The Sun-n-Sand and the decline of political debate

At the close of its era, Jackson’s storied Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel was a calcified husk of its former stylish self: rusty and mildewed on the outside, sprouting moss and oozing mold inside, enclosed by an ugly cyclone fence.

A passerby would have to squint to see the mid-century modern bones of the abandoned motel complex, which for more than three decades served as the state’s de facto offsite capitol, where legislators, lobbyists and political reporters gathered in the bar, restaurant and private rooms, and around the swimming pool, to talk politics and make deals.

“We did way more business, quite frankly, in that bar at the Sun-n-Sand than we did at the Capitol,” former state Rep. Steve Holland observed during a tour of the ruined motel for the 2023 documentary film “Libation and Legislation.” Revisiting the empty restaurant, basement bar and the private room that he occupied during legislative sessions between 1983 and 2001, Holland summed up the basic Sun-n-Sand ethos: “You would libate and legislate.”

The Sun-n-Sand’s heyday, along with the kind of free legislative debate that lawmakers recall taking place there, are now history. The motel was torn down in 2021, and “crossing the aisle” has become a political anachronism. When the motel’s surviving, freestanding sign was refurbished and unveiled in early 2024, it was basically a colorful, Googie-style tombstone for the now-vanished motel and a nostalgic reminder for politicos of a certain age of the era when lawmakers also freely crossed the bar or poolside patio to directly engage with their legislative counterparts.

The Sun-n-Sand opened in 1960 on downtown Jackson’s North Lamar Street a block from the statehouse. Its extracurricular role would later be memorialized by Mississippi author Willie Morris, who wrote: “In the shadowy bar with Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn on the jukebox, or in the dining room at breakfast, the pols more or less passed that day’s legislation, merely to be formalized later on the floors of the Capitol.”

John Grisham reportedly wrote his first book, A Time to Kill, in a Sun-n-Sand room during his former life as a state legislator. Holland’s and Grisham’s rooms shared a common door.

Even after the Sun-n-Sand grew dowdy and eventually closed, in 2001, its futuristic, Mad Men-style sign, period architecture and noteworthy political history exerted a powerful, lingering presence. There was nostalgia for both the motel’s retro style and its role as a legislative meeting ground, back when political discourse was far less divisive than it is today. When the state announced in 2019 that it had bought the complex with plans to demolish it for an employee parking lot, there was a major outcry.

State Sen. Hob Bryan, who, like many lawmakers, rented a room at the Sun-n-Sand during legislative sessions, was among those who opposed razing it. Bryan’s reasoning was: “Architecture matters,” he said during a recent interview with The Mississippi Independent. Though Bryan was referring specifically to the motel’s aesthetics and design, there is likewise architecture involved in lawmaking, and from his perspective, both have suffered in the time since he was first elected in 1983. A Democrat from Amory and now the longest serving state senator, Bryan recalled that there was more open interaction among lawmakers back then, even when they held opposing views.

At its height, the Sun-n-Sand was a key cog in the legislative wheel, housing lawmakers and hosting informal discussions as well as occasional alcohol-fueled bacchanals. Lobbyists were frequent guests, along with reporters who agreed to abide by certain discretionary rules. Bryan said one lobbyist told him she maintained multiple tabs at the motel bar for pragmatic reasons, adding that, “When they started making legislative decisions in Sunday School, she’d start going to Sunday School.” The bar was famously tended by the late, great Rudolph “Cotton” Baronich, an erudite observer and listener known for dispensing pithy, discreet advice, who referred to his customers as his patients.

There were also swimming pool gatherings and cookouts that attracted a diverse array of politicos and legislative hangers-on. “The design of the Sun-n-Sand, with the rooms around a plaza and courtyard, lent itself to that,” Bryan said, adding that the layout reminded him of the Academical Village at the University of Virginia, where he earned his law degree. His description also brings to mind scenes of solons in ancient Rome discussing Senate business while lounging around public baths, but with the addition of grilled sausage dogs and polyester pants.

Opposition to the demolition primarily focused on the Sun-n-Sand’s architecture and its historical significance, and as part of a last-ditch preservation effort, the complex was designated a Mississippi Landmark and included in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2020 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. But the preservation effort ultimately failed. In 2021, everything except the lobby and iconic sign was razed. As something of consolation prize, the state agreed to restore the sign, which was refurbished and reinstalled in January 2024. It now presents an attractive riddle to casual passersby: a prominent beacon for a motel that isn’t there, promising sun and sand when there isn’t a beach for 150 miles. There have been talks, though none have been officially announced, about repurposing the surviving lobby for a restaurant.

The return of the Sun-n-Sand sign to Jackson’s downtown streetscape raises the question of what venue represents the motel’s contemporary successor. Where do lawmakers today gather to kaffeeklatsch, get wined and dined by lobbyists and candidly discuss bills like reinstating the state’s ballot initiative, expanding Medicaid and funding public schools?

According to Bryan, there is no such place. No contemporary signposts point the way because the kind of political discourse that defined the Sun-n-Sand has, in Bryan’s view, been rendered largely irrelevant, with bills today frequently passed according to leadership edicts delivered in secret meetings to members of the Republican supermajority. Reporters, the public, Democratic lawmakers and even Republican dissenters are no longer a significant part of the negotiations, he said.

Legislators and their attendant lobbyists do occasionally still meet up in area restaurants -- Tico’s Steakhouse and Char are high on the list, according to one lobbyist -- and in rented apartments and hotel rooms scattered around the city. Others who call themselves the Camper Caucus spend evenings sitting around firepits at the state fairgrounds, beside the RVs they call home during legislative sessions, as if part of some dystopian tribal council.  Yet there is no longer an epicenter for meaningful legislative interaction. In its place are the performative stage sets of the House and Senate chambers, and Room 113 at the Capitol, aka “the Bilbo room,” where a statue of the infamous former governor stood until it was removed to the basement of the Two Museums in 2022.

Members of the state GOP House Caucus meet in private in Room 113 to strategize about bills that are typically passed in rote votes. That, Bryan noted, is the antithesis of the kind of true negotiation and debate that formerly took place in committee rooms and during discussions and dealmaking in unofficial spaces typified by the Sun-n-Sand.

Though the public might logically assume the legislative process unfolds in the Capitol’s grand, marble chambers, others point to Room 113 and the board rooms of major political donors and organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, which prepackages bills that lawmakers often follow verbatim, and is reportedly funded by conservative billionaires and allied groups that contribute to Republican state legislative campaigns. (Former speaker of the Mississippi House Philip Gunn was chair of ALEC’s board.)

Legislative activity also takes place in the digital realm, in the form of emailed talking points and messages circulated on closed phone apps. Aside from the potential for leaks, such communiques are generally restricted to those on the inside track.

It is not as if everything was above board at the Sun-n-Sand, but by comparison, the era’s open, interactive model comes across as dated, even quaint.

While the meetings in Room 113 are secretive, their existence is well known. Mississippi Today reported in March 2022 that state Sen. Sollie Norwood (D-Jackson) had formally asked the Mississippi Ethics Commission to decide whether the closed House caucus meetings violated the state’s Open Meetings Act. The same outlet reported that Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann had decided against holding similar Senate caucus meetings because his staff advised that they would likely violate the act.

After Ethics Commission executive director Tom Hood advised the commission that the meetings violated the law, its members overruled him in a 5-3 vote, “clearing the way for the Republican majority to keep formulating policy and tactics behind closed doors,” according to the Associated Press. In January 2024, around the time that the Sun-n-Sand’s refurbished sign was going back up, House Speaker Jason White said he planned to continue convening the closed meetings, telling the AP that if lawmakers were forced to open them to the public, it could have a “chilling effect” on policy discussions.

There is an old saw that you don’t want to see how laws are made because it’s akin to making sausage, which is not pretty, and it’s better not to know what goes into it. Yet the process, like the outcome, clearly matters. Today, the argument could be made that the legislative sausage is frequently processed elsewhere, then prepackaged for local consumption. Though reporters once relished the opportunity to be a fly on the wall at the Sun-n-Sand, that option is off the table in Room 113, much less in the bill-crafting labs at ALEC. Bryan noted that there are often no reporters present even at public legislative hearings and official debates because they tend to work from remote locations, all of which renders the approach embodied by the Sun-N-Sand even more anachronistic.

The Sun-n-Sand’s singular importance began to wane in the late 1990s, because, Bryan said, “Ultimately, the accommodations got terrible.” Lawmakers moved on to apartments or other downtown hotels such as the Ramada Inn (also since demolished), near the likewise razed Dennery’s restaurant, another popular legislative meeting place. Such offsite venues proved expendable, but in their respective moments served as important staging areas, more or less in public view. Bryan dates what he sees as the overall decline in political discourse to the election of lobbyist Haley Barbour, who served as governor from 2004 to 2012 and introduced a style of top-down politics that was more typical of Beltway culture.

Because there are no available transcripts for the meetings in Room 113, it is impossible to document how or whether lawmakers have discussed a particular bill, such as the failed effort to reinstate the state’s ballot initiative process, a key measure considered during the 2023-2024 session. However, when state Rep. Fred Shanks (R-Brandon), the chief negotiator on that issue in the House, was asked in an email if it came up, he said, “Yes[.] We would have talked about it.” (A more comprehensive look at the ballot initiative process, including detailed observations by Shanks, will be the subject of an upcoming Mississippi Independent series.) 

Restoring the public’s right to effect laws through such initiatives, specifically through constitutional amendments, was doubtless a hot topic at the Sun-n-Sand bar when the original measure was being debated in 1992. Today, in Bryan’s view, the paucity of public debate over the measure, which was killed by a state supreme court ruling in 2021 that cited an outdated requirement in the enabling language, and which the legislature has failed three times to fix, “reinforces the concept that it’s an inside game.”

Two other measures proposed during the 2023-2024 session (which likewise failed) would have further diminished public knowledge of the legislative process by effectively banishing political reporters who once had wide-ranging access to official and often to offstage legislative discussions. In January 2024, the Mississippi Free Press reported, legislation was filed to bar the media from the Senate floor and to abolish the Capitol press office on the building’s fourth floor. Should such legislation eventually pass, a “Press Room” sign could perhaps be preserved as another relic of Mississippi’s political olden days.

Before the razing of the Sun-n-Sand, when Holland toured its ruins for the documentary film, he pointed out that the motel was so ingrained in the legislative experience that when he arrived as a newly elected representative, he was surprised to learn at the reception desk that the rooms were not paid for by the legislature. During his 18 years of rooming at the motel, Holland (who left office in 2020) said he got to know legislators of every political persuasion, and often their families, too, and that such familiarity influenced the way lawmakers interacted when crafting bills.

“I wish modern-day legislators had the experience of something like this,” he said while standing in a now vanished room, “because the camaraderie died in the legislature, almost, when this place died. People are so disjointed, just like the whole country is, and you’re all partisan, and people don’t get together in fellowship,” which he said included not only staying up into the wee hours sipping “dark water” by the Sun-n-Sand pool, but truly listening to other vantage points, even if you disagreed.

As it is, Holland said, “They’ll just have to read about in the history books.”

See also: “A Saturday meeting at the Capitol” under the Reporter’s Notebook tab.

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Images: Sun-n-Sand sign, pre-restoration, by Linh Dinh, used by permission (more of Dinh’s work can be found here); House ceiling, by Shawn Rossi (Flickr)

Alan Huffman is a freelance writer, author and political researcher based in Bolton, Mississippi. His work has appeared in The Atlantic; The Guardian; the Los Angeles Times; Newsweek; the New York Times; ProPublica; the Washington Post; and numerous other publications.