Former Alabama governor Guy Hunt died yesterday. He was 75. In an odd convergence of history, his passing comes less than a day after Rod Blagojevich was impeached 59-0 by the Illinois Senate. For while countless press reports have mentioned the name Evan Mecham of Arizona as the last American governor to be impeached in 1988, Guy Hunt was actually America’s last governor to be removed from office in 1992, and the only governor Alabama has ever removed from office.
Today in Alabama, newspaper stories center on his uniqueness as the first Republican to be elected governor of Alabama since Civil War Reconstruction. National notices are, of course, minimal. And that’s a shame, because the curious career of Governor Hunt is an illumination of the history of conservative politics in America. The story of his rise is the story of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” and the 12-year tide of southern conservative dominance in Washington, written in miniature. His downfall was the result of citizen action, and a kind of “legacy project” is determined to pass his life into the realm of permanent victimhood.
Hunt was never expected to win the 1986 governor’s race. Despite having helped put Ronald Reagan in office twice, Alabama was still a one-party state in the Democratic fold. George Wallace had effectively been governor for a generation, even when he wasn’t in office. This was, after all, the man who once ran his wife for the office when a new state law forbid him to run again.
The 1978 governor’s race had seen his hand-picked candidate Fob James handily defeat Guy Hunt in a racially-charged atmosphere. Wallace spent the next four years as the power behind the throne, and in the wake of that election he decided to leave a different legacy. So after shoving the hapless Fob James aside in 1982, Wallace won his final term as governor and promptly began opening up Alabama government to blacks at a faster rate than most northern states.
In 1985, the entire state waited to see if the wheelchair-bound elder statesman wanted a fifth term in office. I vividly remember my 8th-grade civics teacher waxing philosophical about it. He was a proud Republican, but even he did not have Guy Hunt on his radar. No one did. Wallace’s decision to retire was a shock that left the Alabama Democratic Party wondering what to do next.
The newspaper carried headlines about the Democratic race almost every day in 1986, but carried Hunt’s primary win in a sidebar capsule. For in Alabama, the Democratic Primary was the general election. The Republican candidate was a kind of sacrificial lamb whose inevitable defeat enshrined Democratic dominance. This arrangement served as a symbolic victory over the outcome of the Civil War and a rejection of post-war Reconstruction.
For until 1986, the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln. Despite the Civil Rights Era, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the consequent infusion of African-Americans into the Democratic Party, this southern mythology had a life of its own. Thus the irony of the Republicans’ southern strategy: in order to take the south, they first had to end this ritual defeat of their party. The Democrats that year could not have been more helpful.
Two candidates squared off for the nomination. Each represented the last of a Democratic breed, and both were members of the Wallace entourage, but they could not have been more different.
As state Attorney General, Bill Baxley had convicted Robert Chambliss of the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing despite an all-white jury. When the Ku Klux Klan called him an “honorary nigger” and wished him to share the fate of John F. Kennedy, Baxley replied on official state letterhead: “My response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is – kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.”
Baxley, who never shied away from being identified as a southern liberal, lost a close primary to conservative DINO Charles Graddick. (When the GOP swept to power in Washington in the mid 1990s, Graddick — like almost all DINOs across the south — switched parties, becoming an unrepentant Republican.) While race was never an open subject, it was an open sore, and Graddick adopted the coded rhetoric Wallace had invented and Reagan had lately perfected. By framing Baxley as a ‘liberal,’ Graddick didn’t actually say ‘nigger-lover,’ but certainly meant it. Wallace’s racist base responded by voting for him.
Baxley sued, claiming Graddick had cheated by encouraging Republicans to vote in the Democrats’ primary. Of course, Alabama allows cross-over voting, but the party chose to set aside the popular vote anyway. Graddick began a write-in campaign, handing out thousands of pencils at rallies and running campaign commercials that showed voters where to write in his name on their ballots. Baxley found himself defending his flank instead of focusing on the general election, and the Democrats descended into self-parody.
Riding a wave of disgust with the Democrats — real or DINO — Guy Hunt became the first Republican elected governor of Alabama since the Reconstruction era. It wasn’t that Hunt was a particularly attractive candidate; in today’s terminology, Hunt was a paleo-Republican — an anti-science, Bible-thumping member of the Council of Conservative Citizens. (Get it? CCC=KKK). He also had a history of self-dealing: Reagan had appointed him to a seat on a Department of Agriculture agency, and by 1985 he had been forced to resign or face prosecution for mismanagement of funds. Indeed, his presence would never have been tolerated on a dominant-party ticket, but none of this made a dent in his sudden popularity. Alabama knew nothing about him, and didn’t really want to know.
His coalition was substantial, and he led it with crafted charisma. As a traveling Primitive Baptist preacher, Hunt appealed to the evangelical movement. As a member of the CCC, he appealed to white racists. As a Reaganite, he appealed to Reagan Democrats. A hobby farmer, Hunt had the aw-shucks demeanor of a good-old-boy grafted onto the slick salesmanship of an Amway salesman, which he was.
Nor can we leave out the story of his reelection. Hunt faced Paul Hubbert, head of the teacher’s union, the state’s most powerful lobbyist, and co-chair of the Alabama Democratic Party. For decades, stories have circulated about Hubbert’s god-like influence on the state legislature; he is a Democrat that even Democrats love to hate. Hunt won handily.
But after 1990, cracks began to form in the foundations of the Guy Hunt phenomenon. A long series of faux pas had worn away the charisma. News reports began to circulate: Hunt had been using state travel resources, including an airplane, to attend Primitive Baptist events across the south. While preaching at these revivals and meetings, hats and plates had been passed and bundles of cash had been offered to the governor. He was effectively violating state ethics laws by using state resources to enrich himself.
Flush with campaign cash after his reelection, Hunt formed a 501(c)3 corporation with the ostensible purpose of using leftover contributions for state charitable purposes. But instead of using those monies in legally-appointed ways, Hunt bought himself a new tractor, paid his mortgage, and bought furniture for family members. He had also developed a reputation for paranoia, insular secrecy, and high-handed behavior that resonates with the Bush years; while attending governors’ conferences, he had the largest bodyguard entourage of any governor. When questioned, he peevishly claimed the seven or eight state troopers surrounding him were a necessary protection. Against what, he refused to say.
The beginning of the end came in 1991, when Hunt visited the northwestern city of Florence to dedicate a civic boondoggle known as the Renaissance Tower. After his speech, Hunt clambered down a cardboard walkway and responded to a reporter’s question about his ethical lapses with angry denial — not of the lapses, but of the reporter’s right to ask him about them.
Standing nearby was a local citizen named John Crowder. Offended by the governor’s response, Crowder looked up the head of the Alabama Ethics Commission to ask why the AEC had done nothing about Guy Hunt. When he learned that the AEC is unable to bring any actions of its own, but instead must receive a request for action from a citizen of the state, Crowder asked for the commission’s mailing address. The letter he sent would start an avalanche of litigation.
Hunt was convicted by a jury in 1992. Since state laws require anyone convicted of a felony to resign, Hunt was forced from office. Immediately, Republicans in the legislature — and there was a new flood of them, for Hunt had broken the dam — leapt to his defense, claiming that he ‘had not done anything that everyone else didn’t do.’
This silly defense — ‘everyone does it’ — has become the basis of the Guy Hunt legend. Just as the southern mind has turned the Civil War defeat into a noble victory, Hunt has engineered a correction of the public record. His defenders have made him into a martyr of partisan politics ever since the jury’s verdict:
The most controversial element in the verdict may have come from the judge’s instructions to jurors that “the use of excess campaign funds for direct personal gain” is not lawful.Angry Republican legislators said that set a standard that was not in the law and not regularly observed. Those instructions are certain to be a critical element of Mr. Hunt’s appeal.
“No one has ever found that or anything close to it in the ethics law,” said State Representative Kerry Rich, a Republican from Arab. “He pulled it out of the clear blue sky. This was a total miscarriage of justice. Total.” (Emphasis mine)
Hunt was placed on five years’ probation and ordered to pay $232,350. After serving only three years and paying only $12,000, Hunt applied to the three-member Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, two of whom were still his own appointees. Incredibly, they granted him a full pardon on the justification that he had “paid full restitution to his victims.” John Crowder has observed the handwritten forms at the Board’s Montgomery offices. Yet today, news reports and the former governor’s Wikipedia page all claim the pardon was issued on the grounds of innocence!
Given that pardons are only granted on the admission of a crime, and that there can be no such thing as a crimeless victim, Hunt’s strange career ends with a disturbing cover-up framed by his defenders and enabled by the media. His sad death from lung cancer is no justification for rewriting history, but continues a tradition going back to the days of defeat in the War of Southern Aggression.
Hunt’s true legacy is in the Republican takeover of the south. It is in the redness of this region amidst a sea of blue last November. It is the defection of rural, white racists to the Republican party while declaring that the Democrats left them, and not the other way around. It is the know-nothing popularity of Sarah Palin, the Rovian secrecy of Bush, and the deliberate creation of a false “legacy.” Hunt’s story is Republicanism in miniature.
