I celebrate that his home state may go beyond the limits of the last few decades and may do so with votes from Clayton County, which, until recently, was represented by John Lewis.
And even though I have found much peace in the last few evenings, tonight I feel like singing “just an old sweet song” because the election has been keeping “Georgia on my mind.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.