Word: georgias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...hired college athletes from Pittsburgh. But there was still a South the rest of the U.S. could not quite understand. That South loved buffoons, corny oratory and the smell of violence; its prophets were demagogues like "Tom Tom" Heflin, Huey Long, Senator Bilbo and the late governor-elect of Georgia, turkey-necked "Old Gene" Talmadge. Last week it got a new one-at least temporarily. Old Gene's heavy-lidded, 33-year-old son Herman (pronounced Hummon) claimed that he was now the governor of Georgia...
...Caesarean operation by which Hummon was jerked out of obscurity, blessed by the General Assembly, bathed in publicity, and installed in the governor's mansion in his pappy's place. Neither had it seen anything like the comic opera alarums & excursions which followed it. During the week Georgia had endured not one but three governors. Both retiring Governor Ellis Gibbs Arnall and Lieut. Governor Melvin E. Thompson, once Arnall's executive secretary, had set up governments-in-exile. And Georgia had been all but inundated in a flow of tobacco juice and horrible verbiage...
...Question. In a sense, Hummon was the work of one Gibson Greer Ezell, an unknown storekeeper from little Monticello (pop. 1,746). One day just before last November's final election, Ezell ran a coony eye over the new Georgia constitution, discovered that it provided no clear answer to a question which had been bothering him and many other Georgians: "What if ailing Old Gene Talmadge died before he got inaugurated?" Ezell thought of an answer that suited him, and telephoned Hummon: "You better get some votes written in for yourself...
Hummon got busy. On election day, 675 hastily coached Talmadge backers scratched Old Gene's name off their ballots and wrote in Hummon's. This placed him second to Gene's 143,279. When Old Gene died, Hummon and an ex-Georgia legislator named Roy V. Harris set out to parlay this handful of paper into the governorship. They put their faith in a line in the constitution which read: "If no person shall have [a] majority (of the total votes cast) then from the two persons having the highest number of votes . . . the General Assembly shall...
Almost everyone else in Georgia was confused. Many a citizen believed that glib, liberal Ellis Arnall should just continue in office. Others, including Arnall himself, thought Melvin Thompson should assume...