Comfortable Again

In the red-clay country around Marietta, Ga. an old story was retold. An ancient and destitute woman had scrabbled for years in one of the town's back streets. One day she took sick and a squad of church ladies moved in, tidied her shack, bathed her, dressed her in clean clothes and tucked her into a clean bed. When they called next day, they found the old woman and her bed back in the familiar rags. "I just wasn't comfortable," she explained. "I'll have to git used to them clean clothes gradual."

Last week, rural Georgia was comfortable again. After nearly four years of wearing the laundered government of chubby Governor Ellis Arnall (who cannot succeed himself under state law), she had gone back to his skinny, wild-eyed predecessor, 61-year-old ex-Governor Eugene Talmadge. Talmadge's once discarded political union suit still smelled of demagoguery, Klan support and white supremacy. But it felt easy in the seat.

How "Ole Gene" had wangled himself back into the governorship by winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary was no puzzle to Georgians--even though his principal opponent, James V. Carmichael, had polled 314,421 popular votes to Gene's 305,777. The "Wild Man from Sugar Creek" had just exploited Georgia's county unit system of counting votes.

Under the unit system, Fulton County (where Carmichael beat Talmadge by 23,836) got six electoral votes for its 92,500 voters. Echols County got two for its 619 voters. Thus, one Echols vote had the electoral power of 150 Fulton votes in last week's election. Not one of Georgia's 159 counties is so humble as to have less than two electoral votes.

With that kind of setup, it was no particular trick for Ole Gene. Unworried by popular majorities, he bypassed the cities where Carmichael appealed to the voters (including Georgia's 650,000 adult Negroes belatedly enfranchised this year). He just concentrated on the farmers. Gene had always had the farmers right by their pet prejudices. Once more, he snapped his red galluses at them, borrowed chaws of cut plug from crowds, ranted about the Negro menace, the labor menace, the new carpetbaggers--and promised little but a return to normalcy, Georgia style.

Listening to Gene, the farmers had suddenly realized what it was that had been binding them so long. It was those damn clean clothes.

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