Most Prominent Politicians (VIII): South Carolina
Oh South Carolina, have you ever elected decent politicians?
I will try to counter one clear criticism of this list. I know that there are a few state-level people who played major roles in the road to secession. I haven’t always included them, simply because I don’t have the time to go into that level of depth. Call me a failure if you will.
The top 10:
1. John C. Calhoun–the architect of secession. Only man to serve as Vice-President for two presidents of different political parties. Secretary of State under Tyler. One of the most evil men in American history.
2. Strom Thurmond–leader of the Dixiecrats in 1948. Arch-segregationist led the white southern charge from the Democrats to the Republicans when it became clear that the Democrats were willing to accept African-Americans as part of their coalition. Long-time senator and another of the most evil men in American history.
3. Ben Tillman–Originally a leading Populist, Tillman quickly turned to race-baiting white supremacy of the most virulent form to advance his political career. Governor of South Carolina from 1890-94 and then senator from 1894-1918. Censured by the Senate in 1902 for physically assaulting the other senator from South Carolina.
4. James Byrnes–Leading Democrat of the early and mid-20th century. Senator, governor, Supreme Court justice, and, most famously, Secretary of State from 1945-47. One of the most powerful men in American foreign policy for much of his career. Considered himself a moderate on racial issues, but still actively supported segregation while governor in the 1950s.
5. Robert Barnwell Rhett–only a senator from 1850-52, but one of the most important people in South Carolina political history because of his leadership for secession. A fireeater of the worst kind, Rhett actually resigned his Senate seat in 1852 because a South Carolina secessionist statement was not worded strongly enough for his tastes. To the right of John C. Calhoun on secession, he actively supported South Carolina secession in 1860, but found himself marginalized within the Confederate government, leading him to resign from the Confederate Congress and become an active critic of Jefferson Davis.
6. Wade Hampton–Confederate general and Redemption politician. Redemption was a term white Southerners used for those who “redeemed” them from the supposed tyranny of northern occupation and black politicians. Used massive violence and voter fraud to win the 1876 governor’s election. Later a senator.
7. John Rutledge–Revolutionary leader, first governor of South Carolina after the Declaration of Independence, 2nd Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
8. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney–2 time Federalist presidential nominee (1804 and 1808).
9. Ernest Hollings–senator from South Carolina from 1966-2005. Although a man of limited achievements in the Senate, he remained a popular figure, running for the Democratic nomination in 1984. He even endorsed Jesse Jackson for the presidency in 1988.
10. Preston Brooks. It’s not that Preston Brooks had any real achievements as a politician. He served in Congress from 1853-57. But he became a hero to the South and helped spur on the nation’s collapse by walking into the Senate chamber in 1856 and beating abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to within an inch of his life with his cane. People from around the South sent Brooks new canes to replace his broken one (he used a cane after being shot in the hip during a duel in the 1840s). Didn’t do him much good though, because Brooks died from the croup in 1857. All around great guy…
Next: New Hampshire
Every time I start to despair about being from Indiana, I just think of South Carolina.
As a fellow Hoosier, I’m not sure you can…Sure, we avoided secession, but we sure didn’t avoid the Klan
I might’ve thrown in Cotton Ed Smith instead of Brooks, but this list looks on target to me (sad as that might be).
Ben Tillman had been a member of the Farmer’s Alliance, the predecessor of the Populist Party, but he was never a Populist, but always a Democrat. When the SC Democrats under his leadership adopted most of the Populist platform in the early 1890s, this prevented the development of an independent Populist Party there.
Tillman’s major accomplishment in SC was the formation of a terrorist organization, the Red Shirts, which began their career in 1876 with the Hamburg massacre. The purpose of the Red Shirts was to intimidate Republicans and black Americans and drive them out of politics. When intimidation failed, murder came next.
The Populists in North Carolina were in fusion with the Republicans, and in 1896 the Populists elected 5 Congressmen, the Republicans 3 (one black) and the Democrats only one; the governor and one Senator were Republicans and the other Senator was a Populist.
Democrats responded with violence, and Tillman sent his Red Shirts to help. Violence was general, but the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection was most notable: the elected Republican government was deposed, Wilmington’s flourishing black middle class was driven from NC (Wilmington was NC’s largest city), and within two or three years the Populists were dead, the Democrats were dominant, the Republicans were “lily white”, and white supremacy was firmly in place.
The dubious social science concept of “populism” devised by Hofstadter, Gellner, et. al. allows any anti-intellectual, demagogic racist whatever to be called a populist. During the period 1890-1900 there actually did exist a Populist Party, of which some people were supporters and some enemies. Tillman was an enemy.
Tillman was a peripheral figure in the events of 1876. The Red Shirt leadership came from aristocratic high-ranking Confederate officers. Tillman’s mother kept him out of the Confederate Army. He was not at Hamburg when the 5 prisoners were executed. His Sweetwater Rifle Club arrived too late to participate in the truly horrendous Silverton or Ellenton Riot in the early fall. Somewhere between 30 and 100 African-Americans were killed in what can only be called a racial pogrom in the Aiken County swamps near the Savannah River.
SC had its own massacre on election day 1898 in the Phoenix Riot. 11 people were killed in Greenwood and Edgefield County. The difference between Phoenix and Wilmington is that Republicans had no chance of gaining any political power in SC. Pathological fear necessitated the extermination of any African-American participation in politics.
Tillman must have claimed murders committed by others in order to magnify his importance, because the idea that he was part of that is widespread.
For example, here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/05/21/reviews/000521.21dewlt.html
When he was a gentleman US Senator, Wade Hampton tried to disassociate himself from the violence of ’76. He claimed to only be the piano player in the whore house. Tillman forthrightly set the record straight, saying Hampton’s victory in ’76 was the result of fraud and violence. For political reasons, Tillman had to shift the focus from the Confederacy to Redemption.
There were something like 75 men indicted for the Hamburg Massacre. Tillman was not one of them.
I’m not really willing to get down in the weeds about how SC grand juries worked, or which self-confessed murderer was really just a big fat liar. (Were any of the men indicted for the Hamburg massacre white?)
Set Kantrowicz straight, please. Until you do, between some guy on the internet and Tillman’s biographer, I’ll stick with Kantrowicz.
The indictments were all against white men. Aiken County was created as an African-American majority county in 1871. The indictments were issued before the overthrow of Republican rule. After Redemption the charges were dropped. I have just read Kantrowicz’s account of Hamburg. I may have been in error that Tillman was not there. He writes the Sweetwater Sabre Club was there, but no where does he write that Tillman was a leading figure in the events. Tillman sought to identify himself with ’76 but that does not change his minor role. If you have a page citation from Kantrowicz indicating Tillman’s key role, please tell me. I am trying to discuss these events without getting personal. I hope you will do the same.
As I said, Tillman was the head of a terrorist group which apparently was present at Hamburg. I never claimed anything one way or another about the relative significance of Tillman’s role at Hamburg, but only that his terrorist activities began there. If his group at Hamburg was not called the Red Shirts, I was wrong about that, but that was the name of his later group. He seems to have been willing to get a reputation, deserved or not, as having played a major role at the Hamburg massacre, and he continued such activities all the way up until 1898. His participation in the Wilmington insurrection, which was my starting point and the more significant event, is unchallenged as far as I know.
Your characterization of Tillman as participating in and endorsing terrorist tactics in defense of white supremacy is dead on. In an age when rhetoric was flamboyant, Tillman could out-hate just about anyone. I use Red Shirts as a specific term for para-militarys during the election of ’76. The legend is that local women dyed shirts red to increase the intimidation factor when the Hamburg defendants rode en mass to a hearing at the Aiken Courthouse. White militias statewide adopted red shirts as their uniform. In the run-up to the election, whites formed rifle and sabre clubs to combat African-American state militia companies. After the rifle clubs were outlawed, whites reorganized using sometimes whimsical names, The Allendale Mounted Baseball Club for example.
Fritz Hollings may have supported Jackson, but he didn’t vote for confirming Thurgood Marshall and did vote to confirm Bork and Thomas and was a big supporter of DRM and restrictions favorable to big media distribution. Hollings was big on eliminating hunger, so he has that going for him.
Some quotes
said to Janet Reno about Beavis and Butthead
on attending international summits
Strom Thurman, you forgot to add child-rape (the 16 year old African-American girl, who was his family’s maid, by whom he had a child he refused to acknowledge until he was in his 70′s) to his list of accomplishments.
“Pitchfork” Ben Tillman did not follow the arc of Tom Watson career. Watson flirted, briefly, with bi-racialism. At a time when every institution of the country- political, cultural, scientific and religious- supported white supremacy, Tillman’s racism was pathological. He was never a capital nor lower case ‘p’ Populist. He was an Agrarian- a vaguely anti-corporate, anti-tariff inflationist. He was also a flexible politician. His Dispensary plan of a state liquor monopoly stalled Prohibition for two decades and raised revenue. For better or worse given the current ultra-nationalism/militarism, Tillman lead a move towards nationalism at a time when many whites refused to celebrate the Fourth of July. He exhibited imagination and flexibility when he was a leading supporter of building a federal steel mill to produce armor plating for navy ships when private steel companies were gouging the government.
Despite Thurmond’s seemingly giant malevolent shadow over contemporary politics, James F. Byrnes was the more significant figure- US Representative, early New Deal Senator, Supreme Court justice, ‘assistant President’ during WWII, awful Secretary of State under Truman and the pre-Brown Governor who instituted the first state sales tax to keep African-American schools separate but to make it appear there was an effort to make them equal. Brynes led the move to the Republican Party with his tacit support for Eisenhower and explicit endorsement of Nixon in ’60. He doesn’t deserve his reputation for racial moderation. He was a realist but he really believed that shit.
Olin D. Johnston deserves a place on your list. Derided by Bourbons as the ‘mill boy lawyer,’ he was elected governor in 1934 amid accusations of radicalism in the shadow of Textile General Strike. As Senator he voted against Taft-Hartley. In 1950 Olin D. was the only candidate to defeat Strom Thurmond in a state-wide race. Called the Race of the Century, the campaign was an unedifying carnival of race baiting. The 30 thousand African-American voters supported Johnston overwhelmingly because they understood he didn’t believe that shit.
Robert Elliot should be included also. An African-American Reconstruction era lawyer with roots in either Boston or Liverpool, Elliot was generally considered to have won a debate on the US House floor with Alexander Stephens on the question of white supremacy. He later became Lieutenant Governor and stole less than many in an era of rampant, national political corruption. Coley Blease, Governor 1911-15, Senator 1925-31, was a constant irritant and perennial candidate for nearly 40 years. A crude, virulent racist, he articulated the caste and class resentments of lintheads and rural poor whites against the better element without implementing policies which would help them. The only good things I could say about him were that he was a wet, didn’t use the militia against strikers and pardoned my great-granddaddy on a manslaughter conviction. If you want pure evil in public and private life, James Henry (Cotton is King) Hammonds is your man.
I respect your position that a certain degree of racism puts any politician beyond the pale. But I have to disagree. What public figure between Redemption and the New Deal would not be classified as racist by contemporary standards? The political argument was over how to treat African-Americans. Their inferiority was generally accepted. The attempt to prove a continuity of reaction from Calhoun to Demint breaks down in the Gilded Age and Progressive Age. The Slaughter House Cases and Lochner were decided in an era when the South was a political and cultural backwater. Racism and white supremacy are national pathologies. Late 19th century Spain and Czarist Russia were both officially anti-Semitic. Pogroms occurred in Russia because that is where the mobs could get at Jews. The South obsessed over African-American’s place in society because 90% lived in the South.
Thank you for your fine series. I love barroom arguments- The Band, one of the top 100 rock bands? Ted Williams or Willie Mays? Strom Thurmond or Jimmy Byrnes?
There’s a lot of irony involved when loyal Democrats accuse Populists of racism — and they always do. Josephus Daniels, the primary inciter of the Wilmington Insurrection which effectively destroyed NC Populism, was Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and FDR’s Ambassador to Mexico. He never backed down about the 1898 events, though he acknowledged some excesses.
As far as that goes, in NC the white supremacist Democratic Party only gained total control with the New Deal.
Daniels also supported Woman’s Suffrage and opened the Naval Academy to common sailors and acted as a counter-balance to the more belligerent Lindley Garrison in cabinet debates. An interesting man who deserves a new scholarly biography…
I’ve seen it argued that Women’s Suffrage was anti-Catholic — it diluted the Catholic vote since Catholic women didn’t vote.
The Band–top 10 rock band!
Amen!
maybe top 500
“The Weight” alone should put them in the top 100…
It’s Strom Thurmond. The Thurman you’re thinking of is Uma, who is blonder and less reptilian in appearance but probably not quite as sexy.
I was going with Dennis or Scotty
As I mentioned yesterday, noted right wing racist Robert Stacy McCain has a current post up defending Calhoun’s intelligence and Constitutional interpretation. I admit I tried to rebut him and in response he listed a bill of particulars from 1855, including denouncing the North for failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. What sort of political movement welcomes a man like that into polite society
It’s 4th of July weekend, how could you forget Francis Marion? His views on the need for state funded education were light-years ahead of the current group of SC politicians.
See “Life of General Francis Marion” by Mason Locke Weems
Wasn’t Marion most influential as a general, rather than as a politician? Wikipedia says he served a few terms in the state Senate, but I doubt that’s where his influence came from.
On a list of best generals, he deserves a place. On a list of influential politicians, I’m not so sure.
Overall a pretty good list, but man, the preponderance of negative influence is depressing.
Parson Weems? Of the cherry tree legend? Need better sources….
Eric,
I’m really bothered by your use of the word “evil” here. While it’s true that Calhoun was ruthless, ambitious and wrong about everything, he was also an honorable man.
And what’s so surprising about that? Human beings are contradictions. Who among the “prominent” can say that their life, examined by strangers long from now, will not be written as a cautionary tale?
But more than that, invidious and ultimately gratuitous distinctions of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, are a failure of historiography. We learn nothing from such nonsense because there is nothing left of them to teach.
You do good work. Do it with this (admittedly challenging) subject: Teach me something about John C. Calhoun that I can take with me. Give me a useable past; that’s your job. To say that he was evil is to let me (and yourself) off the hook; it is to say ” you can ignore this guy, he has nothing to teach us.” Well, except maybe “Don’t be Bad like He Was!”.
In other news, I might be picking nits here, but if the qualification for entry to your list is “prominence” where is Francis Marion? Every other public space in South Carolina is named “Marion” for some reason isn’t it?
Craven opportunists like Tillman and Thurmond are prominent (in the same way as John McCain will be in Arizona), but including Preston Brooks without Marion is weird.
It’s fun though to think (argue?) that Brooks is to 19th century southern politics what Sarah Palin is to our time. It says more about the popular passions than about them.
I dunno. I think that remembering that some men can be truly evil is a useful reminder for many people. Maybe “fanatic” would be a better term???
I actually appreciate what you are saying about learning from Calhoun, etc., but that’s precisely why I call the motherfucker evil. People today still lionize the man. His ideas about nullification are more popular now since anytime after the Civil War. While obviously no one is advocating slavery, there is a strong racial undertone to the neo-Confederates who place Calhoun on a pedestal.
So rather than this being a gratuitous pejorative, it is very much in the service of remembering just who Calhoun (and most of these SC politicians) was and why they should be shunned today.
I would add that Calhoun was the greatest enemy the United States ever had. People like Alfonso XIII or Ho Chi Minh were more the victims of the United States than its enemies. The Soviet Union seems to have no serious plans to defeat the United States, just hope in trends so long term as to be meaningless. Even the Axis, had they won complete control of the entire Eastern Hemisphere had no serious plan to conquer a united America.
A divided America, however, is another story.
I took the word “evil” here to mean not “had bad thoughts in his heart” but “devoted himself to wrong causes, in bad ways, with bad results” — all judged from a position of ignorance with respect to his honor, intentions, etc.
John Rutledge might well rank higher had he not suffered from mental illness in his final years.
Others worthy of possible mention:
Robert Hayne–a fairly prominent Senator in the 1820s; best remembered as the Hayne of Daniel Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne.”
Olin Johnston–Senator from 1945-65. Like Jimmy Byrnes, a relative moderate for a Southern Democrat of that time; although he opposed civil rights he also opposed Taft-Hartley and voted for Medicare.
Carroll Campbell–Governor from 1987-95. He is considered to be the man who built the modern Republican party in South Carolina.
Were I to spend a lot of time thinking through the politics of each state, Campbell would make a lot of sense. He is very, very important for the reasons you mention. In my cursory list-making, this is the kind of thing I am going to forget.
One omitted fact about Sen. Hollings – he was one of the primary Hollywood shills behind the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) which would have required pretty much ANYTHING capable of recording any sort of signal to incorporate circuitry and/or software that detected “copyright violation” and prevented it. Essentially, it asserted that the media companies should have more control over YOUR devices than you. What an evil prick.
and yet still less evil than Calhoun
One more thing on Brooks: he wasn’t just a vicious thug, he was also a stereotypically cowardly bully.
I don’t know why this isn’t mentioned more often when he comes up in accounts of the prelude to the civil war.
After Brooks’s assault on Sumner, Massachusetts’s other Senator, Henry Wilson, described the act as “a brutal, murderous, and cowardly assault”. Brooks challenged him to a duel. Wilson declined to duel, but stated his belief in “right of self-defense in its broadest sense.”
Soon afterward, Massachusetts congressman Anson Burlingame also criticized Brooks, stating that Brooks had “smote [Sumner] as Cain smote his brother”. Brooks promptly challenged Burlingame.
Burlingame accepted, specifying rifles at twenty yards.
After learning that Burlingame was known throughout New England as a crack shot and avid deer hunter, Brooks declined to appear for the duel. Oddly, for members of a supposedly honor-obsessed culture, his fellow South Carolinians didn’t hold this clear cowardice against him.
Exactly. Brooks himself and the popular legend that grew up (and, sadly lasts) around him were, to his day, precisely what Palin and others are to ours.
Erik, why did you not consider Preston Brooks, who should be remembered for his attack on Charles Sumner; and L. Mendel Rivers who ensure that the Federal Defense pork flowed South Carolina’s way?
I often see Andrew Jackson quoted as saying that his only regret on leaving office was that he had not hanged Calhoun.
Calhoun has found a defender.