Karl E. Campbell, author of Senator Sam Ervin, Last
of the Founding Fathers, on the paradox of the "old country
lawyer" who helped bring down a president.
Q: Why did you write a biography of Senator Sam Ervin, and why now?
A: I cannot think of another
historical figure that is more relevant to the political crisis we face
today. Just over thirty years ago Senator Ervin led the congressional
counter-offensive to Richard Nixon's imperial presidency. He became a
national hero when he chaired the Senate Watergate hearings which
exposed the Nixon administration's "white house horrors." Because of
Ervin's old-fashioned country lawyer charm, his advanced age - he was
seventy six - and his fundamental faith in Constitutional government,
reporters began calling him "the last of the founding fathers."
Today another presidential administration is claiming unchecked
executive power in a time of uncertainty and fear. I believe that this
biography of Senator Ervin can contribute to our national debate over
how to balance national security with individual freedom.
Q: Do you believe that Ervin's primary
historical legacy was his role in Watergate and is that the main focus
of the book?
A: Obviously Watergate represented
the highpoint of Ervin's career, but that scandal emerged from a long
series of constitutional battles between Ervin and the Nixon
administration over executive power, secrecy, domestic spying, civil
rights, and civil liberties. The book actually focuses more on Ervin's
road to Watergate, and the often overlooked historical context in which
the scandal emerged, than on the details of the Watergate story itself.
But there is much more to Sam Ervin than just Watergate. He served in
the Senate from 1954 to 1974 and participated in many of the most
important political events of the second half of the twentieth century.
For instance, Ervin played a major role in bringing down Senator Joseph
McCarthy in the 1950s and he fought very hard to protect the separation
of church and state in the 1960s. His many crusades to defend civil
liberties and personal privacy, long before the advent of Richard Nixon,
are certainly important as well. But if it had not been for Watergate
his greatest historical legacy would have been his consistent battle
against civil rights. Few politicians contributed more to the South's
defense of Jim Crow than Sam Ervin. The book gives equal attention to
his record on both civil liberties and civil rights.
Q: It seems to be a contradiction that
Ervin was both a defender of civil liberties and an opponent of civil
rights. How do you explain this paradox?
A: There is considerable debate
about this question. Sam Ervin liked to say that it was not the civil
rights of some Americans but the civil liberties of all Americans on
which he took his stand. Ervin and his many defenders argued that he was
not a racist but a true believer in limited constitutional government
who fought against all infringements on individual freedom. Ervin's
critics dismissed this intellectual defense by pointing out that he
opposed every single civil rights bill proposed during his two decades
in the Senate. They suggested that Ervin was a rational segregationist
who hid his racism under a cloak of constitutional respectability. I
believe that neither the orthodox defense of Ervin as a consistent
constitutional libertarian nor the critical attack on the senator as an
inconsistent southern obstructionist can withstand a close review of the
historical record.
Perhaps it was Ervin himself who hinted at a more revealing way to
understand his political philosophy when he told a story about a
ninety-five year old man who was celebrating his birthday down home in
North Carolina. When a reporter suggested that he had lived a long time
and must have seen many changes, the old man answered, "Yup, and I have
been against every damn one of them." Sam Ervin, too, was against
change. He built a constitutional ideology that rationalized and
defended the traditional southern way of life that he valued so deeply.
Q: Tell us a little about Ervin's childhood
in North Carolina.
A: The world in which Ervin was
born in 1896 was drastically different from the world in which he served
as a United States senator between 1954 and 1974. Morganton, his home
town, was a small village located just below the Blue Ridge Mountains in
western North Carolina. It was so small that Ervin not only knew the
names of all the people in town but also the names of all their dogs and
cats. He grew up in a time when buggy whips, pickle barrels, ice wagons,
washboards, and outhouses were common items of daily life. Sam was one
of ten children who lived comfortably in a big house on the outskirts of
town. Indoor plumbing and electricity did not arrive at his home until
he was a teenager. Firsthand accounts of the Civil War and
Reconstruction filled the conversations on the front porch. His father
was a lawyer who practiced in the old courthouse downtown. The Ervin
family experienced several tragedies but Sam remembered his childhood as
a very happy time in which "you had time to live."
Q: Where did Ervin get his education and how did it influence him?
A: Ervin went to the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he loved everything about it. He
later told his sister that there were few things in his life that he did
not relate in some way back to his schooling at Chapel Hill. But it can
be argued that his education came as much from his traumatic experience
in World War I as it did from the classroom. After an early failure and
demotion Ervin won a silver star for heroism in battle. He returned home
in 1919 recovering from both physical and emotional wounds. He soon
decided to study the law at Harvard University, but his sweetheart, Miss
Margaret, was not sure if she would wait for him. So Ervin took the last
year of courses first, then obtained Margaret's permission to take the
second year courses, and finally he talked her into waiting one more
year so that he could take his first year courses and finish his law
degree before they got married. Thus, Sam Ervin went through Harvard Law
School backwards. To this day some of Ervin's critics suggest his view
of the Constitution was as backwards as was his legal education.
Q: Ervin often claimed that he was "just a
country lawyer." Was that really true?
A: Yes, he really was a country
lawyer, just like his father, in the sense that they served all kinds of
clients, in all sorts of cases, all across western North Carolina. One
of my favorite Ervin stories is about an old, mountain woman who came
into Ervin's office unannounced to ask for some legal advice. Ervin
pulled down some law books and spent about an hour talking with the
woman. When she stood up to leave Ervin asked her for five dollars.
"What for," she asked. "For my legal advice," Ervin answered. "Well,"
the old woman snapped, "I ain't a-going to take it," and she walked out
the door without paying him. Years later, Senator Ervin used this same
story to illustrate why the Watergate Committee would not accept
President Nixon's legal rational of executive privilege to avoid
surrendering the Watergate tapes.
Q: Ervin did not go to the Senate until 1954
when he was fifty eight years old. What did he accomplish before that
time?
A: Even as a young man Ervin
distinguished himself as an outstanding lawyer and state leader. In his
twenties he served in the state legislature where he helped defeat a
bill preventing the teaching of Darwin's theories in the public schools.
In his thirties he served the interests of the conservative businessmen
who ran the state by managing several challenges to their authority,
including commanding national guard troops called out to put down a
textile strike, and working with the local sheriff to stop the lynching
of an already deceased African American accused of raping a white woman.
In his forties he served as a prosecutor and judge in criminal and the
state superior courts. By the time he was fifty he was one of the most
respected justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Q: In the book you quote a journalist as
saying that Ervin was "the most North Carolinian of North Carolinians."
What does that mean and how does it fit into your understanding of the
senator?
A: Sam Ervin deeply reflected the
culture, and the contradictions, of his home state. Over fifty years ago
the political scientist V.O. Key called North Carolina a "Progressive
Plutocracy." He believed that a small group of businessmen and their
lawyers held a tight grip on the state's government, but that they also
acted in a generally beneficent manner making North Carolina the most
progressive state in the South. Ervin was steeped in the values of this
influential group of Christian southern gentlemen. At the core of their
belief system was what one scholar has described as a "progressive
mystique" based on civility, tokenism, and especially paternalism. Ervin
embodied his state's progressive mystique and he was a consummate
practitioner of the etiquette of civility. Thus, as North Carolina's
representative in the United States Senate, he opposed civil rights with
a "soft southern strategy" and respectable constitutional argumentation.
But he also took his paternalistic responsibility seriously, eventually
defending the civil liberties of many Americans from the intrusive power
of the federal government.
Q: Can you explain why you describe Senator
Ervin's approach to defeating civil rights bills as the soft southern
strategy"? Why you think it was so significant?
A: Ervin replaced the traditional,
angry, racist rhetoric of earlier civil rights battles with a polite,
legalistic approach that proved much more effective. He always found a
respectable legal or constitutional reason to oppose a civil rights bill
instead of attacking the goal of the legislation - to give African
Americans equal rights. While most scholars have dismissed Ervin's soft
southern strategy as mere legal sophistry and focused on the more openly
racist approaches of such outspoken segregationists such as Senators
Byrd, Thurmond, and Eastland, many civil rights activists believed
Ervin's soft southern strategy to be a far greater threat to their
movement. I agree. Indeed, I argue that Ervin became the de facto
attorney general for the southern caucus in the Senate and that his
legalistic approach became the South's most successful defense of Jim
Crow. I also think that his soft southern strategy foreshadowed the
color-blind logic that many of today's civil rights opponents use to
undercut contemporary efforts to advance racial equality.
Q: So how did this conservative southern
segregationist become the Senate's most respected champion of civil
liberties?
A: Ervin inherited a deep respect
for the rule of law from his father, and he grew up with a distrust of
the federal government shared by many white southerners after the Civil
War and Reconstruction. In the early 1960s he became chairman of the
Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and he surprised many of
his critics by expanding its agenda to defend the constitutional rights
of several previously neglected groups such as the mentally ill,
military personnel, and Native Americans. A few years later he pushed
for bail reform, privacy legislation, guaranteed legal services for
indigent defendants, and the right of anti-war protestors to demonstrate
peacefully against the government. By the time Nixon came to the White
House Ervin had evolved from a conservative civil libertarian into an
activist champion of every individual's right to privacy.
Q: What was Ervin's position on the Supreme
Court's ruling against mandatory school prayer?
A: Ervin was outraged when he
heard that the Supreme Court had ruled that school prayer was
unconstitutional. He liked to tell a story about an elementary school
teacher who entered her classroom to find several students down on their
knees in a corner. When she demanded to know what they were doing, the
students responded that they were shooting craps. "That's ok," the
relieved teacher said, "I was afraid you were praying and that is
against the rules."
But after studying the issue in more depth Ervin changed his mind and
decided that the separation of church and state prevented any government
official, even a teacher, from requiring prayer. When Senator Everett
Dirksen proposed an amendment to overrule the Court's prohibition
against school prayer, Senator Ervin surprised many of his friends and
constituents by rising to speak against it. In one of his best speeches
he called on the Senate to protect the freedom of religion by allowing
every citizen to worship their own god in their own manner without
government interference. The Dirksen amendment was defeated. It is rare
to find a politician who is willing to put the consistency of their
constitutional ideology above political expediency. The Washington Post
called Ervin "an authentic hero."
Q: What did Ervin think of Nixon when he ran
for president in 1968 and did his opinion change over the next few
years?
A: Ervin had never liked, or
trusted, Richard Nixon, although the two men had not had many dealings
with each other before Nixon became president. As conservatives they
agreed on most of the major issues of the campaign. But Ervin and Nixon
repeatedly clashed over civil liberties and the separation of powers
during the president's first term. Ervin held hearings to challenge
Nixon's impoundment of funds, doctrine of executive privilege,
restriction of newspersons' privileges, strengthening of the Subversive
Activities Control Board, and other executive actions based on the
president's claim of "inherent Constitutional powers." Watergate was the
logical culmination of this progression.
Q: In a chapter titled "Rehearsal for
Watergate" you discuss Ervin's hearings into the Army's domestic
surveillance program in 1971. How did these hearings foreshadow
Watergate?
A: It is actually an amazing
story. For several years the U.S. military spied on the American people
and kept secret computers filled with information about their lawful
activity. The Army even kept notes on American politicians, which should
scare anyone who understands our country's historic distrust of military
interference in a democratic society. When Ervin led an investigation
into this clearly unconstitutional domestic spying many of the same
people on both sides of the hearings made the same arguments about
presidential power and individual freedom that they would make two years
later during Watergate. Although the Nixon administration did not
directly defend the military's domestic surveillance during the hearings
it lied to Congress about the program, withheld important documents by
claiming executive privilege, and argued that national security trumped
civil liberties whenever a president thought that it should. These
hearings not only served as a rehearsal for Watergate, they foreshadowed
the debates we are having today about how to conduct the so-called War
on Terror.
Q: How do explain Ervin's tremendous
popularity during Watergate?
A: Part of his appeal came from
his appearance. Ervin was a nightmare on television, but his bobbing
eyebrows, ample jowls, southern drawl, rambling quotations, and corny
cracker barrel stories made him seem all the more real compared to the
slick media-savvy bureaucrats from the Nixon administration. Another
part of his popularity came from his obvious love of the Constitution
and his almost naive faith in our system of checks and balances. He
seemed like a voice from the distant past reminding us of our nation's
history and heritage. As one college student explained, "he says he's
just 'an old country lawyer,' but when he talks about the Constitution
he makes you want to stand up to pledge allegiance."
Q: Are there any historical lessons to be
drawn from Ervin's road to Watergate?
A: Historians are reluctant to
suggest that we can draw conclusive lessons from the past, but Ervin did
remind us that freedom is a precious gift that must be defended not only
from external attacks but from internal threats as well. Like the
founding fathers to who he was so often compared, Ervin argued that
unchecked executive power will inevitably lead to corruption. One can
only hope that this central tenet of the American constitutional
tradition will not be forgotten today.
