 Associated
Press Senator Strom
Thurmond at a 1996 Republican event. Mr. Thurmond
always insisted he had never been a racist, but
was merely opposed to excessive federal
authority. |
Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a central figure in the political transformation of the South and the longest-serving senator in American history, died yesterday in Edgefield, S.C. He was 100.
He had been living in Edgefield, his hometown, since retiring from the Senate in January, after 48 years.
Mr. Thurmond first came to national attention in 1948 as the States' Rights candidate after Southerners walked out of the Democratic convention to protest the party's new commitment to civil rights. Mr. Thurmond finished a distant third to President Harry S. Truman that year, but his million votes cracked the once-solid Democratic South and helped set the stage for political realignment.
In 1964, Mr. Thurmond switched parties to back the Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry M. Goldwater. Four years later Mr. Thurmond held the South for Richard M. Nixon's nomination and election, after assuring Southerners that Mr. Nixon, as president, would go easy on civil rights.
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Mr. Thurmond always insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
As governor of South Carolina, he led the effort to abolish the state poll tax, but in Congress he fought efforts to ban it nationally. Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that "on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line." And, he went on, "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."
His opposition to integration, which he often attributed to Communism, was the hallmark of his career in Washington until the 1970's. In 1971, he was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide — in recognition of increased black voting resulting from the legislation he had fought. From then on, black South Carolinians, like all other residents, benefited from his skills as a pork-barrel politician who took care of the home folks.
 Associated
Press First elected to
the Senate in 1954, Senator Thurmond retired in
January as the oldest member of Congress ever.
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"We've looked out for the state," he said in a 1999 interview, "and everything that was honorable to get, we got it."
Mr. Thurmond went to the Senate in 1954, the only senator ever elected by a write-in vote. His death was announced on the floor of the Senate last night by Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader. The Senate, at work on Medicare legislation, paused for a moment of silence. Mr. Frist said Mr. Thurmond had "a life really unmatched in public service."
Though his long career brought him national prominence, Mr. Thurmond was better known in the Senate for looking out for South Carolina and the United States Army than for any particular legislation he sponsored. As a lieutenant colonel in an Army civil affairs unit in 1944, he landed in France by glider on D-Day and captured German soldiers at pistol point. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the French Croix de Guerre.
Until his last years, Mr. Thurmond was a man of uncommon energy and legendary fitness. He neither smoked nor drank, did more pushups and sit-ups than many men decades younger and fathered children into his mid-70's. He was also known for fondling women in Senate elevators, including a woman who turned out to be a fellow senator, much to his surprise.
But he became very hard of hearing and, unwilling to use a hearing aid, sometimes had trouble following debates. He collapsed on the Senate floor in October 2001, and moved into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in November. In those last years, he had to be helped on and off the Senate floor by aides, who also told him, in voices audible in the Senate gallery, how to vote.
The final political furor of his career involved him indirectly. At his 100th birthday party Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, paid tribute to Mr. Thurmond, saying the nation "wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years" had he won the presidency in 1948. The racially charged political firestorm over the next two weeks forced Mr. Lott to resign his leadership post.
James Strom Thurmond was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in Edgefield, a combative town that had produced several governors, among them Benjamin R. Tillman, a race-baiter whom Mr. Thurmond met at the age of 6 and from whom he learned the firm politician's handshake he would use all his life.
He did not go straight into politics. After graduating from Clemson College in 1923, he became a teacher and quickly rose to the job of county school superintendent. He studied law with his father, a Tillman protégé and former United States attorney, and in 1930, while still an educator, he was admitted to the bar.
Three years later, he was elected a state senator. In 1938, he campaigned hard among his fellow legislators, and they elected him a circuit judge, which provided an opportunity for him to become known statewide and broaden his political contacts. In 1940, he called on the grand jury in Greenville to be ready to take action against the Ku Klux Klan, which, he said, represented "the most abominable type of lawlessness." Years later, as a United States senator, he insisted that the four death sentences he had imposed as a judge had deterred crime.
A War Hero Seeks the Statehouse
In 1941, Mr. Thurmond joined the Army as a captain. After the invasion of Normandy, his civil affairs unit was among the first to arrive at the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald. In 1996 he remembered the ways the Germans had murdered their victims — by starvation or shooting or bashing in their skulls. "I had never seen such inhuman acts in my life," he said. "I couldn't dream of men treating men in such a manner. It was awful."
He had been re-elected judge while overseas, but when he returned from the war he resigned to run for governor in 1946. When two state political leaders in Barnwell refused to endorse him, he had a campaign issue. As the 11 candidates traveled around South Carolina for joint meetings, he regularly denounced "the Barnwell ring."
Mr. Thurmond, as a war hero and a tireless campaigner, led the field in the first primary. In the runoff, he attacked his opponent for being insufficiently loyal to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mr. Thurmond won the runoff and the Democratic nomination, which was tantamount to election, with 56 percent of the vote. He faced no further opposition and was elected with 26,520 votes, the 10th governor to come from Edgefield.
A month after he took office in 1947, a mob in Greenville lynched a black man accused of robbing and killing a white taxi driver. As governor, Mr. Thurmond brought in a tough prosecutor, but a jury acquitted all 28 white defendants. Mr. Thurmond was widely praised for his efforts, and he said he believed the prosecution would deter lynchings in the future. South Carolina has never had another lynching.
In many areas, Mr. Thurmond was a progressive governor, pressing to improve black schools, promoting equal pay for women and fighting for better working conditions at textile mills. He even called for rent control. And when a federal judge, J. Waties Waring, ordered the state Democratic Party to allow blacks to vote in the primaries, Governor Thurmond kept silent, neither denouncing nor praising the decision.
At 44, Mr. Thurmond proposed to his 20-year-old secretary, Jean Crouch, in an intraoffice memorandum he dictated to her. She consented by memorandum, and by all accounts it was a happy marriage. Until her death in 1960, they would share many interests, including reading the Bible together. They had no children.
After President Truman announced a broad civil rights program and issued an executive order to integrate the armed services in 1948, Mr. Thurmond was not among the president's most strident early critics. He said nothing comparable to the analogy by Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia that using the Federal Bureau of Investigation on civil rights cases was comparable to Hitler's use of the Gestapo.
But when other Southern governors turned up the rhetoric against civil rights, Mr. Thurmond joined in, declaring: "No fight was ever won by staying out of it. Our cause is right and just. We shall honor ourselves by pressing it to the end."
A Political Legacy
At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, electrified the hall when he spoke for a strong civil rights plank in the platform, saying that "the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights." When the convention adopted the plan, delegates from Alabama and Mississippi walked out.
The next weekend in Birmingham, Ala., Mr. Thurmond became the leader of an effort to capture the Democratic Party and its electoral votes in the South — a first step in a strategy of trying to deadlock the electoral college and force the election into the House of Representatives, where the South had power to bargain for its positions.
In November, Mr. Thurmond got 1.1 million votes and the 38 electoral votes of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, plus a vote from one elector in Tennessee. But Mr. Truman won, helped by farm votes, the overconfidence of his Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, and the support of Northern blacks who rallied to his civil rights banner.
Prof. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University, said in 1999 that the Thurmond candidacy had a lasting impact on American politics.
"Forty-eight is when you see the first drop in white vote for Democrats in the South," Professor Black said. "It helped to realign the conservative and more racist Democrats. Later on, many of those votes went to Goldwater and Wallace." Dwight D. Eisenhower's Southern support in his successful campaigns in 1952 and 1956 came from different states than those Mr. Thurmond carried, and especially from newly suburbanized areas.
As his term as governor expired in 1950, Mr. Thurmond ran for the United States Senate as a Democrat and lost to Olin D. Johnston, the incumbent. He then moved to Aiken and began a law practice.
But in 1954, Senator Burnet R. Maybank died two days before the deadline for certifying the Democratic Party's nominee. He had already been nominated and was sure to win. The Democratic State Committee did not call for another primary election. Instead, it nominated one of its members, Edgar A. Brown, one of Mr. Thurmond's old antagonists from Barnwell.
Backed by Gov. James F. Byrnes, a former United States Supreme Court justice and former secretary of state, Mr. Thurmond made bossism the issue and won the election as a write-in candidate. He got 143,444 votes to Mr. Brown's 82,525. But, as he had promised, he resigned in 1956 to open the primary for anyone to oppose him. No one did, and he returned that fall to the Senate, where he remained until this year.
Once in Washington, he attacked the Supreme Court decision requiring that segregation in public schools end. In 1956, with Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, he proposed a Southern manifesto, which, after various drafts, argued that the Supreme Court justices, "with no legal basis for their action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal and political ideas for the established law of the land." Nineteen of the 22 Southern senators signed — those who did not were Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The manifesto gave major encouragement for Southern delay and defiance of the court's verdict to end segregation.
In 1957, after widespread efforts by the White Citizens Council to purge blacks from Southern voting rolls, the United States attorney general, Herbert Brownell, pushed for civil rights legislation. He drew up a bill to create a civil rights commission and a civil rights division in the Justice Department and outlaw efforts to bar people from voting in federal elections. The bill's most important section would allow the attorney general to file suits to halt discrimination in voting, education and elsewhere.
Senator Russell said the bill would lead to "concentration camps" and the use of the military to "destroy the system of separation of the races in the Southern states at the point of a bayonet." But behind the scenes he worked with Senator Johnson to weaken the bill but allow it to be passed, fearing that all-out Southern opposition would turn the nation firmly against the South and foreclose Mr. Johnson's hope for the White House.
Although the fight was obviously over, Mr. Thurmond staged a one-man filibuster. He had taken steam baths to dehydrate himself so he would not have to yield the floor to go to the restroom. At 8:54 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1957, he started talking, and he did not stop until 9:12 p.m. the next day. Two hours later, the Senate passed the first civil rights bill since 1875. Other Southerners were furious at Mr. Thurmond for grandstanding, and Mr. Russell accused him of "self-aggrandizement."
Mr. Thurmond was no less committed in his condemnation of Communism and suggested, in 1962, that Communists had infiltrated the government. He called them "silent socialists" and once said: "I don't know of any right-wing extremists, as I define them, bringing harm to the government. Left-wingers have."
His support of the right was much in evidence in 1962, when he was an active participant in a special subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which held hearings on accusations that the Kennedy Administration had "muzzled" officers of the armed forces and prevented them from teaching their soldiers about the menace of Communism.
He continued to connect Communism and civil rights, calling the Freedom Riders of 1961, who sought integrated bus travel, "red pawns and publicity seekers."
Five days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Lyndon Johnson went to the Congress as his successor, saying that "no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long." The next summer Mr. Johnson, breaking a filibuster, won passage of the legislation, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, employment and the use of federal money. He succeeded despite the opposition of the Southerners and a handful of Republicans, including Senator Goldwater of Arizona.
After the Republicans nominated Mr. Goldwater to oppose President Johnson in the 1964 election, Mr. Thurmond switched parties and endorsed him. Mr. Thurmond condemned the Democratic Party for "leading the evolution of our country to a socialistic dictatorship," for having "forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors," for invading "the private lives of the people" and for supporting "judicial tyranny."
"The party of our fathers is dead," he said.
Mr. Thurmond helped Mr. Goldwater carry the four states he himself had won in 1948. But Mr. Goldwater won only two others in the Johnson landslide.
In 1968, Mr. Thurmond, then 66 and a widower for eight years, married for the second time. His bride, Nancy Moore, a former Miss South Carolina, was 22. That marriage effectively ended in 1991 when Ms. Moore announced that she wanted "some measure of independence." They separated.
Although Mr. Thurmond had been criticized for marrying a woman much younger than he, the marriage produced four children. The oldest, Nancy Moore Thurmond, was killed by a drunken driver in 1993, a month before her graduation from college and weeks before her entry into the Miss South Carolina pageant, where she had hoped to follow in her mother's footsteps.
Her death at 22 shook the senator, and he became one of the Senate's strongest crusaders against drunken driving, a cause he had already embraced by calling for labels on alcoholic beverages identifying drunken driving as a health hazard of drinking.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Thurmond is survived by his sons, Strom Jr. and Paul, and his daughter Julie.
In 1968, Mr. Thurmond played a central role in Mr. Nixon's nomination and election. After Mr. Thurmond first won a promise that Mr. Nixon would favor an anti-ballistic missile defense system, he worked over Southern Republicans. He started in his own delegation, where there was almost solid support for Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, an undeclared candidate who was plainly running. Mr. Thurmond told his colleagues to be practical, that only Mr. Nixon could win. "Believe me, I love Reagan, but Nixon's the one," he said.
At the Republican convention in Miami Beach, Mr. Thurmond prevented a slide to Mr. Reagan that could have nominated him on a second ballot. Mr. Thurmond met with Mr. Nixon and told him that Southerners needed reassurance that he would not press hard on school desegregation and that his choice of a vice-presidential candidate would not be a Northern liberal. Mr. Nixon promised to consult Mr. Thurmond before he made his choice.
Then Mr. Thurmond made the rounds of the Southern delegations to reassure them, making it sound as if he had been promised a veto on Mr. Nixon's running mate. In the end, Mr. Nixon chose Gov. Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, who was known for his hostility to black demonstrators.
On Mr. Thurmond's advice, Mr. Nixon promised the Southern delegations that he would not "use the South as a whipping boy" and that he would fight to win the region against the third-party candidacy of George C. Wallace, the populist and race-baiting governor of Alabama. The Southern delegations held for Mr. Nixon, and he went on to barely defeat Mr. Reagan on the first ballot.
Mr. Thurmond campaigned heavily against Mr. Wallace, telling Southerners that a vote for a sentimental favorite would be wasted because if Mr. Nixon did not triumph, the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice president, would.
Mr. Thurmond was influential in the Nixon administration, but it could not deliver on its promise to slow school desegregation. And by 1970 blacks were voting heavily in South Carolina.
Changing With the Times
Mr. Thurmond was not up for re-election in 1970; the race that year involved his choice for governor, Representative Albert Watson, who was linked to various racial conflicts in the state and who boasted of standing up for "hard-core rednecks."
Mr. Watson lost to the Democratic candidate, John West, and Mr. Thurmond got the message. He hired Thomas Moss of Orangeburg, a state director of the Voter Education Project, which sought to encourage blacks to register to vote. Mr. Moss was the first black employed by any of South Carolina's members of Congress. For a quarter of a century, Mr. Moss worked for the senator and for black South Carolinians, using Mr. Thurmond's clout to win sewer grants for black hamlets and grants for black colleges and small businesses.
Mr. Thurmond's political agility, his ability to remember names and faces and his fine hand at pork-barrel politics enabled him to win re-election with 64 percent of the vote in 1972, 56 percent in 1978, 67 percent in 1984, 64 percent in 1990 and 53 percent in 1996. In that year, at 93, he became the oldest person ever to serve in Congress, and questions about his age finally began to worry some voters.
His political pragmatism played a part when Mr. Reagan became president in 1981. That year he persuaded some new, very conservative Republican senators to stick with the administration and Senate leaders on a budget with deep tax and spending cuts, even if it did not go as far as they wanted toward ending deficits. It also showed in some of the votes he cast — votes in favor of extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and putting teeth into the Fair Housing Act in 1988. And although he was an intense foe of abortion, he broke with anti-abortion campaigners over the issue of using fetal tissue for research, telling the Senate that this research would help people like his daughter Julie, who had juvenile diabetes.
When the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1981 for the first time since 1955, Mr. Thurmond, as their senior senator, was elected president pro tem. That put him behind the vice president and the speaker of the House in the line of succession to the presidency. When his party regained control in 1995, he was again chosen president pro tem.
The Republican majorities also brought him two committee chairmanships. He headed the Judiciary Committee from 1981 to 1987, working successfully with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to pass a major rewriting of federal criminal law, including an end to parole in the federal prison system.
In 1995 he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee, where he had served since 1959 in a time when he rose to the rank of major general in the Army Reserve. But under pressure from Republican colleagues who thought he was no longer up to the job, he resigned the chairmanship on Dec. 4, 1998, the day before his 96th birthday.
Asked in his 1999 interview if there was anything in more than 70 years of public service he would do differently, Mr. Thurmond said: "I can't think of anything. My guardian angel has guarded over me. And everything has turned out all right. I love serving the public, and I get pleasure out of helping people. We help an average of 2,000 people every month."
Although Republicans were again the minority, he presided over the Senate on Nov. 19, 2002, the last day of his last session. In a raspy voice, he read, "The Senate stands adjourned."
Then he threw up his gnarled hands and said his final Senate words: "That's all."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company