Loading
BacK in Governor Catts’stTHIS IS THE FORD THAT-GOT-ME THEREYour browser does not support the element. day, you approached Sunbright Manor on a driveway lined with magnolias. His was the first house in Walton County to have indoor plumbing, along with a bathtub said to have been made specially for his large frame. From the octagonal turret or wraparound verandas, he had a view of the pretty lake at the heart of DeFuniak Springs.For Sidney Catts, this corner of Florida was a congenial bolthole from the maelstrom of politics. He left office over a century ago, but his style and story are eerily familiar. Catts was a man of the people who grew up in luxury. He fulminated against immigrants and reviled the media, thrilled the pious and stoked scandal and indictments. He drove his enemies nuts and supporters wild—showing that, with enough gall and gumption, the rules of political decorum could be smashed. Like others of his ilk, he embodied the turmoil of democracy. An interloper in Florida, he was born in 1863, in the middle of America’s civil war, in the small town of Pleasant Hill, Alabama.Todaycotton grows once again in the fields around Pleasant Hill, glowing in the golden evening light. But otherwise it is very different from Catts’s time. “The town has vanished,” says Michael Vaughn Sims, a local historian, dodging a turkey buzzard that his car has startled on a verge. Next to the whitewashed Baptist church is a plot overrun by long grass and bugs. This is where the grand Catts house once stood. The governor’s father, a Confederate cavalryman, is buried nearby, as is the first of his many children, Allie Catts. He had a lifelong fondness for puns on his surname.In the late 19th century, Pleasant Hill was wealthy. Slave-owners before the war, the Catts clan held onto their plantation and servants after it; Mr Sims points out a pecan grove on what he thinks was their land. At three, Catts lost an eye in an accident (the glass replacement is still in the family). This upbringing left two contradictory impressions. The scions of plantations had expectations of grandeur: “He wanted to be somebody,” says Wayne Flynt, author of “Cracker Messiah”, an excellent biography of Catts. In his case, however, a taste for the high life went along with a strict Baptist faith.Surveying his later years—not least his ties to gamblers and counterfeiters—you might conclude that religion was just a vehicle for Catts’s raging ambition. But that is to read his life backwards when, like everyone’s, it was lived the other way. Pleasant Hill was a devout place. “Modern dancing”, declared a resolution of the Baptist church in the 1890s, “is a sin against God.” As Mr Flynt recounts, Catts’s first foray into politics came in a local liquor referendum. He inveighed against “demon rum”, despite enjoying fortified eggnog at Christmas. (Until recently, remembers a resident of nearby Selma, bashful Baptists in this part of Alabama enlisted Methodists to buy their booze.)Catts practised briefly as a lawyer, until, by his account, the Holy Spirit led him to a revival meeting and he took up preaching, an alternative path to renown. Ordained in 1886, he was a pastor in several then-prosperous, now faded Alabama towns, among them Fort Deposit, today a poor place rich in churches, and Tuskegee, where many palatial old homes are crumbling. But he rowed with his flocks over money—“He was the kind of guy”, says Mr Flynt, “who goes to his boss every year for a raise”—and his fierce moralising.In 1911 Catts headed south to DeFuniak Springs, in the centre of Florida’s Panhandle. Follow his route today, and you pass signs affirming that “There evidence for God” and adverts for all-you-can-eat catfish buffets. When Catts arrived, the town was home to an outpost of the Chautauqua movement, an education initiative that drew thousands of visitors. In 1914, after another dust-up, he quit the church for good and became an itinerant insurance salesman, underwriting mortal bodies instead of eternal souls.From preaching to insurance may seem a leap. But the two jobs had a lot in common. Both took Catts to backwoods places where he frightened, entertained and charmed Florida’s “crackers”, or poor rural whites. He knew their hopes and prejudices, and they knew him, much as a stint on television might warm up an electorate today. Since Reconstruction the real political contests in the segregated South had mostly been in Democratic primaries. In 1904 Catts had entered a congressional race in Alabama, making rookie errors (a man he paid to canvass for him bet the fee on his opponent). When he stood for Florida’s governorship in 1916, he was ready.Catts loved the poorly educated—and persuaded them that this son of a plantation was on their side. He saw that Florida’s yeoman farmers, fishermen and labourers craved protection from both social change and rapacious employers. He knew they deemed politics a plutocrats’ racket, and wooed them in speeches laced with anecdotes and jokes. “He could say things that in other speakers would sound coarse and possibly offensive,” an observer noted. Tall and red-haired, he trekked across the state in a white suit, cooling himself with a palmetto fan on the stump. He pledged to drain the swamp—in his case, the Everglades.Above all, Catts sensed that Florida had an unserved market for nativism, which, like populists before and later, he mixed with promises of a fairer economy. He had imbibed white supremacy in Pleasant Hill and saw segregation as natural and necessary. In Tuskegee, home of a pioneering black university, Catts’s wife, Alice May, once unwittingly invited Booker T. Washington, its first president, to do her gardening. This condescending racism had a bloody seam. Catts blamed African-Americans for provoking their own lynchings. He had once killed a black man himself—in self-defence, he insisted.Buthis main bogeymen were Catholics. Anti-Catholicism in America was older than the country; a popular children’s game in colonial times was called “Break the pope’s neck”. Especially after waves of immigration, the animosity erupted in arson, riots and allegations of depravity and disloyalty. Catts refined these age-old tropes to a hysterical pitch.The Catholics were planning a revolt, he warned, for which they were storing arms in a cathedral in Tampa (it didn’t have a cathedral, but never mind). The Holy See was to be moved to Florida; a papist cabal in Apalachicola was plotting to kill him. Amid febrile speculation about goings-on in convents and monasteries, Catts proposed a law allowing the state to inspect them. His supporters dressed up as priests and tainted an opponent by praising him. Too few in number to wield political clout, Florida’s Catholics made easy scapegoats. Many voters didn’t know any: useful when you want to demonise a minority.His conspiracy-mongering illustrates the enduring power of whopping lies. Invent a peril out of whole cloth, and it can be hard to disprove. The absence of evidence merely shows the conspirators’ cunning. If your adversaries pooh-pooh the menace, denounce them for betraying the voters, as Catts did.He had a taste for violent rhetoric, and flirted with actual violence. Colourful insults and nicknames were a forte, such as “Hog Island Pete”, for a man who did business on Hog Island, Pennsylvania. Catts revelled in personal attacks and braggadocio, favourably comparing the size of his head, and supposedly his brain, with a rival’s. He hated journalists and they reciprocated. After he predicted they would be “cast into hell”, one said he feared bumping into Catts there. It wasn’t just words. As well as brandishing a Bible, he toted two loaded pistols with which to fend off assassins. He spoke darkly of his supporters marching on Tallahassee, the state capital, should he be denied victory. He threatened to punch, shoot or imprison his critics.Catts’s opponents in the Democratic primary made two big and familiar mistakes. They didn’t take him seriously, ignoring or deriding him until it was too late. “Every time Catts says anything,” mocked an editorial, “he hits the nail on the thumb.” And too many of them ran against him, splitting the establishment vote. At the poll in June 1916 Catts won—probably. It is hard to be sure, because after months of wrangling and recounts, Florida’s Supreme Court dubiously declared a different primary victor. Catts may have been paranoid, but some people were indeed out to get him.It didn’t stop him. The self-anointed martyr of a conspiracy, he got on the ballot on the Prohibition Party’s ticket. Previously he had to pass a hat around his crowds to pay for onward fares. Now he raised enough cash to buy a Model Ford, mounting a loudspeaker on the roof—an innovation in Florida politics. It boosted his reach as social media do today, wowing voters who had never seen either a candidate or a car. He harped on elite skulduggery: “Kill the Rats…Vote for Catts” proclaimed a poster. The Florida cracker, it was said, had but three friends, God Almighty, the mail-order retailer Sears Roebuck—and Catts.In November 1916 he won the governorship handily. Among other things, the result was, for its era, a triumph of democracy. An outsider and political ingénue, Catts channelled the grievances of people who felt ignored. He convinced them that attacks on him were really assaults on them; that he was, so to speak, their retribution. His voters embraced the slights directed at them. Referring to the dodgy primary, some displayed placards saying, “We may be ignorant, but we will not steal.”The history museum in DeFuniak Springs has a crepe and silk dress that it once thought Catts’s wife wore to his inauguration ball. She couldn’t have, however, because the couple didn’t attend, on account of the sinful dancing. But he had a parade, an event captured on a jerky silent newsreel. First come Confederate veterans on horseback, then a cavalcade of cars. Catts’s vehicle bears a sign: “”. (Evidently he had a thing for hyphens.) A ray of sunlight is said to have pierced the clouds when he spoke. “America for Americans,” Catts thundered, “throughout eternity!”Fond memories of the family’s sojourn in Tallahassee have come down to his descendants. “It wasn’t just a stern, militaristic life,” says Nancy Catts-Tippin, his charming great-granddaughter. (The current generation, she notes, have a wide range of political views.) His children recalled playing pranks in the governor’s mansion. When one married a Catholic, he accepted her warmly. Among the heirlooms is a letter in which Catts expounds his love for his wife over two pages. If home was a refuge, the governor needed it.“He’s an insurance salesman and a preacher,” says Andrew Frank of Florida State University, sitting in the old Capitol building, down the hall from what was once Catts’s office. “He’s been in uncomfortable situations before.” Tallahassee was certainly one of them. Reviling him as a turncoat and upstart, Democrats talked of impeaching him. He was criticised for purging bureaucrats who had opposed him and for nepotism (he tried to make his lawyer the state’s attorney-general). Catts responded punningly: “Did you ever see an old cat that wouldn’t take care of its kittens?”In office he flogged some old hobby-horses. He signed a state prohibition bill, and pondered using martial law to enforce it in the gap before the national booze ban took effect. After America entered the first world war, he urged troops in Jacksonville to abjure prostitution and get married, offering to help any who couldn’t afford the licence. “There is no record of any such requests,” Mr Flynt’s biography reports.But he also had positive, even enlightened achievements. He made humane reforms to the penal system and invested in education, including for girls and black pupils. He improved the state’s roads and mental-health facilities. He mostly left the Catholics alone.At least he did until, limited to one term at a time as governor, he ran for the Senate in 1920. Reviving his old themes, he railed against both immigration and American involvement in the League of Nations, warning that it would lead to foreigners inspecting Floridian women’s underwear. He lost. In 1924 and 1928 he tried for the governorship again, making a stink about the supposed circulation of obscene books in colleges, another echo of today’s politics.Less adept at comebacks than some, he lost twice more. Yet the support Catts retained is as noteworthy as his defeats. Maybe because of donations from betting syndicates, the erstwhile preacher proposed to let Florida’s counties legalise gambling, so its citizens could enjoy “horse-racing, dog-racing, and cat-racing if you want it”. When fellow Baptists objected, he threatened to “beat hell out of them”. Ridiculed as the God and gambling candidate, Catts was insouciant: “Any man who don’t like a good dog, a fast horse and a good-looking woman just ain’t in my class.”His fans were loyal less to specific policies or prejudices than to his personality and pugnacious style. That is often the way with demagogues. A corollary is that they struggle to transfer their mandates to their acolytes. This proved true in Florida, where an ally of Catts who tried to succeed him flopped.His post-political career was eclectic. Moving briefly to Atlanta, he peddled “Catts’ Hog Tonic” and other quack cures for humans and animals. Back in DeFuniak Springs he grew peaches to make brandy and dabbled in real estate. Along the way he got acquainted with some shady characters (Florida was a mob haven). These links contributed to the legal troubles that are another familiar feature of his story.Catts was accused of selling pardons, including for the murderer of a deputy sheriff, and of using convicts as forced labour on his land. And he was snagged in a lurid counterfeiting bust. He was said to have sneaked five $1,000 bills into a motel room in his shoes, operating under the alias Gato, Spanish for “cat”. He acknowledged carrying money in his footwear but denied wrongdoing. The charges were politically motivated, he insisted. Perhaps they were. He was eventually acquitted of all of them. He died in 1936.Today Catts is forgotten. Even the pastor at his church in DeFuniak Springs hasn’t heard of him. But his career, at once alien and recognisable, holds lessons and, for the anxious, a muted kind of consolation. For starters, there is nothing new under the Florida sun. The ideal of America as a melting pot has always jostled with a view of it as a fortress. Facing change and complex problems, Americans, like many others, have sometimes looked for scapegoats and strongmen. Such populist irruptions are not fatal to democracy but part of it. The lightning of history illuminates a gaudy champion—and then the storm passes.If, a century on, Catts seems reprehensible, he is also a little pitiable. Planter, lawyer, salesman, gun-toting Bible-basher, demagogue, reformer, shifty operator: throughout his rollercoaster life he seems to have been chasing a goal that endlessly receded. It is hard to work out who he really was by the end, says Mr Flynt, and he may not have known himself.Catts lay in state in his parlour in DeFuniak Springs and was buried in Magnolia Cemetery, a serene spot shaded by cedars and oaks. His house is now a swankily restored inn. It is rumoured to be haunted; locals have seen a figure dressed in white hovering in the turret. The spectre of Catts may stalk American politics, but lately the innkeeper hasn’t seen any ghosts. “If they were here,” he says, “they all moved away.”
