1

OF GENTLEMEN AND SOBs: THE GREAT WAR AND PROGRESSIVISM

IN

In April 1917, 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 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 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 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 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 .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. He looked like a top-notch medicine man. . . . He was

. . . a splendid ham actor,” and “his inability to reason was . . . contagious, it was impossible to determine where his idealism ended and his demagoguery began.” His speeches were mostly “bastard emotionalism and raven-tressed rant,” though he had “a gift for the vivid reckless phrase.” He was “likable . . . as a poolroom wit is likable, but surely not one to set in the councils of the nation.” Though his racial diatribes were misguided, “he was not a moral idiot,” just “an exhibitionist playing with fire.” The older

Percy had actually managed Vardaman’s 1899 campaign for governor and again, along with Williams, supported him in 1903.11

Bilbo evoked less benign sensibilities. He was, said the younger Percy, “a pert little monster, glib and shameless with that sort of cunning common to criminals which passes for intelligence. The people loved him. They loved him not because they were deceived in him, but because they understood him thoroughly; they said of him proudly,

‘He’s a slick little bastard.’ He was one of them and he had risen from obscurity to the fame of glittering infamy—it was as if they themselves had crashed the headlines.” 7

Vardaman might be amusingly “mischievous,” but Bilbo seemed down right sinister.

“The chief trouble with Vardaman,” Williams later mused, “is that he hasn’t any sense . .

. the chief trouble with Bilbo is that he hasn’t anything except sense.” Some in the Delta found Bilbo so abhorrent that in the general election for lieutenant-governor in 1911 they quietly supported his Socialist opponent, James T. Lester, who carried Sunflower and

Washington counties and lost Issaquena by only three votes.12

Indeed, Bilbo magnified Vardaman’s potential for mischief. Before the secret caucus, the White Chief had never run particularly well in certain white counties, especially in south Mississippi. In the 1903 primary, he garnered 51,829 votes and won by fewer than 7,000. In his 1907 loss to Williams, he fared poorly outside the hills, losing many of the counties he had carried earlier. Not until the 1911 Senate campaign, with Bilbo simultaneously running for lieutenant governor, did he enjoy a landslide victory, winning 79,380 votes, 60 percent of the total, and carrying all but five of the state’s eighty counties, sixty-one of them by a majority. The overriding issue in that campaign was the secret caucus, and Bilbo, not Vardaman, had made it so. Two years before, The Man had been virtually unknown outside his district while the White Chief had run four statewide races and had served four years as governor. Still, Bilbo polled almost as many votes (76,240) as Vardaman and carried all but one white county and sixty-eight overall.13

Most of Vardaman’s margin over Bilbo came in black counties, where he ran ahead of The Man in all but one of thirty-three. Moreover, Vardaman’s campaign that year was unlike any he had run before. He “dropped the race issue,” says Charles G.

Hamilton, who has perhaps written more on Mississippi progressivism than any other 8 historian, “and made a powerful appeal to the underprivileged against ‘railroads, predatory wealth, and its shackles of political and legislative corruption.’” Even

Vardaman’s biographer concedes that “it was Bilbo . . . more than any other man, who whipped the white masses into fury and excitement.” A south Mississippi friend insisted to Williams that “Bilbo was the ‘tug’ that towed the whole [Vardaman] fleet to victory.”14

The secret caucus, Hamilton asserts, marked “a turning point in the political history of the state.” Proportionately, more of Mississippi’s electorate voted in 1911 than at any time since disfranchisement, and progressives throughout the nation “cheered the results.” Of the eighty-seven legislators who had voted for Percy the previous year, only five retained their seats. Bourbonism had been routed, and the badge of agrarian revolt, the red necktie, seemed ubiquitous. Vardaman and Bilbo had, in Hamilton’s words, dispelled “the shadow of war and Reconstruction” and turned the voters’ attention “to other concerns beside[s] race.” In its first century of statehood, Mississippi had elected but a single governor from a white county, and since Reconstruction, all but two had come from the northern half of the state. Of the ten elected in the four decades following

1911, eight were from white counties, seven from south Mississippi.15

In 1915, Bilbo won the state’s top office, again in the first primary. He did so, says Albert Kirwan, without “resort to the anti-Negro tirades which characterized

Vardaman’s political campaigns.” Bilbo later boasted that he was the first governor since

Reconstruction who did not ride into office on the race issue. “Nary a word did I say about it,” he claimed. “The Negro churches held prayer meetings in the interests of my election because I was not doing as others had done.” Apologetically explaining Bilbo’s 9 triumph to Wilson, Senator Williams attributed it less to divine intervention than to “the temporary insanity of the state of Mississippi.” Jackson Daily News editor Fred Sullens’s response was less measured and more graphic. Perhaps, he suggested, it was time to swap the eagle atop the Capitol dome for “a puking buzzard.”16

In 1916, progressivism reached its pinnacle, both in Mississippi and in

Washington. Reluctantly acknowledging the political inadequacy of his New Freedom reforms of 1913-14, Woodrow Wilson turned instead to the New Nationalist principles of his old adversary, . By election day in November, Wilson had secured from Congress virtually every feature of the Bull Moose platform of 1912: a child labor law, workmen’s compensation, a federal tariff commission, and maximum hours for railroad workers. Meanwhile, as one historian put it, Bilbo was wringing from

Mississippi lawmakers “more Progressive” measures than any other legislative session

“in the state’s history.” Moreover, unlike earlier reformers, Bilbo struck at the vitals of the plantation elite’s power. The centerpiece of his program was a call for a constitutional convention to address the related issues of legislative apportionment, property tax assessment, and distribution of school funds.17

Since the Civil War, Mississippi had operated under what Bilbo termed “the most anomalous, paradoxical and illogical tax system ever devised by an enlightened government.” While the legislature set the ad valorem millage rate, each board of supervisors assessed its county’s property values. Tax policy had degenerated into a perverse game, as every rise in state millage rates provoked local reductions in assessments, leaving the revenue stream basically unchanged and increasingly inadequate. While mules were sometimes known to triple in value simply by being sold 10 across certain county lines, the real beneficiaries of the tax charade were under-assessed corporations and prosperous black county plantations. Between 1890 and 1907, the

Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad allegedly paid taxes on property assessed at $11 million that for ratemaking purposes was valued at $58.5 million. Collective assessment of all railroads in 1900 totaled $26 million and generated a paltry $171, 000 in state revenue. In the mid-nineties, a Jackson editor wondered publicly why “Copiah, a piney woods county,” ranked “ahead of all the river and prairie counties . . . in tax paying . . . property,” why landowners in Lincoln and Jones counties paid more than those in many of the plantation counties. “It would appear,” he scornfully observed, “that the piney woods” was wallowing in wealth. A 1916 legislative investigation concluded that the tax system “tended to impose burdens with reference to inability to escape, rather than in proportion to ability to pay.”18

The results, of course, were stingy appropriations for state services and chronic state debt. In 1876, Mississippi’s Redeemers had inherited a 2 ½-mill levy and an

$830,750 debt, both small by Reconstruction standards in the South. By the time Bilbo took office in 1916, the debt had mushroomed to $2.5 million and the ad valorem rate to nine mills. What money the state did appropriate for education, it distributed among the counties on the basis of educable, rather than actually enrolled, children. By grossly discriminating in favor of white schools, black counties were able to spend much more per white student than could the poorer white counties. As late as 1916, Washington

County in the Delta, with only 888 white children in school, could pay its 46 white teachers $56 a month ($29 per white child) while Newton County, with 3,459 white students, paid its 110 white teachers $37 ($8 per child). With similar populations, both 11 counties received $41,251 in state funds; Newton County simply had far fewer black children to shortchange. A 1927 University of Wisconsin study of education in

Mississippi found that, among whites, Delta students “ranked ahead of children in the counties of all other sections in respect to both mental ability and intellectual advancement. . . . Superior economic conditions,” the report concluded, spawned

“superior schools, superior teachers, and superior facilities.” Black children, of course, suffered most of all.19

Undergirding such inequities was a legislative apportionment severely tilted in favor of predominantly black counties, particularly those in the Delta. In 1890, 45,000 eligible white voters in black counties had controlled sixty-eight seats in the state House of Representatives, leaving but fifty-two for the 71,000 voters in the white counties. The new constitution of that year reapportioned lawmakers on the basis of “voting” rather than total population and sprinkled thirteen new seats exclusively among the white counties. Still, in 1900, black counties such as Wilkinson, with barely a thousand white voters, and Coahoma, with 1,200, sent two representatives to Jackson while such white counties as Jones, with almost 3,000 white voters, and Harrison, with 5,600, sent one and one-and-a-half (Harrison shared a “floater” representative with neighboring Jackson

County) respectively. A constitutional amendment that year perpetuated the imbalance by dividing the state into three districts, one encompassing the Delta and River counties, and allotted each a minimum of forty-four seats in the lower chamber, with a maximum total of 133. Additional seats in any district could come only at the expense of other counties in the same district. Rapidly growing and overwhelmingly white south

Mississippi was frozen into irrevocable under-representation. During the 1915 campaign, 12

Bilbo reminded voters at a rally in Biloxi, “It has been seventy years since South

Mississippi has furnished a governor and it’s about time for the people of this part of the state to be recognized.”20

Unable to secure a constitutional convention in 1916, Bilbo pursued his other objectives piecemeal. The most spectacular success came with the Kyle Law, which allowed the governor to appoint a “board of state tax commissioners” authorized to

“investigate all matters of taxation and [to] recommend . . . such changes and alternatives” they considered necessary to create “a more perfect, equitable, adequate, just and thorough system of taxation and valuation of property for state and county taxation” (emphasis added). Sponsored in the legislature by Bilbo loyalist A. H. Kyle of

Panola County, the measure required the commissioners “to familiarize themselves,” not only with “property values,” but with “the general economic conditions prevailing throughout the state.” They were to visit each county annually to “ascertain what property, if any, is escaping taxation or assessment.” It was a sweeping mandate with the potential to give Mississippi a modern council of economic advisors. Of more immediate significance, the act granted the board power to revise any assessment not based on actual values.21

Delta lawmakers howled, assailing the scheme as “unconstitutional, undemocratic, dangerous, revolutionary, and dictatorial.” Their protests were both self- serving and well-founded. In 1917, overall assessments rose $254 million, despite falling in sixty-five of the state’s eighty-one counties. The most dramatic increases came in the

Delta, where Washington County’s assessment jumped 234 percent, Coahoma’s 433 percent, and Bolivar’s 464 percent, generating $124 million of additional revenue from 13 those counties alone. Only the threat of fines and jail sentences persuaded Tunica

County’s supervisors to comply with the law. The new tax commission administered the act evenhandedly, however, as assessments also rose in south Mississippi, including a

$10 million increase in Bilbo’s home county of Pearl River. Assessments on corporate property, including railroads, increased $40 million. A special legislative session in 1917 optimistically reduced the ad valorem rate to four mills, but an ensuing deficit required an increase to five and one-half in 1918. For the first time in memory, Mississippi balanced its budget, and the Kyle law became the “cornerstone” of the state’s fiscal system.22

Bilbo’s other major victories in 1916 came in education, which more than any other issue, according to Jesse Lamar White, measured “the general progressive instinct” in the Magnolia State. Among lawmakers elected in 1915, teachers outnumbered those from every other occupation, including lawyers and farmers. The governor himself had begun his career in the classroom, and his election, along with theirs, one historian suggests, was perhaps “the most important development of all” in the state’s struggle for educational advancement. The 1916 appropriation for schools was a record $1.73 million, which rose to $1.87 million the following year. With more than thirty thousand of Mississippi’s white adults illiterate, the legislature created free night schools and established a state commission on illiteracy. To sustain the momentum, the governor proposed an educational commission to study school systems in other states as a basis for specific recommendations to the 1918 legislature. The war intervened, however, distracting the public’s attention, and the lawmakers rejected the commission’s major proposal, a comprehensive state code for education. Again, Bilbo salvaged several provisions individually. Most significant were a compulsory school attendance law, 14 though opponents’ amendments eroded its effectiveness considerably, and the long sought equalization of school funds. The latter, which shifted the basis of allocation among counties from the total number of educable children to students actually enrolled, required constitutional revision. The following year, voters approved it by a majority of almost five to one. In 1921, the United States Commissioner of Education declared that since 1917 Mississippi had set the national pace for educational progress.23

The 1916 legislature enacted a host of additional Bilbo-backed reforms: creation of several modern state boards and agencies, including a highway commission that qualified the state for access to federal funds; abolition of the fee system for most county officials; restrictions on lobbying activity; abolition of public hanging; and significant expansion of the system of eleemosynary institutions. It had been the most productive single session in Mississippi’s legislative history, the culmination of more than a decade of progressive ferment. United behind Vardaman and Bilbo, the reform faction appeared ready to wrest the reins of power permanently from the hands of a Bourbon elite who had held them for almost half a century.24

The war, however, changed everything. Shortly before taking office, Woodrow

Wilson had confided to a Princeton friend, “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.” If confined to his second term, that remark proved tragically prescient. Late in 1914, he worried that “every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war.” However exaggerated, the insight was essentially accurate. As early as 1915, progressives divided bitterly over the preparedness controversy, foreshadowing, in David Kennedy’s words, “the havoc the war itself would wreak upon the left. Many reformers would be destroyed. Some would be 15 driven further left. The majority, who with fear and trembling decided to take their stand with Wilson, began almost immediately to feel the withering effect of war on the liberal spirit.”25

Whatever its effect elsewhere, the war especially devastated progressivism in

Mississippi. The first, most costly, and perhaps most tragic casualty was the man to whom virtually every reformer in the state traced his heritage, however tenuously, the

White Chief himself. Vardaman’s opposition to Wilson’s foreign policy, like that of

LaFollette and others among “the little group of willful men,” was an adjunct to his progressivism. “War,” he believed, “is the game of the men in power, and those who profit pecuniarily thereby—a bloody game in which the ignorant and subservient masses are merely the pawns.” The surging tide of patriotism, however, had overwhelmed class politics, and even many of Vardaman’s most loyal supporters had come to agree with

Judge R. F. Cochran of Meridian that “Woodrow Wilson’s policies are the clearest expressions of God’s will on earth to mankind.” The senator’s intransigent, and increasingly personal, opposition to the president was growing intolerable.26

By 1918, Vardaman was in deep trouble politically. Shortly before the congressional vote on war, his closest advisors met with him at the Roosevelt Hotel in

New Orleans to persuade him to support the Wilson. “We informed” him, one of them later recalled, “of the change in sentiment in Mississippi from peace to war . . . and told him that we felt his attitude would cost him his seat in the Senate.” He crossed the room to the window and “stood there a few minutes,” gazing vacantly out over Baronne Street.

Turning back, he thanked his friends for their concern but assured them of his “abiding faith in the people of the United States doing the right thing when they have an 16 opportunity to think clearly. Even if it should cost me my life I cannot do what you now think you want me to do.” The loss of a Senate seat paled, he declared, when “compared with the loss of lives and liberty and opportunities which would follow such a war.”

Besides, he added, “some one else will carry on my work if I am defeated.”27

In August 1917, at the Neshoba County Fair, Congressman of

Gulfport announced that he would challenge Vardaman’s reelection in the Democratic primary the following year. Though he had originally won his House seat in 1910 as a critic of the secret caucus, Harrison was hardly an ideological Vardamanite. He was, rather, as Martha Swain describes it, “the quintessential conservative in his approach to economic questions.” Vardaman defended his progressive record in the Senate, but

Harrison adroitly reduced the campaign to a single issue: “loyalty, absolute, unconditional and unmodified.” Critics distorted Vardaman’s every effort to explain his controversial votes against conscription, the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and the war declaration itself. His speeches, said Senator Williams, “graze the very edge of treason.”

Harrison officially launched his campaign at a July 4 rally in Meridian, where precisely seven years earlier Vardaman in triumphant splendor had entered the city atop a wagon drawn by eighty oxen and trailing a torch-lit parade of thousands, some carrying signs that read “Rednecks” or “Hillbillies.” To the White Chief’s mortification, Harrison now mockingly duplicated that feat, using some of the very animals that had participated in the 1911 original, this time bearing a placard inscribed with, “We helped pull him in and now we are helping pull him out again.” Notwithstanding his volunteer service in the

Spanish-American War or his two sons’ present service in the Great War, Vardaman 17 endured the humiliation of speaking from rostrums stained with bright yellow paint or hearing irreverent taunts of “Herr von Vardaman” or “Kaiser Jim.”28

The death knell sounded when newspapers printed the president’s August 5 letter to Myron McNeil of Copiah County. A Vardaman victory, said Wilson, could only mean a “condemnation of my administration,” and voters “should know this before they act.”

Their verdict came two weeks later, as Harrison led Vardaman 56,715 to 44,154, while ex-governor Edmund F. Noel limped home with but 6,730, sparing the Congressman— and the ill and physically exhausted incumbent—a second primary. Chastened but impenitent, the White Chief returned to Washington, as he informed his stepson,

to prevent the conscription of boys eighteen years of age. It is a damned outrage to rob the cradle while there are plenty of . . . mature men to fight the Nation’s battles. I do not know what will be the outcome . . . but I suppose if the “Imperious Pedagogue” demands it, it will be granted. . . . He is the coldest blooded, most selfish ruler beneath the stars today. . . . I would rather be defeated on the record I have made than to be elected as the “tool” of the White House. The fact is, I have done my duty as God gave me the power to see it and I would not change the record that I have made for the Presidency.

The war had cost Vardaman his political life, and he dragged Bilbo down with him. The progressive faction that had steadily coalesced around the White Chief since 1903 was coming apart at the seams.29

Constitutionally barred from succeeding himself as governor, Bilbo entered the race for Harrison’s soon-to-be-vacated House seat. Of his four opponents, Paul B.

Johnson of Hattiesburg would prove most formidable. A native of Scott County and a graduate of Millsaps College, Johnson passed the bar in 1903 and chose to launch his legal career in the Hub City of the Piney Woods. A stint as city judge led to two terms on the circuit bench, where he earned respect and popularity throughout south Mississippi, 18 including the Sixth Congressional District. Bilbo faced an uphill battle. Gubernatorial duties delayed campaigning and gave his opponents a significant head start. Many voters resented a sitting governor seeking another office with a year and a half left in his current term. Worst of all, “the war spirit,” as a Laurel editor put it, overshadowed all else, confronting Bilbo with an impossible dilemma: how to distance himself from

Vardaman’s unpopular stand without splitting his own constituency, many of whom remained loyal to the White Chief.30

Signs of strain between the two progressive leaders had already surfaced.

Vardaman had refused to choose among friends in the 1915 governor’s race, forcing

Bilbo to labor without an explicit endorsement. When Vardaman denounced

“bribetakers” and those who would vote for them, the conservative press took it as a reference to Bilbo, eliciting from the Senator a public denial that hardly undid the damage. As governor, Bilbo not only supported Wilson’s policies but declared his impatience with those who attributed them to the influence of “big interests, munition factories, and money lenders.” Newspapers reported that on visits to Washington in 1916 and 1917, the governor spent more time with Harrison than with Vardaman. When the

Congressman announced his candidacy for the Senate, Bilbo sat with him on the platform alongside Fred Sullens and former governor Earl Brewer.31

Ironically, Bilbo’s very progressivism as governor came back to haunt him in the campaign for Congress. For years, a tick-borne fever had ravaged dairy and beef cattle throughout the South. At one time, a federal quarantine of infected territory stretched from Virginia to California, encompassing 29 million animals in 983 counties in 15 states, including all of Mississippi. Estimates of the annual cost to the state’s farmers 19 ranged as high as $45 million. The only effective remedy seemed to be “dipping” infected cattle in concrete vats filled with a diluted arsenical compound, and in 1916 the legislature enacted Mississippi’s first mandatory dipping law. The act allowed the state

Live Stock Sanitary Board to appoint local inspectors authorized to force owners of infected animals to have them dipped regularly until eradication could be verified.

Though he had never specifically endorsed the measure, Bilbo signed it. By then, only twenty-three Mississippi counties, all in the Piney Woods, remained under quarantine.

Most farmers in those areas allowed their cattle to graze on open range land, and the immediate costs of rounding them up every two weeks and driving them as far as five miles to the nearest vat often seemed to outweigh the distant benefits of eradication.

Some argued that dipping often seemed to “eradicate cattle as well as ticks.”32

Proponents seemed vindicated, however, when the United States Department of

Agriculture announced that the quarantine would end on December 1, 1917, “a day,”

Bilbo officially proclaimed, “to be celebrated throughout the entire state.” Piney Woods cattlemen were more inclined to wreck the 6,000 vats and to hang the 526 inspectors than to celebrate them. Supplementary legislation in 1918 barring diseased animals from the open range only heightened their outrage. Some clandestinely destroyed vats, but most sought judicial relief and found an effective advocate in Judge Johnson, who declared that he would dismiss from his court any charges based on the eradication laws.

Moreover, Johnson milked the controversy politically, scorching Bilbo for his failure to veto the legislation and making the issue the centerpiece of his campaign. Even many of those who stood by the governor qualified their loyalty by explaining, “I’m fer Bilbo, but 20

I’m ag’in dippin’.” Johnson led the first primary and swamped Bilbo in the runoff

11,061 to 6,725. “I was,” The Man wailed, “crucified on a cross of ticks and politics.”33

Barely two years earlier, progressivism in Mississippi had appeared invincible.

Now, its force seemed spent, and its leaders had been, in Albert Kirwan’s words,

“stripped of all power, relegated to private life, and their followings disorganized.” In

1919, lieutenant-governor, and Bilbo protégé, Lee Russell won a gubernatorial victory that took some of the sting out of the previous year’s disasters. But the Russell administration turned into an embarrassment, and before it ended he and Bilbo would part company over patronage and pardons. The Man himself would ultimately rise from the political grave, running a strong, though unsuccessful, race for governor in 1923 before finally winning a second term four years later. This time, however, the conservative faction held a death grip on the state house of representatives, and their recalcitrance, aggravated by relentless economic depression after 1929, rendered this administration politically rancorous and legislatively barren. In 1931, Martin Sennett (Mike) Conner, on his third try, won the governorship, and the anti-reform faction reigned supreme.

Thereafter, wholesale federal intrusion under the New Deal shifted the political axis severely toward Washington and left factional lines hopelessly tangled. If the ideological waters grew muddy back home, they remained relatively clear in Washington, especially after 1935 when Bilbo arrived as Harrison’s junior colleague in the Senate. Amidst the political turmoil unleashed by World War I, Mississippi voters seemed perversely determined to vindicate at least the stability of the old senatorial legend. More fitting heirs to Vardaman and Williams hardly seemed imaginable.34

21

1 David F. , Eight Years with Wilson’s Cabinet, 1913-1920, 2 vols. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926), 1:255; David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 13; George Coleman Osborn, John Sharp Williams: Planter-Statesman of the Deep South (Baton Rouge: State University Press, 1943), 287.

2 New York Times, April 3, 1917; Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914-1917 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1935), 439-40.

3 William F. Holmes, The White Chief, James Kimble Vardaman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 315-18; Millis, 410-11, 436-40; New York Times, April 3, 1917.

4 David Leon Chandler, The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians: A Revisionist History (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1977), 281.

5 Osborne, 4-7, 13-21; Chester M. Morgan, Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 14-16; , Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1941), 143; Charles Granville Hamilton, “Mississippi Politics in the Progressive Era, 1904-1920” (Ph. D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1958), 119.

6 Morgan, 16.

7 Ibid., 31-37; Hamilton, 213; Jesse Lamar White, Jr., “Mississippi Electoral Politics, 1903-1976: The Emerging Modernization Consensus” (Ph. D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979), 142-46.

8 Holmes, 3-20, 43-49.

9 Ibid., 49-60, 75-80, 102-112; Thomas Neville Boschert, “A Family Affair: Mississippi Politics, 1882-1932” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Mississippi, 1995), 121.

10 Morgan, 52; Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951), 226; A. Wigfall Green, The Man Bilbo (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), 39.

11 Percy, 143-44; Holmes, 95, 111; Kirwan, 79; Boschert, 157, 187.

12 Percy, 148; Boschert, 318; Hamilton, 226-27.

13 Holmes, 191; Kirwan, 184; Hamilton, 224-25; Larry Thomas Balsamo, “Theodore G. Bilbo and Mississippi Politics, 1877-1932” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1967), 76; Morgan, 52-53.

14 Hamilton, 213; Holmes, 251, 239; Boschert, 260.

15 Hamilton, 213, 225, 228-29, 304.

16 Kirwan, 253, 257-58; Hamilton, 303, 306.

17 Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1954), 223-41; Bobby Wade Saucier, “The Public Career of Theodore G. Bilbo” (Ph. D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1971), 29; Balsamo, 105-109; Kirwan, 259-60.

18 William D. McCain, “The Triumph of Democracy, 1916-1932,” in A , 2 vols., ed. Richard Aubrey McLemore (Hattiesburg: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973) 2: 22

61; Balsamo, 109-112; Hamilton, 316, 30; Kirwan, 261-63; Lester Milton Salamon, “Protest, Politics, and Modernization in the American South: Mississippi as a Developing Society” (Ph. D. dissertation, , 1971), 329-30.

19 Kirwan, 261-63; Hamilton, 342-43; William N. Washburn, “Progressive Educational Reform in Mississippi during the First Bilbo Administration” (M. A. Thesis, University of Mississippi, 1962), 23-24.

20 Kirwan, 78-79, 141; Balsamo, 19-20, 96.

21 Laws of the State of Mississippi, 1916, Chapter 98, 97-100; Balsamo, 112-13; Kirwan, 263.

22 Balsamo, 113-14, 118; Hamilton, 316-19; Kirwan, 263-64.

23 Balsamo, 117, 120-22; White, 87; Washburn, 37, 109; Saucier, 33; Hamilton, 345.

24 Balsamo, 115.

25 Link, 81; Kennedy, 11, 36.

26 Holmes, 325, 348-49, 356.

27 Ibid., 317; Kirwan, 280.

28 Martha H. Swain, Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 5-10, 16; Holmes, 353-57; Kirwan, 281-86; Balsamo, 127.

29 Swain, 10; Vardaman to Douglas Robinson, August 24, 1918, James K. Vardaman Letters, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi; Holmes, 357-58, 327; Kirwan, 288- 91.

30 Morgan, 20; Balsamo, 128-30, 134-35.

31 Holmes, 331-33, 385; Boschert, 312; Saucier, 37-38; Kirwan, 284-85.

32 Chester M. Morgan, “Ticks and Politics,” unpublished paper in the author’s possession, 2-6, 10- 14; Morgan, Redneck Liberal, 38-39; Balsamo, 131-33

33 Morgan, “Ticks and Politics,” 12-14; Balsamo, 132-34.

34 Holmes, 360; Kirwan, 291; Balsamo, 135, 139-40, 147-48; Morgan, Redneck Liberal, 78-79, 233.