to appeal to the white farmers who traditionally supported Talmadge, but may have inadvertently hurt him as even many of Talmadge's rural supporters knew that a better education represented their children's best hope of escaping poverty, and did not appreciate the implied message that the best thing that could happen to their children would be to follow their parents in lives of drudgery and poverty. As was always the case, Talmadge presented himself as an aggressive defender of white supremacy, arguing that keeping the black people disfranchised and segregated was far more important than education, a message that appealed to his core supporters, but to nobody else. At one campaign rally, Talmadge stated: "We in the South love the Negro in his place-but his place is at the back door". The fact that Arnall had also declared himself a supporter of segregation, albeit not in quite the same crude terms as Talmadge had, meant that for many white Georgians there was no difference between the candidates on "the Negro question", and therefore neutralized Talmadge's advantage as an defender of white supremacy. Furthermore, men were more likely to vote for Talmadge than women, and in 1942, many Georgian men were serving in the military, thus leading to women being over-represented in the Democratic primary. In the primary, Arnall won 174,575 votes to Talmadge's 128,394. Even the "county unit system", which worked to Talmadge's advantage in the past, failed to save him in 1942. Arnall won 242 unit votes to Talmadge's 149. In retirement Just after Talmadge left office in January 1943, it emerged that since 1940 that he had been receiving food grown on the state prison farms for free, an allegation that he admitted to, saying he was saving the state of Georgia money by not paying for his food. Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he attended a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, which he again admitted to, saying that "everyone had a good time" at the Klan banquet. In his retirement, Talmadge grew increasingly bitter and became consumed with a violent hatred for Roosevelt. The isolationist Talmadge also deplored the United States fighting in World War II, all the more so as the social changes caused by the war were threatening Talmadge's vision of what an ideal America should be. In particular, the first tentative gains made by the Civil rights movement in the war years enraged Talmadge,