Senator Strom Hits Century Mark
It was a century ago - a year before the Wright brothers made their famous flight - that Sen. Strom Thurmond was born in a small farming town amid the rolling hills on the western edge of South Carolina.
The man who has served in the Senate for 48 years, longer than anyone else in history, has seen much in his 10 decades.
Thurmond has seen the nation go to war five times and fought in one war himself. He's lived through the jazz age of the 1920s, the big band era of the 1940s and the birth of rock 'n' roll. He has seen men land on the moon.
He's been an educator, judge, soldier, governor and senator. And, as he prepares to celebrate his birthday Thursday, he remains the stuff of legend in his South Carolina.
To mark the occasion, Gov. Jim Hodges has signed a proclamation declaring Thursday as Senator Strom Thurmond Day.
"It's a tremendous milestone for him," says his son, South Carolina U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. "I've talked to him a couple of times in the last several days, and he has been pretty nostalgic about his time in the Senate and is also looking forward to coming back to South Carolina in January."
While Thurmond himself and much of the attention will be in Washington on the actual birthday, folks in his home town of Edgefield, S.C., plan to gather for a party in the quaint town square lined with old brick buildings.
"A lot of people in Edgefield can't get to Washington or don't want to go," says Mayor Bob McKie. "So this is our own Edgefield party."
There will be a table set up in the square just in front of the bronze statue of Thurmond. There will be enough cake to feed everyone in this town 2,500.
The cake, of course, will have the requisite 100 candles and will be decorated with red, white and blue icing and flags.
Thurmond isn't expected back in Edgefield until after his term officially ends in January. Plans are being made for him to move into a wing of the 40-bed county hospital.
"It's a personal milestone that very few human beings ever get to see - turning 100," says U.S. Sen.-elect Lindsey Graham, who will take Thurmond's seat in Washington next year and who was born in 1955, a year after Thurmond began his record-breaking Senate run.
Thurmond's departure, along with the retirement of fellow conservative icon Jesse Helms, R-N.C., marks the end of an era in which Southerners with outsize personalities wielded overwhelming influence over the Senate.
In 1948 Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, rebelled against Harry Truman's civil rights policy and ran for president as a states' rights Dixiecrat, winning 39 Southern electoral votes. He captured a Senate seat in 1954 as a write-in independent, and won again in 1956 as a Democrat.
Almost immediately, he took the lead in crafting the Southern Manifesto that was signed by almost every Southern senator. It deplored Supreme Court rulings on desegregation and commended "the motives of those states which have declared their intention to resist integration by any lawful means."
A year later Thurmond, battling a civil rights bill, staged the longest filibuster in Senate history, holding the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes.
In 1964, he switched to the Republican Party to support Barry Goldwater, a states' rights conservative, for president.
"He's sort of a larger-than-life figure," says Jack Bass, a College of Charleston professor who co-wrote a biography of Thurmond.
"In terms of South Carolina, he retires as a political icon," Bass says. "He's one of the most enduring political figures in 20th century America."
Rice University professor Earl Black, an authority on Southern politics, says Thurmond will be remembered by historians for his transformation from a segregationist Democrat to a conservative Republican.
Over the years, much of the South has become solidly Republican, which has helped the GOP gain a majority in Congress.
"What Thurmond started now has had a tremendous impact on national politics," Black says. "Not so much because of what he's done as a legislator, but in leaving the Democratic party."
Thurmond, however, is admired most in his native state for his constituent service - helping Aunt Shirley get her Social Security check or helping Uncle Joe unsnarl red tape with his veterans benefits.
And voters in small towns such as Edgefield admire his sense of timing, keen political antenna and ability to change with the times.
Bass recalls talking to one man who voted for Thurmond in 1972. When asked why he supported Thurmond, the man replied, "He stands up for what he believes in, even when he's wrong."
Thurmond himself, when asked what he wanted for his epitaph, simply replied, "How about, 'He loved the people, and the people loved him.'"