Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who had been the principal organizer of Long's Share Our Wealth Clubs; John Henry Kirby, a wealthy Texas businessman who had been a leading Long supporter; and novelist Thomas Dixon Jr., a white supremacist whose books glorifying the Ku Klux Klan were very popular at the time. Talmadge's bid was being financed with some $41,000 dollars contributed by Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors, together with money from the Raskob and du Pont families. His Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution organized a convention in Macon, Georgia, in January 1936 that brought together fragments of the old Huey P. Long coalition. The Macon convention turned out to be a media disaster that ended Talmadge's presidential hopes. The populist platform that Talmadge drafted at his Macon convention, with its call for more silver to be mined to support the silver standard, more protectionism, more states rights, more isolationism, and less immigration was widely mocked as more appropriate for the 19th century than the 20th. Talmadge pledged to defend the "sovereignty of our states and local self-government" at the upcoming Democratic National Convention. However, Roosevelt, who visited Warm Springs, Georgia, often because of his past polio, was more popular with the poor farmers. Unable to run for re-election in 1936, Talmadge chose to challenge Senator Russell in the primary, but Russell defeated Talmadge by a landslide and Talmadge's presidential hopes collapsed. Talmadge's handpicked candidate for governor, Charles Redwine, lost the 1936 Georgia gubernatorial election to pro-New Deal Democrat Eurith D. Rivers by an overwhelming margin. In 1936, according to a United Press (UP) article printed in the Atlanta Constitution on August 21, 1936, titled "Gene Selects Hitler as Favorite 'Author'", Talmadge reportedly told a Los Angeles newspaper that while he didn't have time to read many books, he read Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") seven times. The Nazi publication Die Bewegung reprinted the interview with Talmadge and praised him, stating that "Governor Eugene Talmadge, of Georgia, is obviously a very intelligent man." In 1938, Talmadge challenged incumbent U.S. senator Walter F. George. Though George had sided with 34 of Roosevelt's 44 New Deal proposals, he refused to support some of the proposals in Roosevelt's second term. The president believed George had been "put out to pasture". Roosevelt tried to purge George and campaigned for his own candidate, Lawrence Camp. George, however, refused to criticize Roosevelt