Bob Schaefer, political science professor at the University of Mobile and a friend of mine, has an excellent piece in today’s Press-Register on our state’s need for constitutional reform:State haunted by 1901 constitution.
The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but I will specifically note that Bob does a very good job of underscoring the lack of local democracy in our state and the insidious restrictions on internal improvements.
He gets to the heart of the matter in the following paragraphs:
Many of the delegates at the 1901 constitutional convention in Montgomery were plantation owners who missed the “good old days” prior to the Civil War. They understood that “progress” might mean paying for roads. Or sewers. Or public education. And they very much believed that “education ruins a good field hand.”The other notable participants at the convention were the new industrial class from the recently founded city of Birmingham, who wanted to take advantage of the tremendous resources Alabama had to offer: uneducated and low-paid workers.
The industrialists were either from, or tied to, banking interests in New York. The Northern capitalists understood a good thing when they saw it: Whip the Southerners in the Big War and then profit off of them in the decades to come.
What the plantation owners and industrialists could not allow for, under any circumstances, was democracy.
Although many of today’s critics of the 1901 Constitution tend to focus on its racist origins, what they overlook is the more fundamental goal of restricting blacks and whites from the political process. And why not? Citizens might actually vote to build roads, promote economic development and do other things that a free people consider good.
When I lived in Texas and taught Texas government I used to note that the framers of Texas’ constitution consciously created a weak state government and dispersed power to the localities because they did not trust government (especially after their experience with Reconstruction). In the Alabama case, the 1901 framers centralized power in Montgomery and then created a broken and decrepit central government that couldn’t really govern. It makes for an interesting contrast as we look at two post-Confederate states: one had a focus on limited state government and a reliance more on individualism, while the other was focused on the conservation of traditional power structures.
In practical terms, one of the key differences is that while Texas could be said to suffer from an overflow of local government and the commensurately large number of special districts of various stripes, Alabama localities find themselves having to beg Montgomery (and often the voters of the entire state) for the simplest of policy measures–often with voters or legislators who are utterly unaffected by the given policy initiative in a position to block the move.
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January 7th, 2024 at 5:05 pm
Back in November at the Mitchell-McPherson Lecture (on campus) the speaker talked about politics in Alabama at the turn of the last century. It was actually quite interesting. You should have been there. I forget the guy’s name but I’m sure you could find out if you are interested. He has written a book on the subject.