Gubernatorial Election of 1966
Callaway was the first Republican even to seek the Georgia governorship since 1876.Because Republicans held no primary at the time in Georgia, Callaway was required to obtain 87,000 signatures, or 5 percent of the then registered voters, to guarantee ballot access. He secured 150,765 names, which were hand-delivered to the Georgia Secretary of State. Ellis Arnall, who said that he relished a showdown with Callaway, even signed the Republican's petition.
The media continually speculated that Callaway would wage a formidable campaign against either Arnall or Lester Maddox, the segregationist businessman who finished in second place in the first primary election. National figures, Gerald Ford and U.S. Senator George Murphy of California campaigned in Georgia for Callaway.
Callaway formally launched his campaign on September 30, 1966, with a thirty-unit motorcade along Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Few African Americans or blue collar workers were visible in the white collar crowd numbering 25,000. He discussed such consensus priorities as education, integrity and efficiency in government, protection of life and property, mental health issues, industrial development, tourism, highways, and natural resources. Callaway promised if elected to alleviate overcrowded classrooms and to augment teacher salaries by $1,200 per year, but he had criticized a similar plan by Maddox as too costly. Both major party nominees opposed federal enforcement of desegregation guidelines. Callaway had sponsored a resolution in the U.S. House which would have barred United States Education Commissioner Harold Howe, II, from equating "racial imbalance" with "segregation" in the determination of the disposition of federal funds. Maddox frequently claimed that the wealthy Callaway was insensitive to the needy.
U.S. News and World Report forecast a Callaway victory because of the Republican's business support. Republican optimism had soared in the 1966 municipal elections, when their candidates won the offices of mayor and all six city council seats in Savannah, the state's second largest city. Arnall compiled a dossier on Callaway which he claimed would guarantee a Democratic victory in the fall, with him as the head of the ticket. He denounced the tax-exempt status of the Callaway Foundation. Time proclaimed Arnall "the odds on favorite"; Newsweek predicted that Maddox was "certain to lose." The Athens Daily News claimed that Maddox lacked "a Chinaman's chance". The Macon Telegraph said that Maddox's "anger, hate, and vengeance ... has from earliest biblical times ... divided and destroyed."
The Macon Telegraph warned Callaway that he "must rise early and work late" to overcome the "little Pickrick warrior", a reference to Maddox's former Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta. The newspaper urged Callaway to seek moderate Democratic backing because he could never outfox Maddox in the "seemingly popular sport of LBJ cussin'". The Marietta Daily Journal depicted Callaway as a "responsible conservative whose weapons are logic and reason in contrast to the irresponsible racist Maddox whose weapons are ax handles and intemperate epithets." The Atlanta Constitution called upon Callaway to offer specifics shared by "reasonable Georgians in good conscience." Thought it held Callaway "better qualified" than Maddox, the liberal Constitution withheld any endorsement of either candidate. Callaway remained conservative and shunned the labels "segregationist" or "integrationist" but said he stood for "freedom of choice" desegregation plans. Both candidates ran afoul of the Atlanta Roman Catholic Archbishop Paul H. Halliman, who proclaimed that no "honest Catholic" could support a segregationist.
Callaway's Cadillac bore the bumper sticker: "I fight poverty - I work!" Callaway once joked that he had "looked all over Washington, for a money tree that supports these programs, and I have yet to find it."Benjamin B. Blackburn, a suburban Atlanta Republican congressman from 1967 to 1975 said that Callaway was not "racist" but abhorred the high costs of such federal social programs at the expense of taxpayers.
Time magazine carried a report of some voters with Callaway stickers on their cars voting in the Democratic runoff, presumably for Maddox on the theory that he would be a weaker opponent for Callaway than would have been Arnall. Maddox received 443,055 votes to Arnall's 373,004; one Arnall aide attributed the entire Maddox margin to the Republican crossovers. However, the Marietta Daily Journal dismissed the crossovers and speculated that supporters of Jimmy Carter largely backed Maddox. Callaway denied having urged any Republicans to support Maddox: "the losers always blame the other party."
After he surprisingly defeated Arnall in the runoff election, Maddox borrowed from a nursery verse: "Little Bo Callaway has lost lots of his sheep ... and he can't get them back." He ridiculed his opponent as a "baby in his crib reaching for his rattler." Maddox declared reports of Democratic decline in Georgia as unfounded: "The party is not dead, it's not even sick. It has a new shot in the arm -- it has a new breath of life." Maddox said that Callaway should have sought reelection to Congress, rather than making the groundbreaking race for governor.
As a Democrat in 1962, Callaway had supported former Governor Marvin Griffin, who lost the primary to Carl Sanders. Then the publisher of the Post Searchlight in Bainbridge, Griffin at first indicated that he would repay Callaway, but he instead held firm for Maddox. "I consider Bo Callaway one of my best friends, but I can't go with him in the governor's race," Griffin said. Conversely, former Governor Ernest Vandiver, who as lieutenant governor from 1955 to 1959 had quarreled with Governor Griffin, dismissed Maddox as "a pipsqueak" and endorsed Callaway.
"Go Bo" was the persistent Callaway campaign slogan. Some liberals, disgruntled with both party nominees, proclaimed, "Go Bo, and take Lester with you". Some of these individuals organized a write-in campaign on behalf of Ellis Arnall, who said that he neither encouraged nor discouraged their undertaking. Maddox likened the write-in to an attempt to "slip into the back door like a thief in the night" and called upon Arnall to renounce the drive. Several celebrities endorsed the Arnall write-in, including television personality Hugh Downs and singers Peter, Paul, and Mary, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis, Jr. The Georgia civil rights activist Hosea Williams challenged Callaway on a myriad of issues important to liberals and claimed that the Republican nominee had purchased the endorsement of the Atlanta Journal.
Enthusiastic crowds and promising opinion polls falsely buoyed Callaway in late October. An Oliver Quayle tabulation for NBC News showed Callaway leading Maddox, 42 to 27 percent, but with 22 percent undecided and 7 percent for the Arnall write-in. Atlanta bookies gave Maddox a 50-50 chance of victory. Callaway performed well in stump speaking but was less effective in one-on-one exchanges because his adherence to a strict schedule exuded impatience. Maddox supporters insisted that a Republican governor would clash with the heavily Democratic Georgia legislature, but Callaway called upon Republican Governor Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma, who had worked there with a Democratic legislature, to refute such claims. Callaway told students in Albany, Georgia, that he would promote industrial development whereas Maddox, he charged, would undermine their employment possibilities.
Jimmy Carter, who had sat out the Democratic runoff election between Arnall and Maddox much to Arnall's outrage, finally endorsed Maddox, having described the Democratic state platform excluding racial matters as "more progressive and more liberal" than the Republican alternative. The Macon Telegraph found nothing "liberal" in Maddox, whom it dismissed as "a grave threat to peace, dignity, and progress." The publication denounced "inept and erratic leadership" which could thrust the state into a "tailspin, poison race relations, stagnate the growth of jobs and payrolls, ruin the accreditation of schools, and make Georgia a laughingstock of the nation."
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