Anthony D. Sayre

Anthony Dickinson Sayre (April 29, 1858 – November 17, 1931) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a state legislator in the Alabama House of Representatives (1890–1893), as the President of the Alabama State Senate (1896–1897), and as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama (1909–1931). Influential in Alabama politics for nearly half a century, Sayre is widely regarded by historians as the legal architect who laid the foundation for the state's Jim Crow laws.

Sayre played a key role in undermining the protections guaranteed to black citizens in Alabama by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and in enabling the ideology of white supremacy. As a white supremacist and state legislator in the post-Reconstruction era, he authored and introduced the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which disenfranchised black Alabamians for seventy years and ushered in the racially segregated Jim Crow period in the state. Sayre boasted in newspaper interviews that his law forever eliminated "the Negro from politics" in the Cotton State.

Sayre's uncle and patron was U.S. Senator John Tyler Morgan (D-Alabama), His uncle William Sayre owned a slave plantation.

The young Sayre was a model of Southern conservatism and "had all the proper family connections for a conservative politician." His father-in-law was Kentucky Senator Willis Benson Machen, a former Confederate general. His mother's uncle was the influential Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan, another former Confederate general and the second Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. During Morgan's six consecutive terms as U.S. Senator from 1877 to 1907, he was an outspoken proponent of black disfranchisement, racial segregation, and lynching African-Americans. Sayre's paternal uncle William Sayre, using slavor labor, built the house later used by Jefferson Davis for the First White House of the Confederacy.

After two years of attending a wealthy private academy, Sayre pursued his higher education at Roanoke College, a private liberal arts college in Salem, Virginia. At the time, Roanoke remained famous throughout the American South for its students mustering a volunteer corps and fighting alongside Confederate forces amid the American Civil War. Upon graduation, Sayre returned to Alabama to study law under Judge Thomas M. Arrington (1829–1895), a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate Army. In 1880 or 1881, Sayre was admitted to the Alabama bar, and he became known as "one of the most brilliant and able lawyers" in the state.

Political career

For the next thirty years, from 1880 to 1909, Sayre politically aligned himself with his uncle John Tyler Morgan's Bourbon Democrat faction of the Southern Democrats, and he represented both cities and counties in various capacities. Sayre served as clerk of the city court from 1883 to 1889, and next as Montgomery County's representative in the Alabama House of Representatives from 1890 to 1893.

According to Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Anthony Sayre—as an ambitious state legislator serving in the Alabama House of Representatives—played a pivotal role in the disfranchisement of the black population in the Cotton State and ushering in Alabama's Jim Crow era. Drawing on his legal expertise, Sayre drafted and introduced the landmark 1893 Sayre Act which he boasted was designed to "eliminate the Negro from politics, and in a perfectly legal way."

Sayre's legislation used "creative ways to reduce the influence of blacks" in Alabama politics and "made the voting process difficult for poor and illiterate blacks and whites through small changes to the election system." According to historian C. Vann Woodward, Sayre's discriminatory legislation "prohibited assistance in marking ballots, thus providing means of disfranchising thousands of illiterate voters, white as well as black." In the words of a contemporary party leader, Sayre's bill sought to "maintain white supremacy, and to have a ticket selected where only white men will vote." After her father's death, Zelda resided in and out of sanatoriums for the remainder of her life.

Personal life Marriage and family Sayre's daughter was Zelda Fitzgerald, the neo-Confederate wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda revered her father and described herself as "a Typhoid Mary of Confederate tradition".

Circa 1883, a 25-year-old Sayre met Minerva "Minnie" Buckner Machen, the daughter of U.S. Senator Willis Benson Machen (D-Kentucky) and his third wife, Victoria Theresa Mims. The couple met while in Montgomery through Sayre's uncle and close friend Senator John Tyler Morgan. Morgan hosted a New Year's Eve ball in Montgomery and invited both Anthony and Minnie to attend.

The Sayres married on January 17, 1883, in Eddyville, Kentucky, and settled in downtown Montgomery. They lived in the affluent white section of racially-segregated Montgomery in a lavish home with five bedrooms. During the Jim Crow era, which Sayre's 1893 law inaugurated, they relocated to the Wilson Plantation. They had eight children—three of whom died in infancy—including Anthony Dickinson Sayre Jr., who committed suicide in 1933 and Zelda Sayre, the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Sayres employed many African-American domestic servants. Accustomed to these black servants catering to and fulfilling her every need, an adult Zelda showed little competence in managing ordinary responsibilities, from money matters to daily tasks.

Relationship with Zelda Although Zelda's sibling Rosalind described their father as genial and humorous, neighborhood children feared him, and Zelda herself described him in her semi-autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz as a remote and distant man—a "living fortress". Scholarly speculation exists regarding whether Sayre sexually abused Zelda as a young girl based on Fitzgerald's characterization in the semi-autobiographical work Tender is the Night, but there is no concrete evidence confirming incest. F. Scott Fitzgerald disliked his Sayre in-laws and believed the Sayre family suffered from hereditary mental illness.

Whereas Scott Fitzgerald denigrated his own family's Confederate relatives and mocked the Sayre family's Confederate beliefs, Zelda described herself as "a Typhoid Mary of Confederate tradition... in the frenetic, decadent world of Scott and his friends." She venerated her white supremacist father as a Southern paragon whose life embodied the "categorical imperatives of Confederate ethics". The increasing divergence in political opinion between Zelda and Scott regarding her love of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South caused friction in their marriage. Zelda wrote to a friend: "Scott's changed... He used... to say he loved the South, but now he wants to get as far away from it as he can."

Family legacy In contrast to her mother Zelda, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald felt guilt and embarrassment over the Sayre family's legacy of white supremacy. While living in Alabama, Scottie discovered that her grandfather authored the 1893 election law depriving the black people of Alabama of their voting rights and devoted herself to voter outreach for black citizens in Alabama. As many black citizens living in Montgomery still viewed the Sayre family with askance as late as the 1970s, they did not reciprocate her social overtures. In 2016, at a conference, F. Scott Fitzgerald's grandson, Sam Lanahan, spoke candidly on Anthony D. Sayre's legacy and described him as a white supremacist who used his judicial influence to "erode the emerging Negro power."