Talk:Eugene Talmadge

Political party?

This biography of an American politician manages to get all the way through without indicating whether he was a Democrat or a Republican! --Jfruh (talk) 05:40, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Does it really need to be stated that a Governor of a Deep South state during the thirties and forties was a Democrat? Fairly obvious, I would have thought.

Best to state it. A lot of people who don't care that much about American history wouldn't know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.22.215.20 (talk) 21:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes best to state it outright.

Fascist?

Why is he in the fascist category? Clothcoat (talk) 23:06, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

What would you call the KKK? Most of his clansmanship has been scrubbed, yet he was a large presence and leader of the Georga Klan. Stetson Kennedy exposed him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson_Kennedy http://www.amazon.com/How-Superman-Defeated-the-KKK/dp/B00SD94G1O

The Ku Klux Klan was never a fascist organization. That should be obvious from the fact that the Klan's origin is older than Fascism, which began after the First World War.

The article describes Talmadge as a conservative. In other words, he was a constitutionalist and an advocate of States' Rights and minimal federal government. That is not fascism.

If you want a general idea of what fascism is, read Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism (1934) or The Dynamics of War and Revolution (1940). Your Buddy Fred Lewis (talk) 04:39, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

"Although Whites Benefitted Greatly.."

A cite is needed for this sort of statement. Did Georgians (white and black) benefit from the New Deal? Wholly possible, but we need a cite from an academic or otherwise reputable source. HandsomeSam57 (talk) 18:05, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Well, we're talking here about Georgia, but this statement applies to everywhere affected by the Great Depression. One of the dirty little secrets about the 1930s is that if you had money, it was the best time to be allowed. The Great Depression was an era of drastic deflation which meant that everything was super cheap. If you were middle class or upper class in the 1930s, this was the best time to be alive because you buy could everything you wanted at a bargain prices. Effectively, an era of deflation meant the value of money went up for those who had money, or in other words, was an equivalent of getting a pay rise of between 50-75%. I get so sick and tired of here this being repeated here that in early 1930s, the impoverished people of Germany voted for the Nazis. That is not true. If you look at voter returns for urban areas in Germany, you will see a correlation between income level and the tendency to vote Nazi. The higher the income level in an urban area, the greater the vote was for the Nazis while the lower income, the lower the vote was for the Nazis. It was the middle class people in Germany who doing well in Great Depression who voted for the Nazis, not the working class people who were suffering in the Depression. However, that doesn't mean there was no connection between the Depression and the rise of Nazism. The Nazis presented themselves as an ultra-aggressive anti-Marxist party, and middle class Germans tended to vote for the Nazis in the early 1930s because out of the fear that Marxists (i.e. Social Democrats and Communists) would lead the unemployed masses in a revolution.

Now, getting back to the main point, if you didn't have money, the Great Depression was the worse time to be alive. American farmers had a very miserable 1920s, which were followed up by an even worse 1930s. Deflation meant that farmers were getting less and less for their products. For a mostly rural state like Georgia whose farmers were already struggling, the Great Depression was an utter disaster. Farmers were getting a pittance for their products, which caused ruin and destitution. This was particularly bad in the South because so many farmers were sharecroppers, which was a nasty form of exploitative labor. The group with the second lowest income level in the entire United States were white sharecroppers in the South and the group with the lowest income level were black sharecroppers in the South. For the sharecroppers, deflation by lowering the price of the food forced them deeper into debt to their landlords, making their situation even worse than it had been in the 1920s. The New Deal was not very successful in trying to force up the price of food, but the New Deal public works projects did give otherwise unemployed men in the South who were the brink of starving to death jobs. Moreover, on the New Deal public works projects, black men were paid the same rate as white men, which caused a lot of complaints in the South. A wage of $1.30 a day was a low one, but for an unemployed men in the South even getting that was salvation.

Notably, Talmadge was opposed to that, complaining the effect of higher wages on public works projects were inflationary. If one had a choice, it would be better to be working on a New Deal public work projects, earning $1.30 a day rather than working as a sharecropper for 50 cents a day. Inflation can be a bad thing, but in a era of drastic deflation, a little of inflation was actually a good thing. A major of Roosevelt's New Deal policies was trying to raise wages out of the belief that higher wage would increase consumption and push the economy out of the Depression. As Roosevelt wrote in his letter to Talmadge about the low wages in Georgia: "Somehow I cannot get into my head that wages on such a scale make possible a reasonable American standard of living". One could argue that for those who were struggling, Roosevelt's efforts to raise wages did benefit them. Roosevelt's views about raising wages caused him a great deal of trouble with Southern politicians like Talmadge who were completely opposed to that. I've added a little of material here about the economic impact of the New Deal in the South from David Kennedy's book Freedom From Fear The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, which is a very readable social history of those years, and since it was published by Oxford University Press, I do think it qualifies as a RS. Maybe I should add a bit more from Kennedy's book. --A.S. Brown (talk) 21:52, 3 April 2020 (UTC)       

". If you were middle class or upper class in the 1930s, this was the best time to be alive because you buy could everything you wanted at a bargain prices. " Yes for some., BUT BUT BUT but probably not for most people in the middle or upper class. Those folks did not have bags of gold under the bed, in 1929 they had their money in banks, or in the stock market, or in the ownership of farms and plantations, or perhaps operated small businesses. Many of them were devastated when the stock market collapsed, thousands of banks closed down, and many small businesses became hard-pressed. Middle-class professionals found that their clients couldn't pay the bills. College professors discovered that students couldn't pay tuition. Yess prices were lower at the grocery store, and housing prices were lower too. That meant if you bought a house in the 1920s, as middle and upper-class people typically did, the value of your house declined sharply and you were the loser in terms of equity. One of the biggest problems economically in the 1930s was the relative absence of exciting new growth industries such as typified the 1920s. There were lots of opportunities to become rich entrepreneurs in the 1920s, but far fewer such opportunities in the 1930s. I went to college a long time ago (my (BA was 1962) and knew a lot of very well-educated academics who took their PhD's in the 1930s-- and spent years in hardship trying to get a permanent job-- those jobs did become available after 1945. (That, by the way, is the typical situation in 2020 for new PhD's in history). Rjensen (talk) 22:20, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

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Hostile tone - the article is basically just a rant.

The author of the article clearly has a political hatred of Eugene Talmadge, and sadly he or she allows that hatred to control the writing of the article - it is not a reference article, it is a political attack. Sadly this sort of biased political attack is all too common in Wikipedia articles.2A02:C7C:E124:800:1553:95A3:AFDB:60DA (talk) 21:31, 21 May 2023 (UTC)