July 14, 2006
Lester Maddox Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:15 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes in his recent post that the state of Georgia can’t be trusted to have free and fair elections because “as late as 1966, Georgians elected businessman Lester Maddox as governor.”
Not quite. I hold no brief for Lester Maddox, an iconic figure from the civil rights era infamous for refusing to integrate his restaurant and passing out ax handles as enforcers. But in fact he became governor of Georgia by a legal fluke, not by the people of Georgia.
Georgia had open primaries, meaning anyone of any party could vote in a primary. This system is an open invitation—frequently accepted—to political mischief. In 1966 there were three candidates running in the Democratic primary for governor, and Maddox came in second to former governor Ellis Arnall. (Coming in third was some guy from Plains, Georgia, named Jimmy Carter. What ever happened to him anyway?) But because Arnall had not gotten 50 percent of the vote, a runoff was required.
The Republicans had settled on Bo Callaway, a Georgia businessman from an old family, and they figured that Maddox would be a lot easier to defeat than Arnall. So Republicans flooded into the Democratic primary and put Maddox over the top.
In the general election Callaway won a narrow lead over Maddox but also lacked 50 percent, because of write-in votes for Arnall. Under the Georgia constitution, the election went to the Legislature, then still heavily Democratic. They, no surprise, voted in Maddox.
So Lester Maddox’s election is not a very good indication of the state of the Georgia electorate 40 years ago. It is, of course, no indication whatsoever of the state of the Georgia electorate today. Mr. Zeitz—giving ample evidence of why so many Southerners think “damn Yankee” is one word—assumes, on no evidence whatever, that they might well be still a pack of racists kept in check only by the federal government. “However reasonable the Georgia legislature’s aims might seem,” he writes, “the state’s Jim Crow past suggests that legislators cannot be given the benefit of the doubt.” In other words, don’t judge them by their present behavior, judge them by their behavior of 40 years ago.
If someone had robbed a bank, I imagine that Mr. Zeitz would argue that his voting rights should be restored just as soon as he finished his sentence, not four decades later. But cut the state of Georgia the same slack? Not a chance. The Voting Rights Act, if renewed as is, would judge states and districts by their electoral behavior back when I was too young to vote. Was Mr. Zeitz, much younger than I, even alive? The Republicans who are fighting for revisions want the states to be judged on their recent electoral behavior, not on their behavior in a different era. That seems reasonable to me.
But for liberals, it seems, it’s forever 1966.
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