Demagogue's Decline

TOM WATSON: AGRARIAN REBEL--C. Vann Woodward--Macmillan ($3.75).

During the delirious boom years after Reconstruction, when Northern capital poured into the South, and Confederate generals became presidents of railroad and steel companies, two movements opposed to industrialism also got under way. One was the type represented by General Robert Toombs, tousle-haired, unreconstructed, uncompromising old Confederate who refused to take the oath of allegiance and who used to stalk around the lobby of Atlanta's Kimball House, deep in his cups, delivering his matchless tirades against the North. The other was the tvpe represented by the nervous, embattled Tom Watson of Thomson, only nine years old when the war ended, who began as a champion of the poor farmers, became a Populist candidate for President, and wound up as a rabble-rouser, an anti-Semite, anti-Catholic, defender of lynching, with a reputation as the "basest, most depraved, most poisonous man in Georgia."

Last week Professor C. Vann Woodward analyzed these two protesting movements in a long (518 pages), meaty biography. Toombs's story was simpler and more heroic; Watson's was incredibly confused. For 30 years he was a hero to hard pressed Georgia dirt farmers; The Thomas E. Watson Song is still sung in the Georgia back country. Debs admired Watson, Bryan feared him.

Fifty-one years ago this month the crusading Farmers' Alliance began organizing in Georgia, had 100,000 members in three years. At that time Watson was a 31-year-old lawyer who played the fiddle, spouted Byron by the hour, and was considered a born orator in a State famed for them. Becoming the Alliance leader, Watson worked as hard for Negro farmers as for white, fought the convict lease system, was denounced as a communist while his followers were shot at and chased from the State.

Persecution made Watson stronger, but success beat him. In Congress he was despondent and ineffectual. He became wealthy, built a big house where he lived like an oldtime planter, but grew morose and vindictive, gradually stopped crusading for farmers and took up more sensational causes. Increasingly unhappy, he would interrupt his incoherent tirades against the Jews and Catholics with strange stories about assassins who were after him, about mysterious footprints found outside his mansion windows. At times he thought he was going insane. Beaten in one campaign after another, he was finally jeered off the stage in Atlanta, where he had had so many triumphs. Until the end of his life he detested industrialism in all its forms, was driven frantic by noise, and in the depths of his despair and hatred of the modern world cried out: "Come back to us once more oh dream of the old time South!"

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