South Carolina Redux - Thurmond-cum-Gingrich

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Not to put too fine a point on yesterday's South Carolina's presidential primary, but reflect that this election represented the essence of rarefied reflexive Southern conservatism:

1. No Democrats were on the ballot; so, presumably the only voters were card-carrying Republicans.


2. The modern Republican party is a product of the South - in reflexive revolt of post World War II socially progressive initiatives.

3. While the South loves Jesus and its women with equal fervor, Republicans, like Baptists, seriously believe that fifty percent of the human race doesn't have the human qualities to weigh in on the really important stuff - whether it be preaching the gospel or electing a president.

For that, this week's electioneering and voting in South Carolina took on a surrealistic aura, tapping into a well spring of antediluvian angst. Not to get too pedantic, but it's therapeutic to rewind sixty-four years to the birth of South Carolina politics as we know it.


James Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) represented South Carolina in the U.S. Senate for virtually a half century (1954-2003). But his unblemished record as a old-school cracker bigot reached its apogee in 1948, when he threw in for president under the States' Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party - the first of the so-called Solid South Democratic factions to peel-off from tissue rejection, owing to their party's postwar progressive initiatives - in this case Truman's executive order to desegregate of the military. Outrage - outrage I tell you! That done it.

In one of his milder stump diatribes Thurmond allowed: "I wanna' tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Strom would bail out on the race-mixing Dems and switch to the more like-minded Republican Party in his 1956 senatorial race.

In 1948. Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats peeled-off 39 Deep South electoral votes (including one so-called faithless elector in Tennessee) from the reviled turncoat white American Harry Truman - creating one of the closest presidential elections in history.

An implacable racist, Strom Thurmond harangued the Senate with the longest filibuster in history, speaking for a total of 24-hours, 18-minutes, in a failed attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Cots were brought for colleagues to nap on while Thurmond weighed in on - among other things - his grandmother's biscuit recipe.

Thurmond's family life was somewhat of cartoon - as he had a thing for beauty queens. He met his first wife Jean when he was judging a Miss South Carolina pageant in which she was a contestant. While she didn't win, Thurmond hired her - 24-years' his junior - as his personal secretary and proposed to her in an office dictation. Tragically, she succumbed of a brain tumor 13-years' later, childless.

But Strom really sent South Carolina's eyebrows northward in 1968, when he married Nancy Janice Moore, Miss South Carolina of 1965. He was 66 and she was 22. Yep, that's a 44-year margin of error.

Strom's and Nancy's union would produce four lily-white strapping South Carolinians in rapid-fire succession. Above circa 1990 (L-R): James Strom, Jr. (1972-); wife Nancy Janice Moore Thurmond; James Strom, Sr.; Nancy (1971-1993); Juliana (1973-); and Paul (1976-). Tragically, daughter Nancy was killed at the age of 22 by a drunk driver in Columbia, SC. Nancy and Strom separated (when he was 89) about a year after this idyllic portrait. Although they never divorced, Nancy did not attempt to hide her adulterous relationship with Dr. Thomas Rowland, Jr., president of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSA), whom she would quietly marry in 2003 - a matter of weeks after Strom's long overdue demise.

Good ole' Strom suffered from immortality disorder. And apparently South Carolinians were complicit in the deception - not wanting to relinquish their fetish on the 19th century. Accordingly, he ran for Senate in 1996 at the age of 94. Despite unambiguous clinical evidence of advancing dementia, the immobile, doddering, and drooling novogenarian - with signature sprigged hair, dyed the color of Tang - won handily by 9 points. For that, the insentient Strom spent most of his eighth term trundled in-and-out of Walter Reed Army Hospital on the taxpayers' dime, a sort of middle-finger salute to America, courtesy of the dullards of South Carolina.

But Stom's operatives weren't done yet. Intent on defying all odds, they went on to broker his 2002 senatorial prospects, banking on the would-be 100-year-old's unblemished electoral record. When it became obvious that Strom could no longer be propped up alive, they ran the following deal by Jim Hodges, then-governor of South Carolina: Strom would resign his Senate seat, provided the governor would appoint his estranged spouse Nancy to his unexpired term, allowing her to run, in her own right in 2002, as an incumbent. The Democratic governor declined to oblige, thus steering the Thurmond dynasty safely to the curb.

But Strom would not go out without fanfare. In the run-up to his 100th birthday, Republican supplicants lined up en masse to genuflect and offer up incense to the burnt-out effigy of the wrong side of history. Front and center would be Republican Senate Minority Leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi.

On December 5, 2002 at Strom's 100th birthday fete, Lott famously proclaimed - full open-mic: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either." Thurmond nodded - like a bobble-headed nebbish - in nostalgic regret.

Presumably the manifold problems Lott was referring to were ... admit[ting] the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. While desultory Republican colleagues would awkwardly leap onto the bandwagon in his defense, craven party leadership would throw Lott under the political buss - stripping him of his senate leadership status. 

Strom Thurmond died in his sleep on June 26, 2003, at the age of 100-years and 200-days. But, alas, he would be denied the last word. On July 1, 2003 - only 5-days after his death - Slate Magazine broke the story of then 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thurmond's eldest child. It seems back in 1925 the randy 22-year-old Strom had bedded a 16-year-old black household servant by the name of Carrie Butler - and in fact, carried on a relationship with her for quite some time. Essie Mae was the mixed-race progeny of that match.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams (1925-), mixed-race eldest child of Sen. Strom Thurmond and 16-year-old black household servant Carrie Butler

As an infant, Essie Mae was sent to Pennsylvania to be raised by her aunt Mary (Carrie Butler's older sister) and her husband John Henry Washington. In 1941, when Essie Mae was 16, Carrie broke the news of her highfalutin white daddy and took her to South Carolina to call on him. For that, it seems Strom had been a walk-on player in Essie Mae's life ever since, supporting her on-and-off at intervals - including paying her tuition at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically all-black black institution, where she graduated with a degree in business.

Essie Mae Washington wound up in California, where she earned a masters degree in education at USC. She married an attorney, Julius T. Williams, with whom she had 4 children. She went on to have a 30-year teaching career in the Los Angeles public school system. In 2005 she was awarded an honorary PhD from her undergraduate alma mater SCSU. That same year, she published a memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, which  explored her sense of dislocation based on her mixed heritage, as well as going to college in the Jim Crow South after having grown up in the North.

Slate Magazine's Diana McWhorter puts an exceptionally fine point on the stultifying enigma of Ole' Strom: .... "We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that someone who ran for president on an anti-pool-mixin' platform was party to an integrated gene pool. Or that Thurmond's other signature political achievement—the 24-hour-without-bathroom-break filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957—was done in the name of sparing the South from 'mongrelization.' This form of duplicity has been a Southern tradition dating back to those miscegenating slave owners." 

.... "Racial conflict as a diversion from class conflict is nothing new, of course. But somehow Thurmond's subterranean Freudian life—surreptitious relationships with a black daughter and her mother—brings a fresh level of appall to the immorality of his demagoguing. That it was just 'bidness' may account for why Strom Thurmond never felt compelled to ask the forgiveness of a race he devoted so much public capital to making miserable—a race that included members of his own family."

Fast Forward sixty-four years: now come the 2012 Republican wannabes: Mitt Romney, the plastic Mormon Jesus-denying heathen from Massachusetts. Rick Santorum, the sweater-vest wearing Pennsylvania plutocrat who looks down his nose at a little recreational sodomy (hey this is South Carolina). Ron Paul, the perennial whack-job who wants to legalize dope-smokin' and outlaw the Federal Reserve. Or the authentic Newt Gingrich. Why, they didn't know what hit 'em.

Brother Newt - although he hails from Pennsylvania - has spent his political life acquiring perfect pitch when it comes to aggrieved Southern populist rhetoric. For that, he was the hands-down beneficiary of two South Carolina debates - delivering back-to-back grand slams while his opponents looked on in stunned awe.

First came Fox News' Juan Williams - who as a black man has hilariously made a career of pandering to his white betters, embracing conservatism like a Clarence Thomas acolyte. But Newt's "Food Stamp President" epithet was even a bit much for the step-and-fetch-it Williams. Cornering Newt for his unambiguous racist dog whistle rhetoric, Newt doubled down on his attack on minorities and their putative lack of work ethic. The Myrtle Beach crowd erupted in adulation. Juan retreated hang-dog at being upbraided by his fellow Fox News colleague.

Then came CNN's John King - giddy at the prospect of airing out Newt's x-wife's dirty laundry as the lead-off pitch in Charleston's Convention Center. ABC News had only days' before supposedly broken the news of second wife Marianne - the one scorned by third-wife interloper Calista, the one sharing the stage with Newt. (By the way, those even remotely following Newt viewed this as stale news on a slow day - as Marianne had already spilled these beans in an 2010 Esquire Interview - with the same lurid detail.)

Ahh - painted in the corner of bargaining for an "open marriage" with X No. 2 and today's vaunted No. 3 Calista. Newt hammered the offense, blaming the media for the pain he inflicted on three marriages. Once again the room erupted with delight.

The take-home message: "Why, don't every man have an x-old lady out there somewhere ready to make his life miserable? I ask you." Perfect pitch for the self-selected chauvinist audience. Blam. Four hundred feet over the center field fence.

Thus, given the home-court game and the rarefied demographics, Newtie swept the floor with 40% of the South Carolina Republican vote. South Carolina Republican's gambit: buying into the party propaganda that Obama is an ineffectual poseur, incapable of uttering a cogent thought without his TelePrompter, ole' Newt is just the ticket to blow a hole in his cover.


This is not to say that Newt will fare similarly on Super Tuesday - but that his racist, homophobic, xenophobic sentiments are enjoying unbridled fervor among his primary supporters. For that, he will hold many cards in a brokered convention - inspiring and giddy news for Obama and the Democrats.

Shitepoke.com, Calhoun GA, January 22, 2012