After RFK died, Senator Hollings graciously and generously lent or donated one of his five Russell Senate Office Building suite rooms to Senator Ted Kennedy for his mailroom.
My nickname there in Senator Kennedy's office, starting in that mailroom was "Fast Eddie," for the speed with which I could walk to and from the Senate's three Capitol press galleries, read and sort mail, and other office work for EMK.
Senator Hollings was a stalwart defender of tort victims' rights against "tort deform" and the wealthy corporate tortfeasors' lobby. When he last ran for re-election, in 1998, his republican opponent challenged him to take a drug test. Senator Hollings replied, "I'LL TAKE A DRUG TEST WHEN HE TAKES AN IQ TEST."
We shall miss him.
Ernest Hollings, 97, a South Carolina Senator Who Evolved, Is Dead
Ernest F. Hollings, a silver-haired South Carolina Democrat who served 38 years in the United States Senate in an era of rising prosperity and often painful accommodation to racial tolerance in his state and across the South, died on Saturday at his home in Isle of Palms, S.C. He was 97.
His former press secretary, Andy Brack, confirmed his death.
Like his colleague Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s senior senator, Mr. Hollings became governor, ran for president and was a revered populist who took care of the military, business interests and the folks back home.
Together, they were the nation’s longest-serving Senate pair from one state. When Mr. Thurmond died in 2003 at 100, he had been the Senate’s longest-tenured member after 48 years in office. Moreover, Mr. Hollings was junior senator for 36 years, itself a record, and his tenure of 38 years and 55 days, including more than two years fulfilling the term of a senator who died in office, made him the eighth longest-serving senator.
Mr. Thurmond, a Democrat who switched to the Republican Party, never relented in his opposition to full equality for black Americans. Mr. Hollings, while remaining a fiscal conservative, evolved into a social moderate, riding winds of change that swept the South as proponents of civil rights won court cases, staged protests and endured brutalities that shocked the nation’s conscience.
ADVERTISEMENT
Having grown up in segregated Charleston, attended a segregated college and served in a segregated army, Mr. Hollings had little contact with poor black people and initially opposed civil rights legislation. Guided by N.A.A.C.P. officials, he toured poor black and white areas of his state in 1968 and 1969, and what he saw shocked him: rat-infested slums where families subsisted on grits and greens; children infected with worms, living in shacks without lights, heat or water; a mentally disabled mother of 10 who had never heard of food stamps.
“There is hunger in South Carolina,” a solemn Mr. Hollings told a Senate committee. “I know as a public servant I am late to the problem,” adding, “We’ve got work to do in our own backyard, just as anybody who’s candid knows he has work in his own backyard, and I’d rather clean it up than cover it up.”
The News and Courier of Charleston reported, “Senators, members of the press corps and visitors packed in the hearing room watched and listened in disbelief as Hollings detailed dozens of tragically poignant scenes of human suffering in his state.”
Despite their differences, Mr. Hollings and Mr. Thurmond had a relatively good relationship, collaborating on legislation and projects to benefit education, employment, textiles, tourism and other industries and small businesses in South Carolina.
ADVERTISEMENT
Tall and trim, with a military bearing and a Charleston Tidewater drawl, Mr. Hollings, who was known as Fritz, began his career in 1949 as a state legislator and an orthodox segregationist, flying the Confederate battle flag, defending school segregation and denouncing the N.A.A.C.P. as subversive, illegal and “against our way of life in the South.”
But by 1963, ending his governorship, he accepted integration at Clemson University. “South Carolina is running out of courts,” he told state legislators. “This General Assembly must make clear South Carolina’s choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men. This should be done with dignity.” Weeks later, Harvey Gantt enrolled at Clemson without incident as its first black student.
By 1984, during a hopeless campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he called himself a centrist, “strong on defense and liberal on social issues.” He built his campaign around a spending freeze but endorsed racial amity, the fight against poverty and a shift away from the Reagan administration’s use of military force and covert operations in Central America.
And by 2005, when he left the Senate, Mr. Hollings had established a long record of support for civil rights. He had also endorsed the Rev. Jesse Jackson for president in 1988, and had voted in 1991 to confirm Clarence Thomas as the second black justice of the Supreme Court.
Reminded by Mike Wallace, in a 2004 interview on “60 Minutes” on CBS, that he had voted against the 1967 nomination of Thurgood Marshall as the first black Supreme Court justice, Mr. Hollings expressed regret, but offered an excuse. “I couldn’t get re-elected,” he said. “That’s the honest answer. If I had voted for him, I might as well withdraw from the race. It was political.”
Ernest Frederick Hollings was born in Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 1, 1922, to Adolph G. and Wilhelmine (Meyer) Hollings. His family of paper mill proprietors went bankrupt in the Depression. He attended public schools, but was raised in an affluent neighborhood now on the National Register of Historic Places. He graduated in 1942 from The Citadel, the military college in Charleston. In World War II, he was an Army artillery combat officer in North Africa, France and Germany and was discharged a captain in 1945.
Correction:
An earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary referred incorrectly to the members of the Senate Commerce Committee shown in a 2002 photograph with Mr. Hollings. One of them, Peter Fitzgerald, is a Republican; they are not all Democrats.
Keith Schneider and Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.
No comments:
Post a Comment