View Single Post
Old 06-26-2003, 07:06 PM   #1 (permalink)
The_Dude
The GrandDaddy of them all!
 
The_Dude's Avatar
 
Location: Austin, TX
Strom Thurmond Dies at 100

Quote:
WASHINGTON - Sen. Strom Thurmond (news, bio, voting record) of South Carolina, a one-time Democratic segregationist who helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative Republican Party in the South, died Thursday. He was 100 and the longest-serving senator in history.

Thurmond died at 9:45 p.m., his son Strom Thurmond Jr. said. He had been living in a newly renovated wing of a hospital in his hometown of Edgefield since he returned to the state from Washington earlier this year.


Thurmond, whose physical and political endurance were legendary — he holds the record for solo Senate filibustering — retired on Jan. 5, 2003, after more than 48 years in office.


Age took its inevitable toll on Thurmond as he neared retirement, and he was guided through the Capitol in a wheelchair. Yet he wielded political power virtually to the end, prevailing upon President Bush (news - web sites) to appoint his 29-year-old son, Strom Jr., as U.S. Attorney in South Carolina in 2001.


Thurmond is "beyond criticism" in South Carolina, Furman University political scientist Don Aiesi said as the senator's health declined and he underwent a series of hospitalizations late in his congressional tenure. "Strom is the most venerable of institutions here."


In a political career that spanned seven decades, Thurmond won his first election in 1928, to local office, and his last in 1996, to his eighth Senate term. "We cannot and I shall not give up on our mission to right the 40-year wrongs of liberalism," he said during his last campaign. "The people of South Carolina know that Strom Thurmond doesn't like unfinished business."


His voting record was pro-defense, anti-communist and staunchly conservative. His devotion to constituent services was legendary. He was a lifelong physical fitness buff, who shunned tobacco and alcohol and was known for his vigorous handshake. He had a storied, lifelong reputation as a ladies' man.


Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and won 39 Southern electoral votes as part of a states-rights uprising against President Harry Truman's support for civil rights. Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering when he spoke for a straight 24 hours and 18 minutes against a bill to end discrimination in housing.


Ironically, his presidential campaign sparked controversy more than a half-century later, when then-Majority Leader Trent Lott declared at Thurmond's 100th birthday party that voters of Mississippi were proud to have supported the South Carolinian when he ran for the White House. "If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either," added Lott, who was forced to step down as the Senate's Republican leader in the ensuing uproar.


Thurmond's racial politics changed over the years as blacks began voting in large numbers. He became the first Southern senator to hire a black aide, supported the appointment of a black Southern federal judge and voted to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.


His outlook seemed far different a half century ago, when he ran for president.


"I want to tell you," he declared in one speech in 1948, "that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."


Thurmond grew up a Democrat — his father once ran for office — but switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater's conservative campaign for the White House.


He said at the time he had made the move because Democrats were "leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship."


Like other Southern states, South Carolina had been a one-party Democratic state since the end of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier. Thurmond's switch anticipated a broader trend. By the 1990s, the South favored the GOP, and Republican candidates generally triumphed in statewide races in South Carolina.


The first time he ran as a Republican, in 1966, he won easily.


In 1968, Thurmond played a pivotal role in executing the "Southern Strategy" that helped Richard Nixon win the White House. The South Carolinian helped hold Southern delegates in line at the GOP convention when a charismatic conservative, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), made a late play for the nomination. In the general election, he sought to blunt George Wallace's third-party candidacy in the South, arguing that anything but a vote for Nixon would help elect a liberal Democrat, Hubert Humphrey.





Born Dec. 5, 1902, in Edgefield, S.C., James Strom Thurmond — Strom was his mother's maiden name — was elected county school superintendent, state senator and circuit judge before enlisting in the Army in World War II. He landed in Normandy as part of the 82nd Airborne Division assault on D-Day, and won five battle stars and numerous other awards.

The war over, he returned home to resume his political career and won election as governor in 1946. His record was progressive by contemporary standards for a Southern Democrat. He pushed for repeal of the poll tax and boosted education spending.

He lost a race in South Carolina for the only time in his career four years later, when he challenged incumbent Sen. Olin Johnston for renomination. In defeat, he returned home to practice law.

But in 1954, Sen. Burnet Maybank died unexpectedly. When party officials tapped a state lawmaker to run for the post, Thurmond challenged as a write-in candidate, saying the voters, not the party's leaders, should decide who got the nomination. To underscore his credentials as an insurgent, he pledged to resign his seat before seeking re-election in 1956.

He won, the only person in history to capture a seat in Congress by write-in. Two years later, he kept his pledge to resign before running for the four years remaining in the term.

His presidential race and write-in victory behind him, Thurmond arrived in Washington with a nationwide reputation. The civil rights movement was gathering steam, but he held fast to his segregationist views for years.

He was a leader in drafting the Southern Manifesto of 1956, in which Southern lawmakers vowed resistance to the Supreme Court's unanimous school desegregation order. In 1957, he staged his record nonstop filibuster against housing legislation that he denounced as "race mixing."

Ironically, in earlier decades, Thurmond's segregationist views were more nuanced than those held by other Southern politicians.

As governor, he called for forceful prosecution after a black man, a murder suspect, was lynched by a mob. The result was a trial at which 31 white men were defendants.

His 1950 defeat came at the hands of an opponent who made an issue of Thurmond's gubernatorial appointment of a black physician to a state medical advisory board.

Like many one-time segregationists, Thurmond insisted the issue wasn't race but "federal power vs. state power" — though the state power he wanted to preserve was the power to segregate.

"The question of integration was only one facet of that matter," he said in a November 1992 interview.

Showing how much his world had changed, in 1977, Thurmond's young daughter, Nancy, 6, enrolled in a public school in Columbia, S.C., that was 50 percent black. The girl's teacher also was black.

Thurmond's first wife, Jean Crouch, was 23 years his junior. The couple married in 1947, and she died of a brain tumor in 1960.

His second wife, former beauty queen Nancy Moore, was 44 years younger than Thurmond when they were married in 1968. Thurmond was 68 when their first child, Nancy, was born. The couple had three other children before separating in 1991: Strom Jr., Juliana and Paul. Nancy died in 1993 after being struck by a car.
he definately led an interesting life.

from an ex racist to man w/ a wife 44 years younger than him.

the man's dead, so let's keep the negativity on this thread to a min.
__________________
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal
The_Dude is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360