Eminentoes / The Last of the Red-Hot Populists
Gold, Victor
EMINENTOES THE LAST OF THE RED-HOT POPULISTS James Elisha Folsom, 79, the liquor-guzzling former Alabama governor whose racial moderation in the 1940s and 1950s brought calls for impeachment from...
...He hired a band called the Strawberry Pickers, picked up an old mop and a galvanized iron bucket, and promised to clean out the Capitol...
...13 Who knows...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 the gilding of office and unction of power were stripped away...
...He could coin an by Victor Gold occasional phrase and work a crowd, but his real power derived from a native talent for stroking the courthouse barons of Alabama's sixty-seven counties...
...EMINENTOES THE LAST OF THE RED-HOT POPULISTS James Elisha Folsom, 79, the liquor-guzzling former Alabama governor whose racial moderation in the 1940s and 1950s brought calls for impeachment from segregationists . . . died yesterday at his home in Cullman, Ala...
...Nary a black mayor or sheriff or legislator showed up...
...And he proposed abolition of the poll tax, theorizing that it disenfranchised poor white voters as well as blacks...
...There had been the eccentric senator "Cotton Tom" Heflin, who deserted the party of his fathers in 1928, warning fellow Democrats that if Al Smith were elected President, "The Pope will sail up Mobile Bay in a submarine...
...If that's the way they aim to trap me—a beautiful blonde and a bottle of fine whiskey—if that's their bait, they'll catch Big Jim every time...
...He wasn't merely guilty-as-charged, they said, but brazen about it...
...They're gonna get a beautiful blonde and a bottle of fine whiskey in a hotel room and invite you up.' And I told my friend, 'Is that so...
...But while Graves had the common touch, his style was better-suited to the smoke-filled room than the speaking stump...
...Until he came along, Alabama politics had been bromidic and predictable...
...Hawkins also remembered the stunned expression that crossed the face of the governor of New York when he suddenly realized that the sixfoot-eight, 250-pound hulk breathing Bourbon fumes and populist fire down at him (and how many people ever breathed down on Averell Harriman...
...It was Graves who coined the phrase "Big Mules" to characterize Alabama's economic establishment—the steel, coal, electric power, and railroad operators who traditionally had their way when dealing with the state legislature...
...2) the industrial moguls headquartered in Birmingham...
...The populist constituency—farmers, workers, those who deal in real, not intangible goods—knows the distance between political words and political deeds...
...Don Phillips, the Washington Post November 22, 1987 1'1 hanks to James Earl Carter, the I term "populist" became the In word of political reportage in the 1970s and eighties...
...Folsom lost his first two political races—for Congress in 1936 and governor in 1942...
...The group gathered at the Holiday Inn remembered all of Big Jim's enemies from the past: the Segs, who called him a "nigger lover...
...Frank Long, a Folsom confidanteduring his second term as governor, remembered Big Jim's public response to charges that he had (1) invited Adam Powell over for drinks...
...George Wallace were left to wonder what all the front-page noise was about...
...Only Bourbon...
...Fifty-six," someone said...
...The funeral procession, traveling from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, was the longest in the state's history...
...The Young Democrat convention where the poli sci student wanted to show whether we had a merit system in Alabama government, and Big Jim told him, `Sure we do...
...By the time he died—legally blind, virtually deaf, his huge body ravaged by years of heavy-duty drinking—most Alabamians had forgotten the governor who called himself the Little Man's Big Friend...
...What's certain is that he wasn't on schedule...
...Folsom was in the back seat of a Plymouth sedan parked across from the Redmont Hotel when Frank Long knocked on the window to introduce him to a young friend with a special talent Big Jim might find useful...
...Whether Big Jim Folsom was ahead of his time or behind it is open to argument...
...The scene was downtown Birmingham, Folsom's least-favorite Alabama town, the time a Saturday morning in the autumn of 1954...
...But nobody objected to hearing them again, because they were part of the legend, and on that of all days it seemed important to preserve the legend...
...3) had a one nighter with a blonde in east Tennessee: "When I heard this New York Congressman was passing through town, I thought, well, I'm the Governor and it's my job to show him some Southern hospitality...
...M y own favorite Folsom story involved Big Jim's candid appraisal of what he did for a living, when all 'What Bibb Graves called the "Big Mules," Big Jim called the "Gotrocks...
...More than smile, laugh—at the establishment, the system, the political process, even the candidate himself...
...Given the way he lived, the wonder was that Big Jim Folsom survived into his late seventies...
...A friend warned me, 'Big Jim,' he said, 'your enemies plan to trap you...
...and the "proper folk" appalled by his rustic way of operating affairs of state—Good Government Leaguers whom Big Jim collectively tarred as "that damned decency crowd...
...If he was the best then he'd be Governor, not me...
...Or a Big Jim, on stage debating in Des Moines or Manchester, telling his peer from Massachusetts (or New York), "Governor, why don't you quit pissin' down the people's leg...
...What the establishment sees as cynicism, the populist appreciates as candor from the unlikeliest of sources—a working politician...
...Big Jim Folsom, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, 1948 Before Wallace, there was Folsom...
...Check the record...
...Now "Bear" Bryant—them was an Alabama legend who knew how to make the grand exit...
...The Segs, calling themselves Dixiecrats, took over the Alabama state party machinery, elected a delegation pledged to walk out of the national convention, and left Folsom high (but assuredly not dry) in Montgomery, unable even to get enough votes to become a delegate...
...He divided his political opponents into three parts: (1) the old Alabama aristocracy that traced their names and lost fortunes to the Civil War...
...man in the state of Alabama...
...What, after all, had he done for them lately...
...and how proper tongues had clucked when Folsom, sensing that a peer was trying to bamboozle him at a national party gathering, had thrown an arm around Averell Harriman and bellowed, "Governor, why don't you quit pissin' down my leg...
...It just so happens all my friends got merit and none of my enemies do.' " The crowd seated around the table laughed, as if they hadn't heard the story before...
...D ut imagine, if you will—exhilarant 1...
...It remained for Big Jim Folsom, at age 37, to do for Alabama what Huey Long did for Louisiana, "Pa" Ferguson did for Texas, Cole Blease did for South Carolina, and Gene Talmadge did for Georgia—turn his state's politics into an entertainment form...
...and (3) the would-be moguls looking for a friendly administration in Montgomery, i.e., "the Hadrocks, the Gotrocks, and the Wanna-get-rocks...
...It was a golden oldie, like the stories about Big Jim and Ave Harriman, and Big Jim in the Birmingham jail, and all the others repeated in the next two hours...
...If I were President, I'd use the old corn shuck mop on the monopolists, the Wall Street lawyers, and the State Department fancy pants who've never done an honest day's work or even talked to anybody who has...
...Worse than brazen, cynical...
...There were those over the age of 45 who looked up from their morning papers and said, "Folsom died...
...but contrary to national media perception, Carter was no populist...
...In one sense and one sense only did he fit the populist mold: he was a political outsider who was forced by circumstance to follow the fundamental populist credo, "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em...
...Maybe even a P.R...
...Something to ponder in this era of bromidic, predictable politics, bellied asit is with ersatz "populist?' spieling macro-and-micro-economic theory, furrow-browed and humorless in their tailor-made suits...
...Only two, and neither one a member of Alabama's new black political establishment...
...One month after "Bear" retired from coaching, with the public memory of his exploits still vivid, he had a massive heart attack...
...Folks, those Birmingham Got-rocks' look down their nose at ol' Big Jim...
...But Carter on the campaign trail was a bore, a candidate devoid of the saving wit that separates true populists from other politicians...
...while the baby-boomers who grew up in Alabama knowing no governor but Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Or, in the case of his de-merited political enemies, "Folsom's latest," the very utterance of the name larded with a regional contempt usually reserved for out-of-state troublemakers and losing football coaches...
...Beyond Heflin, the only colorful figure on the state's political landscape had been Bibb Graves, a downhome governor best described as a hominy-grits Dick Daley...
...Everybody knows I don't drink Scotch...
...Truman was re-nominated by the Democrats on a hot night in Philadelphia, and the State Department fancy pants were secure in their jobs for another four years...
...Well, let me tell you something...
...Washington Post November 22, 1987 A fter the funeral the out-of-town contingent headed for the Holiday Inn for the standard buffet d'hôtel—fried chicken, greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread—along with one last round of Big Jim stories...
...He promised a $50-a-month pension for everyone over 65, a paved road past every rural mail box and higher pay for teachers...
...You bet I spent a night with a blonde) only compounded Big Jim's image problem with the "damned decency crowd...
...So I had him to the mansion...
...Not that the length of Big Jim's cortege wasn't respectable...
...For example, only two blacks came to the funeral of the governor who had stood up to the Segs when the KKK and White Citizens Councils were still politically potent...
...Folsom rolled down the window...
...was an undomesticated political animal unlike any he had ever seen in the wilds of the Hudson River valley...
...But in 1946, he came back strong with a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 23 populist campaign that dazzled the state...
...Or course, times have changed and, as everyone seated around the table at the Holiday Inn agreed, if Big Jim were in his prime today he'd have to adapt his style to the age of television...
...It followed that this sort of mea culpa-with-a-wink (Yes, I had a drink with a black Congressman...
...Governor," said Frank, "I'd like you to meet Vic Gold, the best P.R...
...Maybe second-best," he replied, looking me over...
...And they were right, of course, to the extent that a healthy dose of cynicism is part-and-parcel of the populist Weltanschauung...
...He lived in an era when the state party machines were in place, dictating the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 25...
...No, '55," insisted Morgan...
...He smiled (and smiled, and smiled), but the litmus for the populist pol is his ability to make others smile...
...I remember his Oklahoma City speech in 1955," he began...
...That much is true...
...Sure, I was arrested in Birmingham...
...But 1948, as events proved out, wasn't Big Jim's year...
...God in His infinite wisdom has decreed," explained Big Jim, conceding defeat, "that I can't be elected anything but Governor of Alabama...
...You'll find I wasn't good enough to get into the Birmingham jail until I became Governor of Alabama...
...As for Big Jim himself, he didn't even make it to the convention...
...But a lot of folks who should have been there had other things to do...
...Good God, I didn't know he was still alive...
...No, make that '55...
...That might be how George got the idea that a Governor of Alabama, as he later told audiences, "has as much right to run for President of the United States as the Governor of New York, or California, or any other state...
...Thirty years ago, when Big Jim Folsom was sending the white political establishment into apoplectic spasms by inviting Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell to the governor's mansion for drinks, half the dialogue in the state capital at Montgomery began with the question, "Have you heard his latest...
...suspension of disbelief—imagine a young Big Jim, one born forty years later, on the hustings there in Iowa, New Hampshire, corn shuck mop in hand, galvanized iron bucket by his side, Strawberry Pickers warming up the crowd...
...is transit legends unlucky enough ki to outlive their aura...
...people's options as to presidential nominees...
...For that, he might need some help...
...I'm not up to their high society standard...
...Bad timing again...
...the business establishment, fearful of his rabble-rousing ways...
...Graves practiced one-party machine politics with a south Alabama drawl, manipulating the county courthouse bosses the way Daley pulled the strings on Chicago's precinct bosses...
...But that business about having a Scotch-and-soda with him, that's pure lie...
...America wasn't quite ready for a six-foot-eight, 250-pound populist from the Deep South who, in the over-used phrase of the 1960s and seventies, told-it-like-itis...
...George Hawkins, Folsom's legal adviser during his first term and House floor leader during the second, recalled how the "proper people" had shuddered when their outsized governor was pictured in the national press with his shoes off, stretched out for an afternoon snooze in public...
...For that matter, Big Jim Folsom was an original by his own state's political standards...
...2) been arrested near Birmingham for drivingwhile-under-the-influence...
...Chuck Morgan, a law student when Folsom was governor, opened it up...
...The machines said Tillman, and that same year the Republican machines, given a choice between Dewey, Taft, and Stassen, nominated the governor of New York...
...Big Jim smiled and shook his head...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
