Thomas Edward Watson (1856-1922) was an American political leader in the South. His degeneration from idealism and equalitarianism to racial and religious bigotry is indicative of problems affecting the nation at this time.

Thomas E. Watson was born in Columbia County, Ga., on Sept. 5, 1856, into a wealthy family. His father was ruined by the Civil War, so Tom, emotional and hungry for knowledge, had to leave Baptist Mercer University to work. He taught school unhappily for two years. Then he passed the bar requirements in 1875 and began a spectacular rise as a criminal lawyer.

Watson turned against not only those who had dispossessed his family but those who dominated Georgia politics. Violent and threatening, he accused them of using the state's black citizens as a force with which to divide the poor. He defied the Democratic party and won election to the U.S. Congress in 1890 as a...