(The author was America's most controversial politician ev...)
The author was America's most controversial politician ever elected to high office, including the governorship and senate of the state of Mississippi. This book, written while Bilbo was awaiting a ruling by the US Senate designed to strip him of his senate seat, summed up his core beliefs about race, civilization and what he called the only solution to racial conflict: separate geographical states. It is a valuable historical document which accurately reflects racial thinking in the Deep South prior to the Civil Rights Era. An avowed Southern nationalist, Bilbo was even a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth, although he left that organization before he was elected to office. A firm defender of Southern segregation, Bilbo was unusual in that he realized that segregation was no answer and invoked considerable opposition from his fellow Southerners because of his demand that physical geographical separation was the only way to preserve Western Civilization. "If we choose any plan short of the physical separation of the races, we are in effect adopting the scheme of amalgamation of the races. Any student of racial history knows that if the Negroes remain in the United States, the last American will be an octoroon or a mongrel . . . If the Negroes are not removed, this condition may come about in three to five hundred years: The fact that it will come sooner or later is a certainty."
Theodore Gilmore Bilbo was an American statesman and politician. He was United States Senator from Mississippi from 1935 to 1947.
Background
Theodore Bilbo was born on October, 13, 1877, on a farm at Juniper Grove, Poplarville, Mississippi, United States, the youngest of the nine children of James Oliver and Beedy (Wallace) Bilbo. His father, a Confederate veteran, was a moderately well-to-do farmer.
Education
Young Bilbo graduated from the Poplarville high school in 1896 and for three years (1897 - 1900) attended Peabody Normal College in Nashville, Tennessee. He also studied law at Vanderbilt University (1905 - 1907) and the University of Michigan (1908).
Career
For several years Theodore taught Latin and mathematics in schools in south Mississippi. Later he began a legal practice in Mississippi. Bilbo early displayed an aptitude for politics. He developed a colorful, sometimes bawdy, style of oratory which he used with skill against his enemies. In the state senate, where he served from 1908 to 1912, he became a supporter of former governor James K. Vardaman, race-baiting champion of the underprivileged workers and farmers in the hill country and piney woods, as against the aristocratic Delta planters, the railroads, and the corporations. In 1910 the legislature was faced with the duty of filling an unexpired term in the United States Senate. The chief candidates were Vardaman and LeRoy Percy, the latter a corporation lawyer and Delta plantation owner; after a long "secret caucus, " the aristocratic Percy was chosen.
Bilbo was accused of having accepted a $645 bribe to cast his vote for Percy. Although he claimed to have accepted the money only to expose the corruption of the anti-Vardaman forces, the senate came within one vote of expelling him, and did adopt a resolution of censure requesting him to resign. Bilbo, however, remained in the legislature, assumed the role of a persecuted folk hero, and, with the secret caucus as his chief issue, immediately sought election as lieutenant governor. In a particularly vituperative campaign, Bilbo galvanized the crowds with slashing attacks on his opponents. He won election. As lieutenant governor from 1912 to 1916, Bilbo emerged as a leader of the masses equal to Vardaman. He feuded with Gov. Earl Brewer and again posed as a martyr when he was indicted on another bribery charge, for which he was tried and acquitted in 1914.
In 1916 Bilbo was elected governor. He proved to be an energetic and constructive administrator, one who did not fear to increase the state's fiscal indebtedness. By 1920 the Bilbo-Vardaman faction of the Democratic party had begun to weaken, and when Bilbo, unable to succeed himself as governor, sought a congressional seat, he was badly beaten in the primary. Failing in 1923 in a bid for a second term as governor, he began to edit the Mississippi Free Lance, a widely distributed political weekly, in preparation for the campaign of 1927. He was returned to the governorship that year, but his second administration was a fiasco. His highway building program was riddled with scandal; he debased the state college system by appointing political allies to academic posts; and although the state was nearly bankrupt, he began to build for himself a controversial and expensive home, "Dream House, " near Poplarville.
Thoroughly discredited by the end of his term, in 1933 Bilbo was forced to accept a position with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration clipping newspapers. In 1934, however, Bilbo returned to the political wars and after a whirlwind campaign won a seat in the United States Senate. But he served unobtrusively until the late 1930's, supporting most New Deal measures and working hard for his constituents. Toward the end of the decade, however, he became increasingly preoccupied with racial matters. He denounced a federal antilynching bill in 1938, advocated the resettlement of American Negroes in Africa, and attacked a Washington, D. C. , law permitting racial intermarriage.
Reelected in 1940, Bilbo joined in filibusters against anti-polltax measures in 1942 and 1944. With one eye on his next campaign, he dramatized himself as a bulwark against the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee and the threat of Negro voting in Mississippi. Other objects of his vilification were "kikes, " "dagoes, " Communists, and labor unions. Although Bilbo was again elected in 1946, the Senate Republican Steering Committee sought to deny the Mississippian his seat when the Eightieth Congress convened in 1947. He had been investigated by two Senate committees, one of which censured him for personal gain in connection with war contracts and campaign funds. Since Bilbo was ill, a compromise was arranged whereby his credentials would lie on the table without prejudice until he could return to defend himself. This he was never able to do, for that August, after three operations for cancer of the mouth, he died of a heart ailment in a New Orleans hospital. A funeral service was held in the Juniper Grove Baptist Church, and he was buried in the church cemetery.
(The author was America's most controversial politician ev...)
Religion
Bilbo was a member of the Juniper Grove Baptist Church.
Politics
Bilbo was a member of the Democratic Party. He was a member of the Mississippi Senate
from 1908 to 1912. Later he served as United States Senator from Mississippi. 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.
Membership
Bilbo was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Personality
Bilbo was a short, stocky man with a rustic wit and a penchant for garish clothes. He was nicknamed "The Man" because he tended to refer to himself in the third person.
Connections
Bilbo was twice married: on May 25, 1898, to Lillian S. Herrington, who died in 1900; and on January 27, 1903, to Linda R. Gaddy. The second marriage ended in divorce in 1938. Bilbo had a daughter, Jessie Forrest, by his first wife, and a son, Theodore Gilmore, by his second.