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June 29, 2003
Constituent service is Thurmond’s enduring legacy
To most South Carolinians, Strom Thurmond was their senator in perpetuity.
And in fact, he sat in the U.S. Senate for nearly half a century until he reached the century mark in age, retired in January and returned to his native Edgefield County where he died on Thursday.
The longest-serving U.S. senator in history, Strom Thurmond occupied the political landscape in South Carolina for most of the 20th century. His first elective office was county superintendent of education in Edgefield in 1928, at the age of 25. After that, he served continuously in public office, interrupted only twice: when he volunteered for military service in World War II, participating in the D-Day landing in Normandy, decorated for bravery and serving from 1941-1946, and from 1951-54, when he practiced law.
He was a state senator, a circuit court judge and governor. Before he completed his term as governor — 1946-1950 — he had run for president of the United States on the Dixiecrat ticket (1948) and challenged Sen. Olin D. Johnston in the Democratic Primary (1950). He lost both races — his only losses in politics.
Thought to be washed up in state politics after the Johnston defeat and completion of his single term as governor in 1951 (there was a one-term limit then), Thurmond arose from the dead in 1954 with the unexpected death of Sen. Burnet R. Maybank, ran as a write-in candidate against the Democratic Party’s nominee, state Sen. Edgar Brown, and made history by being elected, the first and only U.S. senator to be elected by that method.
During that period and for some time afterward, Thurmond was an arch-segregationist, an anti-civil rights politician who would bolt the Democratic Party in 1964 and was instrumental in establishing the modern Republican Party in the South. A keen practitioner of retail politics who kept his ear to the ground and his fingers in the wind, Thurmond moved with the tide by the 1970s, shed his implacable segregationist role and adjusted to the political mainstream. He began reaching out to his black constituents, who were becoming an electoral force, first by hiring a black staff member (the first Southern senator to do so), then voting in 1982 to extend the Voting Rights Act that he had once bitterly opposed. He also supported legislation designating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a national holiday.
Thurmond was around so long and became so entrenched as an institution and a living legend that many forgot the ingredients of his longevity and success in public office. As Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson pointed out in their immensely readable unauthorized biography of the senator, “Ol’ Strom,” his political mastery rested on four corners of its foundation: 1) political boldness, which reflects both courage and an unsurpassed instinct for timing; 2) a refusal to keep an enemy, which dissipates opposition; 3) a willingness to take a firm stand on issues, which generates respect; and 4) a record of legendary constituent service, which creates goodwill.
The last quality, in our view, is what brought legendary status to Thurmond. The stories about his attention to constituents could fill a book; no request for assistance from South Carolinians, no matter how seemingly insignificant, was ignored. Every request received a response within 24 hours — that philosophy was embedded in his extraordinarily efficient staff. He once told an aide, as quoted in the Bass-Thompson book: “If the bureaucrats would do what they are supposed to do, I wouldn’t have to do it. I could do what people think a legislator more typically does.” The aide went on to say, “It’s unbelievable what people would call about. He would say, ‘Look, I know that might not sound important to you. That might not sound important to me. But to that person, especially if they take the time to write or call about it, that’s the single most important issue in their life.’ We had to deal with it that way.”
On the most basic level, Thurmond genuinely liked to help others, and he derived satisfaction in doing so, using his name, his office and his seniority to produce results. In that way, Thurmond earned respect, admiration and eventually affection and loyalty from those he served. It may have been smart politics, but he sincerely believed it was the right thing to do as a public servant.
Because he understood what it was to be a public servant, there was not even a hint of corruption or self-aggrandizement on his record. He never profited from his office; honesty was not only the best policy, it was the only policy that defined his character. In 1992 he gave almost $400,000 in campaign funds to his Strom Thurmond Foundation, a foundation that at the time had provided close to 4,000 scholarships to needy students in its 30 years of existence. What Strom Thurmond received from his high office, he gave back, to his everlasting credit.
After 48 years in the U.S. Senate, no significant or groundbreaking legislation bears his name. But that is of little consequence. Thurmond cared about the people who put him in office and re-elected him every six years. He never lost sight of that. That, more than anything, is his enduring legacy.
We mourn the passage of a remarkable man: politician, citizen-soldier, patriot, gentleman, a man of honor and integrity. But the greatest epitaph of all for this incomparable South Carolinian is this: Servant of the People.
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June 30, 2003
Downtown’s
slow start gains speed
