Gore Vidal (2 page)

The next generation brought Ezekiel Gore's strong-principled religious assertiveness into the tumultuous post–Civil War politics of northern Mississippi. His numerous children were always politicians, and imbued their politics with the same passionate rhetoric that their grandfather had brought to his religion. The Civil War had impoverished a never particularly prosperous county. Postwar recovery was slow, cash scarce, crops poor. Reconstruction seemed to most Southern whites an abomination, though Choctaw County had relatively few blacks to enfranchise. And with the end of military rule in 1869, the Democratic Party that had dominated the county before the war gradually regained control, though not before the 1874 Reconstructionist Mississippi state legislature divided the county and named the northern part Sumner, after the Massachusetts abolitionist.

Republicans began to disappear from Mississippi. In 1882 the leaders of Sumner County succeeded in having its name changed to the less offensive Webster. Daniel had some of the mitigating afterglow of a belated Founding Father. Reconstruction had been beaten back, and demographics made white power secure; only 25 percent of the county's ten thousand residents were black. The pervasive problem was agricultural depression. People lived spartan lives, close to the proverbial bone. Material sophistication
hardly rose above the level of their pioneer grandparents', though Ezekiel's sons were slightly better off than the average. Children of the Book, they were bookish enough to pursue professions as well as farm. To some extent they all became caught up in the tumultuous political events that dominated Webster County in the 1880s.

Born in Alabama in 1837, Thomas Madison Gore, Ezekiel's eldest child, Gore Vidal's great-grandfather, came to Mississippi as an infant in his grandfather and father's entourage. His education was rural. Law and politics fascinated him. As a young man he resented the idea of the Confederacy. He sat all day, hesitating, on the steps of the Choctaw County courthouse. Finally, he bit the bullet and enlisted as a private. The bullet bit back. He was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga. Later, he joked that “
as far as he knew
he was the only corporal in the entire Confederate army as everyone else that he met in later years was at least a colonel.” He earned his living first as a schoolteacher, then at the intersection between politics and law. On the last day of December 1865 he married Carrie Wingo, two years his junior, a strikingly beautiful South Carolina—born Mississippian. In 1868 Carrie gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Mary, then in 1870 a son, Thomas Pryor, to be followed by two more sons, Ellis in 1874 and Richard (nicknamed Dixie) in 1883. In 1876 Thomas Madison Gore was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for chancery clerk in Webster County. The nomination automatically meant election. That autumn the Thomas Madison Gore family moved to Walthall, the newly named county seat, where he took up his official duties. In a scarcity economy, political office was a valuable economic asset. Thomas Madison was reelected chancery clerk four times. But Democratic politics, simmering, soon boiled over. In Mississippi, dissident Democrats objected to what seemed the indifference of large agricultural and business interests, whose powerful political network controlled the state, to the interests of the small farmer. Proudly independent farmers lost their land. Sharecropping became a widespread humiliation. It seemed as if the state was being run by monopolies and banks.

The dissidents gathered force through the 1880s. In Webster County, farmers joined “The Great Agricultural Relief,” which became “The Farmer's Alliance,” part of the fabric of the emerging national populist movement that advocated political and monetary policies to help the farmer through hard times. Passions were high. Articulate, principled, and ambitious, Thomas Madison Gore gave his heart to the People's Party. As a
dissident Democrat, he lost his party's chancery-clerk nomination in 1887. In 1890 the entrenched political powers organized a state constitutional convention. Outraged by the Democratic Party's support of even more restrictive suffrage (the final guarantee that Reconstruction had been defeated), appointed rather than elected judges (who would do the will of their masters), and tax breaks for corporations, Webster County populists rebelled. The powerful and rich were conspiring to keep them poor. They did not favor blacks having the right to vote, but they would be damned if they would allow their own franchise to be restricted in order to keep blacks disenfranchised. At a mass meeting at Walthall in July 1890 they resolved “
That in order
to preserve our Constitutional liberties, we oppose any amendment … that would lessen, impair or increase the vote of any legal voter.” The new, more restrictive constitution was approved anyway. In Webster County the Democratic Party soon insisted that members sign pledges of support for its candidates. In July, at Walthall, the dissidents legally created the Webster County Populist Party, whose platform advocated “equal rights to all and special privileges to none, public control of communications and transportation, and election of United States senators by direct vote of the people.” Thomas Madison's fate was sealed: he was never elected to public office again.

Born in December 1870, Thomas Pryor Gore, Gore Vidal's grandfather, was soon anointed “Guv” by his ambitious father, in anticipation of what the family felt sure would be his destiny. Young Tom remembered the garden where they lived in Walthall, overflowing with trees and flowers. “
Somebody who loved
the beautiful had lived at that place.” Later he remembered vividly the colors and the shapes of the garden. As a six-year-old, in the same year he started school and learned to read, he heard his first political speech. When his grandmother, Rock Gore's pious wife, died in 1878, he went to the funeral. He never forgot that the gruel that she had once made for him was “the best stuff” he had ever tasted. At his father's knee he learned Webster County politics. At nine he suffered what seemed a minor injury to his left eye when a stick he and a playmate were throwing hit his lower lid. He could still see through it, but with diminished sight. Though his right eye was fine, premonitions of blindness began to haunt
him. At school he became obsessed with rereading a story “about a blind swan and another about a boy who had lost both eyes accidentally at different times.” In 1881 he got his first job, as a printer's “devil,” setting type for a local Walthall newspaper. Later that year he was thrilled to be appointed a page in the state senate in Jackson. Within three days he learned all the senators' names.

But a sense of doom accompanied him. In Jackson he practiced being almost blind, holding a hand over his right eye, getting around as best he could with only his diminished left. When he visited the Institute for the Blind, he told a boy there that he did not know how long it would be before he himself would be a resident. He had a nightmare: “I dreamed I was blind and in the rotunda—the second story—where the capital met and … some of the boys had kinder hung me over that place for fun.” Two days later he was demonstrating, for the children of the state senator at whose home he boarded, a crossbow that he had bought as a present to send home to his brother. It was a fragile contraption, dependent on worn rubber bands. When the children asked him to shoot it, he said he “did not want to as it was not shooting well. They insisted. I had it standing there on the floor. I dropped the arrow down the barrel…. I glanced down into the barrel to see if it was right, and while I was looking at it, it went off. It shot me in the right eye, blinding me on the instant.” His father took him to New Orleans for medical treatment. Whatever sight he had in his left eye and the flickers of sight briefly restored in his right “gradually faded out.”

Despite his blindness, his determination to become educated and a leader never weakened. In fact, blindness now became a force of concentration, almost itself a special power. Blindness was awful but also eerie and awesome, connecting him with Tiresias, Samson, and Milton. It was also a darkness against which his accomplishments would only shine the brighter, an unavoidable identification that would make him distinctive. He still hoped to rise to high political office. As a page in the state senate he had refused to sign a petition circulated by the other pages to have their one-dollar-a-day salary supplemented by a twenty-five-dollar bonus each session. He then wrote a bill, increasing salaries from one to two dollars a day. Introduced by a friendly senator, it passed. Back in Walthall, he attended school, with the help of relatives and friends who read to him. The school year was short, the facilities rudimentary. But he soon developed a prodigious memory. He also
developed a soft spot for pets—a heifer and a pony, then chickens and roosters—which led to a lifelong slightly guilty passion for cockfighting. At sixteen he had his “first love affair” with a girl with whom he exchanged Valentine's Day cards every year of his life. For him blindness was not a disability. He would allow no one to make excuses for him. In high school, he helped organize a debating club, soon converted into a moot United States Senate, in which he was the leading speaker. It was exercise. It was sport. It was training for the real thing. When in 1887 a teacher from Kentucky organized the Walthall Normal College, “Guv” began his most intensive three years of formal schooling. Attending political meetings with his father, his uncles, his friends, he learned about politics in the passionate crucible of family, county, state. When he found a copy of the
Congressional Record
, he memorized the name of every United States senator. From then on, the thing he wanted most was to be one.

At his graduation from Walthall Normal School in June 1890, he gave such a highly regarded commencement speech on race relations that numbers of people suggested he be sent as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in Jackson. Since he was too young to qualify, the voters instead chose his uncle. Tom Gore became, for the summer months, an assistant to his sister, teaching at Embry, within sight of the house in which he had been born. That October he spent six weeks at the Institute for the Blind in Jackson, learning how to be as self-sufficient as possible, mastering the New York point-reading system for the blind. One of the very few books available contained the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He spent “
a good many evenings
reading that volume. I learned the Declaration of Independence by heart.” In Jackson he haunted the convention debates. He soon taught in another town at a time of such pervasive statewide poverty that rural schools generally had one two-month session a year or, at most, two. His meager salary was paid in warrants. A fiery populist orator, he was now a leader of the opposition in Webster County. At a large meeting in July 1891 he was nominated for the state legislature. But the new state constitution had added an age qualification. Since he would not be twenty-one until early December, he had to withdraw. In September he sold at discount the warrants he had received for teaching (his sister contributed hers) and left Mississippi for Lebanon, Tennessee, not far from Nashville, to attend Cumberland University Law School. Since there were no law books available for the blind, his roommate read everything aloud to him. When
Guv's money ran out, his father sold a small tract of land to keep him there. In 1892 he returned to Walthall as a law-school graduate. He had twenty-five cents in his pocket. He still hoped to have the brilliant future in Mississippi that people predicted for him. The state convention of the People's Party made him a presidential elector. He campaigned widely for the ticket. Reading law throughout the year, he helped to try, successfully, two prominent criminal cases. But realistic opportunities for elective office in Mississippi seemed few and far between; the Democratic Party was still formidably entrenched, and many people above him on the slippery pole. The next year, twenty-three-year-old Tom Gore began to cast his ambitions westward.

One night that autumn his uncle, John Ellis, stayed with the Thomas Madison family. By chance he had with him a copy of a Texas newspaper in which Guv found the name and address of the secretary of the State Executive Committee of the Texas People's Party. He wrote immediately, asking what might be a good place in Texas for a young lawyer to settle. The answer, with two names to contact, came back: Corsicana, in Navarro County. The name struck a responsive chord. The previous Christmas a friend who had spent a year in Texas had been reading to him from a book that listed names of Texas counties and towns. Corsicana had stuck in his memory. Accepting an invitation from a populist leader to address the Navarro County convention, he left for Texas in May 1894 with a few dollars for expenses and barely enough for a return ticket. At the convention in Waco he spoke dramatically for William Jennings Bryan: suddenly Tom Gore was in demand as an orator throughout Texas. He spoke and debated until late October, then returned to Mississippi. In Navarro County, the populists won; they did not in Webster. Accompanied by his brother Dixie, Tom returned to Texas at the beginning of the new year. Helped by the Texas-Mississippi network, Dixie became deputy to the Navarro County district clerk. Guv, though, decided to give Mississippi one last chance. Populist sentiment was at its height. It was now or never. Returning to Walthall, he ran for the state legislature in the election of 1895. The Democrats, administering the death blow, accused Gore and the other populists of being “nigger lovers.” Campaigning brilliantly, he still almost won. When the final count was in, he had lost by thirty-two votes. On the last day of the year he left for Texas again. He vowed never to return “
until and unless
” he had been elected to the United States Senate.