On June 1, 1819, Pres. James Monroe paid an unannounced visit to Huntsville while on an inspection tour of southern military fortifications. At a quickly organized dinner that evening, Monroe toasted Alabama on the eve of statehood, saying, “May her speedy admission to the Union advance her happiness and augment the national strength and prosperity.” Six months later, the president signed the congressional resolution admitting Alabama as the nation’s twenty-second state.
Since Monroe’s arrival, twenty of the men elected to the nation’s highest office have traveled to Alabama. Presidents have come in times of crisis, celebration, and campaigning. They have come as commanders-in-chief touring military bases and production facilities. They have come as comforters-in-chief to Alabama communities ravaged by natural disasters.
A new exhibit created by the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) explores some of these stories ahead of the 2024 election. Drawn largely from the vast photographic collection of the ADAH, the exhibit can be seen in person on the eighth floor of the Alabama State House in Montgomery and in an expanded online version, which can be found at www.archives.alabama.gov.
The ADAH’s earliest image of an Alabama presidential visit was taken on October 20, 1887, during Grover Cleveland’s stop in Montgomery, the southernmost city of his lengthy nationwide tour. He stands beside his wife, Frances, amidst a sea of others on the balcony of the Exchange Hotel. As Cleveland’s visit attests, with the exception of Monroe’s arrival in 1819, presidential trips to the Yellowhammer State have been greatly choreographed affairs.
A few sitting presidents have visited the state on multiple occasions. None, however, came more often than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose historically long tenure in office spanned a critical twelve years in Alabama’s economic and political history from the Great Depression through most of World War II. FDR visited Alabama on at least four occasions. On one of those trips, he came not only as president, but as a friend. In September 1940, he traveled to Jasper to attend the funeral of Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead. The president praised the Alabama politician, with whom he had enjoyed a long and mutually beneficial partnership in Washington.
Perhaps no Alabama presidential visit has carried more foreign-policy weight than Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 trip to Mobile. There, at an October 27 meeting of the Southern Commercial Congress ahead of the opening of the Panama Canal, Wilson outlined a new Latin American policy. He pledged that the United States “would never again seek one foot of additional territory by conquest.”
Commemorative events held nine decades apart drew the nation’s twenty-ninth and forty-fourth presidents to Alabama. In 1921, Pres. Warren G. Harding helped mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Birmingham. During a parade through the city, he rode in a luxury automobile built by the Birmingham-based Preston Motors Corporation. Harding’s speech that day notably called for Black political equality. Reactions among the Magic City press revealed the depth of this ongoing racial debate. While the Birmingham News felt Harding’s commentary was “courageous,” the more racially conservative Birmingham Post felt the remarks by the Republican president were an “untimely and ill-considered intrusion” upon the festivities of the day. In 2015, Pres. Barack Obama marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, flanked by civil rights foot soldiers, many from Alabama, who were beaten there a half-century earlier on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. Speaking at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Obama cast the turbulent history of the modern civil rights era as “a contest to determine the true meaning of America…the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America, and a generous America.”
In the post-World War II era, the political career of Gov. George C. Wallace held sway over several presidential visits to the state. In 1963, amidst a contentious standoff with the governor over civil rights matters, Pres. John F. Kennedy arrived for an inspection tour and speech at Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal. Images from Birmingham News photographer Jack Hopper, which are now part of the ADAH’s Alabama Media Group collection, include views of a presidential motorcade, with Kennedy greeting onlookers from the back of a convertible. In subsequent years, Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency threatened to reorder the electoral map, a fact that colored visits by several of Kennedy’s successors and other presidential hopefuls.
Some of the images in the exhibit depict presidents enjoying quieter moments within the state’s borders. Far away from the din of national politics, Pres. George H. W. Bush found solace fishing alongside Ray Scott, founder of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.).
Visits by former presidents are covered as well, including newspaper accounts of James K. Polk, who traveled through Montgomery and Mobile mere weeks after leaving office in 1849. Committees of public officials greeted him in both locales, but the affairs were decidedly low-key. Suffering from exhaustion and ill health attributed to the rigors of the office, Polk died on June 15, 1849, only four months after his term ended. Campaign politics brought Harry Truman to Decatur more than a century later, ahead of the 1960 election. Speaking in support of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, he stood beneath a large reproduction of the iconic “Dewey Defeats Truman” image from his 1948 election victory.
The exhibit also chronicles Alabama visits by First Ladies, vice presidents, and presidential hopefuls. It concludes with an exploration of several notable Alabamians who visited the White House, including Booker T. Washington, Helen Keller, and Harper Lee.
Though a resident of the state has yet to ascend to that high office, the exhibit chronicles the interesting and unexpected ways Alabama and the presidency intersect. You can explore the digital exhibit at www.archives.alabama.gov.
Top photo: President John F. Kennedy visits Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal in 1963. [Alabama Department of Archives and History]
This article was previously featured in Alabama Heritage magazine, Issue 152, Spring 2024.
