Tandy Little

Tandy Duncan Little, Jr. (born July 22, 1921 – July 11, 2015), was a Republican former state representative from the capital city of Montgomery, Alabama, who held his seat for one term from 1962 to 1966.^[1]

Background[edit]

Reared in Montgomery, Little graduated from Sidney Lanier High School there, and he received a degree in electrical engineering from Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.^[2]

During World War II, Little was a lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces.^[3] After the war, he joined the family business, Little Electric Company and subsequently branched into real estate development in Montgomery.^[2]

He was among the founding members of the Dixie Sailing Club^[4] on Lake Martin, a reservoir formed by the construction of Martin Dam on the Tallapoosa River near Montgomery. The lake encompasses three counties, Tallapoosa, Elmore, and Coosa.^[3] Little retired to Florida, where he died at the age of ninety-three.

Political life[edit]

In 1962, Little was one of three Republicans elected to the Alabama House, when fellow Republican businessman James Douglas Martin (1918-2017) of Gadsden nearly upset the veteran Democratic U.S. Senator Lister Hill of Montgomery. In that same election, the Republicans did not offer an opponent to George C. Wallace, the Democrat who for a time became synonymous with the desire to preserve segregation in the American South. The two other Republicans elected with Little to single terms in the House were Donald Lamar Collins (1929-1993) of Jefferson County, and John Andrew Posey, Jr. (1923-1972), of Winston County, in northern Alabama.^[1] Two years later, Little and his wife, the former Virginia Ruth Blair (1921-2013), a Montgomery native and a graduate of Auburn University,^[3] were delegates to the 1964 Republican National Convention, which met in San Francisco, California, to nominate the Goldwater-Miller ticket,^[5] the first Republican slate to win the electoral votes of Alabama since Reconstruction.

In 1965, Little and another Republican representative from Montgomery, Alfred Goldthwaite, who had defected the previous year from the Democrats, fought George Wallace's move to permit governors to succeed themselves, a change finally adopted for the 1974 election.^[6]

Little, Collins, Posey, and Goldthwaite all left the legislature in 1966, when James D. Martin, by then a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives for Alabama's 7th congressional district, since disbanded, lost badly in the race for governor. Martin was defeated by Lurleen Wallace, and the Republican John Grenier of Birmingham similarly failed to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator John Sparkman in a high-profile race. The defeats of Martin and Grenier set back the Republican attempt to gain a permanent foothold in Alabama after nearly a century of one-party Democratic hegemony. The Montgomery Advertiser described the state party's bleak prospects: "The flimsy house that Barry [Goldwater] built collapsed except for a few boards here and there. ... The Republicans have little more than the bare foundations of a party."^[7]

In 1968, Little was the party finance chairman when the state GOP failed to mount a serious effort on behalf of the Nixon-Agnew ticket, which had no chance in Alabama against George Wallace's presidential candidacy under his American Independent Party. Nor could Perry Oliver Hooper, Sr. (1925-2016), of Montgomery gain momentum in his race for the U.S. Senate seat that Lister Hill vacated, a position won overwhelmingly by James B. Allen of Gadsden, a former two-term lieutenant governor. Of the lack of a Nixon campaign in Alabama, Little said, "We couldn't afford it" because of the decision to concentrate on the successful third-term bids of three Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Alabama, all first elected in the Goldwater sweep of the state in 1964: Jack Edwards of Mobile and William Louis "Bill" Dickinson (1925-2008) of Montgomery, both conservatives, and John Hall Buchanan, Jr. (1928-2018), a Moderate Republican from Birmingham. For years no matter how poorly the state GOP fared, Alabama still had the three Republican U.S. representatives who gained footholds in their districts.^[8]

Later years[edit]

In their later years, the Littles moved to the Shell Point Retirement Community in Fort Myers, Florida, where Mrs. Little, the former Virginia Ruth Blair (1922-2013), known as "Teenie," died at the age of ninety-one. The couple had four children, three surviving: Linda Little of Lumberton, North Carolina, Tandy Little, III, known as Duncan Little, of Seabrook, Texas, and Ann Little of Washington, D.C.^[3] Another son, Donald Blair Little (1954-2012), was an attorney in Montgomery, who ran unsuccessfully, 61-33 percent, in the Republican primary election]] in 1998 against incumbent Perry O. Hooper, Jr., for the District 73 seat in the Alabama House.^[9] Hooper's father was the 1968 U.S. Senate nominee and later the first Republican to serve as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.^[10]

The two Little grandchildren are Tandy Little, IV, of Tampa, Florida, and Laura Blair Little, of Clarksville, Tennessee.^[3]

Tandy and Virginia Ruth Little were Presbyterians. They are interred at Fort Myers Memorial Gardens.^[2]

References[edit]