From Prohibitionist to New Deal Liberal: The Political Evolution of Colonel Harry Mell Ayers of the Anniston Star

From Prohibitionist to New Deal Liberal: The Political Evolution of Colonel Harry Mell Ayers of the Anniston Star IN EARLY DECEMBER 1902, AFTER TWO YEARS IN CHINA, Harry Mell Ayers, who would turn seventeen December 18, met with his father, Dr. Thomas W. “T. W.” Ayers, before returning home to Anniston, Alabama. A Southern Baptist medical missionary who built two hospitals in China, the elder Ayers knew of his son’s interest in journalism . Having owned and edited newspapers in Georgia and Alabama, the doctor had wielded his pen in many political campaigns and had even served as Democratic Party chairman for Alabama’s Fourth Congressional District. But T. W. Ayers warned his son to steer clear of politics. “For if I have an enemy in the world,” T. W. said, “that enemy was made during a political campaign.” Harry ignored his father’s advice. “He might just as well have told a duck to keep away from the water,” Harry later wrote.1 Young Ayers returned to Anniston, joined the staff of the Anniston Morning Hot Blast, once owned by his father, and began covering city politics. He soon developed a close friendship with city councilman Thomas E. Kilby, a banker and steel manufacturer. Though Ayers’s senior by twenty years, Kilby shared Ayers’s passion for reform and Prohibition. Kilby won two terms as Anniston’s mayor and served in the state legislature. Meanwhile, Ayers spent three years on the Hot KEVIN STOKER Kevin Stoker is associate dean for faculty affairs in the College of Mass Communications at Texas Tech University. He received his PhD from the University of Alabama. He wants to thank his mentor, E. Culpepper Clark, dean of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, for encouraging research on Colonel Ayers. He also thanks the editors of the Alabama Review, who showed Job-like patience on this project. 1 Harry M. Ayers, “Politics Born in Our Minds,” Anniston Star, undated newspaper clipping, Colonel Harry Mell Ayers Papers, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama (hereafter cited as Ayers Papers, UA). O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 263 Blast and then joined the paper’s afternoon competitor, the Anniston Evening Star. He rose through the ranks from reporter to news editor to managing editor. James B. Lloyd bought the Evening Star in 1910 and initially gave Ayers free rein over the news operations, but the two soon clashed over pay and editorial policy. He left the Star in 1910 and partnered with Kilby to buy the Morning Hot Blast from Coca Cola executive Veazey Rainwater; a year later he bought out the Evening Star. By 1914, Kilby had sold his portion of the paper to Ayers, and the consolidated newspapers backed Kilby’s successful bid for lieutenant governor. Four years later, Ayers managed Kilby’s campaign for the state’s top political job, crisscrossing the state with the candidate, writing speeches, and meeting with fellow editors. Kilby won the election and was sworn in as governor in January 1919. Governor Kilby appointed his thirty-one-year-old friend a lieutenant colonel in the National Guard and from then on the “well-known and prominent” Ayers became known as the Colonel.2 One of Kilby’s supporters was former Alabama Governor Braxton Bragg Comer, who had similarly started his political career with a rapid climb to the governor’s chair. “As to the game of politics,” Comer wrote in 1918, “I never yet know a man to be willing to stay out of the game, all of them believe they can get it, that it would be easy and that they will have a nice and profitable time.” With Kilby’s victory, Ayers was having a good time and profiting from his friend’s success, but the “peculiar forces of the 1920s” were about to change the game—and Kilby and Ayers along with it.3 Southern historian George Brown Tindall defined those peculiar forces as “prohibition, fundamentalism, nativism, religious bigotry , and the nascent middle-class Republicanism.” They combined to break up the solid South in 1928 and helped...