Op-Ed Columns

Where are the ironists, where is Mark Twain who could make us laugh at the unexpected twists our self-made dilemmas have taken and the preposterous parodies we have made of our own history?

As Twain wrote in Eruption, "The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet."

Of immediate interest to a man acquainted with the perversities of humankind such as Mark Twain is the situation in Black Belt Alabama's Perry County, where a black county commissioner is accused of voter fraud.

Albert Turner Jr. is suspected of manipulating the black vote.

Dress him in a tall gray hat, wainscot, cane and a ruffle of lace at the wrists with a whiff of French cologne, put him back in the 1890s, and you'd have the master of Turner plantation manipulating the "colored vote" to keep out the devil reformer Populists.

The master of Turner plantation and his class had a strong interest in keeping the Populists out of power. Why, those devils would have taxed cotton and trees to educate the black population, which would ruin them, make them unreliable voters.

If the radicals ever got into power, they'd be snakes in the Eden that the landed and urban industrial classes had built for themselves; they would take children out of the mines and give workers the right to bargain for better wages and conditions.

Couldn't let that happen. Next thing you know, they'd be taxing personal income to build roads and bridges for farmers to get their produce to market, which would benefit small merchants and banks, but that was of little interest to plantation owners such as Turner or the coal and iron industrialists of Birmingham.

Thus was born the alliance of the Black Belt and the Big Mules.

The alliance had its way. The Populist candidate for governor, Reuben F. Kolb, was "counted out" in 1890 and '92, carrying most of the "white" counties but losing big in the Black Belt, where landed interests voted blacks against their own interest.

Kolb was no shirttail radical. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, was an officer in the Confederate Army, and was elected Agriculture Commissioner, a significant office in a 19th-century agricultural economy. But he had progressive ideas and, thus, was regarded as a traitor to his class.

Though there were mountains of evidence that there had been massive voter fraud, wagonloads of blacks taken to the polls to vote against Kolb, so tight was the alliance's control that there was no legal means to challenge the election.

Kolb put a pretty good scare into the Black Belt plantaristocrasy and the Big Mules. Their control was tight, but it was a lot of trouble stealing election after election, and what if the blacks and urban working class ever got together? That was a frightening thought.

So the alliance pulled together a 1901 Constitutional Convention, chaired by Calhoun County's own John B. Knox, and cured the Black Belt barons' logistical headache, manipulating the black vote. One last time they hauled black voters to the polls to vote away their franchise. No more black vote; no more headache.

Only nothing lasts forever. Fast forward through wars, elections, Supreme Court decisions, reapportionment and a civil rights movement, which brings us to the present.

There stands Albert Turner Jr., not in knee britches on a colonnaded porch, but in a red golf shirt and baseball cap. He is pictured in The New York Times working the polls, work he knows well.

As Adam Nossiter of The Times reported about the June 3 primary, 25 percent of the vote was absentee (travelin' folk, these Perry County people). That is 1,114 in tiny Perry County, compared to 365 absentees in Birmingham.

That's enough to raise an eyebrow. Ask an honest man such as Chris Steadman if votes there had been bought and he'll tell you, "Well, yeah, I've accepted it. $100, $50. It's pretty common. Ain't no jobs around here. I know it's wrong."

Evidently, the Justice Department and the Alabama attorney general's office both think something fishy is going on in Perry County. Even the county district attorney, Michael W. Jackson, the first black to hold the office, has called for an investigation.

It looks as if the days of Turner running Perry County like a plantation may be numbered. But he's not backing down; he thinks the probe is motivated by racism and partisanship. "The Republican Party has an unscripted mandate to target Democratic counties, and African-Americans particularly."

He's probably right about that. Republicans have been on a tear nationally and in states such as Georgia to abolish "voter fraud." Republicans in Georgia passed a law requiring photo IDs, which, among others, disfranchises monks, nuns, old people, the handicapped and urban citizens dependent on public transportation.

This modern-day version of the poll tax to eliminate or suppress the black vote neatly poses the question: Who should manipulate the franchise, white Republicans or black Democrats?

Talking about these ironies one day at lunch with a black statesman, former Surgeon General David Satcher, I said, "It's funny. When the oppressed reach positions of power and influence, they behave distressingly like people." David smiled and added. "Like the old ones."

Just think of what Mark Twain could have made of all this.