For more than 80 years, a bronze statue of a stern-faced man in a frock-coat, one clenched fist at his side and one held over his head as though he were in mid-declamation, stood before the front entrance to Georgia's capitol building. The statue is of Tom Watson, a fiery populist who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served in Georgia's legislature and both houses of Congress. He was also a publisher, essayist and vice-presidential candidate. At first, Watson was a progressive agrarian populist, winning the support of rural blacks and whites alike. He came to abandon those ideals, writing vicious diatribes in his magazine against blacks ("an inferior being.. .not any more our brother than the apes are"), Jews ("thick-lipped rakes [who] glut their eyes upon handsome Gentile women") and Catholics (he referred to the Pope as "a fat old Dago"). He whipped up sentiment against Leo Frank, a Jewish factory worker lynched in 1913 after having been convicted, on flimsy evidence, of killing a 13-year-old Christian girl.
展开▼
