Double Trouble

Georgia was getting more publicity than a two-headed calf--and seemed to suffer from the same ailments which harass such a rare beast. Each of Georgia's heads wanted to go in a different direction. Each mooed incessantly. Each tried to butt the other out of the feedbox. Meanwhile, the animal proper did not seem able to eat, walk or cough up its cud, but simply stood disconsolately, enduring violent disturbances of the fourth stomach.

After two weeks in office, young Governor Herman ("Hummon") Talmadge still held his favored position on the neck of state. But the constitutionality of his succession was far from settled. Lieut. Governor Melvin E. Thompson, who called himself governor and acted like one, kept crying that Hummon was a fraud.

Georgia reacted noisily. Hundreds of citizens gathered at impromptu meetings to attack Hummon. Two thousand students from eight Georgia colleges marched on the capitol, hanged Hummon in effigy, and bayed from the street outside. And the state assembly lagged in carrying out Hummon's orders for a white primary bill; so many of his legislative backers left town one day that Thompson's minority was almost able to vote a long recess.

"Coop de Tote." Hummon was not abashed. He got the legislators together for a pep talk, gave them a piece of oratory distinguished mainly by his unique pronunciation of coup d'etat. Hummon made it "coop de tate." He went on the air to cry that radicals were plotting to "destroy the dominance of the white race in the South"--and to suggest that his followers mail in nickels and dimes to pay for the radio time he had used, a matter of $1,637.66. To demonstrate his innate kindliness he even got himself photographed giving a dollar bill to a poverty-stricken Negro sharecropper.

Meanwhile each governor announced that he expected to get paid at the rate of $12,000 a year. Each appointed state officers. Hummon's had the edge, since they were confirmed by the state senate. But the processes of government began to succumb to a sort of galloping schizophrenia. The 200 Georgia banks which handle state money didn't know which governor to recognize; and one--the Fulton National Bank of Atlanta--prepared to institute legal action to find out who was really it.

It seemed doubtful that there would be any clear-cut legal decision for months, but at week's end an Atlanta judge named Virlyn B. Moore expressed positive if indirect disapproval of the present state of affairs. A Negro bigamist arraigned in his court cried: "I caint see where it's wrong for a man to have two wives when it's all right for a state to have two governors." Judge Moore just gave him twelve months in the cooler.

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