Word: johnstons
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge ousted his politically hostile State Highway Commission by declaring martial law and setting National Guardsmen with machine guns over highway funds (TIME, July 3, 1933), there were few more interested observers than a young politician named Olin Dewitt Talmadge Johnston across the Savannah River in South Carolina. No sooner had he entered his State's Legislature in 1929 than Representative Johnston began charging the head of South Carolina's State Highway Commission, potent Ben Mack Sawyer, with political skulduggery. Next year he ran for Governor with the slogan "Out with Tsar...
...last week 61 South Carolina National Guardsmen marched up to the State Office Building in Columbia, trained machine guns on its entrance. Since taking office in January, 38-year-old Governor Johnston had been trying to make good his campaign promises by attempting to withhold Chief Commissioner Sawyer's salary, appointing new members to the Commission, trying to discharge old ones. Each time he had been balked by statutes and injunctions. "A state of rebellion," he now proclaimed, "exists in the Highway Department...
Moving swiftly. Governor Johnston set up a new Commission, dispatched Guardsmen to seize $1,871,352 of highway funds in three Columbia banks, announced he would have his promised $3 tags on sale within a fortnight. Also wasting no time, ousted Commissioner Sawyer & friends sped to the Chief Justice of South Carolina's Supreme Court, got an injunction forbidding the Johnston Commission to disburse highway funds. Banks promptly refused to honor the new Commission's vouchers. In this stalemate bewildered motorists reached the deadline for buying 1936 licenses, got high-priced tags or went without.* Those who waited...
Billy Rose (né Rosenberg), one of the brightest boys ever graduated from New York City's Public School No. 44, has brooked very few failures in his 34 years. As his biographer, Alva Johnston, has pointed out. Rose has become one of the shrewdest characters in the cut-throat life of the metropolis by sheer quickness of thinking. He won grade-school medals for sprinting by learning to jump the starter's gun without detection. Later Rose's instinct for what pleases the masses made him one of the most successful song writers of the times...
Another highway material currently attracting attention is cotton. In Mississippi last month huge bolts of open-mesh cotton fabric were unrolled, like a mile-long rug, on the new road between Greenville and Scott, under the eyes of 400 engineers, farmers and Federal bureaucrats, including Manager Oscar Johnston of AAA's Cotton Pool. The cotton, fixed by tar. is laid between the clay and gravel base and the asphalt surfacing. It acts as a binder, prevents stretching and cracking. Extra cost of the binder is $750 per mile, which, experiments in other States show, should be returned later...