Thomas Edward Watson

• Thomas Edward Watson
• Born: September 5, 1856
• Died: September 26, 1922

Populist editor and congressman, was born in Columbia County, Georgia, the second child and eldest son of seven children of John Smith Watson and Ann Eliza (Maddox) Watson. He was descended from English Quakers who had come to Georgia in the eighteenth century. Watson’s childhood was shadowed by the effects of the Civil War on his family: he identified the deaths of his grandfather and uncle and the impoverishment and demoralization of his father, who had been wounded twice, with the military defeat of the South and the threatened destruction of its agrarian way of life at the hands of victorious northern capitalists and their southern allies. Romantic and ambitious, he reversed his given names—he had been christened Edward Thomas—so that he might bear the name of his grandfather, who had been a substantial planter and slaveowner. He read widely, and poured his aggrieved feelings and desires for both recognition and revenge into poetry and diaries.

At the age of sixteen, Watson entered Mercer University, a small Baptist institution in Macon, Georgia, where he spent two years; he later read law in Augusta, alternating his studies with periods of schoolteaching. He was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1875 and settled in Thomson, near his birthplace. In 1878 he married Georgia Durham of Thomson. They had a son and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy.

In the early days of his legal career, Watson specialized in criminal defense; he doubled his income every year and invested in land. He was able to repurchase the family home and install his parents there, and he punished a landlord who wronged his sharecropper brother by publicly whipping the man. Politically, Watson allied himself with the former Confederate officials Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens, who were trying to protect agrarian values against the state Democratic machine, which was now dominated by northern capitalists, and against the “New South” philosophy that extolled this alliance with the industrial North. Beginning with his first unsuccessful bid for the Georgia legislature and continuing through his single term in 1882, he maintained his strong opposition to the postwar leaders, who, he said, would “betray the South with a Judas kiss.”

The South’s only hope, Watson believed, lay in an alliance with the agrarian West. He was an early supporter of the Farmers’ Alliance program of using the economic power of organized farmers to fight off subjection by organized capital. He played a leading role in the successful 1888 boycott of the jute trust by the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, which persuaded its members to substitute cotton bags for those made of jute. He was also prominent in the faction of the Alliance that held that economic action alone could not achieve the farmers’ goals and insisted on independent political action by a third party, based on agriculture but including labor and reform elements.

Watson’s many speeches in behalf of a third party won him a large following. He easily won his 1890 race for the House of Representatives, where he became the Populist leader, a candidate for Speaker of the House, and a supporter of reform measures advocated by labor or by the Alliance. He fought for a bill to abolish the use of Pinkerton operatives as strikebreakers and introduced the first bill to provide free rural mail delivery.

Watson also used his congressional seat to promote the People’s party, which had been organized by the Populists in the early 1890s. But Lon Livingston and his followers, who believed that agrarian reform could be accomplished through the Democrats, were still at the helm of the Farmers’ Alliance of Georgia. To bring the majority to his point of view, Watson founded the People’s Party Paper in 1891 and used its columns to persuade readers that the cornerstone of the Alliance program—Charles Macune’s plan to free American agriculture from the stranglehold of the commercial banks by having the federal government issue credit in the form of greenback dollars so that farmers would no longer have to mortgage their crops—could be accomplished only through a third party that owed nothing to the financial and political establishment. Georgia came to be regarded as a test case of whether class interests could transcend traditional party loyalties, and the results were celebrated for years by Georgians in song: “When Watson led the people out / They marched through flood and flame; / Old Livingston tried to turn them back, / But they got there all the same.”

After the death of Leonidas L. Polk three weeks before his expected presidential nomination by the People’s party convention of 1892, Tom Watson became the acknowledged leader of populism in the Southeast, serving as organizer, tactician, and its most powerful spokesman in print and on the stump. For the 1892 campaign he compiled the People’s Party Campaign Book (subtitled Not a Revolt; It Is a Revolution), a compendium of aids to speakers in their exposition of Populist doctrine. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the Populist movement was his belief in educating the masses on the economic and political problems of the day so that they could provide their own initiative and leadership. In an editorial in the spring of 1892, Watson exulted that “Plutocracy and Democracy” were contending on fairly even terms at the ballot box for the first time in history.

The test of this belief was not long in coming. Watson campaign for reelection to Congress in 1892 was opposed by powerful conservative Democrats who were determined to keep him out of Washington. His district was gerrymandered and his life was threatened; many of his speeches were made from platforms surrounded by armed Populist guards. Because he solicited the black vote and frequently shared the platform with black speakers, he was accused of undermining white supremacy and of being a socialist. When a young black minister supporting Watson was threatened, a call went out to the countryside, producing, as Watson pointed out in an editorial, a spectacle very rare indeed in Georgia, “the sight of white farmers riding all night to save a Negro from lynching.”

During the 1892 campaign Watson published “The Negro Question in the South” in a national magazine, The Arena (October 1892), presenting the Populist view that the ruling elite encourages animosity between the races in order to keep them from joining forces in pursuit of political power; the poor, he said, would be better advised to put class interests above racial interests. On the stump, the wiry, redheaded Watson drove himself to exhaustion every day, visibly swaying crowds with his denunciations of the banks, the railroads, the trusts, and their new corporate feudalism. When violence failed to intimidate Watson and his supporters, the opposition resorted to fraud: in Augusta, his opponent’s tally exceeded the number of legal voters in the city. But even the fraudulent returns showed that, despite Watson’s loss, almost half the voters in Georgia had voted Populist.

Watson’s defeat in the congressional campaign of 1894 was again the result of violence and fraud, but it brought him national attention just as populism was reaching its crest. At the People’s party convention of 1896, he was nominated for vice president in the early stages of a bitter floor fight between the faction advocating fusion with the Democrats over the issue of free silver coinage and the “mid-roader” faction, which refused to make populism a one-issue movement. The fusionists succeeded in taking control of the convention and giving the Populist nomination for president to the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. A staunch opponent of fusion, Watson accepted the vice-presidential nomination reluctantly in the interests of uniting all factions and in the mistaken belief that the Democrats would withdraw their own vice-presidential nominee, Arthur Sewall, a conservative financier who was completely unacceptable to rank-and-file Populists. Nonetheless, Sewall was adopted, at Bryan’s insistence, as the party’s official nominee, and the Populists suffered a disastrous schism. Watson made some fiery speeches in Texas, but elsewhere in the West his campaign was a fiasco. He was ignored by Populist fusionists and treated with scorn by Democrats.

Demoralized and humiliated, Watson returned to Georgia. As the nation’s best-known symbol of the radical third party, he had become an anachronism. No one understood more clearly than Watson what this meant for the future of populism. Along with other antifusionists, he had long feared the distorting power of the silver issue, and he knew that with the nomination of Bryan, free silver, the “cowbird of the reform movement,” had triumphed: the agrarian crusade against corporate America was over.

After the election, Watson retired from public life for eight years and devoted himself to exploring the roots and ramifications of class politics in the two great revolutionary countries of the West. He wrote a two-volume popular history of France (1899), an adequate biography of Napoleon (1902), “life and times” studies of Jefferson and Jackson (1903 and 1912), and a sentimental novel, Bethany (1904).

In 1904, when the Democrats named the conservative Alton B. Parker to run against Theodore Roosevelt, a convention of mid-road Populists nominated Watson for president. Although he polled little more than 117,000 votes, the spirit and ideas of his campaign speeches attracted the attention of reformers all over the country.

Turning once more to journalism in 1905, he started the short-lived Tom Watson’s Magazine in New York City, featuring contributions from Theodore Dreiser, Maksim Gorky, and Edgar Lee Masters, as well as his own editorials on political and economic reform. Returning to Georgia, he founded the Weekly Jeffersonian and Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine. To publicize his 1908 campaign for the presidency, he wrote The Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson.

Throughout this period of low political fortune, Watson’s publications helped him retain a large personal following; his hold over the Georgia Democrats (and, therefore, state politics in general) was complete. He no longer appealed for racial and class unity; most of his supporters were now white supremacists who appreciated his virulent attacks on “alien influences”—Catholics, blacks, Jews, socialists, and foreigners.

Probably the nadir of Watson’s political life, and certainly the incident best known to later generations, was his infamous role in the lynching of Leo Frank of Atlanta. Frank, a Jewish engineer, was convicted in 1913 of the rape and murder of a young girl on the testimony of a perjured witness. In the spring of 1914 a new trial was demanded by the Atlanta Journal, the mouthpiece of Watson’s political enemy, U.S. Senator Hoke Smith, who was running for reelection that year; Watson responded by running inflammatory editorials in the Jeffersonian, calling Frank a “filthy, perverted Jew” and warning that commutation of Frank’s death sentence would result in “the bloodiest riot ever known in the history of the South.” The Jeffersonian’s circulation tripled. Watson helped organize the Knights of Mary Phagan to harass Jewish businesses and issued a call for anticommutation rallies, which were held throughout Georgia in June 1914. When the Supreme Court denied Frank’s appeal in 1915, Governor John Slaton, whose own investigation had shown Frank to be innocent, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Frank was hanged by a lynch mob two months later and Governor Slaton was hounded out of Georgia.

The Frank case provided the impetus for both the founding of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Watson’s role in the latter may have helped to resuscitate his political fortunes. Probably more important was his stand against American intervention in World War I, which he blamed on “ravenous commercialism.” He carried on a vigorous campaign against conscription until the U.S. Post Office banned his publications, and he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1918 and in the presidential primary of 1920 on a platform endorsing the restoration of civil liberties revoked during wartime and American rejection of the League of Nations. Elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in 1920, he briefly returned to his old ideals, showing support for the Soviet Union and organized labor. He died two years into his term, at the age of sixty-six, of a stroke brought on by severe attacks of bronchial asthma. He had been unable to resolve the contradiction between his two lifelong goals—radical change in American society and public recognition from its highest stratum. His funeral was attended by thousands, and most conspicuous among the floral tributes was an eight-foot cross sent by the Ku Klux Klan. He was buried in Thomson Cemetery, Thomson, Georgia.

Representative excerpts from Watson’s editorials are found in N. Pollack, The Populist Mind (1967). C. V. Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938) is still the definitive biography. The best study of southern populism is L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976). For the Frank case, see S. Hertzberg, Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915 (1978). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1936).