Bibb Graves - Political Life

Political Life

Graves lost his first campaign for governor in 1922, but four years later, with the secret endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, he was elected to his first term as governor. Almost certainly Graves was the Exalted Cyclops (chapter president) of the Montgomery chapter of the Klan, but both Graves and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, another Alabama Klan member, were more opportunists than ideologues, politicians who used the temporary strength of the Klan to further their careers. After receiving solid gold "passports" from the Klan, Graves and Black were collectively known in some Alabama circles as "The Gold Dust Twins."

As governor, Graves earned a reputation as reformer, abolishing the convict leasing system and raising taxes on public utilities, railroads, and coal and iron companies. The new revenue was used to expand educational and public health facilities, increase teachers' salaries and veterans' pensions, fund an ambitious road-building program, and improve port facilities in Mobile. "To maintain his popularity among the farmers in northern Alabama and the working classes, Graves made good on his commitment to New Deal legislation, winning a reputation as one of the most progressive governors in the South." During his second gubernatorial administration he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's “court packing” plan and Hugo Black's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1937, when Black's ties to the Klan were debated in Congress, Graves noted his own previous membership as well, a membership that had been publicly revealed when he resigned from the organization in 1928.

Graves made many successful trips to Washington to secure funds for Alabama, which he called "plum-tree-shaking expeditions," and President Roosevelt appointed him to a national advisory committee on agriculture and to an interregional highway committee. Graves was a strong opponent of eugenic sterilization, and by 1938, he was on hand to greet the 1,200 delegates to the founding session of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare—a fifth of whom were black.

In 1937, when President Franklin Roosevelt named Senator Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme Court, Graves appointed his own wife, Dixie Bibb Graves, to serve the remainder of Black's term. She thus became Alabama's first woman Senator.