Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Senator Thomas E. Watson of Georgia was one of the strangest political characters that ever graced the American political landscape. In worshipful respect, my uncle Tom Peak had his huge framed picture hanging over his fireplace until the day he died. Watson was a populist who led poor farmers until he found them too backward and ignorant for political activity. He once supported the vote for blacks IN GEORGIA! His newspaper fanned the flames that led to the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. I was then not two years old.

Senator Watson died in 1922 and was succeeded by Rebecca Felton, the first United States woman senator. She served one day and was succeeded by Walter Franklin George. George became one of the great thorns in the side of Franklin Roosevelt for the twelve years they shared government power—Roosevelt progressive president, Senator George—insisting that the clock be stopped NOW, and FOREVER!

George, and Franklin Roosevelt were exact opposites. Roosevelt smiled easily; George, a stiff collared stuffed shirt, had smiled once upon a time but didn’t remember when. He was dignified and serious—never talked nigger-hate, just acted to preserve the status-crow.

Roosevelt had a plan. In its simplest illumination, it was to raise up the hardest corps of downtrodden poor whites and blacks one single notch on the economic scale. Senator George thought those folks were excellent at their social level of the time, scrounging the earth for enough to eat. In his view, all was well.

In 1938, after a dozen congress people had stymied Roosevelt’s efforts to raise the standard of living a single notch, FDR threw caution to the wind. He decided to purge those bastards from the Congress.

In August, after a confab with Mexico’s president, Roosevelt landed his transport, the USS Houston in Pensacola, took a train to his hideaway in Warm Springs for a short rest and moved on the Barnesville, Georgia. There Senator George waited for him to celebrate the opening of one of Roosevelt’s progressive rural electrification projects. On the platform also stood U. S. Attorney Lawrence Camp who had been recruited by the president to run against Senator George in the upcoming election
In his speech, Roosevelt said: “I trust and am confident that Senator George and I shall always be personal friends” well knowing that “the most intractable of white supremacists” had never been his friend and would never be. Unrattled, George took the challenge and predicted a good fight.

Later that same day Roosevelt spoke to the crowd who met the presidential train in Greenville SC which was the district of Congressman Cotton Ed Smith. In opposing FDR, Smith had stated that a man and his family could live on fifty cents a day. FDR used that occasion to tell SC voters what their representative thought of them.

The third of these deadwood congresspersons Roosevelt tried to dump, was from the North—New York State as I recall. All were reelected, remaining in those great meditative bodies to represent reaction and entrenched power—devil take the ignorant electorate.

Are things really all that different today?

END


P.S. I personally remember this presidential fiasco of the late 1930s. My source for the above was: Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black. Mr. Black, scion of a wealthy Canadian family and crackerjack writer, is presently serving a long sentence for financial fraud in United States Federal prison. "