Four Governors On Hand As Tom Murphy Is Laid To Rest

By Tom Baxter

Waco, Ga.

(12/22/07) Tom Murphy was laid to rest Saturday on a day like the one envisioned by the writer of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” A cold and cloudy day - a day his son, Mike, said that he’s dreaded for a long time.

After lying in state at the Capitol Friday, the funeral for the former speaker was held at West Central Technical College in Waco, one of the institutions his district will remember him by.

Former Gov. Zell Miller, his old legislative nemesis, called Murphy “the most compelling force in state government in Georgia during the last half century. "God rest his soul. He was a piece of work,” Miller said.

This was not exactly an intimate service, but it was more personal in tone than the ceremonies at the Capitol. One observer, looking down from the third floor of the rotunda Friday, swore she saw Murphy’s casket moving slightly, as a group of Republicans gathered around it. Saturday’s service was one you could imagine Murphy sitting back and listening to without breaking his cigar.

Four Georgia governors -- Miller, Joe Frank Harris, Roy Barnes and Sonny Perdue -- spoke, and Lauren “Bubba” McDonald, who Murphy wanted to be governor, gave the eulogy. Country singer Roy Mitchell sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” this time without the Speaker in his Stetson singing along, and the Rev. Nelson Price gave the benediction.

But it may have been the remarks and prayer by Elder Leonard Robinson of the Primitive Baptist Church Murphy attended that spoke most directly to what kind of man Murphy was.

It wasn’t anything he said. It was the way he said it, in that stammering, sing-song cadence that Hardshell Baptist preachers get into midway through a sermon, like the davening rhythm of Hasidic Jews

Listening to Elder Robinson and imagining how deeply that sound echoed in Murphy’s upbringing, you could hear in a new way how he chanted the ceremonial language of the House – “All members take their seats and cease all audible conversation....” – in the musical way he did.

It also made more understandable the way Murphy made moral choices. This is the sound of an old religion that is the very opposite of those more modern ones that promise a quick buck and an easy road to salvation. It is often emotional but never glib. It is very simple – “primitive” – in its teachings but very knowing in its expectations of human behavior.

There was much of that in Murphy. He could be unbending in his positions and dogmatic in his opposition to the Republicans slowly working their way toward majority status in Georgia and the South, but he had enough political sensitivity to serve as a House speaker longer than any other legislator in the United States. He could be teary-eyed in his defense of the indigent and the vulnerable, but flinty in his judgments on what was to pass into the budget and what was not.

“Brother Murphy may be up there now, hittin’ that ol’ gavel and separating people out,” Robinson said.

For a Republican, those words have to be as chilling as Dante’s.