The Lieutenant Governor Who Shot a Journalist: The Narciso Gonzalez Assassination
Gone South
Audacy Podcasts
4.8 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1903, South Carolina’s most powerful journalist is gunned down in broad daylight, and the shooter is the lieutenant governor.
Narciso Gonzalez, editor of The State newspaper in Columbia, spent years attacking the Tillman machine: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the architect of South Carolina’s post-Reconstruction political order, and Ben’s volatile nephew James Tillman, a rising politician with a reputation for drinking, gambling, and vendettas. On January 19, 1903, that feud turns into a street-corner assassination outside the State House.
From Red Shirts intimidation and the Hamburg massacre, to Ben Tillman’s state-run liquor “dispensary” system and the riots it sparked, to a murder trial engineered to let the shooter walk, we trace the bloodline politics and raw violence behind the killing with writer Jack Hitt (This American Life, Uncivil).
It’s a story about press power, political revenge, and how a state’s myths, and its laws, get written when the loudest voice in the room can be silenced with a gun.
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Listen to Jack Hitt on This American Life https://www.thisamericanlife.org/archive?contributor=8770Read some of Jack Hitt's best magazine stories on Longform.orghttps://longform.org/archive/writers/jack-hitt
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For years, Gone South has been a podcast about crime in the American South, but for our new season, we're widening the lens. |
| 0:09.0 | Through deeply reported narrative-driven stories, we're digging into the myths, scandals, and power structures that still shape the South, and in a lot of ways, the country itself. |
| 0:19.9 | Follow and listen to Gone South Season 5, an Odyssey podcast, |
| 0:24.5 | available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. |
| 0:35.5 | On the afternoon of January 19, 1903, the editor of the state newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, left the newsroom to grab lunch. |
| 0:46.0 | His name was Narciso Gonzalez. |
| 0:48.9 | He and his brother had co-founded the newspaper 12 years earlier, and he was known as a sharp, fearless critic |
| 0:55.0 | whose columns set the political agenda in South Carolina. |
| 0:59.0 | As Gonzalez passed the state Capitol building, he saw the lieutenant governor, a man named |
| 1:05.0 | James Tillman, walking his way. |
| 1:07.0 | They were ferocious enemies and had been for several years at this point. |
| 1:13.3 | This is writer Jack Hitt. Things have been sort of quiet between them for several months. |
| 1:18.5 | But on this day, as they passed, Gonzalez sort of moves towards the inside of the building to sort of |
| 1:25.2 | take the right turn to where he's going to go get his lunch. |
| 1:28.3 | And right when they came side by side, the lieutenant governor of the state of South Carolina pulled out a pistol and shot him once in the gut. |
| 1:38.3 | Gonzalez collapsed against the Capitol building. |
| 1:42.3 | He said to have shouted, shoot again, you coward. |
| 1:45.9 | But Tillman's assistance whisked him away, |
| 1:48.4 | and Gonzalez was rushed to the hospital. |
| 1:50.9 | He died four days later. |
| 1:53.4 | This was, of course, national news, |
| 1:55.0 | a political assassination of the First Order, |
... |
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