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The Senators among whom Herman will take his confident place will find this new colleague a jack of many trades. He owns 4,000 fertile acres of farmland, chairmans booming young insurance and investment companies, has built a $40,000-a-year law practice, dabbles profitably in real estate, markets Georgia-cured hams. He edits a weekly newspaper that ranges in content from economic evaluations of the changing Georgia scene to muck-slinging racist propaganda in campaign seasons. Recently he became an author: his You and Segregation is being snatched up by the Citizens' Councils of the South.
The Status Quo. These outward evidences of well-being and well-meaning are deceiving. Respectability and temperance are the coats that hide the flaming red galluses and the flaming passions of Herman's father. Says a Georgia lawyer who has watched Gene and Herman Talmadge operate through the years: "The Talmadges have always maintained a fundamental disrespect for the law."
A fine, flaring disrespect for the outside world, coupled with a profound understanding of Georgia and its politics, carried both Talmadges to the governor's mansion. As governor, Herman inherited and refined his father's credo: keep down the cities, hold the Negro to his proper place in God's order. But today, city and Negro are both restless in the boom that is sweeping Georgia from its mountains and red-clay hills to its plains and coast. Cities outpace the struggling counties, the Negro vote leaps upward, cattle are becoming more valuable than cotton, industry outproduces the farmer, even Republicans are running candidates. Against this gathering avalanche Herman intends to maintain the Bible-shouting, "Anglo-Saxon," segregated status quo he has always enjoyed. He believes firmly that he can halt the pulsing pistons of political progress. He believes because, reared on politics, he has found that the processes of Georgia government can be manipulated to achieve the things the Talmadges want and that old Georgia wants. If they cannot be had within the law, they can be had around and under the law.
Rawhide Justice. Herman was 13 when his father first began to feel his way around in politics. The family lived in little (pop. 1,904) McCrae, 168 miles southeast of Atlanta, where Mattie Talmadge operated a 1,000-acre farm while her husband practiced law and became gradually disgruntled at the rarity with which McCrae needed lawyers. As a country boy, Herman fished and swam in nearby Sugar Creek, hunted, drove the family's 15 cows to milking, cleaned the dirty kerosene-lamp chimneys ("I don't know anything more disgusting").
Three times on Sunday Herman and his sisters attended service at the Baptist Church in McCrae. At home he listened while Gene Talmadge read the Bible or talked politics. When he forgot his chores, Herman felt his father's swift justice: a whipping administered with the stinging end of a plowline. On the farm, too, he gradually learned a special discipline: that he and the small sons of the Negro field hands with whom he played must eventually go their separate, segregated ways.