The Wild Man from Sugar Creek: The Political Career of Eugene Talmadge, by William Anderson, Louisiana State University, 1975. xviii + 239pp. William Anderson presents a well-written history of the rise and downfall of a Georgia demagogue, Eugene Talmadge. Anderson's account provides insight into Talmadge's popular support and how he orchestrated the perception of being a "man of the people". He also has a fluid writing style that keeps the story moving and the reader interested in following along. Anderson shows how Talmadge was a complex personality with seemingly contradictory ideas like most Southern white men at that time. As Anderson says, "Eugene Talmadge could not possibly be considered an integrationist," but he invited his African-American workers to dine with him at his home table when he ran his farm in McRae, Georgia. He would grant blacks some respect as long as they "kept their place." James Corley remembered that all the black people who "knew Gene liked him." Like most white men in Georgia, he had strong paternalistic ideas. Talmadge lived in a time when, for the first time in Georgia's history, less than half the population lived on farms. Classic rural Georgia was changing along with the rest of the nation, albeit more slowly, but faster than Talmadge and other paternalistic white males wanted or even recognized. Anderson inadvertently gives us an even bigger lesson about politics in Georgia and the South in general. The Democratic Party was typically seen as the party of the oppressed, poor farmers, and other economically depressed people. The poor certainly saw them as their political savior. However, the party's support extended only to white Georgians and particularly white males, without having their best interests at heart, only their best interests as perceived and enabled by the political elite. Some of the issues that disenfranchised Talmadge in the Democratic Party under Roosevelt, such as setting wage levels, dependence on the federal government, fighting outside interference in "his" state, and especially the desegregation that subsequently forced many Southern Democrats to leave the party later. When the Democratic Party found itself without the paternalistic allegiance of the Southern white male and oppressed white males, it was forced to seek support from what they perceived as the next group of oppressed voters instead of redefining its own issues..