Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER FOUR: Oafs of Office

125 chapter four Oafs of Office Being a conservative can be cool and, as Mitchell puts it, not “just something that wacko people in Alabama do.” —john colapinto quoting charles mitchell,   “Armies of the Right” O God, we painfully recognize that all too often the only list which Alabama heads is the alphabetical one. —rev. hugh tobias, Trinity Baptist Church, Madison, Alabama In January 1987, as the administration of Elder Guy Hunt began, Circuit Judge Charles Price, an African American Democrat appointed during the final Wallace term, considered the new makeup of the state’s executive and legislative branches: “They’re all in bed together. The Democratic Legislature now is controlled by the Business Council and the Farm Bureau and your very conservative pro-business elements. There’s not going to be any concern about minorities.”1 For his part, Governor Hunt made only one black appointment out of some two-dozen cabinet-level positions .2 As Price anticipated, thanks to Jimmy Clark, the conservative Democrat who was elected as new house speaker, no African Americans were to be found on important committees in the legislature, or as committee chairs. “I think it is time we talk about racism in Alabama politics,” complained Senator Michael Figures of Mobile. “We need to really start pointing the finger in this state because black people are not going anywhere here.”3 Hunt and the legislature quickly passed a tort reform package that would cap liability awards. The state supreme court, not yet under the sway of Republican justices supported by the Business Council of Alabama, struck 126 • chapter four down the legislation. Things grew testier. The governor’s taxation and educational reform commissions offered recommendations, including increasing revenues for education, that were at odds with what legislators would accept. Several poor counties sued the state for failing to provide public education funding equivalent to that of wealthy counties.4 Hunt fiercely opposed, and appealed , a state circuit court decision against flying the Confederate battle flag atop the state capitol where George Wallace had placed it in 1963 in defiance of school desegregation efforts.5 In his inaugural address, Hunt had pledged to “leave no stone unturned to make it clear that the business climate is second to none.”6 In practice, Hunt’s search under rocks tempted industry with paleoeconomic incentives such as giveaways of site locations and development, tax breaks, exemptions, deferments , and cheap, non-union labor. As rural Alabama became sited as the nation ’s chemical septic tank, the ineffectual Hunt failed in efforts to stop incoming shipments of toxic waste and in his attempt to levy higher out-of-state than in-state taxes for toxics hauled to the vast ChemWaste site —known as the “toxic waste Cadillac”—near Emelle in the Selma Chalk at the western edge of the Black Belt.7 When the gubernatorial season loomed again in 1990, Republican strategist and state chairman John E. Grenier, a right-wing zealot since the 1964 Goldwater campaign, worked openly to establish “racial separation of the parties.” The Republicans would become the white people’s party, and “racial antagonisms,” observed Howell Raines, “will enable Hunt to withstand the Democrats’ charge that he is the puppet of the banks and insurance, oil, steel and forest-products companies represented by Grenier’s Birmingham law firm.”8 The Democrats’ hopes for recapturing the governor’s office from Guy Hunt lay with fifty-four-year-old Paul Hubbert, former teacher and school administrator who, over two decades, had built the Alabama Education Association (aea) into one of the state’s most powerful lobbying forces. Through its political action arm, a-vote, the aea’s seventy thousand members, primarily teachers but also janitors and bus drivers, provided millions of dollars in support of endorsed candidates. Political tactician Hubbert was said to sit in the balcony of the state house or senate and signal thumbs up or down to a bevy of legislators on the floor. Across racial lines, Hubbert worked with a variety of Democratic loyalists and organizations. The state Sierra Club, for instance, Oafs of Office • 127 hoped a Hubbert administration would help get the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (adem) out from under the heavy-metal thumb of water and air polluters.9 In his first campaign for statewide office, Hubbert dared to suggest that George Wallace might have led the state astray. “The Democratic campaign,” wrote Raines, “has an inescapable...