by Casey Cep
Radney faced seven opponents in the lieutenant governor race, and their platforms differed sharply from his. For one thing, while they were running on law and order, he was running on education and the economy. He wanted to double the education budget, build highways to link the state’s small towns, and take on power companies for polluting Alabama’s waterways and failing to reliably control water levels in reservoirs like Lake Martin. But he knew that all of these measures would require increasing property taxes, which hadn’t been raised in six decades. He went around singing the praises of paying one’s fair share, and trying to cultivate an understanding of what governments at every level can do for their people. Opportunity was expensive, Tom argued, but a lot more affordable than the alternative, which was falling even further behind the rest of the country. “I yield to no man in the state of Alabama the love I have for the past,” he’d say from the stump, “but we can’t live in it.”
Above all, though, Radney and his opponents parted ways on civil rights. Tom never marched and he never registered black voters. He didn’t go to meet the freedom riders after their integrated buses arrived in Alabama, and when he found himself on the defensive, he wasn’t above telling a crowd, “I am proud of my Southern heritage and I honor the Confederate flag as a symbol of something noble and good.” But he was no believer in the Lost Cause, and he always took care to add, “I do not honor it in the ‘Hell, no, never’ type of defiance.”
More starkly, he was a sixth-generation Alabamian who dared to say that his state was often wrong and the federal government was sometimes right, and after the courts mandated integration, he became a staunch supporter of it—not only in his public life, but in his private one as well. Once, when he heard that a local restaurant refused to serve an all-black marching band, he told Madolyn that he’d be bringing some students by for lunch; shortly thereafter, he showed up with all two hundred members of the band. On the day in 1970 that the Alexander City schools integrated, when many white families kept their children at home, Tom sat his seven-year-old daughter, Ellen, down at breakfast and told her that it would be a very special day. “There’ll be busloads of black children at your school,” he told her. “They are going to be scared, but you be nice, and make sure they know you are their friend.” In a state where a legislator had proposed closing the public schools instead of integrating them, it was more than enough to get Tom branded as a radical.
And there weren’t many registered radicals in Alabama. Although the fearless organizing of civil rights activists had increased the number of African American voters in the state from 66,000 in 1960 to 315,000 in 1970, their work had caused a backlash, in the form of a highly effective countereffort by white supremacists. The under-told and stunning story of voter registration in the South is this: in 1965, 79 percent of eligible whites were registered to vote; five years later, that figure had risen to 97 percent. In the end, there simply weren’t enough votes to carry a progressive candidate like Tom into the runoff.
We like to say that some people are ahead of their time, but it is closer to the truth to say that Tom Radney was ahead of his place. On the evening that he lost the race for lieutenant governor, Tom said he felt “not defeated, only disappointed.” He had wanted to bring a new kind of politics to Alabama: “the politics of reason, not race; of unity, not division; of concern for all citizens, not callous disregard of some for the sake of others.” Like most liberals in the Deep South, he refused to believe that the region would never change, and spoke movingly about his willingness to work until it did. He knew that the struggle for civil rights and political equality remained unfinished and promised to keep fighting for both as a citizen. He conceded the election before all the votes were even tallied, gave by far the greatest speech of his political career, then bowed out once again, this time for good.
| 10 |
The Maxwell House
There were courts in Alabama even before there were courthouses. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a judge in Baldwin County presided from the fork of an oak tree, with the jury on his right, the spectators on his left, and another oak—the one for the hangman—not far away. In Jasper, the seat of Walker County, the judge sat on a big rock, the jury on a bigger one. Over in Randolph County, the judge’s bench was a stump, and those he sentenced to jail did their time in a hollow log along the Tallapoosa River. After one prisoner nearly drowned when the river flooded and carried the log off the bank with him inside it, the court turned over a wagon instead, put prisoners underneath, and had a sheriff sit on top.
When proper courthouses did come to Alabama, though, they came in style. As a rule, most southern towns are allergic to authority and resent any federal presence that isn’t a post office. But all of them welcome a courthouse, no matter what court it’s designed to house: city, county, district, federal, anything so long as you can put a building around it. As the Alabama chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America put it in 1860, there was no better way to advertise how civilized you were than “the erection of a courthouse in a new and virgin territory.” Some of the first ones in the state were simple log cabins, but it didn’t take long for even half-paved hamlets and unassuming county seats to start trying to outdo each other architecturally, with grand brick numbers, column-happy Greek Revivals, and extravagant affairs with cupolas and clock towers and gilt eagles on top. Inside were the courts themselves, together with government offices, records rooms, and space to host pretty much anything that might happen in a small southern town: Mardi Gras balls, shape-note concerts, dinners for foxhunters, Confederate reunions, campaign rallies, land auctions, Klan meetings, harvest dances. That’s to say nothing of their basement vaults, where men gathered to stay cool while playing poker or dominoes.
Right around the time that Tom Radney was giving up his political ambitions, he was settling into a new law office just beside the Alexander City Courthouse. Although the county seat of Tallapoosa is over in Dadeville, Alex City has had a courthouse for more than a century, and for a long time it has split the county’s circuit cases. The original one burned down in 1902, but not the bottle of rum set into its cornerstone, which was moved into the new building. This building, erected after the Great Depression, had one wing to house the court, another for city hall, and spare rooms to accommodate other uses. A person could show up at 1 Court Square to pay his taxes, register his will, sue for his inheritance, check out a library book, renew his driver’s license, or marry his sweetheart. For locals, it was where you went for pretty much everything short of salvation and groceries.
Still, the courthouse wasn’t the most important place in Alexander City; that honor belonged to the mills. The whole South was built on cotton, but Alex City was built specifically on athletic clothes, long underwear, and teddies. In 1902, thirty years after the town was founded, a local man named Benjamin Russell set up shop with six knitting machines, ten sewing machines, a steam-powered mill, and a dozen employees. The company barely stayed afloat on its original plan, which involved buying up yarn to make knitted shirts for women and children, but business took off when Russell switched to teddies, better known at the time as camiknickers. By 1932, the mill could move fiber all the way to finished product, and its inventory had expanded substantially. The company enjoyed another boom a decade later, during World War II, when Russell made millions by manufacturing military uniforms like the one the Reverend Willie Maxwell had worn.
Some of the people who made the clothes that made Ben Russell wealthy lived in Alex City, but many others—including the Maxwells—did not. The back roads and half-towns of the surrounding counties were full of spinners, slashers, cutters, weavers, folders, and spoolers who traveled to Alex City each day to punch in, and between Russell Mills and its competitor Avondale Mills, the whole region seemed to keep time by the work whistles. Jobs at the cotton mills were coveted, but most workers there didn’t make regular wages; they were paid according
to what they produced, and much of what they earned went straight back to the company, either during their shift as the dope wagon moved between rooms selling sodas, chocolate bars, sandwiches, and chips or after hours for their housing and clothing and food.
Whether or not you worked in the mills—whether or not you even lived within the city limits—Alexander City was clearly a company town. Within a dozen years of opening his mill, Russell had hired a teacher to hold classes in a church downtown, and pretty soon his employees were sending their kids to the Russell School, getting their medical care at the Russell Hospital, and buying their groceries at the Russell-owned store. Ben’s brother Thomas served as mayor from 1907 until 1947, and the Russell family helped establish the Chamber of Commerce and ran one of the town’s largest banks. If cotton was king, it turned men like the Russells into dukes and earls and made Alexander City lavishly more wealthy than the surrounding areas.
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Tom Radney, who would eventually count Russell Mills among his clients, fit in with all that prosperity just fine. He’d studied law at the University of Alabama and spent his summers with the Marine Corps at Camp Upshur, in Virginia. He was a bit younger than the Reverend Maxwell, so he missed the war, and quite a bit wealthier, so he entered the service in 1955 as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. At Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Radney was promoted to first lieutenant; at Camp Chaffee, in Arkansas, he received his commission and served as assistant trial counsel.
Thanks to his time in the JAG Corps, Radney returned home to eastern Alabama with trial experience; thanks to law school, he returned home with a partner, a friend he’d made while signing up for classes. It was Tom who proposed opening a practice in Alexander City, in part because he had some cousins there and in part because he wanted to work in a town affluent enough to accommodate his ambition. He and his friend hung up a shingle above a furniture store and waited for clients to come knocking—waited so long, in fact, that his partner eventually gave up and left private practice. But Tom stuck it out and gradually attracted enough business to move to an office on the second floor of the Alexander City Courthouse, which he maintained throughout his political career.
When that ended, though, he was ready to change just about everything else, too. After Tom lost the lieutenant governor’s race, he let his hair grow out, literally: the disappearance of his signature crew cut was such a shock that it made the local newspaper. His suits got a little looser, and his cars got a little nicer. His marriage started recovering from the strain of the campaign trail. Most momentously, he and Madolyn had another child: Thomas, his only son, who was born the May after the election and irrevocably turned his father into Big Tom.
Big Tom had more money than state senator Radney, and now that he was practicing law full-time, he needed a little more office, too. He leased the land next door to the courthouse, at 56 Court Square, and built his own place, a brick building with an interior atrium and offices all around. Later, when the other big mill in town—the rumor one—started churning out questions about how exactly Radney could afford such a fancy place, people started to call the building the Maxwell House. But because it was so constantly busy, Big Tom preferred to call it the Zoo.
The office was busy in part because Big Tom believed that everyone deserved a lawyer, and he wanted every potential client to feel welcome in the building. But he also lived for conversation, and he would talk to anyone, client or otherwise, who set foot in his door—including, in a pinch, the skeleton named Harvey that lived in the office library. Over the years, the Zoo hosted farmers, governors, mill workers, judges, police officers, medical doctors, bankers, restaurateurs, rival counselors, preachers, postal clerks, janitors, juvenile delinquents, and senators. When country star Tammy Wynette came to Alexander City for the seventy-fifth birthday celebration of the Russell Corporation, she walked off her tour bus singing “Stand By Your Man” and, as just about everybody in Alex City did eventually, made her way to 56 Court Square.
Whenever clients called the Zoo, Radney’s assistants knew to put them right through to Big Tom; if he wasn’t there, they knew to say that he was in court, a policy he insisted they follow even when court wasn’t in session. When clients showed up in person, they were marched right into Tom’s office, where he’d sit them down, pull a malt ball from the candy drawer in his desk, pop it into his mouth, lean back in his green leather chair, and listen, surrounded by his own personal Louvre of Liberalism: busts of JFK, donkey cartoons, and pictures of himself with everyone from Ted Kennedy to Jimmy Carter.
While his clients talked about what kind of lawyering they needed done, Tom would think about what to charge them. He wasn’t above raising rates on those he knew could afford it; for those who couldn’t, he would work cases on contingency, or in exchange for blueberry cobblers and chickens, for pecan pies or, sometimes, just pecans. One bill was paid in furniture. He thought often about what his mother had told him when she sent him off to the neighbors with milk and jam, and he liked to say that no client should be charged more than he or she could manage. As with his political career, Big Tom’s legal career seemed like a way to reject his father’s cruelty and reflect his mother’s generosity, and whenever he did work for less than what it was worth, he felt that he was using his time and talents as she had taught him and as God wanted.
He taught his own son and daughters the same lessons. Big Tom wasn’t the kind of man who boasted about never bringing his work home with him; he always brought his work home with him. He liked to rehearse his cases with his wife and children, encouraging them to ask questions and refusing to reveal which client was his until after his family had reached a verdict; his “dinner table jury” heard every case he ever tried in a courtroom. As Ellen, Fran, Hollis, and Thomas grew older, he gave them each a pocket copy of the Constitution for their birthdays, and they all did stints at their father’s law office, making him coffee, running his errands, and doing his typing, a skill he never learned. Big Tom hired other runners, too, young men and women from around Lake Martin who learned a little law and a lot of liberalism during their time at the Zoo. He wasn’t above asking them to oil the office plants (he liked the leaves and fronds to shine, and baby oil did the trick) or to throw on the yellow dog costume that he’d purchased for political rallies.
Post-campaign Tom still loved going to those, in costume or otherwise. Madolyn didn’t want him running for public office again, but Radney raised money for other candidates, attended just about every event a Democrat held in a five-county radius, and kept ballots handy in case he needed to show anyone how to vote a straight Democratic ticket. He even occasionally snuck himself onto those ballots, but only for party leadership, never again for general office. But if Radney missed his political career, that loss was mitigated by how much the courtroom felt, to him, like the campaign trail. Like many politicians, he had always been extroverted and charismatic, and he loved the performative aspects of being a trial lawyer. After years of trying to win over tens of thousands of voters, he found it was easier to convince twelve jurors.
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The failures of Big Tom’s political career had given him character; the success of his legal career gave him personality. His Democratic boosterism was less threatening from the sidelines, and his liberal streak was more tolerable after he’d helped your teenage son out of a legal jam. Tom soon settled into a Big Man in Town role, gathering over lunch most weekdays with a rotating roster of Tallapoosa County businessmen, lawyers, bankers, and mill managers. They’d call around in the morning, meet at a restaurant at noon, and gossip for an hour or two before going back to their offices. One by one, the restaurants in town kicked them out for staying too long, not ordering enough, or using language that was a little much for the other patrons. Finally, when there were no restaurants left in town large enough or accommodating enough to seat them, they bought a duplex next to th
e St. James Episcopal Church, remodeled it, hired a cooking staff, and incorporated themselves as “The Lunch Bunch.” The dues were modest, and there were only two rules: every lunch started with a round of “Strike the Jury” to determine who would cover that day’s tab (guests played, but never paid; last man standing got the check, second to last man got the tip); and every lunch ended with a few hands of blackjack.
Indulgent as it sometimes seemed, Big Tom’s relentless sociability was part of what made him such a remarkable trial lawyer. He knew just about every power broker in the judicial circuits where he practiced, knew what they liked to drink and what they thought of their neighbors and whether they liked the guy who cut their lawn. But he also knew the guy who cut the lawn and what he liked to drink. Big Tom was a walking Rolodex of bias and conflict; he knew who had been fired from what, where someone had worked before she got her current job, why one person would pardon an aggravated assault and another would want the death penalty for petty theft. He was the lawyerly version of the “old woman” in W. J. Cash’s Mind of the South, the one “with the memory like a Homeric bard’s, capable of moving easily through a mass of names and relationships so intricate that the quantum theory is mere child’s play in comparison.” Big Tom was a genealogist and sociologist of everyone he’d ever met, and it made him, among other things, a master of the art of jury selection. Anyone who ever saw him in action marveled at how he turned voir dire into a family reunion, catching up and chatting with potential jurors as if they were his second cousins.
