Profiles in Courage for Our Time

Hyperion Books

Chapter One

Carl Elliott, Sr.

by Michael Beschloss

* * *

Carl Elliott was born poor in 1913 in Jasper, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. The oldest of nine children, he was the descendant of farmers and Confederates, none of whom had ever finished high school. His grandmother filled his ears about rebel glories. "Until I was six or seven years old," he wrote in his memoir The Cost of Courage (Doubleday, 1992), "I thought the South had won the Civil War."

    In the northern Alabama hills, Elliott grew up loving books, working in his father's fields, earning money for his family by trapping muskrat, possum and raccoon and going to watch politicians: "The speaking might start at ten o'clock and last until noon?any speaker worth his salt was good for at least two hours.... The women in the community would kill a goat or cook a pig, and everybody would eat until they were full. By then most of the afternoon was gone."

    From an early age Elliott hoped to run for the U.S. Congress. As he watched the pols who came through Jasper and nearby towns, he tried to learn the tricks of their trade. At thirteen, he was awestruck at how Senator "Cotton" Tom Heflin could mesmerize a crowd by gasconading about the Wall Street "thieves" who had stolen the cotton farmers' money. After warming up, Heflin "went after the blacks ... then the Jews, then the Catholics, playing them all like the keys on an organ, raising that big fist of his to the heavens and shaking his long gray hair."

    Elliott wished he could one day speak as powerfully as Heflin: "But ... I could not hate like he could. Hate is a powerful force, and a man who knows how to tap it, well, he can go a long way with it.... That was something else I saw in the faces of the crowd that day?the frenzy of hate?and that shook me."

    At seventeen, with his best friend at his side and a check for twenty-five dollars in his pocket, Elliott put everything he owned in a cardboard box and walked to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where the two spent their first night in the rain, sleeping under a truck. Some classmates derided Elliott as a "hillbilly" and moved away when he sat near them in class.

    The aspiring politician knew that Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman and other Alabama greats had assumed their first leadership role by serving as student body president at Tuscaloosa. As a law school student, Elliott campaigned as the tribune of those shunned by the university's fraternities and sororities. To boost his candidacy, he threw a dance for non-sorority girls: "Almost eight hundred and fifty showed up, most of them girls that had never been invited to a dance in their lives. And those old gals had the biggest time I'd ever seen, just cutting up and dancing those old country dances. Yes, sir, it was a real night for the have-nots."

    The candidate of the have-nots won his first election by a vote of two to one. A gaggle of Elliott's supporters hauled two barrels of whiskey onto the back of a pickup truck in front of the student union building and raised glasses in triumph. The old-guard university president, Dr. George Denny, looked on in disgust: "The modern student has grown to be nothing but a pig."

    Since arriving in Tuscaloosa, Elliott had been startled to find students who lacked access to fraternity or sorority "courting rooms" instead lying on blankets on a hillside, "doing things I'd never seen before. Not that my mission was to pull them off those blankets, but I thought those students should have as proper a place to court as their wealthier classmates." Elliott used student funds to buy fifty "courting benches." He said years later, "They got heavy use, and I think some of them are still there."

    Elliott also thought that students should own the high-priced college bookstore. Dr. Denny fought him tooth and nail. Elliott discovered that Denny had a quiet financial interest in the supply company that owned and operated the store. "The college ended up hanging onto its ownership, but we got them to slice the markup on the books they were selling to students."

    In 1936, during his final semester, Elliott went to Washington to testify before Congress on behalf of federal scholarships for college students. Thanks to a scrawled note from his senator, Hugo Black, whom he had met as a boy, he was granted an audience with President Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office: "He asked me a little about my background and I told him. We talked some about the bill, about how we both felt it was a tragic waste to see young people with ability and potential miss the chance for an education simply because they had no money." FDR later sent him an autographed portrait, inscribed, "To a New Voice in Education."

    The earnest, smooth-faced young man returned to Jasper, ambitious to practice law and run for Congress. Most of his clients were struggling coal miners and farmers, causing one friend to call him "Old Coal and Potatoes." He recalled, "I knew just why Franklin Roosevelt was such a popular man. He was aware of these people and he felt for them, and they knew it. I was a New Deal man long before there was a New Deal, and I was definitely one thereafter."

    In 1940, thinking himself not quite ready to run for Congress, Elliott instead ran for county judge but lost to the incumbent by three hundred votes. The next day, he said, "I went back to my law office, licked my wounds a little bit, then got to work to start paying back my debts from that campaign." Then he married Jane Hamilton, a federal clerk in Jasper. For their first date, Elliott had taken her to a wrestling match.

    With a namesake son at home, after Pearl Harbor Elliott entered the U.S. infantry. But while training in Tennessee, he suffered a climbing accident and was honorably discharged. By 1948, he had been appointed a Jasper city judge and had three children. It was then he decided to make his move.

    At the age of thirty-four, Elliott declared for Congress against a fifth-term Democrat named Carter Manasco. Under the banner "From Farm Boy to Congress," he made eighty-five speeches in three months: "I focused real hard on education, telling those miners and farmers that there was no reason on earth their children shouldn't have schooling of the same quality as that of children who live in large cities." He won, spending twelve hundred dollars in the process: "After six years of dreaming, I was finally on my way to Washington, D.C."

    The Eighty-first Congress, convened in 1949, was swept into office along with Harry Truman in his surprise presidential victory that year. Elliott's new House colleagues included future Presidents John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

    Elliott was determined not to go native. Since he was a boy, what he had cared about was "seeing that folks got what they deserved, good or bad; seeing that the less fortunate weren't denied at least the same opportunity to get an education, earn a decent income, have a home and raise a family as people who happened to be in better circumstances." He was determined never to be "mesmerized" by power or prestige.

    He later wrote, "A Congressman holds a seductive position in a very seductive city, and it's easy to see how some men lose sight of why they're here or of what their priorities are. I never hit a golf ball in my life. I went to as few parties as possible, although those still kept me busy enough to wear out two tuxedos during the time I was in Washington."

    Elliott managed to obtain only his third-choice committee assignment?Veterans' Affairs, under the chairmanship of the notorious Mississippi racist John Rankin: "I had no taste for Rankin's virulent racism, but ... I'd learned early on in life that you can only afford to get offended about so many things, so you've got to pick and choose the spots to spend your steam on. Hopefully those spots are on something you can change. God knows there was no changing John Rankin." He quickly concluded that there was "one secret to John Rankin's success?he was simply one of the best parliamentarians on the floor of the House.... He could play those thousands of legislative strings like a harp."

    Elliott aspired to be not just a congressman from Jasper but "a national Congressman?an American Congressman.... The way I saw it, somebody's got to mind the store, and if Congress doesn't do it, if every man's just looking out for himself and his friends, nobody's tending the store. I wanted to hear what America's problems were."

    Elliott soon discovered that a congressman of loose ethics could make a lot of money from lobbyists and special interests: "Lord knows I could have reached out and grabbed some for myself back then. If I'd taken all that was offered me, both legitimately and otherwise, during my years in Congress, I'd be a rich man today."

    One constituent offered Elliott a bribe to get him a post office job in Winston County. He asked Elliott what the price would be. "There ain't no price to it, you sorry son of a bitch, and I'll throw you out this goddamn window unless you leave my office immediately," came the reply. "It's three floors down to that sidewalk down there, and that's where your ass will be if you don't leave my sight right now."

    The idealistic freshman congressman told President Harry Truman at the White House that he wanted to work for federal aid to education. By Elliott's account, Truman told him, "Aw, Carl, you don't want to fool with that. There's no politics in education, no future. You've got to be practical about these things. There's probably never going to be any federal aid to education ... in your lifetime." Both Truman and Elliott knew that conservatives saw federal aid to schools as a dangerous means of allowing Big Brother to control citizens' lives.

    Truman advised the young congressman, "Get you a dam built down there somewhere. Now that's something I can help you with.... That'll help you get reelected.... And you'll have none of the problems that come with this education business."

    Elliott took Truman's advice. He concentrated on roads, dams, housing, rural electrification and veterans. Still he kept his eye on education. In 1951, he won appointment to the House Committee on Education and Labor. In every congressional session during his first decade in office, he proposed some form of aid to students. "I knew this would take time, and I was right. But hell, it took me twenty-seven years to get to Congress. I could handle another ten to get this done."

    Elliott considered education "like a religion to me. I believed totally in its ability to empower every man to explore the limits of his potential." In 1958, he and his Alabama colleague Senator Lister Hill were key champions of the $900 million National Defense Education Act, also known as the Hill-Elliott Act. Passed after the national scare over the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and American lassitude, the bill was the first serious federal effort to aid education.

    "We were hanging our hat on the need for scientists in particular," he said. "But our aim was much broader than that. The forty thousand grant-in-aid college scholarships we proposed were aimed at the immediate goal of producing scientists, engineers, mathematicians and linguists. But the program we hoped to put in place was going to last much longer than any particular crisis." Senator Barry Goldwater was warning that the bill would allow the federal camel to get its nose into local tents. As Elliott recalled, "I couldn't admit it at the time, but I prayed Goldwater was right."

    One of Elliott's early peers on Education and Labor was the thirty-four-year-old John Kennedy of Massachusetts. He admired JFK's grace in dealing with his painful back injuries: "Maybe it's the fact that I was raised by a man with a crippled leg, but I've always felt an affinity for people with any sort of physical disability, especially when I see them working through and with it the way my father had."

    When Elliott came to Congress, the issue of race was becoming the focal point of American politics. As he later recalled, before the mid-twentieth century, it was "still relatively easy" for a Southern liberal to "skirt the issue of race." But the national Democratic party was beginning to fracture over segregation and voting rights.

    At the Democratic convention of 1948, white Southerners had walked over the Harry Truman civil rights plank, crying, "We bid you goodbye!" Fifty-two Southern Democratic congressmen bolted the Truman ticket for the Dixiecrats led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Elliott recalled how Sam Rayburn of Texas had said, "Those Dixiecrats are as welcome around here as a bastard at a family reunion." But Thurmond carried Alabama that year. "It was frighteningly clear to me that the fight down here had only begun," said Elliott. "But I hoped it would burn itself out."

    In the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that "separate but equal" schools had no place in American society. In Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. Little Rock Central High School was integrated by troops sent by a reluctant President Eisenhower. The fires of rebellion were being stoked in every American city.

    White Southerners in Congress were under ferocious pressure to take their stand with the segregationists of Dixie. Elliott said, "By then the biggest challenge facing a liberal in the South was figuring out some way to make the voters at home look away from or see beyond the issue of race alone, so he could find his way back to Washington and do some work that really meant something ... for blacks and whites alike. If you took a firm stand at home on race?the wrong stand?you could be assured you would not be making a stand anywhere else on anything. You'd be out of office."

    Long afterward, Elliott told a reporter, "Anybody who had a grain of sense knew that the blacks had to be given their rights. The question was, how were we going to do it. Then the question locally was, what can we do and still live with our own particular situation?"

    By the 1950s, he observed, "There was no room left in the middle.... A course of reasoned moderation had become a tightrope almost impossible to walk.... I saw ... a South that seemed to be slowly losing its senses." Elliott felt that he had to find some way to "appease" the reactionaries "without sacrificing your own principles. Not only did you face that challenge with your constituents at home, but you faced it as well with your colleagues in Congress ... from the South."

    In March 1956, Southerners in Congress issued the notorious "Southern Manifesto," declaring that after Brown v. Board of Education, "meddlers" and "outside agitators" had acted against the Constitution to upset the "Southern way of life." The petition was signed by 101 Southerners. Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee refused to sign. Carl Elliott did not.

    "Yes, I signed it," he said in 1992. "I can say now it was an evil thing, but I could not say it then. And I honestly did not feel it then as strongly as I do now." At the time, Elliott had "reservations" about the Supreme Court's demand that school desegregation be ended "with all deliberate speed." He recalled, "I knew things had to change.... But I was afraid things were happening too quickly, too fast, with too much force."

    Elliott consoled himself by telling himself that "the aid-to-education bill I was working on was something that could heal and strengthen us all, black and white, as we let go of the past.... But I also knew time was slipping away.... don't want to sound like I'm making any excuses. Given that time, that place and those circumstances?with none of the knowledge that comes after forty years of hindsight?I'd probably make the same decision again."

    In 1960, racist Alabamans were denouncing the education act Elliott had worked so hard for as a "nigger-loving" bill. That year, Elliott endorsed his old friend John Kennedy for the Democratic nomination for president. "In the same way that young liberal Democrats in my day had worshipped Franklin Roosevelt, I saw this new generation completely smitten by JFK."

Continues...
Excerpted from Profiles in Courage for Our Timeby Caroline Kennedy Copyright © 2003 by Caroline Kennedy. Excerpted by permission.
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