Understanding Senator Sam

By D. G. Martin
Posted Monday, November 5, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - Although my mother grew up in the Deep South, she always considered herself a political liberal, especially on matters of race. Yet she often expressed admiration for Senators Richard Russell and Sam Ervin, who were two of the most effective warriors against proposed civil rights legislation during the 1950’s and 1960’s.

I think my mother overlooked her differences with Senator Ervin on civil rights because she had a high regard for his character and temperament—and because he was often helpful to her and her friends when she called his office for help.

Certainly, she shared the pride many other North Carolinians felt about their “Senator Sam” when he became a national folk hero during the times of the Watergate crisis that brought down President Richard Nixon.

But even before Watergate, other political liberals across the country grudgingly came to respect and admire Ervin, even though his views on civil rights were abhorrent to them. That respect came because at the same time he was fighting against civil rights legislation, Ervin became a champion for civil liberties and the protection of individuals against an overreaching government.

How did Senator Ervin come to these seemingly contradictory viewpoints? Were his philosophical and political underpinnings conservative or liberal? And, just what was it about his background and personality that prepared him so well to chair the Senate’s hearings on Watergate?

In a biography of Senator Ervin (“Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers”) being released this month by UNC Press, Appalachian State University associate professor Karl Campbell wrestles with these questions as he charts Ervin’s life from his birth in 1896 in Morganton to its climax in 1973-74 when he became America’s folk hero as chair of the Senate Watergate hearings.

Growing up in Morganton and as a university student in Chapel Hill, he was optimistic and studious. Although he was decorated for service in World War I, it took time for the war wounds in body and spirit to heal. But they did. He passed the bar, graduated from Harvard Law School, made a happy marriage, found himself elected to the legislature, and began law practice in association with his father. He was quickly on a fast track to a successful career in law and public service in his home state. In 1937, then Governor Clyde Hoey (the brother-in-law of former Governor O. Max Gardner, not his son-in-law as the book reports) made Ervin a superior court judge. In 1946 he served a partial term in Congress. In 1948 Governor Gregg Cherry appointed him to the North Carolina Supreme Court. There, he enhanced his reputation as a hard working, well-prepared, clear thinking and writing, and good-humored storyteller and judge.

He would have remained there, except for several events in 1954. First, Clyde Hoey, then a U. S. Senator, died in office. Second, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregation in the public schools. Third, North Carolina Governor William Umstead wanted to appoint as Hoey’s successor someone who opposed the Brown decision and would use legal means to fight it. He appointed Ervin.

Thanks to Campbell’s good narrative skills and his liberal use of Ervin’s own words, his compact description of Ervin’s pre-Senate life is interesting and entertaining. But there is a point to the early biography: It is to prepare the reader to understand the complexities and seemingly contradictory views of Ervin as a senator.

Based on his upbringing in the North Carolina mountains of the early 20th Century, Ervin believed, according to Campbell, that “the society of order and a government of balance” founded by his forbearers “should be maintained and defended.” His defense of this order, including its segregated institutions, made him a conservative. But his other passion was protecting individual freedom, which led him, well before Watergate, to fight side-by-side with liberals against the Nixon Administration’s efforts to expand the reach of government’s intelligence gathering activities.

Campbell’s greatest contribution and the core of his new book is in showing how those early battles with Nixon hardened Ervin’s skepticism about the President’s trustworthiness and prepared Senator Sam for the role in which he earned a permanent place in American history.
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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/

This week’s (November 9,11) guest is Fred Hobson, author of “Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood,” in which a nationally known scholar tells how his boyhood in Yadkin County led to a lifetime addiction to basketball.