
          A mayor who was never addicted to steel.
          Reviewed by Morgan, Charles, Jr.Charles Morgan Jr.
          Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 22-23
          
          BACK TO
BIRMINGHAM: Richard Barrington, Jr. and His Times by Jimmie
Lewis Franklin (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press,
1989).
          Whether to review the biography, the subject of it, the place, or
"the times" is rarely answered by reviewers. Here is my
answer. Dr. Franklin, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University,
has produced a carefully researched chronicle of the life of Mayor
Arrington. He strives for accuracy and seems to achieve it. It is
worth reading if you are running against Richard Arrington or are
seeking his support.
          Each year in the United States fifty thousand new books are
published. Whether fifty thousand good sentences are annually written
or uttered in the United States is a question more pertinent to our
collective future than are most books which, if put to the torch,
really would produce a bonfire of the vanities.
          In this book Dick Arrington emerges as a man who from college
"watched closely the unfolding civil rights events" and who "preferred
a life of the mind" to a life of politics, which is, apparently,
mindless. The book does him a disservice for it is a scholarly
vivisection of his political campaigns and service such as would
render any politician--mayors Daley and Curley of Chicago and Boston,
even the fictional Frank Skeffington--boring. Of course it is possible
to write about politics in a way that would make the lives of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, Huey P. Long, and John F. Kennedy boring.
          "Things have been mighty quiet here lately," some used to comment
about post-1963 Birmingham. True enough, and it is hard to tell an
interesting story about The Quiet. The city, however, could provide a
good novelist virgin timber. The bawdyhouses and wildness of
Birmingham's early years, the struggles of immigrants in the only
non-seacoast Southern city that had many of them, and the competition
of poor blacks and poor whites to get the right to live in company
houses and buy from The Company's stores would provide some writers a
rich prelude to changed politics in what black folks used to call the
"Johannesburg of the South."
          During the Depression, Birmingham--quite understandably--had about
as many Communist Patty members as there were in the rest of the
South. In its bad old days U.S. Steel exercised raw power. At one time
it even expropriated a substantial share of the county's tax dollars
and invested them in "the Company's schools."
          Why not? The entire city had been created for steel. In the early
years Lloyd Noland, a physician fresh from work on the Panama Canal,
was hired by U.S. Steel to drain work areas to make them inhospitable
to mosquitos and habitable for its labor. Even the way that the water
flowed had been decided by steel.
          Today there is concern about the homeless. In Birmingham in the
1930s there were those who tried to live in cold, dirty coke ovens for
want of another home--and were evicted-but it was the near killing of
a white man, Joseph Gelders, by prominent citizens whose livelihood
was drawn from U.S. Steel and the ensuing investigation by Senator
Robert LaFollette's committee that resulted in a detente-like end of
violence between steel and labor. These events did give William
Bradford Huie his first novel, Mud on the Stars
(renamed Wild River) but other than that they go
unremembered.
          In the mid-1940s the city's efforts at post-war diversification
were futile, for steel owned the town's economy "lock, stock, and
mill," beginning with 50,000 prosperous steel and mine workers.
          It was the civil rights revolution and the decline of steel that
set Birmingham free and made the election of a Richard Arrington
inevitable, but this book treats them like far away ghosts that
needlessly haunt the city and its culture.
          Dr. Arrington was not a participant in civil rights and labor
struggles. He is a product of them, an heir to them, a kind of trustee
for the past, and as he seeks to forge a way into that future he is
governed by that past.
          The driving force of the city was steel. It left. Blue-collar
Birmingham stayed behind and so did the ever-present memory of the
power of steel to veto all other private en-

terprises. Like East
European nations that depended on government for their capital,
Birmingham and its bankers depended on steel. Like the white
paternalism that governed opportunities for black folks, steel's
paternalism became the habit of white folks. Local business leaders
were leaders in satellite industries, like the slag companies that
sold waste products, the fabricators that fashioned steel products,
and the casters of pipes that left on the trains that had come to
Birmingham because of steel. The leading citizens were bankers and
barristers who served whims delivered from Pittsburgh and New York.
          The world changed. Airplanes, for example, flew over, around, and
through Birmingham. Today, Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, and Miami
serve the transportation needs of the South. Some might wonder why,
after deregulation, a few of Birmingham's wealthy residents didn't buy
a jet and set up an airline all their own. The answer probably comes
from habits of dependence developed by business leaders who depended
on Steel for all major decisions. Today Birmingham does have
hard-driving, young entrepreneurs. One reason is that these younger
people had never become addicted to Steel.
          It was government, state and federal, that created the new
Birmingham presided over by Mayor Arrington. Now the largest employer
is the University of Alabama's sprawling medical complex. That brought
to the city outstanding physicians, who brought with them others with
entrepreneurial attitudes. They and younger citizens offer the "Magic
City" its best chance to recapture that hundred year-old monicker.
          One night a few years ago I went to a fundraising affair for Mayor
Arrington in Washington, D.C. Held in a rather dimly lit room and
populated by perhaps one hundred people, ninety-five of whom were
black, local black leadership chatted until Richard Arrington
entered. As he spoke, it dawned on me that I had heard everything he
was saying: the bad days of the past are gone; Birmingham is moving
forward as a progressive city; hope is abounding; tomorrow will be a
better day.
          Richard Arrington sounded exactly like his white predecessor, David
J. Vann, who had sounded exactly like his white predecessors George
Siebels and Albert Boutwell, who had sounded exactly like their white
predecessors Jimmy Morgan and Cooper Green. Mayors of Birmingham were
its official greeters and for more than forty years I had heard them
speak of hope and promise and dreams. But more important were the
voices that had come from the pulpits of black churches and the police
commissioner's bull horns.
          Yet this Mayor was speaking the same "Mayor's words" in a different
time. Now the state has a Republican governor and the county
commission is presided over by a Republican Harvard graduate named
Katopodis who has a doctorate. Blacks represent the city in both
houses of the state legislature. The Democratic congressman is
Jewish. Some judges are black, others are white women. The police
chief is from Brooklyn.
          The words uttered by Dick Arrington's white predecessors had been
unbelievable. It dawned on me now that I believed those same words
when they were spoken by Dick Arrington, probably because of his
race. Birmingham, Alabama, had not merely elected a mayor of
reason--it often had done that--but had elected a black man as mayor;
and--rest in peace Bull Connor--Birmingham, Alabama, has a mayor who
is a PhD. And all because the civil rights movement came to town, and
"big steel" left, and the City was set free.
          
            The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture says
of Charles Morgan Jr. that he has been "involved in much of the
litigation that altered political and social life" of the
South. During the 1960s up to the mid 1970s when be departed company
from the A.C.L.U. and took up private practice in Washington, no
lawyer did more or with more commitment, and none with more lasting
cadet.
          
        