John Grenier - The 1966 Campaign

The 1966 Campaign

Grenier himself planned to run for governor in 1966, but he instead deferred to U.S. Representative James D. Martin of Gadsden, who became the unopposed Republican Party candidate. Grenier, meanwhile, challenged U.S. Senator John Sparkman. He received 313,018 votes (39 percent) to Sparkman's 482,138 (60.1 percent). Another 7,444 votes (0.9 percent) went to Julian Elgin, an independent from Montgomery who had been Sparkman's Republican opponent in 1960. Sparkman was an entrenched incumbent senator and a former member of the U.S. House as well, who had also been the vice presidential running-mate of Adlai Stevenson of Illinois in 1952. Grenier ran ahead of his ticket-mate Martin, who was crushed in the gubernatorial race by Lurleen Wallace, wife of popular outgoing Democratic Governor George C. Wallace. Martin finished with 262,943 votes (31 percent); Mrs. Wallace's 537,505 (63.4 percent), and the remaining 47,655 (5.6 percent) went to independent Dr. Carl Ray Robinson (1925–2005), a Bessemer physician. Martin and Grenier each won only one of the state's sixty-seven counties -- Winston in north Alabama, whose descendants were mostly non-slaveholders who had been Republican at the time of the American Civil War. Grenier hence ran eight percentage points ahead of Martin because he received 50,075 more votes than Martin, and 45,503 fewer ballots were cast for senator than for governor. The sole voter group with whom Martin and Grenier prevailed was upper-income whites.

For a time during the first half of 1966, Senator Sparkman had seemed vulnerable. He won the Democratic nomination by an unimpressive margin over weak opponents. Some 224,000 voters who participated in the gubernatorial primary, handily won by Lurleen Wallace, skipped the Senate race. Grenier concluded that such apparent lukewarmedness toward Sparkman provided a base from which to mount a challenge. Yet Sparkman benefited from Lurleen Wallace's candidacy, for he could extol the popular portions of his record and still stress that he had opposed U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson on nearly half of Senate roll call votes. Philosophical differences between the Wallaces and Sparkman were hence blurred in the interest of party harmony. Sparkman successfully emphasized the value to Alabamians of his constituent services, his chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee and his key membership on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Grenier tried to tie Sparkman to President Johnson, having called his opponent "the ambassador to Alabama from the court of King Lyndon." He challenged the Democrats over the economy, constitutional interpretation, the Great Society, civil disobedience, and urban unrest. Grenier proposed military victory in the Vietnam War, the restoration of voluntary school prayer, and restrictions on foreign aid programs.