AP

DANTE PICCINI, a Republican from Mobile, Alabama, stands in the state legislature waving copies of the bible and the communist manifesto. Our choice, he implies, is between these two documents. Sandra Lane Smith, the president of the Association for Judeo-Christian Values, says Alabama must defend “the only thing that stands before us and tyranny.” Nonsense, says the Reverend Jerry Burks: “There is a seething fermentation within the citizens of this state that cries out for change.” The governor, Don Siegelman, claims the decisions the politicians must take will define the state for generations.

The immediate question is boringly technical: the rules committee of the Alabama House of Representatives must decide whether the full chamber should approve a referendum to decide if a new constitution should be written by a special convention next year. But the issue goes deeper. This is the first time the legislature has addressed the latest, and most widely supported demand to change Alabama's founding charter. It is also one more struggle in the war between Old South and New South, and an example of how decisions made 100 years ago still affect the day-to-day conduct of politics.

Alabama has a reputation as a backward, gun-toting, bible-thumping, redneck place. This is wrong. Unlike its neighbour, Mississippi, it is not dirt-poor. Its main city, Birmingham, boasts the largest concentration of financial institutions in the south after Charlotte, North Carolina, plus a huge Mercedes-Benz factory.

But the state is peculiar. Alabama has the lightest tax burden in the South by far. It is the only state never to have had a modernising “New Southern” governor. George Wallace is partly to blame: his governorship in the 1960s and 1970s sabotaged the state's attempt to overcome the legacy of the Old South (as other states did). But the bigger reason is the constitution of 1901.

John Knox, the planter who chaired the 1901 convention, made no bones about his aim: “to establish white supremacy in this state”. Section 102 said “the legislature shall never pass any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a negro.” This was amended away only in 2000, though it had been illegal under the US constitution for decades. Section 256 said “separate schools shall be provided for white and coloured children.” And black voters were disenfranchised. In the last decade of the 19th century, almost 80% of Alabamians, black and white, had registered to vote. By 1908, only 2% of blacks were eligible, though their voting rights had in theory been guaranteed by the US constitution.

Alabama was not the only southern state to exclude blacks. But it took the various tricks pioneered elsewhere to circumvent the US constitution and used them all: property qualifications, poll taxes as a condition of voting, a requirement that voters be of “good character” (as defined by white officials) and a ban on blacks accused of vagrancy, a charge that could be levied against them at will. When white South Africans were planning their apartheid constitution, they supposedly used Alabama as a model.

Racism was not the sole aim of the constitution. In the 1890s, poor white farmers were being ruined by falling cotton prices. Their man, Reuben Kolb, won the races for governor in 1892 and 1894 on promises to regulate trusts, abolish national banks, protect black votes and introduce a progressive income tax—only to see the elections stolen from him by fraud. What one newspaper called the “Populite-Nigger-Communist Social Equality ticket” terrified the plantation owners and steel barons even more than black voters did. These rich “Big Mules” used the cry of “white supremacy” first to paper over differences with poor whites and then as a ruse to disenfranchise them. The constitution's devices also cut white voter rolls, though only by one-third.

More important, it set up a system of government to make Alabama safe for plantation owners. After the Civil War, local county governments had run up huge debts to build railways and modernise the state. To prevent poor whites from using county governments to do anything like that again, the constitution banned counties from writing local laws and centralised almost all decision-making and law enforcement in Montgomery.

The plantation owners underlined their dominance with a remarkable clause (section 93): “The state shall not engage in works of internal improvement, nor lend its money or its credit in aid of such; nor shall the state be interested in any private or corporate enterprise.” This clause was so insane—it would prevent the state from building roads or other “works of internal improvement”—that it was amended rapidly. But it remains on the books.

The constitution was itself the product of electoral fraud. The decisive votes that returned a collection of white supremacists to the convention were cast in areas of the state which were 75% black. Yet this squalid history is not necessarily a reason for scrapping the existing constitution.

If it contains racist language, so does the US constitution, which defines blacks as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of census-taking. The racist provisions have no legal force, having been amended away. The clause preventing the state from dealing with private companies did not prevent Alabama from wooing Mercedes-Benz with copious subsidies. And many Alabamians like the restrictions the constitution places on the state's power.

The real argument for rewriting the constitution is practical. It is not true that the document is unworkable (it might be easier to change if it were). But it can be made to work only at huge cost. At well over 300,000 words, it is longer than “Moby Dick” and 40 times the length of the US constitution. The 1901 document itself accounts for only about a tenth of this. The rest comes from some 700 amendments, which are appearing with increasing rapidity (52 in 2000 alone). Most states in the South have amended their constitutions fewer than 100 times.

Many of Alabama's changes have nothing to do with the basic framework of government. Three amendments permit counties to spray for mosquitoes; two permit poultry growers to levy a tax on each hen sold in the state; one allows the Alabama Music Hall of Fame to buy CDs. The constitution is not so much a founding document as a sort of constitutional preamble to hundreds of pages of rules.

But the real problem is not the length. Rather, it is incoherent in two areas. The first is the relationship between the state and local governments. Counties have no power to act on their own. They lack authority over those two staples of local government, land use and school financing.

This hits the fastest-growing parts of the state worst. Hardy McCollum, the chairman of the Tuscaloosa County commission, quotes Thomas Jefferson's dictum that the body that governs best is the one closest to the voters. He is continually having to petition the state government to write a law on his county's behalf.

Sometimes this is done extremely badly. In one case, the state government amended a local law in Jefferson County in contradictory ways and then took 30 years to sort it out. Just as often, it is not done at all. State custom gives a right of veto over county law to any state representative from that county. Jefferson County has 20 such representatives, all of whom have to agree to any decision.

County officials often have no idea what the law actually is. Any legal action has to accord with two sets of local laws, both passed by the state legislature in Montgomery. The first, state law, is at least codified, so you can look up the relevant legislation. The second set, applying to individual counties, is published, uncodified, in separate annual editions. A law could be in any of 200 different volumes. One county found it was inadvertently collecting a tax for which its authority had expired years before. Jim Williams of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama says that the constitution destroys democratic accountability at the local level. This was, of course, the point.

The second area of incoherence has to do with taxes. The constitution not only decides what taxes may be raised, but who gets them. Other states earmark taxes as well, but Alabama outdoes them all, designating no less than 89% of its revenues for specific purposes. All the state's personal income and corporate tax goes to education. So does 96% of the public utilities tax. The fuel tax is earmarked for highways. And so the list goes on.

Predictably, this has made fiscal policy far too rigid. But earmarking has also given recipients of taxes a vested interest in the status quo, and made them even more influential than they would be anyway. For example, because so many taxes go to education, the head of the teachers' union, Paul Hubbert, has a huge influence on the state legislature. He had to be consulted even over tax relief for Mercedes-Benz, because the incentives offered to the firm reduced the corporation tax receipts his members rely upon.

The odd thing about this mess is how many defenders it has. Some beneficiaries are obvious. Large farmers and timber-growers pay a pittance for tax on their land (if the Alabama land tax were trebled, it would still be the lowest in the country). But there are also plenty of interest groups who like bits of it. Teachers, for instance, hate the fact that Alabama spends so little on schools, but like earmarked taxes. State legislators dislike spending fully half their time on local affairs, but they like lording it over the counties. Of Alabama's power-brokers, only the county commissioners are clearly hobbled by the system.

In a set-up like this, reform cannot come from the top. Mr Siegelman is the latest in a long line of governors who have attempted (so far unsuccessfully) to introduce a new constitution: Emmet O'Neal complained in 1915 that the document made it impossible to govern the state. But now, for the first time, there is grass-roots support. Bailey Thomson, a professor at the University of Alabama, has set up Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, which has held public meetings all over the state. Almost all Alabama's newspapers support change. According to the Capital Survey Research Centre, 56% of Alabamians say a new constitution is needed to solve the state's problems.

More importantly, not all the interest groups are now opposed to change. Mr Hubbert's teachers' union wants reform, as do some of the multinational companies (like Honda, Boeing and Toyota) who have followed Mercedes into the state. The three leading candidates for this year's governor's race all back reform, so the issue will remain on the agenda even if the House of Representatives turns down a referendum.

At the moment, the opponents of reform in Montgomery probably hold the edge. But 51% of Alabamians say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who opposes a new constitution. If that is really true, then against all the odds, and after a mere 100 years, Alabama might one day get a constitution that will not need amending 50 times a year.

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