He then turned his energies to grappling with the Dixiecrat rebellion in Alabama. “These Dixiecrats,” he snorted, “all they want to do is sleep with 'em, you know, but when it comes time for breakfast, they ain't gonna sit down with 'em…” He carried his challenge all the way to the Supreme Court, but in the end, Alabama's electors voted for Strom Thurmond anyway.
Confounded at every turn, his spirit still never flagged, and he continued a gradually hopeless skirmish against the massive shabby folly into which he saw the South entering. Even during his second term, after the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision, when the hysteria had already set in, he batted down the swarm of segregation bills issuing from the legislature and dismissed an interposition resolution, in which the legislature supposed it had nullified the Supreme Court degree, as “hog-wash-it reminds me of an old hound dog hollerin' at the moon.”
Actually Folsom was a casualty of his own magnificent gusto and guilelessness. It would seem he was born to become a folk legend, the spectacular swoop of his style transcending his final political futility. Like Wallace after him, he flourished a Jackso-nian indifference to aristocratic pomp and circumstance and seemed to take a country boy's relish in disconcerting, even disheveling, ceremony and citified starchiness. On one occasion the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, paid a visit to Alabama and was invited to the mansion for dinner. He was greeted at the door by Billy Watson, who always had a way of being somewhere around at such times, and as Halifax came through the door he noticed that Watson was barefooted. “Yessuh,” Watson murmured, “it's customary for one to take off one's shoes when one is in the presence of the guvnuh of Alabama.” A few minutes later, a welcoming delegation of state dignitaries arrived and found Halifax reclining on a couch in the mansion's living room, chatting comfortably with Watson, his shoes and socks removed and his trousers legs rolled halfway up his shin-bone. “I'm very indebted to Mr. Watson,” Halifax amiably explained, “for informing me that it is a custom to-” About then, the group heard a roar from the central stairway, “Whur is that goddamn limey? Let's get him fed and outta here,” and turned to see Folsom sitting midway up the flight of stairs, a drink resting beside him, fumbling on his own socks and shoes. Halifax paled but maintained a thin smile, his hands folded delicately in his lap and his legs elegantly crossed. “Only,” recalled Watson, “he got this look on his face right then like his feet had just went cold.” Halifax proceeded, barefooted, but still game, on in to dinner. At the table, recalled Watson, he talked very rapidly and profusely, with frequent light skittering little laughs, until Folsom, bellowing a weary, “Aww, shit!” leaned far back in his chair and toppled backward, upending the table. With that, Folsom took his leave, instructing the Negro servant busily swabbing food from Halifax's lap, “See he gets everything he wants to eat and anything else we can get for him.” After Folsom had gone upstairs, Halifax remarked, “The governor, I'll have to say, is probably the most interesting man I have ever met in my life,” and finished his dinner in relative silence, the thin little smile still on his face, and then went back to the living room, pulled on his socks and shoes as the others stood over him, and departed.
During Folsom's second administration, the national Young Democrats met in Oklahoma City, and one of the stronger candidates for president of the group happened to be from Alabama. “Big Jim was shippin' out planeloads of state officials and legislators for three days,” says an Alabamian who was there. “They were comin' in day and night. I mean, he was gonna see to it that our boy was treated right. The only trouble was, he didn't leave anybody around to run the state. We even had the finance director flown out.” While Folsom was in Oklahoma City, Aver-ell Harriman, then governor of New York and aspirant for the Democratic presidential nomination, decided to drop by Folsom's hotel room to pay his respects, impelled no doubt by the fact that Folsom had just won reelection by a heavy margin. Folsom received him in his undershirt. After a short exchange of pleasantries, it suddenly occurred to Folsom that Harriman was cultivating him. With his huge arm wrapped around Harri-man's dapper shoulders, Folsom advised him, with a benign little tilt of his head, “Now, don't piss on ole Jim's leg. You can't piss on ole Jim's leg.” A little later he appeared on a local television program with a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, a rather swashbuckling flourish, since Oklahoma happened to be bone-dry; as a political favor, he had Carl Elliott, then an Alabama congressman, sit on his left, and for obscure reasons he positioned a member of the Alabama delegation named Pete Matthews on his right. When the camera swung on him, he hoisted his glass and began, “Now, I know all you good Oklahoma folks think this is whiskey I'm drinkin', but I want you to know it ain't nothin' but good ole Oklahoma branch water. Ain't that right, Pete?” and he whacked Matthews on the back. Before the program had proceeded very far, as Folsom continued smacking Matthews on the back, Elliott discreetly slipped down in his chair, below camera range, and crawled out of the studio on his hands and knees.
Folsom's nature was expansive in more ways than one. During his first term, his compulsive pardoning and paroling of convicts finally brought a legislative investigation. He acquired a state yacht and named it after Jamelle. Expenses at the governor's mansion sometimes ran to 388 dollars a day. When his opponents accused him of indiscretions that disgraced the office he held, he would boom, “I plead guilty. I always plead guilty. Now, why don't we get on with the issues here.”
For all those indiscretions, Wallace long regarded Folsom with an awe and admiration that were almost childlike. “Wadn't anybody in the legislature any stronger for Folsom than Wallace was,” says one former state senator. “He really believed in all that stuff that Folsom wanted to do for the common folks. With Folsom, he felt his kind of people were getting a hook into things finally.” Wallace regularly accompanied Folsom on jaunts over the state, and gleefully recounted to other legislators how Fol som, arriving one afternoon in Clayton to dedicate a new courthouse, tumbled out of his car before the assembled officials and strode directly over to the Negro janitor and shook his hand before greeting any of the dignitaries. Wallace himself asked Folsom to appoint him to the board of trustees at Tuskegee Institute, a campus which traditionally orchestrated the Negro vote in the state. “It was considered a very liberal move at the time,” says one Alabama political veteran. “Naturally, nobody was thinking about race back then like they got to thinking about it later, but it was still considered very liberal of him to establish this contact with the Negro community. And he was real proud of this connection with Tuskegee; he'd tell everybody about it and all. Anybody'd said back then he would be where he is today on the racial question, we'd of thought they were crazy.”
When Folsom ran for reelection in 1954, Wallace was his southern Alabama campaign manager, writing about ninety percent of Folsom's speeches, according to one estimate, including the kickoff address. “It was almost a master-disciple relationship,” claims one old Folsom aide. “Everything that boy learned, he learned at the feet of Folsom. He even got to where he'd mispronounce things like Folsom, like saying 1-dee-ho' and things like that.”
But, as one Alabama politician observes, “Folsom was innocent, when you get right down to it. All along, he was innocent in a way that Wallace never has been.” A veteran Alabama political analyst declares, “Folsom was a flawed masterpiece. He was almost great. But he could never be great, and the reason was, he was basically a kind and decent person. He was absolutely incapable of the kind of ruthlessness it takes to get things done in politics.”
Actually, by his second term, whatever happier possibilities Folsom may have once offered Alabama and the South had already vanished. The times had turned irrevocably against him, matters were beyond him now, and the mood was inflamed and implacable. If he had not been doomed from the beginning, he had now run out of grace.
But his final fatal vulnerability was the simple and immemorial one of his kind. As was his manner in all other things, he drank heroically. “That second term, he literall
y bombed himself to pieces with the bottle,” says a politician from those years. “A lot of times, in the middle of a reception or party out at the mansion, Jim would just quietly disappear. We'd start to missing him, and then we'd go out and find him stretched out on the front lawn of the mansion under the trees in his evening clothes, his gigantic shape spread-eagled on the grass, a bottle lying beside him. If we tried to pull him up, we might get him to a sitting position, but then he'd grunt, Naw, boys, I'm all right,' and swat us aside.”
A northern Alabama lawyer who was House floor leader after Folsom's spectacular reelection victory recalls, “You'd have to catch him before breakfast if you wanted to talk to him about anything. He was used to risin' early, you know, before sunup. He'd come lumberin' down those steps and sit down at the breakfast table and put a fifth of liquor right beside his plate, and by the time he'd finished breakfast, that bottle was empty and he was openin' another one. Many's the time I've driven like hell toward the mansion with the light just gettin' gray, tryin' to beat the dawn there, knowin' that the lighter it got the further away Big Jim was driftin'-because if you didn't get to the mansion before the sun did, he was gone. And once he was drunk, all he'd want to talk about was Andy Jackson- 'Goddamn that legislature, they against everything I'm tryin' to do, Andy Jackson wouldn't of stood for none of this.' That's all you'd hear from him-Andy Jackson. I don't know, maybe he just had too many disappointments during that first administration, because during his second administration, he was lost most every day. He would come in and inhabit the governor's office for a while, but that was 'bout all. The few days he'd show up all right-and they were rare-you'd see people runnin' all over the capitol hollerin' to each other, 'He's sober, he's sober, he's sober today!'”
But the times were growing grimmer in Alabama, and before long the people ceased even being amused by Folsom. His association with Folsom began to afford Wallace acute discomfort. Then Folsom created a major furor in the state when he hosted Adam Clayton Powell, at the time a fledgling Harlem congressman on a dramatic excursion into Deep Dixie, to a drink of Scotch at the mansion. “Big Jim had a great way of not saying anything when there was a fuss, and hoping it'd go away,” says one of his old allies. “Well, that worked pretty good, until he had that drink of Scotch with Powell. That was one that didn't go away.”
“When Wallace heard about the Powell thing,” says an Alabama newsman, “that was the day he knew he had to break with Folsom.” He availed himself of a small political frustration to do it: Wallace had asked Folsom to appoint Billy Watson to a vacancy on the Board of Revenue in Barbour County, but Folsom, trading for votes on a pending reapportionment bill, named instead a member of the family that had been sporadic antagonists of the Wallaces in the county-in fact, it had been a member of that family whom Wallace's father had pursued through the courthouse with a pocket knife. When Wallace heard of Folsom's decision, according to one eyewitness, “he walked up and down that hall outside Folsom's office for about thirty minutes, grabbin' people by the arm and cussin' Folsom out so you could hear him at the other end of the building.” That evening, he was in the lobby of the Jeff Davis hotel, still pacing, still chewing savagely on his cigar, seizing legislators by their lapels as they wandered past, and barking, “This is it. I'm through with him.” Finally a canny old Alabama political broker, “Foots” Clement, motioned Wallace over to a couch and told him, “C'mon, George, sit down a minute and try to calm down.” But Wallace declined to sit, merely pausing over Clement for a moment as he snatched his shredded cigar out of his mouth and spat a speck of tobacco to one side and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand while casting his eyes about the lobby for other legislators to waylay. “I'm through with him, Foots. Why, he appointed a man who's fought me down there!” Clement said, “Well, if you gonna split with him, you better do it over an issue. It's gonna look a little petty splittin' over just a little home-county political appointment.” Wallace answered quickly, almost while Clement was still talking, “Well, Big Jim's always been weak on the nigguh issue.” Clement stared at him a moment. “You say that like you already been thinkin' about it a little.” Wallace looked at him, his eyes bright. “Well, ain't he? Ain't you heard folks talkin'?”
When Folsom learned of Wallace's mood, says one of his former cabinet officials, “It hurt Big Jim bad. It hurt him deep.” Two men close to both Folsom and Wallace arranged a meeting with Wallace at a small cafe in Union Springs, a village between Clayton and Montgomery. “He said all right,” one of them recalls; “he even seemed eager to talk to us, so we thought maybe he was anxious to patch things up. We drove down that very afternoon. He was waitin' on us when we got there. We sat there in that little cafe by a window, drinkin' coffee and talkin', for must of been about two hours-tellin' him how upset Big Jim was, askin' him to come on back with us 'cause a little biddy political appointment wadn't much of a reason to break with a man like that. But it seemed like his mind had already been made up when he was standin' there waitin' for us. 'Naw, boys,' he said, 'folks are fed up with this entertainin' nigguhs in the mansion. Something else they fed up with too is the drinkin'. Naw, boys, I'm goin' all the way with it.'” And before long, he had begun to approach his old associates in the House, men still working with Folsom, urging them to renounce Folsom too. One of them remembers, “He kept tellin' me, 'Folsom's gonna gut you. Hit him. You better hit him now before it's too late.'”
Folsom has not won an important political race in Alabama since his second term ended, in 1959. He tried for governor again in 1962, the year Wallace was elected, and his annihilation, with that campaign, was complete. Ironically, the ultimate mortal stroke was prompted not so much by his racial attitudes as by a single absurd and freakish moment, a treacherous last-second fiasco that has become a classic in the lore of political disaster in Alabama. Right up to election eve there were clear signs that Folsom had managed to muster from the old halcyon days enough vitality to ensure himself a place in the runoff. But the night before the vote, when he was to make a statewide address on television, he arrived at the studio catastrophically drunk. The telecast was live, and it was too late to stop it. Folsom tried to introduce his children but forgot their names-“Now, lessee, which one are you?”-affectionately ruffled his wife's hair with his huge hand, and finally lapsed into making cooing noises to the cameras. “Sitting there watching it, you couldn't believe it was happening,” remembers one Alabama newsman. “You couldn't really laugh. You felt more like crying.”
Folsom now offers several explanations for that evening: one of them is that “somebody dropped a pill in my steak.” But he seems to sense that he just messed up in godawful fashion. Talking to a visitor once, he paused, looked down in his lap, and said, his voice cracking, “I don't know what happened. It don't make any difference now. I'm way the hell out of the picture anyway.” But to his old political allies, “that TV program” has become the great outrageous event-the isolated, capricious, demonic, devastating prank-that ended it all, and it still seems, in a way, to dominate their lives, to hang over them, though they have since scattered to the far corners of the state. But an indication of Folsom's political magnitude in Alabama once is that, even after that ghastly evening, he came within twelve hundred votes of making the runoff anyway.
Once more, in 1966, he roused himself to run for governor, but this time it was merely the antic and weightless blundering of a ghost. It was as if, having come so close to the runoff four years before, it was simply too much to accept that anything like that one monstrous accident could have deprived him of it, that so much that seemed inevitable could have been lost so quickly and whimsically, and time had simply stopped and would remain arrested for him until the chance came to do it all over again without making that mistake. So he went through all the motions. By now, it seemed the newly registered Negro vote would be a dramatic factor in the election, and Folsom, who during his two terms had probably struck the bravest and most realistic racial theme of any governor in A
labama's history, presented himself at a conference of Negro leaders in a downtown Montgomery hotel to entreat their support. But when he addressed the men, he neglected to update his pronunciation of “Negro” and talked on genially, oblivious of the hush that had fallen over the gathering. Later, in the lobby, a newsman told him, “Big Jim, I don't think they're gonna go with you. You made 'em all pretty mad in there when you kept sayin” nigger.'” Folsom charged back to the conference room, knocked on the door, and when it opened, implored the sergeant-at-arms who peeped through at him, “Look, you tell 'em Big Jim wants to come back in and apologize for not sayin” Negro' right. I just ain't used to it, but I won't make that mistake again. Can I come back in and just tell 'em that?” But the Negro vote went to Richmond Flowers, Sr., and Folsom was lost somewhere in the motley, dusty pack of other trailing candidates. “I helped the Negroes, sure,” he says now, “but when you help somebody, you make fifty enemies and one ingrate. Hell, when I'm speakin', my tongue just slips and I say 'nigger,' I don't mean nothing by it.”
Wallace Page 12