Alfred Goldthwaite

Alfred Witherspoon Goldthwaite, Sr. (August 12, 1921–May 13, 1997), was an attorney from his native Montgomery, Alabama, who as a member of the Alabama House of Representatives became the first public official in his state to defect in the early 1960s from the Democratic to the Republican Party.^[1]

Background

Goldthwaite was descended from George Goldthwaite, the founder of a political family who came to Alabama from Massachusetts in the early 19th century and served during the 1870s as a member of the United States Senate. Alfred Goldthwaite was born in the historic Goldthwaite-Arrington Home in Montgomery and reared and totally supported financially by his guardian and uncle by marriage, Archibald "Archie" Arrington (September 13, 1874–May 27, 1946). His aunt was Olivia Goldthwaite Arrington (August 10, 1868–August 7, 1946). The Goldthwaites and the Arringtons had a financial interest in both the Durr Drug Company and the Alabama National Bank in Montgomery, but Alfred Goldthwaite himself was not on the payroll of either firm.^[2] In 1940, Goldthwaite graduated from Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery.^[3]

Goldthwaite and his wife, the former Evelyn Adams, an educator and a native of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who died in 2003, had three children, Alfred W. Goldthwaite, Jr., of Montgomery, Mary Arrington Goldthwaite Perry and husband Dudley, also of Montgomery, and Ellen Adams Goldthwaite of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Goldthwaites are interred along with other family members at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery.^[4][5]

Political life

Goldthwaite was elected as a Democrat to the state House of Representatives in 1958 and again in 1962, corresponding with the successful candidacies of gubernatorial nominees John Malcolm Patterson and George C. Wallace, respectively. He changed parties in 1964 even before Strom Thurmond made the famous defection in September 1964 and endorsed U.S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election against the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. At the time of his own party bolt, Goldthwaite felt compelled to describe himself as "neither a rabble-rouser nor a demagogue" but one "committed to fiscal responsibility".^[6] In 1965, Goldthwaite and another Republican representative, Tandy Little, also from Montgomery who was elected in 1962, fought George Wallace's move to permit governors to succeed themselves, a change finally adopted for the 1974 election. Because Wallace could not run again in 1966, he offered his wife, Lurleen Wallace, as his political stand-in.^[7]

All of the Republican state legislative candidates lost in 1966,^[1] when James D. Martin of Gadsden and John Grenier of Birmingham at the top of the Republican ticket, were handily defeated for governor and U.S. senator, respectively, by the Democrats Lurleen Wallace and John Sparkman. In 1967, Goldthwaite became the Alabama Republican state party chairman.^[6] He attended the 1968 Republican National Convention, which met in Miami Beach, Florida, to nominate the Nixon-Agnew slate. Goldthwaite was part of a group of Deep South Republicans, including Howard Callaway of Georgia, Clarke Reed of Mississippi, Charlton Lyons of Louisiana, and Harry S. Dent, Sr., of South Carolina, who followed what is called the Southern Strategy to guarantee Nixon's nomination over a last-minute convention bid launched by then Governor Ronald W. Reagan.^[8]

There was little visible Nixon-Agnew campaign in Alabama in 1968. George Wallace, as the presidential nominee of his American Independent Party, had an early lock on his home state that thwarted the viability of both Nixon and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Nor could Republican Perry O. Hooper, Sr., of Montgomery gain momentum in his race for the U.S. Senate seat that the Democrat J. Lister Hill vacated after thirty-one years, a position won overwhelmingly by James B. Allen of Gadsden, a former two-term lieutenant governor. Of the lack of a Nixon campaign in Alabama, state GOP finance chairman Tandy Little said, "We couldn't afford it" because of the decision to concentrate on the successful third-term bids of three Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama, all first elected in the Goldwater sweep of the state in 1964: Jack Edwards of Mobile, William Louis Dickinson of Montgomery, and John H. Buchanan, Jr., of Birmingham.^[9]

References