Carl Albert: Nose-Counter From Bug Tussle

  • Share
  • Read Later

OKLAHOMA'S Democratic Representative Carl Bert Albert, 53, is 5 ft. 4 in. tall, wears an elfin grin, and is so inconspicuous that he might be mistaken for a filing clerk in his own office. But Albert has qualities that should serve him well as majority floor leader: he combines an abiding love of the House with a shrewd sense of its mood that has earned him respect on both sides of the aisle and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

On to Oxford. Albert comes from the "Little Dixie" corner of southeastern Oklahoma—a corn, cotton, coal and cattle area bordering on Arkansas and Texas. Albert's father was a shot-firer in a McAlester coal mine, but when Carl, the oldest of five children, was a child, the family moved to a cotton farm near the hamlet of Bug Tussle. * Young Carl went to the two-room Bug Tussle school, then to high school in McAlester (he was the first Bug Tussle pupil ever to progress as far as a high school diploma). He showed an early instinct for politics, at the age of 15 took the stump for the local Democratic candidate for the state legislature. At the University of Oklahoma, Albert majored in political science, was student council president, Phi Beta Kappa, a tournament bridge player, a sprinter, a 118-lb. wrestler (he now weighs 168), a member of the chess team and the pistol squad. The boy from Bug Tussle also won a Rhodes scholarship.

After three years of law at Oxford, Albert returned to Oklahoma, eventually went into private practice. In 1941 he enlisted in the Army as a private, emerged five years later, after service in New Guinea, Okinawa and Japan, as a lieutenant colonel. Back in McAlester after the war, he resumed his law practice, but when Representative Paul Stewart resigned because of ill-health, Albert ran for the seat. He won a spirited Democratic primary by a scant 350 votes; his Oxford background had not sat well with some of the farmers. The general election was a pushover (Oklahoma's Third District rarely elects a Republican to office), and in his re-election campaigns since 1946, Albert has never received less than 75% of the Third District's vote.

"That's It." In the House, Albert voted along generally liberal lines, except on civil rights issues, served as an effective member of the Agriculture Committee. Although he had earned a reputation back home in Oklahoma as a skillful stump speaker, he has addressed the House only where necessary. Speaker Sam Rayburn. whose Fourth Texas District is just across the Red River from Albert's, took a fatherly, neighborly interest in Albert. In 1955. when the Democrats regained control of the House, Rayburn and John McCormack pored over the delegation lists for a majority whip. They got only as far as Oklahoma and the name of Carl Albert when Rayburn said: "That's it."

  1. Previous Page
  2. 1
  3. 2