Bert Nettles

Albert Sheffield Nettles, known as Bert Nettles (born May 6, 1936), is an attorney from Birmingham, Alabama, who served from 1969 to 1974 as a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives from Mobile County. He is one of the first members of his party to have held a state legislative seat in Alabama since Reconstruction though Tandy Little of Montgomery and two other Republicans had been elected for single terms in 1962.^[1]

Background

Nettles is the youngest of four sons of George Lee Nettles (1894-1969) and the former Blanche Sheffield (1908-1995).^[2] He was born in Monroeville in Monroe County in south Alabama. His brothers are David Miller Nettles (1930-1981), George Clay Nettles (born 1932), and Joe Lee Nettles (born 1933).^[3] Monroeville, the setting of the 1960 Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is located halfway between Mobile on the Gulf Coast and the capital city of Montgomery.^[4]

Nettles graduated in 1958 from the University of Alabama and in 1960^[5] from the University of Alabama School of Law, both institutions located in Tuscaloosa. Thereafter, he was admitted to the bar and worked briefly in Montgomery for the office of the state attorney general, MacDonald Gallion, before he joined a law firm in Mobile.^[4]

Nettles is Episcopalian. From 1983 to 1988, he was the chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast, and from 2000 to 2003, he was assistant chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.^[5]

Nettles and his wife, Elizabeth (born c. 1940), have four daughters, Mary Katherine Nettles Willis, Jane Elizabeth Nettles Nagle, Susan S. Nettles Han and Anne Nettles Stanford.^[6]

Political life

In 1964, Nettles supported Barry M. Goldwater for U.S. President, the first Republican since Reconstruction to win the electoral votes of Alabama. However, he considers himself a moderate Republican, unlike the Goldwater conservatives that dominated the Alabama party during the 1960s. Nettles was elected to the Mobile County Republican Executive Committee and was the chairman of the state convention in 1968,^[4] at which Perry O. Hooper, Sr., a conservative probate judge from Montgomery, was nominated for an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate against former Lieutenant Governor James B. Allen of Gadsden, a Conservative Democrat.^[7]

In 1966, Nettles ran unsuccessfully for the Alabama State Senate against the Democrat Pierre Pelham, a graduate of Harvard Law School, an old-school orator, and an ally of George Wallace, the four-term governor of Alabama known for his segregationist stance. The Republican nominees for governor and the U.S. Senate, James D. Martin and John Grenier, respectively, lost badly, but the three incumbent Republican members of the United States House of Representatives survived, including Jack Edwards of Mobile. Three years later in 1969, Nettles won a special election for state representative with 53 percent of the vote; for nearly two years, he was the only Republican member of the legislature until after the 1970 general election, when he was joined by a second GOP member. Nettles was elected for a full term even as the Democrat George Wallace claimed a second nonconsecutive term as governor after he defeated in a runoff election Albert Brewer, who had succeeded to the governorship upon the death of Lurleen Wallace in May 1968. Wallace then faced no Republican opponent, but he came to Mobile to campaign against Nettles.^[4]

As a legislator, Nettles became the first Alabama lawmaker to call for lowering the voting age to eighteen, prior to ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He worked to resolve a long-simmering dispute over the regulation of the sale of milk in Alabama. He worked to pass laws to guarantee the quality of air and water. He worked to prevent House members with conflicts of interest from voting on legislation which impacts their personal status. Nettles supported increased expenditures for public education and called for a national constitutional convention to establish the legality of the neighborhood-school concept. He worked for separation of powers among the state legislative, executive, and judicial branches.^[8] Nettles supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, opposed by most conservatives and rejected by the Alabama legislature.^[4]

In 1972, Nettles sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat John Sparkman. His opponents for the nomination were Winton Blount, the Montgomery industrialist who had stepped down as the last Postmaster General of the United States within the presidential Cabinet, and former U.S. Representative James D. Martin of Gadsden, who had lost the governor's race in 1966 to Lurleen Wallace, first wife and the political stand-in for her husband, George Wallace. Both Blount and Martin ran to Nettles' political right in what was the first Republican primary election in Alabama history, held on May 2, 1972. Nettles himself had authored the bill to authorize Republican primaries at state expense, as had already been long provided for the Democratic Party.^[8]

Nettles won the endorsement of The Tuscaloosa News:

Mr. Nettles concluded years ago that a two-party system in Alabama had more to offer the state than one dominated by Democrats oftentimes fractured by dissent and disloyalty. And he felt a personal obligation to help achieve the better status. ... He has consistently voted for honesty in government, for progress in all segments. There have been times when he and a few others shouldered the responsibility of becoming the Alabama Legislature's conscience. ... He has done more to build a real Republican Party in our state than any other person. ... He should win the Republican nomination on the basis of integrity, ability, courage, and experience. The Mobile attorney is only 35, and not another one can approach his youthful vigor.^[8]

With Martin and Nettles eliminated from contention, Blount was nominated but handily defeated by Sparkman in the November 7 general election, in which U.S. President Richard M. Nixon crushed George S. McGovern in forty-nine states. Nixon had shunned the Blount campaign despite Blount's service as Nixon's Postmaster General because of past friendship with Senator Sparkman, who had been Nixon's Democratic opponent in 1952 for Vice President.^[9]

In a 1974 interview with Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, Nettles said that the GOP needed to attract urban and African-American voters to become competitive statewide.

I don't see how any Republican in a county wide - certainly state wide-position, can win consistently without a good support among the black community. ... You just can't cut out one large segment of the state. Cut them out almost completely. And then hope to win two thirds for three fourths of the remaining segment. In an area that's traditionally been Democratic. I think that's very short sighted philosophy ...^[4]

Nettles argued that the moderate approach he advocated could produce slow but solid GOP growth while a conservative theme could "score some dramatic upsets when the Democrats are in disarray" but spell a "dismal long-term future."^[10]

However, the Alabama GOP gained majority status early in the 21st century without ever winning the significant urban black backing that Nettles had long thought essential to success.

Later years

Nettles later moved his law practice from Mobile to Birmingham. Formerly affiliated with Haskell Slaughter Young & Rediker, LLC, Nettles in February 2014 joined the Hand-Arendall firm. He has worked for four different state attorneys general to handle several complicated civil lawsuits. For more than twenty-five years, he has been counsel to the Alabama Insurance Underwriting Association. He is listed among the "Best Lawyers in America for Insurance Law."^[5]

References