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The
History of Georgia ranges from its Pre-Columbian
settlement by
Native American peoples to its modern status as
a rapidly growing part of the
United States. In the
intervening time,
Georgia was a British
colony, a state of the U.S., and a member of the
Confederate
States of America. Georgia has had five
"permanent" state capitals:
Savannah,
Augusta,
Louisville,
Milledgeville,
and Atlanta. The legislature
has also met in other places temporarily.
Prehistory
Prior to
European contact, Native American cultures are divided into
four time periods: Paleoindian,
Archaic,
Woodland and
Mississippian. The
Mississippian culture, lasting from 800 to 1500 AD,
developed urban societies, distinguished by their
construction of truncated pyramid mounds, or
platform mounds. The largest
Mound Builder villages
in present-day Georgia were
Etowah and
Ocmulgee. The causes of the fall of the Mississippian
culture are unknown. Archaeological evidence suggests that
overpopulation and bad harvests contributed to the decline
of the larger chiefdoms prior to European conquest, but the
introduction of plague diseases by the expedition of
Hernando de Soto,
from 1539-42, was the main reason for its collapse. The
largest tribe of Indians are the
Creek.
European exploration
At the time
of European
colonization of the Americas,
Cherokee and Creek Indians
lived in what is now Georgia. Though it is unknown exactly
who was the first European to sight
Georgia, it is possible that
Juan Ponce de Leon sailed along the coast during his
exploration of Florida. In 1526,
Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón
attempted to establish a colony there, possibly near
St. Catherines Island.
Another
colony attempt, called
Charlesfort, made by the French under
Jean Ribault, was realized when
French Huguenots settled an area in the
Port Royal Sound area of
present-day South Carolina. Within a year the colony failed.
Most of the colonists followed
René Goulaine de
Laudonnière south and founded a new outpost in
present-day Florida called Fort
Caroline.
Over the
next few decades, a number of
Spanish explorers from
Florida visited the
inland region. The local
moundbuilder culture, described
by Hernando de Soto
in 1540, had completely disappeared by 1560.
British colony
The
conflict between Spain and
Britain over control
of Georgia began in earnest in about 1670, when the British
colony of South Carolina
was founded just north of the missionary provinces of
Guale and Mocama,
part of Spanish Florida.
Guale and Mocama, today part of Georgia, lay between
Carolina's capital,
Charles Town, and Spanish Florida's capital,
St. Augustine. They
were subjected to repeated military invasions by both sides.
The mission system was permanently destroyed by 1704, after
which the coast of future Georgia was occupied by
English-allied Yamasee Indians until
they were decimated in the Yamasee
War of 1715-1717. The surviving Yamasee fled to Florida,
leaving the coast of Georgia thoroughly depopulated, opening
the possibility of a new British colony. A few defeated
Yamasee remained, becoming known as the
Yamacraw.
Massive
British settlement began in the early 1730s with
James Oglethorpe, an
Englishman in the British parliament, who promoted the idea
that the area be used to settle the worthy poor of England,
providing an alternative to the overcrowded debtors'
prisons. Oglethorpe and other British philanthropists
secured a royal charter as the
Trustees of the colony of
Georgia on June 9,
1732. Ultimately, the colony was not founded by or for
debtors, although the misconception of Georgia having been
founded as a debtor or penal colony persists. With the
motto, "Not for ourselves, but for others," the Trustees
selected colonists for Georgia. On
February 12, 1733, the first
settlers landed in HMS Anne
at what was to become the city of
Savannah.
From 1735
and 1750, the trustees of Georgia, unique among Britain's
American colonies, prohibited African slavery as a matter of
public policy. However, as the growing wealth of slave-based
plantation economy in neighboring
South Carolina
demonstrated, slaves were more profitable than other forms
of labor available to colonists, due to the high mortality
rates of white indentured servants. In 1749, the ban on
slavery was overturned, and, from 1750 to 1775, Georgia's
enslaved population grew from less than 500 to approximately
18,000, providing the labor for rice and
indigo plantations. Beginning in the
mid-1760s, Georgia began importing slaves directly from
Africa—mostly from present-day Angola,
Sierra Leone, and
the Gambia.
South
Carolinian emigrant planters, wealthier than the original
settlers of Georgia, soon dominated the colony. They
replicated the customs and institutions of the
South Carolina Low
Country, closer to the West
Indies than Virginia in the
higher proportion of African-born slaves and higher rates of
absenteeism among planters. The slaves of the 'Rice Coast'
of South Carolina and Georgia developed a
Gullah or Geechee culture (the later term more common in
Georgia) preserving important traces of their African
linguistic and cultural heritage.
American Revolution
In the
1760s, the decade before the
American Revolution, Britain threatened Georgia's 18,000
white colonists with some 10,000 hostile Indians nearby.
Royal governor James Wright was
popular. But Georgians read the same political tracts as
Bostonians, and developed their own concept of their rights
and republican
ideals that were violated by British actions imposing a
stamp tax, which Georgians denounced in 1765. More fearsome
was the British punishment of Boston after the
Boston Tea Party. Many
feared they would be next - and indeed they were.
In August
1774, at a general meeting in
Savannah the people proclaimed. "Protection and
allegiance are reciprocal, and under the British
Constitution correlative terms; ... the Constitution admits
of no taxation without representation." Georgia had few
grievances of its own but ideologically supported the
patriot cause and expelled the British.
Angered by
the news of the battle of
Concord, on the eleventh of May 1775, the patriots
stormed the royal magazine at
Savannah and carried off the ammunition stored there.
The customary celebration of the King's birthday on June 4th
was turned into a wild demonstration against the King; a
liberty pole was erected. Within a month the patriots
completely defied royal authority and set up their own
government. In June and July, assemblies at Savannah chose a
Council of Safety and a Provincial Congress, to take control
of the government and cooperate with the other colonies.
They started raising troops and prepared for war. "In short
my lord," wrote Wright to Lord
Dartmouth on September 16, 1775, "the whole Executive
Power is Assumed by them, and the King's Governor remains
little Else than Nominally so."
In February
1776, Wright fled to a British warship and the patriots
controlled all of Georgia. The new Congress adopted "Rules
and Regulations" April 15, 1776, which can be considered the
Constitution of 1776. (There never was a Georgia declaration
of independence.) Georgia was no longer a colony--it was a
state with a weak chief executive, the "President and
Commander-in-Chief," who was elected by the Congress for a
term of only six months.
Archibald Bulloch, President of the two previous
Congresses, was elected first President, and he bent his
efforts to mobilizing and training the militia. The
Constitution of 1777 was a highly democratic document
putting power in the hands of the elected House of Assembly,
which chose the governor; there was no senate and the
franchise was open to nearly all white men.
The new
state's exposed seaboard position made it a tempting target
for the British Navy. Savannah
was captured by British and
Loyalist
forces in 1778, along with some of its hinterland. The
patriots moved to Augusta.
At the Siege of Savannah in
1779, American and French troops (the latter including a
company of free blacks from
Haiti) fought unsuccessfully to retake
the city. During the final years of the American Revolution,
Georgia had a functioning Loyalist colonial government along
the coast, and remained the last Loyalist bastion along with
New York City.
Georgia
ratified the U.S. Constitution on
January 2, 1788.
The
original eight counties of Georgia were
Burke,
Camden,
Chatham,
Effingham,
Glynn,
Liberty,
Richmond and
Wilkes. Before these
counties were created in 1777, Georgia had been divided into
local government units called parishes.
Antebellum period
In 1787,
the Treaty of Beaufort
established the eastern boundary of Georgia as the
Savannah River, to Tugalo
Lake. 12 to 14 miles of land (inhabited at the time by the
Cherokee Nation) separate the
lake from the southern boundary of North Carolina. South
Carolina ceded its claim to this land (extending all the way
to the Pacific Ocean) to the federal government.
Georgia
maintained a claim on western land from 31° N to 35° N, the
southern part of which overlapped with the
Mississippi Territory
created from part of Spanish
Florida in 1798. Georgia ceded its claims in 1802,
fixing its present western boundary, and in 1804, the
federal government added the cession to the Mississippi
Territory.
The Treaty
of 1816 fixed the present-day boundary between Georgia and
South Carolina at the Chattooga
River, proceeding northwest from the lake.
In 1794,
Eli Whitney, a
Massachusetts-born artisan
residing in Savannah,
patented the cotton gin,
mechanizing cotton production at a
time when the Industrial
Revolution resulted in the mechanized spinning and
weaving of cloth in the world’s first factories in the north
of England. Fueled by the soaring demands of British textile
manufacturers, King Cotton
quickly came to dominate Georgia and the other southern
states. Although Congress
banned the slave trade in 1808, Georgia's slave population
continued to grow with the importation of slaves from the
plantations of the
South Carolina Low Country and
Chesapeake Tidewater, increasing from 149,656 in 1820 to
280,944 in 1840. A small population of free blacks
developed, mostly working as artisans. However, the Georgia
legislature unanimously passed a resolution in 1842
declaring that free blacks were not U.S. citizens.
Slaves
worked the fields in large cotton
plantations, and the economy of the state became
dependent on the institution of slavery. Requiring little
cultivation and easy to transport, cotton proved ideally
suited to the inland frontier. The lower
Piedmont or 'Black
Belt' counties-comprising the middle third of the state
and initially named for the regions distinctively dark and
fertile soil-became the site of the largest and most
productive cotton plantations. By 1860, the slave population
in the Black Belt was three
times greater than that of the coastal counties, where
rice remained the principle crop. The
upper Piedmont was
settled mainly by white yeoman farmers of
Scots-Irish descent, and
despite the presence of many smaller cotton plantations, the
proportion of slaves was lower than in the
coastal and Black Belt
counties.
In 1829,
gold was discovered in the north Georgia mountains,
resulting in the Georgia Gold
Rush, the first gold rush in
U.S. history. A Federal mint was established in
Dahlonega, Georgia and
continued to operate until 1861. An influx of white settlers
pressured the U.S. government to take the land away from the
Cherokee Indians, who owned the
land, operated their own government, with a written
constitution, and did not recognize the authority of the
state of Georgia. This dispute culminated in the
Indian Removal Act of
1830, under which all eastern tribes were sent west to
Indian reservations in
present-day Oklahoma. In
Worcester v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that
states were not permitted to redraw the boundaries of Indian
lands, but President Andrew
Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In
1838, his successor, Martin van
Buren dispatched federal troops to round up the Cherokee
and deport them west of the
Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the
Trail of Tears led to the
death of over 4,000 Cherokees.
Civil War
On
January 18, 1861
Georgia seceded from the Union, keeping the name "State of
Georgia" and joined the newly-formed
Confederacy in
February. During the war, Georgia sent hundreds of thousands
of soldiers to battle, mostly to the armies in Virginia. The
state switched from cotton to food production, but severe
transportation difficulties restricted supplies. Thinking
the state safe from invasion, the Confederates built small
munitions factories. Their largest prisoner of war camp, at
Andersonville, proved a death camp because of severe
lack of supplies, food, water, and medicine.
The first
major battle in Georgia was a Confederate victory at the
Battle of Chickamauga
in 1863--it was the last major Confederate victory in the
west. In 1864, William T.
Sherman's armies invaded Georgia as part of the
Atlanta Campaign.
Confederate general Joseph E.
Johnston fought a series of delaying battles, the
largest being the
Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, as he tried to delay as
long as possible by retreating toward Atlanta. Johnston's
replacement, Gen. John Bell Hood
attempted several unsuccessful counterattacks at the
Battle of Peachtree
Creek and the Battle of
Atlanta, but Sherman captured the city on
September 2, 1864.
After burning Atlanta to the ground, Sherman embarked on his
March to the Sea
on November 15, en route to
Milledgeville, the state
capital, which he reached on November
23, and the port city of
Savannah, which he entered on
December 22. A swath of land about 60 miles across was
destroyed in this campaign, less than 10% of the state. Once
Sherman's army passed through, the Confederates regained
control. The March is a major part of the state's folk
history, and is the setting for
Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel
Gone with the Wind and
the subsequent 1939
film. One of the last land battles of the Civil War, the
Battle of Columbus,
was fought on the Georgia-Alabama border.
Reconstruction
At the
beginning of the Reconstruction,
Georgia had over 460,000 Freedmen.
In January 1865, William T.
Sherman issued
Special Field Orders, No. 15 authorizing federal
authorities to confiscate 'abandoned' plantation lands in
the Sea Islands and redistribute
them to former slaves. This order was revoked later that
year by President Andrew Johnson,
who returned the lands to their former owners.
Andrew Johnson's decision to
restore the former Confederate states to the Union was
criticized by the Radical
Republicans in Congress, who, in March 1867, passed the
First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under military
occupation. Georgia, along with Alabama
and Florida, became part of the Third
Military District, under the command of General
John Pope.
Radical Republicans passed an
ironclad oath, preventing ex-Confederates from voting or
holding office, replacing them with a coalition of
Freedmen,
Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags,
mostly former Whigs
who had opposed secession.
In January
1868, after Georgia's first elected governor after the end
of the war, Charles Jenkins,
refused to authorize state funds for a racially integrated
state constitutional convention, his government was
dissolved by Pope's successor General
George Meade and replaced by
a military governor. This coup galvanized white resistance
to the Reconstruction, fueling
the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.
Grand Wizard Nathan
Bedford Forrest visited Atlanta several times in early
1868 to help set up the organization.
Freedmen's Bureau agents
reported 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill
against freedmen across the state from January 1 through
November 15 of 1868.
In July
1868, the newly elected General Assembly ratified the
Fourteenth Amendment, a Republican governor,
Rufus Bullock, was inaugurated,
and Georgia was readmitted to the Union. The states
Democrats-including former Confederate leaders
Robert Toombs and
Howell Cobb-convened in Atlanta
to denounce the Reconstruction, in what was described as the
largest mass-rally held in Georgia. In September, white
Republicans joined with the Democrats in expelling the
thirty-two black legislators from the General Assembly. A
week later in the southwest Georgia town of
Camilla, white residents
attacked a black Republican rally, killing twelve people.
These
developments led to calls for Georgia's return to military
rule, which increased after Georgia was one of only two
ex-Confederate states to vote against
Ulysses S. Grant in the
presidential election of 1868. In March 1869 Governor
Bullock, in order to prolong Reconstruction, "engineered"
the defeat of the Fifteenth Amendment. The same month the
U.S. Congress once again barred Georgia's representatives
from their seats, causing military rule to resume in
December 1869. In January 1870, Gen.
Alfred H. Terry, the final
commanding general of the Third District, purged the General
Assembly's ex-Confederates, replaced them with the
Republican runners-up, and reinstated the expelled black
legislators, creating a large Republican majority in the
legislature. In February 1870 the newly constituted
legislature ratified the
Fifteenth Amendment and chose new Senators to send to
Washington. On July 15, Georgia became the last former
Confederate state readmitted into the Union. The Democrats
subsequently won commanding majorities in both houses of the
General Assembly, forcing the last Republican governor,
Rufus Bullock, to flee the
state in order to avoid impeachment.
Postwar economic growth
Under the
Reconstruction government, the former state capital of
Milledgeville was replaced by
the inland rail terminus of Atlanta,
with construction beginning on a new
capitol building,
completed by 1889.
Post-Reconstruction Georgia was dominated by the 'Bourbon
Triumvirate' of Joseph E. Brown,
Gen. John B. Gordon and Gen.
Alfred H. Colquitt.
Between 1872 and 1890, either Brown or Gordon held one of
Georgia's Senate seats, Colquitt
held the other, and, in the major part of that period,
either Colquitt or
Gordon occupied the Governor's
office. With their appeals to white supremacy, the Democrats
effectively monopolized state politics.
Colquitt represented the
old planter class; Brown,
who, as head of
Western & Atlantic Railroad was one of the states first
millionaires, represented the New South
businessmen. Gordon was neither a planter nor a successful
businessman, but proved the most skilled politician. A
General in the Army of
Northern Virginia whose led the fabled last charge at
Appomattox, he was the
leader of the Ku Klux Klan in
Georgia, and became the first former Confederate to serve in
the Senate, where he helped write
the Compromise of 1877
ending the Reconstruction. A native of northwest Georgia,
his popularity impeded the growth of the 'mountain
Republicanism' prevalent throughout southern
Appalachia, where slavery was
largely nonexistent and resentment against the planter class
widespread.
During the
Gilded Age, Georgia recovered from
the devastation of the Civil War, experiencing unprecedented
economic growth. Atlanta
Constitution editor Henry
Grady emerged as the leading spokesman of the 'New
South', promoting sectional reconciliation and the
region's place in a rapidly industrializing nation. The
International Cotton Exposition of 1881 and the
Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895 were
staged to promote Georgia and the South as a textile center,
luring mills from New England in an attempt to build a new
economic base in the post-war South by diversifying the
region’s agrarian economies. Attracted by close proximity to
the raw materials and cheap wages, the venture had
considerable success, transforming
Columbus and
Atlanta, as well as
Graniteville, on
the Georgia-South Carolina
border, into textile manufacturing centers. Due to Georgia's
relatively untapped virgin forests, particularly in the
thinly populated pine barrens of
the Atlantic Coastal Plain,
logging became a major industry, supporting several new
industries, most notably paper mills
and turpentine distilling, which,
by 1900, made Georgia the leading producer of naval stores.
Also important were coal,
granite and kaolin-mining,
the later used in the manufacture of paper, bricks and
ceramic piping. In 1885, when Atlanta and
Fulton County enacted
Prohibition legislation, a local
pharmacist invented the drink that, after being sold two
years later to Asa Candler, would
become the state's most famous export,
Coca-Cola.
In 1868,
Georgia became the first state to implement the
convict lease system, allowing
the overwhelmingly black prison population to be leased to
private citizens. The convict lease provided a major source
of revenue for the state, while creating an unwaged and
unprotected labor force at the disposal of railroad
companies, mines, turpentine distilleries and other
manufacturers, in essence, reinventing slavery in a form
that hastened industrialization. While the entities
employing convicts were legally obliged to provide humane
treatment, widespread reports that leased convicts were
being overworked, brutally whipped, and killed were
completely ignored. Georgia’s incipient capitalists reaped
huge profits from this system; the greatest beneficiary
being Joseph E. Brown, whose
railroads, coal mines and iron works were all dependent on
convict labor.
During this
period, Georgia, along with the rest of the
American South,
experienced an epidemic of lynch-mob violence directed
against newly freed blacks. In the 1880's and 1890's, the
number of lynchings grew steadily, reaching its height in
1899, when twenty-seven Georgians were killed by lynch mobs.
From 1890 to 1900, Georgia averaged more than one mob
killing per month; more than 95% of the victims of the 450
documented lynchings between 1882 and 1930 were black.
The Cotton
States and International Exposition was most famous as the
site of Booker T. Washington's
Atlanta Compromise, in
which he urged African-Americans to focus their efforts, not
on demands for social equality, but improving their own
conditions by becoming proficient in agriculture, mechanics,
and domestic service, while urging whites to take
responsibility for improving social and economic relations
between the races. Washington was denounced by other black
leaders as acquiesing to oppression, most notably
W.E.B. DuBois, who in 1897
joined the faculty of
Atlanta University.
Agrarian Rebellion
While Grady
and other proponents of the New South
insisted on Georgia's urban future, the state's economy
remained overwhelmingly dependent on cotton. Much of the
industrialization that did occur was as a subsidiary of
cotton agriculture; many of the states new textile factories
were devoted to the manufacture of cotton bags. The price
per pound of cotton plummeted from $1 at the end of the
Civil War to an average of
20 cents in the 1870s, nine cents in the 1880s, and seven
cents in the 1890s. By 1898, it had fallen to five cents a
pound-while costing seven cents to produce. Once prosperous
planters were reduced to fledgling small farmers, while
thousands of freemen preferred to become tenant farmers or
sharecroppers rather than hire themselves out to labor
gangs. Through the lien system, small-county merchants
assumed a central role in cotton production, monopolizing
the supply of equipment, fertilizers, seeds and foodstuffs
needed to make sharecropping possible. As cotton prices
plummeted below production costs, by the 1890s, 80-90% of
cotton growers, whether owner or tenant, were in debt to
lien merchants.
Indebted
Georgia cotton growers responded by embracing the 'agrarian
radicalism' manifested, successively, in the 1870s with the
Granger movement, in the
1880s with the Farmers'
Alliance, and in the 1890s with the the
Populist Party.
In 1892, Congressman Tom Watson
joined the Populists, becoming the most visible spokesman
for their predominately Western Congressional delegation.
Southern Populists denounced the convict lease system while
urging white and black small farmers to unite on the basis
of shared economic self-interest, even as they generally
refrained from advocating social equality. In his essay 'The
Negro Question in the South,' Watson framed his appeal for a
united front between black and white farmers declaring:
"You are
kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your
earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that
hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial
despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and
blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism
perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both."
Southern
Populists did not share their Western counterparts emphasis
on Free Silver and bitterly
opposed their desire for fusion with the
Democratic Party,
having faced death threats, mob violence and ballot-box
stuffing to challenge the monopoly of their states'
Bourbon Democrat political
machines. The merger with the Democratic Party in the 1896
Presidential election dealt a fatal blow to Southern
Populism. The Populists nominated Watson as
William Jennings Bryan's
vice-president, but Bryan selected
New England industrialist
Arthur Sewall as a concession to Democratic leaders.
Watson was not reelected
and, as the Populist Party disintegrated, through his
periodical The Jeffersonian, became a vigorous
anti-Semite,
anti-Catholic and white
supremacist crusader, while attacking the
socialism that had
attracted many former Populists. He campaigned with little
success for the party's candidate for President in 1904 and
1908, but continued to exert influence in Georgia politics,
providing a key endorsement for the gubernatorial campaign
of M. Hoke Smith, a former
cabinet member in Grover
Cleveland's administration who broke with Cleveland on
account of his support for Bryan. Hoke Smith's tenure was
noted for the passage of new Jim
Crow laws requiring literacy tests and property
ownership for voting, which could be waived for whites
through the grandfather clause,
securing the disfranchisement of all
African-Americans, an
undertaking dependent on the vigilante system of lynch-law.
Boll weevil to World War II
In the
early 1900s, Georgia's manufacturing and agriculture grew.
The cotton industry benefited from the depradations of the
boll weevil further west, and, in
1911, Georgia produced a record 2.8 million bales of cotton.
However, four years later, the boll weevil arrived in
Georgia, and by 1921 reached such epidemic proportions that
it destroyed 45% of the states' cotton crop. World War I
drove cotton prices to a high of $1 a pound in 1919, but
quickly fell to 10 cents. Landowners ruined by the boll
weevil and declining prices were forced to expel their
sharecroppers, significant numbers of whom migrated to the
northern industrial states as factory jobs began to open up
during the war, the beginning of the
Great
Migration.
In the
security frenzy triggered by the outbreak of
World War I in Europe, Georgia
was thrust into the national spotlight by the notorious
trial and lynching of Atlanta Jewish
pencil factory owner Leo Frank,
accused of raping and murdering a white female employee,
twelve year old Mary Phagan. The ringleaders of the lynch
mob which murdered Frank in the
Marietta town square in 1917, calling themselves 'The
Knights of Mary Phagan,' included a number of prominent
politicians, most notably former Governor
Joseph Mackey Brown,
while Watson played a
leading role lin instigating the violence. The trial led to
a campaign for the revival of the Ku
Klux Klan, which was refounded in a ceremony atop
Stone Mountain in November
1915. With Atlanta as its Imperial
City, the Klan quickly came to occupy a powerful role in
state and municipal politics. Governor
Clifford Walker, who served
from 1923 to 1927, was closely associated with the Klan. By
the end of the decade, the organization suffered from a
number of scandals and internal feuds. Klan membership in
the state declined from 156,000 in 1925 to 1,400 in 1930.
The
Great Depression
considerably worsened the states economic situation, with
collapsing demand for cotton and other agricultural staples
compounded by ecological havoc wrecked by poor land-use
strategies. However, in most rural parts of the state, the
effects of the Depression were less apparent than in the
nation as a whole, because they had been struggling with an
on and off depression throughout the 1920s. Georgia was one
of the greatest beneficiaries of the New
Deal, which brought major advances in rural
electrification, housing and road construction, education,
and health care.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a particularly close
relationship with Georgia, establishing a home in the
therapeutic waters of Warm
Springs, which became known as the 'Little
White House.' The
Agricultural Adjustment Act, enacted during Roosevelt's
first 100 days in office, paid farmers to plant less cotton,
and, from 1932 and 1936, succeeded in raising the price of
cotton from five to fifteen cents a pound. Between 1933 and
1940, the New Deal brought $250 million to Georgia,
establishing a series of agencies that offered extensive
public works projects, including rural electrification
programs, libraries, schools, parks, roads and the nation's
first public housing project and slum clearance.
Roosevelt's
programs faced considerable opposition from Georgia's
powerful governor Eugene Talmadge.
A former Agriculture Commissioner whose claims to be a 'real
dirt farmer' won him the loyalty of his small-town and rural
constituencies, in his four terms as Governor (1933-37) he
sought to subvert many New Deal programs. Appealing to white
supremacy, he denounced New Deal programs that paid black
workers wages equal to whites, and attacked what he
described as the communist tendencies of the New Deal. In
the 1936 election, he unsuccessfully attempted to run for
the Senate, losing to pro-New Deal incumbent
Richard Russell, Jr.,
while the candidate he endorsed for Governor was also
defeated. Under the pro-New Deal administration of for State
House speaker E.D. Rivers Georgia
came, by 1940, to lead the nation in the number of Rural
Electrification Cooperatives and rural public housing
projects. Talmadge was re-elected Governor in 1940, but
suffered from a scandal caused by his firing of a dean of
the University of Georgia system, on the grounds that he
advocated racial equality, leading the
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to withdraw
accreditation from the state's white colleges. In 1942,
Tamladge was defeated in his bid for reelection, suffering
because of the scandal and the popularity of Roosevelt. In
1946, he was reelected by opposing a federal court ruling
invalidating the white primary, but died before taking
office. The administration was often able to circumvent
Talmadge's opposition by working with pro-New Deal
politicians, most notably Atlanta Mayor
William B. Hartsfield.
Wartime
factory production during World War
II lifted Georgia's economy out of recession.
Marietta's Bell Aircraft
plant, the principle assembly site for the
B-29 Superfortress bomber,
employed some 28,000 people at its peak,
Robins Air Field near
Macon employed some 13,000
civilians, Fort Benning became
the world's largest infantry training school, newly-opened
Fort Gordon became a major
deployment center, while shipyards in
Savannah and
Brunswick built many of
the Liberty Ships used to
transport war matériel to the
European and
Pacific Theatres.
Following the cesation of hostilities, the states urban
centers continued to thrive. In 1946, the Communicable
Disease Center, later called the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was
founded in Atlanta from the old Malaria Control in War Areas
offices and staff. From 1946 to 1955, some 500 new factories
were constructed in the state. By 1950, more Georgians were
employed in manufacturing than farming. At the same time,
the mechanization of agriculture dramatically reduced the
need for farm laborers, precipitating an urban migration of
former sharecroppers and tenant farmers, mostly to the urban
Midwest and
Northeast, but also to the states own burgeoning urban
centers. During the war, Atlanta's
Candler Field was the nations busiest airport in terms
of flight operation, and afterwards Mayor
Hartsfield lobbied
successfully to make the city a hub of commercial air
travel, based on its strategic location in relation to the
nation's major population centers.
Civil Rights Movement
Georgia was
an important battleground in the
American Civil
Rights Movement. Governor
Marvin Griffin denounced
Brown v. Board of
Education, pledging to keep Georgia's schools
segregated, "come hell or high water". Atlanta-born
Baptist minister
Martin Luther King, Jr.
emerged in the national spotlight through his leadership of
the Montgomery Bus Boycott
in 1955. The success of the boycott led to the formation of
the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in
1957, providing the political leadership for the Civil
Rights movement. In 1958, a
a Reform Jewish temple in Atlanta was bombed by a group
called the 'Confederate Underground,' in retaliation for
Jewish support of the Civil Rights movement. The SCLC
committed much of its resources to a desegregation campaign
in Albany in 1961, but, with
the local police chief restraining the violent attacks on
demonstrators that had inflamed national opinion elsewhere,
this campaign failed to achieve any dramatic victories.
However, the Albany campaign taught King and the SCLC
important lessons they would put into use in the more
successful Birmingham
campaign of 1963-64, which forced
John F. Kennedy to submit a
Civil Rights bill to Congress, leading to the passage of the
Civil Rights Act.
Atlanta
Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr.
testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights
Act, and Governor Carl Sanders
worked with the Kennedy
administration to ensure the states compliance.
Atlanta Constitution
editor and syndicated columnist
Ralph McGill earned admiration, enmity and several death
threats by writing in support of the civil rights movement.
However, the majority of white Georgians continued to oppose
integration. In 1964, Barry
Goldwater won a majority of votes in Georgia, Alabama
and Mississippi, because of his opposition to the
Civil Rights Act. In 1968
arch-segregationist Alabama Governor
George Wallace won these three
states when he ran an independent for the Presidency. In
1966, Lester Maddox, who gained
fame by threatening black civil rights demonstrators
attempting to enter his restaurant, was elected Governor. He
stubbornly agitated against integration, preventing the body
of Martin Luther King,
Jr. from lying in state at the capital after his
assassination. However, in 1969, the
U.S. Department of
Justice successfully filed a lawsuit against the state
to finally integrate the public schools. In 1970,
newly-elected Governor Jimmy Carter
declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial
segregation had ended.
King's former lieutenant Andrew
Young became the first African-American since
Reconstruction elected to
Congress in 1972, and in 1974, the city of Atlanta elected
its first black mayor, Maynard
Jackson.
Sun Belt Growth and the New Right
In 1980,
construction was completed on the
William B. Hartsfield International Airport opened, the
largest in the world, designed to accommodate up to 55
million passengers a year. The airport became a major engine
for economic growth, and, along with cheap real estate, low
taxes, anti-union Right-to-work
laws and lax corporate regulations, made the Atlanta
metropolitan area a national center of
finance, insurance, and
real estate, as well as the
convention and trade show business. As a testement to the
cities growing international profile, in 1990 the
International
Olympic Committee selected Atlanta
as the site of the 1996
Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of its status as a
transportation hub, UPS
established its headquarters in an Atlanta suburb in 1991.
In 1992, construction finished on
Bank of America
Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside
New York or
Chicago.
The
association of the
Democratic Party
with the Left transformed Georgia, along with the rest of
the formerly Democrat Solid South,
into a
Republican stronghold. Realignment was hastened by the
turbulent one-term Presidency of native-son
Jimmy Carter, the popularity of
Reagan and the growth of the
Religious Right. In 1992,
Paul Coverdell became the
first Republican Senator from Georgia since the end of
Reconstruction. When newly
elected President Bill Clinton
moved to the left on social issues, most notably
gays in the military,
the Christian Coalition,
whose leader, Ralph E. Reed,
Jr., had close ties to Georgia, mobilized
evangelical and
fundamentalist Christian
voters in support of Republican candidates during the 1994
midterm elections. Republican Congressman
Newt Gingrich, representing the
wealthy northern suburbs of Atlanta and the acknowledged
leader of the Republican
Revolution, was elected
Speaker of the House. Another Georgia Republican
Congressmen, Bob Barr, introduced
the Defense of Marriage
Act and led the campaign to impeach
Bill Clinton.
Georgia
also gained notereity as a center of radical right-wing
terrorism. During the 1996 Olympics, after the
International
Olympic Committee condemned the anti-homosexuality
resolutions of one Atlanta county, a militant Christian
fundamentalist named Eric
Robert Rudolph
detonated a bomb
that killed one person and wounded 111. The organization to
which he was linked, the Army of God,
carried out bombings of an Atlanta lesbian nighclub and
abortion clinic the following year.
In this
political climate, Georgia's leading Democrat, Governor
Zell Miller (1990-99), shifted to
the right. After being appointed to the Senate following the
death of Coverdell in 2000, he emerged as a prominent ally
of George W. Bush on the war
in Iraq,
Social Security privatization, tax cuts, and opposition
to gay marriage, delivering a controversial keynote speech
in the 2004 Republican convention where he endorsed Bush for
reelection and denounced his Democrat colleagues. In 2002,
Georgia elected its first Republican governor since
Reconstruction, Sonny Perdue,
who campaigned against a controversial redesign of the state
flag that removed the Confederate battle emblem.
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