Conscience of a Congressman: The Life and Times of Carl Elliott

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and segregation for others. It might have fared my political well-being in the past, and it might spread in the days. I mean, it hurts the federal government, and shall never at the top of my voice. But I'm not going to do it. I didn't do it during the 16 years of our represented Alabama's Congress, and I'm not going to do it today, for for forever or ever. I call Elliot never lost the essence of being a politician and the politicians at the desk, and that is commitment to principle. And he truly believes in his heart that being the conscience of America that I am,

I should be I am my brother's keeper, and he wrote it for that actually all the time. He was very good at actually translating an idea in the law. He could combine the pragmatism with ideal as well as anyone I ever know. His legacy sort of is his long-planned record, and he can somewhat feel not somewhat we can still hear the music. This is the story of a rare individual. A southern politician who challenged his culture and helped to change it. But for all the respect he enjoyed among his peers, he was never widely known by the General Public, and was later almost entirely forgotten in his own state. His work produced profound and lasting effects, which shaped the future of his country. Yet as a congressman, he was content with a yeoman's role reflective of his humble origins.

Hello, I'm Julian Bond. Former Alabama congressman Carl Elliott was the first recipient of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation Award for Political Courage, and there is plenty of evidence to support that selection. But while he can now savor his successes, Elliott must also live with the compromises it took to ensure them. Some of those compromises he regrets. In the end, history will not single him out. In many ways, he was merely an average man, reacting to extraordinary times. But his greatest achievement may lie in that fact that he remained first and always representative of common people, not unlike Mr. Smith in Washington, a Jeffersonian model alive and well in the 20th century. His story then is ultimately an American story, about an America trying to be its best. There were those who said, in my case, that I was a hit of my time,

but they were wrong. I believe that I was always behind the times and loved the band. Thank you. I'm not a man who shows much emotion. I can't remember crying too many times in my life.

I cried when my son died. I know that. And when my wife died, I cried again. But normally, I don't show much personal feelings. So all those folks at the Boston probably didn't know how I felt when they brought me out in front of that crowd. I really didn't have an answer to all those reporters' questions, at least not the simple answers they might have hoped to hear. There's nothing simple about all of this, not now, not back then. And this is a part of the prologue of the book, which I've just finished. That book is in the hand. A family gathering in Northwestern Alabama, Hill Country. There are no plantations here. It's a land of coal miners and small farmers, independent, white, and cool. Some of their ancestors battled the British,

and came here to fight Indians with Andy Jackson. When Alabama left the Union, one county declared itself a free state. A rich man's war and a poor man's fight, some call it. 3,000 of them wore blue. 70 years later, the South had come to be called the nation's number one economic problem, but distinctions of caste and class remained. Slavery had been replaced by sharecropping on the plantations, sometimes with little practical difference. Workers in the mostly extractive new industries often fared no better. Political power was concentrated in the hands of the owners, a conservative platter industrialist alliance. Meanwhile, Hill Country whites returned to their independent isolation, forging a long but wary compact with their more well-to-do cousins. Into this world was born the grandson of Andrew Jackson Massey, on December 20th, 1913. The first of the nine children of Will and Nora Elliott.

Like most small farmers, the family raised their own food, plus what they could manage to grow for cash. One year, the income from the sale of cotton total $3.30. And we would come home from school, and we would go right into cotton picket, but just about everyone I was swarming away from that environment thought there must be something better out there. This is a field that we worked in. This is where Carl grew up. This was his old home. Just across and here's a railroad. That's where Carl Wolkbaum hit the railroad. And went to Vienna to be Jonathan to the school down. The rare brooms down. Carl would get on the stage if he'd make one of the most dramatic speeches you've ever heard about some day becoming hungry. Well, it had always been my ambition to run for Congress. I've got to work that in. When I was eight years old, my father carried me into here Will Bankhead,

speak at Vana, Alabama. William Bankhead was the speaker of the House of Representatives, son of Senator John Bankhead, and father of the irrepressible actress Talula. I was absolutely thrilled to death by hearing Will Bankhead speak. So I went back to school the next day. I was in the third grade at that time. She asked all of us to stand, each one by one, stand, and state his ambition in life. And when it came my time to stand, I stood and said, I'd like to be a member of Congress from this section of Alabama, this district of Alabama. And everybody in the class, why? Hugo Black, Senator and Supreme Court Justice to be, was among others he met. So was Tom Hefflin. Hefflin was known as a spell bonding speaker, but also as a notorious racial demagogue.

The race card might be played by any ambitious politician, but it was a favorite of the conservative elite for preventing political unity between the masses of poor whites and blacks. Race was not a political issue for the elites or the masses, who tended to make up their own minds about most political issues. They had not been unionist, and the Civil War stories young Carl Herd from family members who remembered it, carried a certain sland. And I thought I grew up thinking that the South won that war, and I was terribly surprised when few years later, I learned that we didn't win it at all. They proved less traditional when the women's suffrage movement came about, and Carl helped his mother campaign for it. But it wasn't long until he then began to make fun of us, but my mother impressed me very much, always with how hard she worked at the things she undertook. But it has been a long time.

A long time since I was a boy growing up in a long cabin and staying up late at night to read books by the living room firelight. Books about America, books that made me dream, there could be nothing. Political and educational opportunities were linked for Ellen, and it was family that sparked his interest in both. A book on the president's from his father, a 100-volume library from his uncle, Bob Ray, to further his reputation as a prodigy. After his grandmother, Elliot, taught him to read the entire Bible by the time he was fine. Teachers were very fond of him. Because they knew what they called on Carl and get an excellent answer. And to the point, he was just an honor student. I always thought of Carl looking like Abraham Lincoln. And I guess he graduated from high school when he was 16, and he must have been almost six feet. And we just looked upon him as a sort of a second father, an older man, and much older than the rest of us.

And the admiration was beyond belief. And I can remember when he went to the university, he and a friend of his, and they left about $3 in their pockets each. The Hitchhiker's destination, the University of Alabama, lay in plantation country, built by planters to educate their sons, and later, somewhat reluctantly, their daughters. In the depression year of 1930, it was struggling to stay afloat. At the helm was a somewhat cantankerous Virginia Patricia by the name of George H. Dennis. Elliot went straight to Denny's door and announced that he was ready to win Rome. I don't know how I got involved in this alternative truth, but I didn't see any problem with that. I just went in. But he said, no, he can't do that now. I said, you can't do it. I said, go home and save your money. And come back here and you can go to the university. And I told him I wasn't going to do that. I was going to go there. And he said, well, I don't know how. Well, that was the observatory itself, right there.

That's right, right there. And this was my room. I didn't have anybody's mission. I just moved in. After a first night on campus, sleeping under a truck, Elliot moved into an abandoned building with a dozen other young squatters who slept on cots. Heeded with scavenge cold, cooked on camp stoves, and bartered for dormitory baths. To pay tuition, he became a groundskeeper, a delivery boy, a janitor, and for a time, Dr. Denny's houseboy. Then a fellow came along, warned me to give away chewing gum for it. And I did that a little while, but I gave away so much of it that he had soon fired me. While head waiter at the campus dining hall, he unionized his fellow workers. He had occasion to meet a fellow farmboy named Paul Bryant, and the future Lady Bird Johnson. He spilled a pitcher of water in her land. Although work sometimes postponed studying until midnight, Elliot earned a history degree in three years,

and a law degree in three more. But he still found time for his other great passion, politics. I am fighting as I always have for it, for the rights of the little man, as well as the big man. For the week as well as the... Somehow or other, I got near radio. I didn't buy it. I barred it, and we held an open house at the old observatory that night for this DR was being elected. And I think, I would say, that that was the most exciting night, and heard of spending politics. The common man's presence had been elected. All hail to Mr. Roosevelt to the hero of the hour. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Franklin Roosevelt on the formative political mind of a poor southern boy in 1932. As to a card player, a new deal meant a fresh start. Instead of being some project of socialism,

the Tennessee Valley Authority, you know, brought electricity to people. Crop supports minimum wage and social security. All these things were a heritage from FDR and that Carl is young man could see the visible fruits of this planting, this seed planting. And of course he wanted to continue it. Four years later, Eliot would meet his political idol while representing the university as its student body president. He was in Washington to testify before Congress on behalf of federal scholarships for college students. It would be far from his last experience with that subject or that place. Music 1936 saw Franklin Roosevelt return to the White House. Elected by a wide margin over a public anomaly, outland. Key to his victory was the solid south and large measure his new deal was being dealt.

In another region still suffering from military defeat and economic crisis, an alabamian named Jesse Owens overpowered notions of racial superiority. And back in his home state, according to legend, a Franklin County jury form and explained his verdict, saying that it was more important for Carl Eliot to win his first case than for some fellow to get convicted over a little flare up that didn't amount to much. After moving to Jasper at the center of the congressional district, Eliot built his practice battling coal companies on behalf of injured minors. A fellow champion of the common man, Big Jim Folsom ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1942 and Eliot headed his local campaign. As he did when later elected, Folsom targeted the planters and industrialists, whom he labeled the big mules with the People's Platform promising sweeping populace reform. He was, to my way of thinking, was a great problem.

Jim never quite accomplished, but he had a heart as big as a water buddy. Meanwhile, at a political gathering, Eliot had his first meeting with another young politician. He came up to him and told me that he heard some very good things about me and that I was a friend of the common man. I don't know what I want to say. But I should have. His name, he said, was George Wallace. Eliot's own political ambitions were delayed by World War II. The war years also saw his marriage to Jane Hamilton and the birth of their first son, Carl Jr. But in 1948, the time had come. Flaunting his Jacksonian credentials and his support for veterans, unions and education, Eliot launched his campaign. Joining the battle as he would

for the rest of Eliot's career was Garb Ivy. Ivy had quit school to support his family evicted from mining company housing after the murder of his father. The WPA rescued him. His determination earned him Eliot's enduring support and he became a sort of one-man kitchen cabinet. Eliot's assurance that those he called his people would always have his ear. They apparently did not have that of his opponent, Carter Manasco, who had succeeded William Bankhead and who was supported by his organization. Twice Manasco had come home to ask Bankhead son Walter if they should start to campaign. He said, didn't time, Carter. Didn't many days fast, though. They recognized that we were way up and front. We had gone to see the people to grasp group people. And Carter would see Walter Will. And said, Mr. Bankhead, what about the election? He said, Carter is too damn lucky. Eliot took 60% of the vote.

He had at last realized the ambition he had held since the age of eight. But I worked on it to practice the full time for 24 years and finally achieved it. When I get to thinking some time that I've been kind of smart about something, I think of that. And I said, I've got a fellow that takes him 24 years to get elected to Congress. Can't claim any in his smarts, whatsoever. And that you go well and faithfully discharge the duties of an office upon which you're about to enter so that you're gone. Carl Eliot becomes Congressman Eliot on January 3rd, 1949. It is the country's 81st Congress and he appears on the cover of its director. Among his fellow freshman, Gerald Ford, Eugene McCarthy, and Lloyd Benson. Returning for second terms, Richard Nixon, and John F. Kennedy. Eliot moves his growing family

into a brick bungalow in a pleasant, tree-lined Washington neighborhood. But except for weekends, he spends little time with him. He's a skilled legislator. He was a good student of government. And just to work a hollock, he was working all the time. Establishing a daily routine often spanning 18 hours, he takes particular pride in personally helping constituents to get rural male delivery or veterans benefit. He sponsors Public Works legislation, Waterway Development, Highway Expansion, and one of the most extensive programs of public housing in the nation, but his ambition stretched beyond his district. I feel that a member of Congress has a two-hat. One is he's got to satisfy his own from stations, whatever kind of nature

in his district. But secondly, a Congresswoman, I think, is a Congresswoman for the United States of America. Again, his overriding concern was what he saw as the lack of access to quality education for people of all classes. It became his mission. I would hate to think that everybody had to do the things I did to become a fairly educated person. And I felt that the need for black education in the South was staggering. So I thought we could maybe use education as a lemon to achieve other social and economic goals that blacks and whites might have. Eliot's first major piece of legislation concerned federal aid to education, and he personally asked the president for his support.

He said, oh, Carl, he said, you got to be practical about these things. There's not going to be in a federal aid to education, probably in your lifetime. And I was awful disappointed, but I thanked him and I left, and I decided soon thereafter that I wasn't on the right committee. But when Eliot succeeded in joining the education and labor committee about a year later, he faced its chairman, Graham Barton, who it was said, regarded liberals and their legislation as a Muslim regards pork. He had a great fear of anything that changed established patterns of doing things. He wanted nothing to do with the civil rights movement. He wanted nothing to do with federal aid to education matters of that kind. He viewed with grave alarm. But Eliot and McGovern became part of a liberal faction whose strength was growing. The first major victory,

the 1956 Library Services Act, brought rural libraries and bookmobiles to 300 American counties where there were none. But it was only a skirmish compared with the battle that would follow. So far, federal aid to education had consisted of two laws, reserving public land for schools and colleges. No bill providing federal money for buildings, equipment, or tuition had ever passed. When I thought it'd be a pretty nice thing for a country bumpkin from a North Alabama to be the author of that thing. I am hopeful that the Congress will immediately face up to its responsibility of Eliot and Tintley focused upon that goal for the next two years. A media campaign, extensive legislative research, and a nationwide tour of schools advance the cause. So did luck. Today,

a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket. October 1957, the space race scarcely begun. The United States has left at the starting block in the mind of the public panic replaces apathy. As soon as I saw that happening, I returned to Washington to Dr. Senator Hill, who was advocating the same bill in the Senate, and I said Senator the time has come. The namesake of Sir Joseph Lister, with whom his father had studied medicine, Lister Hill was a progressive advocate of new deal health care legislation. Like Elliott, he had also championed federal aid to education with a similar lack of success. With the iron now hot, the two joined forces to strike. Barricated in Birmingham's Tuttweiler Hotel, they spent the Christmas recess of 1957 hammering out the bill they now called

the National Defense Education Act. Mary Allen Jolly was there. It was my recollection of the meeting in Birmingham was that there was a long review of all the things that we had done that failed. And nobody had ever tried to do anything that related education to the National Defense. And it was a kind of practical political decision. Well, if we can make that work, let's do it. We have no problem with that. We came down, we beat it back to Washington and we started really in a minor work to hard in my life. It took eight months. Elliot and Hill brought in a series of star witnesses. The celebrities of science. Vernon Ron Brown Edward Teller and others they coerced bartered and co co finally on August 23

1958 The final version of the National Defense Education Act passed the house by 2012 to 85 and became public law 864 in its first 10 years alone it would spend in excess of three billion dollars and provide loans to over a million and half students. The whole national defense education act was the whole for the whole new frontier legislation I believe the progressive legislation of Kennedy and Johnson years. I'm most proud of the National Defense Education Act and the other acts of educational legislation which I sponsored then got passed I if I'm to be judged by anything

that I did during the period of my time in Congress. I'd rather be judged for that. I would be judged for that. It is one of the great ironies of Eliot's political career that within his proud to achieve the seeds of the federal government and the federal government and the federal government and the it is another great irony that the decline of new de all the new prosperity was breeding conservatism Roosevelt himself was dead and when heir apparent harry Truman sent an anti segregation measure to Congress the long dormant conservative alliance awoke they saw the ability to take the good support their

economic interest under the cover of opposing racial change the opportunity was not lost when the democratic convention convened in Philadelphia half the Alabama delegates were unplished and had promised to walk out if a strong civil rights as the so-called dixie crats made good their threat delegation chairman lister hill stayed behind with the laurels so did a young state representative by the name of Wallace two weeks later at the dixie crats own convention in Birmingham a former baseball announcer bull Connor introduced the delegates while nominee strong Thurman would carry only four by the stepping stone between democratic and

republican lorities and the south but in congress the death of the new deal was still highly exaggerated even by the late fifties because of its delegation the nation magazine the nation magazine and Jim Folsom was governor this progressive coalition would survive McCarthy and Eisenhower to greet the decade that became a metaphor for change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. ... ... .... ... ... .... .... ..... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

.. .. ... .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . … .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ... I do not speak for my church on public matters. And the church does not speak for me. Whatever. Race had not yet been used against Kennedy, but religion had. Now speaking in a series of small group meetings called Cauphies for Kennedy, Elliot comforted the same fears as he and his father for 1928 Catholic nominee, Al Smith. When we finished, we had broken in this district to a great extent. The prejudice against Kennedy different being a Catholic. I thought it was a beautiful job.

And I'm proud myself that I had an opportunity to take part in that. Back on our boards again, we have taken a look at the national total first. The national total for Mr. Nixon is 30,000, 819, 184. For Kennedy, 31, 326, 151. By the morning after election night, it was clear that the old Democratic coalition had held, though barely and for the last time. A handful of Dixie Craddie lecturers notwithstanding, Kennedy had swept the deep south. He took Alabama by just 57,000 votes, but his greatest plurality had come from Elliot's district. So let us begin anew. Among the invited guests on inauguration day were some who had never before left the North Alabama hills.

At the head of the parade, daughters of coal miners from Carbon Hill High marched in the 22-degree chill, warmed only by their pride. They did not own leotards. The president's honeymoon was short. As the new frontier moved into the White House, the old guard awaited in Congress. Republicans and conservative Democrats on key committees stood ready to block Kennedy's legislation. The most critical was the powerful 12-member House Rules Committee, dominated by its chairman. Judge Howard Smith, who often voted with the Republican minority. To an important legislation, the vote would be a 66 vote. And we had more luck legislation. And the judge would not bring up the legislation that the Speaker wanted and that the party wanted.

Kennedy's solution was to expand the committee by three. nominees would all be progressives. One would be Elliot. And Jack Kennedy knew him, respected him, admired him, and appreciated him. And I always figured he could nominate the committee because the president personally asked Sam Raven. The president and his brother Robert lobbied for the expansion. So did Lyndon Johnson. The pressure was so intense, it was said, that some congressman literally hid. Kennedy won by five votes. And Elliot took the seat from which he often cast the swing vote for the new frontier. He used his position in the House to make it easier to get civil rights legislation onto the floor. So he helped vote a political legislation that would help do immigrants, blacks, poor southerners, or whoever you were. Strong, stand up, man. At times, loyalty had its rewards.

During Kennedy's last southeastern visit in May of 1963, Elliot gave the president a tour. We started out on that helicopter, and we got out of the world for AIDS. And he seemed to appreciate it and pray to you. And he would ask questions about how these people made him live and what they did and so on. That said, there's no one to live in and find when he died in the world that's ever had a path of a water-worked system in over a plenty of water. And he laughed about that, and he thought that was funny. I don't know why, but I never did think it was very funny. He called his chief legislative man at that time. And he said, I want him to have these two water projects. And I want you to have on his desk in the morning a telegram or a proof in both of them. That's the way the Russellville got its $750 for the project and the way of honor got its $200,000.

Among the crowd, when the entourage reached unspilled, was to Lula Banken. Before his speech, Kennedy asked Elliot to invite her on stage. He said, well, darling, don't ever put it down. I'd like to sit on the stage with John F. Kennedy. I've supported him. I love him. I think he's the most wonderful president we've had in a long time. But she said, I don't sit on the stage with George Wallace anywhere at any time or any place. And I went back and told him, and I can see him now. I'm just tickled to death. Well, George, when he hears me and that I've been telling that, he always gets fears to get offended by it. But it was Wallace who would have the last laugh. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow.

Having kept his vow never to be outmaneuvered on the race issue, Wallace's 1962 election heralded an era in which men like Carl Elliott would have a little place. But Elliot returned the fire in a speech that referred to political extremists, as loud mouth no nothing, and intellectual nitwits. Did he hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the central government? The escalation continued as Wallace's symbolic stand in the schoolhouse door further legitimized an attitude of defiance against civil rights and the federal government. A worldwide television audience heard Martin Luther King's eloquent vision of the American dream. But they also saw Bull Connor's police dogs and firehoses, the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the loss of four young girls in the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church. In one of their last conversations, Elliot talked with the president about how far

the political polarization had gone, and the chances for white Southern compromise. He said, something has got to be done. He said, could you do anything about it? And I said, no, I can't. I said, it's out of my hand. It's been gone beyond the place that I might have been able to do anything about it. He said, well, I sure am sad. And that was the end of that conversation. Before the year was over, Kennedy was dead. When the news came that he had been shot, there were school children in Alabama who cheered. The Wallace Organization singled out Egypt, singled him out for what he had done on the House Rules Committee, and they got him. I mean, it would take an awfully innocent view of politics to think anything else.

1964 was the year of reckoning. Alabama's population loss in the 1960 census required the elimination of one congressman in an at-large election. In May, a confederation of Dixie Crats and white supremacists calling itself the United Conservative Coalition met in Montgomery's Jefferson Davis Hotel to coordinate efforts against a single candidate. The target would be Elliot. The weapon would be race. I didn't want to be a naught on the log in Congress. I wanted to get it a prediction where your voice would mean something. While Elliot stressed his achievements, it became clear that the pending civil rights bill of 1964 would be the hot button issue that would confront him with the greatest moral and political dilemma of his career. And we want to send you back up while you can keep up the good fight against this vicious bill that they're trying to put over. Thank you, Bill.

I really think the time had come for the Black man to have his rights. And I was sorry that I was not in position to help. More than I was. And there was no saying that some of us liberals had that what profit is, what profit is it? A man to do good for all the whole of humanity. When by doing so, he lost his seat in the house. You know, it's always difficult. It's a political or figure to know when to compromise and when not to. I mean, you know when to hold him and know when to fold him. I mean, it's your face to that constantly. If he didn't campaign in a sudden way, it was possible that someone else would defeat him and be much worse, more to the right, much more conservative.

You know, he was a dead pigeon, a dead duck that he wouldn't have been in the Congress of the United States. And he had not gone to the root that he had. He had plans that he was that he had hoped for for America that he would be able to get through the Congress of the United States. And in retrospect, he did the right thing. What he did was to choose expediency. Like Hill, he had signed the so-called Southern Manifesto Against Integration. Like a younger Lyndon Johnson, he had outwardly opposed civil rights. Now he used that record in the campaign. And I'm against with you. I'm against the civil rights bill in 1964. I oppose the civil rights bill to that year. I oppose the civil rights bill to every year. I oppose the civil rights bill of 19. I remember thinking strongly about both for it, but I didn't have the gut trying to guess you'd say too well. To do it, that was a condition of the times, you know.

I think that any bowels to racism by progressive politicians were harmful to the state. And I'm not going to endorse that behavior by Carlisle or any politician. He did the best he could. Was the best was the best enough? No, absolutely not. But under those circumstances, he did the best he personally could. Well, there's no question, that kind of an issue, really tore up a person like Carlisle yet. I mean, tore him up inside, because his instincts would be to go with the civil rights proposals. He was essentially a person of justice. Nobody had an excuse for them against that. I said, for a few numbers like myself. And I look back on it now, and I wish I had gone further in that field that I did.

But meanwhile, Wallace applied pressure from the right, inviting the congressman to imply support for his first presidential bid by appearing on stage with him in Maryland. It didn't want to go in Bob Jones, so the story goes fortified himself with a couple of drinks we got on the plane because he was feeling so bad about going. And they got up in the air, and not far out of Washington, hit this immense air pocket, and the plane dropped suddenly at 4,500 feet, and Carl was sitting up at the front and bobbed in the back. They said that Bob, when they dropped like that, Bob hollered to Carlisle, and Carlisle knew it, said, God's going to get us for going over here with Wallace so I know we'll never get back on the ground again. Elliott succeeded in defeating Wallace floor leader Tom Bevel in the district race by healthy margin. But just prior to the statewide primary, the coalition circulated sample ballots

omitting Elliott's name. Others headed by the Wallace slogan, stand up for Alabama, were also distributed, and were widely rumored to have been carried by state trooper cars. Wallace denied any involvement. On election day, Elliott garnered support from over 3 quarters of the 380,000 voters who went to the polls. But he was last by a percentage point, and he was out. I already knew my chance to go back to Congress was, what do they say, Zils? Well, when I was moving away from Washington, I'd been thinking a good deal about what my future might hold, and I had several things I wanted to do. I wanted to complete through in the towel, but the racial issue kept getting worse and worse and worse. As long as George was in charge of it,

it couldn't do anything but get worse. In practice, Wallace's use of state troopers to physically bar school integration and their violence against Selma voting rights activists ultimately sped the progress of both causes. But there had been a backlash against events like the urban riots of the mid-60s, claiming 43% of the 1964 vote in one northern primary. He was looking to 68, but he needed the governorship as a springboard, an Alabama law forbade his succession. During a special session called to change the law, one state senator compared Wallace's racial appeals to those of Adolf Hitler, and he and wyffler lean left the state house in rare defeat. Ladies and gentlemen, I will be a candidate for governor of Alabama. But not for long. Mrs. Wallace's announcement in February of 1966

made it clear that if she were elected, her husband would in effect remain in office. Meanwhile, still smarting from his own treatment by the governor and did odds with his politics of defiance, Elliot disregarded most advisers and launched his own campaign with a distinctively anti-Wallace tone. All Elliot has never attempted to stir up racial strife and bitterness in this state we love to serve his own end, and he never will. He saw himself as a voice of reason and moderation. He had good initial support from Birmingham businesses, plus farmers, teachers, and labor, and he hoped to add blacks. Among ten candidates, his early efforts were promising. Aided by a 17-year-old Hank Williams, Jr., his rallies were drawing crowds of up to 6,000, but hoped dwindle with support, and white extremists again began to dictate the tone of the campaign.

They just wanted to ruin Carl Elliot, and I do believe they have fun doing it. Oh, we're almost niggers in our schools. We're not far out of integration. He's those niggers in there. Makes you have a better nation. They just give me hell about it. Some of them shot at my cars. They planned toward down my signs, all over the state here, written great chunks out of them, of course, my face. Yeah, they say, well, they're your lover, and they'd hollow that from the crowd, and I don't mean not just a little of that. I mean a lot of it. The only question that was asked of any political figure in the state of Alabama was, was, you for George or again him with eyes narrowed, and you better say you for him.

By April, the Wallace's were sure thing. The only hope for the others lay in second place and to run off. Elliot assumed that his record would earn him the now critical quarter million newly registered black votes without the need for a direct appeal, nearly certain to alienate all but the most progressive whites. What we need today in Alabama is unity. But another candidate was not afraid of that risk. Once a Dixie Cratt known for racial anecdotes, later an outspoken Wallace critic, state attorney General Richmond Flowers now prosecuted crimes against civil rights activists, and saying, we shall overcome in black churches. Despite some local black endorsement, Elliot knew that his subtle undertones were no match for such direct grassroots appeal. He decided to go directly but quietly to Dr. King himself in a meeting at the Birmingham airport. According to Elliot, King apologized but refused his support, explaining that Flowers rank and file appeal was already too great. He said, if you lead somebody,

you got to do some things that they want to do, and he said, that was the best thing. Best way out with me, he said, it would have been a great message and a great victory for change, for coalition building by endorsement or the support of a quiet endorsement of the movement and Dr. King. The civil rights leadership at that time were people looking for overt affirmation and that is the habit of people who are winning as they were. So if I were analyzing that today, I would look at the question of whether Carl thought he could slide by at a time when those kind of deals weren't working anymore. Knowing that the blow was mortal, Elliot continued making as many as 15 speeches a day while advisors were telling him to withdraw. But if I had done that, there had been a lot of people

who thought they ran me out and I didn't like that much. I don't like to be run out. I get run out enough, but I don't like it. Let's select Carl Elliot, Governor of Alabama. The last ditch appeal was a $30,000 television special underwritten by three contributors who each withdrew their support just prior to the broadcast and later supported Wallace. Again, against advice, Elliot withdrew his congressional retirement to buy the airtime. Few, if any, thought it would make a difference. Before the next day election, Garv, I have been Mary Allen, we're driving back to Jasper. Garv was tweet-wise. He'd made lost a lot of money in various things, including the chicken business. Mary was trying to be optimistic and she was telling Garv that it's going to be a great victory because God is going to take a hand in it. So Garv drove a little while finally.

He said, Mary, I said, my experience, I've been around a long time, so there's two things God don't hardly mess with, and that's politics and the chicken business. When the returns were in, Lurley and Wallace had defeated all ten challengers without a runoff. Richmond Flowers was second. Elliot was third, and $500,000 in debt. In the early morning hours after election night, he spoke to a group of young campaign workers gathered at his house. Every person is large, I know every person there was crying. It was a lot of feeling about it, and a lot of there were still good many progressives in the state at that time. And I have an idea that that's, you know, the good book says, and they grew up a generation that you not Moses.

And the time will come here when they grow up a generation that you not Wallace, and they'll make a better run at this thing. And I was able to do it. It is 25 years later, a reporter in Jasper to talk to Elliot asked directions from a sales clerk. And she said, Carl Elliot's dead. I said, pardon me, and she said, he's dead. I said, no, no, no, he's not dead. I just talked to him this week. And she said, Carl Elliot's been dead for years. I'm going down there thinking I'm going to see some sort of blended, southern elegance and I'm quite surprised. But he was a very prideful gentleman. Renting the house he once owned,

Elliot has lived alone since Jane's death in 1985. Tended part-time by Cook and the Secretary, visited by family members, he has remained in political exile. A lifetime of memorabilia surrounds him. His attic having become a metaphor, his past hangs literally over his head. He had returned to his law practice in 1966. But again, most clients were poor miners, now victims of black-long disease. He made some speeches for Humphrey and McGovern, otherwise his political career was over. But his old campaign debts lived on. And refusing to declare bankruptcy, he continues to make payments to his creditors for a third decade. His long passion for books continues, as a reader of political biography, and as the author of seven volumes of North Alabama history, a continuing effort to give voice to that culture, though not the kind of work likely to lift him out of obscurity or debt. It was the Profile Encourage Award that offered the most promise of that.

For a time, making Elliot a national media celebrity, and arousing the interest of double-day editor, Jacqueline Kennedy O'Nassas. The result was the cost of courage, his own political biography with co-author Michael Dorsa. But I haven't changed. I'm the same man now that I was 60 years ago. Aside from its financial promise, the book finally gave Elliot a chance to put his life and career in perspective. My children used to be born the fact that I was going over about my career, and I used to tell them I said, well, somebody, sometimes rather will see that if I have been mistreated, see that I was mistreated, and they'll correct it. That's been unanimous, but there's been a good deal of good deal of courage. But I do want to be remembered as being a friend of the poor,

and I want to be remembered as a person who did something to improve their education in America. And if there were mistakes of Jacqueline, connected with all that, then I'm sorry about that. And I hope that the people, at least from time passes, the blue of the fall weather soaked into the souls of people who think. At least they'll say that I'd get my best. When everything's said and done, when all the shouting and hola-blue are over, when there are no whole scripts left to right, all you've got is yourself and the way you lived your life. The things you stood for or didn't stand for.

If you can live with that, you're all right. And me, I can live with it. This program was funded in part by the Alabama Humanities Foundation, Alabama Public Television, and the University of Alabama Law School Foundation.