In 1903, South Carolina’s most powerful journalist is gunned down in broad daylight, and the shooter is the lieutenant governor.
Narciso Gonzalez, editor of The State newspaper in Columbia, spent years attacking the Tillman machine: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the architect of South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction political order, and Ben’s volatile nephew James Tillman, a rising politician with a reputation for drinking, gambling, and vendettas. On January 19, 1903, that feud turns into a street-corner assassination outside the State House.
From Red Shirts intimidation and the Hamburg massacre, to Ben Tillman’s state-run liquor “dispensary” system and the riots it sparked, to a murder trial engineered to let the shooter walk, we trace the bloodline politics and raw violence behind the killing with writer Jack Hitt (This American Life, Uncivil).
It’s a story about press power, political revenge, and how a state’s myths, and its laws, get written when the loudest voice in the room can be silenced with a gun.
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