 Eugene Talmadge statue (2020) | |
| Location | Georgia State Capitol, Atlanta, Georgia |
|---|---|
| Designer | Steffen Thomas |
| Dedicated date | September 23, 1949 |
| Dedicated to | Eugene Talmadge |
The Eugene Talmadge statue is a public monument located on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, Georgia. Designed by Steffen Thomas, the statue was unveiled in 1949 and depicts Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge. The statue has been the subject of recent controversy given Talmadge's white supremacist and racist views.
Born in 1884, [1] Eugene Talmadge served multiple terms as Governor of Georgia during the 1930s and 1940s. [1] [2] We was first elected to that position in 1932 and in total was elected governor a total of four times. He died in 1946 after his fourth election before taking office. [3] He is noted for several scandals that occurred both during and after his governorships, including the Cocking affair during his third term, the Moore's Ford lynchings during his campaign in the 1946 Georgia gubernatorial election, and the three governors controversy that occurred shortly after his death in 1946. [1] [2] Talmadge was also a segregationist, [4] and during his 1946 campaign he made restoring the Georgia Democratic Party's white primary (which had recently been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States) a key campaign issue. [1] [3]
In 1949, Eugene's son Herman Talmadge, who had briefly served as governor during the three governors controversy, pushed for the installation of a statue honoring his deceased father. [1] Steffen Thomas sculpted the statue from his studio in nearby Stone Mountain, Georgia. While initially wanting to depict Talmadge with shirt sleeves and his thumbs hooked under his suspenders, the Talmadge family felt that that would be an "undignified" image of him. [5] The statue was unveiled on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol by his grandsons on September 23, 1949, [6] on what would have been Eugene's 65th birthday. [7] The statue's right hand features six fingers, an inconsistency from the real Talmadge. [5]
Since the 2010s, Talmadge's reputation as governor has come under more scrutiny, with multiple publications criticizing the statue's placement at the Georgia State Capitol. Following the removal of a statue honoring Thomas E. Watson from the capitol grounds, publications including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Washington Monthly criticized Talmadge and the statue, with the latter calling him a "reactionary demagogue" and the former calling him one of several racist figures honored on the capitol grounds, which included a statue of John Brown Gordon. [3] [8] Further criticism of the statue appeared following the Unite the Right rally in 2017. [1] [2]
Thomas Edward Watson was an American Populist and white supremacist politician, attorney, newspaper editor, and writer from Georgia. In the 1890s Watson championed poor farmers as a leader of the Populist Party, articulating an agrarian political viewpoint while attacking business, bankers, railroads, Democratic President Grover Cleveland, and the Democratic Party. He was the nominee for vice president with Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 on the Populist ticket.
Herman Eugene Talmadge was an American politician who served as governor of Georgia in 1947 and from 1948 to 1955 and as a U.S. senator from Georgia from 1957 to 1981. A Democrat, Talmadge served during a time of political transition, both in Georgia and nationally. He began his career as a staunch segregationist known for his opposition to civil rights, ordering schools to be closed rather than desegregated. But by the later stages of his career, following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, which gave substance to the Fifteenth Amendment enacted nearly one hundred years before, Talmadge, like many other Southern politicians of that period, had modified his views. His life eventually encapsulated the emergence of his native Georgia from entrenched white supremacy into a political culture where white voters regularly elect black members of Congress.
Eugene Talmadge was an attorney and American politician who served three terms as the 67th governor of Georgia, from 1933 to 1937, and then again from 1941 to 1943. Elected to a fourth term in November 1946, he died before his inauguration, scheduled for January 1947. Only Talmadge and Joe Brown, in the mid-19th century, have been elected four times as governor of Georgia.
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The three governors controversy was a political crisis in the U.S. state of Georgia from 1946 to 1947. On December 21, 1946, Eugene Talmadge, the governor-elect of Georgia, died before taking office. The state constitution did not specify who would assume the governorship in such a situation, so three men made claims to the governorship: Ellis Arnall, the outgoing governor; Melvin E. Thompson, the lieutenant governor-elect; and Herman Talmadge, Eugene Talmadge's son. Eventually a ruling by the Supreme Court of Georgia settled the matter in favor of Thompson. Georgia's Secretary of State Ben Fortson hid the state seal in his wheelchair so no official business could be conducted until the controversy was settled.
The 1948 Georgia gubernatorial special election took place on November 2, 1948, in order to elect the Governor of Georgia.
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The Martin Luther King Jr. statue is a public monument of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia. The statue, designed by Martin Dawe, was unveiled in 2017 and stands on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol, overlooking Liberty Plaza.
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Media related to Eugene Talmadge statue (Georgia State Capitol) at Wikimedia Commons