It’s a Grand Old Party for Thurmond as He Turns 100 and Leaves the Senate

WASHINGTON —  There will be a big birthday cake with 100 candles blazing on Capitol Hill, assuming the fire marshal approves. There will be tubs of butter pecan ice cream -- his favorite -- testimonials by Senate luminaries, a mountain of cards and a bundle of balloons set aloft.

Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina turns one century old today. He is the oldest and longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, a man who had but two goals in recent years: live to be 100 and finish a record eight terms.

He managed to pull off both despite infirmity and a political resume that boasts little more than his failed effort to keep the South segregated. Nevertheless, he will be joyously feted, his defiance of time marked by his pumpkin orange hair, his racist past a dim memory.

“You want to be sensitive to the elderly but I don’t think we ought to ignore the history here,” said Ferrel Guillory, a political analyst specializing in Southern politics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Still, in Edgefield, S.C., where Thurmond was born, enough cake to feed all 2,500 residents will sit on a great big table in front of a great big statue of the senator in bronze, facing south. The Strom Thurmond High School chorus will sing. Birthday cards from schoolchildren will hang from Christmas trees.

But Thurmond won’t be there -- his little sister Mary, 92, will attempt to blow out the candles for him. The senator has opted to stay in Washington, attending the party held in the same office building where he once wrestled a colleague to the ground to prevent him from casting a committee vote on legislation he didn’t like.

Some say he’s staying in town to ensure he completes the term, which doesn’t officially end until January, even though the Senate has already adjourned. Indeed, he brought it to a close himself Nov. 20, helped by aides to the podium where he struggled to remember the traditional lines, banged the gavel, then added his own gravelly postscript to a nearly half-century run: “That’s all.”

Home-State Hero

In South Carolina he is a hero, in Washington he is an icon. His political longevity says as much about the South as the Senate -- the former bound by a code of gentility that refused to push an elder out the door, the latter cocooned in a world where seniority trumps everything.

Born while Theodore Roosevelt was president, James Strom Thurmond married for the first time in 1947 but his wife, Jean, died 13 years later. In 1968, he married his second wife, Nancy, a former Miss South Carolina 44 years his junior. A father of four, he was in his 60s before his first child was born; she was killed by a drunk driver in 1993.

For years, Thurmond prided himself on keeping physically fit and was known to go so far as to stand on his head to impress a woman. Now separated from Nancy, he has been living in a suite at Walter Reed Army Hospital the last year.

Thurmond embodies an era of American politics that is not exactly proud. Much of his early career was built on resisting the civil rights movement, when he famously declared: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit Negroes into our homes, our theaters and our swimming pools.”

His most memorable Senate moment came in 1957 when he dehydrated his body in a steam bath to avoid trips to the men’s room, then spent 24 hours and 18 minutes unsuccessfully filibustering a watered-down civil rights bill.

“He was basically a segregationist, most of it framed in states’ rights language. That was a widely supported view throughout most of the white South, especially South Carolina,” said Hastings Wyman, a Southern political analyst who once worked as Thurmond’s legislative assistant.

“He represented a state that had views at variance with the rest of the nation for several centuries. Those views have been applauded among his constituents but have been the subject of enormous criticism in much of the rest of the country.”

For many years that meant leading the resistance as the South was pulled kicking and screaming into an era of civil rights. In 1948, while governor of South Carolina, Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party to run against Harry S. Truman as a Dixiecrat -- a breakaway party dedicated to ending “social intermingling of the races.”

He railed against Lyndon B. Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 that integrated restaurants and hotels, calling it “the worst, most unreasonable and unconstitutional” legislation ever considered by Congress.

That same year he switched to the GOP, making it newly acceptable to be a Republican in the South and paving the way for other Southern Democrats to do the same.

Then, by all appearances, Thurmond changed. He became the first Southern senator to hire a black man to his staff, signaling conservative Southern holdouts that it was time to relent.

“He made it respectable for white conservatives to move into the biracial arena,” Wyman said. “If Thurmond could do it, we all could do it.”

Thurmond never became a great advocate of civil rights, but he dropped his obstructionist ways. He never renounced his past either. But his gesture, however small, made a difference.

“I’m not saying he made the state move forward, but he put the icing on the cake. And it needed to be done,” Wyman said.

After that, most analysts have concluded, Thurmond didn’t do much to influence national policy.

“There is no great Thurmond Act or Thurmond Amendment,” analyst Guillory said. “He’s known more for his longevity and his stand against civil rights.”

But he paid his constituents the attentions of an eager suitor, scanning the obituaries to send condolences to widows, congratulating high school graduates, changing unfavorable military discharges to favorable ones. He brought home the requisite pork. The people of South Carolina responded by pinning his name to a dam, a lake and scads of buildings while faithfully re-upping his term every six years.

When he was 93 and wanted an eighth term, polls showed a majority of his constituents would prefer he retire. But in a grand act of Southern hospitality -- or maybe, as some historians pose, because South Carolina still has a toe in its sullied past -- they overlooked his infirmity, the widely known secret that his chief of staff was effectively the acting senator, and granted his wish.

And today his birthday will be honored in two places, the nation’s capital and the home in Edgefield where Thurmond will return in January to live in a special suite set up in a wing of the county hospital.

Thurmond leaves behind more than 16,000 votes, more than 700,000 answered constituent requests and an ignominious past that, on this birthday at least, nobody will mention. Indeed, President Bush wished him a happy birthday, praising “his values, and his good works.”

“It tells you it pays to live a long time and be around long enough to spin your own legend,” said James Pinkerton, a Republican analyst in Washington. He recalled former Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, who served with Thurmond and called for Congress to deport blacks to Africa. Bilbo died in 1947 and went down in history as a shameless racist.

“But Thurmond lived another 50 years,” Pinkerton said, “and had a chance to call it youthful indiscretion, over-eagerness, and go on to be a respected elder statesman.”

And today, it will be left at that.