Bailey Thomson, ed. A Century of Controversy: Constitutional Reform in Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. x + 187 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8173-1218-3.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Dale (Department of History and Levin College of Law, University of Florida)
Published on H-South (February, 2003)

Law in a Society: Alabama's Troubling Constitution

Law in a Society: Alabama's Troubling Constitution

Alabama's current state constitution, written over a century ago in 1901, has 287 sections, which is impressive in and of itself, but as G. Alan Tarr notes, "no other state constitution rivals Alabama's with its encrustation of more than seven hundred amendments" (p. 129). This collection of essays is intended, as Bailey Thomson explains in his introduction to the book (p. ix), to help citizens--particularly citizens of Alabama--understand what that convoluted document has meant to that state. Although geared toward a local audience, and clearly designed to help prompt a major revision of the constitution, the essays have something to offer a more general audience.

As that suggests, the twelve essays in the book, written by historians, political scientists, and public policy thinkers, consider Alabama's constitution from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Roughly half the essays in the book deal with the constitution's past: the first five, by Samuel L. Webb, Harvey H. Jackson III, Wayne Flynt, William H. Stewart, and Joe A. Sumners, trace its history from creation through repeated efforts to rewrite it over the course of the twentieth century. The last seven, by Bradley Moody, James W. Williams, Jr., Anne Permalotf, G. Alan Tarr, Howard P. Walthall, Sr., and Bailey Thomson, address the problems the constitution has caused Alabama, and focus particularly on the last twenty years.

The result is a collection of snapshots of Alabama's history, snapshots which illuminate the politics of the twentieth-century South and, in the process, raise a number of issues relating to local politics more generally. Many of the historical accounts tell familiar tales: there is little, for example, to surprise us in the essays that recount Alabama's late nineteenth-century populist revolt or connect passage of the constitution to the triumph of white supremacy. However, that familiarity does not diminish the value of those essays, which set out the processes, and suggest the consequences, of those century-old events in a clear and accessible manner. So, too, many of the studies focusing on contemporary problems, essays that trace Alabama's revenue crises, economic and political inequalities, and problems with judicial elections back to the 1901 Constitution, are familiar, though their familiarity arises in another, more disconcerting way. The problems those essays recount--weak tax bases, poorly funded schools, and skyrocketing expenditures in judicial elections--are the stuff of daily articles and editorials in newspaper in many states.

It is that sense that many of the problems these essays trace to Alabama's cumbersome constitution exist in other states, which have more enlightened (or at least more recent, and shorter) constitutions, that makes this work so interesting. Almost despite themselves, these essays pose a question that is central to legal history: Do society and culture shape law, or does law shape society and culture? One is left with a book that provokes debate over a key historical question: To what extent are the constitutional problems facing Alabama a reflection of its circumstances, history, culture, and traditions, or the product of a larger, regional or national phenomenon? It raises these questions in ways that can be grasped and wrestled with by a general reader. And viewed from that perspective, this is a collection whose value extends beyond the limited audience to whom it is geared.

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Citation: Elizabeth Dale. Review of Thomson, Bailey, ed., A Century of Controversy: Constitutional Reform in Alabama. H-South, H-Net Reviews. February, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7173

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