Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 29, 1990 TAG: 9005290069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RONALD SMOTHERS THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: JASPER, ALA. LENGTH: Long
His stands eventually cost him his seat in Congress, in 1964, and much more as the segregationist and states-rights positions of George Wallace came to dominate Alabama.
Elliott, 76, now lives on a meager Social Security check and in a sagging frame house that he long since lost to creditors who rent it back to him.
Suffering from a kidney ailment, diabetes, near blindness and restricted to a wheelchair, he still ponders large issues with the same wry country humor he did in 16 years in Congress.
But the resonance has faded some as he holds forth in homey columns occasionally written for the local newspaper or in a series of short monographs he publishes himself, his daughter Lenora Cannon said, "whenever he gets two nickels to rub together."
Last week Elliott won some belated recognition for his efforts while in Congress: He was named the recipient of the first Profiles in Courage Award.
The award, named for the Pulitzer Prize winning book by John F. Kennedy, will be given annually by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to recognize public servants who showed political courage in the face of tremendous odds. Elliott will receive his award in Boston today.
Paul G. Kirk Jr., chairman of the foundation, said Elliott "faced intense public scorn and suffered personal abuse and eventual political defeat while achieving victories for the good of a nation he loved."
Though the words had the ring of vindication and redemption for a man who many friends said had been forgotten, Elliott smiled at the suggestion.
"It's a nice gesture by these folks," he said in an interview, "but as far as I'm concerned, I didn't think much vindication was required. I saw myself making social change. But I also saw myself having a long political career until George Wallace came along."
Elliott said he is still about $500,000 in debt from 39 lawsuits from creditors after his 1964 re-election campaign and a subsequent, unsuccessful run for governor against Lurleen Wallace in 1966. He cashed in his hefty congressional pension to finance the two campaigns. It has taken some effort to get over the losses, he said, but, he added:
"I hope it didn't all make me bitter."
After his defeat by the Wallace forces in 1964 and 1966, Elliott practiced law, first in Washington and Birmingham, and then in Jasper only, where his office was in a shed attached to his home. A sign in the overgrown yard still reads "Carl Elliot Sr., Attorney at Law".
The oldest of nine children growing up on a nearby farm in Franklin, Elliott attended the University of Alabama in the thirties where he worked shoveling coal into a campus boiler, shining shoes, waiting on tables and clipping shrubs to pay his tuition. University officials, impressed with his diligence, allowed him to live free in a building basement.
After graduation, he practiced law in Jasper until winning a seat in Congress in 1948.
William Bernard, chairman of the history department at Alabama, said Elliott was part of "an incredibly effective and remarkably progressive" Alabama political tradition that included men like John Sparkman, Lister Hill and Hugo Black.
As a congressman, Elliot sponsored legislation intended to help the poorest of Americans. He wrote and pushed through the National Defense Education Act in 1958, which has helped more than 20 million poor college students, and the Library Assistance Act, which helped libraries in poor regions of the country.
But as the federal government began to press for an end to racial segregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Elliott's views collided with a growing "states' rights" tone in the South and resistance to integration.
"Now I wasn't out front there marching with Martin Luther King or anything, because you just couldn't do that then and stay in Congress," Elliott said, conceding that like most of his Southern colleagues he routinely voted against civil rights bills in the '50s.
"The whole South was galvanized against civil rights, but I knew that the bills I was supporting would help both white and colored, and my opponents knew that, too."
Elliott was one of the few Southern leaders to actively campaign for Kennedy as president in 1960, and a year later his congressional shadow lengthened as Speaker Sam Rayburn chose him to fill the new seat created on the powerful House Rules Committee to push through the Kennedy programs.
Elliott laughs as he recalled the contrasts of his conservative colleagues angrily denying him his own chair at the committee table and the the more liberal members calling him the morning of panel meetings to ask which bills he, the junior member and swing vote, was going to let advance to the floor that day. A crucial fight was over creation of the Medicare program, and it was Elliott's committee votes that advanced those measures.
But in Alabama Elliott was in trouble.
"Suddenly the things Carl Elliott was fighting for were unpopular," said Julian Butler, a Huntsville lawyer who has long been active in the state Democratic Party.
"With Wallace's rise, if you were unwilling to make race the be-all and end-all you were removed. Carl Elliott was unwilling to do this and he was removed."
In the process, though, the soft-spoken Elliott found a new voice. He set about attacking the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and the White Citizens Council. But the opposition was too much. He was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1964 and placed third in the Democratic primary for governor two years later.
In the years after that, Elliott said he suffered some social ostracism from those who at one time sought him out. Some friends said that it was the financial and commercial sectors in the state, by then aligned with Wallace, who helped drive Elliott into near poverty. But others suggested that there were strong and perhaps impractical principles in the man that accounted more for his problems.
Cannon, his daughter, said her father was "an idea man and not a detail man" and so many things were allowed to go unattended.
Butler recalls Elliott's unwillingness at 56 years old and out of Congress "to merchandise his legal and governmental skills" as well as the fierce pride he showed in refusing to declare bankruptcy in the face of the debtors suits.
Elliott's Profiles in Courage award includes a $25,000 stipend and some of his friends hope this can be used to seed some sort of foundation that will allow him to better care for himself, catalog the scores of papers he has assembled over his career and get secretarial help in writing the memoir he has always wanted to write.
If he writes his memoir, Elliott said, he would tell about how as he teen-ager he settled on the goal of going to Congress. It was "quite a thing to do for a fellow with no money, no connections and not much encouragement," he said. But he did it and the reason for his initial success, he said, was probably the same reason for his subsequent defeat.
"I never swapped an old friend for a new one," he said, "and I guess in the beginning people saw that as a mark of courage."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB