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Ballots & Boll Weevils. Gene Talmadge had long followed the career of Georgia's mellifluous, rabble-rousing Senator Tom Watson. Gene approved of Watson's Populist movement and its appeal to country voters, and set out along the Watson trail to accomplish similar triumphs. The Georgia farmers of the 1920s were being battered by the boll weevil, would soon be battered harder by the Depression. Gene established himself as their champion. He filed for state commissioner of agriculture in the 1926 election, swept out a corrupt incumbent. When he could spare time, Herman helped by tacking up posters and distributing handbills. But the boy was busy with his own politicking for vice president of his ninth-grade class. He also won, likes to brag: "I've never lost an election since then."
In addition to classroom politics, Herman was fond of history, biography and a study of the U.S. Constitution. Other pleasures: Greek and Roman classics, Gibbon's Decline and Fall. He stayed late only if the class was debating. Other days he went home to his chores. One afternoon in 1930, while Herman was picking turnips, the house caught fire and burned to the ground (with one casualty, a German shepherd dog named Al Smith). Gene, who was spending weekdays in Atlanta as agriculture commissioner and only weekends at home as a father, took advantage of the fire to move the family to Atlanta. Herman entered Druid Hills School, found himself better grounded in his subjects than the city boys.
The BMOC. Graduating as salutatorian of his class, he argued against Gene's suggestion that he work his way through Georgia Tech. Herman got his own way: studying law at the University of Georgia as his father had done. With a car and more spending money than the average student, Herman became a big man on campus. He got Bs with little book-cracking, loafed, played poker, dated coeds. Remembers one: "He was pretty forward, but he was good company." Pledged to Sigma Nu, his father's fraternity, Herman helped guide a revolt by smaller fraternities against the big three—Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Chi Phi and Kappa Alpha—that traditionally controlled the university's Pan Hellenic Society. For his politicking, Herman won some patronage: the Pan Hellenic presidency in his senior year. Like his father, he joined the Phi Kappa debating society, but there was a difference in their styles. Campus audiences remembered Gene's chewing tobacco while he declaimed, pausing periodically to spit with wondrous accuracy into a nearby potbellied stove. They remember Herman because he always brought along a claque to touch off appropriate applause for his important points.