Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,330
By This is the grave of Joseph M. Brown.
Born in 1851 in Canton, Georgia, Brown grew up at the peak of the southern elite. His father was Joseph E. Brown, the Civil War governor of Georgia who was a huge pain in Jefferson Davis’ ass because he took the states rights argument seriously and resisted Richmond’s draft orders during the Treason in Defense of Slavery War. So young Joseph Brown had all the opportunities. He went to Oglethorpe College, graduating in 1872. He briefly studied law at Harvard and passed the bar the next year but he never practiced because he had really bad eyesight and thus it was just too much for him to do the detailed reading that being a lawyer required back then. So he took a job with the Western and Atlantic Railroad. He actually started out just as a clerk, but given his education and connections, rose relatively rapidly in the company and by 1889 was the traffic manager for it, which is a much bigger and more complex job than it might sound. This was a pretty normal New South move, as the planter control over the South died and either those people simply lost their wealth entirely or they moved into industry.
For the next three decades, Brown was really just a guy. He was railroad executive, but wasn’t active in politics in any meaningful way. He was the kind of guy who was involved in the Civil War nostalgia overwhelming both the South and North at this point and he wrote a book called The Mountain Campaigns in Georgia, published in 1896. Must be riveting….He also wrote a book in 1907 called Astyanax. Let me just quote the New Georgia Encyclopedia on this one: The book is set in pre-Columbian America. This epic tale chronicles the life of fictional warrior Astyanax, who travels among Native American empires in Central America fighting battles; losing and regaining his beloved sweetheart, Columbia; and eventually becoming king of an empire.” Hoo boy, I wonder how that one hasn’t been republished in the Library of America yet. It is worth noting here at least that this was a moment in which Americans and their growing nationalism were trying to make claims around the indigenous past to say that America has as great of history of empires as Europe and look at all our awesome ruins to prove it. Of course none of this meant anything when it came to crafting humane policies for the tribes, but I assume that Brown was somewhat influenced by this trend when he chose to write a book like this.
Brown invested in textile factories, as southern elites attracted northern industrialists to their largely white areas with the promise of no immigration/no socialism/plenty of chance to divide workers by race. With unions winning power in the northern textile mills and people daring to criticize our sweatshop elites when they killed 146 workers in the Triangle Fire, they fled South and Brown benefited. He was on railroad boards, involved in banking, the normal elite financial stuff of the Gilded Age.
In 1904, he got named to the Georgia Railroad Commission and that gave him a path forward in politics. But in 1907, the new governor, Hoke Smith, who was just as racist but was also the economic populist that Brown definitely was not, kicked Brown off over anger over passenger fair rates, which Smith wanted to cut and Brown did not. Of course Brown would have opposed cutting passenger rates. Might have affected his own pocketbook.
So Brown decided to run for governor himself in 1908 against Smith. He won the primary and in a one-party state that was all that mattered. He won not because he was particularly good. He didn’t even really campaign. But Tom Watson was pissed at Smith and so threw his support to Brown just to screw over his former ally. As governor, Brown was very big on Prohibition and he also wanted to reduce taxes. He did usefully sign Georgia’s first laws on driving regulations, which included a prohibition on drunk driving. He also signed a law forcing gun owners to register their revolvers with the state, so obviously he was the worst governor in American history.
Brown wasn’t really that much as a governor and the Georgia Democratic Party was an amazing world of knife slashing infighting in these years. Smith just started his 1910 campaign as soon as he lost in 1908 and defeated the latter that year. But almost immediately after Smith won again, he got himself appointed to the Senate to complete Alexander Clay’s term and so Brown ran unopposed for the office. He returned, then took on Smith in the 1914 Senate primary and lost.
After that loss, Brown retired from politics. Instead, he turned his attention to some good ol’ anti-Semitism. In 1915, the Jewish factory manager Leo Frank was lynched by Georgians after he supposedly raped and killed a white girl, which he almost certainly did not do. When John Slaton, who had replaced Brown as governor, commuted Frank’s death sentence, Brown took it upon himself to whip up a mob, though he had plenty of help from Watson and others on this. Brown asked Georgians in an article in an Augusta newspaper whether “anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime.” Classy. That was in 1914. The next year, shortly before the lynching, Brown decided to whip up a few more flames and encouraged a lynch mob to take Frank out of prison and take care of the job, which is exactly what happened shortly after. Nice guy!
Brown spent most of his later years in banking and tending to his other business interests. I guess others could take care of the public anti-Semitism.
Brown died in 1932. He was 80 years old.
Joseph H. Brown is buried in the family plot in Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. We will get to his awful father later.
If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the so-called New South, a problematic term to say the least, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Hathaway Edmonds is in Baltimore and William “Pig Iron” Kelley is in Philadelphia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.