Politics and Pellagra in Mill Town Byzantium

Politics and Pellagra in Mill Town Byzantium By Cathy Donelson Business Alabama January 2001 A powerful alliance of Bourbon planters and mill town industrialists fashioned the 1901 Constitution. Only a handful of would-be New South governors have dared to challenge the feudal protectors of this Byzantine document created by the Bourbons and the Big Mules Calls for revising the 1901 Constitution have been sounded by many Alabama governors since 1915, says former Gov. Albert P. Brewer. But the calls have gone unanswered for a century.   Brewer, now a law professor pushing for constitutional reforms, is a board member of the Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform (ACCR Foundation, Inc.), the new public interest group incorporated last year to inform Alabamians about their antiquated constitution and inspire them to create a modern charter.   The document, which has grown into a thick book after a century of amendments, is holding the state back, according to reformers. It was so flawed in the beginning, the first amendment was needed to allow the state to improve roads and bridges. Today, on its hundredth anniversary, it is the world’s longest and most amended constitution.   Alabama went through political and social upheavals that alarmed the old guard in the Reconstruction years leading up to the new constitution, so a century ago they crafted a new constitution to prevent another scare. It was intended to disenfranchise poor whites, blacks and scalawags and make it all but impossible to raise taxes.   A new industrial order was emerging, but the state was still one of the most backward areas of the country. The planter class retained its influence and power with thousands of poor whites and blacks sharecropping small plots on former plantations. Most white Alabama farmers worked land they didn't own under the tenancy system, another "peculiar institution" which arose to replace slave labor.   The Populist movement of the 1890s brought together many farm and factory workers - white and black - to take on the old aristocrats and Gilded Age capitalism. There were bitterly fought elections over issues dividing the "haves" and the "have nots" in Alabama.   The turn of the century also brought an outbreak of pellagra to Alabama. Affecting poor residents often existing on diets of spoiled corn, the physically debilitating disease -- which also caused dementia -- the epidemic that spread across the South gave rise to the stereotype that Alabamians were dumb and lazy.   Many factors spurred the ill-fated Populist farmers’ revolt in the South. The election of 1896 was the Populists' last serious political campaign, marking the beginning of their political decline. The aftermath provided a system of white supremacy and one-party Democratic rule, which stabilized the power of the Bourbons and Big Mules in Alabama. The so-called Bourbons were the aristocratic plantation interests and the Big Mules were the post-war cotton and steel mill owners.   Alabama's governor exemplified both at the turn of the century. Joseph Forney Johnston, who governed the state from 1896 to 1900, was determined to end the vestiges of carpetbagger rule and re-establish white rule. The Civil War veteran who laid the foundation for a new constitution was an attorney, president of the Alabama National Bank, one of the first banks in the state's mineral district, and also the first president of the Sloss Iron and Steel Company, which gave rise to the city of Birmingham. Always called “Captain” Johnston, he died serving his second term as an U.S. senator.   The steel company had been founded by the colorful investor J.W. Sloss, who had the attitude of many industrialists of his time and today. Sloss was fond of saying, "I like to use money as I use a horse - to ride!"   The new Black Belt planter and urban industrialist coalition rode to power on the Constitution of 1901 in Alabama, which was beginning to join a new century in American life while still living with the myth and memory of the Lost Cause.   Like the rest of the nation, Alabama got caught up in the Spanish-American War of 1898 in a resurgence of nationalism. Even old Confederate heroes like Gen. "Fighting" Joe Wheeler of Alabama joined the "splendid little war" started after the U.S.S. Maine blew up in the Havana Harbor. Fighting in the U.S. Army, momentarily forgetting himself in the heat of battle with the Spaniards in retreat, Wheeler gave a Rebel yell, hollering, "We've got the damn Yankees on the run!"   Yankee carpetbag rule was still a galling memory in Alabama in 1901 when delegates gathered in the capital city of Montgomery for a new constitutional convention. The new constitution was passed mainly to disenfranchise black voters. But it had other flaws as well, in addition to removing most poor whites from the voter registration rolls. Tens of thousands of uneducated whites unknowingly cast their last ballots in a statewide ratification, based on false promises by politicians that their voting rights would be preserved.   As early as 1914, Gov. Emmett O'Neal was calling for a modern constitution, notes Dr. Gerald Johnson, emeritus professor of political science at Auburn University. O'Neal, son of a governor himself, is remembered as a progressive with a sense of noblesse oblige, even though he had been a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1901. He addressed the Legislature in 1915, saying, "No real or permanent progress is possible in Alabama until the present fundamental law is thoroughly revised and adapted to meet present conditions. The provisions of our present antiquated fundamental-plan constitution form inseparable barriers to the most important reforms necessary to meet modern conditions." O'Neal went on to note that the Constitution of 1901 had been written primarily to limit black voting, so "little consideration was given to other matters." However, O'Neal's proposed reforms were hamstrung by a Legislature controlled by lobbyists bent on keeping power.   And Alabama still struggles with that same document, says Johnson, director of the Montgomery-based Capital Survey Research Center.   "The current constitution now has over 600 amendments, but I don't call them amendments," he said. "Our constitution has over 600 defects that have to be addressed. What we have done since 1901 is patch, tape, wire and glue to get around a document which prohibited internal improvements in the state and took power away from people."   Only a handful of progressive governors have tried to change Alabama's image of "provincial politics and pellagra," according to a study by Harvey H. Jackson, Jacksonville State University history professor and ACCR Foundation  member.   Jackson notes Charles Henderson, one of the state's early "business governors," tried to push Alabama into 20th-century reforms by asking the Russell Sage Foundation of New York in 1917 to survey the state and offer suggestions for improvement. The governor got a report detailing "a grim landscape of neglect and inequity," Jackson said. "And that neglect and inequity, inadequacy and unfairness were just what the Constitution of 1901 was all about."   The voting provisions of the Alabama's '01 constitution were "the most elaborate...that have ever been in force in the United States," according to "A History of Suffrage in the United States," published in 1918.   At the onset of the Great War, Alabamians with their culture still molded to a great extent by the Civil War were cool to the remote conflict, even as the British blockade denied the state staple crop access to the continental cotton market.   By 1917 they joined the call to arms and the war helped stimulate the Alabama economy with shipbuilding contracts in coastal Mobile and the establishment of training camps for thousands of soldiers, such as Camp Sheridan near Montgomery.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, an aspiring writer assigned to Camp Sheridan in 1918, fell in love with Montgomery belle Zelda Sayre, 18-year-old daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice. At war's end he began a novel "This Side of Paradise," which made him famous overnight and brought him the money to marry the zany Zelda.   "With the war of 1914-1918," observed Allen Tate, "the South re-entered the world..." But to Baltimore Sun newspaper editor H.L. Mencken the South of 1919 was the "Sahara of the Bozarts" as far as its literary landscape was concerned.   Describing the South as a region of yokels, Mencken called its politics "cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic."   However, even the crusty, cigar-chewing iconoclast wasn't immune to southern charm, because he married Montgomery beauty Sara Haardt. As head of the Alabama branch of the National Women's Party, she had led the battle to have the Alabama Legislature ratify the 19th Amendment giving women the vote in 1920.   That right wasn't extended to blacks, still denied the vote under Alabama's constitution, though it had been amended nine times in the first two decades of the century. The state was still run by Black Belt planters and North Alabama industrialists. The Black Belt gained its named from the crescent swath of rich, black soil which constituted the plantation region of the central part of the state, though then and today it has the highest ratio of black residents.   Along with the rest of the nation, Alabama entered the Roaring 20s and the Jazz Age epitomized by Scott and Zelda, who was the quintessential flapper. The intellectual Miss Haardt and the flamboyant Zelda renewed their girlhood acquaintance while living up-scale sophisticated lives Up East, while back home in Alabama cotton prices were plummeting and the boll weevil arrived to devastate crops.   The 20s also gave Alabama two progressive governors: Thomas Kilby and Bibb Graves. The tax base broadened somewhat and public funding increased a little, but white supremacy, low taxes, minimal social services and centralized government remained.   "Looking back," professor Jackson writes, "some pundits have suggested that it was during this era, 1920 to 1929, that Alabama got its first and last ‘New South’ governors." The constitution was amended only 13 times during the 20s and most of those changes concerned road construction.   In 1923 Kilby called for the Legislature to call a constitutional convention and a commission to draft a new constitution to submit to voters. Nothing happened.   Graves, the state's first two-term governor, served from 1927-31 and 1935-39 and was in office during the stock market crash of '29 and the ensuing Great Depression, so the state had more pressing problems that revamping its constitution.   In 1930 Benjamin Meek Miller was elected, campaigning against the extravagant reforms of the first Graves administration and the power of the Ku Klux Klan. Inheriting a desperate economic situation with low revenues and schools about to close, Miller turned to the Brookings Institution of Washington, D.C. The organization's scholars and experts studied Alabama government and made several recommendations, including revising the constitution, but the advice failed to stir the Legislature to action.   By 1930 tenant farming still held on under the old plantation economy, with more than half the farms in the South - probably more in Alabama - operated by sharecroppers and tenants.   Franklin D. Roosevelt, sworn in as the 32nd U.S. President in 1933, brought in New Deal programs, which provided some relief to Alabama farmers and oversaw creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority.   Artists and writers also found work. The tenant shacks would be a kudzu-covered memory in Alabama if a New Deal photography project under the Farm Security Administration hadn't brought the nation's leading photographers to the South and Alabama. Walker Evans left indelible images of the stark poverty of Alabama farm life during the Great Depression in his classic photographs of sharecropper families featured in James Agee’s classic book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” His work for the FSA was featured in a 1938 exhibition titled Walker Evans: American Photographs. It was the first exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art devoted to a lone photographer. Zelda even wrote a Depression era novel. In "Save Me the Waltz," published in 1932, she referred to her hometown capital city of Montgomery as Jeffersonville. "So in Jeffersonville there existed then, and I suppose now, a time and a quality that appertains to nowhere else," she wrote.   However, Zelda wasn't quite herself, observed a contemporary, actress Tallulah Bankhead, who also was raised in Montgomery. "I was there in a flower shop in the South of France when Zelda, poor darling, went off her head," Tallulah said. "She had gone into a flower shop and suddenly for her all the flowers had faces."   In the American south in Alabama, however, times were hard and Roosevelt depended on a powerful coalition of southern congressmen to hold his New Deal coalition together, particularly Tallulah's daddy, U.S. Rep. William B. Bankhead, who was Speaker of the House from 1936 to his death in 1940.   Others were Tallulah's uncle, U.S. Sen. John H. Bankhead Jr., who co-sponsored the Jones-Bankhead Act to help tenant farmers acquire their own land, and U.S. Sen. Hugo L. Black, appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937.   Progressive Gov. Graves, back in office for a second term,  also became an ardent "New Dealer,”  creating the Alabama Department of Labor and the Department of Human Welfare in 1935 and trying to get the state's corporate interests and utilities to bear a bigger share of the tax burden. He was in office when Roosevelt's 1938 National Emergency Council report was released, calling the South "the Nation's #1 economic problem."   The report outlined three main causes: population; assessed value of taxable property averaging only a third as much as northeastern states; and the inability to adequately educate children. The South was trying to educate a third of the nation's students on 17 percent of the country's school revenues.   During the 30s and 40s the Alabama Policy Commission, a citizens' group, pushed for constitutional revision, but nothing came of it.   The popularity of the Depression-fighting programs began to wane in Alabama as they began to threaten white supremacy and other policies cemented in the Constitution of '01, and the state began a slow defection to more conservative politics.   The year 1938 saw the election of Frank M. Dixon, a patrician and grandson of the author of "The Klansman," the book the film "Birth of a Nation" was based on.   Dixon, who served 1939-1943, won a reputation as a leader in state reorganization and internal improvements. Dixon didn't take on any major constitutional reforms other than pushing for redistricting the Legislature as mandated by the constitution every 10 years, but his bill failed. He also supported modifying the cumulative poll tax instituted to disenfranchise blacks after a state policy report said it kept more whites than blacks from the polls.   His successor in the war years was Chauncey M. Sparks (1943-1947), a conservative called the "Bourbon from Barbour." Sparks, a bachelor, hailed from rural Barbour County, called the "county of governors." Representing the anti-New Deal wing of the Democrats, he defeated a young upstate candidate named James Elisha Folsom by just over 6,000 votes in what had been predicted to be a landslide election for him in 1942.   Sparks is not remembered for progress, but he had little leeway. The power brokers were afraid of the Populist Folsom, who was for repealing the poll tax and gearing up for another run at the capital.   State Democratic Party chairman Gessner McCorvey of Mobile was concerned that there would be more registration of whites "even though they are of a type which has no business voting."   According to the book "Democrats and Dixiecrats" by Professor William D. Bernard, McCorvey thought the cumulative poll tax was a "lawful and legitimate method of getting rid of a very large number of people who would not have cast an intelligent ballot even if they were given the right to vote."   In 1945 McCorvey went to Alabama legislators, urging them to ensure the sacrosanct 1901 constitution was just updated to keep a restricted electorate. He wrote: "I did not think that we have the right to undo the work of that great group of Alabama leaders, who...had only in mind love of their state and the determination that no radical and irresponsible group could take charge of our State Government or of any of our County Governments, especially in the Black Belt."  Rural Black Belt politicians still ruled the Alabama Legislature, which hadn't been reapportioned by population, even though the constitution mandated redistricting after every federal census.   Nicknamed "Big Jim" because of his height, Folsom was back in 1946, taking his campaign on the roads of Alabama with his Strawberry Pickers county band, hoisting the mop and suds bucket he said would use to clean up state government.   Folsom was the first - and last - Alabama gubernatorial candidate to stump the state calling for constitutional revision. The old Constitution of '01, a barrier to progress, he told crowds, "was written by reactionaries on behalf of corporations."   Former governor Dixon stepped into the fray, warning a constitutional convention would be "dangerous at this time, particularly in view of the temper of the people."   Folsom, nonetheless, rode into office championing the "little man" and on a Populist platform of redistricting the planter-dominated Legislature and eliminating class hatred and the hated poll tax.   After the election, Dixon worried publicly that blacks would be registered to vote, but his fears were groundless. Folsom, unable to work with a conservative legislature, wasn't able to extend voting rights to blacks or poor whites.   When Alabama emerged from World War II, its constitution had only 51 amendments, and Nation magazine called Alabama "the most liberal state in the South."   But the next year the States' Rights Party, also called "Dixiecrats," arose at a national convention in Birmingham, splitting from the national Democratic party.   Led by Dixon, McCorvey and former South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats bolted in 1948 when President Harry S Truman proposed eliminating the poll tax and other reforms. Thurmond, born in 1902, is one of the most enduring politicians of the 20th Century. Now a long-time U.S. senator, he carried four states as the States' Rights presidential candidate.   Truman was elected and once proclaimed that the 1952 autobiography of the bourbon-loving Alabama actress Tallulah Bankhead was the best book he had read since coming to the White House.   Folsom was re-elected in 1954, but never succeeded in passing his proposed voting reforms or constitutional revision. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to make the most significant changes, with decisions in civil and voting rights cases over the years rendering whole sections of Alabama's constitution unconstitutional.   The Voting Rights Act passed by Congress in 1965 dismantled barriers to voting, like the ones built into Alabama's constitution. It suspended literacy tests and outlawed the poll tax as a state suffrage requirement.   Country politicians with status quo attitudes ignored constitutionally-required redistricting until federal court-ordered legislative reapportionment finally took place in 1962, after lawsuits were filed. In 1965 the Legislature passed a redistricting package that ended rural Bourbon domination but still ensured white supremacy. However, the courts struck down the state House of Representatives plan and drew one up in the absence of legislative action.    To date all the state's legislative redistricting plans have been drawn under state or federal court order, following legal challenges. And since 1901 no major constitutional reforms have been passed, with one exception. "Most people don't realize there was a significant revision in the constitution in the 1970s with the Judicial Article," says Thomas Corts, ACCR chairman and Samford University president..    Almost unnoticed by a majority of Alabamians, the Judicial Article, one of the most sweeping changes in the state's court system since it was set up, was quietly ratified the week before Christmas in 1973, due to the efforts of Howell Heflin, then chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.   In just one term Heflin, who went on to become U.S. senator from Alabama, changed the judiciary from one of the least efficient to a model for the nation. He built coalitions with judges he promised to include in the state retirement system and special interest groups, particularly the Alabama Farmers Federation, which was pushing an amendment to benefit pork producers.   "Vote for Hogs and Judges" was the slogan for the little noticed amendments which passed with only a 7 percent turnout. Heflin said the judiciary amendment “laid to rest a system that served well in the 18th and 19th centuries, but which was strained by the economic, political and social conditions of the 20th Century."   The Judicial Article was the only survivor of a proposed new constitution drafted by a commission the Legislature created at the request of former Gov. Brewer, who served from 1968-1971. Again, constitutional revision went nowhere.   Former Gov. Fob James, elected in 1978, also tried to get the constitution revised early in his first administration as soon as he realized its constrictions. By then it had been amended 380 times and 60 times in the prior 15 years.   James' proposal for wholesale rewriting brought out every special interest group in the state seeking to keep the amendments to their advantage. His constitutional proposals got as far as legislative public hearings, but in the end there was too much opposition from lawmakers bent on keeping power.   The irony of Alabama's constitution is it restricts the Legislature from authorizing basic government functions without a constitutional amendment. Only the Legislature can change it by legislative amendment or through a constitutional convention. The governor's approval isn't even required.   Since 1935 at least 25 bills and resolutions have been introduced in the Alabama Legislature calling for a constitutional convention, but not one passed. In 1992 a joint legislative resolution proposed a constitutional convention, but it wasn't enacted.   Two decades have passed since an Alabama governor has seriously attempted to change the outmoded constitution. The document is observing its 100th birthday this year in a state living the legacy of the planter class that established the Constitution of '01.   There's only a 1.5 percent farm population now, but a fifth of the people live below the poverty level, and a third of Alabama's adults didn't graduate from high school.   No centennial celebrations have been announced in the Capitol or State House this year for the constitution which has given Alabama its destiny.   Note: The author credits and recommends, for further information, Albert Brewer's "Constitutional Revision in Alabama," an Alabama Law Review article, which can be located at www.law.ua.edu/lawreview/brewfull.htm. Reprinted with Permission from Business Alabama.