James Strom Thurmond, who was the oldest person ever to serve in the U.S. Senate and who personified many of the changes that swept the South in the wake of the civil rights movement after World War II, died Thursday at the age of 100.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) halted the Senate’s historic debate over Medicare and prescription drugs to announce Thurmond’s death and extend his sympathies to the family.
Senators observed a moment of silence in honor of Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican.
“He was, in many respects, a legend,” observed Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
Thurmond was controversial during much of his national political career. Just last December at his 100th birthday and retirement party, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) ignited a political firestorm by paying tribute to Thurmond’s past embrace of segregationist policies.
“I want to say this about my state. 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 all these years either,” Lott said, recalling Thurmond’s presidential campaign in 1948 on a segregationist platform.
The remarks provoked a heated controversy and forced Lott to resign as Senate majority leader with Frist being chosen as his replacement.
“Strom Thurmond will forever be a symbol of what one person can accomplish when they live life, as we all know he did, to the fullest,” Frist said late Thursday.
Symbol of Southern resistance
Until displaced by then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Thurmond was a leading symbol of the South’s resistance to granting civil rights to the nation’s blacks.
Thurmond was also known for his stamina. In August 1957, he waged a solo filibuster, holding the Senate floor for a record 24 hours and 18 minutes, in a futile attempt to block passage of a landmark voting rights bill–the first since Reconstruction.
A one-time Democrat and delegate to the 1932 convention that nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for president, the former South Carolina governor ran for president in 1948 on the third-party States’ Rights or Dixiecrat ticket when Democratic President Harry S. Truman pushed a civil rights agenda.
“We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race,” the Dixiecrat party platform stated. During the campaign Thurmond was quoted as saying, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negroes into our homes, our schools, our churches.”
In the election Thurmond’s segregationist ticket carried the Deep South states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, winning 39 electoral votes. Truman won election with 303; New York Gov. Thomas Dewey had 189 for the GOP ticket.
But times changed and so did Thurmond. First elected to the U.S. Senate in 1954 by an unprecedented write-in vote after the state Democratic machine refused to back him, Thurmond eventually abandoned the Democrats in 1964 and joined the Republican Party.
In a statement televised throughout the then-solidly Democratic South, Thurmond charged that the Democratic Party had “abandoned” the people, “repudiated” the U.S. Constitution and was “leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship.”
After the 1970s, however, Thurmond voted for several civil-rights laws, including the extension of the 1982 Voting Rights Act and District of Columbia statehood. He also began to hire black staffers, and in 1979 became the first Southern senator to recommend an African-American to the federal bench.
Ralph Neas, former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights for 14 years, said the 1965 Voting Rights Act was a major reason for Thurmond’s transformation. The conference is the legislative arm of the civil rights movement.
“One thing to remember is that Sen. Thurmond is a masterful politician who pays attention to all his constituencies, and also his black constituency,” Neas said in an interview.
Thurmond died at 9:45 p.m. after having been in poor health in recent weeks, his son Strom Thurmond Jr. said. He had been living in a newly renovated wing of a hospital in his hometown of Edgefield, S.C., since he returned to the state from Washington earlier this year.
“Surrounded by family, my father was resting comfortably, without pain, and in total peace,” Thurmond Jr. said in a statement released by the hospital.
Political career began in ’28
Born Dec. 5, 1902, Thurmond grew up in Edgefield, where his father, lawyer and landowner J. William Thurmond, frequently invited politicians home for dinner. Clearly a favorite relative was grandfather George Washington Thurmond, a Civil War veteran who hiked home from Virginia when the Confederacy was defeated.
After his graduation from Clemson University in 1923, Thurmond taught and coached high school students before launching his political career in 1928 by running for Edgefield County school superintendent. His winning platform called for new courses in character formation, free health examinations by local doctors and dentists for both whites and blacks.
While serving as superintendent, he began to study law under his father, the author of the standard South Carolina law text “Thurmond’s Cases.” Before passing the state bar examination, Thurmond represented a group of black children born out of wedlock and won a complex state supreme court case involving their inheritance rights.
Combining his law practice with state politics, Thurmond continued his rise through the ranks from senator to circuit judge to governor in 1947.
During World War II, he served in the Army and landed in Normandy on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne Division. He was wounded in a glider crash behind enemy lines. On display in his museum-like Senate office were such medals as the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre.
Thurmond had known every U.S. president since FDR and in a 1996 Tribune interview offered his personal assessment of other chief executives:
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– Dwight Eisenhower was “a fine man, an able man as president, though he had gone through so much I think he was tired and wasn’t in good health.”
– John Kennedy was “a nice fellow. … I had an idea that communists and maybe the Cubans had something to do with his assassination.”
– Jimmy Carter “was a very pleasant, Christian man. He graduated from the Naval Academy. Ordinarily, you would think a man like that would be very decisive. But I didn’t think he was decisive or a strong leader.”
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Truman clearly were not his favorites but Ronald Reagan, he said, was “more responsible than any living person for the downfall of the Soviet Union.” He described the elder George Bush as “a good, sound, responsible president who on TV didn’t indicate he really desired so strongly to be re-elected.”
Longevity and popularity
On March 6, 1996, Thurmond–then 93 years and 94 days old–finally surpassed the late Theodore Green of Rhode Island, who had retired from the Senate in 1961 at age 93. By then he was the Senate’s president pro tempore, third in line for the presidency after the vice president and House speaker.
While not known for his legislative achievements, Thurmond was popular on both sides of the political spectrum because of the attention he paid to his colleagues and their legislation.
Former Democratic Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois recalled in an interview several years ago that the South Carolinian “was surprisingly not rigid on many things.” Despite their political differences, Simon said, “we worked together well.”
Simon remembered, in particular, an occasion when Thurmond asked to be allowed to co-sponsor a bill dealing with historically black colleges.
On Capitol Hill, Thurmond was widely viewed as an institution and a stickler for civility rather than a wheeler-dealer willing to use any political tactic to achieve a political goals.
The real secret of Thurmond’s success, said veteran reporter Lee Bandy, was service to his constituents. Most South Carolinians sooner or later came into contact with the senator through a letter–whether he was congratulating a new high school graduate, the parents of a child or a birthday celebrant.
Bandy, chief political writer for The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., recalled meeting a black woman at a Thurmond function with an old letter showing how the senator had helped her husband resolve a government benefit problem.
In his late 90s, his age and a hip ailment kept Thurmond from returning on weekends to South Carolina. The senator was treated like royalty in his home state.
A nonsmoker and teetotaler, Thurmond prided himself on a healthy lifestyle that emphasized exercise and a sensible diet, featuring a breakfast of grits and an egg substitute.
In the early 1970s he was one of the first members of Congress to undergo hair transplants, a few years after he had married Nancy Moore, a one-time Miss South Carolina and a former intern in his office who was 44 years his junior. With a well-known eye for attractive women, Thurmond frequented the Senate beauty salon to maintain his hair’s reddish hue and his aura of indestructibility.
His first wife, Jean, who was 24 years his junior, died in 1960 after surgery for a brain tumor.
With the Senate divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans after the November 2000 election, Thurmond’s increased frailty raised concerns about his health and his ability to continue in office.
With the defection of Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont from the GOP ranks in 2001, however, the Democrats regained control and veteran Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia succeeded Thurmond as president pro tem.
By then the senior Republican had resigned the chairmanship of the powerful Armed Services Committee. Although Thurmond remained diligent about voting, his appearances and testimony at hearings became noticeably abbreviated.
Nearing his 99th birthday in November 2001, Thurmond moved into Walter Reed Army Medical Center to have his health monitored. He insisted the move was temporary, and continued to show up for work at the Senate.
Thurmond and his second wife, Nancy, who lived separately in later years, had four children, including J. Strom Jr., the U.S. attorney for South Carolina; Juliana Whitmer; and Paul. Their eldest child, Nancy, was struck and killed by a drunken driver in 1993 when she was a college senior.