James K. Vardaman was born on July 26, 1861, near Edna, Jackson County, Texas, to which his parents, William Sylvester and Mary (Fox) Vardaman, had removed from Mississippi in 1858.
After the Civil War, in which the father was a Confederate soldier, the family returned from Texas and settled on a farm in Yalobusha County, Miss. James, the fourth of the six children.
After attending the public schools in that county and reading law at Carrollton, was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one.
Vardaman began to practise at Winona, Mississippi, and there edited in 1883 the Winona Advance. From 1890 to 1896, he edited the Greenwood Enterprise, and in the latter year he established the Greenwood Commonwealth, which he edited until 1903. While editing the Enterprise, he served three terms in the state legislature and in 1894 was speaker of the House. During the Spanish-American War, he was captain and later major in the 5th United States Volunteer Infantry, serving in Santiago, Cuba, from August 1898 to May 1899.
In 1895 and 1899, he sought in vain to obtain the nomination for the governorship in the state conventions, which at that time either partially concealed or avoided rifts in the all-powerful Democratic party in Mississippi. When a law was passed in 1902 providing for nominations by party primaries, factionalism within the party became more probable; and it became more necessary for the office seeker to know the technique of swaying the masses. It was Vardaman's good fortune that a split could be made in the party with more ease than formerly; it was due to his own skill that the party was fractured on class lines.
Though he was charged with extending the spoils system, he made a praiseworthy attack on the system of leasing state convicts to private persons and corporations. In the summer of 1907, a few months before the close of his administration, he was a candidate for the federal Senate but was defeated in the Democratic primary. To keep from being forgotten while out of office, he began to publish the Issue, a weekly political newspaper, at Jackson in 1908. Early in 1910, he again sought a senatorship. The legislature had not been bound by a primary nomination, and after a prolonged, bitter, and corrupt fight, it elected Le Roy Percy. Vardaman charged that the will of the people had been disregarded, and to them he appealed in the 1911 primary and was elected. He entered the Senate on March 4, 1913. There he became conspicuous by strenuously opposing the President's war policies.
By the time an enthusiastic support of the war had become the prevailing sentiment in his state, it was too late for Vardaman to withdraw from the opposition with any consistency. He was defeated in 1918 by Pat Harrison, who was aided by a direct appeal from Wilson to the voters of Mississippi. That Vardaman still had a large following was shown when he again ran for the Senate in 1922. Though he was defeated in the second primary, he had received a plurality in the first. Yet he was already so broken in body and mind that most of his speeches had to be made by his friends.
Realizing that this was the end, he soon removed to Birmingham, Alabama, and there spent his remaining years with his two daughters, who with one of their two brothers and their mother survived him.
James K. Vardaman was the first governor elected under Mississippi’s new primary law, an effective campaigner who was known fondly by his followers as “The White Chief. ” He became the idol of the masses, was nominated in the Democratic primary, and was inaugurated governor in January 1904. In July 2017, the University of Mississippi announced that Vardaman's name would be removed from a building which has carried his name since 1929.
Vardaman brought into play his extraordinary power as a political speechmaker. By riding on great eight-wheeled lumber wagons drawn by many yokes of white oxen and by making such declarations as that his first audiences had been "barnyard inhabitants and jackasses, " he established his brotherhood with the farmers. He further appealed to the poor white man by asserting that the political dominance of his race was being endangered by the education of the Negro. While he doubtless believed this, raising the Negro issue may have saved him from being branded as a Populist, even though he was appealing to the economically discontented, many of whom had recently voted the Populist ticket.
He was one of the "little group of willful men" who aroused Wilson's indignation by their successful filibuster against the Armed Neutrality Bill, and he was one of the six who voted against the resolution declaring war against Germany. He maintained that the war was injurious to the common people who had put him in office, and for a time many of his constituents agreed with this view. Also, he resented Wilson's refusal to follow his advice on several occasions early in the administration.
Vardaman's interest in the common man seems to have been sincere. With a keen eye for dramatic values in his campaigns, he accentuated his striking appearance by wearing his black hair down to his shoulders and by dressing in immaculate white.
On May 31, 1883, Vardaman was married to Anna E. (Burleson) Robinson, a native of Alabama.
3 December 1826 - 13 April 1887
17 November 1834 - 18 March 1905
7 January 1859 - 18 December 1947
25 May 1870 - 27 July 1884
19 October 1853 - 13 August 1930
28 August 1894 - 28 July 1972
