 Like almost all white Southerners at the time, Rusk was a Democrat and his childhood hero was President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson.Unlike many other white Southerners, the experience of poverty made him sympathetic to black Americans as he noted during his childhood that the poverty of his black neighbors was worse than his white neighbors.When the Rusk family moved to Atlanta to escape the poverty of Cherokee Country, he took a job at the age of 8 as an assistant at a local grocery store.