No Place for a Gentleman Politician

To walk into Charlie Capps’ office is to be wrapped in a blanket of charm.

Capps, 80, a rural Democrat who is leaving the Mississippi House after 34 years, is of the political school that values calm over agitation, quiet over clamor, and congeniality above nearly everything. He grew up in the Delta and, as he puts it, “I feel no reason to shout and holler.”

Capps, citing health problems, announced his departure in March to a state Capitol in which charm no longer seems to be a currency.

Since Republican Gov. Haley Barbour took office 14 months ago, upsetting Democratic control of Mississippi state government, partisan politics have flooded into Jackson. Squabbling legislators missed a budget deadline last week, something unthinkable during Capps’ 15-year tenure as chairman of the appropriations committee. A Democratic legislator recently was observed flashing an obscene hand gesture at Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck.

It is, in short, a distressing atmosphere for the old Southern horse trader, a conservative who kept a bottle of bourbon in his desk and never bothered to become a Republican because, he said, “it was too much trouble, really.”

Capps divides Mississippi’s politicians into three rough categories: friends, close friends and very close personal friends. Terry Coleman, Georgia’s former House speaker, said he had never seen Capps engage in a political attack, unless you counted that one evening in Savannah.

“We were going to dinner and asked [Capps] if he wanted to bring so-and-so, and he said: ‘No, sure don’t.’ There was never an explanation,” Coleman said. “That’s about as ugly as it would get with Charlie.”

Capps followed a line of Delta politicians whose power came wrapped in softness.

John Stennis, a 42-year U.S. senator, was known for halting committee meetings if a female spectator was forced to stand. U.S. Rep. Jamie Whitten, who served more than 50 years in Congress, was so indirect in his negotiations that one colleague, Silvio Conte of Massachusetts, said dealing with him was “like throwing putty at a wall.”

Beginning in 1971, when Capps was elected to the Mississippi House, deals were made inside the ring of smoke from his cigar. Capps, a cotton merchant’s son, listened like a sphinx. Petitioners filed into his office, were refused and left smiling, “crazy about him anyway,” said former speaker Tim Ford. Those who crossed Capps would discover that a line item had disappeared mysteriously from the budget, Coleman said.

In a traditionally one-party state with a weak governor, the speaker of the House had unchecked power, and Capps joined the small circle of top committee chairmen. For “many, many years,” Ole Miss historian David Sansing said, “money in this state has been spent the way Charlie Capps directed it.”

But Capps said he never pursued powerful positions. “If you’re the right kind of fellow and educated and work hard, power will seek you out,” he said.

Capps has glided through watershed changes in state politics, among them a redistricting that made the Delta into a reservoir of black political power.

Capps began his career as a staunch segregationist. In the spring of 1964, the sheriff of Bolivar County kept a close watch on civil rights activists’ plans for Freedom Summer.

Capps viewed them as “foreign white people coming down here and breaking up our way of life” and prepared for their arrival with quiet meetings, he said in a recent interview.

First, he persuaded the editor of the local newspaper not to print a single item about the civil rights workers. Then he met with the head of the local Ku Klux Klan -- a Baptist preacher who “happened to be a good friend of mine” -- and warned him that if the Klan burned a single cross, or distributed a single leaflet, he would throw him in jail. Activists who worked in Bolivar County that summer recalled that Capps arrested numerous civil rights workers and sent them to the state penitentiary in Parchman, Miss. But as far as the locals were concerned, the summer passed uneventfully.

“There’s nothing in print to suggest we had any trouble,” Capps said.

More than 40 years later, Capps is one of two white politicians who still represent the Delta. He has staunch allies among black colleagues, who testify that he has left behind the racial politics of his early career. Rep. George Flaggs, an African American Democrat from Vicksburg, Miss., called Capps “the most honorable man I know.”

“I witnessed him transforming,” Flaggs said. “It’s a credit to his lifestyle that he’s always been able to transform in a new era. He accepted it and moved forward because of his love for Mississippi.”

But this last adjustment -- to a state government riven by partisan politics -- grieves him more than the others. Gov. Barbour implemented tactics like an online scorecard assigning letter grades to lawmakers.

House Democrats responded with equal ferocity; in comments last year, Rep. Steve Holland warned the governor that he was “going to meet the bull -- the head bull and all the steers.”

Barbour’s first year in office brought two rancorous special sessions and unprecedented brinksmanship on the state budget. This year was no easier; Mississippi lawmakers spent much of last week in a stalemate over educational funding. Legislators have not been paid since April 1, when the funds ran out.

“It’s just gone too far for a compromise at this point -- too many strong personalities saying, ‘My way or the highway,’ ” Roger Ishee, a Republican lawmaker, told south Mississippi’s SunHerald.

Meanwhile, Capps, the last of the Delta giants, was sitting in his seven-sided broom closet of an office, one foot slung up on a table. In his day, the budget process was highly controlled. On the weekend before the deadline, agency heads would meet in Capps’ office to negotiate, “never a pleasant affair,” but one that ended, always, in an agreement.

“The Senate, and I and the House all wanted to do the same thing,” he said. “It was just a matter of finding the money.”

But Capps, who leaves office June 30, was not inclined to lay blame for this year’s stalemate on Barbour, whom he called “a close friend of mine,” or House Speaker Billy McCoy, whom he called “a very close personal friend.” Then who has poisoned the atmosphere?

“Let me say I would do nothing to malign the leadership of the House,” said Capps, who never says a harsh word in public. “I will just have to keep that a private feeling for myself.”