In his reminiscence, William Percy, the son of Vardaman’s Democratic opponent, LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote: They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal. Though he had no patience for the politics of hate run as a
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