NONFICTION - Jan. 26, 1992

THE COST OF COURAGE: The Journey of an American Congressman by Carl Elliott Sr. and Michael D’Orso (Doubleday: $22; 307 pp.) While they have in common log cabins or other humble beginnings, stories about American political leaders tend to flow in two distinct streams. Autobiographies by the rich and powerful usually end up implying that “the best man makes it”: Work hard, have faith in people and in the system and you will succeed in this great land, thank you very much. From liberal historians and many novelists, on the other hand, the message is usually that truly good people will be ground down by an amoral system and immature public.

“The Cost of Courage,” in contrast, flows in the middle of these two streams. A refreshing alternative to the rather shrill and predictable moralizing from the left and right, it is true to all of the bracing ambiguities of the real world.

A congressman from Alabama who served eight terms in the House of Representatives, Carl Elliott surely made it. His up-from-nowhere story--he would stand on tree stumps under starry skies, practicing his oratory on the cornstalks and cotton plants--rings with the inspiring idealism of Frank Capra and the soaring patriotic rhetoric of Stephen Vincent Benet.

And yet, Carl Elliott also was destroyed by the people he felt so honored to serve. Ridiculed by George Wallace for his opposition to segregation, he was defeated in a vicious election. When a Boston Globe reporter visited him in 1989 to garner information about Elliott’s friend, Adam Clayton Powell, he found the wheelchair-bound, insulin-dependent former congressman reading by a naked light bulb and letting his phone ring to avoid creditors such as the ones who repossessed his car a few years earlier.

Like so many educated American liberals, Elliott often swings between proud Populism and veiled elitism. Thanks to the richly evocative text shaped by co-writer Michael D’Orso (which has preserved Elliott’s thick Deep Southern cadences), we swing too: viewing the Alabamans as victims during the Great Depression and as victimizers when they later reject integration so stubbornly and consistently.