Photo: Fabian Bachrach

Albert Coates served the state of
North Carolina with missionary zeal

Long before he became known as the father of the Institute of Government, Albert Coates was a man with a mission. His career at Carolina spanned six decades, including 31 years as the institute’s first director.

During that time, Coates was alternately seen as a selfless idealist and a rule-breaking maverick who had the oratorical skills of a country lawyer – or preacher – and was driven by a consuming passion for public service gleaned from then-University President Edward Kidder Graham.

Coates drew from that missionary zeal to create the institute, but at times it also made him impossible to work with – or for, said John Sanders, who joined the institute in 1956 and succeeded Coates as director six years later.

Both Coates’ striking originality and his sometimes exasperating determination are captured in the newly released biography by Howard E. Covington Jr., “The Good Government Man: Albert Coates and the Early Years of the Institute of Government.” (The North Carolina Collection published the book, which is being distributed by UNC Press.)

Coates launched the institute in 1931 as his personal enterprise, and with the full support of his wife, Gladys, he sustained it for more than a decade by his own labor and force of will.

Monument – or tombstone
Covington said that Coates “created the Institute of Government as an extension of his classroom, and thus as an extension of himself.” It was conceived not merely to amass knowledge, but to share that knowledge with public officials across North Carolina.

Throughout the 1930s, Coates traveled the state preaching the gospel of good government and courting benefactors to keep the fledgling institute afloat during the Great Depression.

Eventually, Coates raised enough money to buy land on Franklin Street for a home for the institute, and then borrowed money to clear the land. When fundraising fell $25,000 short, Coates convinced an insurance executive from Greensboro to advance him the money as a loan – under terms that claimed more than half his annual law salary should he default.

When the building was dedicated on Thanksgiving 1939, friends said the building would become Coates’ monument, but he wasn’t so sure.

“It may turn out to be my tombstone,” Coates said. At the time, the institute and Coates – who continued to heavily subsidize it – were so deep in debt, the future remained uncertain. It wasn’t until years later that the building was named for Coates and his wife.

In 1942, the institute was incorporated into the University and began receiving state support.

As Covington describes in his book, this arrangement came about because of a chance encounter between Coates and William D. “Billy” Carmichael, the University’s chief financial officer. Carmichael was walking at the edge of campus and saw a light in the Institute of Government, where he found Coates putting in another late night.

Given his commitment, it was only natural that when faced with the prospect of forced retirement at age 65 (then mandatory for University administrators), Coates believed the institute couldn’t go on without him – or for that matter, he without it.

So as his 65th birthday neared, Coates wrote a 158-page document for President William Aycock, intended as a history of the institute and an appeal to Aycock to waive the retirement rule. But Aycock refused to budge.

On the night of Aug. 31, 1962, Coates unscrewed the nameplate from his office door in Knapp Building, the institute’s building at the corner of South and Country Club roads that opened in 1956, and replaced it with one for Sanders.

After his mandatory retirement, Coates continued teaching fulltime at the law school until 1967. He and Gladys would not set foot in the Knapp Building again until 1972 when a concert by the North Carolina Symphony was held in their honor.

Trailblazer for ‘bewildered humanity’
Coates was a big man on campus long before he began the institute.

He started his first year at Carolina in 1914 and soon fell under the spell of Graham, the new University president he would come to revere.

During daily chapel meetings in Gerrard Hall, Graham called upon students to practice an “everyday patriotism” as he called upon the University to commit its resources to the service of the people of North Carolina.

Coates took those words to heart.

By his senior year, Coates was president of the North Carolina Club and had begun his lifelong quest to connect the University’s know-how with the needs of the state.

Though inspired by Graham, Coates’ closest mentor was E.C. Branson, who during 19 years on the Carolina faculty made the governmental, social and economic institutions of the state the legitimate subject of research by professors and study by students.

In 1923, as Coates was about to join the law school faculty, Branson wrote Coates to convey his pride in his former student: “I have always felt sure you would find yourself and your place in the scheme of things entire, and your place is that of a trailblazer and pace maker for bewildered humanity in its forward march,” Branson wrote. “You begin where every effective genius begins, namely, with the folks and the big problem you best know.”

Coates’ circle of influence included novelist Thomas Wolfe who, in the face of withering criticism following the publication of “Look Homeward Angel,” sought Coates for his fair- minded appraisal.

He also was influenced by Horace Williams, the eccentric, beloved philosophy professor who encouraged Coates to study law at Harvard. And he faced formidable rivals Howard Odum, the sociologist with whom he battled over academic turf in the 1930s, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed as a potential threat the law enforcement training offered by the institute.

Continuing the dream
A memorial tribute by Sanders after Coates’ death in March 1989 said Coates’ first great achievement was to conceive and advocate with “eloquence, unrelenting vigor and absolute conviction” the idea of the institute.

His bulldog tenacity and vision were bound inseparably, Sanders said in a recent interview. Coates’ overzealousness was tolerated, Sanders said, because supporters understood that it allowed him to overcome obstacles necessary to conceive of the institute and to keep it going through hard times.

Coates also inspired others to believe in his dream so they could build upon it, Sanders said. In the early years, most people who worked at the institute had no job security, only their faith in Coates to draw on. What joined them in an almost spiritual brotherhood was the ideal of the institute itself. 

As Covington wrote, Coates paraphrased the Bible to tell “his disciples that he wanted them to ‘love the Institute of Government with all their heart, with all their mind and with all their soul.’”

And those who stayed did, although none acquired full status as faculty members until 1957.

Sanders stayed on as institute director for three decades, with a break from 1973 to 1979 when he worked for UNC President William Friday, and Henry Lewis served as director.

In 1992, he was succeeded by Mike Smith, who presided over the expansion of what is now the Knapp-Sanders Building and the transformation of the institute into the School of Government. Currently, it is the largest university-based local government training, advisory and research organization in the United States.

Smith said Covington’s new book provides an opportunity to look back with admiration at the man who set high standards for service that are still followed today.

“Albert Coates built an impeccable reputation for quality of service, political neutrality and reliability that continues to make the school a trusted resource for public officials across the state,” Smith said.