On November 7, 1936, a jury of twelve white men deliberated for two hours and five minutes before finding Fluker guilty. There was no recommendation for mercy. Judge James C. Davis sentenced Fluker to die in the electric chair on December 11, less than five weeks away.
Fluker’s young wife, Jean, was hysterical. “They can’t do this to me,” she cried.
With bailiffs at his side, Fluker tried to comfort his wife, who cried on his shoulder.
“I have never seen a greater travesty of justice,” said Fluker’s attorney, Russell Turner. As he walked out of the courtroom, Turner shook his finger at Myrtle Guyol. “You’ll answer to God and justice for this,” the lawyer told the gangster’s widow.12
Turner filed an aggressive appeal before the Georgia Supreme Court, even though Fluker had no money and had declared himself a pauper. Turner did not simply make nuanced legal arguments, but introduced new evidence, including an affidavit from George Fay, the union secretary, who did not testify at the trial but now swore he was with Fluker at a union meeting at the Redmont Hotel from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the day of the killing.13 That contradicted Fluker’s own testimony that he was at the union meeting in the morning.
Also, an Atlanta police captain now came forward to swear that he was present during the lineup and that Mrs. Guyol had failed to identify Fluker, shaking her head after she looked at him.14
This contradicted Fluker’s own statement on the witness stand that Mrs. Guyol had indeed branded him the killer with the unequivocal words “You are the man that killed my husband.” It also contradicted the testimony of another Atlanta police officer at the lineup who also said Mrs. Guyol did indeed identify Fluker. One police officer contradicting the other: that was how insidious the ubiquitous lottery could be with its vast amounts of cash and its ability to corrupt. Who could know if the two cops were on the payrolls of opposing companies?
On November 10, 1937, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected Fluker’s aggressive appeal. Fluker had a new date of death: March 4, 1938.
But Fluker was not going to die anytime soon. He had the governor of Georgia, Ed Rivers, on his side. Rivers would delay Fluker’s death time and time again. Ed Rivers would prove to be very good friend of gangsters, like Fluker, involved in one faction or another of the bug.
6
A Friend from the Klan
Like Atlanta gangsters, the Ku Klux Klan would find itself a welcome seat in the administration of Governor Ed Rivers, the former great titan, after his inauguration in January 1937.
From the very beginning there were signs that the Rivers administration would be closely aligned and very sympathetic to the Klan.
In the public’s mind, Rivers was foremost a New Dealer, offering the chance, finally, for Georgia to tap into the vast federal help offered by President Roosevelt’s administration, help that Rivers described as basically the North’s blood money, payback for its destruction of the South during the Civil War. Rivers’s predecessor, Eugene Talmadge, did not see it that way. A proponent of small government and low taxes, Talmadge had opposed the New Deal at almost every turn, forcing the state to do without major programs such as Social Security, even though citizens were paying for the program with their federal taxes.
Yet it should have been clear that Ed Rivers was no ordinary New Dealer. Just two months before Rivers was inaugurated as governor, the Atlanta Constitution singled out Hiram Wesley Evans—imperial wizard of the Atlanta-based Ku Klux Klan—as one of thirteen Georgians named as honorary members of Ed Rivers’s military staff.1
In a sign of Evans’s esteem in the white community at the time, the Constitution’s astrology writer featured the imperial wizard in a column about “interesting Georgia personalities.” The Klansman’s horoscope revealed “a disposition friendly to all, one powerful in the defense of weaker persons.”
This was the same imperial wizard who in Dallas, Texas, in April 1921 had participated as hooded Klansmen used acid to brand KKK into the forehead of a black bellhop and who had presided over an organization responsible, directly and indirectly, for countless floggings, killings, and lynchings over the years of both blacks and whites.
By the time Rivers was elected governor of Georgia in 1936, he and Evans had been acquainted for a decade. In early 1927, Evans had named Rivers, then a young state senator from Lanier County in the backwoods of south Georgia, as one of the Klan’s eight great titans for the state of Georgia.2
The Klan, its influence declining, had not proved an effective base for Rivers politically. It was just not potent enough to deliver a statewide victory at the polls. So in the mid-1930s, Rivers, then Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, latched on to the New Deal, despite the fact that the Klan constantly attacked FDR and his policies, picketing the president’s appearance in Atlanta in 1936 at a new public housing project. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was also a target, accused by the Klan of endorsing racial equality. “While today, Klansmen are using every ounce of their energy to combat communism and to maintain white supremacy in this great land of ours and to protect and defend our womanhood, the wife of the President of the United States delivers an address to the Negroes advocating ‘equality,’” a great titan of Maryland wrote in the Klan newspaper, the Kourier, in June 1935.3
Even in August 1936, in the heat of Rivers’s race for governor as a devout New Dealer, the Klan launched broad attacks on FDR and the Democratic Party at large for embracing black voters. A Kourier headline proclaimed, “A Darkey Drives the Donkey Now.” The Republicans were no longer “the nigger party,” the Kourier wrote. That title now belonged to the Democrats, said the Klan.4
Rivers, however, was an astute politician. He would do what it took to get elected governor. He could sense the enormous support for the New Deal among the weary Georgia voters. And the only other major opponent in the 1936 race, Charlie Redwine, was a Talmadge ally. So the New Deal vote was up for grabs, and Rivers, the Klansman, ran with it, winning the Democratic primary and the general election. Soon after, the great titan from Lakeland, Georgia, was in the governor’s mansion. And Evans, the Klan’s imperial wizard, had an inside seat as well, complete with an honorary title of lieutenant colonel. The title actually came with a military uniform, which the rotund imperial wizard squeezed into for an Associated Press photo shoot.5
By 1937, however, the Klan was a shell of its former self, having peaked in the 1920s, when it had more than a million members who each paid $10 to join. With cash pouring back in, the the Klan wielded real political clout in states across the nation.
Now the Klan was down to a fraction of its former membership. Its annual convention, called a Klonvocation, attracted only a few hundred Klansmen. The Klan had sold the Imperial Palace on Peachtree Road in the late 1920s after relocating the headquarters to Washington, D.C. It was now back in Atlanta, but in a sparsely furnished downtown office building, not a palace.6 Herman Talmadge, son of former governor Eugene Talmadge, would later write that Ed Rivers was the only major politician left who still believed in the Klan. Yet there were rumblings of an uptick in Klan activity in 1937, not even close to the level of the glory days of the 1920s, but an uptick nevertheless.
Evans, the imperial wizard, was still wealthy, and lived in a heavily gated art deco home on Peachtree Battle Avenue described by a newspaper reporter as “palatial.”7 The four-thousand-square-foot home in Atlanta’s stylish Buckhead neighborhood sold in 2011 for more than $700,000, unrestored. The imperial wizard also owned a country home near Atlanta complete with a lake. It was called Cochran Mill.8
As a New Deal governor, Rivers spent a lot of time with FDR, who had a second home in Warm Springs, Georgia, the “Little White House.” On one occasion, FDR stopped the presidential train in Toccoa, Georgia, and Rivers rode with the president to Warm Springs.9
In telegrams to FDR, Rivers was always ingratiating, always profusely praising the president’s policies and decisions. In April 1938, Rivers toured the U.S. Army’s Fort Benning with the president
, arousing “rumors that he was being groomed to run for the Senate against Democrat Walter George,” Time magazine reported.10 George, the incumbent, had voted against Roosevelt’s plan to increase the size of the U.S. Supreme Court from nine justices to fifteen, after the court struck down several key New Deal programs. In the “purge primaries” of 1938, Roosevelt was supporting challengers to senators who had opposed the court-stacking proposal. Rivers, a devout New Dealer, would have been a strong opponent against George. In fact, Jim Farley, FDR’s campaign manager in 1932 and 1936, believed that Rivers was the only person who could defeat George.11
The White House, however, knew of Rivers’s deep Klan connections. This is clear in a message delivered to one of FDR’s aides, Stephen T. Early, in May 1938 from Irving Brant, editor of the St. Louis Star-Times newspaper. Early summarized Brant’s message in a memo to M. H. McIntyre, another Roosevelt aide. “Mr. Brant said that he understands that the President was told in Georgia that Rivers had been a paid organizer for the KKK for 10 years and that there are a lot of other stories being circulated about Rivers besides,” Early wrote.12
Brant worried that the president’s appearances with Rivers would be perceived as an endorsement of the former Klansman for the Senate contest. Roosevelt had already dealt with one Klan controversy. In 1937, he nominated U.S. senator Hugo Black, a Democrat from Alabama, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. After Black’s confirmation, it was revealed that he had been a Klan member in the 1920s. Farley told FDR that an endorsement of Rivers for the Georgia Senate seat would “raise the Klan issue and I don’t think you want to go through that again.”13
And there were even more alarm bells sounded in Georgia about Rivers as he considered a run for the Senate. Union organizers in the Georgia textile mills suspected the governor was antiunion based on a speech he gave on May 19, 1938, at the Cloister Hotel on Sea Island, Georgia, accusing the unions of trying to hurt the South economically.
Rivers, speaking to a group of textile executives, praised the industry for boosting the South by allowing poor tenant farmers and mountaineers living in shacks the chance to move into comfortable homes built by the mills and to earn a decent living. One of the South’s advantages for manufacturing was the “type of people” it had, the governor said. “Southern industrial workers are homogeneous and of almost pure Anglo-Saxon blood,” Rivers said. “They have the same hopes and ideals and traditions as exist in the minds and hearts of those by whom they are employed.” That harmony was threatened by unions, which were trying to “disrupt the friendly relationship that has always existed between management and labor in the South.”14
One Georgia textile union organizer, Lucy Mason, was so worried about Rivers that she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to express her concern. She predicted that Rivers, like Talmadge before him, would use the National Guard if need be to break strikes.15 The right of unions to organize and to collectively bargain was a key component of the New Deal and had been backed by federal legislation. But Georgia’s governor, supposedly a New Dealer, apparently had no use for unions, nor did the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan believed unions were infiltrated by those godless communists who not only opposed capitalism, but favored and promoted racial equality.
Rivers never received Roosevelt’s endorsement for the Senate and decided to skip the race entirely, opting instead for a second two-year term as governor. FDR went on to endorse one of George’s opponents, U.S. Attorney Lawrence Camp. It backfired, with a Gallup poll showing 75 percent of Georgians objected to Roosevelt’s attacks on George. George won, with former governor Eugene Talmadge placing second and Camp a distant third, a rare political defeat in Georgia for Roosevelt. The results were similar across the nation. The “purge primaries” proved to be a flop for FDR.
On at least one occasion when a reporter asked Rivers directly about his Klan involvement, the former great titan didn’t deny it. The interview was in the fall of 1937, less than a year after Rivers took office as governor. A reporter for the International News Service asked the “soft spoken” governor if he was a member of the Klan, and Rivers politely declined to answer, saying he did not want to get involved in the Hugo Black controversy still swirling at the time. Hiram Wesley Evans, the imperial wizard, had been a key player as the Black drama unfolded, telling reporters only that Black was not currently a Klan member.
Rivers would not flatly disclose his own Klan history to the International News Service reporter, but he did praise the Klan as a “patriotic organization.” Rivers estimated that 90 percent of Georgia elected officials were current or former Klan members. One member of his cabinet, Rivers said, was an active Klan member. Rivers acknowledged that Hiram Evans was a member of his military staff, while pointing out, correctly, that a Jew and a Catholic were also awarded similar honorific titles. It was an odd comparison, two religions equated with the Klan, a violent hate group, but in Rivers’s mind they were the same. The Klan was entitled to a seat at the table of state government just as were various religions, the governor said.
The article mentioned “general reports” that Rivers had “been active in promoting Klan principles as a lecturer” before taking office as governor. If those reports were true, Rivers had indeed been promoted from his post as a great titan in Georgia to a larger, national position within the Klan.
“He shrinks from offending anyone, being by nature a professional pleaser,” the International News Service journalist wrote of Rivers.16
Quickly after Ed Rivers became governor, he rewarded Hiram Evans with much more than an honorific title. He handed the imperial wizard a pot of gold.
Evans in April 1937 launched a side business, the Southeastern Construction Company, selling liquid asphalt. It would only sell asphalt, not manufacture it.17 Evans had tried the manufacturing end of the business before, winning a few contracts with the state of Georgia and a New Deal agency, the Civilian Conservation Corps. But Evans decided he could not compete with the larger companies on the manufacturing side of the business. On the selling side, that was a different story, particularly now that Rivers was governor.
In a brazen, bizarre scheme, Ed Rivers handed the imperial wizard a monopoly on the state’s lucrative asphalt business.
The imperial wizard’s company had no inventory, no manufacturing plant or equipment. Its only asset was the imperial wizard’s deep connections to the governor of Georgia. In addition to owning his own company, which outsourced the production of asphalt and then sold it to the state of Georgia, Evans acted as a sales agent for three competing companies, including Shell Union Oil. Evans not only received sales commissions from the three companies, but was also allowed to set the prices those companies would charge the state for asphalt. And it was a price far above the prevailing market rates.
It had to be high-priced asphalt in order to pay the imperial wizard’s commissions, which were enormous. For example, the Emulsified Asphalt Refining Company sold the state of Georgia $85,000 worth of asphalt and paid Evans a commission of $39,108.18
It was a price-fixing scheme, plain and simple. The purchasing agent for the Georgia highway department was a man named John Greer Jr., a native of Lakeland, Georgia, the governor’s hometown. Greer was previously editor of the Ed Rivers Weekly, a newspaper published by the governor. The chairman of the state highway board, W. L. “Lint” Miller, was also from the same tiny town of Lakeland.
The asphalt scheme would eventually attract the attention of federal investigators, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but for now the business grew rapidly, netting Evans $100,714 in profit in 1937 alone, the equivalent in 2014 dollars of $1.6 million. For the imperial wizard, it was a cash-rich business with no overhead. And the imperial wizard expanded beyond asphalt. There was a lucrative market for painting center lines on highways, particularly if you did not have to actually paint them. Evans arranged for a North Carolina company to get a Georgia contract for center-line painting at $14.50 per mile. Evans’s commission was $4 a mile. The imperial wizard managed to
get state printing contracts as well.
Mary Vines, a secretary at the Klan’s meager Atlanta headquarters, operated as secretary for Southeastern Construction, Evans’s asphalt company, as it conducted business with the state of Georgia. She was paid $80 a month for her asphalt company work and $120 a month for the Klan job. That is how closely the Klan and the Georgia state government were meshed during the Rivers administration; the Klan had actually infiltrated the government.19
But the ties were even closer than that.
In the summer of 1937, the boyfriend of the imperial wizard’s daughter, Ellen Evans, was looking for a job. “Dr. Evans suggested I put my application in for a job at the Georgia State Highway Department,” the boyfriend, William J. Gottenstrater, later told the FBI.20
He quickly received a call back from a highway department secretary. She asked Gottenstrater if he would like to work in the state’s asphalt-testing laboratory, and he accepted, reporting to work the next day. With one phone call, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan could place a close family friend in a job with a state agency. And it was not just any job. Gottenstrater was assigned to test the asphalt sold to the state by the American Bitumuls Company, one of the three firms Evans represented in the price-fixing scheme. Gottenstrater would later tell the FBI that he never cheated on tests at the asphalt plant and never intentionally doctored results in order to help one of the companies involved with Evans’s price-fixing scheme.21 Yet it remained an odd and suspicious job placement for the future son-in-law of the imperial wizard.
On Thanksgiving Day 1937, Gottenstrater and Ellen Evans were engaged to be married. The first lady of Georgia, Lucille Rivers, presided at the tea table at a reception honoring the betrothed, a sign that Rivers and Evans were family friends, not just fellow Klansmen and business partners.22
In the banner year of 1937, the year that Rivers worked feverishly to bring Georgia into the New Deal, the year that the Klan’s imperial wizard made $100,000 on state asphalt contracts, Rivers decided to purchase land near Atlanta for a “quiet retreat.”23
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 8
