Is there anything more morally repugnant than a hypocrit?
I remember Strom back in the 60s on the Senate floor, in high umbrage, vowing that "race-mixing" would never happen. His daughter is unbelievably forgiving and compassionate. Must have gotten some quality genes from her mother, sure didn't come from that nasty cracker.
Strom Thurmond was born in 1902. Attitudes and behavior were quite different back then. We can not be intellectual honest by applying the morals of today to the behavior of the past. Ole Strom could have been accused of being a bigot and philanderer but a hypocrite . . . don’t think so. You know what you were dealing with when you dealt with Strom Thurmond.
And, the passage of time has a way of dealing with the past. Strom is gone and so are many of the old attitudes that he originally espoused. In his long and fruitful life of public service he came to see that many of his past beliefs required reexamination and his views became moderated as he grew in wisdom.
So, please don’t speak too harshly of “the Old Man”. I really don’t think that he was a “nasty cracker.”
Bzzzzt
Whatever else he was, he was by definition a hypocrite, in that he preached racial segregation and practiced, uh, something else.
It may be true that the culture in which ol' Strom grew up might be used to rationalize away his bigotry; it can do nothing to mitigate his hypocrisy, unless you are suggesting that hypocrisy was a cultural norm of the early-20th-century South as well.
As far as the putative moderation of his later years is concerned, it seemed to arise along with his dementia. He probably just forgot.
"Fruitful life", apparently, though perhaps not in public service.
He was born in 1902 but talked about the glories of segregation into the 60's. He loudly protested in public exactly what he did in private. Unless I have developed some sort of cognitive disability, this is the definition of hypocrisy. An "ole" bigot is a bigot nonetheless.
to paraphrase " I KNEW Strom Thurmond............and you're no Trent Lott ". That was said with tongue in cheek. I just couldn't resist.
The man was a product of his time and if we are to believe some pretty creditable people, he changed with the times. Maybe not as fast as some other hypocrites would have had him do, but change none the less. I think its high time that the stone throwers focus on what they can do in the future rather than ridicule the past. Whats done is done. I agree highly with whomever said that his daughter has a lot of dignity and we should honor that and try to emulate it rather than throw stones.
Isn't this season about forgiveness?
Why not keep that in mind as we post for the next few days.
In the spirit of the season I bid you all good wishes for the holidays.
harry j
And there are those who would cast stones at the dead.
Chip:finger:
I must say that he, and from what I have read, was a somewhat hands-on father to this daughter. They talked about her being ushered into his office and spending time with him. She is truly a remarkable woman and she must have an equally remarkable mother to have kept this quiet for so many years. Cause the press would have gobbled this one up.
I have to beleive that Mrs. Washington-Williams may have had something to do with his softening stance on segregation. She would have been in her 30's when he was in the heat of his segregation stance. That must have been very hard to watch and know that was your daddy saying those things against you.
I wish it would have come out while he was alive. It would have been interesting to see how he dealt with it. Surely he told his children because they didn't deny it at all and his children want to meet with her. So he must have raised remarkable human beings in them as well.
~Cindy
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -Catherine Aird-
Let us not judge a man only by his foibles . . .
The New York Times
Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a central figure in the political transformation of the South and the longest serving senator in American history, died Thursday night. He was 100.
He had been living in Edgefield, his hometown, since retiring from the Senate earlier this year, after 48 years.
Thurmond came to national attention in 1948 as the States' Rights candidate for the presidency after Southerners walked out of the Democratic convention to protest the party's new commitment to civil rights.
Thurmond finished a distant third to President Harry S. Truman that year, but his million votes cracked the once-solid Democratic South and helped set the stage for political realignment.
In 1964, Thurmond switched parties to back the Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater. Four years later, Thurmond held the South for Richard Nixon's nomination and election after assuring Southerners that Nixon, as president, would go easy on civil rights.
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Thurmond always insisted that he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
As governor of South Carolina, he led the effort to abolish the state poll tax, but in Congress he fought efforts to ban it nationally. Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that "on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line." And, he went on, "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."
His opposition to integration, which he often attributed to communism, was the hallmark of his career in Washington until the 1970s. In 1971, he was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide - in recognition of increased black voting resulting from the legislation he had fought.
Thurmond went to the Senate in 1954, the only senator ever elected by a write-in vote. Though his long career brought him national prominence, he was better known in the Senate for looking out for South Carolina and the U.S. Army than for any particular legislation.
As a lieutenant colonel in an army civil affairs unit in 1944, he landed in France by glider on D-Day and captured German soldiers at pistol point. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the French Croix de Guerre.
Until his last years, Thurmond was a man of uncommon energy and legendary fitness. He neither smoked nor drank, did more push-ups and sit-ups than many men decades younger, and fathered children into his mid-70s. He was also known for grabbing women in Senate elevators, including a woman who turned out to be a fellow senator, much to his surprise.
But he became very hard of hearing and, unwilling to use a hearing aid, sometimes had trouble following Senate debates. In his last years, he had to be assisted on and off the Senate floor by aides, who also told him, in voices audible in the gallery, how to vote.
The final political furor of his career involved him indirectly. At his 100th birthday party last December, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, paid tribute to Thurmond, saying the nation "wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years" had Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. The racially charged political firestorm over the next two weeks forced Lott to resign his leadership post.
James Strom Thurmond was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in Edgefield, South Carolina, a combative town that had produced several governors.
.
After graduating from Clemson College in 1923, he became a teacher and quickly rose to the job of county school superintendent. He studied law with his father, a Tillman protégé and former U.S. attorney, and in 1930, while still an educator, he was admitted to the bar.
Three years later, he was elected a state senator. In 1938, he was elected a circuit judge, which provided an opportunity for him to become known statewide. In 1940, he called on the grand jury in Greenville to be ready to take action against the Ku Klux Klan, which, he said, represented "the most abominable type of lawlessness."
In 1941, Thurmond joined the army as a captain. After the invasion of Normandy, his civil affairs unit was among the first to arrive at the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald, Germany. In 1996 he remembered the ways the Germans had murdered their victims - by starvation or shooting or bashing in their skulls. "I had never seen such inhuman acts in my life," he said. "I couldn't dream of men treating men in such a manner. It was awful."
He had been re-elected judge while overseas, but when he returned from the war he resigned to run for governor in 1946 and won.
At 44, Thurmond proposed to his 20-year-old secretary, Jean Crouch, in a memorandum he dictated to her. She consented by memorandum, and by all accounts it was a happy marriage. Until her death in 1960, they would share many interests, including reading the Bible together. They had no children.
In 1968, Thurmond, then 66 and a widower for eight years, married for the second time. His bride, Nancy Moore, a former Miss South Carolina, was 22. That marriage effectively ended in 1991 when Moore announced that she wanted "some measure of independence," and they separated.
The New York Times Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a central figure in the political transformation of the South and the longest serving senator in American history, died Thursday night. He was 100.
He had been living in Edgefield, his hometown, since retiring from the Senate earlier this year, after 48 years.
Thurmond came to national attention in 1948 as the States' Rights candidate for the presidency after Southerners walked out of the Democratic convention to protest the party's new commitment to civil rights.
Thurmond finished a distant third to President Harry S. Truman that year, but his million votes cracked the once-solid Democratic South and helped set the stage for political realignment.
In 1964, Thurmond switched parties to back the Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater. Four years later, Thurmond held the South for Richard Nixon's nomination and election after assuring Southerners that Nixon, as president, would go easy on civil rights.
Despite the role of civil rights in his political evolution and his record-breaking filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes against the civil rights bill of 1957, Thurmond always insisted that he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal authority.
As governor of South Carolina, he led the effort to abolish the state poll tax, but in Congress he fought efforts to ban it nationally. Running for president in 1948 as what the press called a Dixiecrat, he said that "on the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line." And, he went on, "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."
His opposition to integration, which he often attributed to communism, was the hallmark of his career in Washington until the 1970s. In 1971, he was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide - in recognition of increased black voting resulting from the legislation he had fought.
Thurmond went to the Senate in 1954, the only senator ever elected by a write-in vote. Though his long career brought him national prominence, he was better known in the Senate for looking out for South Carolina and the U.S. Army than for any particular legislation.
As a lieutenant colonel in an army civil affairs unit in 1944, he landed in France by glider on D-Day and captured German soldiers at pistol point. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the French Croix de Guerre.
Until his last years, Thurmond was a man of uncommon energy and legendary fitness. He neither smoked nor drank, did more push-ups and sit-ups than many men decades younger, and fathered children into his mid-70s. He was also known for grabbing women in Senate elevators, including a woman who turned out to be a fellow senator, much to his surprise.
But he became very hard of hearing and, unwilling to use a hearing aid, sometimes had trouble following Senate debates. In his last years, he had to be assisted on and off the Senate floor by aides, who also told him, in voices audible in the gallery, how to vote.
The final political furor of his career involved him indirectly. At his 100th birthday party last December, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader, paid tribute to Thurmond, saying the nation "wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years" had Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. The racially charged political firestorm over the next two weeks forced Lott to resign his leadership post.
Aside from his landing in France on D-Day, and his criticism of the Klan, exactly what in this indictment do you find laudable?
p.s. You might want to edit your post; you appear to have pasted the article in about 1.5 times.
The term cracker is usually deemed offensive by southern people,just as other offensive terms are used to describe people not necessarily like us. I am sure you would never use one of those.
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