Watson, Thomas Edward (1856–1922)

US populist politician. He served Georgia as a Populist in the US House of Representatives (1891–93), where he won the first appropriation for free delivery of rural mail. He was nominated for vice-president by the Populist Party in 1896 and for president by the People's Party in 1904. He became a ferocious supporter of segregation and was obsessively opposed to such minorities as Catholics, Jews, and Socialists. He violently opposed US entrance into World War I and his magazines were banned from the US mail. Elected on a platform of opposition to the League of Nations, he served Georgia as a Democrat only briefly in the US Senate (1921–22).

Watson was born near Thomson, Georgia. The grandson of a wealthy slave owner, 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’. His career was celebrated in a ballad, the ‘Thomas E Watson Song’.