By John Martin

 
ate on election night in 1980, I began to understand how Herman Talmadge had survived and prospered in a state that had evolved so far from the banana republic of virulent racist politics that he had ruled for so long.

It had been a rough couple of years for “Hummon,” as the former governor and then-senior senator who died March 21 was known from Brasstown Bald to Tybee Light. Partly it was the Talmadge campaign-finance scandal — all those hundred-dollar bills stuffed into an overcoat pocket — that had exploded out of his nasty divorce proceedings. And partly it was the senator’s admission of alcoholism, which surprised no one who knew him well. And partly, of course, it was the gathering momentum of the Reagan presidential juggernaut.

But none of those — and certainly not the Republican challenger whom Talmadge referred to as “that typewriter salesman from Indiana” — would have been enough to defeat the magic of the Talmadge name. Talmadges had been the dominant force in Georgia politics since Herman’s father Gene, the red-suspendered “Wild Man of Sugar Creek,” won the governorship in 1926. They had been the dominant force in the disputed election of 1946, when Herman had claimed the governorship on the basis of princely primogeniture and some write-in votes.

No politician, north or south, Republican or Democrat, could best Herman Talmadge at the survival game. This Talmadge was the same one who, in a 1955 book entitled Segregation and You, had written that “God advocates segregation.” And it was the same Talmadge who, not so many years after that, was sponsoring federal legislation to provide food stamps and school lunches for the poor. Was he sincere, or was he an unprincipled opportunist? Morris Brown College, the elite black school in Atlanta, chose to believe in his actions, proclaiming Talmadge its Man of the Year in 1975.

So on election night in 1980, it seemed that Herman Eugene Talmadge was going to pull it off one more time. Late into the night, his vote lead across the state was comfortable enough for two networks and a wire service to declare him the winner. Enraptured supporters, on hand for his victory celebration, were chanting “Hummon, Hummon, Hummon,” begging him to take the podium and declare victory over Republican nobody Mack Mattingly.

Talmadge made no victory speech. He went to bed. It’s doubtful that he slept well, knowing as he surely did that Georgia politics had changed once again, that the new force to be reckoned with was demographics — all those new suburban Atlanta voters whose ballots were still being counted, those typewriter salesmen from Indiana and other places, those Republicans and those Democrats for whom the Talmadge name held no magic, and never would.

In 1980, Governing.com Editor John Martin was an editor on the Atlanta Journal city desk.

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