By Ben Palmer
Staff Writer
Web-posted June 21, 1996 at 4 p.m.

The winner of the 1977 and 1981 Masters tournaments wasn't the first Tom Watson to make front-page headlines in Augusta.

Nearly a century earlier, Thomas E. Watson rose from his native McDuffie County to become a champion of the downtrodden farmer and the working class, a controversial publisher and Populist politician and - two years before his death - U.S. senator from Georgia.

In the end, Watson's virulent attacks on the Catholic Church, blacks, Jews, the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson and the war effort diminished his stature and political influence.

His life, spanning 66 years and chronicled in historian C. Vann Woodward's acclaimed 1938 biography Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, is to this day puzzling to historians - a contradictory, paradoxical and, ultimately, enigmatic personality.

``Just the idea of starting a campaign against Catholicism while at the same time he sent his child to a Catholic school shows the contradictions in his character,'' said Augusta College history professor Edward J. Cashin, whose doctoral dissertation w as on Watson.

In the 15 years since he wrote about Watson in his book The Story of Augusta, Dr. Cashin has not changed his understanding of the man.

``He's just as enigmatic,'' Dr. Cashin said.

Watson was in many ways a product of impersonal forces that buffeted post-Civil War South.

Those forces ``thwarted at every turn his courageous struggle in the face of them during his early Populist battles, and they led him to the futility and degeneration of his later career,'' Dr. Woodward wrote in the preface to Tom Watson.

Born in 1856, Watson spent his early years and much of his adult life in the Thomson area.

In 1873, his father, John - falling victim to the general economic collapse - lost his last acre of land and moved the family to Augusta. It was the first of several distasteful encounters with city life that framed part of Watson's world view.

He studied law under Judge W.R. McLaws of Augusta, passing the bar in 1875, and later served in the Georgia House of Representatives.

During the 1880s and 1890s, Watson supported the interests of the farmers over those of the entrenched Democratic political establishment. In return, he won the backing of farmers alliances in the state and was elected to Congress in 1891, defeating 10 th District incumbent Major Barnes.

Watson was defeated in the next two elections, then nominated for vice president at the Populist convention in St. Louis in 1896, which endorsed William Jennings Bryan for president.

Watson did not hold elective office again until he won the Senate post in 1920.

``It was not in office, but out among the people preaching a crusade that he found his true role, and that was the role he played until near the end of his life,'' Dr. Woodward wrote in Tom Watson.

Watson promoted his views in several publications he owned, including Tom Watson's Magazine, the Weekly Jeffersonian and the Columbia Sentinel.

``His appeals were very emotional. He appealed to basic instincts in people. But he was not consistent,'' Dr. Cashin said.

In addition to his longstanding dislike for Catholicism and the institution of the Pope, Watson is also remembered for his role in fomenting public outrage in the Leo Frank case.

Frank, a Jew, was convicted and sentenced to die in the 1913 death of Mary Phagan at the Atlanta pencil factory where she worked and where Frank was the superintendent.

The circumstances of the trial were viewed by many, particularly outside of Georgia, as a miscarriage of justice.

But not by Watson, whose newspaper wrote after an attempt was made on Frank's life at the state penitentiary: ``The next Jew who does what Frank did, is going to get exactly the same thing that we give to Negro rapists.''

Over the years, Watson returned to his beloved ``Hickory Hill'' in Thomson, where he found an uneasy peace with himself.

Dr. Cashin believes Watson's experiences in Augusta, in contrast to the good old days and ideals of rural life, set a tone for the future.

``When his father went bankrupt and sold the big house, the Watsons moved to south Augusta where his father drank and gambled away the rest of the fortune. He (Tom) got a view of Augusta as an alien, evil place in contrast to the farm,'' Dr. Cashin sai d.

Watson developed a ``skewed perspective'' that lasted a lifetime, Dr. Cashin said.

In his autobiographical Bethany, Watson's own words describe the contradiction: ``I have imagined enemies where there were not.''