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While Herman was debating airily on the campus, his father was speaking in earnest on the hustings. Running for governor, Gene was charged with dishonesty during his term as commissioner of agriculture; he had once shipped Georgia hogs to Chicago to find a higher price, wasted $11,000 in state funds. Gene laughed off the criticism in his speeches to rural voters: "Sure, I stole it, but I stole it for you." The explanation delighted the hard-pressed countrymen. They rolled up the Talmadge vote. The Talmadges moved into the ugly stone governor's mansion in Atlanta's posh Ansley Park. Because Gene and Mattie (known to two generations of Georgians as "Miss Mitt") wanted to give the mansion a homey atmosphere, they shocked neighbors by tethering a cow on the lawn.
Key to Power. When Gene campaigned for a second term, 21-year-old Herman made a rousing maiden political speech at Rebecca, Ga., helped his father carry every county but three. As governor, Gene booted out his motor vehicles commissioner for refusing to cut prices on automobile licenses to $3 on Gene's say-so. When the public-service commission would not lower utility rates, Gene ordered the commissioners to trial before him, found them guilty of using railroad passes, as punishment replaced them with his own men. His most outrageous move came after the state treasurer refused to dole out funds until the legislature appropriated them. Gene called out the militia, had militiamen carry the treasurer out of his office, brought in locksmiths to open the treasury vaults. At the close of his second term Gene reached for a higher goal: Richard Russell's Senate seat. But a new kind of patronage was in the wind that Gene had underestimated. Russell campaigned on New Deal achievements in Georgia, and won easily.
Retiring to private practice after his second term, Gene was joined by Herman, just out of the University of Georgia law school. Says Herman: "We just about starved. I didn't know any law and he didn't know much about practicing." Yearning to match Huey Long and Theodore Bilbo in the Senate, Gene laid his plans carefully for 1938, when Walter George would run again. As with all Talmadge political plans, they revolved around intensive cultivation of Georgia's farmers, for under Georgia's unit-vote system, it is the farmers who hold the balance of power.
The unit system decides primaries (the only real elections in one-party Georgia) by counties instead of total popular vote. The eight largest counties cast six votes each, the 30 next-largest four votes, and the remaining 121 counties two votes. Designed to prevent city voters from overpowering the farmer, the system achieves an opposite effect: the farmers overpower the cities. Example: the total of 1,996 voters registered in Chattahoochee, Quitman and Echols Counties, at two unit votes per county, can offset 125,000 in six-vote Fulton County (Atlanta). Since candidates can win by carrying 103 small counties, the wisest ignore the cities, woo the rural voters.