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History’s knot |
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 In
August 1894, Reuben Kolb was elected governor of Alabama on a platform
promising better schools, fair taxes and legal rights for black citizens.
He never served, though. Kolb was robbed of victory by the most atrocious kind of fraud. Votes from 15 counties in Alabama with the largest black populations were counted heavily in favor of Kolb's opponent, a white supremacist. The ballot stuffing was so blatant, Kolb almost fomented open rebellion. On Inauguration Day, he marched up Dexter Avenue with his supporters, only to be met at the state Capitol by a contingent of the Montgomery police, the Montgomery Mounted Rifles and other state militia. Turned away, Kolb mounted a wagon across the street, where, instead of stoking the flames of violence, he asked his supporters for patience. "Let us be peaceable, and justice and right will reign in Alabama," he said. Kolb, were he alive today, would still be waiting. The election theft helped spawn a century-old curse on Alabama democracy, cemented in 1901 with another fraud-filled election. That year, the state would adopt a shameful constitution that would keep black votes from being stolen by making sure that blacks couldn't vote. But its insidious poll taxes and literacy tests had an even more maniacal intent. Its framers openly talked about making a state run by the "virtuous and intelligent," or powerful white men like themselves. Eventually, the constitution would rob two-thirds of all voters in Alabama, black and white, of the right to vote. The constitution was also an attempt to set in concrete the rule of an alliance of agrarian and industrial interests, and to cut off a rising competition from more diverse economic interests. And the constitution made sure that nothing of importance could take place without going through the knot of its state Legislature. No innovations from its counties could be tried unless the constitution was amended (and to date, it has been amended 715 times). For the next 60 years, state government shunned the people of Alabama. Over those years a tax culture developed that is the most regressive in the nation. The poor couldn't vote. Thus the state taxed the poor. At the other end of wealth, industrial greed locked into the constitution the nation's lowest taxes on farming, timber and ore lands, making sure a poor state would never be able to take advantage of the resources it did have. Again and again, demagogues used racial fears to browbeat a woefully undereducated populace into believing that every crisis required its unquestioning obedience to a deplorable State House. By the 1970s, after federal courts struck down the old voting obstacles, Alabamians found that their chance to have influence on government had been usurped again, this time by the most wide-open, sleazy campaign finance system in the country. The number of lobbyists in Montgomery grew from less than a dozen in the 1950s to about 550 last year. There is no limit on how much a political action committee or an individual can give a candidate in Alabama. In at least one governor's race, a single contributor has given as much as $1 million. Nor is there any way to discover where the money comes from, because PACs are allowed to transfer funds back and forth in varying mixes for donations. You can't find the pea under the shell. Indeed, our Legislature dines on meals provided by interest groups whose bills are under discussion. In an oligarchy of deep pockets, what chance does the average citizen have of being heard? Government here is of an insane constitution, for a clique of special interest groups and by the anesthetizing influence of 100 years of exclusion. Government is not a mover of progress, but a Gordian knot through which progress rarely passes. Gov. Don Siegelman talks of hacking through that knot of inefficiency. But he refuses to use the sharpest sword at hand - a new constitution that grants decision-making powers to county governments, that frees locked-in money so the Legislature can respond to the biggest needs, that lessens the need for costly, time consuming amendments. The first calls for better education came in the 1890s. The first calls for reforming our 1901 constitution came in 1914. The first calls for reform of our wretched tax system came in 1918. Yet reform after reform has failed, as decent, civic-minded people - including many outstanding legislators and elected officials - banged their heads against the State House wall working to produce something better. In the age of the microchip, our governmental framework remains designed to support an agricultural society that vanished from Alabama decades ago. Some of the most wretchedly funded schools in the country are all we offer to help our children face global economic competition. The people of Alabama do not run Alabama. The people are those in Birmingham who have helped the United Way meet its goal consistently for more than 70 consecutive years, the only United Way in the country that's done so. They are not the government that can take as long as 30 days to investigate a complaint of child abuse. The people are those who sent millions of dollars worth of food and relief supplies to Honduras when Hurricane Mitch devastated that nation a few years ago. They are not the government that pays foster parents $8 a day to care for a child, less than it costs to board a dog in a Birmingham kennel. The people are those who opened their pockets and hearts to survivors of killer tornadoes in Jefferson County and Tuscaloosa in the past two years. They are not the government that stole $1 million from the Alabama School for the Deaf and Blind in Talladega to pay for lawmakers' pet pork projects. The people have to figure a way past the Gordian knot at the center of their government - a government ranked worst in the nation in a 1970 study by the Citizens Conference on State Government and again by Governing magazine in 1999. After 100 years, it is time for a new constitution that returns government where it belongs: to the people of Alabama. After 100 years, it is time for Reuben Kolb's call to be heard. "Justice and right" must reign in Alabama. Next: Malicious Intent Reprinted with Permission from The Birmingham News. |
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| Alabama
Citizens for Constitutional Reform Foundation, Inc. P.O. Box 34 Montgomery, Alabama 36101-0034 E-mail: accr@constitutionalreform.org |
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