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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 20 July 2022 [1].

Evelyn Gandy

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Nominator(s): Indy beetle (talk) 07:02, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This article is about Evelyn Gandy, the first woman elected to a statewide constitutional office in the American state of Mississippi, and the first woman to serve as a lieutenant governor in the Southern United States. Ambitious from a young age, she was the only woman in her law school class and even served as the school's student body president before being hired as a research assistant by Senator Theodore Bilbo. In that capacity she ghostwrite his book outlining and defending his racist views. From there she trailblazed her way through state government, serving variously as a legislator, welfare commissioner, state treasurer, and insurance commissioner, before being elected lieutenant governor in 1975. Her politics were something of a mixed bag of reform and status quo. Her two subsequent gubernatorial campaigns were narrowly brought down due to her gender and her old views on race, which she repudiated. Considered something of an enigma in her day by her contemporaries and distrusted by black leaders of the time for her erstwhile segregationist platform, in death she has become a hero of Mississippi feminists for overcoming a fair amount of sexism to achieve her career aspirations. Before she was buried, she broke through one final barrier by being the first woman to lie in state at the Mississippi Capitol Building. -Indy beetle (talk) 07:02, 30 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

HF Will review at some point over the next three or four days. Hog Farm Talk 16:06, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • Was her Mississippi House seat a 4-year term or multiple terms?
    • Single term, clarified.
  • Is it worth noting who she lost re-election to in 1952?
    • Neither the Brown et al. nor the Hawks et al. papers say who she lost to (election was in 1951 btw, Mississippi state officials are usually seated at the beginning of the year following their election)
  • The link for the War Between the States goes to Names of the American Civil War, would it be better to link it directly to the Civil War article? (War Between the States and The War Between the States target different articles)
    • Relinked to the Civil War, though her choice of language was certainly geared towards invoking the Lost Cause feelings which the names article explains.
  • I think a sentence or two explaining how the primary/runoff system worked would be useful - I can't tell if the second place finisher had the right to call for a runoff in certain circumstances, or if this is a Louisiana primary-style thing where the runoff was automatically triggered if a certain condition wasn't met
    • I'm not finding very much information on the state's primary laws at the time. I know that if a candidate won over 50% of the first primary vote they would win the nomination outright and there could be no runoff. But it is not clear to me whether if no candidate took a majority that the second place finisher could concede to the plurality winner or if there was a required runoff.
  • "Her campaign literature omitted any mention of her employment under Senator Bilbo" - does the source specify if this was an attempt to distance herself from Bilbo's segregationist views?
    • Clarified that this is noteworthy because she had in years past billed her connections to Bilbo as a reason to vote for her. The source doesn't explicitly say why this was done, but the implication is that she was trying to modernize her style.
  • "It opened in 2006" - the highway itself opened, or the named stretch was dedicated, or something else? This isn't clear
    • Revised. The state stated it would name the parkway in 2002, but the actual roadway was not complete and open until 2006.
  • her Mississippi Encyclopedia entry (p. 487) notes that she "implemented a program to ensure the fair and equitable distribution of state funds to all banks across Mississippi", refers to the public school land leasing bill as "her most important legacy" and states that she received the Margaret Brent Award from the American Bar Association. (author is Martha Swain). Is any of that worth mentioning?
    • Gee don't know why I overlooked that. I've now incorporated these elements.

I think that's pretty much all from me. Hog Farm Talk 22:37, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Hog Farm: I've responded to your comments. -Indy beetle (talk) 09:35, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Supporting Hog Farm Talk 18:33, 5 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Mike Christie

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I've copyedited a little; feel free to revert anything you disagree with.

  • "Appealing more openly to women voters, her campaign issued special emery boards." Do we know what was special about them? And maybe "distributed" instead of "issued". And this might read better restructured a little: how about "Her campaign distributed special emery boards as part of an attempt to appeal more directly to women voters"?

Do you have a newspapers.com subscription? I see above that a reviewer asked for the name of her opponent in 1947; Arrington came second, per this and this which I just clipped. There's also this which shows some others were in the race. If you do have a subscription I would suggest running a few searches; if not I'd be happy to do some searches for you to see if I can find any scraps of information that could be added. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:15, 17 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Mike Christie: Re the emery boards: changed to "distributed", they were special because they carried campaign ads.
  • Re newspapers.com. No, I unfortunately do not have a subscription, which is a shame because I know they do have some editions of The Clarion-Ledger. I'll occasionally Google site search for newspapers.com but the results of that are variable. I found one or two clipped articles that mentioned Gandy but they had little information to add to the sources I'd looked through. I'd be very appreciative if you did a search on my behalf. I'd prefer to use more "article"-based material rather than the unofficial vote tabulations, if possible. -Indy beetle (talk) 21:25, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    You can get access via the Wikipedia Library, so you might consider that. Re the clippings, I agree you wouldn't want to use the unofficial vote counts, but I think those would be reliable sources for the names of the other candidates.

I'll add clippings here as find things that might be of interest. There might be too many to really go through in detail but I'll see what I can come up with. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:57, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Clippings
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I'm aware that some of these won't have sufficent notability for you to include the material, but since you know the topic and I don't I figured I could leave the editorial decisions to you.

  • She was a local officer of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs in 1951-52 and was an officer at the state level too. [2]
    • And from this it appears the state position was 2nd VP.
    • Added, first article actually mentions the state position too.
  • You don't say in the article what district she represented; it was Forrest County.
  • This gives the name of her opponent and the vote count for the 1951 election loss.
    • Added her opponent's name.
  • Official results from the 1951 election.
  • She won a 1941 statewide oratorical contest; I see you have that in the article but this gives the date.
    • Added.
  • Number of women in the MS legislature in 1951 and how they fared in the election.

That's from searching for her name restricted to a date range of 1951. I'll have a look through the article for other possible good searches but let me know if there's anything you'd like me to look for. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:21, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

From 1939:

  • A long speech by Gandy supporting Paul B. Johnson Sr.'s candidacy for Governor. She apparently was a neighbour and friend; his son is the one who appointed her to one of her state posts.
  • And she worked on his campaign. There are other articles mentioning her in similar contexts.
    • Added, since she served in the "speaker's bureau" I presume the bulk of her campaign role was delivering public addresses on his behalf.
  • Another speech. Ouch: "a pretty seventeen year old". And she was actually eighteen.
    • Yeah, the ""A Lady of Many Firsts": Press Coverage of the Political Career of Mississippi's Evelyn Gandy, 1948-83" academic paper makes note of the instances of patronizing news coverage she was subjected to.
  • She won a $50 scholarship competition; rather minor, but worth $1,000 in today's money so not to be sneezed at.
    • I honestly feel that's still rather minor, all things considered. I went to a quality public high school, probably a third of my friends got offered some money/minor scholarships when applying for college.

Are these useful? I can post more if you want. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 22:35, 18 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

More clippings
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  • Here is her election to 1st VP of the B&PW in 1952
    • Included.

For her government tenure I'll search by the years she was there:

1947 & 1948:

  • Autobiographical notes in her 1947 candidacy announcement here and here.
  • 1947 election. This makes it sounds as though she beat Arrington in a run-off, which would explain the widely separated dates on some of the other results I found, but also that this was just a Democratic primary, not the final election. Yet I don't see anything from November, which is when I would have expected the actual election to be.
  • It was definitely a primary run-off.
  • But there's also no question that she became state rep after the primary run-off, which means I don't understand how the elections worked in MS in 1947. This is unambiguous.
    • No worries, the Mississippi Republican Party did not functionally exist during this time, so winning a Democratic primary was tantamount to election. Many old Mississippian newspapers thus treat it this way. The Republican in the 1947 Mississippi gubernatorial election got 2% of the vote, and that was the only time the Republicans fielded a gubernatorial candidate between 1881 and 1963. The first Republicans weren't elected to any minor office in the 20th century until the 1960s.
      Very interesting. Can we source some statement like that to add here, maybe as a footnote? Incidentally, in the article you link, the vote numbers don't seem to match between the infobox and the body of the article -- if you've not been involved with the article I'll leave a note on the talk page. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:57, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • I haven't done much on the election articles. It would appear that whoever wrote that combined the totals of the last two finishers in the Democratic primary and added them to Wright's total, possibly because they thought that was better than cramming two minor candidates into the main infobox? Not a good method, obviously.
  • Work with Child Welfare Divison
    • Included.
  • On University and College Committee
    • Included.
  • Introduces and passes bill
    • Included.

There are multiple references to her involvement with memorial plans for Senator Bilbo; I haven't clipped those but can.

You may decide not to use most of these, but at least a couple seem useful. This is for just two years -- I imagine there will be twenty times this many articles to look through if I go through the rest of her career in government. I wonder if it would be better to withdraw the FAC and go through this material on the article talk page, then bring the article back here? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:10, 19 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • @Mike Christie: If you're willing to clip articles for me. The fact that the Hattiesburg American (Gandy's hometown paper) is in the archive means you'll be sifting through a lot of material. The Clarion-Ledger will also prove useful. It will take some time to sift out the wheat from the chaff. I'm confident this article has good bones, but I presume the newspapers might have some meat worth considering. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:27, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I'd be happy to keep clipping. It will take a little while -- there were around 80 articles to look through for 1948 alone. I'll do 1949 next and will post on the talk page; either this morning or tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:14, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Will do. Note that the usual two week hiatus will apply. Gog the Mild (talk) 10:40, 20 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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