CONVERSATION WITH ELLIS ARNALL

STEELY:	I'm Mel Steely, and this is Ted Fitz-Simons with me from West Georgia College. We're continuing our discussions with former Governor former Governor Ellis Arnall. This is our second videotaping. We're going to start today with the period from 1942 and Governor Arnall's gubernatorial campaign and carry it up to the present. Today is April the 2nd, 1986, and we're in Governor Arnall's law offices, in his board room. Governor, as I remember, you consulted with former Governor Cox of Ohio before making the announcement that you intended to run for governor against Gene [Eugene] Talmadge. What role did Governor Cox in Ohio play in Georgia politics, and why did you go consult him?
ARNALL:	Well, back about that time, we had three newspapers in Atlanta-- they were powerful dailies: One, the Atlanta Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Atlanta Georgian. Governor Cox, of course, was the nominee for President of the United States, and Warren Harding defeated him, the Republican candidate. Governor Cox had been governor of Ohio for two terms, and he had a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio. He was interested in journalism and newspapers. He had a winter home in Florida, and he frequently came through Atlanta en route to Florida. He kept up with these Atlanta papers and what they were doing. The Georgian and Journal were afternoon papers; the Constitution was the sole morning paper. So Governor Cox arranged to buy the Atlanta Georgian. That was owned by the Hearst syndicate. He bought the Atlanta Georgian and consolidated it into the Atlanta Journal. So that left the two papers, the Journal and Constitution. Back in those days, they never supported the same candidate. They never had the same position. If one was for white, the other one was for black. If one was for John Jones and his opponent was Jim Smith, then the other paper was for Jim Smith. So the dilemma that I faced in determining that I would be governor, and I thought I was developing a good issue, was to get the support of these Atlanta papers, which is unique and different and had never been done before. Now, one of the members of the Board of Regents that Gene Talmadge kicked out of office was [Clark Howell?], who was publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. Clark and I were good friends. Clark said that he would support me for governor, so that was fine. But then I had the problem of how do we get the Journal support. [George Biggers?] was the editor of the Journal then, and he and I were very close, and George said, "Let me tell you how you can do this, Ellis. There's only one way you can do it. Call Governor Cox and tell him who you are, commend him on his political record, and commend him for his newspaper career, and tell him that you and your wife want to come up to Trail's End"--that was the name of his home out from Dayton--"and visit." So having invited myself, he accepted the invitation to me. Mildred, then my wife, who died in nineteen hundred and eighty [1980]--we went up to Trail's End and spent a couple of days and nights with the Coxes. And Governor Cox drilled me about my views and talked about them and spent a lot of time with me, and I spent a lot of time with him, and when we got through, when we got ready to leave, he said, "Ellis, the Journal is going to endorse you for governor. But if we endorse you before the Constitution does, you'll lose the Constitution, so your ploy is to go back home and get Clark Howell and the Atlanta Constitution, who are leaning toward you anyway, to come out and endorse your candidacy for governor. And then about a week later the Journal will endorse your candidacy. And that will be the first and probably one of the few times those papers have ever been together." Governor Cox was very interested in my career, and he called himself my political godfather, which he was. Then his biography that he wrote in his later years, called Journey Through My Years--he [spent?] a whole section of that book commending me and my program in Georgia. And let me add one footnote about Governor Cox. After the Supreme Court of the United States held that the blacks could not be denied the right to vote in the so-called Democratic white primary, I went down to Florida to see Governor Cox, and I said, "Governor Cox, I've got a rough decision to make, but I've already decided. I wanted to run it by you. If I come out in defiance of the Supreme Court, I can control Georgia politics for the next four years because the feeling is so very strong against the blacks participating in the Democratic so-called white primaries. But I can't do that, because I think that every citizen is entitled to equality, and I think that the blacks and minority groups are entitled to vote in a democracy, so I'm going to take the position I will not be a party to defying the courts. We must have law and order, and the court decisions are the ligaments that hold society together." So then the legislature came into session, and they were trying to get me to pass a law outlawing the blacks and some kind of defiance rigamarole, technically complicated law, and I said, "I won't do it, and if you pass it, I'll veto it." And that was the beginning of my loss of strength in Georgia politics. But I would do it again because it was right. And as long as the United States of America, the state of Georgia remain democracies and I have anything to do with, I'm not only going to see to it that every citizen has the right to vote, but I go further and I want mandatory registration and mandatory voting and voting by mail so that we can get a larger response in the democratic process. I sometimes say there is nothing wrong with the government that a good dose of democracy will not cure. So the story of my relation with Governor Cox I've outlined. They were always in my corner. When I was governor, I don't think the newspapers were ever critical of a thing I did. I would discuss things with them if it was important so that we were in accord, and sometimes they made suggestions which I accepted and sometimes I didn't. But after we talked it out, we were all together. So Governor Cox was a close friend of mine, and he liked my wife, the first lady. He said she was a beautiful, vivacious first lady. And he and Mrs. Cox visited us frequently at the mansion. So we had both Atlanta papers together, and they are tremendously important. I hear people yak-yak about the newspapers and the mass media, but I learned long ago never to get in a controversy with the newspapers because they print while you sleep. There's no way in the world you can--the best thing to do if you don't agree with what they say is be quiet.
STEELY:	Did Governor Cox have much contact with any of the other Georgia politicians of that period?
ARNALL:	Not to my knowledge. If he wanted to know something about politics, Johnny Jones or Jim Smith, he'd call me.
FITZ-SIMONS:	It was a unique relationship.
ARNALL:	It was a unique relationship, and it was a close relationship and a good relationship. And I am devoted to the Cox family now. The papers continue kind to me. I don't remember them [...ing] me. They may have done it, but I don't remember it. We worked closely together. It just happens that my views and the press seem to be pretty much alike. We want a dynamic democracy, and we want steady progress, and we want to strengthen our government. It burns me up when I hear some clown go around and point out what's wrong with the government of the United States. It makes my blood boil. With all of its imperfections, we still have the finest government in the world today.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Did you have a mentor in politics? Oftentimes we hear that Ed [Eurith D.] Rivers had you as his protege. He's the one that brought you along at some point.
ARNALL:	Well, a lot of that is true, and yet not all true. As a matter of fact, when I came to the legislature, I was the youngest man in the legislature, and I ran for speaker pro tem. of the House, which was very unusual for a man who had never been in the capitol and never been in the legislature to run for the assistant presiding officer, but because of my very brashness it made a hit with the members, and they voted me speaker pro tem. I got more votes than the other three candidates all put together, on the first vote. Rivers was speaker of the House, and we developed a very close relationship. We worked together. And there was another man who was very influential as a mentor to me in politics. We became friends, we became enemies, we became friends, we became enemies, and yet in his later days, before he died, I would talk to him nearly every week and see how he's getting along. That was Roy V. Harris. Roy Harris was a floor leader and the man who got things done. He was the best politician I've ever known. He knew everyone in every county, who was important and who wasn't. He could sit on his phone and elect people or defeat people, pretty much. So Roy and Ed Rivers and I worked together as a triumvirate in supporting Gene Talmadge on many things, opposing him on many. And as time went on, we had a very close relationship. Roy was very ambitious to run for governor, but he never got that chance. He ran for Congress once and was defeated. And then, when he and I had a cleavage because of my advocacy of equality in voting for all the people--he was an ardent segregationist; ran a newspaper called the Augusta Courier that he spent his time condemning people and whatnot. So after we got the blacks registered, we registered 7,000 over in Richmond County, then I picked up another good man over there, and we beat Roy for the legislature. Later we made up, and they had a big barbecue for him, and I went there and made the principal speech, and Roy said--these are his words: "The Governor and I have done made up." And we done made up. And then we became close friends. When I ran for governor in '42, Roy was very instrumental and helpful in organization. You see, in Georgia at that time we had the county unit system. The larger counties had six votes; the next I believe thirty middle-size counties had four votes; and the rural counties, some of which had not even a city in them, like Echols County--they had two votes. So all you had to do--and the most unit votes controlled who was the nominee. There was no such thing as a majority popular vote like we have now. Whoever got the most units got the nomination. So it was very easy to work with Roy. Roy took every county. He knew every leader. And he said, "Now, here are the counties that are in the bag, and here are the counties you can't carry. So here's the battleground, these counties." And then we put all of our efforts and force in those counties we could carry. In those days we had political bosses, county political bosses. I remember Chatham County was run by Johnny Bouhan [pronounced BOO-hane], B-o-u-h-a-n. I remember Richmond County, Augusta, was run by John Kennedy. And for fun once, I called John Kennedy when I was running. I said, "John, are you for me?" He was public safety commissioner. He had all the police, the fire de[partment], everything. He was kind of the bigwig. I said, "Are you for me?" He said, "Why do you ask?" I said, "Well, if you're for me, I'm not going to come to Richmond County or make a speech." And he said, "Yes, I'm for you, and there's no need of you coming here and making a speech or doing anything. You'll carry this county by so many votes." And he told me the exact vote we carried it by. He said, "But now let me ask you a question. What if I told you I'm not for you?" I said, "I wouldn't come to Richmond Country because it would have been hopeless." Those were the days of the county bosses. Of course, now, as you know, they've done away with the unit system. The Supreme Court did that. And then, when Carl [E.] Sanders [Jr.] was governor in 1965, he got the legislature to pass a law that in order to be the Democratic nominee or the Republican nominee, you had to get a majority of the popular votes. So up until--even in the election of 1966, I would have been the nominee had Carl not changed that law. I always facetiously say, "Carl, you've got me the governorship" because up until then I would have been the nominee. We had the unit system, and we had the poll tax. Let's not forget the poll tax, before I became governor. While governor, we did away with the pole tax. But that enabled the county bosses to pay the tax for those who would be subservient and vote for their candidate, and that added to the machine that developed. The poll tax and not letting the blacks vote made it easier to control the elections, and then having the county bosses under the unit system was entirely different from what we have here today.
STEELY:	Talking about bosses, who was the boss of Coweta County? You identified with Coweta County for what?--sixty or seventy years.
ARNALL:	Yes. Let me put a footnote, a gigantic footnote to history. Coweta County never did and never has and never will have [boss system?].
FITZ-SIMONS:	Did you meddle in Coweta County politics? Were you kind of the godfather of Coweta County, so to speak, in those days?
ARNALL:	Well,--
FITZ-SIMONS:	Truthfully, now.
ARNALL:	I knew everybody in the county. I spoke at every crossroads, every Kiwanis, Rotary Club, whatever it was. I was a member of the United [Order?] of the Boiler Markers. I was an Odd Fellow, Woodmen of the World, Mason. I did everything. Yes, I knew everybody, and my recommendations went a long way. And the way we did in those days, if you had a local election, and I was for Mel Steely and Ted Fitz-Simons for office, I'd stand around the polls and say, "These two men are running, one for this and one for that. They are cousins of mine." Everybody was a cousin. My wonderful wife, Ruby, who has met so many people here at Coweta County--everyone was a cousin. We used the term "cousin." We don't say--we say, "I get letters from some of my kinfolks, and when they talk to me on the phone it's always Cousin [Heather?]." Because we believe in that. And Ruby said--no, I think it was Gilbert and--who was it?
STEELY:	Sullivan?
ARNALL:	Sullivan, Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote one of their operettas where someone comes out and sings, "Cousins, cousins by the dozens." Additionally, I must say this, that my political strength and influence in my county, my home county, didn't come about by my efforts. My family had been active there since 1841. They were in the textile business, the grocery business, the banking business, the warehouse business, the cotton gin business--everything else. So they were highly regarded. They were good church people, and they were good community builders, and they were highly regarded, so some of that washed off on me.
FITZ-SIMONS:	How in the world did you get Roy Harris to break with the Talmadges to go with you in '42?
FITZ-SIMONS:	Or was he with them that much? Is that a bad assumption to begin with?
ARNALL:	Well, Roy--and let me say this about--I was talking about political bosses. In those days and today--because we don't have political bosses as such--if the most influential citizen in the county is for you, you'll use it now, but in those days it was different. But the political bosses could change with the wind. Whoever was in power, that was their man. Roy Harris had been in the legislature for a number of years, but he became speaker under my administration; I made him speaker. And here let me add another gigantic footnote. I do not believe in an independent legislature. I think the people elect a governor, and he's got a program, and they're looking to him. The people don't elect a legislature; only the people in certain counties or districts vote for them. They're not statewide. The only man who's got the influence and power statewide is the governor, and he ought to have a legislature that cooperates with him. In any event, when I became governor, I named the speaker of the House, speaker pro tem, the floor leader, the chairman of every committee, and those that were for me got good committee assignment; those who were not, didn't. And that's why we passed every plank in my platform by a unanimous vote, even though a lot of them had been Talmadge people. They wanted to curry my favor. And this is true. You know, in those days you dispensed roads and all that. I used to call members of the legislature who were inclined not to vote for my program into my office, and when I got through with them, they'd be sick at the stomach, white as a sheet. And then they would vote right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	But what would you tell them?
ARNALL:	Well, how could you give Aunt Jane a job unless you support me? How can I pave that road through your peach orchard unless you support me? Oh, it's the whole story, still, here, only it's a little more refined than it used to be. [laughter]
FITZ-SIMONS:	You ran on the education issue. I think you mentioned that Talmadge laid it out for you on a silver platter and enabled you to run because of that issue. Can we talk a little about it?
ARNALL:	Yes. Let me get back--when Rivers and Harris and I really moved away from Talmadge was when the legislature adjourned without an appropriation bill, and we thought he would have to call a special session to enact an appropriation measure. But he took the position he could run the state with the last appropriation bill then in effect, and that's what he undertook to do. And this infuriated us that he took the legislative power away from the legislature to control the fiscal affairs of this state, so then we began to organize, knowing that somebody had to run against him. As you've heard me say, I always knew that I would be governor, but I had no idea it would be that quick. I thought it would be later. And the way that came about was--and it's right apropos to what's going on now, indirectly--there was a Board of Regents. When Dick [Richard B.] Russell [Jr.] was governor of Georgia, he had the legislature create the Board of Regents that controlled and operated the university system of Georgia. On that board I believe there were fourteen members, one of whom was the governor, and usually they made the governor the chairman, so he in effect ran the school system. Gene Talmadge was the chairman of the board. There were some outstanding Georgians on it: Sandy Beaver, who was at Riverside Military Academy and who had roomed with Gene at the University of Georgia; Clark Howell; Marion Smith--some of the finest people in Georgia were there. A relative of Talmadge came to him and told him that over at the University of Georgia, in the Department of Education, under Dean [Cockin?] they were teaching racial equality, and that Dr. [Marvin S.] Pittman, who was president of the college at Statesboro, had people on his faculty who were speaking about equality of citizenship. So Gene called a special meeting of the board to defy Dean Cockin and Martin Pittman of Statesboro. And he couldn't get enough votes to do it. So then he decided that he'd have to get some of the Regents off the board. There was a law in Georgia to the effect that only so many Regents can be on the board from the same college or university, and there were other provisions all tangled up. In any event, Talmadge threw off a group of the Regents, including Marion Smith, Clark Howell, Sandy Beaver, and some others, so that he had the votes to throw overboard these teachers who were alleged to have been teaching equality of citizenship. Talmadge also made a public announcement that he had checked the University of Georgia, and there were 779 Georgians on the faculty and 791 foreigners and that this was terrible. They were teaching all these foreign doctrines. And so he removed them.
FITZ-SIMONS:	By "foreign" you mean outside the state of Georgia.
ARNALL:	Yes. And he had one of his lawyers--here I add another parenthesis: In those days the attorney general, and I was attorney general, could name three assistant attorney generals, and the governor could name three. So he got one of his assistant attorney generals to come to the meeting--this is a direct quote: "Pound the chair. Pound the table. Yell 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' But I want to get rid of these folks." So with this control, he got rid of--he controlled it and he fired these eminent, worthwhile teachers. Well, we have an Association of Southern Universities and Colleges that tried to keep the colleges with scholarship and equality of the courses so that one could pick up from another if he transferred schools. They held a meeting and unanimously dropped the University of Georgia from accredited rating. The man who was president of the association was Carmichael from Vanderbilt. He was later succeeded by [Rufus Harris?], who was president of Tulane and then president of Mercer, who's chancellor of Mercer now. They were good friends of mine. In any event, the dropped the university from accredited rating. And Talmadge's response to that was that that won't matter to us one bit because we in Georgia will not recognize or acknowledge a degree from any of these schools that are members of this association. We'll run it ourselves. Of course, he didn't realize that many Georgians would go to professional schools or graduate schools in other states, other universities. Well, this went on, and I was down at Sea Island. My family and I had a rented cottage down there for a month. I would come back and forth. But one morning I picked up the Atlanta Constitution in a newsstand there at the hotel at Sea Island, and there was a big headline article that some assistant attorney general had held that Talmadge was in his legal rights in taking control of the Board of Regents and in getting rid of Regents and doing it like he wanted to. That was one of his three assistant attorney generals. So then I was confronted with the proposition if I do nothing and don't repudiate that opinion, then that's the opinion. But as attorney general I could overrule the opinion and hold that what Talmadge had done was illegal, which I, without a moment's hesitation, proceeded to do. I called the Associated Press, United Press International, and the news media and gave them my opinion. So that overnight projected me into the campaign as the candidate for the educational people. As time went on, ten other associations dropped the university system of Georgia. They broadened it to the whole system, and they dropped them from accredited rating. So the issue in 1942--and by this opinion, by the way, I didn't mean do- -it just happened it did--it eliminated all the other candidates because I'd got an issue. And as you know in politics, it's so much easier to win an election if you've got an issue than just being like everybody: against taxes and for public benefits and all that kind of foolishness. So that's the way it goes. So I ended up as the candidate, so that put Roy Harris behind me. He had to be. And Ed Rivers, and the anti-Talmadge organization. It put the educators behind me, and in every school in college the young people organized. They couldn't vote, many of them; they were under eighteen. But that put them active, and they had caravans, and they hanged Governor Talmadge in effigy out in front of the capitol and all that kind of business. And because this young crowd was so helpful to me, that's why I advocated and had enacted dropping the voting age to eighteen, because it was my feeling that if these people could be this effective without the right to vote, if you give them the right to vote they will be more effective in political affairs. So I ended up as the candidate for the anti-Talmadge faction. Now, those [d...]. There was a man named Columbus Roberts, who had been commissioner of agriculture. He wanted to run for governor. Now, had he run, that would have split the anti-Talmadge forces. And as I explained to you, under the unit system, not requiring any majority of the popular vote--so any popular vote--if you could beg enough of these small counties, you could get elected. And if the Talmadge forces had one candidate and the anti-Talmadge forces had two, there was just no way you could win. So it was not until I got ready to open my campaign the day of the opening in Newnan, because that was the day the entries closed, and they called me and said, "Roberts did not qualify. You've got him to yourself." That was the day that I knew that we had the election in the bag, because there was enough sentiment against Talmadge that since I cornered it and capitalized on it, there was just no way that Talmadge could win.
STEELY:	Why didn't Roberts qualify?
ARNALL:	Roy Harris--I give Roy a lot of credit for that. He spent every night with him, talking to him, and he told him, "It will be foolish for you to get in when Ellis has got the issue against Talmadge. You'll get defeated." And he finally reached that view. Which he would have been, defeated--because he was not well known; he was not a campaigner; he was a very rich fellow from Alabama who had come over here as a farmer and lived at Columbus. But still, another name on that ticket could have been fatal.
STEELY:	It would have you brought you down with him.
ARNALL:	Could have. So the fact that I got him alone, with the educational issue, made it like shooting fish in a barrel. Now, all during the campaign he tried to raise the race issue. Said that was the only issue in the campaign. And I pooh--poohed. I said, "Oh, Gene Talmadge is always up to tricks. Now he's put a pickaninny in his peanut politics." So the issue was race. And let me hasten to say this for history: that I went a long way toward eliminating the race issue and alienated some of my liberal friends in doing it, but I could not let that race issue be the dominant issue because even with the education issue, he may have overcome it. I remember I was speaking up in Canton, Georgia, on occasion. I used to answer questions from the audience. And somebody asked me about the integration of the schools, and I said, "Over where I live in West Georgia, there will not be a black that undertook to enter a Coweta County school because if he did, the sun would never set on his head, and we would need a state militia or National Guard." And ooh, I caught hell about that. But it really pushed the race issue way to the side. And let me say this about politics, Mel and Ted, Ruby: There's no way in the world you can do anything constructive for the public, the people, unless you get into public office. If you are defeated before you get in, you're a nut if you raise issues that are detrimental. For example, when I was running for governor, a lot of my friends wanted me to advocate doing away with the poll tax, in the campaign, and I said, "Not on your life. I've got to get elected governor first." A lot of them wanted me to drop the voting age to eighteen. I said, "I can't possibly do that. If I do that in the campaign, I'll never be governor. But after I get in, you watch me." They were all for these movements that later I brought into fruition, but it would have damned me on a campaign. In any political campaign, you want to try to stay out of trouble as much as you can. The only way in the world any man--as President or as governor or whatever his office is, a congressman or a senator--can be helpful to his constituents and the people is to get into office first. You know, and that brings up another question. I'm going to digress a minute, but while we're on this I think it may be well for history's sake. [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and I got to be very good friends. He would come down to Warm Springs and invite me to come down and visit him. We'd sit out on the porch there at the Little White House and talk. And on some occasions I'd get a call from the Secret Service--this is while I was governor--but I would get a call from the Secret Service that President Roosevelt--his train will get to Newnan in the morning at 9:30, and he wants to get off and ride in his car down to Warm Springs, and he wants you to go with him. And I would go down there and ride with him. We were very close friends. Now, I tell you that because when the issue of the fourth term came up, I visited Roosevelt at the White House in Washington and asked him--I said, "Mr. President, are you going to be a candidate for a fourth term?" And without answering me, he got into how he was a successful grower of Christmas trees at Hyde Park. He wanted to talk all about his exploits of growing trees and putting them on the market. And I said, "Mr. President, you've told me that several times, and I appreciate it, and that's good. But I want to know if you're going to be a candidate for the fourth term." And then he changed his expression and looked at me, and he said, "Ellis, I consider myself like a soldier in the military. We're at war. And if the people call on me to serve, I will obey their order just like I were a military man and my superior officer gave me an order to serve. So I will be a candidate for a fourth term." And I said, "Mr. President, can I announce that to the news corps when I leave your office?" And he said, "Yes." So that was the first announcement that he would be a candidate for the fourth term. Now, I also while there in his office that day asked him who he wanted for vice president, and he said he wanted Henry Wallace, who was already vice president, so I said, "Fine. I'll come home and get the Georgia delegation for you and Wallace," which I did. Now, in those days, they didn't have all this Democratic executive committee or Republican executive committee elected by the voters in [adjuncts?] here, there and yonder. The governor was a power. I named the executive committee, and I told them what to do, because if they didn't follow suit, they were released and relieved from duty on the executive committee. So I had my committee solidly for Wallace. Well, at the convention in Chicago, [Steve Hannigan?], who was chairman of the Democratic Party, came to me and told me that he had a letter from Roosevelt, where he changed his view. He said that either Harry Truman or one of the justices on the Supreme Court--
STEELY:	Justice [William O.?] Douglas, I think.
ARNALL:	Justice Douglas--either Justice Douglas or Harry Truman would be acceptable to him as vice president. He didn't say he wouldn't vote for Wallace; he added to it that if I were a delegate, I would vote for Wallace, but either of these two men, Douglas and Truman, would be acceptable to me. So I seconded Wallace's speech. I told Steve, "The only way he'll change me is to call me. I made a promise to him. I'm going to carry it out." So I made the speech that night, and we had the balcony stacked with AF of L-CIO people, and we had the hall stacked and the yelling and whatnot. And had they let us vote, we would have won. Samuel Jackson, Senator Jackson was chairman, and he adjourned the convention, even though they didn't vote [voice trails off; ...]. And that gave them all night to twist arms and whatnot. So the next day Truman was selected as the vice presidential nominee. Now, when Roosevelt returned--he was in the Pacific then--he called me and asked me to come up; he wanted to talk to me. So I did, and he said, "I want to tell you I'm sorry that I told you to go all out for Wallace, which you did. And then I gained information which I considered would make it very difficult for the ticket of Wallace and me to be selected, so I changed my views to where I was not pushing for Wallace; I just left him dangling [...]." And he said, "I want to tell you that I'm sorry that that happened, and apologize." I said, "Mr. President, you don't apologize to me. I did what you asked me to do, so I feel that I carried out my promise." And then Roosevelt said this--and this is what I'm coming to in all this rambling--he said, "You know, in politics a man can run for office on a platform and pledge this, that and the other. A man who's President can take a position that he's going to do certain things and then not do those things but do something differently. But maybe the President got information that he didn't have when he made that statement, and maybe the local politician got information that would have been ruinous had he carried out the promise that he'd made. So I want you to understand that." And I said, "I understand it, and I'm not reproaching you at all. But," I said, "what are we going to do with poor Henry Wallace? You've got him slaughtered." And he said, "Ellis, he can have any position in my government that he wants." So I said, "Okay, I'll go see him and then I'll come back and tell you what he wants." So I went over to see Wallace. He was living at a hotel out from town about three miles. And I told him that President Roosevelt had asked me to find out what he wanted, and he said, "I want to be Secretary of Commerce." So I went back to see Roosevelt, and I said, "Mr. President, Vice President Henry Wallace says that he would like to be your Secretary of Commerce." And Roosevelt--I'll never forget it--did this way [demonstrates perhaps a facial expression]--and he said, "There goes old Jesse Jones," who was Secretary of Commerce. So Jesse went out, and Henry became Secretary of Commerce. What you say today is not necessarily true tomorrow. Times change, conditions change, things change. I believe in representative government. I think If we send a man to Congress we ought to let him be free to vote how he thinks best for his constituents because if he listens to somebody who's got a special interest or some group that has, he will do a disfavor to his constituents, so I believe in representative government. You've got to trust the man to let him make the decisions. And I feel this way about [Ronald] Reagan. I think I told you Reagan and I are friends. We were in the motion picture business together. There was an organization, the Council of Motion Picture Organizations, and then the Motion Picture Industry Council, and he was an officer in those, and I was the director, and we had many meetings. But one of the things I say about Reagan is that he comes across well. I'm not always sure that he knows exactly what the issue is, what he's talking about, but he'll persuade you he does. And he's very sincere, and he's a good communicator, and he's a good actor, and there's always a little acting in politics. Always has been; always will be. But Reagan on his issue there about the Contras [in Nicaragua], for example, people ask me, "What do you feel about that?" I say, "Well, I don't have any feeling, but we've got a President of the United States who has information that you and I don't have, and I trust him, so if I were in Congress, I would vote for what he proposes."
STEELY:	That would be true whether it was a Democrat or Republican?
ARNALL:	Whether it's a Democrat or a Republican. The Republicans and the Democrats are in complete accord, I believe, in that we, both parties, love America, the United States, and want to do what is best for our country. And I don't know that voting the party line in Congress is as important as it once was. I think the people expect you to use your own independent judgment as to what is best for them.
STEELY:	Going back to '42, Ed Rivers was to be tainted with scandal--[loan?] scandals and other things. Had any of that begun to break when you decided to run for governor in '42? And how did it affect you if it had?
ARNALL:	Well, first of all, the corruption in government, alleged corruption--I couldn't prove it, don't know it. But when Gene Talmadge was in office, his secretary granted many pardons, many pardons, and there sprang up what they called the "pardon racket" in Georgia. And when Ed Rivers became governor, he followed that concept: pardons, pardons. There were those who used to say facetiously, "If you bring the governor a cow, he'll get you a pardon for your kinfolks, or if you get him a bale of cotton if you do this, or if you get the right lawyer or if you get the right set-up, you can get pardons, pardons, pardons." So they had gotten a lot of pardons, and the newspapers were after them day in and day out for granting these pardons. Well, I'm going to come back to your question, but one of the things I did when I became governor, I found in my office twelve hundred files seeking pardons, and I bundled them all up and sent them out of there, got rid of them, and created a pardon and parole commission and removed the right of pardon from the governor so I could get out of that racket. I was sensitive of the charges that had been made against these governors. Some they said were corrupt practices. But I leaned over backward to see that we had an honest administration and we did things properly because I had seen what happens to people who take liberties in politics. So in '42, when I ran, Rivers was tarnished some by the pardon racket and some other things. But, on the other hand, he had many lawyer friends, and he had a good organization, so he helped me tremendously with what was left of his organization. So even though there was that taint, we moved forward. And one of the things that Rivers got caught in, which was terrible, was that Talmadge had vetoed and ran against all New Deal legislation, so Rivers brought all the New Deal concepts into the state government. We took blueprints from Washington [for?] [...] and enacted them into law, and that caused much upheaval in government and changes and whatnot. And I was attorney general at that time. The former attorney general was an elderly man who couldn't come to grips with all these new concepts and new laws, where I, being a very young fellow, they were duck soup for me; I had no problem with them. But Rivers was very helpful to me in the campaign together, and Roy Harris, and others. But they were the two that knew where to touch the right spot.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Let me interject. I can't resist this question.
ARNALL:	Yes, Ted.
FITZ-SIMONS:	In this recent pardon that was issued for Leo Frank, what do you think about that? That is was granted and the fact that it was upheld.
ARNALL:	Well, let me preface this reply by saying that when I was running for speaker pro tem of the House, I went to movies at night if I couldn't get tired [as?] a member of the legislature, and I was in Augusta once and saw a great movie that was produced by [Melvin LeRoy?]. The main actor in it was Paul Muni. And the name of the film was "I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang." Robert Elliott Burns had been in Florida during the great upheaval, and he started back to New Jersey and came through La Grange, and he was hungry, and he broke into a bakery and stole a loaf of bread. He was apprehended, and he was given twenty years' sentence for stealing the loaf of bread. And then he escaped from the prison and then wrote "I'm a Fugitive" and then they made the picture out of it, movie. And this heaped coals of fire on Georgia's reputation and good name. We were known over the world as barbaric, inhumane due to all this. So I was speaking one night in New York, was going to speak to the New York Southern Society at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and I got a call in my room from Robert Elliott Burns that he wanted to come over to see me if I was going to be there the next morning, and I was, so he came over with his wife and two children. He had gotten to be a certified public accountant and was a member of some of the civic clubs and was very active in his church. And he said that this blot on his name as a fugitive he'd like to get rid of because he had rehabilitated himself and become a good citizen. And I told him if he would come back to Georgia, I would be his lawyer before the state pardon and parole commission. He'd read all these prison reforms we instituted, but he wasn't quite sure. So I didn't hear from him for a while. A couple of months later, he came back. Walked in the governor's office, surrendered to me. I took him up to the pardon board, asked for an immediate hearing on his application for pardon, said that he was now subject to the jurisdiction of Georgia, and the pardon board gave him the pardon. Now, Ted, I'm coming to the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank ran a pencil factory up in Marietta, on the outskirts of Marietta. He was a Jew. And there was a young lady working there at the pencil factory doing stenographic work or secretarial work, named [Mary Fagan?] as I believe her name was. And she was murdered. They found her body there in the pencil factory. So the hue and cry went up that Leo Frank was the culprit. There was a man in Atlanta named [Hugh Dellasee?], who was solicitor general, we called him then, prosecuting attorney of the Superior Court here. And he prosecuted Leo Frank. And because of public opinion and public feeling as a result of his conviction of Frank, he was elected governor. He has a fine family here now, a group of boys, relatives. Some of the boys are my close friends. Hugh Dellasee, for example, a lawyer here and so forth. But before he could get in his appeal from the decision convicting him, Governor [Slayton--John Slayton?] was governor, and he studied the record, and he was persuaded that Frank was not guilty and he should give him a pardon. Slayton talked with his wife, and he told her, "I'm going to do something that's going to ruin me and you, and our lives won't be safe, but I'm going to pardon Leo Frank." And she said, "I'd rather be the widow of a brave man." So he pardoned him. But before the pardon could take effect, a mob stormed the jail, took him out, and lynched him, took him back up there where the Klan occurred, and lynched him. As a result of that, a Jewish organization called B'nai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League, was organized on the basis of the Frank case, the contention being that he was convicted merely because he was a Jew, that he did not murder Mary Fagan. And that's a national organization, very active all over the United States today. Now, that has been a blot on the good name of Georgia, just like the Burns case was a blot for years. I considered at one time undertaking to have the pardon board pardon Leo Frank, and yet some of my Jewish friends told me that that was a dead issue now and not to stir it up again; it would be stirred up if I did. So I desisted from it. As you know, a year or two ago, some man in his old age confessed that he heard the janitor say he killed her. But there's been a lot pro and con. Now, I think the pardon of Leo Frank was proper, not that he was not guilty--we will never know that--but I think Georgia has suffered all these years from the stigma of the Frank case and the question whether he was guilty, and the fact that his rights were taken away from him by a lynch mob was such that the board pardoned him. But as I understand it, their pardon did not say that he was not guilty. Their pardon was just what I'm saying, that we've had this blot long enough; we'll never know. He was lynched. He was denied his due process through the courts, and we're going to pardon him. So I think they did right.
STEELY:	In the 1942 campaign, you ran as kind of a white knight. You had clearly the popular issue. Was Roy Harris your campaign manager in that one?
ARNALL:	No, no. This brings up another thing. Yes, I was young Lochinvar, a young white knight on a good charger. Coweta County, the neighboring county down there to Carroll, has furnished this state with two governors. One was [William Wyatt?], who served forty-five years before I did. He died six years before I was born. He was a great governor. He was an educational governor. He established the Georgia Normal School for Girls. At that time, women couldn't be educated in the state system, but he fought for that. He was a good governor. He had been speaker of the House. I had been speaker pro tem. Just so many things in common. I'll move to this. In the 1942 campaign, my campaign manager was William Yates Atkinson, Jr., Governor Atkinson's son, who was then solicitor general of the circuit, and I had the pleasure of appointing Bill to the Supreme Court of the state, and when he died, he was presiding justice of the Supreme Court. So Roy was not my campaign manager. William Atkinson was my campaign manager. Now, having said that, I hasten [to add]: You have a campaign manager who's a front man. He deals with the public, gets you engagements and all this stuff. And you have a staff. We had that at the Piedmont Hotel in those days. That's where our headquarters were. That's where the Equitable Building is now. But Roy Harris had headquarters over at the Henry Grady, secret headquarters; the public didn't know about this. And he had a staff, and they were on the phone all the time, calling, lining up people and reporting back to us. So officially Bill Atkinson was my campaign manager, but unofficially, getting the job done, was Roy Harris. Bill didn't know about the state politics. He had a great reputation. He was a fine man. But Roy knew.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Did Bill help you raise money?
STEELY:	How did you get your money?
ARNALL:	In '42?
STEELY:	Yes.
ARNALL:	Well, in '42 it was a breeze as far as money. I had a group of people who were for me, who said, "Now, don't you worry your brain a minute about money." They said, "We're going to get all the money you need. You go out and make speeches and win this campaign." Our financing came from these sources: [Talmadge Dobbs?], who was my close friend, was president of the Life Insurance Company of Georgia. He contributed heavily to my campaign. The Atlanta banks were strong for me, particularly the bank that's now known as Bank of the South, which was the Fulton National. They raised unlimited funds for me. And the way they would do it is this: They had a long list of debtors that owed them money. And some of these people were builders, some were highway contractors, some of this, some of that. And one of the executive vice presidents would call each one of them and say, "We're supporting one hundred percent Ellis Arnall, and we're raising money, and we want you to do so much." But since they owed the bank, they were always glad to send in the money. Second, I got a lot of money from the highway contractors because they felt that [John Whitney?] from La Grange had had the inside, and they didn't get any business, so the highway contractors did. Additionally, my home people in Newnan and Coweta--my family people gave me a lot of money. And in addition to that, remember the educators organized in every crossroad in Georgia, and they raised tremendous amounts of money for me. And one time it wasn't coming in quite as fast as I was spending it, and I borrowed fifty thousand [$50,000] in my own name from a bank, the First National Bank here. But somehow it disappeared after the election was over.
STEELY:	The note disappeared?
ARNALL:	Everything disappeared. When you win. And if you lose, you get more bills, you don't know. Friends would put ads in the paper and they'd send you the bill. They've used [you driving?] and send you the bill. You get bills for everything when you lose, but when you win, they vanish like the dew.
STEELY:	Well, you've been on both sides of--
ARNALL:	Both sides. I would say that the '42 campaign, that we spent more money than Talmadge. He was an incumbent with the state machine, and that was necessary. And all through that campaign he never called me by my name. He always referred to me, as he did occasionally--he referred to me as Little Boy Blue. And the reason for that was I was attorney general, and Rivers was in all kinds of problems, and so he was indicating that the nursery rhyme, "Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn, the sheep's in the meadow and the cow's in the corn." But he never called me by my name. Now, there's one way he could have won that campaign very easily. At any stage in the campaign, before the election, had he recanted, had he made a confession to the people in Georgia that he had made a grievous-- [End Tape 1. Begin Tape 2]
STEELY:	--the way Gene Talmadge could have won the election. What was that?
ARNALL:	Yes. At any moment before the vote he could have won the election by recanting and making a confession publicly to the people that he had made a grievous mistake in undertaking to meddle with the state Board of Regents in charge of all the state higher education institutions. He could have said, "I was wrong, and if you'll elect me again, we'll create a Board of Regents and take me off and I won't have anything to do with it." And therefore anticipating that that was his way out, I always in speeches said, "Now, you watch this man. We've got him cornered. We've gotten him beat. And he's going to try to extricate himself. So you expect any moment for him to come out and say he's made a grievous error; he didn't mean to do it, he didn't know what was going on, didn't know the effect of this--and ask you for forgiveness. But I don't believe he is going to do that because he's got too much character to run out. But if he does run out, you be prepared." And, of course, the more you say that, the less chance he's got of doing it. So that was the out, but he never used it. And he actually believed, up until the votes were counted, that he was going to be elected governor. He'd been so used to being elected he thought he was going to be elected. He didn't think a young upstart could beat a fellow like that.
STEELY:	Did [radio?] help you a lot in that campaign, or was it primarily newspaper advertising and things of that nature?
ARNALL:	Three things helped me. One, radio helped. The newspapers were terrific. I had, oh, four-fifths of all the newspapers in the state for me, weekly and daily. That's terrific. Day in and day out. As I told you earlier, you can agree with newspapers or not, but you can't join issue with them because they print while you sleep, and there's just no way you can do it. But the other thing that helped me greatly: In those days we had political rallies, and we would have twelve, fifteen thousand people at a speech. We just gave barbecues and fish fries and all that. People would come, and they'd come from distant counties to hear you speak. I had some that every time I made a speech, they went, no matter where it was, standing out in the front row. They always went. They loved it. It was a give and take. And I may have told you this, that I always embellish my speaking by throwing in things that you don't run into every day. I don't know whether I told you about my diamond ring. Did I tell you that?
STEELY:	Mm-hm, yes, sir.
ARNALL:	About how I'd get somebody to ask me a question, "Why are you wearing that diamond ring?" And I'd say, "Well, hadn't you rather your governor wear it before he goes into office than after he comes out?" And they would all--we always had stock things we could do that would bring the house down. So I would say in those days speaking on the courthouse steps, rallies, feeling the flesh, shaking hands was the way you won campaigns. Today, in my sad view, whoever's got the most money to buy the most television advertising or time and who has the best Madison Avenue promotions and who has the best makeup artist will damn near win every time.
FITZ-SIMONS:	I want to just get something straight for the record. You mentioned Burns calling on you with respect to the possibility of a pardon. Now, that was after your prison reform.
ARNALL:	Yes. As a matter of fact, Georgia had such a terrible name in prison work--that we kept prisoners chained, we beat them with rubber hoses, we'd put them on road work, put them in cages so they'd have [..] on the road work, and they wore stripes, they were improperly fed--it was just a terrible ordeal. Since the nation had played up the fact that we were disreputable and we gave them these prison reforms, they were quick to grab them and say, "This is great." We were in the magazines--Time, Life, Newsweek--all of them just featured what all we were doing. And Burns saw that, so that gave him some hope. As a matter of fact, when he talked with me, he said that in view of these prison reforms he had debated whether he would come down and surrender himself, whether he got a pardon or not, because he'd do anything to get this blot off of his name. That was after the prison reform. And let me say this about the prison reforms. No matter, there are no good prisons and no matter who much you do, you'll never have good prisons. You can have better ones all the time, improve them. Not only you can rehabilitate them, but you can teach them a trade, a profession or something to do when they get out. I'll tell you this sad story: There was the most famous escape artist we ever had in Georgia, was a man named [Forrest Turner?]. He escaped thirteen times. On one occasion I was going to Kansas City for some affair--to install the president of a university, I think--and Turner called the night before and said if I left town he was going to kidnap my children. We put a police guard out there and so forth. He was rough. Finally, when they caught him and I came back, I went down to [Talmo?] to see him. They had him in solitary confinement, and I went in there, and I said, "Forrest, I've got some news for you. It could be good or bad. Either I'm going to kill you, or you're going to reform and be a decent citizen when you get out. I hope you do." He said, "Why are you going to kill me?" I said, "For threatening to kidnap my children. I will come back to see you to see how you're doing, to get a report." From that day on, he reformed. He became the best prisoner down there. He never escaped. And today is a very successful businessman. He lives out at Decatur, and he makes dentures for dentists, [all fixed?], and he's been very successful. And a book has been written about him. They were going to make it into a motion picture, and he wanted my son to play my part as governor, [...]. Ruby and I were down at a meeting of the state pardon and parole board shortly after we were married, down at Sea Island, I believe--or Jekyll, somewhere down there--and lo and behold, the first fellow on the program was Forrest Turner, and he made a lot of money and did a lot of good, going all over the United States speaking about a life of imprisonment and the opportunities that you had when you got out if you were a model prisoner.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Would you have killed him?
ARNALL:	Yes, I would have. And he knew it. That's why he did right. We were down there. When we see each other, we hug and all that.
STEELY:	Now, Governor, you were successful in ending railroad rate discrimination. Now, why, in your opinion, had this problem escaped solution up to the time that you did, and what made it possible for you to accomplish it?
ARNALL:	Well, the South, when we lost the War between the States, became a conquered province. Today, in modern warfare, when you defeat a country you immediately go in and rehabilitate their industry and you give them money to let them get back in position. But in those days the South got no handouts from the United States government. We were left high and dry, and all we were in those days, after the war--we were farmers. We grew cotton, peanuts, wheat. We were farmers. Cattle. We had timberlands. We cut down the timber. Now, when the railroads came along--because they were financed by the big Eastern banks, [holding the interest down?], and the banks also financed Eastern manufacture. So the South, being agricultural in nature, was a fruitful field for the Eastern mills to get their raw materials from the South--minerals, cotton, cattle, timber, whatever it was--to get those raw materials for them to manufacture into finished goods. So as a result of that, the railroads had a system of rates that gave the South cheaper commodity rates so that if you had cotton to send North, you could send it cheaper than they could send cotton from the North to the South. But the rates were rigged so that the Eastern manufacturers got preferential rates in finished goods (what we call class rates)--finished goods shipping from the North to the South. As a result of that, the South was somewhat in the position of Ireland in the United Kingdom; we were kind of left high and dry, and our economy faltered. And because of the imbalance in freight rates, we had child labor, we underpaid our working people. We had to, to compete. There's no way you can do it at that time unless you import some of the people. I remember the [boy?] in Newnan. [...] people owned textile mills, an they ran a general store, where all of their workers had trade at the general store, where they were ran a credit. They had houses, mill villages. All the workers had to live in the mill villages. Now, today we think that is terrible. Of course, in time it was done away with. But that was the only way they could survive. It was the only way they could get the goods to market, by absorbing this imbalance in freight rates in wages, in purchasing, in rent and other things. So I knew then that if ever I became governor--and I intended to--I'd drawn a slip of paper saying I would be--I was going to break up that monopoly, that freight rate inequality. Now, for years the Southern governors had an association, and they had file cases with the Interstate Commerce Commission, taking the position that the Interstate Commerce Commission is in sole control of the rates of public utilities. I did not participate with them because I thought it was a waste of time. Since the Interstate Commerce Commission was the tool of the big business interests in the East that rigged and kept in control these rates, how were we going to get relief from them? So I came up with the novel idea of not treating this as a rate case but as an antitrust case, whereby the railroads and their banks and industries and all conspired to get special treatment for them and adverse treatment for the South. So I filed the suit in the U.S. Supreme Court. And before I got that far, the Sherman Act provides that any person aggrieved by conspiracy can sue for treble damages. The head of the Ku Klux Klan was Dr. Hiram W. Evans. He was the imperial wizard in those days. And he had an arrangement with the asphalt companies and the gasoline people to where every time the state highway department called for bids, only he could submit bids that they would accept. So he would get the oil companies and asphalt companies in the room at night, the hotel room, and he'd say, "You bid so and so on this project; you, so and so and so and so." So it was always rigged. I ran into this. So I brought suit against Dr. Evans, head of the Ku Klux, and the highway department and various individuals who implicated the asphalt companies. I brought it in federal court, district court, and the court threw it out on the theory that the state is not a person. The law says any person; the state is not a person. Then I appealed to the circuit court, and they affirmed the district court, holding the state is not a person, and I couldn't sue. So then I filed a--asked for certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States, and much to the railroad's amazement, the Supreme Court granted my certiorari and they heard the case. Now, having established the fact that the state was a person--well, first, the district court held we were not, and then the circuit court--then I appealed, got the certiorari to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court--and incidentally, I've been very active in the Association of Attorneys General, and I got thirty-eight states to file amicus curiae briefs with me, supporting the Georgia position. Of course, the facts are I wrote all the briefs and sent it to them for their signature, and thirty-eight of them complied. Well, when the court--I argued the case myself, as governor then, as governor. This is the only time in history a governor has ever argued a case in the Supreme Court of the United States for his people, but it was my idea and I was going to see it through. So I argued the case in the Supreme Court. I shall never forget. The railroads' lawyers--they had thirty-one lawyers, and I was the only lawyer for the state. And you know lawyers won't agree on the time of day, so when you get thirty-one lawyers together, you've got them in trouble. They couldn't agree on anything.
STEELY:	Who was on the court at that time? Do you remember?
ARNALL:	I remember some of them. [Robert H.] Jackson, [Hugo L.] Black, [Felix] Frankfurter, [William O.] Douglas.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Was Hand still there, Learned Hand?
ARNALL:	No. I remember something about--
FITZ-SIMONS:	That's all right. I was just wondering in general.
ARNALL:	In any event, I argued the case, and the railroads got up and told the court that the reason these rates are fixed like they are is because they're fixed to serve the most people. For example, [just as a?] paved highway going between two points and an unimproved road going between two points, more people would travel that improved road, and therefore our rates are set up to service the South because they are hewers of timber and drawers of water, whereas the East has got the manufacturing. And to serve the people in the South, these rates are favorable to East are disfavorable to the South because the people can buy the things cheaper. Of course, our argument was, How ridiculous can you be? Any fool would know that the reason more people ride on the paved road is because it's paved, and don't ride on the dirt road because it's not paved. And to say that the reason it's paved is because more people ride on it, is false because if it was a dirt road, if both of them were dirt roads going to the same points, the same distance, some would go one way and some the other. In any event, Justice Jackson said to me, "Governor, so why did you bring this case to the Supreme Court? Why didn't you go through the district court, the circuit court?" And I said, "Because having established the fact that the state is a person, we have a right to go directly to your court, to the Supreme Court." And this is true. You don't have to go through these local and state--you can go directly. And I said, "We want a speedy decision. We've suffered long enough." And I remember he asked the clerk to bring in the court calendar, and he thumbed through it, and he said, "Here's a case some state brought that's been pending in this court for four years." He thumbed through it and said, "Here's another one another state brought, and it's been pending here six years." And on and on and on. And I said, "Stop, Mr. Justice Jackson. I had assumed when I say that I filed this case in the Supreme Court directly, because I wanted a speedy trial--I assumed that the court was not derelict in its duty." And everybody laughed, and [...] citing [...] those cases. I remember Mr. Justice Frankfurter said to me, "Governor, what have you got to say about the case of so and so?" Holding it against me. And I said, "Mr. Justice Frankfurter, I don't want to talk about that case. I want to talk about my case. What they did then doesn't affect me. I'm trying to get justice and fair treatment from this court." And so he said that. But as I walked around that room--I doubt if it's ever been done before--instead of standing up at the podium in the dress and decor done in a nice, friendly way, I walked all around, just like I was at a jury hearing. And they were all laughing. They were amused at a fellow taking all the liberties that I did. Well, the railroads--the court took the case under advisement, and the railroads were again flabbergasted. The presidents in their private Pullman cars, they were flabbergasted when the court took jurisdiction of the case. And now, when they did that, under the law instead of the court trying all the facts of the case, they appointed a special master who spends months and years studying the record and the facts in the case. And they appointed Lloyd [K.] Garrison as special master, who was dean of law school at the University of Wisconsin. When the Supreme Court took jurisdiction of the case, I sent each member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, to their home, a copy of the opinion. I've learned don't ever write a fellow to his place of business. If you want attention, write him at home. If it comes to his place of business, the secretary will throw half the stuff away, he'll throw away, [...]. But at home he'll sit there and read the letters. So I would send them home, everything about it. Every time I'd make a mean speech about how they were tools of the railroad, I'd send it to each one at home. So when the Supreme Court took jurisdiction of the case, the Interstate Commerce Commission, like Rip Van Winkle, aroused itself out of a steep slumber and began to adjust the rates, and they gradually started reducing a few, then more and more and more, until finally we ended up with postalization of the rates, where no matter where you lived, you paid the same thing for the same item, the same distance. I used to use as an illustration of [...]. I did this. I went all over the country making speeches about this and telling how unfair it was, and I told you I would say the disparity was 49 percent. The president of the railroad would call me the next week and say I'd lied about it; it was only 39 percent. But I proved my case, which they always took hook, line and sinker. But when the railroads realized that their days were numbered in this disparity, they must have worked it out with the Interstate Commerce Commission to get moving because they got moving. And today the development of what we call the Sunbelt, the development of the West--and the same thing applied to the West--I attribute to Georgia versus Pennsylvania Railroad et al., the case that I conceived and brought. As I sit in my office and look over Atlanta and see these tall buildings right on the edges and see more industry coming in all the time through Georgia, higher income than we've ever had, I like to take a little justifiable pride in the fact that I did what should have been done and received the results, which have enabled us to be competitive with every corner of the United States.
STEELY:	I want to mention one other thing, Governor, and this comes to mind. Some--well, at least one historian I have heard has suggested--I won't say "said"--suggested the cotton growers accepted rate discrimination because it benefitted and because this enabled them to maintain stability in the society.
ARNALL:	There is no question that the disparity of freight rates, the shackles that bound us, were not forged outside of our own jurisdiction. Some of them were forged right here in our own jurisdiction because they were getting preferential treatment and they were happy. There's no doubt about that. And let me say what else this freight rate fight did: It opened up Georgia's ports. When I was governor, we created an authority for the port at Savannah and one at Brunswick, and they've done marvelously well. That was all tied into--see, the trouble in the world today: there is an abundance of food in certain places, and other people are starving to death because of the distribution system and the transportation system. I wanted to tell you one other thing I used as an illustration, which is a good one, when I made these speeches all over the country: I said there is a friend of mine who has a peanut butter factory at Dawson, Georgia, named [Ed Stevens?]. The name of the factory is Cinderella Peanut Company. Before we brought about the equality of freight rates, Ed could send his raw peanuts to Chicago, have them made into peanut butter, and send the finished product, peanut butter, from Chicago to Atlanta cheaper than he could send finished peanut butter from Dawson, Georgia, to Atlanta. So that's what we were up against.
STEELY:	Is that a true case?
ARNALL:	That's true, absolutely.
FITZ-SIMONS:	We'll move on to something else. I believe you appointed Marvin Griffin adjutant general, was it, in '44?
ARNALL:	Well, the way that came about was this: The governor names the adjutant general. I told you that the Atlanta Constitution as well as the Journal were active for me, and that Clark Howell had been thrown off the Board of Regents. He was Republican [...], and he was a close friend of mine. He was a reserve officer, and when war came--see, I was wartime governor. When war came, he entered the Army, and they sent him down to Mississippi to some camp down there; he had to stay down there. And his good wife, Margaret, was with him, and they used to write me and call me every day or two and say, "These mosquitoes are eating us up." They said, "Can't you get us out of here?" So I said, "Sure. I have got to appoint an adjutant general, and I'd like you, Clark, to be my adjutant general." So he accepted, and I got the President and the military to release him to me as my adjutant general. He came home and lived in Atlanta and reported to me every day and all that's fine. Time that Clark got tired of being adjutant general, and he came to me, and he said, "I want to get out of this thing. I appreciate--the war has wound down. I want to get out." So I said, "Fine, Clark, but I've got to get another one if I let you out. Who do you suggest?" He said, "Well, [S.] Marvin Griffin and you are good friends. He's been in the Pacific, fighting, and it would probably be a good idea if you see if he'd like to be adjutant general and get him released from the War Department, and then I could go on back to the newspaper business." So I called Marvin, got him in some outlandish place in the Pacific, some island somewhere, told him what was proposed [...] and he was so happy about it he got out [...] and he began. [?] And he became my adjutant general. Marvin and I had served together in the legislature, and we were close friends. I'd also served with his father, Pat Griffin. Our seats were next to each other. So Marvin came here as adjutant general and made a good adjutant general. But--and here comes the but--Marvin was very ambitious to run for public office. He wanted to run for lieutenant governor, and that was a position I created in the Constitution of 1945. Gene Talmadge had tried to create it, but the people had repudiated it. And there was a man named [Delacey Allen?] from Albany, who was head of the legion. He ran and got the nomination, but since they didn't create the position, he didn't get anything. But I created the office of lieutenant governor, and the people ratified it. My secretary had been M.E. [Melvin E.] Thompson, and I made him revenue commissioner by appointing [J.] Eugene Cook to the state Supreme Court, who was then revenue commissioner. [... Lee?] wanted to be lieutenant governor. I had a great deal of fun with him. I would have a delegation that would come in to see me about this, that or the other, and I'd say, "I want you to do me a favor when we break up. I want you to go the revenue department and see M.E. Thompson and tell him he ought to run for superintendent of schools." They'd all go over there and just convinced him. Late that afternoon, he come on by and said, "I've changed my mind. I'm going to run for superintendent of schools." I said, "Well, that's fine." The next day they would come in, a delegation, and I would say, "Go over to the revenue department and see M.E. Thompson when you leave. I'm trying my best--don't tell him I am--to get him to run for comptroller general, and I want you fellows to tell him that." So the next morning he come on by and said, "I've changed my mind again. I want to run for comptroller general." Whatever it was, each day I [hit him with a Southern lip???].
FITZ-SIMONS:	You had a lot of fun with him, didn't you?
ARNALL:	Oh, fun, fun, fun. As a matter of fact, when I named him to the revenue department--he had been my secretary--I brought in Ivan Allen, Jr., to take his place. He later became mayor. And Ivan Allen came and says, "My typewriter is gone. I don't have a typewriter [...] my secretary." And I inquired, and they said, "Well, M.E. took it with him." I called M.E. on the phone and said, "Damn your soul, M.E., why did you steal my typewriter?" And we had wonderful fun. Well, Marvin was trying to get to run for lieutenant governor, but in the final pinch I decided M.E. Thompson should be the first lieutenant governor, and I then persuaded him to run for lieutenant governor. Well, that didn't sit well with Marvin because he thought that he ought to have been the candidate. Then M.E. became--as you know, when I ended my term of governorship and there was a ruckus as to who should be governor, getting into the Talmadge write-in, voting dead people, and all that stuff--I supported Jimmy [James V.] Carmichael. Marvin had thought he ought to have been the candidate for governor, so when I pulled Jimmy Carmichael out, he left me politically and joined the Talmadge ranks, and when Herman became acting governor or the pretending governor for sixty days or whatever it was, he appointed Marvin adjutant general.
FITZ-SIMONS:	So he served under both you and [Talmadge?].
ARNALL:	Right, right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Did he stay on as adjutant general under M.E. Thompson?
ARNALL:	No, no. When M.E. took over the governorship, he appointed someone else.
STEELY:	If you had to say just one thing, what would you consider the most important accomplishment of your administration?
ARNALL:	Breaking the freight rate shackles, the economic push. Second, education. You see, in education we put in teacher retirement. We developed the basis for the maximum--minimum education foundation. We freed the Board of Regents from political control. We freed the state Board of Education from political control. And listen to this: When I was governor, Georgia spent more of the tax dollar on education than all the other services put together. I would say that was next, education. I would say first was the economic issue, the freight rates, and all the other things we did economically. And I would put the next thing, the educational advancement. I would put high up on the list my fight against intolerance and bigotry and racism. I would put high up on the list prison reform. And I mustn't forget voting reform. Listen to this: When I became governor, we had a half million people voting. By opening the white primaries to the blacks, by killing the poll tax, by dropping the voting age to eighteen, we increased it to over a million just by a stroke of a pen. As you've heard me say, I now favor mandatory registration and mandatory voting and voting by mail. Nine Western democracies have that, and they vote about 95 percent of their people. The five percent are transients and that kind of thing. Whereas in this country--listen to this: Each year in national elections we have a smaller percentage of the citizens voting, even of those registered. And 75 percent are not even registered. We only have 52 percent of those who are registered who vote. And when you consider that a great majority of the American people don't even register to vote, then you quickly conclude that we do not have a majority government in the United States; we have a minority government, and it's going to get progressively worse unless we install some of these reforms: mandatory registration, mandatory voting, voting by mail. You see, Georgia, when it was a crown colony, had a provision that if you were qualified to vote (and you had to own some property then) and didn't register to vote, you were fined five pounds, so it's nothing new to us today. We blazed the trail on that. [...] states had voting my mail, the nine Western democracies that have mandatory voting and registration. [?] My feeling is that the reason government suffers so much--let's take now eighteen-year-old voters--every time I go to the polls, I'm heartsick because the only people I would see there are older people. I don't see any young people. They just don't have any interest in politics, and we've got to make them have some interest. We don't like to serve on the jury, but we have to. We don't like to pay taxes, but we have to. And why shouldn't everybody--voting is not only the highest privilege of a democracy, it is the greatest mandatory requirement. It is an obligation that transcends everything else.
STEELY:	You had both M.E. Thompson and Ivan Allen, Jr., as your executive secretary.
ARNALL:	Right.
STEELY:	Was there anybody else that served in there?
ARNALL:	Yes, [Pat McCutchum?] from Ellijay. He served. M.E., I promoted him to revenue commissioner. Ivan served for a while, and then he decided he'd gotten enough politics; he wanted to get back into the equipment--office supply business. And then Pat McCutchum, who had been clerk of the House, was a lawyer from Franklin, Georgia, originally. [..., ...]. And he lived at Ellijay then. I got him to come down and finish it up.
STEELY:	Which one was your best one?
ARNALL:	They were all good. I'll tell you: The success of my administration--and it was successful--without discounting the great benefits that have come from former and foreign governors, we have more to sink our teeth in of reforms and the structure of government and things that we did than any of the other administrations, no matter how good they were. And the reason for this was I couldn't do it all. I brought in good people, and they did the job well. If I appointed a man to public office, I said, "Now, I don't want to see you till we end up the administration. If you're down here all the time, asking me what to do and all that, you're not my man. You do right. And if you don't do right, you needn't come to see me; you'll hear from me if there's something I don't like." Another thing I did which was unique: One reason I was able to get top-flight people in government--we were at war, and I couldn't get many young people, so I'd get established business people, established educators, people who were not subject to the draft and all that. Talmadge used to ask me why I wasn't in the Army. I said, "Well, if the people want me to go abroad and fight foreign dictators, if they defeat me, I'll join the next day. But if they want me to stay home and fight home-grown dictators, elect me governor." Which they did. But getting back to how I got such good people. For example, Ted, Mel, Jim [who??], if I decided I wanted you to serve in some particular capacity in state government, I called in the newspapers, and I said, "I have this moment appointed so and so to this position." And they would come out with his picture in the paper and the fact that I'd appointed him. Then they made it awfully hard for him to not take over because he'd embarrass me, and this is what I did, and I got some people that never would have agreed to do it if I hadn't just flushed them like that.
STEELY:	Who was your best appointment? Which one are you the most proud of?
ARNALL:	Ben [W.] Fortson [Jr.], who served as secretary of state for thirty-two years. I think his record--in fact, we had a lot of good ones, but the reason I pick him out is his consistency of serving in office, and I never heard anyone say an unkind word of Ben. He was a man that looked after his business, and his whole life was devoted to his office. And that fact that he was always elected and maintained till he died, I would say, if I'd name one, it would be Ben.
STEELY:	You appointed him to secretary of state.
ARNALL:	Right. I'll bet you'd be interested in how that came about. Ben was in the legislature and had been a leader in all my business, whatever it was. And a vacancy occurred in the secretary of state. John Wilson, who was secretary of state for a number of years and had lost an arm, was secretary of state, and he died, and I was besieged by the assistant secretary of state and the people in his office because everybody wanted to be secretary of state. I picked up the telephone and called Ben Fortson in Washington, Georgia, Wilkes County, and they said, "He's out fishing." Well, I said, "Get a messenger to go out there and tell him to come in to the phone. I want him to come up here." Ben always had a good black man who carried him around in his arms because Ben was in a wheelchair. He'd been hurt in an automobile accident while he was a student at Georgia Tech. So his man brought him inside to the phone, and I said, "Ben, I want you to come to Atlanta this very minute." And he said, "Well, Governor, I'm in my old clothes. They're dirty. I've been down to [Black's? Blank's?] fishing." I said, "I don't care what you've been doing. I want you to be in my office in two hours, come hell or high water." But he said, "What do you want?" I said, "I'll tell you when you get here. I'm calling on you to come." So he came, and he walked into the office, and I took him [...], and I said, "Ben, hold this." Had all the newspaper people there. "Hold up your hand." And I gave him the oath of secretary of state. He took the oath before he knew what the hell it was.
STEELY:	[laughs]
ARNALL:	And he was great. But this was the fun! You see, I take the position that being governor is the most fun of anything I ever did. I can appreciate many people in public life who want to stay out of trouble, who don't take any sides on issues, who try to sweep them under the rug, who just want to have peace and tranquility and quiet. But that would bore me to death. I'm a stirrer-upper. Unless there's something going on shocking people, it's no fun. And many of my ideas were way ahead of their times, and I shocked many people, but we accomplished a lot, and it was a lot of fun. Being governor was fun. I used to say--I used to like to go to the state, speaking. I can remember one night I was going to make a commencement speech over in Glascock County, and got in the wrong school and made the speech before they came and told me that I was supposed to be down [at] another school four miles down the road! I like to speak.
STEELY:	[laughs] Then did you go to the next one?
ARNALL:	Yes. They were home, and I made a speech there. But I like to be out of the office. I like to represent the state. I remember while I was governor, I was doing professional lecturing all over the country. One thing: the mass media came into the office and said, "Governor, all these speeches you make--do you get paid for them?" I said, "Absolutely." I said, "My minimum fee is a thousand dollars a speech. I won't go out on the road unless I can have a week's solid speech--three a day." And the [...] gets a fourth, and it cost about a fourth, expenses, and I net about half of it. And if they have a reception for me, a dinner party, a cocktail party, they have to pay me another thousand dollars because then I have to be real nice and sweet. People will come up to you, asking you questions, in private, that they wouldn't dare get up in an audience. And I always invited questions. I had ten questions written on a piece of paper and said, "Ask me any question you want when I get through. And here are the ten you'll ask me." It never failed because we all over America had the same news services--television, radio--and we're thinking of the same things. Today you get a question on Contras [in Nicaragua]--you know, whatever's in the news, you go get them. And being from the South, I knew I'd always get one on the black issue. I used to say--I remember it well--that "we have, under the law, segregation in the South, which is bad, but we have it by law, whereas you don't have it by law here in Chicago"--or wherever it was--"but your practice of segregation is worse than ours. It's just easy to talk about somebody else's problems rather than your own." And that was true. Well, the press came in after I told them--they wanted to know how much I made, and I told them. They said, "Well, what do you do with all that money you're making?" I said, "I give it to my favorite charities." And they said, "What are your favorite charities?" And I said, "My wife and children." And the newspapers said, "Hooray, more power to him," with no criticism at all, because I was taking a message about Georgia, selling Georgia to the rest of this country. It was a good service. But I used to say when I stayed out of the office, making speeches through Georgia--I made one once down in McIntosh County, way down. There was a rally for the Fourth of July, and I remember the editor of Life magazine and the photographer was there to cover it, and I made a good speech. I like to think I'm a good public speaker. You don't learn it except one way: by doing it. You can't learn it in school. And I got on the black question, and here's what I said: I said, "Now, in McIntosh County you've got a certain percent of blacks. As I remember, it's about 40 percent, a terrific percent. And I want the black people of McIntosh County and the state of Georgia to have greater income, better jobs, more money coming into the family till. I'm all for that." And you could have heard a pin drop. They didn't like that. And then I said, "Now, I'm going to tell you why I'm for it: because with 40 percent of your people black, when they have more money and more income, you can get it." And they said, "Hooray, we like that." My point is that's it to the interest of our state of Georgia--we have a third of our people black, the heaviest black population of any state in the union, and it behooves us to treat them fairly and let them have good economic status. Yes, so we can get it, so business can get it and move forward.
STEELY:	So everybody benefits from it.
ARNALL:	Everybody benefits.
STEELY:	Ivan Allen, Jr., was your executive secretary but also was recognized later on as one of the establishment leaders. He once said when you talk about the power structure and the establishment in Atlanta, you were talking about the leaders of the top fifty or so businesses in the city. Would you talk a little bit about this statement, and then your relationship to these men?
ARNALL:	Well, Ivan Allen is a fine junior. I knew his father well. His father was from Dalton, and he came here a relatively poor man and got into the stationery and office supply business, and along came the New Deal, and it fueled a lot of small businesses, and it helped his business, and he became a New Deal Democrat. Ivan Jr. and I have somewhat of a parallel background. He went to Tech, and I went to Georgia. He was head of everything at Tech, and I was head of everything at Georgia. I'm a little older than he is, but we were good friends and knew each other through the college relationship. Ivan Allen Jr. married a very wonderful woman from a very well-to-do family in Atlanta, and he is a very intricate, important part of the establishment. The establishment would also, in my mind, include these people: the publisher of the Cox newspapers, the president of the big banks, the presidents of the largest manufacturing companies--and now we've gone into high technology and so forth. I would say that there is a group in Atlanta who love Atlanta and love Georgia that Ivan may refer to as establishment, but they're the people who interest themselves in the candidates and campaigns and movements and projects for the welfare of this city. They are mostly well-to-do people, but they're good citizens. They're good citizens. I told you my story, I think, about how it works out--did I tell you about my butler?
STEELY:	No, haven't heard about the butler.
ARNALL:	Well, in England, in London there was a lord who had a fine butler, major domo, minor domo, manservant, valet, everything. He was good. He died. So the lord was hard-pressed to find someone to take his place. Made inquiries, got a lot of letters, there were people out looking, and finally he ended up with one man that he felt would be great and he'd got recommendations and so forth. They made an arrangement: The man was to live there in that house and serve the meals and do everything. But the manservant said to the lord, "Now, there's one restriction. I have to be off every other Monday night. I won't be here to serve you dinner." And he says, "No problem there." So everything went along well for quite a while until suddenly the lord realized that the manservant, the butler, was there on Monday nights, these alternating Monday nights, and he told him he wasn't going to be there. So he asked the butler, the valet, the manservant--he said, "I thought you were going to be off every other Monday night." He said, "That was the agreement." But he said, "You're here now." He said, "That's right." He said, "Well, what's happened?" And the manservant said, "Well, I'm a Socialist. I was secretary of the Socialist Party. A devout Socialist, a dedicated Socialist. But a few months ago we had an economist address our meeting, and he said that if we shared all the wealth and divided it equally in the United Kingdom among every man, woman and child, we would each have 192 pounds. And I've got more than that."
STEELY:	[laughs] [interruption in recording]--Socialism.
ARNALL:	So when you talk about the economy, Mills [B.] Lane, who is president of the C&S Bank for a long while and it grew greatly under him and he was a fine man--he lives in Savannah now; he's retired--he used to tell me that he was always so [mean?] because he could never forget a speech that I made to some city club and he was there and heard it. And I said, "Well, that's wonderful. What was the speech?" And he said, "Here's what it was: You said that you loved America, the United States, and you wanted it to always be and remain the land of opportunity, that you wanted the boy or the girl next door to own their own business, that you wanted the boy or the girl down the street to be a millionaire, and you wanted those further down the street to be President of the United States. And you quickly said, 'Not that they will be or can be, but what I'm talking about is that they have the opportunity to do those things.'" And so it is in our system, our economic system. We have the opportunity to make of ourselves what we will. I do not believe a government can guarantee us success in our business or trade or profession. Perhaps the pendulum has swung a little too far in that respect. I think that everyone must start with an even, equal chance, opportunity, and then do with themselves what they will. I have a favorite story--I don't know whether I've covered in our previous tape or not. It's about my friend, [Jack Spivey?]. Did I tell you about him? Well, I like to tell it. I'll tell it again. If you've heard it, okay. When I began to practice law in Newnan, it was the height of the Depression, and the best client I had was a fellow named Jack Spivey. He was a good client of mine because he liked to sue people. He was in the suing business, and he always would come to my office with a suit. He had eight children. He made them work, and his wife worked, and he never did a lick of work in his life. He just handled the money. One day he came to my office, and he said, "Colonel"--we called--in those days lawyers in the South were known as "Colonel"--he said, "Colonel, I've got a real problem." I said, "Jack, what is it?" He said, "It's my brother, Alfred. So you know, he won't work. And my wife and eight children and I have to support him. And I've come up here to see if you can't get your father, whose chairman of the county commissioners, to get Alfred, my brother, admitted to the poorhouse." In those days we had alms houses, poorhouses. So we worked around and got old Alfred safely installed in the poorhouse. Two weeks later, Jack came up to my office, agitated and upset. And I said, "Jack, what is the problem? What is your problem?" He said, "It's Alfred, my brother, Alfred." He said, "I went out to the poorhouse yesterday to see him; it was Sunday. And I got out there and found him sitting on the porch, rocking away in a rocking chair. And I said, 'Alfred, how do you like it out here?' And he said, 'Jack, I don't like it. I want to get out of here.'" And he said, "Colonel, I said to my brother, Alfred, 'Alfred, I cannot understand a man like you. Here you are in the poorhouse. You've got a private room, soft feather bed, you can sleep as long as you want to, you don't have any work to do, they give you three good meals a day, and two days a week they give you chewing tobacco and smoking tobacco, and you don't like it out here. I don't understand a man like you.'" And I said, "Jack, what did Alfred say to that?" He said, "Colonel, he just looked up at me kind of pitiful like, and said, 'Jack, the problem is there ain't no opportunity out here.'" So the trick in our system that we have is the opportunity. We need to educate our people to enhance their chances to seize opportunity. But the trick of the trade is not that anybody will be guaranteed a member of the power structure because they're rich or well-to-do, but the chance to entering the power structure or anything else is the opportunity we talk about.
STEELY:	Did you find the people in the power structure to be pretty active in politics, picking candidates and supporting them, that sort of thing?
ARNALL:	Well, the news media was very active.
STEELY:	How about people like Mr. Woodruff and Allen and people like that?
ARNALL:	Well, Bob [Robert] Woodruff was always for me. I brought the Coca-Cola Company home from Delaware to Georgia. We were always good friends. The main thing that Bob was doing: he had so many contacts, he would contact the business people and get them interested, and he was a financial angel, too. It takes money to run politics. My campaign in '66, way back there--I spent a million dollars of my own money, I borrowed a million dollars, and I must have had contributed a million or more. It's very expensive.
STEELY:	Twenty years ago.
ARNALL:	That's right. Very expensive. And I've got some of the notes that I wrote then that will expire after twenty years on October sixth, and they're in my lock box, and I'll tear them all up because they never [sued? pursued?] me--these friends who gave--they were bank officials, insurance people--they gave me--
STEELY:	Just wrote it off.
ARNALL:	[...]. The way that's done, actually--of course, since the Bert Lance banking law, none of this can be done, but in the old days what you did, the bank would give you a hundred thousand dollars [$100,000] [...], and they would get--to show the records were clean, they would get some of their official subordinates to sign promissory notes to the bank, maybe two thousand, twelve thousand, so it would total a hundred thousand. Then they'd put it in the bank. Then they would give the employees bonuses from time to time to enable them to largely pay off those notes. But you can't do that now.
STEELY:	No, that's indirect [cross-talk; ...]. You can go to jail for it.
ARNALL:	Oh, yes, they'd lock you up.
STEELY:	Yes.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Is this a good place to stop here? [End Tape 2. Begin Tape 3]
STEELY:	Okay, Governor, we talked a little bit about the power structure in the past and the effect that it had. What about the power structure in Atlanta and the state of Georgia today, and what is your role in this?
ARNALL:	Well, my role in it is nil. I've served my time, I paid my dues, and I just enjoy life now. I'm interested in politics, but I was once a Boy Scout. I was a first-class Boy Scout or eagle scout, but I have no desire to inject myself into scouting today. The basic controlling factors in Georgia, in my view, are these: the utilities; the financial institutions, including insurance companies and banks; the mass media--television, radio, newspapers, magazines. If you have those, you can do great things. For example, there are a lot of organizations here. They have a transportation organization of all the shippers. They have influence. We represent the Southern [... ...] Rate Conference, all the truck lines, 498 of them. So you can build it on up. But I would say basically it's the mass media, the banks, the insurance companies, the public utilities.
STEELY:	What role the black middle class have--not much in Georgia, but in the city of Atlanta, and where does Andrew Young fit into this? Or, say, a black mayor. It wouldn't have to be Young personally. It might be Maynard Jackson. Do they look to white leaders?
ARNALL:	All I know is the first time Andrew Young ran for mayor--no, when he ran for Congress--he came up to my office, and I encouraged him to go on with his campaign, and he was elected to Congress. I thought it was time that we had a black congressman to placate the situations that could exist here. And I think he made a good congressman. Carl Sanders came into my office when he was running for lieutenant governor. I told him he ought to run for governor, which he did. A lot of these people who fooled around with politics--I'm jumping them here, there and yon. This is a strange one--I'm jumping once again--when Lester [G.] Maddox, who ultimately got the nomination in '66 but not the vote of the people--he was finally elected by the legislature [someone coughs; ...]--but Maddox in '66 was running for lieutenant governor, and through mutual friends I used my influence to get him in the governor's race. I don't know that he knows that, but that's true. [interruption in recording]
ARNALL:	So getting back to these influential friends, if any man is going to run for statewide office today or for district office, for congressman, it is essential first that he get the money. If he doesn't have the money, he's going to end up bankrupt, and I will not be a party to these begging affairs where, after the campaign is over, some defeated candidate has a dinner and [tries?] to get people to help him pay his debts. He ought to pay them. If he can't pay them, he ought not to get [any? in it?]. I just don't believe in that. That's gotten to be a practice now, when defeated candidates go around begging. In my mail each day I get five or six solicitations for political contributions. I throw them in the trash. I think today, before a man becomes a candidate, he ought to have his finances well in hand. He doesn't have to have the money, but he can go to people who are his friends who will put it up for him. You know, talking about expenditure statements, when I was governor, the law said you had to make a disclosure where your money came from in the campaign. I'll never forget my disclosure because all mine came from family and friends. Today you've got to detail and all that. And I think one of the worst things that's happening in America is the PACs, P-A-C [political action committees]. I'm an attorney for a number of trade associations that have them, but I'm against them. I resent the idea of sending money to a PAC, and they may use the money for a candidate that I don't like, I'm against, but what can you do about it? But that seems to be the trend now, these PACs.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Yes.
STEELY:	Yes.
ARNALL:	The establishment. No, Andy Young. Yes, I think Andy made a good mayor. I think that he might have considered staying at home more.
STEELY:	Was he a better mayor than Maynard Jackson?
ARNALL:	Well, I think that Andy's had an easier time than Maynard because he's built on the structure that Maynard put in. Which is best, I wouldn't say. Atlanta's fortunate in having had good mayors. They had Andy and Jackson and Sam Massell and Ivan Allen. They've had good mayors since I've been keeping up with it, very good. But there was one thing you mentioned a minute ago that worries me greatly.
STEELY:	Yes, sir.
ARNALL:	You indirectly talked about it, one of the questions you were talking about coming to. I'm greatly concerned about what's happening to our small cities and small towns in Georgia, not that I oppose urbanization as such, but I do think that if our [...] gets so rigged that nobody can make a living in small towns and they fall by the wayside, it's going to be terrible for Georgia. I even like as many counties as we've got. I'm against county consolidation. I believe the government is best that is closest to the people.
STEELY:	Concerning the rise of the black middle class and black voting in Atlanta, did you ever consider resigning from the Piedmont Driving Club because they--
ARNALL:	No, indeed. No, indeed. Let me tell you about this. This is all bull, cock and bull. I believe the nature, no matter how much the agitation is, that the nature of humankind is such that most blacks had rather be with blacks, and most whites would rather be with whites. Shall I prove that? The strength of the black community, in my view, is the black churches. Now, there's nothing to keep a white from going to that church or a black from going to a white church, but they don't do it. That's their crowd. And my white people in my church don't go to a black church. They have a right to, but they just don't do it. Some years ago there was a man named John Gunther who wrote a book--
STEELY:	He wrote many books.
ARNALL:	This was Inside U.S.A. He was on this race thing. And I got in the car. I said, "Get in the car. I'm going to drive you." We rode down Auburn Avenue on Saturday night, and I said, "John, point out any whites you see down here." They were blacks because they were with their people, in joined fellowship. I said, "Now we'll ride down Peachtree Street." And we rode up from Five Points up beyond Macy's. I said, "Now point out how many blacks you see on the street." There were none. The whites were there, but they were enjoying their people. What would happen--I wondered this--I'm very much concerned about it--the next most important [adjunct?] to the black community, [vocal?]--first is the preachers, the church. Second are the undertakers. That's right. [No doubt about it?]. And I wonder if the undertakers really want to--I don't know. Let me move onto another thing that troubles me greatly. I'm not against it, but I'm confused about it. After all the fight and the bloodbaths that we've been through to have integrated education, how can anyone say the black colleges are apart from the white or the white apart from the black? This troubles me. And makes me wonder does anybody mean it? I don't know.
FITZ-SIMONS:	You think maybe it's a matter of--might be explained to an extent by people saying, "Well, we want the opportunity."? It's like--
ARNALL:	Well, --
FITZ-SIMONS:	--[...].
ARNALL:	This is what I have always said about first-class citizenship for the blacks, which I want. And I led the fight when they put the lash to my back. I was a maverick. I was a turncoat. I was a terrible fellow. But now they all give lip service to it, although secretly I don't know how much they believe it [...]. But my view is the thing the blacks have fought for through this number of years that they've been underprivileged and imposed on has been the right to do these things, and then if you have that right, you don't want to do it. Now, getting back to the Piedmont Driving Club, I think that the whites have a perfect right to have their own club, those similarly situated, like minded. I'm a member of a legal fraternity. We have our right to pick our own members. But to say that everybody can join, you'll destroy all of these fraternal organizations, all the religious organizations, all the social organizations. And that's not right.
STEELY:	Okay. Numan [V.] Bartley, who's a professor over at University of Georgia and used to teach at Tech--
ARNALL:	Yes.
STEELY:	--for a while. I don't know whether you know Bartley or not. A bright fellow. He wrote a book called The Creation of Modern Georgia, and in it he describes you as "a devotee of economic growth who at the same time was very cautious with respect to urban industrial boosterism." Would you feel that this is a fairly accurate assessment of you and your--
ARNALL:	I would. As a matter of fact, in my administration, we were great planners. I believe in planning. And one of the things we worked on most--we created an agricultural and industrial development board. It was very effective. That board didn't do anything for the urban areas. It worked entirely for the small towns and rural areas. For example, the case in Calloway. The father, Bo Calloway, who's my close friend--I put him on the Board of Regents--he was head of the agricultural development group, and we had a hundred farms scattered all over the country that they operated, a hundred acres, to show that agriculture could be productive if it was done right. We had another adjunct on the industrial developments, and we took the position that we're going to get industry, and we did, and we have since then, and one of the reasons is we've got the labor supply in these small towns and so forth. They don't have to ride fifty miles to get to work. No, I would say I would have been more interested, and I'm still more interested, in the strength of our state in the small town, county seat, village, rural communities than I am in the gigantic urban cities. I'm interested in them, too, but the strength and what we're concerned with--we've got to do something about that. They're dissipating. They close a mill in the town, and everybody's out of a job.
STEELY:	We've been through a whole lot of that recently.
ARNALL:	Right.
STEELY:	Particularly the textiles.
ARNALL:	Oh, yes.
STEELY:	They're hurting really bad. Bartley goes on to state that "Arnall dismissed Southern bourbons for accepting the status quo. His audience was the expanding and increasingly aggressive suburban uptown bourgeoisie." Did you really dismiss the bourbons or you moved beyond them or what?
ARNALL:	Well, the bourbons just didn't--
STEELY:	I mean, you were a bourbon yourself, [...].
ARNALL:	Well, no, I'm a liberal. I'm for the people.
STEELY:	But if any man ever grew up in a bourbon society, out of Newnan, you came out of that. Like Roosevelt, you didn't turn on your class, or did you? How do you feel about all that?
ARNALL:	Well, all I can tell you is this: When I began to practice law in Newnan, it was hard. There came about a series of textile strikes. Gene Talmadge was governor. And the strikers came down to Newnan and came all the mills, the mills of my family. They put them in concentration camps up at Fort MacPherson and whatnot. And they were charged with all kinds of offenses: carrying pistols and all that. Now, my family's mills were represented by old established lawyers, including my uncles and whatnot. Lo and behold, I ended up representing the CIO and the AF of L. I represented the strikers against my own people's mills. And when my family complained about it, my answer was a very simple one: "I've got to make a living." [laughter]
ARNALL:	And they indicted all this crowd. They were going to put them behind the bars, these union people. And I resorted to a strategy that was somewhat unique: I issued subpoenas for over a thousand people in Coweta County, over a thousand people, and a lot of them outside the county. And as you know, you have to pay the witnesses--the county does--so and so. And they soon realized I was out to break the county, so they threw all the cases out of court. But I went against my family. I just was a young lawyer trying to make a living. My views, my political views, actually are designed to help this class that you call the bourbons. My father ran a general grocery store, and he had little stores, one in Greenville and one over at Manchester and one over in Franklin and all this. Little stores. And he did not like unions. I remember once I said, "Dad, if I had these stores, I would put a sign out in front: We favor unions." He said, "Why?" I said, "Because if the working people get more money, you'll have more business and trade." My point is that my views of liberalism strengthen and create wide opportunities for the bourbons.
STEELY:	Do you think that your appeal, as you began to get into politics, really was, as Bartley says, directly appealing more to the very aggressive suburban, uptown middle class? Boosterism? Opportunity?
ARNALL:	No, I don't agree with that. My forte has always been the underprivileged, the little people. No, no, the Pennsylvania Railroad case--my whole battle cry was, "We're not fighting the railroads or the bankers, we're fighting for the little people. I want these boys who are in the Army now, when the war is over to come back home and have jobs, these little people." I always championed that, always. When I was head of price control during the war, the Korean War, the head--over me was Charlie Wilson, not the General Motors Charlie but General Electric Charlie, Charles E. Wilson. He was a stabilizer. Yes, stabilized the whole economy. And I was in charge of all the prices, price stabilizer I was; he was economic stabilizer. And the wage board gave the steel workers a wage increase, and the steel companies came to me to give them a price increase so that they could absorb that wage increase and make a little money for handling the bookkeeping and all that stuff. We had a formula. We took the five last years. They could take the three best, and we would give them whatever price increase they needed to average out the three best profitable years of the last five, whether they were paying off inventory or for labor, whatever it was, taxes. And I had [twelve thousand?] people working for me, and many of the economists who later became presidential economists and so forth. But anyway, they looked at all the stuff and said, "They can't get it. They can absorb twice as much and not break our ceiling here, where they get the profits." So I told them, "Nothin' doin'." And I would go home to Newnan, sometimes on Sunday or for the weekend, and sitting out in my yard on Sunday with Cason [J.] Callaway, a director of U.S. Steel; [Ben Fairless?], president of U.S. Steel; [Admiral Morell?], president of Inland Steel--they were sitting out there, waiting for me, and I was just as sweet and nice to them. Brought them in, gave them a drink. But the answer was always no. I said it politely, but it was always no. So they finally decided they were going to bank the furnaces, close the mills down. And we needed steel right there. It was the Korean War. So [President Harry S] Truman called me and said, "What are we going to do?" He said, "They're going to close the mills down." "Well," I said, "we're not going to break the ceiling, so I suggest you call the Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, and have him seize the mills, under your edict, and run up the American flag and let the military run those mills with such workers as we can get." Which he did. So all hell broke loose. Congress was up in arms, and they called us over there, and they couldn't find who told Truman to do it. If they'd asked me, I'd have said, "Sure, I told him to do it." But they didn't do it. They asked everybody but me. In any event, we began to get a great shortage in steel, and Truman called me and said, "We've got to do something about this." I said, "I don't know what." He said, "Well, they've got a suit now they're going to file in the Supreme Court to hold that I had no authority under my decree to do this." In the meantime, it drug on and on and on, and the next thing, one night at the Lee House, where I stayed, out of the beaten path, so people couldn't see me--they were always wanting price increases--I got a call from Charles E. Wilson in Miami. He said, "Governor, I'm down here with the steel barons, having a meeting, and I've agreed to give them ten dollars price increase, or wage increase [...], [...]. And I want you tomorrow, when you go to the office, to draw up the order, put it in effect, and then I want to have a press conference at 11:30 somewhere, and I want you to join me." And I said, "Well, Charlie, first of all, I'm not going to pass the order. And second, I'm not going to join you for a press conference because it would be a blowout. Whatever you said, I'd deny and say the other." So he said, "Well! I did exactly what the President told me to do, and I will call him now and fly back to Washington, and if I can get an appointment with him, I want you to meet me, and I'll call you right back." He called me back and said, "We're to see Truman, President Truman, at eight o'clock in his office." So I said, "I'll be there." This is a long story to get to something that's very important. So we walked in, and Truman unbuttoned his vest and said, "Boys, what's the problem?" And I said, "Mr. President, there is no problem. Charlie and I have a clash of philosophy here." And Truman said, "About what?" I said, "Very simple. Charlie is for the big man, and I'm for the little fellow. I'm for the consumer. I'm the little man." Well, from that moment on, Truman never heard another word. It was fixed. The issue was fixed. But he sat and talked with us, and finally Wilson said, "Mr. President, now, I did exactly what you told me to do. I went down there and met with them and agreed to give them a ten-dollar price increase, and Governor Arnall won't do it. I'm carrying out your orders." And Truman, who was a great poker player, buttoned his vest, buttoned his coat and said, "Charlie, I want to ask you a question. Do you play poker?" And Wilson said, "No, sir, I don't play poker." He said, "That's your trouble right there. You're not a poker player. I didn't mean for you to go down there and roll over and play dead." Whereupon Wilson said, "Mr. President, you can have my resignation." And President Truman said, "I accept it." And then he turned to me, and he said, "I want you to take Wilson's job." And I said, "Nothin' doin'. I feel badly enough getting this good man out of the government, and I'm not going to take his job." He said, "Well, you get me somebody." I said, "Okay, I will." But my point was this: All of my concepts politically have always been for the little man. I am still for the little man. Although I'm a big corporation lawyer, insurance executive, director on many companies, and have made three or four dollars, I still am for the little fellow. And my views, although they were supposed to be radical at times, have done much to promote the welfare of the whole economy, including little people.
FITZ-SIMONS:	I want to just mention something with respect to the campaign in '46. Gene Talmadge blamed your administration for ending the white primaries.
ARNALL:	Right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Now, Talmadge's literature issued during the campaign said--and I'm quoting--he said, "Throwing the Primus King case (losing it on purpose)--"
ARNALL:	That's right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	"--was the most brazen, below-the-belt sellout of Georgia's white people since the despicable carpetbagger Governor [Bulloch? Bullock?]."
ARNALL:	You see, historically, when the blacks began to vote, there were a lot of tricks used to keep them from voting. They were delayed at the polls, they were questioned, just all kind of things. A lot of them voted, and if they couldn't vote they didn't vote. They'd run away. Primus King lived in Columbus, and he brought a suit that he was denied the right to vote, and he asked damages from the state. I was attorney general, and it was my duty to defend the state's position, whether I believed in it or not. That duty was imposed on me by law. So I sent a couple of assistants down there. I told you it used to be the governor appointed some assistants. Now the attorney general--even then--appointed them all. I had that checked. So I sent some down there, and they argued the case, and the court held that--gave Primus King the verdict, but a hundred dollars damages, I think, [...] to a hundred dollars. And so after Primus King, then the only way that they could be stopped would be to pass a law somewhat like the Texas law, which would eliminate all reference to primaries, so that we would say it's not an appendage of the government; the government [...] do it. And that's when I told the legislature I would never agree to such a law. Made public announcements. And if they pass such a law, I would veto it, that we were going to have these citizens participate in our elections. And what you said Gene said was absolutely right. He said my lawyers threw the case, but hell, the courts decide the case. And besides, I knew we were living on borrowed time. Listen to me, Herman knew we were living on borrowed time. Gene knew we were. [S. Ernest] Vandiver [Jr.] knew we were. No, not one. Fortunately, the United States Supreme Court amends the Constitution with every decision, and this is good. If it were not for that, we would have revolution in this country. And when you see social changes coming, you can't dodge them; you might as well go with them. And these boys were fighting a delaying action, trying to hold it back till they got elected and got out, and then they didn't care what happened. Whereas I looked ahead and saw what was coming, and I didn't care what the penalty was, it was only right, and it did come.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Governor, if you knew [Helen Douglas Mankin?], could you tell us a little bit about her?
ARNALL:	Helen Douglas was one of my key supporters in the legislature. She was on the progressive or liberal side. She got into the race for Congress. At that time I was very, very popular politically, and I was in San Antonio making a speech, a lecture. And she called me and wanted me to endorse her. So I said, "Helen, I'll not only do that, I'll send you a telegram right now, and you release it." Which I did. And with some degree of truth, that elected her to the legislature. There's a book written by someone who knew her well, published by the University of Georgia, called The Lady of [Ashby?] Street. And it's down in my office, and I wrote the foreword to it. And here's what I said there--it all ties in: that those men and women who blaze a trail for equality of citizenship were damned and drummed out of office, whereas some of them have ridden on this wave of acceptance and even gotten to be President of the United States. It's all written down there. I said the people that need the plaudits are those who did the fighting when it was unpopular.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Don't you find the same thing true in the black community, where many of the early civil rights leaders, like [A. Philip] Randolph, people like that, are looked upon as Uncle Toms and ridiculed?
ARNALL:	Right, right, right. Of course, in the black community they were so long enslaved and denied privileges, there is a certain element that want the world changed overnight, immediately, and they're the ones that push so hard, whereas those who brought about the changes and did it intelligently and peacefully are looked on as Uncle Toms.
FITZ-SIMONS:	With your contacts with the newspapers, I'm sure you knew Ralph [E.] McGill and probably personally. A couple of questions: What did you think about him as a man and a newspaperman, and what would you say his most important contribution was?
ARNALL:	Well, Ralph was a dear friend of mine. I knew Ralph when he went to Vanderbilt University, and I went to University of South Suwanee. He was one of the sports editors of the Nashville Banner, as I recall.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Yes.
ARNALL:	Ralph came down here and took a place with the paper, and he grew in standing and friendships and acclaim. He was never afraid to speak out. He spoke his views, whether it was popular or unpopular. It just happened that our views were so much alike that there was no friction between us, and when I ran for governor, he was very active in my campaign. He was quite active. And Gene Talmadge used to try to tie me into Ralph and say we were both nigger lovers. That was what he said. You know, that was a great phrase in those days, nigger lovers.
STEELY:	Was he the one that called him Rastus McGill?
ARNALL:	Yes, yes, that's right. And so Ralph--when Talmadge would get on the radio, he'd make a speech cussing me and Ralph out, called us all the opprobrious names you could get by with. And his wife, Ralph's, would go in a room in their house--it's been torn down now-- out Piedmont way. Her name was Mary Elizabeth. He would get in one room and close the door, with no television, and he would make his wife, Mary Elizabeth, sit there and listen to the television. And every once in a while, Ralph couldn't stand it anymore. He'd jump up, open the door, and say, "What's he saying about me now?" [laughter] But Ralph was a great friend of mine. He was a great liberal. We were very close. When my daughter married, he came to the w[edding]--oh, we were just as close as two fellows could be. He's a great friend of mine. He blazed a trail. He was a trailblazer. He was damned. But so are all trailblazers damned. I was damned. But so what? You know, you want to do something. You want to make progress. That's what you're here for. And I have the highest regard for Ralph McGill.
FITZ-SIMON:	Would you think of him, then, as--I know that either-or choices are not fair--as a sensible, cautious liberal or a radical liberal?
ARNALL:	Well, I would say he was an adventuresome liberal.
FITZ-SIMONS:	All right.
ARNALL:	That's how I would--I'm an adventuresome liberal. I want to change things. Whatever it is that can be improved, I would change them.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Perhaps you're stating it better. When I said "a cautious liberal," I didn't mean--you know, throwing the conservatives and the like around, but adventuresome liberal but not a fool.
ARNALL:	Adventuresome liberal. I always, always in my life.
FITZ-SIMONS:	But I mean that's been your life. I've [only seen?] McGill's.
ARNALL:	I want the results. And if you have to sheath your sword for a while, you sheath it. If you put it out, you don't get the results. So I'd say this, that [...], never running for public office, never sheathed his sword. It didn't matter to him. But I as a public figure, had to occasionally be a little more cautious.
FITZ-SIMONS:	I think you might have answered this in part at least before, but after the Brown case was decided, Governors Talmadge, Griffin, Vandiver supported massive resistance.
ARNALL:	They supported who?
FITZ-SIMONS:	Supported massive resistance--
ARNALL:	Oh, yes.
FITZ-SIMONS:	--to integration. Now, my question is at what point did this support cease to be a possible or an achievable aim in their eyes, and become just a necessary political charade, or was it that all along?
ARNALL:	It was that all along, but the crowning lick was the integration of the University of Georgia, the schools--when Vandiver, who had been elected on a program of "no, not one"-- he said, "Blood will flow in the streets. There will be killings." That "we will never submit while I'm governor to let the first black in the University of Georgia. No, not one. No, not one." And then when under the court order he submitted, that was the last of the warriors in that faction that confessed it was all over with.
FITZ-SIMONS:	You think when he said this, he knew. Do you think he knew that he had to let the courts force him?
ARNALL:	Of course. I like him, and we've gotten to be real good friends, but no matter what he said and what Herman said or what Gene said, they knew they were on a sinking ship, but they were going to try to ride it out and hope they could get to port before it went down, and it went down on Ernie.
STEELY:	Would you say that Gene really felt that way?
ARNALL:	Oh, yes. It was a political ploy. Of course it was.
STEELY:	All right.
FITZ-SIMONS:	Okay, this might be a good place to stop. We're getting right close to your thing. We're halfway through with it.
ARNALL:	Okay.
[End of Interview]