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Former Gov. Albert Brewer
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Albert Preston Brewer, who brought a New South touch to the Alabama governor's office but lost a bid for a full term when George Wallace made an issue of his support from black voters, has died.
"Alabamians have lost a great leader today in the passing of Governor Albert Brewer," Gov. Robert Bentley said.
"He lived his life as an example of integrity and professionalism in public service, and displayed an unwavering commitment to making Alabama a great state. Always a friend to me, Governor Brewer was ever ready with a kind and encouraging word. Most of all he loved serving the people of this state."
"The Samford University and the state of Alabama have lost a giant in the passing of Gov. Albert Brewer," said Samford president Andrew Westmoreland.
"He was loyal to the university, to his family, to his state and to his God and was the epitome of a Christian gentleman. He served the university with distinction, as he did everything in life, and taught constitutional law to generations of students."
"Saddened to learn of passing of a great Alabamian and friend, former governor Albert Brewer. Prayers to his family," Attorney General Luther Strange tweeted.
State Sen. Arthur Orr tweeted: "So sad to hear of passing of former Governor Albert Brewer. He was Morgan Co's favorite son. A true public servant and always a gentleman."
Brewer was in office only two and a half years, from May 1968 until January 1971, according to an obituary written by longtime Birmingham News political reporter Tom Gordon.
That obituary continues:
But during that time, in style and substance, he represented a departure from the confrontational, states rights style of former Gov. George C. Wallace and to an extent, Wallace's wife Lurleen.
"He did a lot in a short amount of time," said University of Alabama political scientist William Stewart.
"He was kind of a League of Women voters type governor," said Auburn University at Montgomery political scientist Carl Grafton. "He's really an ideal to which other governors should strive. The only thing you could possibly fault him on was he didn't have a nasty streak in him. That made him vulnerable to George Wallace. Of course, if he had had a nasty streak, he wouldn't have been Albert Brewer."
"He was a very cordial, friendly kind of fellow - plenty smart," said longtime Jasper bank executive John Oliver, who was a classmate of Brewer's at the University of Alabama Law School.
Brewer was born in Tennessee but spent most of his life in Decatur, where he practiced law, and where he and his wife Martha raised two daughters, Becky and Alison. The son of a TVA employee, Brewer was first elected to the Legislature in 1954 at age 25. With Wallace's approval, he became House speaker at age 34 in 1963. In 1966, he was elected lieutenant governor while Wallace, unable to run for a second consecutive gubernatorial term, successfully ran his wife Lurleen for the state's top job.
At the time, the Republican Party did not have the power and appeal that it holds today, and the winner of the Democratic primary was generally considered a shoo-in for election in the fall. Vowing, as her husband did, to "stand up for Alabama," Lurleen Wallace won the nomination over a multi-candidate field. Brewer, using the slogan, "Elect a responsible man to a responsible office," bested three other candidates to win the lieutenant gubernatorial nomination.
Brewer was considered a Wallace ally. partly because the House, under his leadership, had approved a bill which would have allowed Wallace to run for a second gubernatorial term. That measure, however, failed to pass the Senate.
Lurleen Wallace held the governor's chair for only 16 months, dying of cancer in May 1968, but she had continued to champion her husband's issues of states rights and resistance to federal efforts to desegregate the state's public schools.
Brewer generally stayed the course on states rights, and as lieutenant governor, he helped Wallace's independent presidential campaign get the candidate's name on the ballot in other states in early 1968. As governor, he also pushed for a freedom of choice solution to the school desegregation issue, but he did so without the loud defiance associated with the Wallace years.
"I resolved when I went in, that this very vociferous, combative stance had not served us well," Brewer said in an interview in 2008. "In fact we had become sort of a whipping boy for everything the federal government was doing through the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and through .$?.$?. court cases and so on. It had become not a question of having a nondescriminatory school system. It had become what appeared to be an effort to show Alabama who's boss and that sort of thing. And so I determined that we were going to try to do things right, that we weren't going to make a lot of noise ... but we were going to do what we thought we had to do to protect our school system."
Brewer took the lower voice approach for virtually all of his other initiatives. That stance, coupled with his knowledge of state government and the legislative process, as well as the friendships he had with many lawmakers, got many of those initiatives enacted.
"He behaved like a New South governor, trying to put the racial past behind and focusing on getting the state up to speed as far as modern advances are concerned," Stewart said.
In 1969, according to Brewer's biography with the state Department of Archives and History, "appropriations for public schools received the largest increase in state history and funding from the state to local school systems was equalized." The previous year, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the state had funded education at $200 less per child than the national average and $81 less than the southeast average, with only Mississippi providing less. Alabama teachers' salaries ranked 46th in the nation.
"I was told, 'This is going to hurt you politically and so forth,' but there was never a question in my mind that it was the right thing to do," Brewer said about his education program, which was funded through a package of tax increases. "And I found then what I had always known because I had been there: Legislatures generally will give a governor anything a governor is willing to ask for and take the blame for himself."
The Brewer years also saw the creation of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education and the Education Study Commission, and approval of a constitutional amendment that set up an elected state Board of Education which appointed the state school superintendent.
Brewer also created the state's primary industrial recruitment arm, the Alabama Development Office, set up the state's first ethics agency. He got Medicaid, the health program for the poor, up and running, while expanding its coverage to eyeglasses and prescription drugs. When he ran for a full gubernatorial term in 1970 he saw, up close and personal, what those provisions meant to people.
"I was down at Clanton one day, we had a rally ... in the center of town ... and a little old fellow came up and shook my hand and just touched his finger to his glasses and he said, 'You've gotten me these.'$?" Brewer said. "It seemed like such a little thing to us, but for the guy that doesn't have 'em, it sure has been meaningful."
The Brewer years also saw a number of cost-cutting steps, including the creation of the state motor pool which reduced the number of vehicles in the state fleet. He successfully supported, despite heavy opposition, passage of an law under which any motorist on Alabama's roadways must consent to a sobriety test or lose his license.
"We carried on a major public relations campaign," Brewer said. "I remember our Department of Highway Safety ran ads in the daily newspapers with little coupons on them that people could fill out to send to their legislator endorsing this idea of an implied consent law. Thousands and thousands of those things came to legislators and we ultimately passed it."
In the 2001 book, Alabama Governors, Gordon Harvey, History Professor and Department Chair at JSU, wrote that Brewer "centralized department computers into one unified system, which saved the state another $1 million annually." In addition, "Brewer left vacant many of the 'crony' jobs in the governor's cabinet, positions that had long been awarded to political operatives."
Stewart also said Brewer attempted constitutional reform more seriously than most Alabama governors, and set up a commission which helped pave the way for the state's unified court system. Two justices were added to the state Supreme Court and the civil appeals court was divided into criminal and civil appeals courts.
"With Brewer, you always had the feeling he knew exactly what he was doing and how things worked," Grafton said. "That's no small thing."
As the 1970 election year loomed, Brewer made plans to run for a full term in office. George Wallace was doing the same thing, though he had publicly said more than once he would not run and had said the same thing to Brewer.
Brewer's slogan was "Full Time for Alabama." It was designed to remind voters of Wallace's two previous presidential campaigns and the likelihood he would mount another, even if he was elected governor.
"Part of my standard speech was, 'Elect a candidate who's for something and not against everything,'$?" Brewer said in an interview nearly 40 years later.
Wallace made school busing to achieve integration a major issue and his campaign slogan was, "He's Our Kind of Man."
By the time it was over, the campaign had become the nastiest that many Alabama politicians could remember. A 2006 political history book on the 25 dirtiest campaigns in U.S. history put it at the top of its list.
Brewer kept beating the drum on his full-time approach to governing and the benefits it had brought the state, one of which was an improved national image.
"Albert Brewer traveled over 100,000 miles working as governor last year ... in Alabama," stated one of his early newspaper ads.
"In '70, I felt that the state really needed me," Brewer said. "Not that somebody else wouldn't be as good or better than I would be, but that person wasn't running that year. I did have a lot of self confidence about being governor. We had had such a remarkable record of achievement in the two years at that point that I had been in office."
Wallace said the race between himself and Brewer was a choice between continuing or rejecting the national movement he championed for states rights and Alabama values against federal judges, national Republicans and Democrats, the rich elite, big businesses, big outside media and agitators.
He also said Brewer was suspect because of his black support.
That message became more pronounced as the campaign went on, even evoking the spectre of a return to the post civil war days when, in the minds of many Alabama whites, freed blacks ran amok in a devastated South.
Wallace supporters circulated doctored photos of Brewer with boxer Muhammed Ali and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammed. They also circulated a photo showing smiling young black boys surrounding a smiling young white girl in a swimsuit, suggesting such a scenario would be Alabama's future if Brewer was given a full gubernatorial term.
According to Wallace biographer Dan Carter, even Martha Brewer became a target while making campaign stops for her husband. A'On at least half a dozen occasions," Carter wrote, "a distraught aide' would arrive just minutes after she had left, asking worriedly, 'Was she okay? ... I mean, she wasn't slurring or anything, was she?"
"The terribly disgusting things that they were doing and saying (about me) didn't bother me," Brewer said. "But Martha and the girls hadn't done anything to give anybody any basis for attacking them, saying things about them. We could not respond to that during the campaign .$?.$?. You can't say, 'My daughter's not on drugs' ... All you do when you talk about things like that is spread it farther."
The race drew a lot of national attention, and was in the sights of Richard Nixon's White House. Though Brewer would say he was not taking any outside money for his campaign, the Nixon campaign funneled $400,000 in cash to Brewer in hopes it would help him beat Wallace. The reasoning was simple. Nixon feared that if Wallace regained the governor's chair, he would be a formidable presidential contender in 1972.
In the first round of a seven-candidate primary, Brewer outpolled Wallace by 428,146 votes to 416,443. In the hard-ball runoff, Wallace prevailed by 559,832 to 525,951. Brewer said he saw the outcome in early returns from such north Alabama counties as Lauderdale and Marshall, counties he had carried in the first round.
"Why? The race question," Brewer said in 2008. "People were scared. Within a week after the election, we were getting letters saying, in effect, 'I don't know what happened to me, I'm sorry that ... I did not vote for you, I should have and I heard all those things and I should have known better than that and I'm sorry.'"
In conceding defeat, Brewer was unable to suppress the bitterness that he and his family felt. More than a few of his supporters, such as the late Birmingham businessman Tom Rast, wept over what they felt was another missed opportunity for Alabama to move forward and show a new progressive face to the nation.
"I think if Brewer had had a little bit more as far as charismatic appeal, he would have pulled it off," Stewart said.
Harvey said Brewer was not the scrappy fighter like the former boxer Wallace.
"Brewer was trying to bring things to a new level and I think he thought getting in the gutter with Wallace would debase everything he was for," said Harvery, the author of a book which includes Brewer with such progressive Southern education governors as South Carolina's John West and Florida's Reuben Askew.
"Within a week after the election, we were getting letters saying, in effect, 'I don't know what happened to me, I'm sorry that Brewer made another bid for governor in 1978, citing his previous time in office as his chief asset, but in another crowded and more formidable field of candidates, he did not even make the Democratic primary runoff.
Afterward, Brewer lowered his public profile, but not his level of public-minded activity. He became a distinguished professor of law and government at Samford University and in 1988, he helped form the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA). PARCA is a good government think tank, also based at Samford, and Brewer was its first executive director.
Twenty years later, a year after his retirement from the law school faculty and a year and a half after his wife's death, he was honored by Samford University's Cumberland School of Law with the dedication of the Martha F. and Albert P. Brewer Plaza.