biography
| name: |
Watson, Thomas Edward
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originally Edward Thomas
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1856–1922)
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| biography:
| US representative, senator, and populist politician, born near Thomson, Georgia, USA. The grandson of a wealthy slaveowner, he saw his family fortunes destroyed during the Civil War. He became a successful criminal lawyer, and positioning himself as an agrarian reformer, he opposed the new capitalists and industrialists who were betraying the ‘Old South’. He served in the US House of Representatives (Populist, Georgia, 1891–3), where he won the first appropriation for free delivery of rural mail. He was nominated for vice-president by the Populist Party (1896) and for president by the People's Party (1904), and became a ferocious supporter of segregation and obsessively opposed to such minorities as Catholics, Jews, and Socialists. He violently opposed US entrance into World War 1, and his magazines were banned from the US mail. Elected on a platform of opposition to the League of Nations, he served only briefly in the US Senate (Democrat, Georgia, 1921–2). His career was celebrated in a ballad, the ‘Thomas E Watson Song’. |
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