of farmers, "Sure, I stole it! But I stole it for you." The State House declined requests to impeach Talmadge but agreed to sue him to recover state funds spent on the hog price manipulation scheme. When Governor Richard B. Russell Jr. referred the suit to the state attorney general, however, the request to sue Talmadge was rejected. Governor In 1932, Governor Richard B. Russell, Jr. ran as a candidate for the United States Senate. Talmadge ran for governor, appealing to white rural Georgia by idealizing the small farmer, and preaching what he said were the true values of rural America, such as rugged individualism, frugality, governmental economy, segregation, limited government, and low taxes. Talmadge won a majority of the county unit votes and therefore the primary. Winning the nomination of the Democratic Party was tantamount to automatic victory in the general election. The Republican Party in the state had been essentially hollowed out and made non-competitive by the effective disenfranchisement of African-American voters after 1908. Because all counties were given equal weight, the County Unit System gave outsized power to the rural counties, which were Talmadge's base. He boasted, "I can carry any county that ain't got street cars." He made twelve campaign promises, the most controversial of which was to lower the price of an automobile license to $3, putting them within reach of the poorest farmers. The state legislature intensely debated the $3 license fee issue, but did not pass it. After it adjourned, Talmadge fixed the $3 fee by proclamation. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt developed the New Deal with programs to hire unemployed men to work on various public works projects. These were often for needed infrastructure identified by the states. In the South, these jobs offered higher wages than men could obtain in the private sector, and black men were paid the same rate as white men. Many of the wealthy white land-owning families in Georgia soon complained to Talmadge that their sharecroppers preferred to work on the better-paying New Deal public works projects rather than as sharecroppers, and asked the governor to intercede with the president. In 1933, one sharecropper wrote to Talmadge: "I wound't [wouldn't] plow nobody's mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH". A disgusted Talmadge forwarded the letter to