The Norman Transcript
Norman, Cleveland County, Oklahoma
June 1, 2007

The ‘Man from Bugtussle’ made national impact
The Norman Transcript

The story of Carl Bert Albert is that of an Oklahoma boy who fulfilled his childhood dreams and much more. It is the story of a man who chose a career in politics and rose to hold the highest national political office of any Oklahoman in U.S. history.

Albert was born on May 10, 1908 in the small mining town north of McAlester. This was about a year after Oklahoma became a state. He was the oldest of five children born to Ernest and Leona Albert who were neither poor nor wealthy.

When young Albert was three his parents moved to Bugtussle, a small town six miles northeast of McAlester. Three years earlier it had been renamed Flowery Mound but locals then and now still call it Bugtussle.

As a young boy, Albert marveled that there was meaning on a page of printed letters. He soon learned to read and entered the school at Bugtussle determined to learn.

In 1914, when Albert was about six and in first grade, Charles D. Carter, the local congressman visited the school. He told the students the U.S. was a great country and any one of the children could grow up and be a congressman from that district.

Young Albert was certain that Carter was speaking directly to him. Tradition suggests Albert made up his mind that day to be a congressman. Years later, he remembered that “from early on, everything I did was calculated to being elected to Congress.”

After completing the eighth grade, Albert dropped out of school to help his father on the farm, but the boy continued to read and study. When his parents moved into McAlester a year later, he entered McAlester High School and excelled. There he received the nickname “The Little Giant” because he stood only five feet four inches.

Albert was a member of the school’s debate team that won a state championship. He became a fine public speaker, student body president, and was class valedictorian when he graduated.

With ten dollars in his pocket, Albert entered the University of Oklahoma at Norman in the fall of 1927. To pay his way he immediately located three jobs – waiting tables, working as a soda jerk, and tutoring to pay his way.

As a freshman at OU, Albert won the National Oratorical Contest talking about the U.S. Constitution. He won $1,500 in cash and a trip to Hawaii.

At OU Albert majored in government. He impressed his teachers and fellow students. Graduating in 1931 with a key in Phi Beta Kappa and numerous other awards, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford in England where he studied for three years earning two degrees.

When he returned to Oklahoma, he worked as a legal clerk and was admitted to the bar. In 1937, he began practicing oil law in Oklahoma, Illinois and Ohio.

In June 1941, as war clouds hung over Europe, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private. In 1942, soon after World War II began, he received a direct commission as a 2nd Lieutenant and was assigned to the Judge Advocate’s office in Washington, D.C.

During the war, he was stationed in Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Japan with the 3rd Armored Division. He was awarded a bronze star. When the war ended, Albert’s rank was a Lt. Colonel.

Albert returned to McAlester to practice law. When he learned the local congressman would not run for re-election, he became a candidate, won on the Democratic ticket and headed to Washington, D.C. to represent Oklahoma’s Third District.

For 30 years, from 1947 until 1977, Carl Albert represented Oklahoma’s Third Congressional District in Washington, D.C. Between 1955 and 1961, he served as majority whip in the House of Representatives.

In 1961 he became majority leader and in 1971 became speaker of the House, the third-highest- elective office under the Constitution. Twice he was second in line of succession to the presidency.

At one point, he summed up his personal political views. Albert said he “very much disliked doctrinaire liberals – they want to own your minds. And I don’t like reactionary conservatives. I like to face issues in terms of conditions and not in terms of someone’s inborn political philosophy.”

In 1976, when he was sixty-eight years old Albert retired. An editorial in the New York Times described him as “a conciliator and seeker of consensus, a patient persuader . . . trusted for his fairness and integrity.”

Albert returned to Bugtussle. During the next 24 years, he maintained an office in nearby McAlester, lectured at the University of Oklahoma, and made speeches across the nation and overseas.

His legacy in Oklahoma includes Carl Albert State College in Poteau, the Carl Albert Indian Health Facility at Ada, and the Carl Albert Center established at OU to study his life and the Congress, and Carl Albert Park located south of Durant.

On February 4, 2000, at the age of 92, Carl P. Albert died in McAlester only a few miles from where he had been born and where as a boy a congressman had challenged him to be great.

(Note: “Oklahoma Reflections” is researched and written by David Dary, emeritus professor of journalism, at the University of Oklahoma and the author of 20 books on the American West. The art was produced specifically for this series by Carolyn Chandler, an artist and illustrator of 45 years, who now resides in Norman and specializes in oil painting.)

April 25, 2000, pg 4

Widow of former House Speaker Albert Dies