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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0358, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
George LeMaistre entered the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa in 1930, shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. Three years later, he tried to set up a practice in a tough economic environment and soon found himself teaching law, then joining naval intelligence. He worked out of Louisiana as part of a relatively disorganized defense effort until the end of the war, when he returned to teaching in Tuscaloosa. He continued to teach law even as he moved into a banking career, eventually becoming the chairman of the F.D.I.C. LeMaistre died in 1994.
In this interview, LeMaistre recalls his experiences in World War II, including the Navy's efforts to combat extensive torpedo submarine activity in the Gulf of Mexico. He describes some of the personal relationships and minutiae of Alabama politics, including the roles of politicos like Foots Clement, Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, and Governors Bibb Graves and Frank Dixon, among others. He dwells on the career of George Wallace, describing the gubernatorial primary loss that convinced Wallace to use racist appeals and Wallace's efforts to exploit the integration struggle for political gain. LeMaistre also considers at length the role of race and civil rights in Alabama politics and describes integration at the University of Alabama.
LeMaistre believes that racism remained beneath the surface in Alabama until the mid-1960s. Until then, southern politicians dragged their feet on civil rights, but rarely exploited racial antagonisms to win votes, or spoke openly about opposing legislation for racial reasons. Of course, by the mid-1960s, as the civil rights movement was escalating, Alabama was experiencing spasms of deadly violence. LeMaistre positions himself as an observer, only inserting himself into the story when he describes his contributions to efforts to craft a nonviolent integration strategy in Alabama. This interview offers a detailed and thorough account of the story of race and politics in that state in the civil rights era.
George LeMaistre remembers Alabama politics from the 1920s to the 1970s, a story troubled by violent racism and the struggle over integration.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
So the firm started with you and Clement and Partlow in '30. Clement came in '34, y'all in '33.
Partlow and I started in August of 1933 and Clement joined us in 1936, '34. Gewin graduated and was a friend of ours, who, close contact. He didn't practice in Tuscaloosa till about 1949 when he joined the firm, he had practiced in Greensboro during the meantime and had been in the legislature for two terms, as I recall, and was also county solicitor down there and was prosecutor . . .
Who was it, was it Clement who wanted to run, what were you saying, wanted to run for something?
No, Gewin wanted to run for the seat which was the 6th district of U.S. Congress. He mentioned that several times, but he never did. The last time he mentioned it was when Armistead Selden ran and was elected, because he felt certain that he could beat Selden, who also was from Greensboro. Selden of course was a student in Law School when I was teaching there. He was a Sewanee undergraduate and also a Naval officer and had come back to law school after the war.
Yeah, it was after the war when he was here. I wasn't in school then but I just was working some with fraternity affairs when I was on the faculty here. So I knew some of those famous and infamous SAE's. But now, Clement never ran for an office at all. Did he hold positions in the party as such?
Not as such. Only office that was anywhere near political that Clement ever held was the head of the savings bond drive. He set all kinds of records for the Treasury Department in selling savings bonds both before and after the war. The way the firm broke up was in 1940 when Partlow, who was a member of the National Guard, was called into service—when they called the National Guard into service early in 1940.
Now which Partlow was this?
Billy. William D. He went into service I think in January of 1940 after he had run unsuccessfully against Pete Jarman for House of Representatives the year before and then in '41 prior to Pearl Harbor and prior to the declaration of war, Clement was called to work full time for the Treasury Department and in December '41, I was the only one here.
So you were left.
Left with the firm when Pearl Harbor happened. I had already gone into
the Naval Reserve and when Roosevelt was speaking to the Congress in his
famous speech, "We will hit them again and again and again." Just as he
said again the third time, the phone rang and they told me to report to
New
So that was when the firm disappeared—disintegrated.
Well, actually it didn't. E. W. Skidmore came in and operated his practice, wound up our practice, too. Of course, none of us came back until 1945. When we did come back, Clement and I started out practicing together and Partlow did not come back.
So it was after the war, you and Clement were back together. So those files were there in the office and would cover all those years.
As a matter of fact, if you could find the newspaper accounts of the race between Hill and John Crommelin and between Sparkman and Crommelin you would find that somebody broke into those files and purloined some of Clement's letters, and Crommelin published some of them attempting to prove that there was some kind of a hidden veil for Clement. It wasn't much of a conclusion that could be drawn from it and the letters obviously didn't hurt the man they were run against. But, we never did know who actually broke into those files. We had a young man working for us at that time who had recently graduated, and his subsequent conduct leads me to believe he was probably the one who did it. Mainly because he has never been back or called any one of us since he left the firm. Nobody has ever had any contact with him and yet no one ever accused him.
He wasn't actively political?
He became actively political later as a Republican down in Florida.
Well, that would lead you to that conclusion almost.
But at any rate you would think that anybody who ever worked for six to eight months in a law office at least would call up and speak to people in the firm at some time after that. It would be rather unusual for thirty years to go by and never have any contact. But I don't know that he took those papers out. What happened was he took pictures of them and put them back. Things that were run were the photostats.
Actually Bull Connor's big buddy in Birmingham head of the detectives—was his name Darnell?
That sounds vaguely familiar. I think that was his name.
There's a Darnell in the police force here that has nothing whatsoever to do with it. This man, whatever his name was, was head of detectives up there, came down and conducted an investigation and said he knew who did it, but we never did know for sure. At least I never did.
But these were letters from people like Estes Kefauver and Kefauver's law
partner. There was a letter in there from one man had written in
Tennessee and asked how he could spend that much time in politics and
how in the world he could afford to do it without taking a political
appointment or running for office. Clement had written back about the
And this man took this to mean that he was selling his services for legal work that was brought to the firm, although that was not exactly correct. As far as I know we never had a case out of Tennessee.
At any rate that file if we could have located it would have a great deal of information. I don't know whether I ever told you or not but Clement's law books were worth examining. The margins of the books were all filled up with tallies showing how many would vote for something, how many against. Other people would make notes about what the case was about, but Clement spent all his time worrying about the political things that were going on the campus. How many Wallaby had, how many Garrett had, how many so and so had. He spent the entire time thinking about politics.
Well, now just to round out this chronology, you and Clement and Gewin were together from '49 to 1960 when you went to City National.
That's when I left the law practice—in September of 1960. Clement died one year later. Approximately one year after that Gewin went on the bench. That would have been about '62, I think he went—early '62 or late '61. Clement died in September '61.
I can't remember the date—seeing Gewin in Houston.
That was after '62 but Gewin was on the bench when the Meredith case came up in Mississippi.
I remember when Jack Kennedy went on nation-wide T.V. He referred to the judges being Southern lawyers and referred to him as Judge Gerwin.
That would have been before September '62.
Because that was when the actual order had been issued requiring him to be admitted and that came from the Circuit Court of Appeals.
Was that the 9th?
At that time it was the 5th circuit. It's now the 11th. Alabama is in the 11th. Mississippi is in the 5th.
Ours is in Atlanta now.
So the law firm (I mean you three) itself continued in a way, I mean in the legal records.
Actually, what happened, the young lawyers who were with us continued together for about a year and then they split into two law firms.
I see. Was Perry one of them?
Perry Hubbard and Vann Waldrop stayed with the original firm with about five or six lawyers. Gordon Rosen and Bernie Harwood went into another firm.
I didn't realize Gordon Rosen was originally—
Gordon came in just about the time Gewin did. Bernie Harwood was Bob Harwood's son. He is still practicing here. He and Gordon and George Wright started a firm and since that time the Hubbard firm has split into two. Split into three. The young tax man they had there, Bob Tanner, and two or three others pulled out and started their own firm.
Well back in 1933-'34 when you all started, how many law firms were there in Tuscaloosa?
There weren't over 20 lawyers in Tuscaloosa. Now there must be 200 or at least 180 I would think. You could count the law firms in town on one hand—at least at that time.
But Foots was the most politically active?
He was. He was 100% politically active. He didn't profess to look up law or write legal documents or anything of that sort. He spent all his time working on politics. I must say, very successfully. He was probably the best political organizer that ever worked in this state. He was such a good organizer that when Ed Livingston ran for the Supreme Court, after about three weeks E.L. dodged Foots. When he'd see him coming down the street, he would cross over to go around the block to keep from meeting him because Foots would have another job for him to do, somebody for him to see in another county. He just couldn't stand it, he said. He wasn't able to do all the things that Foots thought up for him.
Foots died in '61. He wasn't too old. Just about 50?
He was born about 1910 so just about 50.
I remember. It was rather sudden wasn't it?
Well, he'd been sick for a long time but of course he was so much overweight that from time to time he'd lose 50 pounds, put back 60, lose 40, then put back 50 and over his career he lost at least a ton. His heart just wouldn't take that sort of thing.
And I guess they weren't as sensitive to that problem as they are now. I guess it's just as well—you'd enjoy life more.
His first successful political race really began before he graduated and that was Chester Walker defeating Fleetwood Rice for probate judge and that was in Tuscaloosa. Judge Rice had the support of all the politicians, every single county official and all the rest of them were out working.
Foots organized a group that met every night at Pug's after Pug's closed. They'd sit at the counter, Pug'd give them coffee or coca-cola—whatever they wanted—while they made plans for the next day's work. They divided the voting list up into small segments and each man had a certain list of people he had to report on the next night. They kept a running account of how that race was going and until the week before it came off, the local political establishment had no inkling they were in trouble. They were already defeated. Chester Walker won by a sizeable margin. The strange thing about it was Wood Rice and Boss Hinton, who were the big powers before that, became the closest friends Foots had—after he demonstrated his ability.
So he really got started in county or local politics?
Local.
Although you said he was active in student politics.
Oh yes. He worked faithfully in student politics even after he graduated.
See, he wasn't married in those days and the students in the campus
machine used to come up to
Right across from the SAE house.
And the Hill grocery had a supermarket right below. Clement managed that operation for Dr. Patton. T.H. Patton owned that whole building—that whole block almost.
I remember the one that ran the drugstore was Ben Levy.
No. He ran Rex's. The man who ran the drugstore at the corner of 12th avenue was Doc Martin.
It was called Spanish Inn Drugstore but the next one was on 13th Ave., Rex's. The man's name was Leverty. I remember one night—I don't remember his first name, but Leverty came running out after a shop lifter and hit him over the head with a pistol and the gun went off when he hit him. Leverty ran one way and the shoplifter ran the other, scared both of them so they never made an arrest.
At any rate upstairs at the Spanish Inn is where it all took place.
That's where it all took place. John L. Lewis' nephew, Fats Lewis, lived up there.
You mean the labor leader's nephew?
Yes. Bob Jones lived up there, Foots Clement lived up there—15 or 20 of the most politically active figures on the campus lived in the Spanish Inn.
And that would have been in the early 30's.
'32. Foots lived there and ran it even while he was practicing law until about 1938, I believe. When did Bear Bryant graduate?
Around '35.
Well, the next year Bryant was married and rented a house at Buena Vista across the highway from the Highlands.
He married right after he graduated; he married Mary Harmon Black.
I think before he graduated; she made him come back to get his degree. They had a room in their house they were not using and Foots moved in and lived with them until Bryant went to Vanderbilt to coach. He left the Spanish Inn in' 37 or '36 or so. He didn't marry 'til after the war in the fifties.
So he really had plenty of time to devote to politics—campus and local . . .
And if you were associated with him you had plenty of time too, because it didn't make any difference to him what the time was. If we came through Birmingham at two o'clock in the morning and there was somebody he needed to get in touch with, he didn't hesitate to stop and call them.
He always said, and I think he's right, although I don't think it's a
very popular practice, that the way to impress a man with the importance
of what you had to say to a man was to wake him up and talk to him. When
you call him up in the middle of the night and tell him what you want
done, you can usually get it done. Right or not, that was
He really didn't practice law as such, then?
No, but the way he got into the State political field was through the Chester Walker race in Tuscaloosa County. That attracted some attention. That race was in '36 or '34. Lister Hill had been in the House of Representatives since 1923, and he was not unfamiliar with campus politics either. He was president of the student body here and he organized the first campus machine.
When Black was going to the Supreme Court, Hill decided to run for the Senate and whether that election was in late '37 or '38, I don't remember. I think it was in the summer, as I recall, Black was on a trip to Europe for summer vacation when the appointment was made, and that thing about the Ku Klux Klan broke while he was on shipboard coming back. Maybe that was the best place for him to have been. Of course he would have been run over with reporters before he had a chance to think about a statement.
But anyway, a Pittsburgh paper broke it while he was at sea and I think that the election was called in the fall of '37, but I'm not sure. When Hill ran, he had represented the district that I came from in South Alabama, and he knew my father, and I had shaken his hand. Montgomery was the northern part of the district.
That district ran all the way from your county on the Florida line.
Covington. So when he came up here, he came to our office, he of course knew Dr. Partlow, Billy's father, he was head of Bryce. And he heard about Clement, and he just asked us to meet him there one night and so the three of us just got in this little room that wouldn't hold four chairs—we just stood around the desk and talked. That's when Foots started working for Lister Hill.
That's when he really moved into state politics. Has Virginia talked to you about Lister Hill?
Virginia Hamilton?
Yes.
She talked to me one time.
She didn't take you down on a tape recorder?
No, I don't think so.
She has done some of these oral history things.
I think she did bring a recorder one time when we talked. The report she
had on Hugo Black I think was factually correct . . . In that speech,
that paper she read the other day, as I say, I think she attributed to
Hill a little more ambition than he really had when she said that he was
thinking about going after Hugo's seat. Actually he was thinking about
saving Hugo's seat for the Democrats, when there was such an uproar in
the Party because it began to look as if Black could not be reelected,
and he was coming up shortly after the appointment was made. I don't
know whether it was the following spring he would have had to qualify—I
guess it was. He would have had to qualify to
To the "big Mules" it would have been.
Yeh, so that was when Hill was looking at that place . . .
Because Black's background is labor oriented in Birmingham, particularly, and Hill, I guess, got interested in it at that time—but going back to Hill's origins—political orientation in Montgomery: now were he and Gunter, were they pretty much together?
They were.
Gunter is usually considered the boss in Montgomery for a long time.
Bill Gunter controlled Montgomery for a long time. Bill Gunter was a distant relative of my mother's. I never knew him that well, but I met him and talked to him. But he was not the Boss Crump type of boss . . .
No, I know that.
He didn't lay down hard and fast rules, but whatever he said was what
happened and I think there was an occasion a little later on when Gunter
and the others pulled away from
I was wondering about that.
It was very close. Whether he squeaked out a little margin in his own county or whether he lost it by a little bit, I don't know, but he lost a tremendous amount of support.
In the last two or three years a little book came out on the Halls—did you see that? Grover Hall Sr.— Grover Hall Jr.
Grover Hall wasn't a big supporter of Hill either.
Well, what I was thinking—although they came to be later on, I guess, kind of reconciled or something but—they were not in the beginning but— the other person I was thinking of—do you know Mills Thornton? He has written a good deal.
The name is familiar, and I know he made the first talk in this series, but I wasn't here and I didn't get to hear it. Where is he? At Michigan?
He's a professor at the University of Michigan, but he's from Montgomery. As I understand it, his mother was a Gunter, and I guess Bill Barnard was telling me.
Well, we still have a Gunter in politics—Annie Laurie Gunter you know is state treasurer now—has been for two terms. She can't succeed herself, but I understand she is going to run for Secretary of State.
Do you remember Mrs. Sue Gunter?
Out here at the University?
Yes.
Yes.
Now, was she related?
I don't know.
I thought she was from Montgomery.
She may have been. She was Assistant Dean of Women.
Well, she was mainly official chaperone. That was the job to stand at the door and sniff everybody.
To see whether or not those young men were coming in with alcohol on their breath.
That's right, that was the general idea. Actually Clement was primarily in politics, but what about Gewin? Was he involved?
Gewin wasn't that much involved in politics. Gewin would make a speech for a candidate or would do specific jobs; helping organize Greensboro or something like that; or helping him write up the platform or something of that sort, but he didn't spend full time on it like Clement did. Clement used to take a map of the state and divide it into I don't remember if it was 13 or 15 trade areas. And he would draw a line around those areas very much like Congressional districts except they would be smaller, and he would assign certain people to organize those areas, and most of them were people who had been in school right in the area.
He knew . . .
He had a machine going all over this state just made up of acquaintances who had gotten interested or that he had helped some way—getting some political favor or something. So when the time came to have a state-wide race, it took him less time than anyone else.
Cause he had all . . .
He had all of it already set up. He'd spend a few hours on the telephone and he'd have his organization going. Of course he kept me broke with the telephone bill.
Well, that's what I was wondering . . . who's paying for all of this?
But that was where he started in that Hill race. I'm just trying to remember who was Hill's opponent in that race. [It was Tom Heflin in 1938.]
We can pin that down I'm sure.
I'm trying to remember whether Frank Boykin ran.
Would he have been in that district?
No, I'm talking about the race for Senate. Boykin was in the House at that time.
He was from Mobile, wasn't he?
He was from Mobile—the old first district. He did run later against Sparkman and was defeated. But whether he ran in that race—seems to me he did—but whether he just threatened to run, I don't remember.
Wasn't your role something like Gewin's? You tried to keep the law office going? But you were well aware of most of the things going on, I guess.
Well, I used to write a lot of political ads and speeches and stuff like
that. I remember one mayor's race here. I wrote the ads for all three
candidates. Dr. Walker was running
Yeh, Yeh . . . But you were not doing any teaching then?
Yes, I was teaching eight o'clock classes.
You did?
I had an eight o'clock class every morning.
Even . . .
Not until '38. I was teaching in the summer of '38—I began teaching eight o'clock classes in fall '39
Well, that's when I started law school in the fall of '39. I didn't remember you were teaching a class.
I was teaching when the war started.
What did you teach?
I was teaching evidence and —I taught evidence the first year, I taught
torts and trial and appellate practice, and one year I taught a course
in equity. After the war I taught a course in equity pleading, oil and
gas; went back to evidence and in '48, I guess, I wrote a book on real
estate practice. And I started teaching real estate transactions—making
an examination of abstracts and closing
Oh you did?
See, Ed Livingston, when he left, the practice court was open.
Was he . . . Mr. Ed Livingston on the faculty in the '30s?
Yes, he was on there when I went to law school '30 through '33.
He was? And then . . . ?
Then he was elected to the Supreme Court in '38 or '9—somewhere around there. Must have been '39 cause I took his place.
Oh, that's right; so he left when I started in '39. The ones I had, course the dean's contracts, Whit McCoy and criminal law and . . .
Did you have Hepburn?
Hepburn for both real and personal property and then Mr. Masters taught equity.
Yes.
I guess that's about all you had in your first year. Legal bibliography—that's the one that . . .
That was Dean Farrah, wasn't it?
Well, who was Mavis?
Mavis Clark.
She was the one who did it all. I guess it must have been listed under Dean Farrah.
And when Hepburn became Dean . . .
He became dean right after Dean Farrah.
Yes, he did a little less teaching. I remember I took over one of his property courses. See, right after the war in 1945, I got back here September the 14th and I think school started the 15th in '45, and I taught full time because they had so many GI students coming in, they didn't have enough people to teach them so I taught full-time and practiced too, and I was glad to get it because coming back out of the navy, I didn't have any practice.
Right. See, in the fall or summer of 1944 I decided I've got to start on my dissertation and so I just resigned from the University. I hadn't been able to do much; I'd done some research, but I was teaching history, running the Union building, and acting Dean of Men. Well, there were very few men here.
Yeah, 'til the next year; then they flooded the place.
Well, I went and I stayed in Montgomery through the fall and winter of
1944-45, but we were on the quarter system. Dean Moore called me and
said, "You've just got to come back. I'm desperate, everybody has left
except Mrs. Panell, and even Al Thomas has left. He went into the OSS
and John Ramsey wouldn't . . . he was something in the historical . . .
the army historical program. So there really wasn't anybody, so I
agreed. I said, "As long as I don't have to teach Latin American
history, because I cannot. I know nothing bout Latin-American history."
Well, I came back in
We got some good students long about that time: Frank Johnson, Tom Christopher, Reese Phifer, Rufus Beale, all those were in the same class.
Well, back from the war . . . [some discussion about the tape running out] Maybe before next time we can get our chronology a little better organized.
Maybe we can get some information about who the various candidates were. I can remember the ones that we represented, so to speak, but I can't always remember who was on the other side. For instance in the Truman race, I remember quite well that Foots Clement was the only person in the state of Alabama that I knew who predicted that Truman would win. And that was when Truman took his whistle-stop campaign . . .
That was in '48.
In '48 Clement said "that is going to win this election." And of course none of us could vote for him, and of course we just didn't think he could get votes in Alabama—didn't have a chance of getting elected. But he did win.
But now Foots never . . . What was his connection with the national Democratic party?
He was very friendly with people in the national party through the senators.
I see, that was the tie—Hill and Sparkman.
He was very active in the state Democratic Party, and the national committeemen were always good friends with Foots. Again, I can't keep straight who all those people were, but people like Albert Rains and John Sparkman and Lister Hill were always active with the national party. We had some, Pete Jarman for instance, wouldn't work for the national party at all. Some in our Congressional delegation just didn't think the national party could help them. I remember when Jim Farley came through town in Roosevelt's . . .
Was that the first?
First administration.
He was the leg man.
This was after '32, he was Postmaster General at this time. Between '32 and '34 he had been down here and had met Clement and some others and I don't remember, I think they all rode a train together from here to Birmingham or somewhere. But I remember quite well when he came through on the train, he came out on the back platform to make a little talk at Tuscaloosa station, and he saw Foots over there and yelled, "Hey, Foots!" That just pointed up how much of a memory Jim Farley had. He could remember people's names better than Dr. Denny almost.
Or Ralph Adams, Ralph Adams was awfully good at it.
Yes.
But he never, Foots never really held an official position.
He never considered one.
I guess he could work better without being in an official capacity.
Well, it was helpful not to be in a position of working to get something for yourself.
He just loved it, I guess.
It was a good thing as far as our whole law firm is concerned that none of us ever took a place. I had left law practice before I ever got the appointment. I did have an appointment as referee in bankruptcy from the district judges in Birmingham. I guess indirectly that might be connected with politics. More than likely it was because Seaborn Lynn was a close friend of ours. He also had been appointed by the President at the behest of Senators Hill and Sparkman. So there were a lot of good connections and good contacts, but there was never any feeling that if I don't do this, I won't get that job. So none of us ever really felt that we had to either do something we didn't want to do or that they had an unusual call on us. The call was always the other way.
Just as a matter of curiosity—the referee in bankruptcy, does he do the same thing the judge would do?
That's what the term really means. "Referee" means that the judge has referred to that person the bankruptcy case for him to handle it for him. Today there is no referee.
They don't use . . . ?
They now have a new code which was passed two years ago which designates certain people as judges in bankruptcy and they have original jurisdiction rather than have something assigned to them by a district judge. Used to be that the federal judge would refer to me all the bankruptcy cases in Tuscaloosa. But now they come directly to the judge of bankruptcy, whoever he is.
Well, now George Wright is the . . .
For Northern Alabama.
But there are other judges too.
Oh yes. And they all now have status somewhat similar to the Federal district judge.
Yeah. Well, we went up a couple of weeks ago when Fulford was made a bankruptcy judge.
Clifford?
Yes, you didn't know that?
See, I didn't get the papers while I was gone.
Oh, I guess you were away then. He succeeded Coleman.
Well, I'm glad he did.
And he called up and wanted Dora and me to come up. Said they were going to have a little ceremony in Judge Pointer's courtroom, and, oh, the place was just overflowing with people—clerks and secretaries and all his friends and so forth were there.
I think Clifford got a bad deal when he didn't get the district judgeship. He deserved it if it's a political appointment.
He worked so much in the Democratic . . .
I thought Heflin did him a grave injustice, and I wouldn't blame him if he never voted for Heflin.
I know he was, but you know you usually get over those things.
They introduced other bankruptcy judges, and there were I guess 5 or 6 of them.
One of the bankruptcy judges for Alabama is a boy named Chandler Watson. Boy . . . he's 65 years old. But he was one of my students out there from Anniston.
So they don't use referees?
No longer have referees. Now they still have special masters that a federal judge can appoint to decide certain facts.
In a particular case?
Yes, but that's just for a single case.
Apparently Coleman . . .
Steve Coleman has been referee in bankruptcy for 40 years.
He had been referee and didn't have the title of judge until that new act.
Yes. Of course everybody called him judge, but it was just a courtesy. His title was really referee.
Well, I was just curious about that. Well, George Wright was not actually judge then until this new act.
He was referee in bankruptcy when the new act was passed.
Did the same thing as you?
Now— now he's called judge, bankruptcy judge.
Apparently he's considered the senior one. I don't know how they refer to—presiding judge, I guess.
Yes, he's stationed in Birmingham.
Yes, but he lives here.
I know it. That's his headquarters. If he wanted to file something in his court, Birmingham would be just as good as here.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
We can start off with any recollections of the early years and of law school. Now you came—where did you do your undergraduate?
At the University of Michigan.
Oh, that's right.
I was at Ann Arbor when my father died, and my family was planning to live wherever I went to school. My older brother had already graduated and was doing graduate work at Duke, and my younger brothers were not yet college age. So we decided to move to Tuscaloosa to live rather than go some place else. We certainly didn't want to live in Ann Arbor. The winters up there didn't appeal to me that much.
What did you major in?
I was majoring in journalism, actually. I was working on a sports page of
the Detroit Free Press and the Cleveland News, not because I had any talent as a sports writer but
because my roommate's father was the sports editor of the Cleveland News.
But you got some experience.
He got us jobs while we were in school. We covered the sports on the Michigan campus for those two papers.
Is that how you first got interested in sports?
I was already interested in them, but that's where I made use of it for the only time I can remember.
It increased you interest?
Actually I might have gone on to school up there except that one Sunday I
had hitch-hiked into Detroit to watch a baseball game and Herb Vetter
who was doing the work for the Chicago Tribune was
trying to call me and he missed me and left a note for me to call him.
Came over to the house. And I didn't get back 'til late that night. I
called him the next morning, to find out that he had resigned from the
Tribune and had recommended me to take his place.
And when I called they figured I didn't want it cause I hadn't responded
and they had already given it to somebody else. If I'd got that job, I
might never have
One of the peculiar twists of fate—but you did, when you decided to study law, you thought you would be practicing in Alabama.
Oh yes. So we came to Tuscaloosa to live.
And it was the only law school in the state. That was 1930, as you say, with the depression just around the corner.
Well, it had just begun, actually. The crash of '29 had come in the fall just before that. We moved up here in the summer of '30 so it was about six or seven months after the stock market crash when we came to Tuscaloosa. And banks were failing right and left. We went through three bank failures in one year, in each of which we had accounts and we got no payments, no deposit insurance from any of them.
Did that have some effect you think on your later banking experience?
Well, actually, I'd say it made me appreciate deposit insurance when I read about them adopting it in the banking act of 1933. It became effective January 1, 1934.
It was one of the early New Deal measures.
But in 1929 I had worked—my father had got sick in January, so I came
home from school and worked in a bank in Florala from January first to
September first, and each month I'd let them deposit my salary in my
savings account. I was living at home. I didn't need any money. So they
put it in this savings account so it would bear interest at the great
rate of 3 ½ percent and when I went back to Ann
Never got any of it?
Never got any of it. So I was pretty much sold on deposit insurance. It wasn't hard to get me to believe that that was a good thing.
I can understand that. I remember they were encouraging savings. They started in the schools in Birmingham—a savings program. And of course it was in cooperation with one of the banks. They got a lot of business started that way. I never had very much in it, but I guess it did survive. Of course, Birmingham was hard hit.
Yeah, we had a big bank failure out there in Ensley—Sam King's bank. Mr. King moved down here and lived in Tuscaloosa for a good many years. I got to know him pretty well before he died.
When I was teaching, my brother and I had an apartment there at 1414 down on the corner of Reed Street and University. The Hamilton Bushes lived in between. Was Erskin Ramsey connected with that too?
I don't know. He was very much connected with Ensley.
Yeah, I know he was.
But whether he lost a lot of money in it or whether he was an officer I don't know. Mr. King went to jail.
Yeah. Well, I had just heard that he took the rap.
Well, this banker in Florala where I lost my savings account, also was
sent to jail. And tried to commit suicide—shot himself in the head but
missed anything of vital importance. He didn't die and some of the
people said
It wasn't very strictly enforced.
It wasn't till they all went broke. When they went broke they began to enforce it against those who were in office. But even today it's almost impossible to conduct a banking business without violating some law. The truth in lending law said that you should state the annual percentage rate of interest that you're charging in a certain size type. If you happen to use a note that is one point above or below that then you've violated a law.
So you can't be watchful and be aware . . .
No you can't. We had a situation in 1933 when Roosevelt took office in March. One of the first things he did was proclaim a bank moratorium.
Well, the states had declared . . . Michigan had started . . .
Several states had declared a moratorium. Michigan was the first state to do it. But when he took office he said all the banks should be closed and none of them should be reopened until they satisfied the authorities that they are well enough capitalized to serve the public. Some of them never did reopen, but most of them reopened anywhere from 15 days to 3 months. But it was a pretty difficult time. I know I had three dollars in my pocket when we closed the banks, and there wasn't any place to get any more.
In Tuscaloosa at that time—were there just two banks?
Just two banks. City National and First National. First National was the survivor when they merged the Merchant's National Bank which originally built the building that First National now occupies. And First National was a block down the street in what used to be Adrian's Department store. When they took over the Merchant's National, which was failing, First National moved into the old Merchant National's quarters.
When was this?
Twenty-nine.
It started failing early, and what about City National?
It survived and managed to stay open. Neither one of them was very big—wouldn't have made a tremendous amount of difference if they had closed them both, I guess. It would have made a lot of difference in Tuscaloosa, but it wouldn't have mattered anywhere else.
City National was where it was there on the corner.
It was on the corner of 23rd Avenue and University Avenue.
Yeah.
Now that's occupied by Security Federal.
And the Moodys were all in the First National?
They were in the First National. Washington Moody and Frank Moody's grandfather I think were the original ones who started that bank in 1871 or something like that. And J. H. Fitts, Jim Fitts, the architect's grandfather, is the one who started the City National Bank. He didn't call it City National, it was J. H. Fitts and Company, and he was president of Alabama Bankers when it was still J. H. Fitts and Company.
I remember seeing that. I was looking at some newspapers from Tuscaloosa in 1880, and it just said J. H. Fitts and Co.
That name didn't change until 1900. But the bank continued to operate. it was still J. H. Fitts and Co.
And when did the Alstons come along?
They came in the twenties—before the collapse. Mr. Cochran was the
connecting link, I guess you might say,
Didn't the University always have its money in the City National?
Well, Mr. Fitts was the treasurer of the University.
Oh he was? Before Shaler Houser?
Oh yes. Mr. Fitts was treasurer of the University in 1865 when they burned it. And he was treasurer when they started the little bank. Matter of fact, he met the University's payroll when they tried to start it up again after they rebuilt it. He paid the payroll himself.
You mean in the Reconstruction years?
Yeah.
It actually closed for several years. I've forgotten the dates.
I don't remember them either but roughly between 1865 and 1870.
Back when the radical government came in 1869, then things went really to pot.
And of course that's the source of Dr. Denny's call on Franklin Roosevelt
when he asked for WPA money to build the library. He (FDR) said well,
we've run out of money to do that sort of thing. All we can do is
replace something that has been burned or damaged in a tornado. He
(Denny) said that's what I'm talkin' about—a library that burned. He
And if Dr. Denny knew it, he didn't admit it that Congress had appropriated money in the 1880s.
Either money or land; I forget which. They gave 'em something. I think they gave the minerals one time.
That's right.
And they gave them the coal lands up in the Warrior basin, too . . .
Now I'm with you. It might not have been an outright money deal.
Yeah, they thought they had paid for it.
They used the money to build the so-called second quadrangle—Clark and Garland and Manly.
And, course, they got that 16th section reserved for the use of schools. A lot of it was squandered.
Yeah, I imagine there was a lot of mismanagement in all of that. But now, coming back to the Law School—in 1930 what was it like?
It was a pretty closely knit group of people. You knew everybody, you
knew where they came from, when they were gonna go home, who they'd see
when they got there, and what their plans were when they graduated. One
reason that you were pretty sure about what they were going to do was
you knew there was no job available for any of them. You couldn't go out
and hire yourself as a lawyer to anybody. Walter Gewin in 1936, I guess,
or whenever he graduated, got
Long-time Congressman.
Yeah. And I remember when I graduated, I wrote several people and tried
to find a job and Mr. Evins E-v-i-n-s, used to be the counsel for the
Birmingham News and was also counsel for the TVA when
it first started, called me one day. He had known my father in the
legislature some ten years before that. He called me and said, "George,
I've got something that you might be interested in. Next time you're in
Birmingham, come to see me." Well, I didn't have anything to do so I was
about ready to go that afternoon. This was, I think, on a Friday, and on
Monday I was planning to go up to Birmingham to see what he was talking
about. I just had a feeling that it had something to do with the new
legal set-up at the Tennessee Valley Authority.
This would have been when—the fall of '33?
In '33 after I had already set up an office. It would have been in
September or somewhere along in there. But unfortunately, Mr. Evins had
a heart attack and died that weekend, and I've never known yet what it
was
Was the freshman class larger—by the time you got to be a senior had many fallen by the wayside?
Yes, a lot of them would fall out because they simply couldn't afford to go any more.
Not because of Dean Farrah's threats?
Well, as I say, they couldn't afford to go because Dean Farrah wouldn't let them work and go to school at the same time.
Couldn't work at all?
He wouldn't let you have any kind of a job. Fact is, he frowned very much
on students working on student publications—the Corolla and the Crimson White. He just didn't
want his law students doing anything except studying law.
"The law is a jealous mistress."
That's what he used to say. He said you've got to live like a hermit and
work like a horse".
He didn't take too much to the lighter side.
No, he didn't. He wasn't joking when he said the law was a jealous mistress.
They followed then the pretty strict case method of teaching, didn't they?
Altogether. Everyone of the classes—the ones that I had were taught by Bob Harwood, who taught a course in Domestic Relations, and Dr. John Masters who taught Equity, the Dean, who taught Contracts and in your second year taught Constitutional Law, and Hepburn, who taught Personal Property in the first semester and Real Property in the second, and then Ed Livingston had the practice court and that's all you took in your freshman year.
Ed Livingston was—he was a practicing attorney. Was he a judge then?
He was an adjunct professor, but they didn't call it that in those days. He was practicing with his brother Frank; he had an Office in the First National Bank Building and Ed taught two courses—Practice Court and Evidence.
Now Whit McCoy was there, wasn't he?
Whit McCoy taught Criminal Law. That was another course you had your first year. We had another professor named Brockelbank—Bill Brockelbank, who taught Common Law Pleading. And in your first two semesters you had to take all of those courses which pretty much crowded your first year in the essentials of the English Common Law.
Was it Dean Farrah who brought the case method?
It started at Harvard. The dean had . . .
Was he at Harvard?
No, he graduated from Michigan in 1912.
Uh huh.
And he and Dr. Denny came here the same year.
Oh, they did—
He had been to—had been the dean at Stetson University down in Deland, Florida, and had done a pretty good job getting that school going and it's still a pretty good law school. The case method was tried at Harvard and had become very popular. I guess it still is—most everybody still uses it all over—there's some courses now that are getting away from it. More seminars being taught, more writing courses, but there are still a lot of professors who simply stick to the case method—require their students to be able to stand and tell what that case is about. That was the Dean's method and you didn't vary from it one bit. You gave the cause of action, well he gave the title of the case, the jurisdiction where it came from—Michigan Supreme Court or United States Supreme Court or whatever, and you gave the cause of action, and you gave the facts of the case, the question that arises from those facts, the judgment of the court, and the ruling of the court. Every case was treated in that same fashion.
You did have to prepare summaries, didn't you?
You were not required to turn them in; you were encouraged to prepare them for your own use.
But you didn't have to turn them in—for your own use in preparing for the exam. Well I had understood that later on it had been modified, at least some Professors had modified . . .
It has been modified a great deal. Today you can buy summaries before the court starts. All of the big publishers now publish summaries too.
And they do have textbooks.
Textbooks are still case books in style. And there are a few textbooks written in style other than case law.
More of a narrative.
Some of them are written pretty much like Corpus Juris or one of the others like American Jurisprudence or some of the other definitive authorities, but they cite numerous cases—they just don't take the facts out of any one. They have a lot of citations that you can follow up on.
Now, as I recall last time, you started actually teaching very soon after you finished, didn't you?
Well I guess I did more informal teaching. You mentioned preparations of summaries. I made summaries that evidently covered the course pretty well, because from the year I graduated to the year 1937 or '38, there would be eight or ten students who would gather at my house or at Foots's apartment or some place like that every year for about three to four weeks before exams, and I'd start drumming into them what these cases meant and where they came from.
So that's the way you just kinda . . .
I've got a lot of alumni . . .
—merged into teaching—
People like Peter Pride, Bob Jones, Billy McQueen—all that bunch, went to these little testing sessions.
Practice in a way.
It was good for me going back through the cases and working on it.
As you've implied before, you didn't have too much else to do, sometimes in the early years of practice.
No. We'd been practicing a year, I guess, before we began to break even. The first month that we practiced Billy Partlow and I took in two dollars and a half cash and put $250 on the books. I don't think we ever collected any of the $250 but it looked good. But during that period of '33, '34, and '35 . . .
There was still a depression.
There just wasn't any possibility that a young lawyer could make any real money. He might be able to get a damage suit that would be rewarding, but if somebody had an accident, it wasn't a question of going to some young lawyer cause he could spend a lot of time on it—the old lawyers had just as much time as the young ones. People who had established reputations could then take those damage suits because it wasn't going to interfere with the practice either; they didn't have any.
I want to back track just a minute. Was you father a lawyer?
No.
How did you . . .
I just went wrong somewhere, just got in
Well you must have had maybe even in undergraduate—. Did they have anything like that now in business law?
If we did, I never took it. Actually there had been no lawyers from my family that I know of. There are some in a collateral sense. My grandmother was a Harlan, and Mr. Justice Harlan of the Supreme Court was her first cousin. That's as close as I . . .
Was he from Kentucky?
From Iowa.
Maybe that was a different . . .
The earliest one was from Kentucky. Harlan County in Kentucky was a big
coal producer. But then there was one who was on the Supreme Court
around the turn of the century, and there was another one, John Harlan,
who just retired about 20 years ago. He was a very . . . not an extreme
liberal, but by no means a conservative. Right after Harlan Fisk Stone.
There have been three of the Harlan family on the . . .
With that name?
Stone was appointed by—I guess by Hoover
I think so. Now that's an area where you can really get confused. When
the justices came on or when the changes
In 1938. I taught in summer school I think in '37. In those days summer school was pretty informal.
I didn't know they even had summer school.
They did in the law school, but it had no connection with the University. They enrolled students—well, say it had no connection—it had to have some connection or they wouldn't be accredited. The amount that you made depended on how many students came to school. No salaries. And if forty students signed up and paid $200 each, that meant they had $8,000 to divide among the faculty. And the University would provide the building, and when the year was over the Dean would divide that up in even shares.
Sounds like something Dr. Denny might have
It might have been Dr. Denny, I don't know. But I taught there in '37 summer school and in '38 when Ed Livingston had run for Supreme Court, and he knew he was going to be elected in the fall. So then the next regular session Dick Foster called me and told me to go out there. He wanted me to teach—he said the Dean wants you to teach. So I went to see the Dean and sure enough, the Dean wanted me to teach just like Foster told me.
Did he tell you what your salary was going to be or did they just kind of leave it up in the air?
He was pretty much ashamed off it I think. As I recall, it was something like $250 a month for the full year. About a $3000 salary.
But—so you continued teaching then—the one course.
Yes, I was a part-time professor from then on. The only time I didn't teach was when I went in to the Navy in December of '41. That was, oh I guess, two weeks before the end of the semester, because in those days our semester began in September and ended about the second week in January and I left on December the ninth, I guess it was.
You went in then just two days after Pearl Harbor.
That's right. I was already a reserve.
You were in the reserve?
And Gordon Madison took over my class for the next two or three weeks and gave the exam.
And your law office was always in the First National Bank Building?
Up until about 1950.
But I mean all during those early years.
Oh, yeh.
And as we said last time, I believe, wasn't it, Foots came in . . .
'36.
As soon as he graduated.
He came in '34. Gewin came in about '49 after the war.
After the war. Yeh. Partlow was with you at first.
Yeh, Billy Partlow.
So, of course, you were out of Tuscaloosa and in the service of Uncle Sam 'til . . .
'Til September of '45. Actually I was in the service until about November. I had accumulated leave that left me technically a member of the service but I was on leave and teaching out here in '45 and from around Thanksgiving I was officially turned loose.
And did somebody continue the law office as such during the war?
No, E. W. Skidmore took it over just to close it as I told you the other day. Foots had already gone to work for the Treasury Department selling bonds and Billy had already been called into the National Guard and I was there by myself. When I got the call to go to New Orleans, the alternative was to close the doors or get somebody to wind up the thing. Skidmore, just sort of wound up the business we had going on, and I would guess he closed it about '43. Then Foots and I reopened it in the Fall of '45 or winter of '45.
And it wasn't long after that that Gewin . . .
Gewin came in a couple of years later. We—the three of us were partners until '60 when I left in September. Then Clement died in '61 and Gewin was appointed to the Circuit Court of Appeals either late '61 or early '62—I think late '61.
What kind of significant or insignificant experiences would the Navy—would you like to get on record?
Actually I was in New Orleans for about a year and two months in Naval Intelligence. And it was a right interesting experience. I don't know if I've told you or not, but the most dangerous work I did during the war was in New Orleans. I was in two or three invasions, but none of them was as difficult as the work down there. And most people really don't know yet the extent of the submarine warfare in the Gulf.
I remember you mentioning that once before.
We started losing ships to a submarine which we thought was German—turned
out to be Italian—in February of 1942, which was really about a month
and a half after all of us had reported down there. The alarming state
of the defenses of the United States was really shocking. I would never
have believed if anybody had told me how poorly defended we were. Mexico
could have invaded New Orleans. We had one 75 mm. gun at the Burrwood
Section Base, which is 105 miles south of New Orleans on the river,
where the river runs into the Gulf. And that gun was used to fire
salutes and things like that. It was not used for defense. There wasn't
another weapon between there and Algiers Section Base in New Orleans,
and the number of boats that the Navy had was practically zero. The Army
had many more boats than we did. They used them in rescues for Army
aircraft, and that sort of thing. Of course, the Navy had the Naval Air
Station in
But New Orleans was a major . . .
There was a Navy base out on the Lake where they trained, and the Algiers
Navy base was a base where supply ships and things like that would come
in and load up but there were not any armored vessels over there.
Immediately when the war started they were extremely busy putting guns
on merchant ships. But in the first six weeks I was down there we set up
a system of travel control where our officers had to board every ship
that came into the port of New Orleans, and interrogate the captain to
find out where he had been. In fact, one of those early ships, I
remember, was a Swedish vessel called the Temnaren. It
had just come out of the Baltic after going up between Russia and
Finland, taking on a load of timber, and they brought it down and
discharged it some place in Holland or somewhere like that and then came
around with another cargo for New Orleans, and came over here to load
sugar or something of that sort. And we got more information about where
various vessels were, where the Germans were basing their pocket
battleships, and things like that, just from talking with those skippers
who were not involved in the war at all.
Just observing.
This man from Sweden remembered having seen the Scharnhorst and several others, but they were heading in to
I guess there had not been much intelligence operations developed prior to when we got into the war.
The best information we had about the nation of Japan was an issue of Fortune magazine which was devoted to the country of
Japan early in the year before the war started. That was about as much
information as we had about it.
A stark contrast from the way it grew in the war years—well it expanded into the CIA and military intelligence. I guess there wasn't much there.
It was a matter of taking a lot of time to get all that information together.
That's mainly what you all were doing.
And then we would try to recruit some people. One of the first things we did was to take on a number of old FBI agents, who had either gotten out of the service or had transferred out of the bureau—something of that sort. People who really had something to give to the Navy. They were extremely helpful in setting up the interrogation and examination procedures. I would say that our relationship with the FBI was not always real good. The FBI would do anything in the world for you if they got all the credit.
They reflected J. Edgar Hoover.
That's right. They were just an elongation of the shadow of J. Edgar
Hoover, and that's the way he thought. One of the amusing things that
happened was they caught a
I remember that vaguely.
They blocked off Jefferson Avenue, the big boulevard that goes out to the lake. Canal Boulevard, I guess it is, or Jefferson Boulevard—one of those—anyway, it was a fourlane with a median in the middle. They blocked it off for about three blocks. They had about 60 FBI agents. They had about 50 deputy sheriffs. They had policemen everywhere around there surrounding this apartment house where Karpis had been spotted. And he came walking out of the house—he must have been stupid, because anybody could see there was no traffic out there, he must have known something was wrong, because they turned every car off that was coming that way. Hoover jumps out of the car and calls him by name and tells him to freeze.
Did they have movie cameras?
Oh, they had everything. The newsreel was there and everything. But when
they got him under arrest—he didn't resist or anything—they said put the
cuffs on him, and out of 165
Some of them had Tuscaloosa
Wasn't that Ellie Ozment's family name—Beatty? Eloise Ozment?
Yeah, she's a sister. The main thing they did for us was train our people in shooting pistols.
Ya'll hadn't had much experience along those line.
Frank Knox came down there, and they handed me a .45 and said, "Now you
protect him." I stuck the .45 in my belt, and he was in more danger from
me than he was
What was he, Secretary of War?
He was Secretary of the Navy. We all got little quickdraw holsters that were issued to the FBI. They issued those with a .38 magnum pistol to each one of us. So we were at least properly dressed for the occasion after that.
I remember you telling once about getting an adjutant general's office or division or what was that? Was this in connection with Foots Newman? He was down in New Orleans.
Foots was in personnel and his boss was a man named Richard Rubottom. You may have known him in Texas; he was Dean of Men at Texas before the war.
I know that name, it's a Texas name.
He was later Ambassador to Argentina.
Latin America?
Yeah. And he was probably the most unpopular man that ever graced a naval uniform. I don't know why nobody liked Richard Rubottom. He had an unpleasant job. He had to tell these people where they had to go, and who wanted to enlist in the Navy and get sent to Cameron, Louisiana or something like that. So it was not easy. Then this work that I was talking about being so difficult really came about after we had gotten established, and the boarding procedures were pretty well underway, and everybody knew what information he was looking for, where were any strange or unusual concentrations of ships or anything of that sort. We began to build up quite a lot of information. Then in February we started having ships torpedoed at the mouth of the river.
in '42?
'42. And as a matter of fact up until that time most of our commissions
in our office had not yet come through. They had been issued but hadn't
been signed by President Roosevelt or something. We were all working in
civilian clothes. We were commissioned agents rather than officers. And
I think I remember mine came in on February second or something like
that. Then they put us in uniform. Well, we were a lot safer in civilian
clothes to tell you the truth Robert E.
Lee, run by the U. S. Army. It was bringing 450 family members from
Trinidad back to the mainland, because they were stationed with their
people down there in Trinidad, and . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
The people who were passengers on the Robert E. Lee
were standing on the rail in the open—standing on the deck by the
rail—and looking out and they saw the torpedo approaching the ship. They
all cheered because it seemed to be going past the ship on the side
about a hundred yards away. They could see the wake of the torpedo. They
thought it was great. All of a sudden it turned and came back into the
rear of the ship, and hit the ship dead astern right where the
propellers were. Turns out it was a new type torpedo they were using
that was set to follow the noise of a ship's screw. That was quite a new
thing, and quite a startling thing, but the amazing thing was out of the
400 odd people on the ship, we managed to get all of them off
That was in a convoy?
No. It was running alone. Later on in interviewing the passengers we think we pinpointed where the information about the ship got out. The captain of the ship, when he left the light outside the port of Tampa, sent a signal to the base on shore with his signal light, "course is so many degrees north by west and speed so-and-so." And to anybody who intercepted that message they knew exactly where that ship would be the next day at a certain time if it maintained that course and speed. So the next day the submarine was at that point, and it came by and picked it off. But it was just one of those picked off. There were a number of them. The Alcoa Steamship Company, the Aluminum Company of America, lost several ships one of which was attacked by a submarine on the surface. It came up and started firing its canon instead of torpedoes. Another one of the Alcoa ships took three torpedoes and didn't sink.
Well they were not armed?
No not at that time. Some of them later on were armed, and most of the
merchant ships were armed as quickly as they could get 'em, but we
didn't have any gun crews trained. But there were training facilities
and there was an armed guard training school at the Algiers naval base
across the river from New Orleans. They were putting people on theRobert E. Lee
went down, the army sent some planes down there that were equipped with
a magnetic detection device that could pick up metal objects on the
surface of the Gulf. The effectiveness of those was sort of indirect;
they didn't destroy the submarine, but they made them stay under water.
They couldn't surface to recharge their batteries. In those days
submarines had to come up at least every 24 to 36 hours for the purpose
of recharging his batteries so it could run the next 20 hours under
water. And by making them stay under water all the time, they became
much less effective, they could not get on the surface and chase a ship
or anything of that sort.
And that was in what year?
That was in early '42 shortly after Pearl Harbor. Of course, the public
had no inkling at that time of the extentDahlgren I believe it was. Duhlgren Hall in Annapolis
is named for the same man that this ship was named for. And it was
operating in water that was pretty shallow for the use of depth charges.
As a matter of fact, when it blew out the submarine, it also blew out
its own condensers and couldn't make any water for its boilers so it had
to come in to port and get fixed up. As far as I know, that was the only
submarine accounted for in counter measures in the Gulf. Now there may
have been some, but there were not any more publicized.
That would be a good subject for some historian to get on.
Yes it would be.
Because I imagine with all the official reports and records—it may have been done in some thesis or other.
The submarine which had somehow managed to get into the Gulf, and it's
not as hard as you might think. Today it would be pretty difficult for a
submarine to get into the Gulf because we have better patrols. But
entrance down there below Cuba is really not more than about a hundred
miles wide anywhere along there. We do pretty well at policing it. But
this submarine evidently was not instructed to pick any certain targets.
It was just shooting at anything that it could get a fix on. As a matter
of fact, about half the tankers that were sunk didn't have any cargo. I
remember two or three of them didn't sink. The first one I went on in
early February of '42 was a tanker bound from either Houston or Baytown,
one of those places in Texas, to Mobile. It was going over for some
repairs at the ship yard, Alabama Drydock. The submarine fired three
torpedoes that hit the ship in the side and blew holes in it 20 to 35 to
40 feet in diameter, but the ship was in a number of water-tight
compartments and it didn't sink. Those things would just fill with water
but the rest of the ship was bouyant enough to hold it up. I remember we
put our group on board to see what we could do with the ship. We had no
tugs. We got a Coast Guard cutter to come close to it, got one line on
board, but with that strong current of the Mississippi coming out into
the Gulf there you couldn't control the ship with just one line pulling
itWanks, a little ship about
140 or 50 feet long of Honduran registry. It never brought anything into
New Orleans that I know of except mahogany logs. The submarine that
finally sank the Wanks missed it with one torpedo, hit
it with another one that didn't sink it, and hit it with a third one
that sank it. I would guess that the three torpedoes would be worth more
than the ship.
After New Orleans, where did you go then?
After the battle of the Gulf, so to speak, subsided, after that submarine
was dealt with, we didn't have any more sinkings for a while. Although
one or two of those ships that were sunk out there were heavily loaded
with aviation fuel and gasoline; they made spectacular torches. I
remember seeing one of them blow up. I was walking along the levee down
at Venice which is 100 miles south of New Orleans on the river. I heard
this noise and looked over to the east and there was this huge ball of
flame. We borrowed a boat as usual, we had none of our own, and went out
there to it and didn't find anybody. We never found a soul. We foundRaleigh Warner. Raleigh
Warner is now the president of one of the big oil companies. He was the
son of the president of Pure Oil Company. But after the shipping scare
subsided, we spent a great deal of time setting up travel control,
because most of the neutrals, or so called neutrals, came in by ship in
those days. Not many planes flew in. We had passenger ships coming in
from Spain, a great many ships from South America; Chile and Argentina
just continuous traffic between New Orleans and their home ports. The
Delta shipping lines based in New Orleans had passenger ships and cargo
ships. Mostly mixed cargo and passenger ships. Freighters carrying a few
passengers. And all the United Fruit ships carried passengers. Some of
them as many as 150. Standard Fruit was still running a big fleet of
white ships, all of them carrying passengers. So we had to set up some
kind of control to interview every passenger that came in to find out
where he came from, what he had seen. In effect, a debriefing without
him really knowing what we were trying to find out. Most of them
volunteered information and were very helpful. The Spanish government
had a little bit of a problem with us or maybe we had one with them. I
don't know. On one or two occasions they were suspected of bringing
information that was helpful to the German fleet—submarine fleet. That
they would either drop off in South America or Corn Island or somewhere
down in the Gulf, or
We quite often found that the people that they were making contact with
were engaged in other subversive activities. Matter of fact, we had a
great setup in New Orleans in one regard. A young man who had joined the
Communist Party and had become a minor official, assistant secretary or
something like that of the cell that was located in New Orleans, decided
that that was the wrong thing to do. He had joined before the war and
when the
You could keep track that way.
We knew when meetings were going to take place, and we could infiltrate the meeting—have someone there who would otherwise attract attention—let them join up with some group before the meeting started.
When you identified actual subversives and informants, what happened?
I never did quite understand why we were so reluctant to make examples of
some of those people, but I do now understand it. It was much better for
us to watch those people and to somehow neutralize their activity
without them knowing it than it was to punish them. Because punishment
would just mean that they would search for somebody else,
Yeah that, I guess, was '42.
I don't know exactly when they declared war on Hitler, but remember in
'40, I guess it was, they had had a nonaggression pact.
It might have been '41.
Yeah, I think it might have been before our actual participation in the war that they came out on our side. But as they began to suffer more and we were trying to get goods to Murmansk and that kind of thing, we got a great deal more cooperation.
You stayed in New Orleans . . .
I stayed there for a year. Along about May or June of '42 I was sent to a
school in Washington for six weeks I guess and after that there was a
graduate school in New York at the old Henry Hudson Hotel. I went to
that school twice—two different sessions. And that was where they put
you through the different phases of intelligence; operational
Yes.
He went into the Asian group. He was doing a lot of work on Japan and places like that. I asked the Bureau of Personnel for operational work with the fleet at Boston.
The eastern Atlantic.
Yeah. After I guess in January of 1943, I was in Panama. We had continued
to set up travel control and we had to call on every government in
Central America. Luckily for us Pan American Airlines was opening a new
service from New Orleans to Panama City. In order to do it they had to
make what they called a proving flight where they took their biggest
plane and landed at every airstrip in Central America that was capable
of taking that plane. At one or two of them, I wondered if they hadn't
over-estimated its capability, but anyway, they took all of their pilots
who were going to fly it and stewards (in those days they had stewards,
not stewardesses) and they took them to train them on what they were
going to be expected to do, and they trained the pilots on the problems
of landing and taking off at those airports some of which had been
militarized. In Guatemala, for instance, we had a squadron of B-26
bombers there and one or two others. Of course Panama was fully
fortified. And we spent about 3 weeks flying down there landing in each
of these places, and everywhere we landed
You didn't complain too much?
No, but while I was on that junket I got my orders to report to the destroyer base in Casco Bay after a little leave and after reporting again at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City. So I went on the staff of destroyer squadron 17. Actually with the various degrees of training, I had several weeks of communications training and I had to go through a Combat Information Center School in Quonset Point, right outside of Newport News. A few things like that took up most of two or three months. I reported to Casco Bay in July 1943 and caught my ship there because the squadron was there, there wasn't room for me on my ship. I had to go over to another destroyer on my first trip across because I just got there the day before they were leaving.
That was convoying?
That was convoying troops. We would pick up a troop convoy in New York
and a typical convoy would be a hundred ships. Ten troop transports in a
line one mile apart, then one mile over there would be ten more. So
there would be ten miles across the front and ten miles deep. And we
had, oh, 15 to 17 ships to escort. We always had either a battleship or
a cruiser at the head of the convoy which gave us just one other thing
to protect. The rest of it was made up of the destroyers in destroyer
squadron 27. Once in a while they'd attach two or three other destroyers
from
Pretty routine, I guess.
Well, the truth of the matter is you had more trouble living than enjoying living. It wasn't the enemy that was the trouble, it was the weather.
Yeah, the North Atlantic is rough.
Many times we could make a trip across and never set a meal on the table.
The tables were equipped with fiddle boards that stood up about like the
sides of a bed tray and plates and trays wouldn't slide off, but usually
what you'd get in that kind of bad weather was a cheese sandwich, which
consisted of a piece of cheese and
Tryin' to survive. I guess it was a good thing you weren't prone to motion sickness.
One or two of the boys were. We had one officer who finally had to be sent back to shore. He lost anywhere from 20 to 25 pounds each trip. Finally he was living off of Karo syrup, he'd take two tablespoons at each meal and that's all he'd eat. Couldn't keep anything else down. But it wasn't that bad. Everybody got sick the first night out, but you get your sea legs; then you could usually stick with it the rest of the time.
You did that for the remainder of the war?
Until January '45, and then my ship was assigned to escort the Quincy, which was carrying President Roosevelt to
Yalta. I got off the ship in Casco Bay five minutes before it sailed. I
couldn't even get a boat from my ship to take me in; we were about five
miles out in the bay. I had to borrow a boat from another ship that
wasn't going to Yalta to take me ashore, but I made it. The reason I was
that late, I had been relieved in August, but it took my relief four
months to catch up with me.
So you didn't make the trip to Yalta?
I didn't make the trip to Yalta. Almost did. I talked to some of the boys
after they got back. It was really about as much of a vacation as
anything else, because when they got over there, Roosevelt turned our
destroyer over to Ibn Saud, the dictator, leader of Saudi Arabia and
when he went on the ship he spread thick oriental rugs across the
forecastle—just covered the whole thing, or, he
didn't, he
Just as a gift?
Yeah, it was kind of like one of those things where you win the use of a car for a year. He had the use of that destroyer for as long as he needed it, and he kept it for about thirty or forty days. He gave every member of the ship's crew a month's salary as a bonus. He gave . . . all the officers fine gifts. The boy who took my place was given a gold dagger—gold handled dagger—with rubies and other stones set in the handle. Other officers were given a gold watch that was from Tiffany's and were appraised at about $1,500 each. It didn't bother Ibn Saud. He was spending Standard Oil's money.
That's when Arabian oil was coming into . . .
That's even before Aramco and before . . .
But they knew the potential.
Oh, they knew what was there but the Arabs hadn't yet learned the secret of getting all the oil . . .
Getting in on the development.
Right. Expropriation came later.
That was in '45 . . .
In '45 I went back to New Orleans.
That's where you were at the end of the war?
In '45 I was sent ashore in January when they left to go to Yalta. I was given 30 days leave and then ordered to report to take the zone intelligence office for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and a chunk of east Texas, and Arkansas. So I had a real good setup. I had an office there on Canal Street in the Wohl building. I guess I had 25 or 30 officers and yeomen assigned to it and no sign on the door—completely incognito. I don't know what people thought with all these uniforms going in and out, but they had nothing to tell them what the office was. And I stayed there doing that work which was somewhat different than it had been when we were under danger from submarines.
That was four years later.
The biggest danger was to get out of the way on V-E day
Is that right? You were back for the fall semester?
Yeah, I got back here on September the—well, I forget if it was the first, fifth or tenth, but say if I returned on the fourteenth, the school started on the fifteenth.
V-J Day was sometime in late August, wasn't it? [Aug. 10, 1945.]
Yeah. We had a minimum of information about the atomic bomb. We knew
there was a Manhattan Project, we knew it was something that no one
understood, we knew it would be a
How early did you know about it?
Five days before Hiroshima.
I meant the Manhattan Project.
Oh, earlier in the year.
Then you hadn't heard of it before '45?
Well, I hadn't been there. Maybe the people in the field office had. I would say it wasn't commonly talked about until January or February '45. Then everybody wondered how the project was coming along. They knew something big was going on at Oak Ridge and places like that because you had tons of money being directed in that direction so people had a pretty good idea that something was brewing.
You came back to Tuscaloosa, then, right away.
I had all the necessary points to get out. I remember when V-J day was
made official, the next day I was in my commanding officer's office, and
I told him I had X number of points, so many points were required to be
discharged, mine was considerably above that, my relief was trained and
ready, and I awaited his command. And he was very nice. He let me out
the next day, I think, or started
Then you started up the practice again?
Started practicing law, teaching at the law school. It didn't hurt me to teach full time cause I didn't have any practice.
Oh, you were teaching full time?
Yeah.
And you were just in time for the post-war deluge of students.
Well, that's really why I taught full time because beginning in mid-year '45 that huge crowd of GIs started pouring in. They hadn't really got out in the summer of '45. Not enough of them were moving toward the colleges to overrun us in the first semester, but the second semester we were really loading up all the facilities. I don't know how many people there were, maybe not as many as we think, but at the time we were going from classes that had typically been 15, 20, 25 girls and three men during the war to 100, 150, and most of them men.
When you came back had Paty already left? When did he go to Georgia?
No, uh . . .
I know he came in the fall of '42.
I guess he was still here. He was here for a year. He was here for a year
when I got here. And then of course Hepburn had succeeded Dean Farrah
and he stayed until about
And is that when Lee Harrison took over?
Lee took over as dean and I guess Lee was dean for ten, twelve, fifteen years.
But you said—had you kept up with what was going on in Alabama much during the war?
Not really. I had voted in 1944 absentee and, as I told you, the information about how the election came out was two or three days late. I got the flash on the Fox schedule of the navy that Roosevelt had won. This shipmate of mine just sent the words, "Oh what a beautiful morning." But I didn't know that Lister Hill had beaten Jim Simpson until maybe ten days after the election.
That was Lister Hill's probably most serious challenge.
I think he won by six or seven thousand votes. It wasn't a very big margin.
Here it says [Hill says?] 126,000 to Simpson's 101,000.
Well, it was more than I thought.
That was the primary, I guess. There was just one primary.
I don't know what the opposition was, if any, in the general election.
I don't imagine there was much . . .
Simpson ran as a Democrat.
He had been in the legislature, hadn't he—a state senator?
State senator.
From Birmingham.
Yeah. He was a lawyer from Birmingham. A very capable lawyer. Later a trustee of Vanderbilt University for many years. Extremely conservative.
That was his reason for opposing Hill, because by the end of the war Southern conservatives were beginning to gain momentum, I'd say.
As a matter of fact, during the war the support of labor lost a lot of
its appeal. You remember John L. Lewis brought the coal industry right
to the brink of a disastrous strike. If they had—if he had carried out
his threats, I'm sure we would have had soldiers in the coal mines.
Truman, you know, said he was going to put the soldiers in there. He
even threatened to
And then Simpson ran again in two years against Sparkman. Sparkman had been in Congress, I think, for about ten years.
For about ten years, and he had only been in the Senate for one term. he went in '40, I think.
Well, they had a special primary. No Bankhead died in May of '46 and Robin Swift was appointed. Then they had a special primary in July of '46, and that's when Sparkman and Simpson and Frank Boykin ran in that special primary. Then in '48, Sparkman ran on his own; that was the regular election.
That first time is when Bob Jones was elected to Congress.
When was that, '46?
Sparkman ran for the Congress and Senate. I don't know if you can still do that or not. He ran for both offices, for representative and senator. Then resigned as representative when he went to the senate. So he never did step out of office to go to another one.
And Bod Jones —
And Bob Jones was elected in a special election to take his seat.
In Congress Bob Jones was pretty much of that same persuasion
He was a big Sparkman supporter, roommate of Foots Clement at the Spanish Inn. So he was pretty liberal in his views.
Well, Clement was back in '46?
Clement came back in early '46. He settled into his regular routine,
telephoning all night
What about the governor's election in '46? Was he active in that?
That was between—
That was when Folsom—it was
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
It was 1946.
When Folsom was running in the runoff with Ellis. In that campaign I remember Foots and his crowd maintained contact with all of them, but never did get identified particularly as the people behind anybody. They were all involved, but not in a managerial capacity.
That was when there were five of them, including Folsom, in the original primary.
And the truth of the matter is all those people were really at heart just Populists, and each one was trying to outdo the others. I don't think Joe Poole was much inclined that way except to talk before his own people.
How did he get into—? He was in Folsom's administration, wasn't he?
Yeah, but he was in the House or in the legislature, whether it was the
House or Senate, I'm not clear. But he had been in the legislature since
the Brandon administration. He was a veteran legislator, and so was
Handy Ellis. See, both of those had come out of the Alabama legislature.
Gordon Persons had held some other office, but he was not at that time
considered to be a
I recall that Gordon Persons was head of REA in Alabama when it first—
But that was an appointed job. I think Lister Hill got it for him.
Probably did, but he got a following there among the rural people.
That's where he made his sweep through the farm sections following up on his REA work.
And the obvious target there was Alabama Power, so it was kind of Populistic oriented.
In those days it was safe to run against Alabama Power and Chamber of
Commerce. If you could get those two on the other side, along with the
Birmingham News, you were pretty well sure of
election.
I guess what I was thinking was Joe Poole, after Folsom was elected, held some office—I think in the administration under Folsom.
I don't recall what it was.
You said he was more conservative.
Much more conservative than Folsom or any of his followers. So my guess is if he held an office under Folsom, it would not have been a policy making office. I frankly don't remember his holding one, but he could well have, but I don't know what he did.
Well, let's backtrack now and we'll come back to the Folsom administration later. I would still like to hear a little more about the Spanish Inn group and how they originated. How far back did they go?
It actually started about 1929. The undercover political group actually
began when Lister Hill was president of the student body in 1914, but it
just came along working as best it could. These people who were in the
Spanish Inn, a number of them had actually lived in the Masonic Home,
which was up University Avenue toward town about two blocks. You pass
Rex's and the next intersection the Masonic home, or whatever they
called it. It was owned by the Masons and they rented rooms to students,
that's what it was. Some
You mean they called his brother Foots too?
Oh, his brother was the original Foots. He was Foots Clement when he came
here. He had been an outstanding high school player in Arkansas, and
John Tucker, who later was Dean of Men at Arkansas Tech, had played with
Foots in a junior college over there at Russellville. John was appointed
to West Point, and went up there and played for a couple of years, then
came down here and played football on that 1930 team. I think he had one
or maybe two years of eligibility left. John was a very intelligent
person and more or less a leader and he sort of shepherded Foots into
the group. Hank Crisp brought Foots over here and John Tucker came with
him. John couldn't play until the second year he was here, as I recall.
Tucker is the last man in football history to start a run and he found
out he couldn't get around the end so he stopped and drop kicked Bull Pen
with Claude Stalworth. Little Foots got a job managing the Spanish Inn
for Dr. Patton, T. H. Patton. He was also making a little commission on
dry cleaning. He was soliciting dry cleaning all over the campus. If you
sent your suit down to get it cleaned it'd cost you fifty cents and I
think Foots would get a nickel of it. He also got his meals free for
soliciting business for Pug's. He'd go around and call on boys and get
them to come eat at Pugs. When they bought a
Did you mention Albert Rains?
Albert I don't think was a student at that time. Albert was a close friend of Foots', but I don't recall him coming to the Spanish Inn. If he happened to be here as a student, he didn't get in on much of that. I think I'd remember it if he'd been here at that time and I don't remember his ever being up there. Course, there were some older Congressmen, Sam Hobbs, Frank Boykin, who were pretty well set in their jobs. There wasn't any . . .
Kenneth Roberts was then congressman in 1950.
Yes, well when the vacancy occurred, Kenneth ran.
What happened to—well, no that was in the black belt district where Kenneth Roberts succeeded Hobbs.
That's right. He was on the eastern end of Hobb's district.
Did he die?
Hobbs died.
And Albert Rains was over in Gadsden-Anniston area.
Roberts lived in Anniston and actually grew up in Piedmont.
But he was around here at that time?—in the Spanish Inn?
He was the editor of the Corolla. Foots was the
business manager of the Corolla. That's where the
money was, and I've forgotten who was the editor of the Crimson White, but I think it was Paul Duncan, or Kilpatrick.
Carol Kilpatrick.
Kilpatrick was editor before I came here. I remember the name now. Wasn't
Gould Beech head of the CW ?
Yeah, but Gould was a few years behind those I think. He wasn't long out of school when Folsom was elected.
In '46.
Yeah, and we're talking about the late 20s and early 30s.
Almost 15 years before that. That group was very much interested in student politics, but they just kinda carried that over into public affairs.
I guess the distinguishing quality of that group was that they kept in
contact. As one would graduate, he'd go down home and start doing the
same there that he had done
Now when you say "to change politics," what were they changing? Any basic philosophy?
They didn't have any big issues. I don't think they were going out to disfranchise the blacks or anything like that. What they were doing was trying to get the power away from the black belt. The people of that area had just about said who would and who would not hold public office in this state and they could pretty well make it stick, because the voting was all warped in their favor.
They controlled the legislature and wouldn't reapportion.
I don't recall when the first reapportionment was, even though the constitution calls for it every ten years, there hadn't been a reapportionment for fifty or sixty years before the first.
Folsom tried it.
He tried it and failed, and the Justice Department filed a suit.
Yeah, it wasn't until up into the 1960s.
You recall that they ordered the legislature to provide for some sort of reapportionment, and instead of doing that they came up with a scheme to have everyone run from the state at large.
Wasn't that when Alabama lost a congressman?
Right, they had to redistrict then.
After the 1960 census.
I think it was. They lost one then and we've lost one since then. We had nine, that brought it down to eight, and now we have seven. But the legislature never did take the initiative and re-district the congressional districts.
That generalization hasn't been made about Alabama that the conservatives commonly referred to as the "black belt," and "big mules" had that tight grip on the legislature but not so much on the two senators or certainly not all the congressmen and not even the governor.
Well, if you'll recall in those days Barbour County had two senators . . .
State senators.
Tuscaloosa had two senators. Birmingham with a population five times as
great as the two of them also just had two senators. So representation
was nowhere near proportional or equally divided. It wasn't until after
the
Yeah, that's right. I was trying to think in terms of right there at about 1929 or 30. This group was beginning to graduate and go out to the state. That came right at the time of the controversy around Heflin.
That was two years after Heflin had deserted the party.
In 1928.
He tried to come back in, but they actually read him out; wouldn't let him qualify.
He couldn't run in the primary. That would have been in 1930 when he would have been up for re-election.
Then when the depression came along, this group of—most of them young
lawyers—really didn't have enough practice to keep them busy. So they
managed to stay busy politicing. They would work at this sort of thing.
Each one of them would get himself some little job. Kenneth Roberts, as
I remember, had an assistant district attorney job or something like
that, Bob Jones had a little county judge thing or something of that
sort. Just enough to keep the body and soul together, but it wasn't long
before they were getting themselves into position to run for office. Of
course running for office was the best way to become known. There was no
way to raise money like they do now, and set up an advertising campaign.
You announced and then just went out and tried to shake every hand in
the county. I would guess that the budget that Roberts and Jones and
Carl
Now Sparkman was a little before them.
Sparkman had graduated about 1928 I believe. Maybe a little earlier than that, '24.
He must have been elected in the 30s.
He had been in the House . . . Well, Hill was elected in '23 and Sparkman, I think, was just a few years later.
That's what I thought. He was in the House at least five terms, I think, by the time he became senator.
Well, he was elected to the Senate in 1946—somewhere around there. So he
must have been elected to the House about maybe 1930s. [NOTE: Sparkman first elected 1936.]
Yeah, Bankhead died in May of '46 and they held a special primary. Sparkman had then been in Congress for five terms. So he was a little ahead of this group.
Actually John Sparkman, as far as I know, was never closely tied to the
student group. He was a member of the same group that kept getting
elected, but he had gone from here before these ones we're talking about
got here. I also remember that he was in a good law firm. He was in one
of the better law firms in Huntsville, but he wasn't making any
That's true of most Alabama districts.
Right.
Then with the New Deal coming along, I think it gave impetus to this new blood idea in Alabama politics in general.
Not only gave impetus to new blood, but it made possible for the new faces, new people to do something for their constituents. If you had been elected in 1930, you could stay on the floor of Congress the rest of your life and you wouldn't get an appropriation that would help Alabama. But after Roosevelt went in, some funds were voted like the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and things like that that really meant cash to constituents in Alabama.
To the rural people particularly. And of course Sparkman and William D. Bankhead, Bill Bankhead, along with Lister Hill were frequently mentioned as stalwarts of the New Deal.
As a matter of fact, along about this time Bill Bankhead was Speaker—Speaker of the House. And a couple of times he was considered for a vice presidential nomination. Hill was not considered for vice presidential nomination until about the last Roosevelt term. Hill made a stem winding political speech nominating Roosevelt and . . .
In the last convention, in '44, he nominated him.
His southern accent was so thick on the radio that you could hardly understand it. I think that speech killed his chances of being named the vice presidential candidate. As a matter of fact, when Stevenson and Sparkman ran in '52, a number of people thought that Hill was extremely disappointed at being passed over. I never heard him mention it but I know he never thought a lot of Stevenson. He very much resented Stevenson coming to Alabama and calling on Gordon Persons and asking him for advice and help and ignoring the people in Hill's group. He didn't call on Clement, he didn't call on anyone that Hill had working behind him. I don't know if that was a deliberate oversight or if he just didn't have time.
Or he didn't have good advice. Yeah, Bankhead, Bill Bankhead, was in the
Congress until '42. I guess that's when he died, wasn't it?
Well, I have here that he was re-elected in '40.
Yeah, but he died before the war started, cause I know I was in civilian clothes.
I was thinking that he died before '40 but it must not have been 'cause I have here that he was re-elected in '40.
Now Black was much older than this group. He graduated around 1907 or
somewhere back in there, didn't he?
No, Black was 92 when he died or 91, something like that. I would guess
that he was ten or twelve years older than Hill and Sparkman.
In 1930, of course, he was already in the Senate. He was elected in '26.
He was in his first term . . .
That's right, and re-elected in 1932 in a run-off against Kilby—former governor. But there was no real tie or connection between Black and this group was there, other than the New Deal?
Not really, There was a great deal of interest in this group in the New
Deal and as a supporter of the New Deal they recognized Black's
influence and all were supporters of his. One thing that these recent
stories of the University honoring Black, I think either left the wrong
impression or got some erroneous information, because every one of the
stories recently when they had the week here dedicated to Hugo Black and
next year which would have been his hundredth birthday, they're gonna
have a whole week of lectures and various kinds of activities by some
pretty important figures at the Law School honoring Hugo Black. I
noticed a numberTimes or Time magazine—saying
that the University resented him and never wanted him to come back after
being appointed to the Supreme Court, never recognized that he was . . .
Well, that isn't true. Dick Foster brought him back here to speak at the
commencement in about the last year before Dick died.
Would have been about 1940 or '41.
Just a year or two before the war, and he pulled out all the stops to
honor Hugo Black. I remember Devane Jones, who was a local lawyer here,
who was one of the Chesterfieldian types, who was sitting around in the
president's mansion waiting for lunch. And Devone began to say something
to Hugo, he said "Mr. Justice, uh, Judge, uh, Hugo . . . what do your
friends
Yeah, when the emotion of the segregation crisis began to take hold.
Black was not shy about writing those opinions; he took part in all of them and some of the reactionaries, who probably didn't go to the University themselves, may have made some disparaging remarks about the University and its graduates. The school certainly shouldn't be painted as having not been willing to honor one of its famous sons. I just don't think that was fair.
I've gotten the impression, kinda like you, that they are going all out to remedy or make amends—
Making up for something that they didn't do then. Matter of fact, I don't recall anybody connected with the University administration who ever had a bad word to say about Hugo Black. Some of them didn't agree with his decisions; some of them wished he'd decided otherwise, but they could read. They could read the Constitution—they knew what he was interpreting.
What was your role in the group in the 1930s before you got called into the service?
Well, mostly my role was to try to keep a law office open, and to write
speeches, write ads. I used to come up with three or four pages for each
one of them to deliver when he'd go out on his mission. And I, uh, I
don't think I had a very important role in it.
You provided a lot of the material for them, though.
Well, I raised a lot of hell about the telephone bill, trying to keep it down so we could keep the office open.
Foots was the great one for personal contacts via the telephone lines.
There was rarely a day passed that he and Lister Hill didn't talk by long
distance. When I say talk, I don't mean three minutes then hang up; they
just kept talking. Luckily, most of them came out of Washington this way
instead of us paying for it going that way. They discussed
Actually Foots was more involved with the Congressmen and the United States Senators and Lister Hill than he was with the state officials.
That was the difference. I've heard him say a number of times to the people that you make fewer enemies working for the officials in Washington—the Senators and Congressmen than you do with the local probate judge, or sheriff, or governor, or Lieutenant governor, or something of that sort. I don't know if he was just sort of justifying his leaning toward the federal officers after his sort of disenchantment with Dixon and some of the others, or whether he really felt that way, but that's what he always said.
Was there any relationship at all with Graves and the so-called Graves machine?
I remember one contact that I participated in; now there may have been
many others, I don't know. Before the last election before Graves'
death, he called one day and asked
He died in '42.
I know, but he was getting ready for the '42 election.
Oh, he was thinking ahead to the '42 . . .
It must have been in '41, cause I left here in December of '41.
When Dixon was governor.
Yeah, and Graves called us, oh this must have been in October before the primary the next spring. He asked us to meet him down there and we did, and as I recall we met in a hotel room rather than his office.
Smoke filled room?
Not smoke filled, but there was just the three of us there. And he was asking whether or not it was possible for us to help organize to get set up. He said that he had a good operation left over from the other administration but that he didn't have the young people.
Yes, his backing went back into the 1920s.
Right. I was agreeably surprised to hear him talk. I always thought that
Bibb Graves was sort of another Tom Heflin, but not quite as bad. He was
saying that he thought that he could do a lot for the University, and he
thought he could do a lot for Tuscaloosa and this area, and he wanted us
to know that if we (to use his term), "helped make that pie," that we
would help distribute it around here. He said, "that's my philosophy;
the ones who work for me are
Well, I thought I recalled you saying on another occasion that Clement, uh, had he supported Dixon?
Foots was one of the top supporters of Dixon. I didn't vote for Dixon.
Back in '38?
'38 or whenever . . .
He was elected in '38, he ran . . .
He was defeated in '34.
He was defeated in '34 by Graves.
Foots worked for him then. I voted for Graves in that election.
In '34?
Yeah, and Foots and John Leland were the local managers for Dixon. And they organized a torch light parade. I bet they had 5,000 people marching through Tuscaloosa on the night before the election carrying torches and that sort of thing. I just for some reason just didn't like Frank Dixon.
Of course, it seems like in Alabama during those years the governorship
would shift back and forth between what you
But the big mules never made it except with Dixon. Before, it had been people like Bill Brandon who'd step in there who was just as much a populist, agrarian type as Graves was. The leading candidate the next time was Charlie McDowell, who was defeated—lived down in Eufaula.
That was Graves that defeated him. [1926]
Yeah, then Chauncy Sparks, who was elected, defeated Folsom in 1942. Chauncy Sparks was from Barbour County; lived in Eufaula; practiced law down there. So Birmingham . . .
Was he the one they called the Bourbon from Barbour?
Yeah. And this group . . . you're right it switched back and forth, but it never completely switched to the power company and U.S. Steel until they got Dixon. Dixon was the first man from Birmingham to be elected in years.
And of course he was not an Alabamian.
Now Kilby had represented that group but kilby came out of Anniston. He was in the steel business. He represented the conservative industrialists, but he wasn't tarred with the Birmingham brush.
So you and Foots in the '30s were on Graves-Dixon—well opposite sides? You weren't active but you voted.
I just told him a night or two before the election, "I just can't vote
for your man." And Folsom came along and pulled an upset which you
remember the reason Folsom ran for
That was 1938.
Yeah, and so Folsom left Elba and went to Cullman. It wasn't because he
knew anything about the division of the state so much as he just wanted
to get out of the place where he had been so soundly defeated. He got up
there and realized that all of the votes
But then really about that time, during the Dixon administration, the war came along. There was an interruption in the political activity.
Quite an interruption. I was at sea in '43 and '44 so I don't know what the politicing was that went on in the national elections.
Foots was in Washington?
Foots was in Washington. He was the state chairman of the bond drive. Ed
Leeigh McMillan was the chairman and Foots was the executive, I guess is
what I should say. Foots was paid by the Treasury Department to promote
U.S. savings bonds. As an employee of the Treasury Department, he wasn't
able to do as much of the political work as you would expect. That
didn't mean that he didn't keep close contact
Now Lister Hill had formidable opposition in 1944.
Formidable opposition yes. Jim Simpson. He beat Simpson by a small margin.
It was 126,000 in round figures to 101,000.
But you can see from that vote that there was not a big turn out.
No. That was before the so-called Allwright decisions of the Supreme Court that outlawed the white primary. By that time there was already considerable increase in conservative reaction against the New Deal, and gradually the question of segregation and integration was already beginning to emerge.
As a matter of fact, though, the Alabama delegation was not opposed to the New Deal, as I recall, in any degree whatever.
You had no outstanding opposition like you had in some other states.
That's right. We didn't have anybody like Bilbo or . . .
Cotton Ed Smith.
Right, the ones who made it so difficult for the New Deal to operate. We may have had one or two who reluctantly voted for the New Deal measures, but I don't even recall George Huddleston voting against anything that . . . Well you can see why. The biggest employer in Birmingham was U.S. Steel.
And you had T.V.A. in North Alabama.
And the savior of North Alabama was Tennessee Valley Authority. And you just have to look at the Warrior River now and you can see the Tennessee-Tom Bigbee, but Buck Oliver and the Mobile people were all trying to get dams completed on the Warrior River. They got them through.
And then the war industries came along, and Mobile developed those areas.
That's right. Blakely Island and Alabama Ship Building and all those things were just booming.
I think the Childersburg plant was one of the largest ammunition—explosive plants in the country. That was Dupont.
Yeah, they manufactured explosives too. My oldest brother was stationed over there for two or three years. I don't know what his job was but he was a research chemist with Hercules Powder Company. He had substantial authority over there in Childersburg. This reaction against the administration didn't really begin to show up until Truman was in office.
In Alabama. I think you're right because Alabama, in a way, was unusual among other southern states. There was no prominent opposition—outspoken. You've got Talmadge in Georgia . . .
And Russell.
And Russell, and George.
And Spessard Holland in Florida. Those were people with a great deal of influence. Joe T. Robinson in Arkansas.
Old Garner in Texas wasn't very happy about that time.
That's right. But it had a chilling effect when Truman was nominated after Humphrey made his civil rights speech in the 1948 convention. I think that triggered the opposition which may have been latent all the time. When they began to see that this may lead to the integration of the races, we had some people challenge.
The Civil Rights Commission had already made its report. I think that was '47. It reported with that whole list and Truman endorsed it. That's when the fat was in the fire, so to speak.
What was the governor of Illinois named that headed that civil rights
investigation and made the report? Later he was a judge of the circuit
court of appeals and was convicted and sent to prison for some act. I
can't think of what his name was, but he was . . .
Federal circuit court in that area?
Yes.
I don't remember. I just associated, of course, Humphrey cause he took a leading role in the convention.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
In the 1930s one of the most controversial issues in Alabama was Scottsboro. What was your recollection of it?
Well the Scottsboro case attracted a great deal of attention in the
trial. They had a judge who came from Athens, Judge Horton, Jim Horton.
He was scrupulously fairSegregationist
Violence and Civil Rights Movements in Tuscaloosa.]
This was in the '30s?
Mid-'30s. Yet it was not really in any way at that time connected with a civil rights act or proposed legislation. These were simply protests against what they called our way of life. They were largely directed against radicals who were of the Eugene Debs stripe—people like that, and against the International Labor Defense (ILD) which furnished the defense counsel.
It was not, as it became in the '60s, connected with any proposed bit of legislation. One of the ironic things about the Scottsboro case is that one of the Attorney General's assistants (Tommy Knight, as I recall, was the Attorney General at that time), one of the assistant attorney generals was Buster Lawson.
Oh yeah.
Who later became a trustee of the University of Alabama and was on the
Supreme Court of Alabama for a long time.
As I understand it, in the beginning the defense was more in the hands of some local, uh, the Commission on Interracial Justice tried to do some things before the outsiders began to push in, before it became internationally publicized.
The American Civil Liberties Union was interested in it but the actual defense was in the hands of a different group, the ILD.
It became identified with the Communist organizations that later were the subject of investigations by Martin Dies and the un-American Activities Committee.
But during all of that time the evidence became pretty strong that there wasn't anything to the case really. The two women were obviously of questionable virtue, to put it mildly, and that's where it put the judge and the Alabama public officials on the spot. The sentiment had built up so against this outside interference. But there were other cases where that didn't develop.
The protests and the money raised for the International Labor Defense and
other causes in this connection were not
Let me ask you again, what do you care to say, do you have any ideas about Bibb Graves as such? What was your general impression of the "little colonel?" Didn't they call him the "little colonel?"
Yes. Well, Bibb Graves had a very outgoing, friendly personality, and he was the consummate politician. He, everywhere he went, he glad-handed everybody. He had a slogan which he put into practice that in any administration that he had anything to do with, those that made the pie would help eat it. What that meant was that if you didn't help him, you were not likely to be appointed by him to any kind of job.
Kind of another version of "to the victor belongs the spoils."
The spoils system was in complete charge when he was there—it was just the spoils system. Some of his people like Jim Folsom's later on were not all that interested in the public's welfare. They were more interested in number one, I guess, but Bib Graves was not a bad governor.
Classifications, of course, are often times misleading, but he's generally classified in the progressive column.
Not only a progressive, but he is classified as one who was a great supporter of education, and typical of Bib Graves, wherever he supported education, he left a monument to Bib Graves. If you look at all of the campuses in the state, you'll find a Bib Graves Hall for education somewhere on it.
And he's also usually referred to as one of the Southern governors who was strongly supportive of the New Deal that they managed to soft-pedal. Whereas other southern governors were very much opposed to it.
Most of the southern governors, though, saw so many opportunities . . .
Yeah—
For their state to receive benefits from the New Deal, they managed to soft-pedal their opposition. They might criticize it in private, but you didn't find many of the governors out leading a fight against anything Roosevelt was trying to do.
And, of course, the two senators then, first Black and then Hill and then Bankhead were all strong supporters of the New Deal.
Yes, and once the TVA was put in place the support of Alabama was just almost conceded.
That's right.
No way you could afford as a politician to oppose TVA, because there's no doubt about it, it did bring tremendous prosperity to the Tennessee Valley. That was a section up there that just wasn't paying its way. They didn't have anything.
I guess of all the states included in the TVA region Alabama probably had more actual territory than—well, East Tennessee would be a vital part of it.
Well, East Tennessee just has that part of the valley that comes down through Knoxville and down into Alabama, but it swings into Alabama, then makes a U-turn, then goes back up.
Really, the bulk of the benefits, and I guess that that part of Alabama was one of the most depressed areas anywhere.
Those beautiful farms up there that had for years produced the best
cotton crops in the United States, had begun to wear out. And they were
not getting anything for their product—it wasn't commercially feasible
to raise cotton. The cotton mills up there were closed down or working
one shift, and the people working in them weren't making more than a
dollar an hour, something like that. One of the big arguments made
against the minimum wage law, where Hugo Black was involved, was that if
they paid $1.35 an hour they would break every hosiery mill and every
textile mill and every saw mill in the state of Alabama. none of them
could operate under those terms. So as the New
Yeah.
But, again, there was strong opposition to the New Deal in Alabama from industry.
Oh yes, Alabama Power Company never stopped its fight against the New Deal. And some of the big banks; it's amazing that the thing that saved the banking industry in this country, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created by a bill sponsored by Henry Stegall. He represented the second district—third district, I guess, down in southeast Alabama. Yet the bankers never supported it. They were very much against this interference of free enterprise.
Ironical—then they were saved in desperate times.
Well, then you were still here when Dixon was elected governor?
Well, Dixon was elected in '38?
Thirty-eight. Of course Bibb Graves couldn't succeed himself.
In those days a governor couldn't succeed himself. Dixon had run once and had been defeated.
He had run against Bibb Graves, I guess.
Graves had defeated him after a three-way race with Leon Mccord and Dixon in '34.
And when he ran in '38, it was Chauncey Sparks—was Dixon's principal [opposition]. Was Sparks a Graves man?
No, Sparks was a very conservative legislator. He had been in the legislature from Barbour County for many years.
Oh, that's right, his nickname was the Bourbon from Barbour
Right. He had a good following among legislators and had not made many enemies. Like most people from down in that area, he voted for every appropriation and against every tax. His single most important point in his platform, I guess, was his opposition to the sales tax. Which Graves had put on or had raised—I don't know if there was one before that or not.
It was the first one, I think.
I think it was the first one. Then Sparks was later elected over Jim Folsom.
In '42.
In '42.
After the Dixon . . . Well, I guess . . . you say both Dixon and Sparks were essentially conservative. Now Dixon maybe was more oriented toward the business and banking groups, but both of them were conservatives. Maybe it reflected that rising anti-New Deal, anti-Roosevelt sentiment in the South by '38.
There may have been some of that in it, but it was not included in the
discussions about it in the newspapers. I remember Grover Hall, who
supported Frank Dixon, they used to call him [Dixon] the "fighting
major" or something like that—he was a major in the air force—and they
brought out political leaflets referring to him as some kind of an
eagle. I remember Grover Hall said that eagle had flown the last
I recall that Roosevelt campaigned against Senator George in Georgia and against Cotton Ed Smith in South Carolina and Both of them won despite the Roosevelt influence. But I don't guess—Roosevelt was not directly involved in the Alabama campaign in '38.
If he ever came down to Alabama, it would only be for doing something
like appointing Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. That was a political
move in many ways. Roosevelt, whether rightly or wrongly, was convinced
that Hugo could not be re-elected. Let's see, he was coming up I guess
in '38. He felt that to keep the influence and the intellect of Hugo
Black active for the country for the state, you had to put him somewhere
where he didn't have to be reelected. The Wage-Hour bill and the Fair
Labor Standards Act and all those things were simply anathema to these
manufacturers in Alabama. They were out to get Black by whatever means.
He
Now, your point was that that may have influenced Roosevelt's decision to appoint Black to the court? Now that was done in '37.
Yeah, and the election was in '38.
He was thinking ahead. Hill I guess really had no serious opposition in '38.
Hill could have been elected for a hundred years in his district if he had stayed in the House.
Yeah. 'Course Heflin ran against him, but there wasn't much support for Heflin.
No, there hadn't been any support for Heflin. Heflin was somewhat like Stassen. Once he was repudiated when he left the Democratic party in the Al Smith race, Heflin was never a big factor from then on.
He had some minor New Deal appointment, I think, just to give him a little livelihood.
I think so.
And he used to tour around speaking a lot.
He was a great orator. As a matter of fact, some of the people I was in
school with remembered him being on the campus here, and they say one of
the greatest speeches ever made in this state was made when he walked
out onto the
Well, now you've already said that you never particularly favored Dixon, and I guess you left to go into the service while he was still governor, didn't you?
In '41. Now Dixon was not a bad governor. I never opposed him because I thought his governing ability was bad. As I mentioned last time, I think that we wrote a—group of the Alabama Policy Committee—wrote a model constitution for the state, and a number of the provisions of it were either incorporated into our constitution by a member—into our present constitution or into statute. Among them being the Fletcher Budget Act and the Merit System and the Prison System, all of those were a part of that matter that we put together. And Dixon supported every one of them. He was a progressive governor in the sense that he knew that was good political science. He was not likely to take a stand just because it favored Birmingham or some of his cronies. He'd give things to his cronies like that liquor appointment. I think we've covered that.
Yeah, I think we did.
But those were just evidences of flaws in character, but not making him a bad governor.
And I guess he really was ideologically conservative. He thought in terms of sound, honest, low taxes . . .
Conservative in the sense that he wanted to conserve what we had, and get the most he could for the money that was available. But not conservative in the sense that he wanted to preserve the status quo. He was in favor of a new constitution for the state, and would have liked to have had a short, simple constitution that contained the framework of government without all of the little bits of legislation that are now in our constitution.
Coming back to that group of Congressmen that we talked about before, with whom Clement was rather closely associated. I guess they were pretty closely associated with Hill too. We identified Albert Rains, Bob Jones, Carl Elliott, and then was Kenneth Roberts . . . ?
Kenneth Roberts was editor of the Corolla and Foots was
the business manager in the same year.
Roberts was from where?
Piedmont. That's up near Jacksonville.
Jacksonville is not too far from Anniston.
Right. They were very close in campus politics and then when Kenneth ran for office, Foots went over there and helped him.
He was one of the later ones. He went in 1950. Who had been the Congressman there? That was Sam Hobbs. Was it the 4th district which includes Selma? I think that's right.
It didn't include Selma. Yes it did too; it went clear across the state. We have Selma now in the district with Tuscaloosa.
Yeah, it cut across, because so many of the districts cut into the Black Belt—they still do actually.
Well, Selma is now the same district as Tuscaloosa. Then it was gerrymandered all the way across the state.
The changes didn't come until '62 or was it even '64 before they got around to dividing . . .
It was actually after that nine/eight election.
Then again it changed in '70. I mean after the '70 census. But anyhow he, Roberts . . .
Joe Starnes was the Congressman.
Yeah, well now Starnes was in the 5th district, and that's where Albert Rains took over. He succeeded Starnes in 1944. So he was . . . Now Sparkman was associated with that group, but he wasn't one of the Spanish Inn group.
No Sparkman had already been out of school for some time when that group was here.
I think they said he had been in Congress five terms when he was elected senator in '46 right after the war.
Yeah, but he had been practicing law with Lanier and Pride in Huntsville for several years before he ran for Congress.
Even before he ran for Congress.
It's my understanding. I would guess he graduated from law school about '29, but I'm not sure.
Well that would have been . . .
Maybe a little before that.
That would have been about right. I think he first went into Congress about 1936.
As you mentioned the other day, Sparkman not only took an undergraduate degree here, he took a master's degree before he went to law school. So he was here probably a year or two longer than most of the others.
He took his master's before he went to law school. Yeah, I remember that master's thesis. It was in the late '20s.
That's right; I think he graduated in the very late '20s.
But in political philosophy he was with that group. Then Bob Jones was elected in '46.
He succeeded Sparkman
Yeah, that's right. And Carl Elliott in 1948.
I guess Carl beat Carter Manasco, didn't he?
Yes, I think so.
Carter Manasco had been the administrative assistant (that's what he would be called now, but I don't know what they called it then) to Bankhead.
Well Manasco succeeded Bankhead.
Yeah, Will Bankhead died in '30s or . . .
Must have been the early '40s because he was elected again in '40.
Well he died shortly after, because he was speaker of the House. That was shortly before I went into service in '41, because I remember going to his funeral in Jasper.
I think he probably died in '41.
Luther Patrick was . . .
He was in from '36 to '42.
Luther Patrick was a lawyer in Birmingham who was not making a big splash in the legal profession. He was not a recognized prosecutor nor was he a well-known lawyer. he did a lot of work in the lower courts—city court.
He was a wheel horse lawyer, I guess. Was he a graduate of the University?
Yeah. The best way I know to describe Luther Patrick is the way Judge
Grubb did. One day Judge Grubb had a case when Luther Patrick was the
District Attorney for the northern district of Alabama—federal court,
and Judge Grubb had a black man before him charged with violating the
Internal Revenue statute—making whiskey and not paying tax on it. And he
called the man around and he called him uncle. He said "Uncle, do you
know what you're charged with?" Yes sir, Judge." He said, "Do you have a
lawyer?" He said, "No sir Judge. I can't afford no lawyer. I ain't got
one." Judge said, "Well, the government hasn't got a lawyer either;
let's go to trial."
Did he get labor support?
Yeah.
That was my impression. He succeeded Huddleston in the mid-'30s and I assume he must have been at least generally supportive of the New Deal.
Now he succeeded George Huddleston.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
He was defeated by the other Huddleston which was his son. Well, he stayed out one term from '42 . . . no, he was defeated by John T. Newsome first. Newsome was in from '42 to '44, then Patrick came back and was defeated by Laurie Battle. Laurie Battle came in between Luther Patrick and Huddleston junior. Huddleston senior was way back. I don't remember how long he had been a congressman.
Yeah, I remember both the Huddleston boys in my law class. I taught George and John too.
The sons.
George Huddleston succeeded Battle. But as I recall it, Luther Patrick
lost his race to Battle in connection with some sort of an incident in a
restaurant. Either he hit somebody with a catsup bottle
Luther Patrick was never one of the . . . uh . . . you wouldn't label him one of the progressive congressmen.
I wouldn't think that he was ever considered a very effective
congressman. He was a kind of man to run errands
And then of course Laurie Battle was pretty conservative, wasn't he? I think of him more as a spokesman for the big mules.
Well, Laurie Battle was influenced pretty much by his constituency. Anybody representing Birmingham in those days didn't have the big black vote that you have now. You had to get your money and your votes from the Mountain Brook people and the downtown people. So, in fairness to Laurie Battle, I don't know if he was as conservative as he appeared to be or if he was just trying to tailor his beliefs to those of his constituency. But he was much more conservative than the other members of the delegation.
Now Laurie Battle—did he run against Sparkman in '54?
Yeah.
He didn't run for Congress [House] in '54.
I think he was appointed ambassador to some place after he lost. I've forgotten where it was.
But he doesn't appear again.
No, he's been lobbying in Washington for some group ever since—bituminous
coal people, I think. No, Carter Monasco has been representing the coal
people. Monasco, to me, is
That's just his hobby, I guess?
That's his hobby. And, of course, being a lobbyist for the coal company, you don't have a lot of litigation. he gets involved about twice a year when the coal contract comes up and when something is done about the gasification of coal or something like that. The rest of the time his is largely a job of just keeping up his contacts. So he roams the Capitol and he absorbs all the information. He's about eighty-two or three years old now, but he's still an interesting man to talk to about the Capitol itself.
And then, leaving Jefferson County, the Montgomery Congressman from 1938 to 1964 was George Grant . . .
George Grant originally cast his lot with the Agricultural Committee; stayed on it for years, and I don't think he ever sponsored any legislation, never got into any great controversy.
Never stirred the waters much either in Washington or at home, I guess.
Well, he was good at running errands for his people, and he's lucky the district that he represented, about the only organized labor in it was in Montgomery. And not a whole lot of that. So he could stick with his agricultural leanings.
But he didn't survive the Republican sweep in '64.
There were five Republicans elected and three democrats. Right.
Was Boykin defeated I guess. Was he still . . . ?
Boykin lost the nomination. He ran 9th [in 1962] when they had only 8 places.
Oh, that's right. That's when they had that crazy thing. But ever since '64 the three big cities have remained Republican with Buchanan first in Birmingham, and Edwards and Dickinson.
Funny thing, though. Edwards was succeeded this time by Callahan, a
turncoat Democrat who became a Republican for the purpose of running.
And yet it wasn't the big city vote that elected Callahan. Callahan lost
Mobile; lost most of the other counties in the district, but Baldwin
County overwhelmingly voted for him and put him office. So maybe the
hold on the city is not as strong as it appeared to be. Birmingham still
has their group of Republicans, but they lost to Ben Erdreich. So
Montgomery, with Bill Dickinson,
That's right. Now the Congressman we haven't mentioned is George Andrews. No he stayed in from 1944 to 1971. He survived the Republican sweep.
I don't remember George having any effective opposition.
Where was he from?
Union Springs, which is in the farming section, but not the rich farming section. Its on the edge of the wiregrass.
That whole district is from there southeast; included all the way to Dothan, I think.
But George was quite conservative.
I gathered that he survived during the '60s, the '50s and 60's, both—and then he was succeeded by Nichols. They changed those districts. Nichols is still in, isn't he?
Nichols is there now. In fact, Nichols is the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. No, I guess he's outranked by Dickinson who's a Republican.
Yeah, Dickinson's been there since '64 and Nichols was elected in '70. Then finally Tom Bevill from Gadsden.
No, Tom Bevill is from Jasper.
Oh, from Jasper.
Bevill didn't succeed Jones, but he succeeded to Jones' place on the Public Works Committee. By far the most powerful man on the water projects in Washington.
Whom did he succeed in Congress now? Let's see, if he came in '66; that was after all that shuffling around.
Well, Elliott was the last one of that group to lose, and I guess he lost in either '66 or '68.
Bevill was in '66—he was elected from the seventh district. Now that was after the reshuffling. Elliott survived in '62 and it must have been '64—yeah, that's right, that's when Martin [Republican] came in for one term.
In the Goldwater thing.
Yeah, and then Bevill came back and defeated the Republican. Is he still there? Is Bevill still in Congress?
Yes. He's the chairman of the Public Works Committee, and as such he's probably gonna stay in office as long as he wants to because of the Tennessee-Tombigbee. He almost single-handedly drove that through the House in the final stages when the Republicans looked like they had the votes to kill it.
Coming back to the questions we were talking about before we actually started this recording just to round out some of these loose ends. Virginia Hamilton in that paper, mainly on Hill and some on Black, said that Hill's greatest disappointment was not getting the 1952 vice presidential nomination. I think you had some doubts about that.
I have some doubts about that. I think that Hill was a little bit jealous
of John Sparkman. He felt that there were others who had probably done
more for the party than Sparkman, and that they probably should have
come first, and he thought that he was one of them. But he didn't make
any
And regularity.
I remember he got very upset at Adlai Stevenson for coming to Alabama and going by to see Gordon Persons and not going by to see Foots Clement. Of course, Foots had always worked with Hill and Hill respected him and realized that he had helped organize the state, and Persons had only organized his own campaign. He had never fought for the Democratic Executive committee control.
This was in '52.
Right. And he was very critical of Stevenson for doing that, but that doesn't mean he didn't support Stevenson.
Of course Persons was governor at that time.
But he [Stevenson] was down here on Democratic business. He was down here
supposedly to help Democrats get elected. Persons was in office and he
wasn't helping
Well, Stevenson didn't really select his vice presidential nominee like they do now. Didn't he leave it in the hands of . . .
Well, let's put it this way; he said, "I'm leaving it to you," but his
people all went to Sparkman. It took about all of one evening and until
about four o'clock in the
Yeah, he was getting a lot of publicity.
Some of the others were hoping to balance the ticket by getting someone from the West. There was some talk of Wayne Morse. I think that Stevenson probably tipped the scales in favor of Sparkman.
The other thing that she [Hamilton] stated in there, she quoted Clement as saying—no, this was referring to the 1954 senatorial election and the 1956 senatorial election when Crommelin accused Clement of controlling Hill and Sparkman for his own personal . . .
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
the story of the Crommelin-Hill and Crommelin and Sparkman elections. One
thing that has to be understood is that Crommelin was really a fanatic
on the subject of not only race relations, but he was completely
obsessed with the idea that everybody that he didn't vote for was
crooked; yet he based his campaign against both these two senators on
materials which he admitted were stolen from Clement's file. He had
about, oh I guess, half a dozen letters from various people written to
Clement, many of them not even dealing with the subject of the election
but just talking about something that had happened between elections,
and from those letters he was drawing completely unwarranted conclusions
that Clement was making a fortune out of being a
During the war.
Before and during the war. He was physically unable to pass the test to get into any of the services and this was probably the best service he could render and he went with the Treasury Department in 1941 full time before—for at least eight or ten months, maybe longer—before Pearl Harbor, and he stayed with them throughout the war working with Ed Leigh McMillan, who was the volunteer head of the service and a number of other people on various committees. But Mr. McMillan was the head of the group and Clement was the only paid employee. And he travelled from one end of the state to the other calling on bankers, labor unions, any kind of organized group that he could get together to organize a sale of U.S. savings bonds—
War bonds
As evidence of his ability, the State of Alabama is the only state in the
Union that met its quota in every drive before time expired and he never
had one that wasn't bigger than the last one. He did a remarkable job
with it. And later, after Clement came back to practice law in
Tuscaloosa, which I think was early in '46, Young Boozer
Purely vindictive.
Right. And one thing that I've always been sorry for is that we never determined exactly who stole those letters out of Clement's file. The letters were not of themselves of an incriminating type letter—they were just something where somebody would kiddingly say "we know you're going to be there because all the rich people will be there," or something like that, you know, and some friend of his would say "Why don't you make Lister do this (or that?)," and—
They took it out of context.
And they just took those statements to make it appear that he was
actually doing those things which he was not. I have always suspected a
young man who worked in our office. He was a young lawyer. I think he
worked there a few months before he graduated and just a few months
after—purely a temporary employee. But my only reason for suspecting him
is that he's the only person we've ever been connected with that has
never renewed his contact with us—hasn't been back to the office—he
never called anybody in the office—as far as I know, he's never been
back to Tuscaloosa, but he's never even sent a Christmas card or
anything of that sort,
May have done it just for— probably just for money and not political commitment to Crommelin.
I don't think he was committed to candidates—matter of fact, he wouldn't have been foolin' with the Democratic primary if he was, because he came from a Republican state.
Uh huh.
And the political connection never had any bearing on the employment of
people in our office. We had many good—a couple of them are on the
Federal bench right now.
Clement just loved politics—he was fascinated by it.
He loved it and he was enough of a detached critic, I guess you'd say, to
realize the he really was not a good lawyer. He never applied himself to
being a good lawyer. In his law books that were used when he was in
school, you'd find on almost every page a tally of some kind where he'd
count the votes that were for this proposition and those that were
against it, or you'd see one of the candidates for student office with
the number 46 beside his name and his opponent down there with 37. You'd
be left to figure out whether that was how they were voting in the
Barracks or whether that was how they were voting over at the "Piping
Hot" corner
And shows where his mind was running when he was looking at the law books.
Exactly. And he was shrewd enough to be able to pick out of a group of people—he had hundreds of friends—but the ones that moved into political office were largely brought there simply because he saw that they had this product that could be sold to the public and he set about and helped them organize their campaigns, worked with them, and he never exercised any kind of king-making powers. He never said "you've got to hire so and so."
Not like a typical boss.
No, he was not the political boss. I've heard him, much to my regret
because I was paying the telephone bills, get on the telephone and talk
for an hour and a half to the senators just about what the climate was
in Washington and was it looking any better and that sort of thing and
he just liked to do that kind of talk, and as an aside, he had one
principle which I always disliked but I had to admit it probably is
correct, that was that he was dedicated to the proposition that if you
wanted somebody to pay attention to what you had to say, and to carry
out what you asked them to do, the best time to approach him was about
two or three o'clock in the morning. Wake him up and then he's got
nothing else to think about except what you're saying, and you'd be
surprised how many people he would call at the wee
That, I think you had indicated before, he was very influential and instrumental in getting the State Democratic Executive Committee back in line after the Dixiecrats . . .
Well he saw that the key to getting the state back in the Democratic
column instead of going off with the Dixiecrats was not trying to
persuade two million people that this was the better of the two choices.
The first thing he had to do and the most important thing he had to do
was to persuade the executive committee that was laying down the rules
for the party, the Democratic party, that it was important that they
stay within the party and not do as they did in 1948 and go chasing
moonbeams and leaving their constituents in a situation where they
couldn't even vote for the nominee of their party. So he saw that and
began working on the Committee and was extremely successful with the
chairman of the Committee— all worked with him,
He was just a dedicated loyal Democrat who wanted to be sure that the state didn't go astray from the regular—
That's right.
—from the regular party, and I guess that all goes back to his early background and interest in the Party.
Well, let's face it, in 1930 through 1939 the only hope this part of the country had was with the Democratic party. The Republicans had not—I don't suppose anyone in the Republican party ever said let's get the South now like we did in 1865, but the result of what they were doing was about the same thing. The steel mills couldn't compete, the textile mills couldn't compete, and it was simply a matter of changing the policy so people down here had a fair chance.
And that was—didn't come about until the catastrophe of the depression.
That's right. It took the disastrous depression to shake the people's real sense of fairness enough to make them say, "Well we can't keep doing a big segment of the country that way."
So Clement, like you and I, were really kind of brought up in our formative years in that tradition but he was really giving a practical application
You would have been very lonely in Alabama as a Republican. Your only hope if you were a Republican in Alabama was that every few years when the Republicans were in power in Washington you might get an appointment as postmaster in a small town.
To kind of summarize, his efforts were largely with the congressmen, particularly those with whom he was closely associated and with the two senators, not so much involved in the state or the gubernatorial race other than the party—
The party officers were the only state offices that he really turned all out for. His primary interest was always the two senators. The congressmen were close friends, and received his support wherever it was possible to do it but he would, as far as I know, he would never have taken a position favoring one of the congressmen against one of the senators. What would have been very upsetting to him would have been to have one of his associates, one of his group to run against either Hill or Sparkman.
Now if we can kind of shift gears and take a running start toward the politics of race, I think it's pretty well agreed that by 1950, in most southern states including Alabama, race began to be the predominant element, I guess you could say, in politics, but—
It probably was the most effective element in influencing votes. To say
it was predominant would probably indicate that it received the most
attention, and that isn't
Particularly after World War II, that's when it became—
And particularly after 1948 when the civil rights—well '47 I guess the civil rights commission reported and then Hubert Humphrey made his stirring speech to the Democratic party which provoked the walkout and began the Dixiecrats rise. For the next three or four years it was a matter of not so much race as party loyalty—how you get these people to straighten up and be Democrats regardless of what happens to the race question.
Yeh
And then after the 1954 school decision, then it became more and more open discussion, then when the civil rights act—what was the date of that?
That was '64, but you mean the big civil rights act. There was a civil rights act in '57.
'57 was the first one.
And then one in '60
They were the first ones that really carried the label "civil rights act"
except way back in Civil War times . . . but after they went on the
books you could get a few more people saying, "Why don't you take a
stand on civil rights?—Where do you stand on this (or that)?" And the
best that we could get from most of the successful politicians was that
whatever was being proposed was so completely unfair to the whites that
they could oppose it on that ground rather
And back, if we keep backing up, we were talking about, for instance, the Scottsboro case, now about the only thing that was discussed widely in the 1930's as far as race was concerned was the question of violence and lynchings, and that was the concern more than any mention of civil rights as it came to be understood later.
The real problem in the Scottsboro case was not that a mob was about to take those seven people out and lynch 'em, the real problem was that the jury did the dirty work for them. When the case was tried, Judge Horton did almost everything a judge could do to say to the jury, "They haven't proven these people to be guilty." And yet it didn't take them any time to come back with a guilty verdict. And yet, I suppose that one of the real reasons that competent lawyers felt that they had to take part in the Scottsboro appeals was that this was really subverting the judicial system—you were using the system to do what the mobs had done before and I would think that Judge Horton, who really suffered considerably because of his rather liberal charges to the jury, his rulings in the case, should have been regarded as something of a hero. But he wasn't. He had a great deal of difficulty with the Ku Klux and White citizens and people of that stripe for the rest of his life.
But there was a great deal of sentiment in support of measures to curb
lynching—that goes way back—back into the World War I period and in the
twenties and the thirties. But, again, there was this resentment that
was mounted
Yes, and I think you have to face the fact that some of it was based on
the thought that prevailed in the Old West—we'll give you a fair trial
and then hang you. And that was better than letting a mob take him out
of jail and hang him, but the guy was just as dead one way as he was the
other. And it really didn't do much for the cause of justice. But one of
the most difficult problems, I suppose, with the trial of those cases
was to get adequate representation for defendants of that kind in the
South. Almost invariably the court had to appoint the lawyers to defend
them and almost invariably something like the International Labor
Defense, or whatever that group was called, would send somebody down
here who was recognized or charged immediately with being a known
radical with Marxist leanings and all that kind of stuff. The fact that
some of them later became very fine judges doesn't seem
But now there was a very small group in the South trying to actively work for better racial relations like the Commission on Interracial Cooperation dated from right after World War I. It was active during the twenties and thirties.
And this group that was based in Atlanta. Can't think of the name right now but they did a . . .
I think Commission in Interracial Relations was based in Atlanta, and then that becomes Southern Regional Council?
I think so. And they worked hard at it and there were some dedicated lawyers—Morris Ernst, for instance, his wasn't so much on race as it was religion, remember the Frank case.
Yes, Leo Frank.
Yes. He was lynched simply because he was a Jew.
But you don't have any real—none of that was really actively working in this part of the country, was it?
I really don't recall any campaign in the thirties or forties in which race became a factor except when Tom Heflin was running or—well maybe one or two others.
The other issues overrode all that— issues of the . . .
But underneath all the other big issues, there was always a feeling,
"Well, he knows how to handle race relations." Frank Boykin goes up to
Washington and gets involved in a shooting scrape with a black man —all
that kind of stuff, you know, yet the people never made him come out and
say in his campaigns, "Just leave the blacks to me,
Sometimes mentioned in connection with the New Deal era as being—a Southerner being active in this was Aubrey Williams—but he was involved as I recall in some of the very early and small movements to get more blacks involved in the New Deal, uh, bureaucracy, but . . .
I don't think that—to give him credit I don't think—
He wasn't a typical Alabamian—
I don't think that Aubrey Williams would have ever been elected governor
of Alabama
A lot of people in the thirties might have had some of that.
That's right—
Might have had some—
Some of the most conservative ones in the country now if they'll admit what they thought when they were in college would be guilty of a little Marxist leanings one way or the other. But I don't, I really don't think that we ever got black on white, white on black, until John Paterson ran against George Wallace—
That's when it really came out in the open.
When he just more or less said that I don't want your black vote, I want the pure white vote. Wallace, to the surprise of people who have heard him since then, was pretty much on you might say moderate side and, as everybody knows, Wallace's comment after the race was lost was "They'll never out-nigger me again." Of course the papers always write that up as "out-seged" me again.
He really said that. And there wasn't much push in Alabama, was there, on the part of the blacks themselves to get more voting rights?
Not until after the Kennedy election.
Really not until the sixties. You see in the first series of cases about the white primary, all came from Texas, and it was in 1935 that the court validated the Texas white primary.
And it wasn't really until the one man one vote decision coming up out of Chattanooga in the sixties that blacks really took enough hope to say "we've got a chance on this thing. We can go out now and get the right to vote—get these things carried out the way we want them." Whether that decision came before or after the voting rights act I don't know.
It was before, I think. I think it was '62 I believe—Baker against Carr. But you see Grovey against Townsend which upheld the
white primary was reversed in Smith against Allwright in 1944. That was sometimes mentioned as
But now that—all this doesn't mean that there wasn't a continual pressure for further integration. When Truman was president he put out an executive order that race should not in any way affect the selection of people working in federal offices and, if I'm not mistaken, he also made it apply to the army.
He started that.
Yeh.
I don't think it was fully implemented until—
—But I remember Mort Jordan who was a Collector of Internal Revenue in Birmingham and a . . .
This was when Truman was president?
Uh huh, and when the Inspector General or one of the people inspecting
the office reported that there was a black secretary capable of being
promoted to a rather good job, the White House sent a copy of the
order—I'm not sure it was the White House or whether it was the
Collector of Internal Revenue—but one of them sent a copy to Jordan
telling him to move that woman up, and Jordan refused to do it, and
Truman fired him with an open statement that because of his contumacious
conduct he was being discharged. He's the only federal employee I know
of who ever got that treatment around here.
It was beneath the surface.
Yeh, it was under the surface more than anything else.
But you had the FEPC during World War II that a—then it was a very controversial issue after the war.
And if you look through the record, and the speeches that were made by the candidates from the South, almost without exception they found some reason to be against FEPC—an unwarranted interference with free enterprise, keeping people from making rightful business decisions that they ought to be entitled to, whatever the argument. Most of the time it was a specious argument of some kind, but they never said, "I'm against it because it helps the blacks." There was never anyone of them that I know of who said "I'm just for a white democracy."
Do you ever recall Joseph Gelders? Does that name ring a bell?
Yes, I remember him.
Well you know he was I think sometimes listed or mentioned as the founder of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
He was.
Do you remember that?
I attended his meeting.
You did. What do you recall about it?
The only thing I remember about it was that I. J. Browder and I went up there together.
To Birmingham
And Mrs. Roosevelt was invited to come down and did come. And after we'd
been there a few hours we walked out of the hall and said "The way this
thing is going does not sound like it would be very helpful to either
one of us and I don't think we can help them very much." So we left. But
that was the first confrontation that I remember between Bull Connor and
Eleanor Roosevelt. He was making some kind of a speech on the floor of
the meeting in which he was talking about how well we get along down
here, and how these people are making a little more than they ever made
and that their income is better, their housing is better and all that
sort of stuff, and Mrs. Roosevelt interrupted and said, "Well, if you
have seen their ability to make progress, doesn't that make it even more
important for you to get out and try to help them move ahead?" And Bull
didn't exactly like that.
He thought they were moving ahead too fast.
Yeh, he thought they were going too fast already. But Joe Gelders was—
He was on the faculty here.
Yes, and he also was either a teacher or lecturer or had some connection with that Monteagle School. What was the name of that thing?
Oh, I've forgotten. [Highlander Folk School, probably]
But anyway, it was really a sort of a "fellow travellers" organization.
Front, sort of.
And I don't think he ever had a great deal of influence in the state,
although he was one good target for the Ku Klux and people like that
Yeh, 'cause he was so outspoken. But what reminded me—I think they were working, trying to focus on the poll tax as a—
Well that gave them a convenient thing to focus on because . . .
Alabama of course had the most extreme . . .
Well, there were a great many people who thought the poll tax was just wrong and particularly the cumulative poll tax. As I told you, this Alabama Policy Committee back in the thirties wrote this model constitution. One of the things, the first things we wrote was a provision outlawing the poll tax.
That was the one that Dixon was—
Yeh, —
Trying to get support on.
Yeh, and Simpson. We had all the Republican-leaning Democrats on our side and it was not a—that was not a subject that was the property of the Southern Conference of Human Welfare.
No.
But they grabbed on to it, and I think it was smart of them to do it. It gave them sort of an air of propriety to their whole organization which it really didn't deserve.
But, in that connection, it was along about then that the Boswell Amendment passed, that was in November of '46, and I guess that was an attempt to thwart what looked like might be an increase in black voting.
It was. I've forgotten what county Boswell was representing. [Geneva]
I don't know either.
One of the Black Belt counties as I recall it, but I'm not sure
But—I'm sure—I imagine it was. But Folsom had already been elected, I think.
Yes, Folsom went in right after—[the war]
And he tried to oppose it but didn't succeed. It passed both the legislature and then the voters but I think at the time wasn't it generally understood that it wouldn't stand up in the courts?
That's right. But it was a gesture in that everybody could get on board and be recognized as being on the right side of this thing. Actually there's been so much posturing and posing on the subject of civil rights, you never really did get to know what anybody thought about it. I get tickled by that reference to the bill always as the so-called civil rights act.
It got into the emotional — But now, coming on up to the '48 convention, you didn't go to that?
No, that was in Philadelphia and . . .
Did Clement go to the convention?
Clement, I think, may have gone. Not as a delegate.
What was happening prior to the Philadelphia convention?
Well,
The delegation was obviously splitting on this.
But you must remember that Truman had come through the end of the war, setting up the United Nations, all these various things that took him sort of up to a peak, and then he was going down very fast. When Harry Truman was renominated, there was, or, I guess he was at a lower ebb than Jimmy Carter, and everybody just wrote him off. And in this state particularly where he wasn't on the ballot, his electors weren't on the ballot, nobody gave him a chance of being reelected. And not many people expressed any admiration for the fight he was making for it. All of them now talk about how they admire the scrappy little Truman and how he took that train and went through the country, dared the Republicans to come out and fight, you know, and all that sort of thing., But in those days they did not give him credit for anything. And I think I've told you before that the only human being that I know of in this state who insisted that Harry Truman had a good chance to be elected was Marc Ray Clement
And he was convinced of that.
He was convinced he was going to be elected because he was attacking the people that could do something about the problems and when they got in there to vote they realized, well, if they do what Truman's asking them to do, we can get this thing solved and so they voted for him. Course I think Truman, while I think he was a great president, I think that he was an excellent candidate, I think he gets a lot of credit that he really doesn't deserve just because he had such a lousy candidate against him. Tom Dewey couldn't really sell hot coals to the Eskimos.
And Henry Wallace was tarred with the Communist taint. But the states rights resentment against Truman largely stems from the racial issue.
Almost 100%.
Yeh. And they were organized before going to Philadelphia, I guess that Nixon and McCarthy all—
They were not organized. They were organized in this sense, they were organized to oppose him
But they had no—
They were organized to defeat a civil rights plank, and when they failed on both of those, they walked out. They didn't organize till they came to Birmingham and had their convention. That's when they called all the ones who had walked out there plus whatever other eighteen—thirteen minds they could get their hands on to come join 'em and that's where they put together the Dixiecrat group.
But now the Democratic Executive Committee, the state executive committee—my impression was that McCorvey kind of ran the—although he wasn't chairman of it.
He was chairman.
He was chairman.
McCorvey was extremely conservative, not a deep thinker politically, was more interested in how you control issues to keep them either from coming flaring up in your face or to go along the way you want to go than he was in what the issue was. I'm—I have to get into some of the press files to find out just how he managed to manipulate things so that the Democratic Party of Alabama did not nominate electors that could vote for Truman.
I know that was—
The result was that we didn't have a vote in the election when it came down to a choice between Republicans and Democrats.
And they tried to challenge it in the courts but it was too late, I think that there wasn't time enough or something.
Well, I took the case to the Supreme Court, asking whether the electors could be bound and we had a resolution through the Democratic Committee requiring anybody elected as a Democrat to at least one time vote for the nominee of the Party, and the Supreme Court struck it down, said that you couldn't follow through.
You couldn't—
I regret to say, however, I'm familiar with that one. I was the one to take it up there.
And that's been from back the . . .
And now that came right after McCorvey. This was when McCorvey had taken the electors away. Then Ben Ray was elected president—
Chairman.
Chairman of the Committee. That's when Clement organized a group to bring Ray in and loyal Democrats into the Committee. And the first thing they did was try to shore up that position by saying anybody else who gets nominated by this party is gonna have the support of the party. And the court held they could not. Well, it hasn't hurt very much. We had one instance where an elector voted for Harry Byrd and one vote for Paul Bryant one time and one or two others like that but none that changed a result in any serious way. In 1960, though, when Illinois was still out
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
So you were talking about the Illinois vote in 1960.
While they were still counting the vote, as you remember, the Illinois
vote was delayed for about a day and a half, and gave rise to the famous
wisecrack which Jack Kennedy made that his father didn't have to buy the
entire election; all he had to do was to buy Illinois—something of that
sort. Well while that vote was out, it had already been determined that
some people who had been nominated or named [elected] as electors in
Alabama were not going to
But was that the same situation in the case you took to the Court in 1953?
It was not the same because there wasn't any such loyalty oath in
the—well, I say there wasn't any; there was one, but it had just already
been declared unconstitutional. They still had it on there and the
wording of the oath appeared on the ballot, and in the case of the
ballot it was
Now, to clarify the other court case, which occurred the year before, 1952, after the Loyalists had . . . No, no, I meant the one in 1952 that the State-Righters started when they were trying to undo what the Democratic Committee had prescribed as a loyalist oath—that was the one that the Alabama Supreme Court held for the State-Righters—You were not involved in that one directly?
As I recall it, Truman Hobbs filed that suit . . . along with Gordon Madison and somebody from Birmingham; it may have been Dick Rives; that was before Dick's appointment to the Circuit Court of Appeals.
Before he became judge?
Yes, I think he represented the Party in that case.
And then the Supreme Court reversed that in essence—I guess, held that the Committee could handle . . .
Well, actually, as I recall the case (and I haven't looked it up for
years), but as I recall it, the Supreme Court really decided that that
was a political question which they would not decide. They didn't come
right out and
Right. This controversy between the Loyalists and the State Righters for control of the Committee, as I understand it, took place before it was known that Truman was not going to offer himself again, and after that when Truman withdrew, then it was said, I read, that that took the steam out of the State-Righters.
Well, it didn't give them a target where before it had the Fair
Employment Practices Committee and the Executive Order requiring fair
employment practices. Now all they had was the memory of Truman, and he
was no longer the candidate
But Stevenson did not provoke the bitterness and adverse reaction in the South that Truman had?
No, Stevenson had been a pretty good governor in Illinois and received a great deal of praise for some of the things he did as governor, and he insisted on pitching his campaign on a very high level; he didn't talk about personalities. He might have been better off if he had talked about Eisenhower's lack of political know-how and Eisenhower's lack of knowledge of political science. But instead he talked about goals for the United States and stayed above a battle in which he was really a part. He should have been fighting his battle instead of using these lofty phrases to describe his campaign.
What about Sparkman's nomination—any "inside dope" on that?
Sparkman was nominated by a convention which Stevenson contended until
the day of his death that he did not influence in any way. And I think
he told, at least as well as he knew the truth, he told it. He didn't
ask anybody to nominate John Sparkman, nor did he ask them not to
nominate anybody else. Once he was nominated, he threw the convention
open and told the delegates that he wanted them to nominate the best man
they could—which is contrary to precedent and to recent history. Nearly
all the presidents in the last twenty years, or thirty years, ever since
that election, have chosen their running mate and let somebody put them
through the convention. Stevenson did not, and there was a little
undercurrent of dissatisfaction in this state, the theme of which seemed
to be that if an Alabama
Was Clement involved in any way, as you know, in the nomination of Sparkman?
No, he was not. He was not at that convention. Now he may have been on the telephone with some people talking about it, but I never heard him mention the nomination as being anything affecting the party.
He was probably much more involved in the controversy within the State.
One reason I don't have much information on the nomination of Sparkman was that that night he was nominated I stayed up to listen to the speeches and the nomination, and he was finally named the nominee for vice president at about four o'clock in the morning. And I got in my car then and drove to Dallas which was about an eighteen-hour drive, or something like that, and so I didn't get to talk to Clement immediately afterwards. If he had been involved, and I had visited with him on the day after the convention, I might have picked up something that I don't know now. But in all the years since then he never mentioned it, so I assume that he was not really involved.
Now I also read that most of the State-Righters, once their target had been removed, really become supporters of Eisenhower, more than Stevenson. Do you think that was correct?
I think that was right. I think the large vote that Eisenhower received was largely made up of crossovers. There was no strong Republican organization to deliver a vote for Eisenhower in Alabama.
But it is said that Winton Blount headed up the Citizens for Eisenhower.
I think he did, but he was a comparative newcomer and not a very
accomplished politician. In fact, you have to face the fact that Winton
Blount, except for his money, is
Was he always a Republican?
As far as I know, he had been. Blount owes a great deal of his success to the Republicans. After all, he wasn't chosen to build the National Airport in Washington and to build all the bridges from there into town just because he had a good tractor and bulldozer and whatnot. It was because he supported Eisenhower that he got those "plums," I would guess. But at any rate that's the foundation of the Blount Company's success.
Well now lets move again, looking at the 1950s. It has been said that there was a kind of a lull in this internecine warfare between State-righters and Loyalists, and even on the racial question, between 1953 and 1954 (the Brown case) would you think . . . ?
I think that's true. I think one reason for it is that everything that
could be said had already been said. And you didn't have the situation
that we had in 1980 when it became fashionable for well-to-do young
people to be active in the Republican Party. What we had in those days
was, more or less, a reaction of people voting for a war hero or voting
against a man whose conversation they couldn't understand. Adlai
Stevenson was a beautiful writer and a good speaker, not a compelling
type speaker; he was not a rabble rouser, but the things he said were
said in polished, complete sentences with proper number of subjects
and
Speak their own language. Now returning really a moment to state politics. Of course, the Dixiecrat movement occurred right in the middle of Folsom's first term, and it has been said that Folsom was a Loyalist, as opposed to the Dixiecrats. That was one of the reasons why he wasn't successful, but I'm sure it wasn't the only one.
Well, one thing that Jim Folsom did, and Jim Folsom as a politician was
probably as good at appealing to the little man as anybody. He really
paved the way for George Wallace's hold on the little people with small
income or no income and with very little contact with wealth or
industry, and he was at that time sort of building his base with
continued New Deal pronouncements. Jim Folsom was a believing liberal.
He wasn't just mouthing the phrases that came out of the New Deal. He
also was not a very, I guess you'd say, successful image for somebody to
pattern himself after. Jim was such a problem to his own supporters that
you'd never say anybody supported Jim because he admired him. They
admired what he stood for and what he said, maybe, but, for instance,
the Dean of the law School here, Bill Hepburn, considered Jim Folsom the
purest disciple of democracy that we have ever had. He felt like the
big
But what about Gordon Persons, How would you evaluate him?—as governor and a political figure?
Gordon was a routine, run-of-the-mine type governor who didn't cause any big problems.
He had risen up through the bureaucracy.
Right, and he wasn't a man who would blaze a new trail; he never went off and said, "We are now going to take this course" and persuade people to follow him. He would go along the way people had already started. And he was not a bad governor, but he was not an exceptional governor either.
He had been, as I understand it, head of REA (Rural Electrification Administration) in Alabama, and some of the country people thought he invented electricity.
Yes, I think that's true. I have a recollection of Dr. Gallalee becoming
very much upset because he landed his helicopter out there by the Denny
Chimes and said that if he landed there again, he was going to have him
arrested even if he was the governor. He thought he was endangering
the
Dr. Gallalee didn't think too much of modern mechanical devices.
No. But Persons, to his credit, I guess, never really tried to create a political machine. When Persons moved out of office, there weren't a great number of people to be taken care of or taken over by somebody else.
It was said, or at least I have read, that he was expected to run again in '58 but that he had a stroke.
I think that's true. And the only man that I connect with Persons, as a sort of an insider, was Vernon Merritt who was his Executive Secretary or whatever you call the number one man in the campaign. As far as I was concerned, Merritt's greatest achievement was that his mother made beaten biscuits and sold them, and they were real good. But there was no Persons machine. He was a very personable man; his habits were good, and he looked good in comparison with Folsom's habits. But he was not a great politician . . .
But, as I think we've mentioned before, beneath the surface we know now, looking back, that the racial problems were brewing; there was increasing pressure for school integration, I mean not in Alabama particularly; but I guess there was a little in Alabama.
There was a little in Alabama. It was beginning to bubble. After all, the
Arthurine Lucy thing didn't just happen over night. It was the sort of
thing that built up.
I don't know whether he represented the NAACP or not.
Maybe that's who it was. I remember it wasn't her father's check or her check that was cashed; it was furnished by one of the activist groups that paid for the expenses and the tuition—that sort of thing. It was the kind of thing that had begun to come to a head and really boiled over until then. That was what, '58?
No, that was '56. You see, the Brown decision was handed down in '54, but, I think, that decision came too late to affect the elections of 1954 either, well Sparkman ran in 1954 and Folsom ran . . .
Sparkman was running for a second term, and, as I recall it, he had opposition, but he didn't have any grass-roots opposition up in north Alabama which was where the big vote was.
Laurie Battle and Crommelin were the . . . But he won overwhelmingly, and . . .
And actually the campaign was enlivened by all the accusations that Admiral Crommelin made, but . . .
We've talked about before.
Yes, but they really didn't produce any impact on the voters.
And Folsom won without a runoff over seven candidates. It has been pointed out that this was the first election after Alabama abolished the cumulative poll tax. They still had the poll tax, maybe two-year, but not the cumulative.
Well now, that was the election too in which Folsom made his famous speech in which he told a mixed audience . . . He said to the audience, "Now for my black friends in this audience, I want to assure you that I'm not going to require you to go to school with any white children." He also said that he didn't bother to answer any of the bad things that were said about him, his conduct—that sort of thing. He said his mother told him years ago, "If you get mud on your clothes and try to rub it off, you will smear it; but if you let it dry, you can just thump it off." And he said that's the way he was going to do; just let it dry. He was not going to make any defense against those charges that had been filed against him, all of which were probably true.
That's pretty smart politics.
It's good politics. Just as his suds bucket and mop were good politics. Once one of these country farmers came into the meeting and dropped a dollar into that suds bucket, he had bought his own vote; he was going to vote for Folsom regardless of what happened after having contributed to it.
I just noticed here I had a note that said that after the cumulative poll tax was abolished, almost a third of the voting age population was registered whereas in 1938 it had been only ten percent. I think Virginia Durr said thirteen.
Yes, and I was surprised that it was that small, but I do remember that it was very small.
I don't know where that figure came from, but it did boost the number, and I imagine that practically all of them were white.
And most of them were women who had just never paid poll tax and didn't bother with it. This gave them a chance to pay two years poll tax and vote. You see they had had the right to vote since, what was it, 1921? Yet they had never exercised it because they never did bother to pay the poll tax.
There was also, of course, prior to the Brown Case and the integration controversy, Persons had to contend with all the trouble over Phenix City, and that's when all of that was coming to a head.
That's one of the things that marked Persons as a better than average governor. I said awhile ago that he was sort of run-of-the mine; he really wasn't in that respect. He carried out the duties of the office pretty well. He was not colorful, but he knew that that problem over at Phenix City had to be dealt with; and he appointed special prosecutors and got that thing behind us.
And, of course, in the process gave the impetus to the Pattersons.
Well, when they finished with the cleanup in Phenix City, the next
election, you remember, Albert Patterson was running for Attorney
General, and it was believed that that
But now during the '1950s Clement was still pretty active in politics?
Oh yes, he was active. He began to have health problems about 1959 I
guess, and he had a heart attack in probably the middle of that year.
And he recovered to some great extent; he never got well, and he
continued to have that problem until he died in 1961. So the last two or
three years he really conducted most of his political campaigns from his
telephone. He didn't get out and drive all night
Looking at the decade kinda as a whole, there wasn't serious trouble for the two senators or for the more progressive congressman during those years, because the backlash on race hadn't yet developed, wouldn't you say?
It had begun to show though. You see, in Lister Hill's last race . . .
But that wasn't until the '60s, was it?
When did he retire, '66?
'68 I think. In '62 didn't Martin run against him?
Martin ran as a Republican. That was the strongest campaign that the Republicans had put on for the Senate up to that time.
Six years later Hill decided not to run. What I was thinking about was the '50s.
There wasn't a great . . . There were some unpleasant campaigns like the Crommelin campaigns against each of the senators (in '54 and '56) and it seemed quite obvious that he was more interested in spreading whatever kind of poison he had control of than he was in getting elected.
But just glancing at this [list of elections], Roberts, Rains, Elliott, Jones, all held office all during the '50s.
They did, and they seemed to be in good shape until we lost one seat in Congress.
That was after the census of 1960.
Right, and I think in '62 when Hill had difficulty with Martin, they also had problems which diverted the attention of a lot of Hill supporters because a great many of the senatorial supporters were active in the congressional campaigns. What we got into, I guess you can't describe it as anything except a stupid campaign where the nominations were made at large for the state—nine candidates with the ninth man to drop out and the others to be put in the slots for the eight remaining places. Since then we have had another reduction; you know we only have seven now.
The person that dropped out was Frank Boykin. Then did the others . . . Did they redistrict them? Or were they considered—in the old districts? That never was clear to me.
As I recall, in the beginning they ran in the state at large, and . . .
Once one of them was eliminated . . . When I was looking at the official returns, it looked like to me it wasn't until '64 that they regrouped the counties.
I think that's true, and I think that was after the "one man, one vote" decision.
That was in '62.)
Yeah, and when they did that, we redistricted the state.
But actually in 1962, the eight who were elected, I never have understood what district each of them . . . They must have taken over some of Boykin's district.
Well, the legislature set that thing up.
After the election they must have set it up some way. Well, anyhow . . .
What is your impression of the first reaction to the Brown decision in Alabama?
In '54. It was in the spring, as I recall. The first reaction was, "Well, this is another obstacle that we are going to have to overcome." The general talk was, "Well, that's in Topeka and really doesn't affect us yet, but we've got to be prepared." And you had a lot of talk about how we are going to get around it. I remember one of the senators became quite angry with me when he asked me what are we going to do about the Brown decision, and I told him that I thought it was pretty damn near time we started enforcing it. That wasn't what he wanted to hear; he thought that we ought to have some way of accommodating ourselves to the decision without coming up with mixed schools. And there just wasn't any way, the way that decision was written.
A lot of Southerners thought there were some ways.
Oh yes. You remember we even got around to that massive resistance stuff in Virginia where they would simply have no schools if they had to have blacks and whites together.
I think Alabama was fortunate, if I can use that term, in having Folsom in at that time.
So we did not have any . . . I don't think we even had a bill introduced—may have, but it didn't pass, to abolish public schools. That was one of the solutions that was suggested that nothing in the constitution said that the State had to educate anybody. And so they were talking about abolishing public schools, and one or two states attempted to do that. The Little Rock confrontation between Faubus and Eisenhower probably had a profound impact in Alabama, and the blowing up of a school in Clinton, Tennessee, one or two places like that where the Klan got into it made some decent people realize that we don't belong on the side of those people. And they tried to figure out ways to accommodate themselves to the procedure without destroying the system.
And also the implementing decision in the Brown case, I think, came a year later, and that seemed to moderate because that's when . . .
That's when they came out with "all deliberate speed," phrase and I think that the Supreme Court used an unfortunate expression then. A lot of people thought all deliberate speed meant be deliberate but make it look speedy. And really some people were sort of lulled into a feeling of well, it's not as bad as we think it is; we don't have to comply immediately.
It's certainly an ambiguous phrase.
As a result we are still fighting it; we still have cases pending right here in Tuscaloosa on the method of integrating the schools.
Alabama was brought rather suddenly into the spotlight December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, and then it was just a few months later when Autherine Lucy registered here. That really brought it out.
It also brought out rioting and renewed activity by the Ku Klux Klan and brought that genteel group known as the White Citizens Council out of the woodwork. And so it was a pretty tough time round about then. As a matter of fact a lot of the energy of some of our "loudspeakers" (so to speak) was turned to the subject of integration rather than politics. I think that accounts for the fact that the congressmen and the senators didn't get a whole lot of flack at that time, but what they thought was the backwash from the integration arguments . . . I know the situation in the early sixties reflected very much the public reaction to school integration and didn't really translate itself into a division politically. It was all members of the Democratic Party, those who were segregationists and those who were not stayed in the Party. Now we are getting into a situation where those who are outspoken segregationists have moved into another party.
Of course, you were very much involved in the integration at the
University seven years later. Would you
It did. Autherine Lucy disturbances (I don't like to call them a riot) there was a failure of law and order, and they were not sparked by the educational people. It wasn't a group of students saying "I'm not going to school with blacks." It was a group of Ku Klux, rubber workers, and hoodlums saying "You can't make those folks go to school with blacks." And the rock throwing and the uproar that took place.
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
Threats that were prevalent in Tuscaloosa at that time came from these outsiders, not just rubber workers, people from Holt, other unions, and what you might call the bluecollar class around town were pretty much excited. The only real organized work done on the campus by students was led by Leonard Wilson, who was a student who at that time I think lived in Selma. He later lived in Jasper, but when he came here as a student, he was from Selma. And he became pretty much carried away with his own importance as a student leader, I guess you might say, and had some ideas of being elected governor by acclamation, or something of that sort. At any rate, he organized and led several rather mild protests by students, the biggest of which was one that took place on the night of a Vanderbilt basketball game.
That must have been either Friday or Saturday night.
At that time we were playing them on the weekends. That night after the game the students all marched from Foster Auditorium down University Avenue making a lot of noise and generally behaving like students, having more fun with it then they were seriously trying to upset the constitutional rights of anybody. But at any rate they gathered at the flagpole at the intersection of Greensboro Avenue and University Avenue, and that's the time when Walter Flowers, who was president of the student body, climbed up on the base of the flagpole and pleaded with them to go home. And his opposition when he was addressing the students was led by Leonard Wilson. I think they were sort of directly opposed to each other, but Walter didn't have a whole lot of people in his camp; Leonard had more supporters. About all they achieved was that they finally broke up the parade; they didn't go anywhere else. They didn't change their minds.
Were you at the basketball game?
I was at the basketball game, but I wasn't at the parade. I found out about it after I had gone back home.
Now, one night didn't some group march on Carmichael's house?
There were two or three times when that happened. One time Mrs.
Carmichael was there by herself, I remember. She came out and the
students at that time who had come to protest simply told her to tell
the President that they were
Do you know anything about the efforts to get more police protection, etc.? There were all kinds of stories . . .
I heard the same stories: That they were called for, and a few minutes later a call would come back and they would say, "Where did you say to come?" Or something like that, and nothing would be done. But actually Bill Marable who was the Chief of Tuscaloosa Police at that time, was a very strong-minded kind of person who actually did not resist integration. I wouldn't say that he was an integrationist, but he was not willing to let the city be torn up to keep the blacks and whites from going to school together.
He was trying to preserve law and order.
Exactly. I think he was not only for law and order, but he didn't object
to the integration of schools. And when he was present at the police
station, it didn't have any of that dilly-dallying around; he got out
and took care of the situation as best he could. Of course, he couldn't
be there
Weren't there also stories about attempts to get the State Troopers here?
There was an announcement by George Wallace . . . George Wallace had announced in 1963 when we had the Vivian Malone incident . . . Well at that time George had announced that he could keep order in Alabama. I don't recall that anything was said about the National Guard right after the 101st Airborne went to Little Rock in '58, but the first place I remember the National Guard being brought into it was, I think, at the bombing of the school in Clinton, Tennessee, when the governor called out the National Guard to keep order and, if I'm not mistaken, the President federalized the Guard at that time.
That was '56 I think. Pretty close to the Autherine Lucy [incident]. But what I had heard was that there was some attempt to get Folsom or the head of the State Troopers just to send some Troopers over here to help with police protection.
I don't remember them doing that although you know the troops were here in the Vivian Malone time. In '56 and '57 I do not recall the troops being physically present. Whether there was a discussion of it . . . I am sure the news stories of that time would tell us, because it would have been a public discussion of it.
I don't think they ever came; even the state patrolmen didn't get here, and that was the source of some controversy as to why they didn't come.
Now the state patrol came in after the Autherine Lucy [affair] but not during it.
Some said there was an uncalled for delay.
I think they came in and sealed off the campus; you had to have a pass to go on the campus. Whether that was to keep out her supporters or to impress on people that this was going to be a safe and secure place for their students to go to school, I don't know. If I'm not mistaken the State Highway Patrol did come in.
I know they did that in '63.
Yeah, but I think even then they came in some force and sort of put a ring around the campus, but after the problem had pretty well died down.
Were you on campus that Monday when all the so-called rioting took place?
I was out at the Law School, and of course I was in my office downtown most of the day.
I wasn't aware that it was as critical as it was. I was way over in Woods Hall, where nothing much . . .
Nothing much went on at the Law School either. We were very much involved in the Malone incident, because Foster Auditorium was immediately behind the Law School, and all of it took place where we were all watching. I remember the National Guard attempted to keep people away from the windows, and I can understand why. Of course that was before the assassination of President Kennedy . . . And it pointed out that it was dangerous to let people stand in those windows when some kind of demonstration was going on, particularly if a man had a weapon of some kind. The presence of the police on campus though in the Lucy incident never developed into any kind of battle between police and students. I don't recall any situation where there was a confrontation. There was some rock throwing, noise making, and that kind of stuff when the local police and the University police attempted to move that mob of outsiders off the steps of the Union Building.
All of that by Graves Hall [where] she had a class—where the real danger point was. But talking earlier about Carmichael, when he gave up the presidency, what was your impression of his relations with the Board right after this incident?
I don't think that it could be described as pleasant. I think that the
feeling existed on the part of some of the "leading" members of the
Board who had pretty much grown to
Of course he hadn't been here very long, as I recall—three years, I think.
Well, he wasn't of that nature anyway. But I don't think that he would ever have been a party to an armed resistance against . . . certainly not against the United States authority, but not against the State or even the City.
Was Gessner McCorvey on the Board at that time?
I'm inclined to believe that this may have been the last period that he
was on the Board. Hill Ferguson was still on the Board, and some of the
. . . Buster Lawson was on it and whether Sam Earl Hobbs had come on at
that time or whether he came on right after I don't recall. Hobbs left
the Congress about this time [1965], and Sam Earl was appointed, I
believe, after his father resigned, but I'm not sure of that. The Board
meetings in those days were not covered as well by the newspapers as
they are now. About all you got out of the news about Board meetings in
those days was
During the intervening five or six years before the next crisis at the University of Alabama, as we have said before, there was a gradual increase in tension over racial incidents, particularly the Little Rock in '57 and '58, and then remember beginning about 1960 many of the younger blacks began to (not so much in Alabama but in other states) take matters in their own hands with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating and the sit-ins. So all of that was occurring during that interval. But what was your impression of what was going on in Tuscaloosa during that five to six-year period?
Well, there was a pretty strong undercurrent in Tuscaloosa both for and
against this integrating of public schools. Most of the discussion,
though, dealt with integrating the lunch counters, busses, and things of
that sort. The Rosa Parks case down in Montgomery had attracted an awful
lot of attention and had drawn the support of Martin Luther King. The
public was more attracted to the boycotts that were called from time to
time in various towns and the increasing demands that were being made,
the attempts to integrate churches, things of that sort, things
Somebody said that was brought about by the extensive supply of dynamite used in mining up there. They were familiar with it.
Well, subsequent events have proved that to be true. One or two of those cases where they had a conviction of someone on charges of dynamiting a church, the sixteenth street [avenue] up there, the bombs were made from dynamite that was stolen from a mine or from some other type of industrial operation near Birmingham. It didn't come from anybody's store.
That was the evidence that came out. Well, Mr. Blasi's little book
devotes a few pages to this period and he cites a few instances that
there was tension, some centering around the Episcopal Canterbury Chapel
where they would have
I remember the Council on Human Relations. I'm not sure I remember the names of any of the people connected with it.
He doesn't call names, you know, but he refers to an Alabama law professor as being active in it. Now I don't know whether that was Jay Murphy or not.
Could well have been Jay Murphy, although there really wasn't any structured effort to bring about a rather calm and serene sort of integration until after Kennedy took office. Eisenhower, very properly I think, used the strength of the Federal government to say these things have been declared to be among the rights of citizens white and black, and that he was going to enforce the law. But he never got around to appointing groups to smooth the way. Kennedy, and even more so Lyndon Johnson later on, got the people with some standing in the community to serve on groups that were themselves bi-racial and were trying to make the change to a bi-racial, integrated society a little smoother. They didn't always succeed, but at least there was a place you could go.
Eisenhower didn't ever call up Martin Luther King when he was in jail like Kennedy did.
Eisenhower wasn't that good a politician. But the thing that Eisenhower did was to rely on his legal advice, and when they told him what the rights were, to his credit he didn't back off and say, "Well this is too difficult a job for me to handle."
Attorney General Herbert Brownell was active in promoting some moderate reforms leading toward civil rights, because there was the first Civil Rights Act in '57 and the second one in 1960. Of course, in the '60 one, Lyndon Johnson had a lot to do with it.
Well, Lyndon Johnson had a lot to do with it, and that doesn't mean, however, that Brownell was not in favor of it. I think the truth of the matter is that there was no favorable climate in the Senate or the House for the passage of such a bill before that. Nobody could have got one through. You could have got one through with a general declaration that all citizens have certain rights. But when it came down to spelling out those rights, it was just like the old Fair Employment Practices Act that Truman supported. It had an extremely difficult time in Congress; the people that were in Congress were not ready to do anything about it. I'm not sure there was even a voting rights act pending in Congress until after Kennedy took office.
There may not have been. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 tried to encourage,
if you want to use that word, or to make an inroad into more blacks
voting by certain powers—you know they tried subpoena powers to get
registration lists,
That's when the "integrating, Scalawaging, lying, Federal judge" said that he had delivered the lists to the Federal marshal, and as a matter of fact Wallace's lawyer said that Wallace delivered those things to the Grand Jury as required, and he did it after he had a conference with the Judge. In that conference he is supposed to have said that if you go ahead and find me in contempt that will set me up where they can't beat me for governor. He had already lost his first race for governor and was running again. And Frank Johnson, who happened to be the judge answered and said, "George I'll find you in contempt, but it won't be any little fine or slap on the wrist. You'll go to jail for as long as I can send you if you don't deliver those things."
That must have been about sixty or sixty-one.
When was Wallace first elected?
Sixty-two.
Well, it was right before that when he was running for the office.
It was June of 1960 when Johnson . . . It was appealed to the Supreme Court when Johnson was upheld. Then it was in the campaign when Wallace referred to him as the . . .
"integrating, carpetbagging, scalawaging liar" or something like that.
Johnson had been appointed by Eisenhower with pretty much the
acquiescence of the two Alabama senators—Not that they wouldn't have
taken a Democrat if they had had the power. But they felt that
That was about fifty-four, wasn't it?
Fifty-four or fifty-six—either his first term or second.
When was Johnson here at the University?
I believe he was a student here when he went to the army and came back and finished up law school.
Did you ever have him?
Oh yes. I taught Frank and his brother both, Wallace. And to be truthful about it, Wallace was probably as good or better student than Frank. But Wallace wound up in the penitentiary. He was addicted to drugs and got into a stolen car racket, trying to finance his drug habit. And was caught and sentenced, I believe, to three years in the penitentiary.
Well, of course, Johnson's appointment turned out to be a correct one for the civil rights movement here in Alabama.
Well, he was another one of Foots Clement's' boys here on campus, and Clement had a lot to do with the two senators not opposing his appointment or suggesting anybody else.
By that time, as we've said before, Hill particularly was becoming a little sensitive on the subject.
One reason that I think this problem was probably in the second term of
Eisenhower was that Johnson had already been appointed United States
Attorney and was prosecuting cases in the Birmingham District Court when
he was appointed to
That '54 date may have been when he was appointed District Attorney.
May have been. I've got the little book which was put together when his clerks had their recent meeting to celebrate the occasion. I don't know what the occasion was, but he got the judges over there with all his old clerks. (It tells when it was, but at the moment I don't remember the date.) He was favorably known to Republicans and Democrats as a very fair prosecutor—a very tough one but very fair. He was good about letting somebody off not really shown to be guilty, but he insisted on punishment for those that were, and did a real good job.
In those years we are talking about in the late fifties, Sparkman had won his first election. Was that '58?
Sparkman was elected in '48, and he was in his second term.
Yes, Sparkman was reelected in '54, and Hill was coming up for his major challenge in '62 by Jim Martin.
I think you are right. Of course, the strongest challenge Hill ever had was the '44 primary with Simpson, but the closest the Republicans ever came was when he was with Martin.
I just wonder if you recall anything about Clement's activities there, while he was still active.
Well, he and Hill were on the telephone, I'd say, at least once every day during all that time.
Until the time . . . When did he get sick?
Well, he never got too sick to use the telephone. Well, I shouldn't say
that; there were times when he was really too ill to do anything. But
most of these discussions would be from his bed, in the very late 50s
and '60-'61; he died in September of '61, I think. And up 'til maybe two
years before that, he was extremely active—driving all night—that sort
of thing. Those last two years he stayed pretty close to home, but did
all his organizing and politicing by telephone. I said he and Hill were
on the phone every day; he and Sparkman were on the phone practically
every day. You see, if he didn't talk to either one of the senators,
John Horn was Sparkman's administrative assistant and Charlie Brewton
was the administrative assistant to Lister Hill. As a matter of fact,
just about everybody in both those offices felt like he owed part of his
appointment to Clement, and so if he wasn't talking to the boss, he was
talking to somebody in the office almost every day. And he was extremely
fond of Frank Johnson; they were close friends. I think that his close
friendship with Johnson had about as much to do with his [Johnson's] not
being the subject of a floor fight in the Senate and being confirmed
with no real problem as anything else. Not that Hill and Sparkman didn't
respect Johnson, but he just didn't have the reputation at that time
that he does now. And he wasn't as
Sparkman was working particularly in the area of housing while Hill . . .
Hill was in health. He was very much engaged in not only the Hill-Burton Bill, which is responsible for building hundreds of hospitals, but the National Institute of Health which really caught his attention and received, I'd say, an inordinate amount of attention from him. I think he, if anything, overdid his emphasis on those health measures. And I'm not sure he didn't do it to keep from getting into some of these others. I think it was an escape. He did a tremendous job, and I think he deserves all the credit he gets. But I don't really think that it was necessarily because that's the only interest he had. I think it was to keep from getting into some other things that he threw himself so heartily into those.
You've already said that Clement was not directly or very closely involved with state politics. But it was during these years when Patterson was governor that Wallace was beginning, of course, to . . . Now what about deGraffenried?
He was actively engaged with Ed deGraffenried—Foots [Clement] was a part
of the election of deGraffenried, and I think one of the biggest worries
that Clement had during those years was the unfortunate habit that Ed
had, deGraffenried had, of leaning on the bottle a little too much while
he was in Washington and finding himself unfit for duty on the floor of
the House. I know two or three occasions where either Ed's wife or some
friend would call
And he was actually defeated by Armistead Selden.
Defeated by Armistead Selden because of his absenteeism. That is what he [Selden] used to defeat him.
And I would gather that Selden wasn't as close to Clement as deGraffenried.
No. Selden ran for the state senate, or the state legislature—I think it
was the senate—after he graduated from law school. And he served one or
two terms down there—I think maybe only one and then jumped on the
chance to run against deGraffenried simply because Ed had not answered a
number of rollcalls. And everybody knew why he hadn't answered them; it
wasn't any secret that he was drinking too much. And without having to
say, "You've got a drunk in Congress," he [Selden] was able to run on
that platform and get elected. By that time Foots had not detached
himself from the deGraffenried campaign, but he was interested in other
things. For instance, that was the year that Stevenson was running
against Eisenhower, and he was pretty well engaged in trying to keep the
State's
My general impression was that Selden was more conservative in his general outlook.
Well, he didn't run on a conservative platform. He became conservative after he got elected to Congress when he revealed his conservatism.
And because of the trend of the times, he was going along to get along.
That's right. Well, he was a Black Belt politician, and he was naturally
more conservative than a north Alabama politician. But, face it, the
district that he represented was itself conservative. Tuscaloosa was the
only place that had a labor union in it. Selma wasn't in this district;
neither was any part of Jefferson County. Since then, in the
redistricting, they've put in part of Bessemer and parts of Jefferson
County. Shelby had a few union people in it but not many. And Shelby
County had a situation where it was almost evenly divided between
Republicans and Democrats and had been for years. Shelby and Chilton
Counties were both in this district, and both of them had a very heavy
sprinkling of Republican voters normally. They didn't carry those
counties regularly, but it wasn't any great upset when they did. What
was the man's name who was the head of the
I think he was an undergraduate at Sewanee.
That's right. He came to law school after the War.
Did you teach him?
Yes
He was pretty smart, I think.
He was a very good student. At that time Selden was in class about the same time Clifford Fulford was—in Birmingham—one of them just as far over on the liberal side as you can get, and the other one just about as conservative as you can get. But we had a lot of good students.
Both of them SAE's.
Yes. We had a lot of real good students who had recently come out of the
service; they were more mature than the earlier students. And I think
that Selden probably knew when he gave up his seat in the House that if
he lost the
Well, we kinda digressed a bit, but we want to approach the 1963 integration at the University. Prior to that you had moved to the bank, hadn't you?
I went to the bank in 1960, in September. And I just left the law firm. I had to leave it completely, because I didn't move into the bank gradually; I had to go in all at once. The man who was president of the bank had a heart attack and died very suddenly. He was water skiing, had a heart attack, and two or three days later he was dead.
Who was that?
Alton Barr. The real problem with the bank was that it had changed hands the year before, and Barr had been brought in from Birmingham and had spent all his time getting acquainted in the community. But he hadn't had time to develop anybody in the bank to take his place. So they were desperate to get somebody in there and work full time.
That was still City National at that time?
Yes. And it had been through a trying period with Jim Alston who, with all his faults, was well known but had been completely removed from any connection with the bank. So it wasn't possible to get any help from him or his family. So they asked me to take it.
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
We were talking about the increase of tension and pressure for the "movement," as it was called, after Kennedy's inauguration in January of 1961.
Actually, I would think that the increasing pressure really began in the
latter part of Eisenhower's administration. A great many more blacks had
become interested in voting in Kennedy's campaign. And there was a good
bit of open movement toward demanding rights, and that sort of thing,
and there was a feeling on the part of black young people that they had
certain rights that were being denied to them, where I think that their
fathers and mothers had just written off that they never really had
them. These youngsters were beginning to lead demonstrations and start
sitting in. I think the sit-in movement probably spread even before
Kennedy got into office. And they were sitting in Woolworth's cafeteria
and the bus station cafeteria. One of the things in the bus station that
very quickly attracted attention was the water fountains with "white"
and "colored" signs on them, and most bus stations solved that very
quickly simply by taking down the signs. One or two didn't ever make the
change, and at least one, I recall, put up a sign on one of them which
said, "White Only." But the implication was that if you wanted to drink
with black people, you could drink at the other. When Kennedy took
office in sixty-one, there was a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and I
think that had been building under JohnThe Thunderbolt. I know
that The Thunderbolt even attacked the United Fund
because some of the causes for which its money was spent included blacks
and Jews and Catholics, people that they traditionally had fought.
They were becoming more active in resistance to civil rights-integration now than the White Citizens Councils; they were kinda fading out, I guess.
The White Citizens Council in Tuscaloosa never became quite that big a deal. In Mississippi I think they were effective; I think they were effective in Selma and in the Black Belt, but around here the head of the White Citizens Council was not any big wheel. It seems to me Mr. Lassiter was the head of it, but I'm not sure—J.B. Lassiter who was a CPA and didn't have much to do and didn't do much as the head of it. As you say, I think they were beginning to lose their popularity.
The Klan had more support, particularly from labor, I guess—the workers in Tuscaloosa.
And the Klan had several meetings around here where they blocked country roads, burned crosses, and made themselves rather obvious to people if you were more conscious of the Klan—maybe because you expected more, I don't know. I never really thought the Klan developed into any great political persuasive group. They were noisy, I guess is the best description of them.
The so-called Freedom Rides where you had the riots in Birmingham and Montgomery—there weren't any in Tuscaloosa though?
We didn't have any Freedom Rides, but we did have a very serious incident at the First African Baptist Church.
But that was later. That came after the University's integration.
That's right. That came after it and came at a time when they were trying to extend integration to the churches.
When we were talking earlier, you were saying something about the head of the State Troopers.
Floyd Mann was the head of the Highway Patrol under Patterson's
administration, and there was a very serious incident at the Montgomery
bus station when the Freedom Riders came there and were attacked by a
group of thugs that were gathered at the station. And more and more
seemed to be joining them, and the Montgomery police just stood with
their hands in their pockets or looked the other way. And Mann brought
in the Highway Patrol and broke it up. I'm convinced in my own mind that
if he had not come in with the
But as you move on into sixty-two, that was an election year, and the Democratic primary for governor was in May. Was that when Ryan deGraffenried ran against Wallace? I'm pretty sure it was, because he was killed in sixty-six in that airplane accident.
I'm trying to think who was eliminated in that race. Ryan was not very outspoken on the race issue; he didn't get involved in it very much. Wallace was because Wallace was now seeking to switch to the other side. He had run against the Ku Klux Klan when Patterson was elected in fifty-eight.
Patterson got the Klan support.
Right. And that's when Wallace made his famous statement, "They'll never out-nigger me again." And this time he consciously set out to stir the issue of segregation and whatever other racial issues there might be. And took a very determined stand against mixing of the races in any way, schools, busses, or anywhere else.
In the first primary Wallace ran against deGraffenried and Folsom. Folsom and deGraffenried got about the same number of votes, but then there was a runoff between deGraffenried and Wallace.
Right. That was when Folsom had slipped quite a bit. His conduct didn't please most of the people at that time. I think that was the inauguration speech that Wallace threw the gauntlet down and drew the line in the dust and said that he would be for segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. That encouraged quite a lot of rabble rousers around the state.
That would have been January of sixty-three.
And that was the culmination of this race we are talking about.
What about deGraffenried? He wasn't ever involved much with Clement and the congressmen and the Hill group was he?
He was too young.
I didn't mean in school.
Well, he came by Foots's office every now and them. He was Ed's son and was a very good student, a good mixer, and was fairly liberal. He was not a left-winger, but opposed to Wallace, he looked very liberal. He was a very knowledgeable boy; he finished near the top of his class in law school and ran a very creditable race for his first race.
Had he been in the legislature? Must have . . .
I'm sure he spent one term in the Senate. I'm not sure when he was first elected. He ran though almost immediately after getting out of law school. His influence was quite keenly felt around Tuscaloosa. He had a good following in Tuscaloosa and was a real factor in the races. As a matter of fact, in the race four years afterwards it was pretty well believed around here by most everybody that he was going to win when the plane flew into the side of that mountain and killed him. Of course, that's when Lurleen was elected.
But as you've said before, he couldn't afford to take a strong stand on the civil rights question.
Well, he didn't have to because he hadn't been a party to any of it. He had come along at a time when his own political races didn't involve any of the issues that were being brought out in the governor's race. There really wasn't any great movement in Tuscaloosa County to get a black in the legislature; there weren't enough black votes. He appealed to both white and black. I think Ryan got a generous number of the black votes. He was not a crusader, and he didn't come on as the one to save us from Wallace. He just showed up as a rather clean-cut young man that would make a good governor.
Tried to conduct a positive campaign. But Wallace's slogan was "Stand up for Alabama," whatever that meant.
It meant whatever George Wallace wanted it to mean. He had the
Alice-in-Wonderland approach to language. One
Kinda like the present president.
Yes.
And, of course, race didn't enter into Hill's election that year very much.
Not openly. There was an undercurrent of ill feeling toward Senator Hill because of some of the things that Crommelin had said.
Crommelin was in the primary.
Yes. Because some of the members of the old Bourbon aristocracy thought
that he had sort of betrayed his own people. He didn't have to go out
and seek the support of black voters and that sort of thing, in their
opinion. And it disturbed them very much that he got support from
liberal voting groups. I think he probably had as good a cross-section
of
But in the November election prior to that, race was not really the issue between Martin and Hill; Martin, I guess, appealed to basic business-conservative interest.
Except that he wasn't really running, as I recall it, on the issues of what is good for business or what is not. He was running against Lister Hill as not representing the people of Alabama. He [Hill] had gone to Washington and become inoculated with the left-wing ideas, and that this was foreign to what the people in this section wanted. That was the theme of Martin's campaign.
Of course, Clement was gone by this time.
Yes, he had been dead since September of '61. So it was about a year and a half. The campaign really didn't stir the racial problems. As i recall it, we didn't have any racial problems at the polls; we didn't have any racial disturbances during the campaign. It may be that's because everybody looked the other way, or it may be that the people who stirred those disturbance up didn't think that was a good time to do it.
But in November of sixty-two concern began to grow about integrating the University because of the Mississippi—that was in September of 1962.
Well, there was always the feeling of apprehension in Alabama that the same thing might happen over here. I remember hearing Judge Reuben Wright on a number of occasions talking about the activities of the agitators—always called "outside agitators"—that were going to get a number of those blacks killed over in Mississippi. There were a number of incidents over there other than the integration of the University. You remember the black boy who was evidently thrown into the river.
Till was his name.
Yes, Emmet Till, and he was weighted down with chains. The big joke that
was being spread around by the Ku Klux Klan was that was just like a
dumb nigger; he would steal so many chains that he couldn't swim across
the river with them. And they made a lot of that sort of thing. And I
think there were several instances in Birmingham. A black man was seized
on the side of the road and castrated by a group of Klansmen. I've
forgotten his name, but that made a big front-page story. So the general
attitude was that we really can't let this sort of thing happen around
here if we can prevent it. And I think a lot of people who would have
spoken in answer to some of the things that were said just held their
tongues rather than get into a controversy about it. If I'm not
mistaken, in the campaign, while there was an undercurrent of race
agitation, you might say, there
But it was known that applications were in for blacks to enter the University. In fact I'm sure that Vivian Malone and Hood had their applications in before that.
Yes, and they had had several letters back and forth by this time.
Now Blasi in his book mentions a meeting in the fall of 1962 of business and civic leaders and mentions that Bear Bryant was there, Buford Boone, George LeMaistre, Harry Pritchett. You don't remember when that first meeting was?
I don't remember the date, but I remember that we met at the Pritchetts' house. Frank Rose was the presiding officer, so to speak. The University, while they didn't make the calls, gave the list of people they wanted to come out there to . . . I think about three people did the calling. The purpose of the meeting was simply to discuss what our situation here is, where we are going to have to go, how we can prevent happening here anything that resembled what had happened in Little Rock or Oxford. At that time we had had one university already integrated, more or less against the will of the group then; that was Clemson.
that was in the fall of '62.
That's right. And they had brought their student [Harvey Gantt, later
Mayor of Charlotte and candidate for the U.S. Senate in
You could have done it like Clemson. Get one on your own, so to speak.
And Wallace had just as much notice as the NAACP or anybody else about when it was going to take place because a definite date was set for the hearing.
Well, and, of course, Judge Grooms's ruling for Vivian Malone and James Hood didn't come until the following April. I read somewhere that they thought it was possible to integrate the University at Huntsville at that time. Do you remember anything about that?
I don't think so, because at that time the University at Huntsville was not really a University. It was an extension point as Dothan, Mobile . . .
I guess that's what they were thinking about—to integrate the University of Alabama's Center at Huntsville.
Some of them may have suggested that, but it was never a real possibility, or I don't think that anybody seriously thought that would stop the movement to bring black students here. In that same period the University of Alabama football team took an unmerciful beating in Birmingham from the University of Southern California, and the man who carried the ball was one Sam Cunningham, a black, 215-pound, six-foot-four fullback. And when Sam Cunningham got through running over that football team, they were pretty well convinced that they would be a better football team if they had some blacks to play. So they didn't have that group of people fighting the integration.
Do you think that was the reason Bear Bryant was active . . .
I think it was. Bear was not very active in this situation; he had other things to do, and he didn't have time to do it. He did go to the meeting. Bear Bryant was also a strong supporter of George Wallace. He just couldn't stand it when Wallace failed nationally. He thought that Wallace should have had at least a chance to run for president.
But he didn't support Wallace
Not openly.
I mean in the integration at the University.
No. I don't know what his feeling was about integration. Obviously he couldn't have played as many black football players as he did and been very much opposed to it.
But he did support Rose's efforts to try to bring it off as peaceably as possible.
Right. I think you have to give him credit for going against what he would probably preferred, just for the good of the University . . .
Did you go to Jackson?
Yes, I did. After we went to Clemson, we flew to Jackson, about the next
week and talked to the lawyers there for the University and asked them
if they could outline to us what led up to the shootings on the campus
and what the Meredith admission to Mississippi taught them. And the
lawyer was kind enough to spend half a day with us going
That was toward the end of May, it says. But in the meantime you had been traveling around the state some speaking . . .
Yeah, I had made speeches in Florence, Decatur, Huntsville, Dothan,
Selma. It looked like I was running for office. All of them on the same
theme: If we didn't have sense enough to learn something from Little
Rock and Mississippi, we deserved to have the government just take us
over and run our business for us. And I can say that most of the
business men that attended those meetings, and most all of them were
Rotary Clubs or some civic club or a group of executives who were just
called together for that purpose, nearly everyone of them gave one
hundred percent support . . . I don't recall anybody in the group ever
getting up and saying "You're wrong" in any of those towns, even Selma.
One man in Selma, I remember, got up and said he appreciated somebody
coming in and saying the things they felt they couldn't say. But he
didn't disagree with them.
When did you really become aware that Wallace was going to try to capitalize on this?
We went to see Wallace.
When was that?
Barret Shelton and John McConnell from Mobile and about four others from
here, (I think Tandy Barrett may have been in the group), went to
Wallace's office about two weeks before Vivian Malone came in. And our
plea to Wallace at that time (I was spokesman for the group; I guess
they thought that I could talk to him because I had taught him in law
school) . . . I based the request on the example we needed to set that
if Alabama was going to be a leading state in the South, it had to show
that it could take the things it didn't particularly like as well as the
things that were pleasing like winning football games. And it seemed to
me that the least we could expect from a state administration was that
it do everything in its power to promote law and order. And Wallace at
that time interrupted me and said, "Well, I don't like that law and
order business. ‘Law and order’ is a Communist term. You hear them using
that as an excuse for what they are doing." And I used a little
expletive there that wouldn't look good on the tape and told the
Governor what I thought about his thinking. And I don't think that
helped any; I think I made a mistake. I should have said, "Yeah,
Governor, you're right but come on and go with us." But I didn't. And
we
This would have been in May, I guess, about two or three weeks before the registration in June.
Well, the meeting that we held at the hotel of the businessmen here was to adopt a resolution that was to be presented to Wallace. (I don't know whether we've got the date of that meeting or not; I think we do somewhere.
It was May 28.
Yeah, well that was what the . . .
400 civic leaders.
And they all signed this petition to Wallace, and the gist of it was that we wanted him to stay away and not send armed troopers in but simply leave the chief of police and the citizens of Tuscaloosa to handle the problem. And we felt that we simply could not put Alabama through what Mississippi had gone through. And we left there—left Montgomery after . . .
That was after you took the petition?
We spoke to Wallace and then brought the petition back. But the one thing that probably caused us to feel a little badly about it was when Wallace said goodbye to us, he pretty well assured everybody (There were a number of people there, and I can't remember all of them. Mayan Layman was there, as I recall it.) that he wasn't going to do anything to harm the University, that he wasn't going to do anything to cause loss to the State of Alabama. But he made it pretty plain to us that he was still going to take some political stand on it.
He wanted to "stand in that school house door."
Well, he never did mention the "schoolhouse door" in our discussions. He just said that he felt as chief executive there were some things he could do.
He didn't make it clear what he was going to do?
No. And one of the things we asked him to do was simply stay out of Tuscaloosa—not come up here and not send the troops up here, troopers I should say, the Highway Patrol. And he didn't mention calling out the National Guard. And I don't think that was by accident; I think he already had made up his mind that he would call out the National Guard. He didn't think, however, of the possibility of the President federalizing the Guard and taking command away from him which is what happened.
But, as I recall, the Guard went on "maneuvers" in this area, and Wallace didn't object to that.
But then he issued the order to send them over to the campus to protect the property of the University, as I recall it. The campus was sealed off, not by state troopers but by the National Guard.
But it was said also that Wallace made a direct appeal to the Klan to stay away. I don't know whether that was true or not.
He probably did, and I don't remember the wording of it, but he issued a
statement which in essence said, "Let the authorities handle it. The
people that are interfering with
Well it was said that he sent word unofficially somehow.
Of course, that's like his sending word to the grand jury about those lists that they wanted down in the original investigation.
That wasn't for public consumption.
Right.
I don't know when this was, whether it was immediately after he had formulated his plan of action to stand in the door. He sent some kind of assurance, again privately, to Rose that he was going to step aside and let things proceed normally.
As I remember that little charade, he proposed that he be allowed to read
his protest. Now when I say proposed, that was his attempt to deal with
Bobby Kennedy as the Attorney General. And he asked that he be allowed
to make his protest and then, I remember him using the term,
"overwhelmed," that then he be "overwhelmed by Federal might." And I
guess he wanted to be carried out of that door, I don't know, but
Kennedy turned him down and sent Nick Katzenbach down with the court's
order. And so he wasn't permitted to do his little act of raising his
hand and then being picked up bodily and carried away with cameras
clicking all around the place. He was reduced to having the order read
to him and then the head of his own National Guard saying, It was his
"sad duty" to order him to comply. And so the one that would have been
hauling him off
One little sidelight on this is mentioned where Al Lingo was head of the state troopers. He was here first, before the National Guard came—some time before.
He had a security patrol set up on campus.
And at one point it was said that he issued an order where no blacks whatsoever could come on campus. And somebody pointed out to him that a good many, if not the majority of the help on the campus . . . Do you remember? It was said something about having to have a meeting about it.
Well, he had ordered, in order to protect them from violence, that blacks should stay away from the campus. I don't know who took him the message, but it was quite clear that that would shut down all the kitchens and all the janitorial work on the campus. Most of the cooks and the great majority of the maintenance people were black; not all of them, but that was a pretty well integrated group even in those days. But the message went back to Lingo that the order he had given was so broad that he was simply shutting down the campus, and he withdrew it.
I believe it was said (this was in that Blasi book again) that they had to go through Wallace to get Lingo to retract that.
I think that's correct, because the highway patrol was always treated by
Wallace as pretty much his personal bodyguard. And as chief executive he
technically had the
But by and large, as everyone knows, it has been written up so often, the whole thing went off without any violence anywhere. I guess the efforts of your group paid off in that respect.
I think the group that was probably most incensed by the whole deal was the law students. They sent an order over there ordering them to stay away from the windows in the school. The school looked right down onto the scene, and anybody looking out the windows could have seen everything going on. It was quite warm, and the windows were open; the building wasn't air conditioned. It would have been easy to follow it from the second floor of the law school. But the national guardsmen sent word up there that no one was to be allowed in those windows. And I suppose today that would be a reasonable precaution. The Secret Service probably wouldn't let them get anywhere near there in order to protect the Federal personnel that were around.
So the integration of the University went forward from then on really without any problems at all.
There were several, but very few, problems from then on. Once in a while
a student would report some insult or remark that was made that really
wasn't funny. And there may have been some cases where black students
were made to feel quite
And there wasn't any real repercussion in any sense from outside the University—I mean from the Klan. I guess that by that time they had pretty much accepted the inevitable.
Well, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, black student after Vivian Malone was admitted was John Mitchell who played end on the football team. And actually was captain of the football team his last year, and was the first black coach that Bryant had. He kept him here as the coach after he graduated. Then Wendell Hudson came down and became a black basketball player. Both of them were successful; both of them were diplomatic in speaking to people. They didn't cause any problems, and they didn't act like the downtrodden, humble black either. They took what they thought to be theirs, and I think they deserve some credit for the way this thing has gone on.
I guess it was probably in Wallace's second term by the 1970s that he crowned the first black Homecoming Queen.
I remember that.
That was about ten years after integration?
Well, it was at least eight years anyway.
[END OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE B]
In March of 1967 Robert Kennedy spoke on campus here. Did you go to hear that or do you remember it?
Well, I heard him in one place and he spoke twice, and I only heard him one of the two. I remember he had a Hugo crowd, Foster Auditorium was filled up. But later when he came back, I'm not sure whether the Memorial Coliseum had been finished and they moved over there. But I didn't go to that one.
Somebody mentioned his speaking to ten thousand cheering students.
I think the Memorial Coliseum had been completed about the time he made his first talk. And then when he came back the next year, he had a huge crowd. I don't remember what his message was, but he got a good reception.
I doubt if that had too much to do with race relations or civil rights. He was popular because of his stand against the Viet Nam war.
Well that was part of it, and another thing he was a potential candidate
for President. And the first time he spoke was right after it became
pretty clear that he was not going to be receiving Lyndon Johnson's
support; at that time Lyndon hadn't taken himself out of the race, and
it seemed that Kennedy was speaking about improvement in the race
You had also indicated that during the time when you were trying to prepare the way for peaceful integration of the University you received a good many annoying phone calls. Were some of them threatening too?
Oh yes. We had calls to me and my family all day and all night—at most
any hour. I found out later that the group that was behind it was
actually the Ku Klux Klan. And they were assigning people whose duty it
was to call me andTimes—Henry Brandon covered the thing. He
spoke to me several times about how nice people had been to him. It
didn't seem to him that there was any great undercurrent of violence or
any real hatred involved. It was just a matter of breaking customs, and
I think that may have been a pretty fair solution. I don't think at that
time, outside the Ku Klux Klan and a few rabble who were easily roused,
we had any demonstration that people had any real hatred of blacks. They
were hoping that they wouldn't continue with their thrust for civil
rights, but the truth of the matter is that a great many people
recognized that they were not getting a fair shake. They just hoped
against hope that there would be some way to assure them of what they
were due without going through some kind of traumatic experience for
them to get it.
It probably would have gone off pretty quietly if it had not been for George Wallace.
I don't think there's any doubt that George Wallace did more to stir up ill feeling between the races than any of the local people did. That doesn't mean that there weren't some evidences of violence. As you know, later on we had the first African Baptist Church almost torn up by a mob.
That wasn't very long after . . .
Later that summer.
It was later in 1963 when the Reverend T. Y. Rogers became pastor there, and the Tuscaloosa Community Action Committee . . . Apparently that was closely related to Martin Luther King and the . . .
The Community Action Committee was made up pretty much of black preachers. There were some few white people who sympathized with them and met with them on occasion and a handful of black leaders who worked in various businesses; one or two had their own business. And they were taking a real risk in coming out front and demanding that something be done to correct the mistakes of the past, because what that meant was that their businesses were pinpointed by Ku Klux and people of that sort. I don't think there was any instance of a boycott or anything like that because most of the black businesses had only black customers.
The account that I read indicated that it was mostly a march from the Church to the courthouse. One of their targets was the segregated facilities in the courthouse. Ironical that the clash, where there was some violence there at the church, was less than a month before the Civil Rights Act went into effect.
T. Y. Rogers was a smart man. He had worked with Martin Luther King. He was not any important cog in King's machine. He had certainly been attached to it and was under the direction of Martin Luther King in some ways, but he was much more given to strident language than King was. Rogers was younger, and I don't recall his ever making an open threat. But he made several speeches in which it seemed that he was simply trying to inflame his black brethren against the whites. I remember on Brotherhood Sunday the following year, which was some day in February—I don't remember what date it was—I made a talk in the First African Baptist Church on "brotherhood," and Rogers preceded it by going back to the times telling about the discrimination against his mother and how she had been forced to work for white women taking care of their babies and that sort of thing, and really made it a little uncomfortable for me to talk to this group of people who were my friends, most of them—people who I knew downtown. And ignore what he had to say, because you couldn't talk about brotherhood when you talked about how badly somebody treated your mother. I don't think it was malicious; I just think that was the way he was leaning, and he felt that way.
Were the students at Stillman involved in this?
The students at Stillman were not involved in the situation with George
Wallace. The students at Stillman became very much involved in the
following summer. They burned a small building out there; Stokeley
Carmichael spoke
All of this was a part of the "rebellious sixties."
Yeah. This was largely directed against the Viet Nam war. This had to do more with recruiting on the campus. Army recruiters or Navy recruiters would come through trying to sign the students up for the military. That's when this kind of thing took place. It did not relate to what George Wallace was fussing about when he came over here. But it was just a continuation of a rebellious spirit that was pretty much stirred up when Wallace came and never really died down.
So there was continuation. But taking up the involvement in the commission that you and Blount were on, it had no connection with the Community Service.
No. That was a group which we formed after the Community Service—What's the name? Community Service is not the . . .
Community Relations Service. That was created in the Civil Rights Act of '64.
Community Relations Service. After it was done, the group met, went to Washington for indoctrination, and came back and worked with Governor Collins in several cities. One of which was Selma. This was before the march on the Selma bridge and the beating of the . . .
Wouldn't have been much before, though.
Not long, but it was in that period. And the hope was that if they could get any of this integration accomplished without violence, that the people would wake up to the fact that nobody was going to be really hurt by going to school with somebody of a different race. And the group that Red Blount and I were co-chairmen of was a statewide group. I don't have my files on it, and I don't recall the makeup of the committee, but it was one which was quite active. We met in Birmingham—Birmingham was the most serious spot at that time. Bull Connor was still there. We probably had a more violent confrontation in Birmingham than anywhere else, even in Selma. Because they had the history of the Freedom Riders being beaten and all that sort of thing.
Would this have been before the spring, '63 riots in Birmingham, when they had the fire hoses and the dogs and got so much publicity?
No. This group was not formed before that. It was formed shortly after that.
Bull Connor wasn't around much after that.
He was defeated for his race . . . They changed the form of government
which shuffled him out, and he ran for one of the places, and I guess
Albert Boutwell beat him. But the cleavage was still there between those
who supported him and his tactics and those who wanted do so something
better. Sid Smyer, who was head of the Birmingham Realty Corporation,
was at that time 67 or 68 years old; he died
Did that broaden out into a state-wide group?
No. That group worked with a state-wide group, and some of those on that
were on the state-wide group. I think Judge Coley, over in Alexander
City, was on the state-wide group. I really can't remember the names of
all the people who served on it, but the very fact that it existed gave
people some kind of a forum to go to. If they got into a dispute about
whether or not they were going to close down the bus station in some
small town, they could at least come to that committee and say send
somebody down there to talk to us and see what we can work out. Once you
got them talking, you could usually work one of these things out. The
main problem was to get the two together instead of
Did you ever go on any mission like that?
Oh, yea. I went to two or three places when we all seemed to get good results. And at that time we (and when I say we, I mean the state-wide committee) would get together and invite representatives from the black group in to try to work out a strategy for handling whatever dispute was arising. And I remember one of the people that came to visit with us one time, and was quite helpful, was Andy Young. Young was King's first deputy, you know. And one thing that everybody decided about Young was that if he gave his word about something you didn't have to worry about it. He would go ahead and get it done or call you and tell you why it couldn't be done. You would never be surprised about something going wrong. And there were two or three others who were equally good at that sort of thing. Of course this group had no enforcement power; they couldn't do anything . . . The Community Relations Service didn't have a lot, but it did have some. We had the help of some marshals; we had two or three people assigned to it who had been Federal marshals and were now assigned to the Community Relations Service. And they were very effective because they did have some teeth in their law—not a real strong law but it was at least something you could tie to.
Primarily it was a mediating group?
It was a mediation group, although I remember . . . I think I told you about Fred Miller, that big six foot six, 240 pound marshal that was assigned to them?
I don't know that we put it on tape.)
Well anyway he was in Albany, Georgia, and they had a big parade over
there and a confrontation and then a little violence. And, of course,
the police at that time with any kind of disturbance immediately grabbed
the blacks and threw them in jail, although they didn't limit it to
blacks. They would also get whites if they thought they were known Ku
Klux and that sort of thing. And this time they got one of the white
people who had come down to Albany to help lead the demonstration. He
was a white man, and I remember in the cafe, about two blocks from the
jail, a group of seven people were in there drinking beer or coffee or
something. They began to fuss about what we ought to do; "We ought not
have to waste the time of the county trying that so-and-so who was down
there in the jail. Why don't we go get him out and teach him a lesson?"
They saw Fred Miller over there; Fred was sitting at a table drinking
coffee. They began telling him what they were going to do: "Nothing you
can do to stop us; we are just gonna get that so-and-so. We are just
going to take him out and either give him a good beating or something
he'll remember." At any rate, they made it sound as if they were going
to start a lynching again. And after they had talked a few minutes, they
said something to him along this line: "You just wait around
He was one of those marshals or ex-marshals?
Yes, he had been appointed to a place in the Community Relations Service and assigned to Leroy Collins. Most of that work was persuasive; it was not confrontational.
And you went on some of those outside of the State, didn't you?
Yeah. They were working all over the South. Actually, as I recall, they were called into a couple of places up North. I didn't go up to those meetings. They had situations in Detroit, places like that, that had to be resolved some way.
Well now, shifting a little bit toward politics in the 1960s, how did you decide to become a delegate to the sixty-eight convention?
Well, that came about from the holdover from the fight for control of the State Democratic Executive Committee.
Because there was still a fight . . . )
Well they never did get a huge majority. We had a working majority, but
we never swept the Dixiecrats out, so to speak. I've forgotten when Bob
Vance was named chairman of that Committee, but in '68 he was the
chairman. And we were sitting there one day in the office of the State
Committee trying to decide whom we would try to encourage to run for
Now Bill Barnard in his book says that the Loyalists retained control of the State Democratic Committee despite Wallace except for certain changes in 1958 and 62. I don't know what they were; they must have been some minor alterations, probably about the oath you had to take or something.
Well, I'm sure that all that information is in the files of the Democratic Executive Committee. They've got a complete history on the thing, and I don't recall what the changes were. But we had some bitter battles with the Wallace group . . . just sheer out-and-out control of the Committee.
But they never won?
No. We managed to beat 'em there every time.
Of course, sixty-eight was when he ran on the third party, the American Party ticket.
Which really made the Democratic nomination almost hopeless in Alabama.
David Vann and I were co-chairmen of
I've forgotten; I don't have those figures in front of me either. But the electoral vote went for Wallace. Wallace carried five states as I recall.
Yea. He got the electoral vote. As I recall it, we managed to come in ahead of Nixon—how big his popular vote was. But not much ahead of him.
Of course, sixty-eight is kind of a turning point in a way. Here you have two Democrats, Jim Allen and Armistead Selden, running for that seat, and neither of them were anything like Lister Hill, I'd say.
Well, not only were they not like Lister Hill, but Armistead Selden later ran as a Republican; now Jim Allen never did. But Armistead officially changed his registration. He ran for a Senate seat against . . . Who was it, Heflin?
Heflin ran in '78 when Jim Allen died.
When did Armistead run as a Republican? I'm not sure whether it was the time when . . . What's the man's name who was defeated by Denton?—defeated by Folsom for the nomination. Don Stewart.
Don Stewart won in 1978—the Jim Allen seat.
Who did he beat?
Maryon Allen. Well that was for the nomination. Who did he beat? Selden was the Republican nominee either that time or the time before.
For some reason I didn't put the November elections [1978] down. So I'm not sure of that. [In the November, 1978, elections Heflin had no Republican opponent, and Steward Defeated Jim Martin, the Republican nominee.] She [Maryon Allen] served, of course, temporarily for a few months.
She was appointed for the unexpired term.
And then, of course, Heflin ran against Walter Flowers—that was in '78 [This would have been for Sparkman's seat, while the Stewart-M. Allen race was for J. Allen's seat]
Well, Selden must have run before that.
Must have. Now, Winton Blount ran against Sparkman in 1972.
Well, Winton Blount was another one who was never very certain whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. He was nominated by the Republican Party, but prior to that he had talked to the people in the surrounding community of Montgomery about running for governor against Wallace. And I recall Roy Noland telling me about the possibilities that Blount would run against Wallace—I guess at the time of the third term or the second, I've forgotten which, second, I guess, and he suggested the slogan, "Beat the runt with Winton Blount." I don't know whether it ever got beyond the talking stage or not.
Of course the gubernatorial election of 1970 was supposed to have been one of the most vicious, one of the dirtiest, mud-slinging ones-between Brewer and Wallace. I remember reading that Brewer really got pretty open support from the Republicans and Nixon.
Well, that's an example of what Sam Rayburn meant when he said, "If you just do these things that are unusual, you just teach your own people bad habits." Brewer was probably finished as a politician as soon as he took that money from the Republicans to run against Wallace in the Democratic primary. But it's true; he got a sizeable contribution to his campaign, and I don't know whether it was funds that were raised by the "Creep" group in trying to perpetuate Nixon in office or where it went or where it actually came from. But I'm under the impression that Maurice Stans was the one who raised the money which later came to Brewer. He's also been the treasurer of the Committee to Reelect the President.
"The Creep" group. And of course by 1972 Wallace was pinning his hopes on the Democratic nomination.
Well he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination when he was shot in Maryland, just outside the District.
By that time there was less racist appeal and more populist sort of appeal.
As soon as Wallace finished that first term, he began to talk about the
shortcomings of the Federal government—"Not a dime's worth of difference
between the two parties." And
And by the early 1970s you had some blacks being elected, and Wallace saw the potentiality of black voting in that thing.
Oh yes, as a matter of fact, until this past election, Alabama had the greatest number of elected blacks in office of any state in the country. It seems to me that Mississippi or Louisiana one either came up with somewhat similar numbers or greater numbers last time.
Now what was the origin or role of the National Democratic Party in Alabama?
That was the group that was headed by John Cashin in Huntsville. They were, I guess you might say, the Wallacites of the black people.
They considered themselves a separate party?
They qualified as a party; they were on the ballot as a party.
They weren't challenging the Democratic convention or anything?
No, but they started in the Democratic convention. And after they were shut out in '68, the group that I was a delegate with, were challenged by the National . . . the people who either then or later became the National Democratic Party. I don't know whether they adopted the name at that time or not. But they were demanding that they be seated because they had qualified as the National Democratic Party at that time. And they had qualified and received votes, and they contended that ours were illegal votes or illegal appointments, and were demanding of the Credentials Committee at the '68 convention that they be seated as true delegates from Alabama. And you recall that this was the same tactic that had been used four years earlier by the Mississippi group when Fannie Lou Hamer and some others were bodily carried out of the seats of the Mississippi delegation. That produced a great deal of grist for the TV mills, but it really didn't make a whole lot of difference in the state vote.
I noticed that the Reverend Rogers ran on that ticket for Congress in 1970. They were a separate party at that time.
I don't know when they began that—whether it was in '68 in order to go to
that convention or whether the National Democratic Party—I'll have to
look at the newspaper files to see whether they were created prior to
the '68 races. I'm under the impression that they were probably a little
earlier than that; that's the first time
END OF INTERVIEW