Former senator made reconciliation his life’s work.

By SCOTT GRABER
BEAUFORT TODAY

There’s a mural hanging in the Daniel Library at The Citadel that shows Civil War Gen. Wade Hampton on horseback. The bearded general is leading a company of Citadel cadets as they charge an unseen Union position at Trevilian Station in northern Virginia. Hampton is waving his pistol and one can almost hear the yelling and smell the fear.

Scott GraberWhen I was a cadet I admired Hampton’s courage and wondered if I would ever be part of such a headlong charge.

I was not much interested in the period right after the Civil War. I wasn’t thrilled by the Union occupation, the carpetbaggers, the black office holders or the Klan. This, as far as I was concerned, was a bad time for South Carolina.

In the early 1970s I went to work at Penn Center on St Helena Island and discovered a lot happened during Reconstruction. The former slaves acquired a lot of local real estate. I also discovered that there was a bitter struggle between Wade Hampton and a farmer named “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman.

Hampton had come back from the war convinced the South had lost and prepared to make compromises. He believed South Carolina should spend as much money on black students as it did on white students.

Tillman was not prepared to make this particular compromise or any compromise that would elevate the former slaves to a position of parity. He fought Hampton and, with the help of thousands of frustrated, apoplectic farmers, eventually ousted Hampton from office.

Former Sen. Ernest Hollings talks to friends at a recent book signing.I mention Wade Hampton, a moderate who wanted to bring black folk into the mainstream, because I’ve been with former Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings who has just published a book, “Making Government Work.”

Hollings graduated from The Citadel just in time to take part in World War II. When he came back he was anxious to lead South Carolina out of its agrarian, impoverished, Third World past. He decided to enter politics.

As soon as he became Governor he came face to face with Harvey Gant, a black man who wanted to attend Clemson, a school Pitchfork Ben Tillman helped found.

Hollings made a decision he would not reprise the role of Orval Faubus or George Wallace or any of the southern governors who pledged to fight integration to their last breath. Hollings would, in fact, assist Gant with a peaceful matriculation at Clemson.

But Hollings did even more as Governor.

In the 1950s Northern industry, especially the manufacturing sector, was coming south. But they weren’t coming to South Carolina. They weren’t coming here because South Carolina’s labor force was unskilled, often illiterate and largely incapable of handling heavy machinery.

Hollings decided the state should have a technical education system that would produce men and women who could operate textile machines. Hollings along with John West and Beaufort’s own James Waddell passed legislation that created a technical education system that was the envy of every other Southern state.

After his stint as governor, Hollings decided to run for the U.S. Senate. When he got to the Senate, in 1966, Lyndon Johnson was in the midst of his Great Society legislative push that included equal housing, equal access to hotel accommodations and equal access to the voting booth. It’s fair to say that Lyndon Johnson’s agenda was not popular in South Carolina. But Hollings went further.

In 1969 Hollings did a ‘tour’ of Beaufort County and acknowledged that poverty, hunger and rickets were rampant.

“It stuns me to think there I was in 1969, in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, in Beaufort County, standing in another shack that housed 15 black people. It had no heat, no running water, no bath, no toilet, inside or out. The cracks in the wall were covered by old copies of the Savannah Morning News. The total store of food in the shack consisted of a slab of fatback, a half-filled jar of locally harvested oysters and a stick of margarine.”

Hollings reacted by launching a food stamp program in South Carolina. But there was also a problem with health care in rural Beaufort County.

“Learning of our hunger problems, Sarge Shriver also helped with our health situation. The poor were not only hungry but also without a hospital. Even the one nearby would turn them away. Working with Dr. Tom Bryan and Sarge, the OEO instituted the Beaufort Jasper Comprehensive Health Center, the first such facility in the nation. It could take care of the hungry poor for about a third of the cost of the established hospitals. And when the Beaufort-Jasper success became known, these centers spread — 22 in South Carolina and hundreds across the nation.”

Hollings took a lot of political heat for his liberal, “bleeding heart” compassion.

“Mendel Rivers, the popular and powerful congressman who represented the First Congressional District, including Beaufort and Charleston, described me derisively as ‘Hookworm Hollings.’ He added, ‘I have no intention of immortalizing poverty or dishing out food stamps.’”

In the latter part of his career, with the Republican Party now entrenched in South Carolina, Hollings became a large, inviting target for those who said he campaigned at home like a conservative but voted, in Washington, like a liberal.

They said he took up with Teddy Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Joseph Biden and he was “out of step with the values of South Carolina.”

And, if the truth be told, the Republicans were not entirely wrong on this score. He didn’t always vote the way that his South Carolina constituents would have voted. Yet Ernest Hollings was repeatedly returned to the Senate. His margins of victory were sometimes thin but he found a way to swim against the Republican tide. And in 1984 he decided that he would run for President with Beaufort’s own Billy Keyserling as his campaign manager.

In 1984 Hollings was a well-regarded southern moderate in the same category as Sam Nunn, Albert Gore Sr. and Sam Ervin. He counted the conservative columnist, George Will, as a friend.

But it turned out that he was way too conservative for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the wing that votes in primaries, and he never had a chance when he went up against Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and John Glenn in the New Hampshire primary.

Perhaps, in 1984, Billy Keyserling thought that the Democratic Party was ready to go with a centrist.

But it would take another eight years before the party realized it could not win with Michael Dukakis, George McGovern and Walter Mondale.

During Hollings’ short run he called Walter Mondale a “lapdog” and said John Glenn was “Sky King” who got “confused in his capsule.” But his wit wasn’t enough. He dropped out of the race after winning only 4 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

A big part of Fritz Hollings’ appeal is his appearance and a deep baritone voice that sounds like a distillation of Charleston Harbor, pluff mud and hoppinjohn. He sounds like a United States Senator. But a big part of his appeal is the fact that he never was a “lapdog” who voted the way the president or the Democratic Party told him to vote. Much of the time Fritz Hollings went his own way.

This kind of independence is rare. Normally the speaker, the whip or the majority leader tells members how to vote. And many candidates, especially Republican candidates, actually campaign by saying they’re going to Washington in order to vote the President’s agenda.

Wade Hampton was a successful warrior. He came back from the Civil War and tried to be a peacemaker. He didn’t succeed. But Fritz Hollings came back from World War II and he did succeed because he was willing to devote 52 years in the service of racial reconciliation.

He was willing to make the long legislative and economic haul that has given an African-American man a legitimate shot at the White House.

Scott Graber is a long-time Port Royal resident and practices law in Beaufort. He can be reached via e-mail at ssgraber@charter.net