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By Cathy Donelson
Business Alabama
January 2001

A grassroots effort to deconstruct the regressive juggernaut that is Alabama's state constitution
is largely being ignored by the executive branch, as the document lumbers toward its 100th birthday. Meanwhile, reform proponenets such as the Alabama State Baptist Convention and the RSA's
David Bronner join business leaders in trying to drum up support in the Legislature.

   A hundred years ago Alabama gained its present constitution in one of the most corrupt elections in state history.

   The Constitution of 1901 has been controversial ever since it was approved by voters and some phantom electors. Ratification votes exceeded the entire male voting age populations in many Black Belt and plantation area counties.

   Alabama's Constitution of '01 was a reaction to Reconstruction programs following the Civil War, and historians agree its main purpose was to disenfranchise black voters and concentrate power in the state Capitol instead of the people.

   Now in 2001, on the 300,000-word document's 100th birthday, business and economic leaders are joining reformers in renewing a call for constitutional revision that has echoed over the past century. With the Siegelman administration maintaining a "show me" stance, a group called Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform (ACCR Foundation, Inc.) is leading rallies and sponsoring impassioned speeches for reform.

   But as one of their members points out, this time around it isn't just professors and populists and preachers begging for a break. The business community, stifled by having to go hat-in-hand to legislators for constitutional amendments on minute matters of economic development, is joining the call.

   The Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama sponsored a constitution rally in Tuscaloosa last April and in October a "Let's Fight to Rewrite the Constitution" rally sponsored by the Chambers of Commerce of Baldwin, Conecuh, Clark, Escambia, Mobile and Monroe counties drew hundreds.

   "I don't think there is any question we need to make changes in our constitution," says Bill O'Connor, Business Council of Alabama president. "We need a constitution that will allow us to grow in the 21st Century and allow our government to work for the people. We certainly have a grassroots effort to make that happen, I think."

   The constitution was written a century ago, when the state was emerging from the post-Reconstruction era. Conservative industrial and agricultural interests who came to be called the "Bourbons" and "Big Mules" took control of the state government, curtailing taxing powers and effectively disenfranchising poor voters in the constitution they devised.

   Seeking to protect their economic and political interests, the framers of the constitution designed it to be an all but immovable object. Major amendments must pass statewide.

   It's a new millennium in the state's economy. Farming ain't what it used to be. Mills are closing, "going South" and taking with them Alabama's century-old lure of a cheap, uneducated labor force and rock-bottom property taxes.

   "There's no question we're losing more and more of our lower wage jobs to overseas concerns. We have to make more investments to gear up for high-end jobs, and that's our challenge," O'Connor says. "We competed for a long time on low taxes and a strong back, and that's no longer enough and no longer the right strategy."

   He believes the grassroots push for constitutional reform will grow to a level where the legislature will hear the arguments and respond to the call for change.

   The Business Council, O'Connor says, realizes changes are needed and the environment for changing the constitution is ripe. "It's the right thing to do. It's going to happen. It's an indefensible position to say the constitution we have now works best for our state," he says.

   Dr. Gerald Johnson, director of the Capital Survey Research Center poll, notes that almost everything of importance to the state is in the constitution, leaving almost no discretion within the Legislature.

   For example, he says, when postage went up, Jefferson County officials weren't authorized to pay the new rate to mail license tags.

   "The constitution had to be amended to address that, and that's the kind of activity that so inhibits the state from getting anything done. That's why we have over 600 amendments," says Johnson, ACCR Foundation, Inc. board member and emeritus professor of political science at Auburn University.

   According to Johnson, the constitution of '01 is really Alabama's 1875 constitution amended except for the suffrage requirements. "The document is insulting, demeaning and degrading," he says. "And it prohibits any progress in the state until we adapt it to our present conditions."

   The present constitution has served the state poorly, says ACCR Foundation, Inc. board chairman Thomas Corts, president of Samford University. "We've been working ever since 1901 to make it work," he says. "We have been able to make it work just barely and that has kept us from re-doing it."

   Lawmakers, with a few notable exceptions, are taking a hands-off position along with the executive branch, which is taking increasing hits on the state's editorial pages for a lack of leadership on the issue.

   In an editorial last fall, the Birmingham News chided the governor for not "tackling 'big picture' issues such as reforming the tax structure to make it fairer and rewriting a bloated, rotting carcass of a state constitution."

   The present constitution has retarded the state's economic progress, says Jim Williams, director of the Birmingham-based Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama. He says part of that goes back to the way it prohibited the state from investing in internal improvements. "It has been amended to get rid of a lot of that," Williams says, "but there are basic problems still in the constitution."

   He sees lack of home rule as a bigger problem. "It has kept communities that want to do better from doing so and has sort of held everybody hostage to the average," he says. "I think that's something we have to overcome if the state is going to develop."

   "...I had studied politics enough to know when it comes to who gets what, there are no accidents."
Howell Raines, Whiskey Man, 1977

   In 1946 Alabamian H. Clarence Nixon, political science professor at Vanderbilt University, blamed his home state's "rotten borough system" on its historical "constitutional-political arrangement."

   As W.J. Cash explained in his 1941 classic The Mind of the South, by 1900 the economic mold whether mill town or cotton farm was based on a plantation mentality with everything resting on cheap labor and an uneducated populace.

   In the 1880s the coal and iron beds were exploited and Birmingham grew to be a regional rival to Pittsburgh and Cleveland. With the industrial expansion, a new ruling class emerged in Alabama. Cash noted that mill barons and stockholders and utility magnates ruled, maintaining lobbies in the capitol.

   "I grew up in Birmingham where the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company completely controlled the town...They controlled the Legislature. I grew up knowing that a corporation controlled by a foreign, absentee landlord could control a whole city and everybody in it, financially and politically." Virginia F. Durr, Outside the Magic Circle, 1985.

   By the turn of the past century, Alabama's economy was dominated by cotton agriculture and low-paying industry with capital and control from outside the state. The pattern was set for the use of all the state's natural resources land, timber, minerals, oil and gas to be determined by capitalists outside the region, as Cash pointed out.

   With no solid middle class in Alabama, there was nobody with any property to amount to anything to tax. The Bourbons and Big Mules weren't about to tax their own holdings, so they set up rules that make government revenue dependent on high sales taxes on essential items.

   According to one recent study, Alabamians making less than $15,000 a year pay 9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while those making more than $100,000 pay about 7 percent.

   The Constitution of 1901 set out to keep property taxes at a minimum. The enabling act the Legislature passed to provide for constitutional revision, proclaimed, "No county in this State shall be authorized to levy a larger rate of taxation in any one year, on the value of taxable property therein, than one-half of one per centum."

   Reformers claim the anti-tax, anti-education, keep-'em-down-on-the-farm mentality in the constitution passed in an era of child labor and sharecropping is a legacy that is still holding back modern-day Alabama. In Alabama in 2001, they note, one in three adults does not graduate from high school.

   In addition to suppressing dueling, the old constitution also outlawed "any marriage between any white person and a negro, or descendant of a negro." Alabama voters last November struck down that provision, by passage of the 665th amendment to the constitution.

   To ensure white power, the constitution gave the vote only to male citizens who had paid the annual $1.50 cumulative poll tax due every October 1, who could read and write an article of the Constitution of the United States, and who owned at least 40 acres or $300 worth of real estate or personal property. Criminals, the insane and "idiots" were specifically excluded.

   "It will become apparent that the white man who begins by cheating a Negro out of his ballot soon learns to cheat a white man out of his." Booker T. Washington, autobiography, Up From Slavery.

   In the rush to disenfranchise blacks through stringent property and literacy requirements, it soon dawned on the drafters of Alabama's constitution they had taken the ballot from half of Alabama's white voters too.

   Poor white mill hands and sharecroppers couldn't meet the property requirements in a state with a political and economic system ensuring they weren't homeowners. So the "grandfather clause" was devised, to give the right to vote to veterans of any American wars and the "war between the states" and their descendants.

   But white voters still had little to say about the destiny of the state, because of the unwieldy manner of changing the constitution, which favored power concentrated in the hands of a Legislature easily accessible to lobbyists. Alabamians had little say over the destiny of their state.

   "When you look at our constitution from an economic point of view, I would say it's a hindrance to the state, because we don't have the flexibility to do things other places do," observes Dr. David Bronner, CEO of the giant Retirement Systems of Alabama, which manages billions in investments.

   Noting the state constitution is the oldest, most voluminous and most outdated in the country, Bronner says the document's earmarking of revenues and low-tax provisions is holding the state back. But he believes the politicians will heed the call for change.

   "We have an opportunity to throw off the chains which they really are of a 100 years," Bronner says. "Alabama, unlike other states with urban society, still has those chains on. We are still acting as a society as if all of us are agrarians with cheap labor and low taxes."

   If Alabama taxed like Mississippi, the state would have an extra $500 million a year in revenue, he says, and if we taxed like Georgia we would have $2 billion a year more.

   "Either way solves a lot of socio-economic problems," Bronner says. "We have always had a propensity to hide or run or do nothing about our problems until it got so bad our federal courts made us do something about it."

   Other southern states have revised their constitutions, but it required the backing of their governors and political leaders, points out Dr. Harvey H. Jackson III, a Jacksonville State University history professor who had made a study of Alabama's constitution.

   "We have strong support in the House and Senate, but the governor has been basically hands off," Jackson says. "That makes it difficult for those pushing for constitutional revision. There are groups in our state with a deep economic interest in keeping the constitution the way it is. They don't want to change because it is going to cost them money."

   One group opposed to change is big landowners. In 1978, Alabamians ratified Amendment 373, which required property to be assessed and taxed "at current use value and not market value."

   Critics, who note Alabama would have the nation's lowest property taxes even if they were doubled, say current use deprives the state of needed revenue, while allowing agribusiness and other landed interests to pay less than their fair share of the cost of government.

   The traditionally conservative Alabama State Baptist Convention took a stand for tax reform last month at its annual meeting, voting overwhelmingly for a resolution calling on the governor and legislature "to develop and implement appropriate tax reform which will bring relief and justice to the poor who are our neighbors."

   That puts the state's largest religious denomination at odds with the state's largest farm group, the Alabama Farmers Federation, commonly called Alfa because of its offshoot Alfa Insurance.

   "We join Gov. Don Siegelman and a majority of people in Alabama in not believing that taxes need to be increased," Alabama Farmers Federation spokesman J. Paul Till says. The powerful farm and agribusiness lobby formed in 1921 has more than 423,000 members, and Till says there isn't any reform groundswell among them.

   "It bothers me that the people pushing for constitutional reform like to bring up the original constitution that may have been discriminatory and outdated, when in fact changes have already been made to where our constitution is not like it was in 1901," he says. "We think the system is working now, and when the constitution needs to be changed, there's a mechanism to change it."

   The Alabama Education Association (AEA) also has come out for comprehensive tax reform to make the state's tax system more progressive and less regressive, but the influential teacher and school workers union clings to earmarking of revenues for education and salaries.

   "We're not going to be in favor of unearmarking any funds. The only practical purpose of unearmarking funds is so you can use them for other purposes," says Joe Cottle, AEA governmental relations director. "The schools don't have enough money as it is, and we don't want to be in a position where politicians can get at that money."

   According to Professor Jackson and others these two issues current use and earmarking are the biggest obstacles to real constitutional reform in Alabama.

   "It's gonna be a dogfight when it happens," Jackson predicts. "There are going to be lobbyists crawling all over that capital hill not that that's anything new. It will get interesting, and from some respects will get nasty."

Cathy Donelson is a former staff member of the Alabama Historical Commission and contributes regularly as a freelance writer for Business Alabama. She notes that Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform maintains a web site at www.constitutionalreform.org.

Reprinted with Permission from Business Alabama.

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