Race, Wallace, and the "9-8" Plan: The Defeat of Carl Elliott

Race, Wallace, and the “9-8” Plan: The Defeat of Carl Elliott IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, THE COST OF COURAGE, Carl Elliot recalled with obvious pride the tribute his House colleagues gave him in 1964 at the end of his sixteen-year congressional career. After a difficult campaign and coming in ninth in the 1964 Democratic statewide primary runoff, Elliott felt vindicated by the praise of his fellow congressmen. He was particularly touched by the speech of Missouri congressman Dick Bolling, whose closing words were, “His fault, if any, was foresight . His guilt, if any, was courage.” Elliott appears to have been another victim on the list of southern politicians unwilling to bow to segregationists amid a growing anti-integrationist sentiment that, in Alabama, led to Governor George Wallace’s near-total control of state politics. Elliott, however, was not particularly liberal on racial issues and was by most definitions a segregationist. He signed the Southern Manifesto, which opposed the integration of public schools and facilities . He believed the civil rights movement was moving too fast and that going slower, with fewer confrontational integration strategies , would limit the possibilities for violence and resentment. Elliott asserted publicly in the early 1960s that he was against integration. His record generally confirmed his conservative stand on civil rights: Elliott consistently voted against civil rights legislation, even voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a member of the House Rules Committee.1 The defeat of Carl Elliott is instructive about the nature of the reactionary politics of the 1960s in Alabama. Segregationist beliefs were not sufficient to hold onto a political office, even for a seven-term C H A R L E S K . R O B E R T S Charles K. Roberts is a graduate student at the University of Alabama. His primary research interests are in the modern South. The author would like to thank the staff of the Alabama Review, his dissertation adviser Dr. Kari Frederickson, his parents, and his wife, Lauren. 1 Carl Elliott Sr. and Michael D’Orso, The Cost of Courage: The Journey of an American Congressman (Tuscaloosa, 1992), 258, 180, 236–37, 247. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 114 congressman who had brought a great deal of federal money to his state. A politician also had to express states’-rights political convictions and, above all else in Alabama, avoid the ire of George Wallace. Elliott’s defeat also demonstrates the importance of political structures and institutions. Just as gerrymandered legislative districts and carefully structured state constitutions had amplified slaveholder and rural white power in the previous century, so too did the power of integrationist sentiment, amplified by an unbalanced legislature and curious electoral formats, cripple the political hopes of Alabama liberals in the early 1960s, most obviously in the case of Elliott. The Alabama legislature was biased in favor of rural and Black Belt counties , whose representatives refused to give up their advantage when redistricting and reapportionment required substantial changes. Gridlock during the 1961 legislative session led to the novel 9-8 plan, in which congressional candidates ran at large, a situation that virtually guaranteed that segregationists would target vulnerable liberal congressmen. Elliott survived the 1962 race, but when George Wallace became governor and organized Alabama’s segregationist movement towards his own purposes, Elliott faced an insurmountable challenge. In the 1960s champions of reactionary, racial politics gained more influence in Alabama. The surge that swept Elliott from office was part of a larger development in Alabama and southern politics. During the New Deal, liberalism had primarily defined itself economically , which made it possible for southerners to present themselves as both liberals and segregationists. In part because of growing anticommunist sentiment and in part because racial problems seemed more urgent, liberalism after World War II increasingly defined itself in terms of the issue of race. This created a difficult situation for many southern politicians who thought of themselves as liberals but who could not, for political reasons, publicly affirm anything but segregation . Elliott’s biographer writes that Alabama Senator Lister Hill...