Word: vardaman
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Originally, the county was inhabited by Sartorises, Varners and Comptons. Now it is just about all Snopeses-the twins, Bilbo and Vardaman Snopes, Wallstreet Panic Snopes, Admiral Dewey Snopes, Byron and Virgil Snopes and Montgomery Ward Snopes. (The reader is grateful for an occasional mnemonic rhyme, e.g., one Snopes is called Eck, "the one with the broken neck.") Malignant, hated, despised, physically maladroit, the Snopeses prevail over better men by their rapacity and lack of pride or shame. They are like monkeys on the backs of men, and they move to "the blind glare of the blind money...
...banker's banker, Martin has educated a whole new generation of Federal Reserve officials in the classic function of U.S. central banking: keeping money in balance with production with as little direct Government interference as possible. Says FRB Governor (and Truman crony) J. K. Vardaman: "Martin has a better mastery than any man I know of the intermingling of private enterprise and federal supervision in this mixing bowl of the system. He has done more than any man to ensure continuation of the system by Congress...
...epitome of respectability-a devoted family man and a prosperous landowner for whom politics is a passion rather than a livelihood. And even in his most intemperate outbursts, Eastland never descends to the kind of semi-obscene, anti-Negro venom displayed by Mississippi's late Senator James Vardaman when he declared: "I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning...
...precisely his restraint and respectability that make Eastland a far more dismaying phenomenon than Vardaman and his ilk ever were. When an old-style Southern politician made an unvarnished appeal to racial hatred, it was possible to dismiss it as a coldly cynical maneuver to get the poor white vote; it was obvious that the decent, educated white people of the South did not feel that way. But when James Eastland soberly proclaims his undying opposition to integrated schools, he is obviously speaking from a profound conviction, and his voice is the authentic voice of most of the South...
Alabama's Vardaman managed to become a leading figure at the meeting simply by telling of a hint he had had from Ike. In 1951, Vardaman recalled, he had gone to Paris to urge General Eisenhower to run for President, concluding his speech: "General, please do me a favor. Don't try to stop us." At that time, Ike smiled, shook hands, said nothing beyond wishing Vardaman a pleasant voyage home. A few weeks ago, Claude Vardaman went to the White House, reminded the President of their 1951 talk and pointed to the somewhat similar situation existing this...