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DEL.ICIO.USThe disappearing Watergate class of 1974
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
GOP leaders warned last week that November poses the greatest threat to their office-holders since the tidal wave of Watergate.
But students of 1974 know that, where there weren’t enough Republicans to absorb public frustration with Richard Nixon, this particular tsunami sought out other victims.
In Democrat-dominated Georgia, voters replaced 67 of 180 members of the state House — the chamber’s largest turnover in modern history. It didn’t help that lawmakers had just voted themselves a retroactive pay raise.
Thirty-four years later, only four of those 67 Watergate babies remain: David Lucas of Macon, Bob Holmes of Atlanta, Bobby Parham of Milledgeville, and Calvin Smyre of Columbus.
Three of these four most senior House members — Lucas, Holmes and Smyre — are African-American, and will be honored this weekend by the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials.
It would be hard to pick a more disparate trio of survivors.
In 1974, Lucas, then 24, was living on the fringes of pro football. He’d been cut from the Washington Redskins, and played a season of semi-pro in Sheboygan, Wisc. Redistricting, forced by the Voters Rights Act, opened up a House seat just as the Cleveland Browns called for a tryout.
Politics won out. On his first day as a lawmaker, Lucas wore his eye-popping “Superfly” suit into a bastion of white men whose fashion sense stopped at Early Eisenhower. “When I was playing football, that’s what the guys wore,” Lucas said.
Holmes, then 30, was the philosopher, the New Jersey-born owner of a doctorate in political science from Columbia University. He was new to Atlanta, but something of a joiner. Holmes beat the white incumbent, in a district that was still majority white.
Almost immediately, Holmes and Lucas — eager to continue the revolution — joined an effort to unseat House Speaker Tom Murphy, leader of the rural white Democrats in control. “We were going to change the institution,” Holmes said.
The decision set the pair apart from Smyre, the son and grandson of soldiers. Of the three, Smyre was the only businessman — a personnel manager in a textile mill.
In its highest form, politics is the art of collaboration, not confrontation. Smyre sided with Murphy, who’d given the 27-year-old a coveted seat on the banking committee. “We hit it off from the very first,” Smyre said.
Murphy beat back the ’76 revolt. Committee chairmanships, the source of real power in the Legislature, were denied to Lucas and Holmes for years.
But Smyre rose quickly, ultimately serving as the first black chairman of the state Democratic party. He was in Arizona last week, pressing Barack Obama’s cause among Hispanic lawmakers — stoking that next tsunami.
The Republican takeover stripped the Class of ‘74 of its clout. Its run is nearly finished.
Holmes has announced his retirement. Smyre contemplates making this next term his last. Of the three black lawmakers, only Lucas, the ex-ballplayer, doesn’t see an end in sight.
“I like the competition,” he said. “I like the matching of wits.”
Comments
By betty boop
June 16, 2008 6:44 PM | Link to this
Whoopee. Betty Boop says it is time to clean house again. First we get after Saxby Shameless and Tom Priceless and every seat we can in the Ga Legislature, elect a President who thinks we need change and who is prepared to take steps to heal the broken economy, end our senseless interference in what has now become someone else’s civil war (which started, by the way, with calculated lies by W), and after we have cleaned house we work to clean out the State Capitol next time around. Of course the Repubs are looking over their shoulders, they know they have had their hands deep in the pork barrel and their greasey hides are on the way our. Betty Boop