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HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE PACKED THE McDUFFIE COUNTY COURTHOUSE in Thomson, Georgia, on February 12, 1916, to hear the most influential and controversial figure in Georgia politics. The speaker, the former Populist Party leader Thomas E. "Tom" Watson (1856-1922), was soliciting the crowd's support in the face of federal obscenity charges that stemmed from the hate-filled rants in his newspaper and magazine concerning the case of Leo Frank. Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, was lynched in Cobb County by a Georgia mob in August 1915 after his death sentence for murder was commuted by the governor. In Watson's remarks, as in much of the rhetoric in Watson's Magazine and in his weekly newspaper, the Thomson Jeffersonian, the razor-tongued Georgian described the federal charges in terms of a corrupt, tyrannical outsider imposing its will on the white rural South, whose interests and values were embodied by none other than Watson himself. "From the foundation of this Government to this very moment," he claimed, "the South has never had justice in history or in legislation." According to Watson, the federal government had favored northern manufacturing interests since the earliest days of the republic, while "those infamous laws have become more and more outrageously unjust to the South." For the past hundred years, he contended, the national administration had allowed northern moneyed interests a free hand in business and a comfortable position above the law. His obscenity charge, Watson argued, was merely a continuation of this trend: "She [the South] has never got it [justice], and now the proposition is that this Government of one hundred millions of men, with criminals every which way going unwhipped, this great Government, will pick out one southern man and use the powers of the Government to grind him to powder."
In the same courthouse in June 1917, Watson addressed another large crowd - between five hundred and six hundred listeners - about what he saw as another example of federal power being abused to benefit "Big Money," an epithet he used often. Over two months earlier, President Woodrow Wilson and the members of Congress had thrust the United States into a war with Germany that, at best, only a large minority of Americans supported. The point of the meeting was to organize...