New Politics in the Old South

David T. Ballantyne

Description

The first scholarly account of the South Carolina Democrat's career and the transformation of Southern U.S. politics and society during the civil rights era

New Politics in the Old South is the first scholarly biography of Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, a key figure in South Carolina and national political developments in the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout his career Hollings was renowned for his willingness to voice unpleasant truths, as when he called for the peaceful acceptance of racial desegregation at Clemson University in 1963 and acknowledged the existence of widespread poverty and malnutrition in South Carolina in 1969. David T. Ballantyne uses Hollings's career as a lens for examining the upheaval in southern politics and society after World War II.

Hollings's political career began in 1948, when he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. He served as governor from 1959 to 1963 and then as a U.S. senator from 1966 until he retired in 2005. Ballantyne illuminates Hollings's role in forging a "southern strategy" that helped move southern Democrats away from openly endorsing white supremacy and toward acknowledging the interests of racial minorities, though this approach was halting and reluctant at times. Unlike many southern politicians who emerged as reactionary figures during the civil rights era, Hollings adapted to the changing racial politics of the 1960s while pursuing a clear course—Vietnam War hawk, fiscal conservative, regional economic booster, and free-trade opponent.

While Hollings was at times an atypical southern senator, his behavior in the 1960s and 1970s served as a model for survival as a southern Democrat. His approach to voting rights, military spending, and social and cultural issues was mirrored by many southern Democrats between the 1970s and 1990s. Hollings's career demonstrated an alternative to hard-edged political conservatism, one that was conspicuously successful throughout his Senate tenure.

Sujets

• American Government
• Political
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Lettres et linguistique
• The Politician (book)
• Freedom Rides
• Black school
• Jim Crow laws
• Voter Education Project
• South Carolina v. Katzenbach
• Biography
• Second Reconstruction
• South Carolina Republican Party
• Segregation academies
• Massive resistance
• New South
• Albert Watson (South Carolina)
• Southern Democrats
• Southern strategy
• Political machine
• Desegregation busing in the United States
• War on Poverty
• Federal government of the United States
• Politics
• History of the Americas
• Central
• United States
• Old South
• Autobiography
• FL
• National
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• George McGovern
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177046
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

New Politics in the Old South
New Politics in the Old South
Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era

David T. Ballantyne

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-703-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-704-6 (ebook)
Front cover photographs: Governor Hollings, 1960, ( bottom inset ) Senator Hollings during his 1969 hunger tour, and ( left inset ) Sen. John F. Kennedy, Sen. Olin Johnson, and Governor Hollings at the Columbia airport during Kennedy s 1960 presidential campaign, courtesy of the Hollings Collection, South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
For Kate
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 From Charleston to Columbia
CHAPTER 2 Segregation with Dignity ?
CHAPTER 3 Hollings, the Kennedys, and Democratic Decline in South Carolina
CHAPTER 4 Backlash
CHAPTER 5 Hunger, USA
CHAPTER 6 A common-sense, realistic, South Carolina Democrat
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Hollings as a cadet at the Citadel
Hollings during service in World War II, 1943
Hollings for Governor, campaign pamphlet, 1958
Hollings as an industrializing governor, c. 1959-62
Hollings campaigning with John F. Kennedy and Olin D. Johnston in 1960
Clash between Goldwater and Johnson supporters in Charleston, October 1964
Voter registration line in Richland County, 1964
Hollings visiting Columbia slum with I. DeQuincey Newman, January 1968
Hollings alongside Commerce Committee colleagues Ted Stevens and Warren Magnuson and Senate staffers
Hollings at a dinner with Strom Thurmond, 1969
Hollings scuba diving, c. 1970
Hollings s wedding to Rita Liddy ( Peatsy ), August 21, 1971
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to countless individuals and organizations who helped me during the course of this project. Tony Badger s patience and expertise greatly improved the quality of my work. Adam Fairclough, too, has been extremely generous with his time in offering me advice on research, teaching, and academic employment. I am also grateful to the conveners and participants of the American History Graduate Workshop at the University of Cambridge who reviewed preliminary versions of several chapter drafts. I owe thanks as well to the editorial staff at the University of South Carolina Press, especially Alex Moore, Linda Fogle, and Bill Adams, for their repeated assistance in bringing this project to fruition.
I have been fortunate to receive extraordinary levels of assistance from many archivists and librarians at the Hollings and South Caroliniana Libraries at the University of South Carolina, the Citadel Archives, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the South Carolina State Library, the U.S. Senate Historical Office, and the Johnson and Nixon Presidential Libraries. Patrick Scott, alongside the staff from the Hollings and South Caroliniana Libraries, made me feel welcome in Columbia throughout my stay there. In particular I must thank Herb Hartsook, who graciously responded to my constant questioning and put me in touch with many of the people I later interviewed.
My thanks go to Bob Ellis from the University of South Carolina s Institute for Southern Studies for his encouragement and assistance throughout my work in the state. The visiting fellowship provided by the institute enabled my prolonged study in South Carolina during the 2011-12 academic year. I am also the recipient of a Richard A. Baker Graduate Student Research Travel Grant from the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress and several funding grants from the Cambridge History Trust Funds and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
For the images reproduced in this book, my thanks go to the Hollings Library s Kate Moore, Heather Moore of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, and Bill Barley. I am also indebted to the interviewees and correspondents themselves. Their willingness to engage with me added significantly to my understanding of the topic and the richness of my research. Beyond those cited in the endnotes, I am grateful to John Mark Dean and Joe Riley for talking with me; and Michael Hollings, Hayes Mizell, and Nic Butler, who kindly corresponded with me about my project. Various historians, including Jim Cobb, Walter Edgar, David Farber, Philip Grose, Laura Kalman, Felicia Kornbluh, Thomas Lekan, Don Ritchie, Ellie Shermer, Bryant Simon, Pat Sullivan, and Kerry Taylor, took the time to discuss my work with me. Their suggestions have much improved this book.
Without the repeated encouragement and support of my whole family, especially my parents, this project would not have been possible. Finally I must thank my wife, Kate, whose proofreading, emotional support, and endless tolerance for all things South Carolina-related made my research vastly more manageable and enjoyable than it otherwise could have been.
Introduction
E rnest F. Fritz Hollings was a key figure in South Carolina and national political developments in the second half of the twentieth century. He was arguably the state s most influential Democrat in that period, serving more than fifty years in elective politics. By the time he retired in 2005, he was also the last Democrat to hold high-level statewide office in South Carolina, a remarkable turnaround in the partisan landscape of the formerly one-party Democratic state. First elected as a state representative from Charleston in 1948, Hollings won the state s governorship in 1958 and a U.S. Senate seat in 1966, which he held until his retirement thirty-eight years later. Having served alongside the party-switching Republican Strom Thurmond for thirty-six years, Hollings was the longest-serving junior senator in U.S. history.
Throughout his career Hollings was renowned for his willingness to voice what he perceived to be unpleasant truths. According to John West, who was elected governor himself in 1970, Hollings s closing speech to the General Assembly as governor in January 1963, in which he urged legislators to accept the desegregation of Clemson College peacefully, simply deflated the strong, prosegregation sentiment in the state. 1 A racial moderate by South Carolina standards in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hollings influenced his state in its grudging but peaceful move away from total defiance of the Supreme Court s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. When the national Democratic Party forthrightly embraced civil rights concerns, Hollings remained a Democrat, unlike Thurmond, and made a gradual but tangible shift away from segregationist politics in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, he had embraced a degree of racial moderation. In contrast older southern Democrats such as Georgia senator Richard Russell or North Carolina s Sam Ervin continued to reject the legitimacy of black political participation and civil rights advances.
Known as the bull-headed Dutchman while studying at the Citadel, Hollings was renowned as an energetic and confident, sometimes abrasive, politician with an acid wit. 2 During his reelection campaign in 1986, he silenced his Republican opponent by agreeing take a drug test if [he would] take an IQ test. 3 Meanwhile on This Week with David Brinkley in 1990, ABC s Sam Donaldson discovered Hollings s harsh humor in a segment discussing textile protectionism. After Donaldson questioned Hollings on the origins of his suit (allegedly from Korea), Hollings replied, Sam, if you want to personalize it, I got it right down the street from where you got that wig. 4

Hollings as a cadet at the Citadel .
SOURCE: South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Despite the occasionally blustery exterior, Hollings was a policy-oriented politician. From his championing as a state legislator of a sales tax to improve school facilities to his promotion of a technical training program as governor and his advocacy as a U.S. senator for expanded federal antihunger programs and ocean preservation measures, Hollings was concerned to make substantive policy gains. Vice President Joe Biden was sufficiently impressed by his Senate desk partner of thirty-two years that he proclaimed during a speech in 2010 that Hollings had contributed more over the course of his life to the state of South Carolina than any man in all of political history in this state. 5
Hollings s comparatively early shift away from supporting massive resistance in South Carolina and his advocacy of several progressive policy causes marked him as a moderate New South politician. His outlook was similar to the group of New South Democratic governors such as Jimmy Carter, Dale Bumpers, Reubin Askew, and John West, elected in 1970 in Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, and South Carolina, respectively. Yet unlike that group of moderate southern politicians, Hollings, elected to the Senate in 1966, needed to make negotiations around race in the late 1960s, at a moment when anger over the national Democratic Party s racial and social policies temporarily boosted the newly emergent state Republican parties across the South. The adaptation of South Carolina Democrats to large-scale African American voting took place against the backdrop of significant Republican gains. During the decade African Americans also began to register to vote in significant numbers and cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. <