POLITICAL NOTES: Prince of the Peckerwoods

During 38 years in Mississippi politics Theodore ("The Man") Bilbo has waded through sloughs of scandal which would have sucked down a dozen ordinary politicians. In 1910, as a drink-cadging state legislator, he heard the State Senate pronounce him "unfit to sit with upright men." He was jailed in 1923 for refusing to testify in a seduction suit against his political sidekick, Governor Lee M. Russell. He divorced his wife; she accused him of cruelty and a succession of infidelities, publicly begged Mississippi's women to vote against him.

But The Man always sloshed...

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