Thomas Wesley Loyless, Fighting Editor, Friend of FDR

For reasons I can only imagine, visitation to my website has grown exponentially-and I enjoy knowing that some of what I write is read. Many thanks to those who enjoy reading.  Most of my ideas for stories are inspired by memories but are fleshed out with historical details and connections. This one began when I visited the Columbus State University Archives in search of information on a completely different subject and stumbled across a letter seemingly out of place. It was written by a man who had worked at Warm Springs in the 1920’s, about the time that Franklin Roosevelt – a young family man and promising politician who had been stricken by polio, began coming to Warm Springs, Georgia.

I found the letter by accident, buried in an urelated correspondence at the Columbus State University Archives. It made the case that Warm Springs’s reputation as a healing place for victims of polio was largely due to one man: Thomas Wesley Loyless (1871-1926). Beyond having seen him portrayed by the remarkable actor,  Ben Tate Blake (of Oh Brother Where Art Thou fame),  in the award winning film Warm Springs, nothing rang a bell. But it kept gnawing at me and I thought I recalled Loyless being a minor character in the Mary Phagan murder case – easily the most famous case in Georgia history and at the time, 1913-1916, was the most famous case in American criminal jurisprudence.

Frank was convicted and sentenced to death,  but a petition of 10,000 Georgians, including the trial judge, begged the Governor, John Slaton, to commute the death sentence.  Tom Loyless, editor of the Augusta Chronicle, was one of the petitioners.  In a letter to the Prison Commissioners, he expressed the opinion that Frank was probably guilty of the lesser crime of an unplanned, accidental murder that could hav taken place during an assault. But, Loyless was most concerned that the trial had taken place under fierce mob influence.

Governor Slaton, after careful study of the case did commute the sentence, but it ruined his political career and threats forced him and his family to leave the state for over a year.  Inspired in part by sensational editorials from the pages of Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian newspaper,  a group of men from Mary Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, located just northwest of Atlanta, raided the state penitentiary in Milledgeville, and, with the compliance of local authorities, carried Frank back to Marietta where he was lynched. 

Loyless denounced the lynching in the pages of his Augusta Chronicle .  The incident sparked the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, an event inspired in part by the lynching and in part by the film, Birth of a Nation, which was playing in Atlanta at the time and which  depicted hooded Klansmen applying harsh justice to evil former slaves and Yankee carpetbaggers.  Loyless made the Klan the object of a crusade after that. But the lynching also inspired a brutal editorial campaign between Loyless, writing for the Augusta Chronicle, and Tom Watson reacting in the pages of his  Jeffersonian newspaper,  published in nearby Thompson, Georgia.

Watson was the spokesman for the aspirations of many struggling farmers throughout the South and for a time was a leader of the Populist Movement. He was even nominated by that party for the Vice Presidency of the United States. But the movement played out, its principle issues (rural free delivery of mail, the secret ballot and railroad regulation) became mainstream and were absorbed by the major parties. So, Watson found another horse to ride in the Leo Frank case. When Leo Frank, the accused murderer of a factory girl, came to trial, the public anger against him suggested to northern Jews that he was being made a victim of anti-semiticism. They came to his support by criticizing Georgia as backward, narrowminded and run by racists.  

Watson’s editorials blamed northern Jewish interests for attacking the justice system of the entire state. His popularity (and readership) soared. He became  the messiah of the ”Woolhats” (farmers could not afford fur-felt hats)  and  “Rednecks” (the sun does that when you are in the field all day). This empowered him to become the  the “fixer,” the deal maker between progressive political hopefuls and often-angry farmers. Georgia farmers in particular were incensed by the jute-bag trust, unfair tariffs, freight rates that penalized short-haul shippers and the biting cost of fertilizer.

The Frank Case reignited  all the anger of a defeated South that seemed bent on avenging the death of a 13-year old girl as the embodiment of southern womanhood -a womanhood tragically the victim to an outsider, a Jew.

All this helped make Tom Watson a king-maker in Georgia politics for almost a generation, where he was revered by farmers who read the Jeffersonian (syndicated across the state in small papers) with the alacrity more often reserved for the Bible, and often intimidating candidates for state office, men who needed the farm votes in a farm state. The example made of Slaton likely dissuaded some capable men from entering Georgia politics at all. And it certainly provided a road map for a young reformer- turned-demagogue, Gene Talmadge.

At the height of this heated battle in 1916, the Augusta Chronicle Building and much of downtown Augusta burned in a terrible fire. (Yes, the one my grandfather described to me on his deathbed in my earlier piece “The Sun is Going Down on Gough, Georgia, Part I.”). Tom editorialized that this would in the end be good for the city, forcing along new construction, new businesses and encouraging innovation, accomplishing in two or three years what would have required fifteen.  But Tom soon left for hopefully greener pastures.

Tom left Augusta to team up with Julian and Julia Harris to purchase the Columbus Enquirer. They were like-minded. Perhaps too much so. These were hard times and the Harris’ were – to my mind at least – an unlikely couple to own a Georgia newspaper, especially in a still somewhat provincial city like Columbus. Julian Harris was the son of writer and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of the “Uncle Remus” stories and champion of the “New South.”  Julian was sophisticated in a bookish way and idealistic, genteel where Tom was tough and known as a fighter.

Tom is said to have had a vile temper at times and never suffered liars or political hacks lightly. Julian, on the other hand, was the bearer of a literary heritage who had served as Paris correspondent for a New York newspaper during World War I. He was a man of practiced grace and language. His wife, Julia, was a sophisticated intellectual who spoke several languages and was steeped in modern culture by education and study. She seems to have been an uncredited author of some of the editorials in the Enquirer.

Times were hard. Depression arrived in the south shortly after the war ended. Inflation overwhelmed cotton farmers who had fared well from wartime demand for their fiber, but who found themselves in hard times as foreign competition arose and credit became dear.

Tom’s health was also failing. He resigned, claiming that editorial differences with Julian and Julie Harris made it impossible for him to continue the partnership. To make a long story short:  Tom walked away broke and sick, while the  Columbus Enquirer was soon after awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its stand on progressive issues including its condemnation of the Klan and support for the right to teach evolution in the schools. It was the first such award ever given to a provincial or southern newspaper.

Even that could not save the paper.  The Harris’s were soon back in Atlanta where they had begun. I am left wondering if Tom’s and Julia’s crusading idealism drove the paper in the ground.  Or, were they all victims of the difficult financial times in the South. Where the pre-war years had favored at least some progressivism in Georgia, the hard-times 1920’s fueled a reaction against reform, and an outcry against foreigners, Catholics, Jews  and liberals.

It is the last chapter of this story that is most fascinating to me, though in fact, I know little to tell. Tom had friends in New York as well as in Columbus. Some of his friends owned cottages at Warm Springs, or they spent vacations in the Meriwether Inn there.  I cannot say with any certainty what prompted Tom to make his next move.

 Tom likely knew Dr. Neal Kitchens, a medically trained hydro-therapist and mayor of Warm Springs. Dr. Kitchens had been a leading figure in the Columbus medical community before moving to Warm Springs to enjoy a more rural life, one not unlike his upbringing in tiny Mitchell, Georgia. This aging, but still intellectually vibrant medical man, was hopeful that the springs could could be a resource in developing the town by attracting patients to its warm waters.  I also know Tom was a late-in-life convert to his wife’s Roman Catholicism ( a conversion noted with pride by the state-wide Catholic newspaper). This may have honed his natural idealism into a sharp desire to do something good and enduring.

 Tom convinced the George Peabody family of New York or one of its philanthropic agencies, to help him purchase the Meriwether Inn, a down at the heels, 300-bed hotel in the middle of nowhere.  The plan he sold them is even more incredible: he wanted to refurbish the building and its reputation and attract a clientele of wealthy vacationers and victims of polio who would be rehabilitated in the healing warmth of the springs. He was even able to entice the young polio victim, Franklin Roosevelt to visit in 1924. The two became friends. Roosevelt was soon convinced that the waters helped him regain his strength, both emotionally as well as physically.

Unfortunately, Tom would not live to see the fruition of his dream. Ill much of 1925, he died in March of 1926. Could he have imagined that Warm Springs was destined to become home to FDR’s “Little White House?” Or, that his dream would inspire a generation of polio sufferers and their heart-sick families, families anxious for any hope of healing for their stricken loved ones? Could he have imagined that Roosevelt’s visits to Georgia would inspire in a future president a familiarity and empathy for rural people that would make FDR the first modern president to take the South to heart and seek solutions for its problems?

Certainly, after a life of conflict and confrontation in the competitive world of journalism, Tom Loyless must have felt some satisfaction that his most noble efforts had come at the end.

I will revisit and expand on this later, as I learn and come to understand more of this remarkable story.