Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change. - book reviews

Reason, June, 1993 by John Shelton Reed

The poet and critic Allen Tate once began to write a biography of Robert E. Lee but abandoned it when he decided that Lee wasn't complicated enough to sustain his interest. With Lee, Tate concluded, what you saw was what you got: a man of duty, untroubled by doubt and apparently by temptation. Nadine Cohodas's political biography of Strom Thurmond presents another sort of marble man, embodying principles, winning elections, and representing his constituents without reflection or second thoughts. The man portrayed in this book has no discernible interior life at all and not even a private life apart from politics. He's not just a marble man, but a hollow one.

That may be accurate. In fact, I suspect it is. But Cohodas's Thurmond doesn't even have any real peculiarities. For a successful mid-century Southern politician, he's strangely colorless. This book is an admirable transcript of the words of Southern politics, but the music is heard only rarely. Cohodas just doesn't seem to be particularly interested in the man himself--either that, or she wasn't tuning the fight frequencies. True, Thurmond is no Edwin Edwards or George Wallace, but there are these stories about him...

For instance, Cohodas quotes the Clemson college yearbook's assessment of the young Thurmond as a "ladies' man of the |first water,' " but she doesn't mention that that reputation, mutatis mutandis, has followed him ever since. (At the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings we were told that Thurmond, among other white male senators, "just doesn't get it." Maybe so, but apparently he still tries.)

Cohodas does record Thurmond's penchant for taking young beauty queens to wife (his first young enough to be his daughter; his second young enough to be his granddaughter), and she reproduces a famous Life photograph captioned "VIRILE GOVERNOR demonstrates his prowess in the mansion yard day before wedding." (He was standing on his head). But she simply deposits these data with us and moves on briskly to more dignified matters, not pausing to ask whether Thurmond's amorous impulses are the most spontaneous and human thing about the old goat, evidence that he's interested in something besides politics, or just another good career move. It's true that Thurmond's tastes have given rise to a good deal of bawdy humor in these parts, but, as another Southern pol once observed, they do love a man in the country.

Similarly, the late Lee Atwater told one of his former teachers (a friend of mine) that Thurmond has almost no sense of humor. According to Atwater, though, the senator loves to hear stories of political dirty tricks--the same ones, over and over. He laughs and laughs. This sort of thing makes the man more interesting, if not more sympathetic, and it is absent from this book.

But to say that Cohodas's sketch is one-dimensional is not to say that her account of Thurmond's public life will interest only political junkies. The man has been involved in some of the great events of our time, and his career provides much food for thought--usually depressing thought--about ends and means, motives and unanticipated consequences.

Even if that thought is usually left as an exercise for the reader, Cohodas has done us a service by assembling the raw materials. She gives us one of the best summaries available of the legal and legislative struggle for the civil rights of black Southerners, a struggle from which Thurmond emerged by virtue of his electoral popularity, political agility, and sheer longevity as one of the few survivors on the losing side.

Until 1948, Thurmond's story was one of monotonous political success, with no more than the usual treachery and double-dealing (in fact, probably less than usual). Born into the segregated South of 1902, he went to college at Clemson, where he was an athlete and BMOC. He served briefly as a high-school teacher and coach until, at the age of 26, he was elected county school superintendent. Three years later (having, on the side, studied privately for the bar, passed it, and begun a law practice) he ran successfully for the state senate. After five years in that body, he was elected to a state judgeship. World War 11 interrupted this steady progression, but within six months of returning to South Carolina Thurmond announced that he was running for governor. He was 44 years old when he took office in 1947, with less than half his life and not much more than a quarter of his career behind him.

Some of Thurmond's most striking attributes were evident from the first. He has always been an indefatigable and incessant campaigner, never missing a chance to shake hands, learning and remembering every name, spending his spare moments writing notes of sympathy and congratulation to constituents. Also consistently evident was his physical and political courage. As a judge he once faced down an armed householder. He was wounded and won a Bronze Star while landing in France on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne. As governor he took firm action against a lynch mob.