Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,368

This is the grave of John Sparkman.

Born in 1899 in Hartselle, Alabama, Sparkman grew up as part of the rural white working class. His father was respected in the community and was sheriff for a time, but he was also a tenant farmer growing cotton like just about everyone else and Sparkman knew what it was like to pick cotton. Education was expected but not easy–a one-room schoolhouse four miles away. But he managed to get to the University of Alabama, shoveling coal in the school’s boiler room to pay for it. He got his degree in 1921 and his law degree in 1924. He taught school for a bit, but was already interested in politics while at Alabama and that was going to be his future.

Sparkman was most certainly a man of the white South and his politics were dedicated to defending white supremacy. This is not surprising, as it would not have been possible for him to rise otherwise. Doesn’t make it better though. He passed the bar in 1925, started practicing in Huntsville, and became a magistrate judge in 1930. Becoming a respected member of the Democratic Party in northern Alabama, Sparkman decided to run for Congress in 1936 when the incumbent retired. The only thing that mattered of course was winning the primary and he did that. His early career was mostly dominated by the outsized role the new congressman took in foreign policy, particularly in being a loud support of Lend-Lease. He was a big development guy as well and was a supporter of the TVA, REA, and other big government programs to help his district. He also pushed what became known as the Sparkman Act of 1943, which allowed women to serve as doctors in the armed forces. He was a big supporter of liberal farm bills and for expanded Social Security.

When John Bankhead died, Sparkman ran to complete his term in the Senate. He was elected in 1946 and was never seriously challenged again. His first big move was to use all the power he had to move the military’s missile program from Fort Bliss to Huntsville. This established Huntsville as both a center of the defense industry and later of the space program. It was Sparkman who thus laid the groundwork for Wernher Von Braun and other former Nazis to help the American missile and space program. Not to mention bring a lot of prosperity to a region that was very poor before the New Deal.

In 1952, Adlai Stevenson selected John Sparkman as his VP candidate. This was an interesting choice for the liberal. Sparkman certainly brought foreign policy credentials. But it was also the choice of highly conflicted Democratic Party on race. Stevenson was close to Eleanor Roosevelt and was generally good on racial issues. Sparkman was….not. In truth, Sparkman only became a loud voice for racism compared to his other southern Democrats after Brown v. Board in 1954. But no one questioned his deep commitment to white supremacy and segregation. The New Deal coalition was just so inherently unstable. He and Richard Russell had tried to convince Truman not to run for a full term in 1948 because they were disgusted by his desegregation of the military and other nods to civil rights. Anyway, Eisenhower/Nixon won going away that fall. Republicans used this to their advantage in the fall. Thomas Dewey gave speeches in the North talking about the Democrats “Proudly waving the banner of hate under your noses” by nominating Sparkman as VP.

Again, it was after Brown that Sparkman really took off on the racist stuff. He signed the Southern Manifesto, expressing horror at Brown and what was happening to his white supremacist political party. He paid a price for this too. He was kicked off the ticket in 56 and replaced by Estes Kefauver, one of the few leading southern Democrats who refused to sign the Manifesto. Of course, Eisenhower won that election easily too. But for the real segregationists–the George Wallace types, the John Rankin types, the KKK types–they did not see Sparkman as a true believer. Rather, they saw him as an opportunist who supported segregation because he needed to but he didn’t really care that much about defending the white race. This was probably accurate. It was never Sparkman’s top priority. But I don’t think that means Sparkman was some kind of closet racial liberal like he definitely was an open economic liberal. Absolutely not. It’s just that some politicians are motivated by their hate and for some, the hate is just not as felt. Sparkman was the latter. There’s an interesting 1965 profile of Sparkman in Time about all of this and for the real segregationists, and to quote one Democratic official from Alabama, “John has been a pretty good supporter of the Democratic Administration, and he’s done a lot for the people of Alabama. But they don’t think about that. They’ve got just one thing on their minds: segregation. They hated Kennedy. They hate Johnson. And they hate John Sparkman.” This while he was also lambasting the banning of the poll tax on the Senate floor. Moreover, Sparkman had actively supported Strom Thurmond‘s Dixiecrat third party campaign in 1948 and still managed to be respectable enough in the party to get the VP slot four years later!

But Sparkman remained a powerful figure in the Senate and a sharp critic of Republican economic policy, basically talking about Eisenhower the way we like to talk about Reaganomics. He remained a pretty strong economic liberal for the rest of his career. He was a big booster of government investment in housing and was largely responsible for the Housing Act of 1961 and the Housing Act of 1964. He also boosted public transportation infrastructure and shepherded bills in the Senate around those issues. Between 1967 and 1974, he chaired the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, where he was a real policy expert. By the end of his career, he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, though he was weak in the job due to his belief that presidents and not Congress should lead on foreign policy. Some of this was his pretty strong support for the Vietnam War and aggressive foreign policy. He did not like that William Fulbright, who headed the committee up to 1975, was anti-war and thought that a lot of the senators on the Foreign Relations Committee were preening for political reasons rather than doing their patriotic duty and support, I dunno, the bombing of Cambodia or whatever. But for context, Sparkman thought John Foster Dulles was an amazing foreign policy leader, so yeah…..

Sparkman retired in 1979 and died of a heart attack in 1985, at the age of 85. The last couple of years were pretty tough after a broken hip and it was in a nursing home that he died.

John Sparkman is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery, Huntsville, Alabama.

If you would like this series to visit other signers of the Southern Manifesto, and what a group that is!, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kenneth Roberts is in Arlington and Henderson Lanham is in Rome, Georgia. Previous posts are archived here and here.