In April 1917, John Sharp Williams Was Almost Sixty-Three Years Old, and He Could Barely Hear It Thunder

1 OF GENTLEMEN AND SOBs: THE GREAT WAR AND PROGRESSIVISM IN MISSISSIPPI In April 1917, John Sharp Williams was almost sixty-three years old, and he could barely hear it thunder. Sitting in the first row of the packed House chamber, he leaned forward, “huddled up, listening . approvingly” as his friend Woodrow Wilson asked the Congress, not so much to declare war as to “accept the status of belligerent” which Germany had already thrust upon the reluctant American nation. No one knew how much of the speech the senior senator from Mississippi heard, though the hand cupped conspicuously behind the right ear betrayed the strain of his effort. Frequently, whether from the words themselves or from the applause they evoked, he removed his hand long enough for a single clap before resuming the previous posture, lest he lose the flow of the president’s eloquence.1 “We are glad,” said Wilson, “now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included; for the rights of nations, great and small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy.” That final pregnant phrase Williams surely heard, for “alone he began to applaud . gravely, emphatically,” and continued until the entire audience, at last gripped by “the full and immense meaning” of the words, erupted into thunderous acclamation.2 Scattered about the crowded chamber were a handful of dissenters, including Williams’s junior colleague from Mississippi, James K. Vardaman. Only a few weeks 2 before, Vardaman had opposed the president’s proposal to arm American merchant vessels in the face of Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1. Though not participating in the filibuster that talked the bill to death in the Senate, he had refused to sign a round-robin in support of the measure, earning him inclusion in Wilson’s public denunciation of the “little group of willful men,” who “representing no opinion but their own,” had “rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” Two days hence, Vardaman would cast one of only six Senate votes against the declaration of war, and even now, as he sat, sadly, amidst the crescendo of enthusiasm for the president’s call to arms, his opposition and near isolation were palpable. Earlier, as the senators had filed two by two into the chamber, each carried in his hand or wore in his lapel a tiny American flag; at the conclusion of Wilson’s speech, “those who were wearing, not carrying flags,” ripped them from their coats and “waved with the rest, and they all cheered wildly.” Vardaman’s fellow progressive from the other party, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, “stood motionless with his arms folded tight . chewing gum with a sardonic smile.” Only he and Vardaman were “flagless.”3 There is a venerable legend, according to David Chandler, that since the United States Constitution already provided for two senators from each state when Mississippi joined the Union in 1817, the people tacitly agreed that one seat would be reserved for a gentleman, the other for an SOB; that way the whole state would always be represented. In any case, these two, the urbane planter-statesman and the boisterous agrarian radical, embodied the contradictions imbedded in an archaic agrarian society pervaded by class and racial tensions. Since the 1870s, Mississippians had battled those complexities with 3 but little interference from the outside world. Forces unleashed by the Great War would end that relative isolation and hasten Mississippi and her people along their tortured path to modernity.4 John Sharp Williams was indeed a gentleman. Orphaned young, reared on his grandfather’s 3,000-acre plantation in Yazoo County, educated abroad and at the University of Virginia, he personified the Bourbon forebears who dominated the state following the overthrow of Reconstruction. Vardaman, by contrast, was the White Chief of Mississippi politics, symbol and leader of a redneck revolt that after his gubernatorial triumph in 1903 challenged the Redeemers’ grip on state government and swept Mississippi into the mainstream of progressive reform. To detractors, like Will Percy of Greenville, he was “a kindly vain demagogue unable to think, and given to emotions he considered noble,” but to the masses of poor white farmers, he was a tribune come to judgment for the people. His administration (1904-1908) regulated and taxed corporations, improved education, and humanized the penal system. It also created a textbook commission that forbade the use of any history volume whose account of the “late Civil War” was not “fair and impartial, and written from a Confederate point of view.” Though Vardaman lost a bid for the United States Senate to Williams in 1907, his reform faction of the Democratic Party controlled state politics for a generation.5 A simple catalogue of the reformers’ subsequent achievements more than vindicates their progressive credentials. Between 1908 and 1924, Mississippi: restricted child labor; outlawed blacklisting of union members; increased employer liability; set safety standards for railroads; increased appropriations for education; consolidated rural schools; created a junior college system; established a normal college; made school attendance compulsory; restricted lobbyists; stiffened antitrust regulations; restricted corporate land ownership; regulated stock sales; established a highway 4 commission, a tax commission, a bank board, and a pardon board; strengthened the railroad commission; adopted the initiative, the referendum, and a presidential primary; built a tuberculosis hospital, a school for the feebleminded, a juvenile reformatory, and charity hospitals; allowed cities to adopt the commission system; ratified the federal income tax amendment and enacted a state income tax; outlawed usury, interlocking directorates, and bank holding companies; ended the fee system, county convict leasing, and public hanging; enacted a food and drug law and a tick eradication program; and made the state judiciary elective. It was an impressive record.6 The pivotal event came in 1910 when the infamous “secret caucus” of Democratic legislators again denied Vardaman a Senate seat and inadvertently catapulted an obscure Piney Woods lawmaker into the political limelight. State senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Pearl River County publicly claimed that he had been bribed to change his vote from Vardaman to LeRoy Percy, the ultimate victor in the contest to fill the unexpired term of the recently deceased Anselm McLaurin. The following year, turning scandal to political advantage, Vardaman defeated Percy for the full Senate term, and “The Man,” as Bilbo took to calling himself, won a first primary victory for lieutenant governor.7 The differences between mentor and protégé reflected something significant about Mississippi politics in the early twentieth century. The fundamental distinction was regional. Though Vardaman had grown up in the hills, he chose to become a Delta man, marrying a Leflore County widow from whom he inherited a 3,000-acre plantation and the social status that accompanied it. Soon he became “conscientious about . manners and social niceties.” Politically, he absorbed the black county Bourbonism of his mentors, H. D. Money, a cousin, and Money’s benefactor, J. Z. George—strategist of Mississippi’s redemption, father of the 1890 constitution, and architect of disfranchisement. From them, and from old Benjamin F. Ward of Winona, Vardaman 5 inherited the Bourbon obsession with white supremacy and, early on at least, a commitment to social and economic conservatism. As a young legislator, he supported tax breaks for business and opposed a state income tax, an elective judiciary, and a primary law.8 Twice in the 1890s, Vardaman sought the Democratic nomination for governor, and twice the Redeemer establishment denied him. Disappointed, he remained loyal, defending party solidarity against Populism, especially in the white counties where he discovered the oratorical magic of yoking bitter agrarian discontent to latent racial anxiety. By the turn of the century, he was openly advocating abolition of black education and repeal of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that sustained it. “To educate a Negro,” he proclaimed, “is to spoil a good field hand.” The 1902 primary law, which transferred control of party nominations from courthouse cliques to rank-and-file Democrats, sealed his transformation from Bourbon conservative to agrarian radical. The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters were poor white farmers, and by now Vardaman had sincerely embraced and skillfully mastered their political sensibilities. His election as governor in 1903 thrust Mississippi firmly into the Progressive Era.9 Bilbo, on the other hand, represented the interests not only of white counties in general, but Piney Woods counties in particular. The immediacy of the heritage of Reconstruction and Redemption, as well as the centrality of racial politics, was foreign to him. His south Mississippi constituents were more concerned with the depredations of railroad and sawmill companies and inequities in legislative apportionment and the distribution of school funds. Whereas Vardaman’s affinity for redneck politics, however sincere, was learned, Bilbo’s was natural. A reporter noted that long after his conversion 6 to progressivism the White Chief, “while posing as a commoner,” continued to dress “like a dandy” and carried himself with the “stilted, imperious air” of an aristocrat. Bilbo, however, as his biographer put it, was known to conclude a campaign stop by accompanying the menfolk “behind the barn to relieve his kidneys just as he had shared his spleen with them on the stump”10 The two men’s enemies responded accordingly. Will Percy confessed that his father LeRoy “rather liked Vardaman,” whom the son described as “a flamboyant figure of a man, immaculately overdressed, wearing his black hair long to the shoulders, and crowned with a wide cowboy hat.

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