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Dick was brought up to become nothing less than a repository of Southern traditions and an exemplar of Southern character. Father was a Presbyterian and mother a Methodist, a strict disciplinarian who wielded the peachtree switch and leather strap on the children "until the blood came." Twice, before Dick was 13, the Bible was read aloud in family meetings—all the way through. Well Dick learned the old family stories—great-grandfather had owned a plantation and 35 or 40 slaves; grandfather had his cotton mill on Sweetwater Creek burned down and his slaves set free by Sherman's men, and grandmother had to flee from Marietta escorted by the family coachman, a slave named Monday Russell (because he was born on Monday); Old Slave Monday lived on to serve in that carpetbag Georgia state legislature come Reconstruction. Dick was taught to call Negroes "the colored people" and he admired and respected them in that special, paternal Southern way. Once, when he considered joining the Ku Klux Klan, his father took him aside and handed out some advice that was to last Dick the rest of his life: "Son, any organization where the members are not willing to go around unmasked—I'd go slow about that."
The Youngest Man. Dick's father was respected across the state as a lawyer, and was appointed to state offices all the way up to Georgia's chief justice, but he was defeated whenever he tried to run for such popular-vote offices as governor. Young Dick was concerned about his father's failures. Once he went with his father to the governor's mansion in Atlanta and said: "Daddy, I want to live here someday." And in 1931, after learning about military discipline at Gordon Military College, law at the University of Georgia, politics in ten years in the Georgia State legislature, he declared for the job he had always wanted.
It was hard-up Depression time, and Dick borrowed $1,000 on a life insurance policy, got hold of a battered Oldsmobile coupé to go campaigning 40,000 miles across the state and got elected. He was sworn in by his father, the chief justice (appointed) and then began to rack up such a record of efficiency and integrity—he cut 102 state departments, bureaus and commissions to 17, even dropped his father from two patronage jobs in the state university system—that he was able the next year to run for U.S. Senator and win. In January 1933 Dick Russell, 35, youngest governor in the history of Georgia, became the youngest man in the U.S. Senate.
At once he showed the sense of belonging, the respect for the Senate as an institution that has long characterized the true Senator. He memorized the 40 rules of the Senate; then he set up regular sessions with the Senate parliamentarian to study the precedents. As the years rolled on, Dick Russell became such a master of Senate procedure that Illinois' Paul Douglas once said: "I yield, though my knees are knocking, to one of the subtlest men and one of the most able field generals who ever appeared on the floor of the Senate."