Theodore G. Bilbo
Theodore Gilmore Bilbo was an American politician who twice served as the 39th and 43rd governor of Mississippi and later was elected a U.S. Senator. Bilbo was a demagogue and filibusterer whose name was synonymous with white supremacy. Like many Southern Democrats of his era, Bilbo believed that black people were inferior; he defended segregation, and was a member of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. He also published a pro-segregation work, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.
Bilbo was educated in rural schools and attended Peabody Normal College and Vanderbilt University Law School. He practiced law in Poplarville from 1906. He served in the Mississippi State Senate for four years, from 1908 to 1912.
Bilbo overcame accusations of accepting bribes and won an election for lieutenant governor, a position that he held from 1912 to 1916. In 1915, he was elected governor and served from 1916 to 1920. During this term, he earned accolades for enacting Progressive measures such as compulsory school attendance and increased spending on public works projects. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States House of Representatives in 1918.
Bilbo won the election to the governorship again in 1927, and he served from 1928 to 1932. During this term, Bilbo caused controversy by attempting to move the University of Mississippi from Oxford to Jackson.
In 1930 Bilbo proposed a general sales tax, which was signed into law by his successor in 1932, making Mississippi the first American state to do so. In 1934, Bilbo won election to a seat in the United States Senate. In the Senate, Bilbo maintained his support for segregation and white supremacy; he was also attracted to the ideas of the black separatist movement, considering it a potentially viable method of maintaining segregation. He proposed resettling the 12 million American blacks in Africa. In his second term, he made anti-black racism a major theme. Regarding economic policy, he moved away from support for the New Deal and increasingly joined the Conservative Coalition. Opposing Roosevelt, he became isolationist in foreign policy and opposed labor unions. He was the leader in fighting FDR's Fair Employment Practice Committee and helped kill the nomination of New Dealer Aubrey Willis Williams, a liberal Southerner, to head the Rural Electrification Administration. Although reelected to a third term in 1946, liberals led by Glen H. Taylor blocked his seating based on denying the vote to blacks and accepting bribes. By the time he died, the national media had made him the symbol of racism.
Bilbo died in a New Orleans hospital while undergoing cancer treatment and was buried at Juniper Grove Cemetery in Poplarville. Bilbo was of short stature, frequently wore bright, flashy clothing to draw attention to himself, and was nicknamed "The Man" because he tended to refer to himself in the third person.
Education and family background
On October 13, 1877, Bilbo was born in the small town of Juniper Grove in Hancock County. His parents, Obedience "Beedy" and James Oliver Bilbo, were of Scotch-Irish descent; James was a farmer and veteran of the Confederate States Army who rose from poverty during Theodore Bilbo's early years to become Vice President of the Poplarville National Bank. Theodore Bilbo obtained a scholarship to attend Peabody Normal College in Nashville, Tennessee, and later attended Vanderbilt University Law School, but did not graduate from either. He also taught school and worked at a drug store during his legal studies. During his teaching career, Bilbo was accused of being overly familiar with a female student. He was admitted to the bar in Tennessee in 1906, and began a law practice in Poplarville, Mississippi, the following year.Although he had been admitted to the senior class at Vanderbilt, he left without graduating. He was accused of cheating in academics, but he likely left school for financial reasons. Though these accusations never rose to the level of formal charges, they helped create the perception that Bilbo was profligate and dishonest.
State Senate
On November 5, 1907, Bilbo was elected to the Mississippi State Senate. He served there from 1908 to 1912. In 1909 he attended non-credit summer courses at the University of Michigan Law School when the legislature was not in session.In 1910, Bilbo attracted national attention in a bribery scandal. After the death of U.S. Senator James Gordon, the legislature was deadlocked in choosing between LeRoy Percy or former Governor James K. Vardaman as Gordon's successor. After 58 ballots, on February 28, Bilbo was one of several legislators who broke the stalemate by switching to Percy. Bilbo told a grand jury the next day that he had accepted a $645 bribe from L. C. Dulaney but that he had done so as part of a private investigation. The State Senate voted 28–10 to expel him from office, falling one vote short of the majority needed. The Senate passed a resolution – which did not require a majority – calling him "unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body."
During his subsequent campaign for lieutenant governor, Bilbo commented on Washington Dorsey Gibbs, a state senator from Yazoo City. Gibbs was insulted and broke his cane over Bilbo's head during an ensuing skirmish. But Bilbo's campaign was successful, and he served as lieutenant governor from 1912 to 1916. One of his first acts as lieutenant governor was to remove from the records the resolution calling him "unfit to sit with honest men."
First governorship
After serving as Lieutenant Governor of Mississippi for four years, Bilbo was elected governor in 1915. Cresswell argues that, in his first term, Bilbo had "the most successful administration" of all the governors who served between 1877 and 1917, putting state finances in order and supporting Progressive measures such as compulsory school attendance, a new charity hospital, and a board of bank examiners.In his first term, his Progressive program was largely implemented. He was known as "Bilbo the Builder" because he authorized a state highway system, as well as limestone crushing plants, new dormitories at the Old Soldiers' Home, a tuberculosis hospital, and his work on eradication of the South American tick. Several other reforms were carried out during Bilbo’s time in office; affecting areas such as agriculture, education, taxation, public health, social welfare and labor rights.
In 1916 he pushed through a law eliminating public hangings. The Haynes Report, a call to national action in response to race riots throughout the summer of 1919, pointed to Bilbo as exemplifying the collective failure of the states to stop or even prosecute thousands of lawless executions over several decades. Before the mob lynching of John Hartfield in Ellisville, Mississippi, on June 26, 1919, according to the report, Bilbo said in a speech:
Hartfield had purportedly entered into a consensual relationship with a local white woman; when the relationship was discovered, he fled but was tracked and kidnapped by a local mob. Hartfield was held and beaten before ultimately being publicly lynched without trial. Subsequently the mob burned and mutilated his remains, allegedly selling parts of his corpse as souvenirs. All this, including the premeditated murder, was done with the overt support of local authorities and was announced in the local papers the day prior.
Unsuccessful congressional and gubernatorial bids
The state constitution prohibited governors from having successive terms, so Bilbo chose to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1918. During the campaign, a bout of Texas fever broke out among cattle; Bilbo supported a program to dip cattle in insecticide to kill the ticks carrying the fever. Mississippi farmers were generally not happy about the idea, believing the insecticide would harm the animals. That, in addition to scandal, led Bilbo to lose the Democratic primary to Paul B. Johnson Sr.In 1922, Bilbo became embroiled in a sex scandal involving Lee M. Russell, then Governor, who had served as Bilbo's Lieutenant Governor. Russell was sued by his former secretary, who accused him of breach of promise and seduction. Russell claimed Bilbo helped instigate the suit, identifying Bilbo as “Mr. Blank” in the plaintiff’s statement. The disclosure prompted Bilbo to admit that he had paid her $250 on Russell’s behalf. Bilbo stated at that time that “he knew something of the case and would tell the truth, should it ever come to trial.” Notwithstanding the plaintiff’s subpoena and an order of U.S. Federal Judge Edwin R. Holmes of the Northern District of Mississippi, Bilbo failed to appear as a witness at the trial later that year. Asked to explain his whereabouts, Bilbo said he had been out purchasing trees for his farm. It was later reported that Russell’s allies “bluffed” Bilbo out of testifying for the plaintiff, “threatening to subject him to cross-examination concerning some things about which he would have been exceedingly reluctant to testify.” After 28 minutes’ deliberation, the jury found in Russell’s favor.
In 1923, Bilbo announced his candidacy for governor from the Oxford, Mississippi jail, where he was serving time for contempt of court for his failure to appear as a witness in the Russell case. In the wake of the Russell trial and contempt citation, he had abandoned his announced plans to run for the United States senate in the 1922 elections. Scandal and the state’s economic woes hampered Bilbo’s gubernatorial campaign at a time when the women’s vote was crucial. His opponent, Henry L. Whitfield, was president of the Mississippi State College for Women, called a man of “high character and exalted ideals.” At the same time, editorials described Bilbo’s “vile” character. Bilbo lost the Democratic primary and thus the governorship, but soon thereafter was expected to run for another office.
Bilbo also ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1932. At that time he had lost his home to bankruptcy and had left the state heavily in debt following his second term as governor. He stated, “The reason I want to go to Congress is because I am busted and I need the money in my business.”