Opera explores fear, power in retelling Talmadge vs. Pittman story

It’s not every day that college presidents get their lives turned into operas. But then again, not every college president had so nearly dramatic a tale as that of Marvin Pittman. An opera being staged this weekend at Pittman’s Georgia Southern University tells his story.

Marvin Pittman isn’t a household name today, but the events surrounding his firing as president of what was then Georgia Teachers College in Statesboro was scandalous national news in 1941. The opera, “Academic Under Siege,” begins long after his tenure – and that of the man who fired him.

The fiery Eugene Talmadge serves as the opera’s villain. Denounced by critics as a dictator and demagogue, Talmadge got the state’s white colleges disaccredited after Pittman was fired in 1941. Talmadge accused the academic of harboring integrationist views. Kyle Hancock plays Pittman in the opera.

“It’s not that Pittman was so much pro-integration back then,” Hancock says. “This would’ve been very early. It would’ve been quite a risk for Pittman actually to call for integration. But his ideas were very progressive and that was a threat to Talmadge.”

In the opera, Talmadge comes back from the dead to tell his story. He’s joined by his operative, Robert “Cowboy” Wood.

Talmadge had it out for Pittman after the college president demoted a professor who happened to be a friend of the Governor’s. Talmadge also didn’t like some of the things college faculty were researching in their professional roles. Still, it was a visit by faculty from all-black Tuskegee Institute that gave Talmadge the wedge he needed to force his way. Michael Braz is the opera’s composer.

“Talmadge was an opportunist,” says Braz. “He knew how to get elected and he knew what would appeal to the voters, particularly in the rural counties, the idea, you don’t want things changing. What he did is threaten that, if I’m not elected, things are going to change in ways you’re not going to like. So, he preyed upon that to get rural counties’ votes.”

Rural counties held enormous sway in Georgia under the old county unit system. Abolished in the 1960’s, it was a kind of winner-take-all Electoral College which gave small counties the power to out-vote larger ones. In one particularly snappy number, a suspender-wearing Talmadge, played by Pedro Carrera, sings:

Why waste your time in the stuck-up city,
When the best they can give you is a six?
I’ll take all the little tank-towns with their two-votes each
And tell them white folks and black folks will never mix.

Only one thing stood between the Governor and Pittman, the Board of Regents, the body that oversees state universities. When the Regents didn’t want to fire Pittman, Talmadge stacked the board with sympathetic members and Pittman was out. Composer Braz says, he could’ve made the opera about academic freedom or racial intolerance, but instead wrote an opera about fear and power.

“You simply have two diametrically opposed views of power,” Braz says. “Talmadge’s view is power by the numbers: How many numbers can I pile up to get elected each time or to get my way in a particular incident? As opposed to Marvin Pittman’s idea being that power is in the heart and mind and that power is achieved through education.”

The national scandal and disaccreditation of Georgia colleges that followed Pittman’s firing led to Talmadge’s electoral defeat in 1942. The opera ends with a victorious Pittman accepting accolades and Talmadge shouting from the periphery, “I’ll be back.” In fact, the segregationist did come back, but that’s another matter for Georgia history. “A Scholar Under Siege” will be staged tonight through Sunday at Georgia Southern University’s Performing Arts Center.