#9: Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge
“You all got only three friends in this world; The Lord God Almighty, the Sears Roebuck catalog and Eugene Talmadge. And you can only vote for one of them.”
—Eugene Talmadge
Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge
Spanning the Savannah River between downtown Savannah and Hutchinson Island, the Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge is the point where historic Coastal Highway 17 connects Georgia with the low country of South Carolina.
The bridge, completed in 1991, was named for an important Democratic political figure: Eugene Talmadge, who served consecutive terms as the Governor of Georgia from 1933-37, and again from 1941-43. Talmadge was elected again to a fourth term in 1946 but died before his inauguration.
Talmadge was a major force in Georgian politics for nearly 40-years. Early in his political career, Eugene Talmadge became known as “The Wild Man from Sugar Creek.” If nothing else, Talmadge was quite popular, usually amusing, often a demagogue and always entertaining. After an ambitious and unusual effort to raise hog prices failed early in his political career when he was an agricultural commissioner, Talmadge was reported to say to his populist-constituents: “Shore, I stole, but I stole for you!”
The naming of the bridge has faced significant and continuing controversy because Eugene Talmadge was a consequential leader of a racist and segregationist constituency within the State of Georgia; Talmadge also continuously opposed most New Deal programs offered by President Roosevelt from his own political party. “We Georgians are Georgian as hell,” explained one of his supporters.
Initially, the bridge was to be named after the Native American Yamacraw leader Tomochichi, who assisted James Oglethorpe in establishing the founding location for the new colony of Georgia on the bluffs just above the Savannah River in 1733. In recent years, resolutions have been introduced by the Savannah City Council to rename the bridge to its original designation. Another suggested renaming proposal was to name the bridge for Juliette ‘Daisey’ Gordon Low, the Savannah native who founded the Girl Scouts of the USA in 1912.
All that said, the Talmadge bridge itself may soon need to be replaced to accommodate the much larger fleets of container ships that now are capable of moving through the locks of the Panama Canal — just as this bridge replaced a much shorter bridge for the same reason thirty years ago.
And perhaps if a new bridge is built to connect Georgia and South Carolina at Savannah, the Talmadge naming controversy will finally become water under the (replacement) bridge…so to speak.
In this painting, I have viewed the bridge at dusk from Savannah’s infamous River Street; as usual, the river is busy, so the painting reveals the continuous round-the-clock active bustle of Savannah as a pivotal American port city.
I’m often found painting active water scenes near the Savannah River. In paintings such as these, the sheer pleasure of enjoying the great outdoors in the open air and facing the continuous challenges of painting en plein air, I experience a heightened connection to a picturesque Savannah and its people.
Luba’s Eugene Talmadge Memorial Bridge painting in progress.
