The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman, (Southern biography series)

The White Chief by W. F. Holmes is about James K. Vardaman, a controversial early 20th century politician in Mississippi. This book is one volume in the Southern Biography Series edited by T. Harry Williams, the biographer of Huey P. Long. It is very well written, informative and the definitive source on Vardaman's life written by an Associate Professor at U. Georgia. Historians seem to group Vardaman, "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman of Georgia and Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi as the precursors to the arch demagogue Huey P. Long, the Kingfish of Louisiana. Vardaman's style was to wear white suits in public, which were supposed to be a symbol of white supremacy. Although he and Bilbo were very prejudiced against Afro-Americans, he was not anti-Semitic unlike the latter. He was a governor from 1904-1908 and a senator from 1913-1919. He lost reelection in 1918 because of his stance against the US involvement in WWI. The novelist William Faulkner satirized both him and Bilbo in the novel Intruder in the Dust by giving their names to the sluggish Gowrie Twins