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78 chapter nine Building a Republican Party in Georgia When Elbert and Sara Tuttle moved to Atlanta in 1923, he was only twentysix and had not yet affiliated himself with any political party. In Hawaii, where “a high sugar tariff meant prosperity for the Hawaiian sugar industry ,” his parents had been Republicans. Upon arriving in Georgia, Tuttle noticed a singular irony. “I found that whereas I had left a place where all of the dark people were Democrats, I had arrived at a place where all of the dark people were Republicans.”1 Georgia was a one-party state, and the one party was the white Democratic Party. Because you had to be a member of the Democratic Party to vote in the Democratic primary and because you had to be white to be a member of the party, black voters were excluded from any meaningful participation in the political process. They could vote in the general election, but by then their vote meant little. In contests for statewide office , winning the Democratic primary meant winning the election. From 1900 until the white Democratic primary in Georgia was finally held unconstitutional in 1945, every Democratic nominee for statewide office was elected.2 For Elbert Tuttle, joining the Democratic Party was not an option. In his eyes, the Democratic Party in Georgia was a “paternalistic at best, and autocratic at worse, group of politicians running the state. Nothing ‘democratic ’ about it at all except the name.”3 If, for the time being, not joining meant forgoing the opportunity to be a player in the political arena, so be it. He had other things to occupy him—a young family, a developing law practice, his service in the National Guard, his involvement in professional and civic affairs. Most of all, he could not abide the wrong. “I could see Building a Republican Party in Georgia » 79 absolutely no reason to become involved with what I then thought was the most undemocratic form of government of any state in the Union—that is, the white Democratic Party of Georgia, which of course was merely typical of the white Democratic parties of the other Southern States.” Instead, he undertook to identify himself, when he could, with the “very small number of liberal thinking white people in Atlanta and environs [working] to improve the lot of the Negro people of Georgia.”4 At first, he was not active in the Republican Party. Until 1932 black members controlled the Republican Party in Georgia, and very few whites were involved. When whites began to express interest in the party, black Republicans welcomed them. By 1932, although blacks still had the votes to control the party, whites dominated the state Republican Committee with two-thirds of the seats. In 1936 black members were thrown off the state committee. Black Republicans stayed the course, and in 1940 twenty-two of the sixty-seven committee members elected were black. That victory was short lived; the majority of the committee voted the black members off.5 The battle for control of the Republican Party created two factions. At the 1940 national convention, most of Georgia’s black Republicans supported the delegation led by W. R. Tucker. Benjamin J. Davis Sr., the publisher of the Atlanta Independent (the black community’s weekly newspaper ) and the leader of the Republican Party in the 1930s, dubbed the other delegation, headed by Roscoe Pickett, the “lily-white” delegation. The Pickett delegation actually had one black delegate out of fourteen and three black alternates out of thirteen, but when Davis called them lily white, the name stuck.6 “Lily white” did not mean they were not shrewd enough to include black delegates and alternates; it meant that the black members were mere tokens. In the 1930s Tuttle attended one or two Republican conventions in Atlanta. They were not inspiring. At that time they were held, you might say, in a telephone booth, because it was the avowed and open and known practice for certain candidates at upcoming conventions to send 20 to 40 or 50 thousand dollars to a favored person, usually to the United States Attorney, who could then engage in politics , but who subsequently of course under the Hatch Act could no longer do so, or to the collector of Internal Revenue who was also active in politics. He would spend this money wisely retaining such part of it as he thought [18.221.222.47] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 17:58 GMT...

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