The announcement of an African-American child sired by the late segregationist and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond shook the American political and social establishment. A steady re-examination of race relations - especially Sen. Thurmond's attitudes - soon followed. Authors Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson carefully articulate the historical, personal, and political elements that defined the life of Strom Thurmond. The biography Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond manages to intertwine the lives of Thurmond and his illegitimate daughter Essie-May Washington in a manner that accurately reflects the lives of both and provides the backdrop for Thurmond's enigmatic political motivations.
Many know Strom Thurmond as the oldest and longest serving United States Senator. However, many do not know the history of the man. Strom attempts to explain the environmental forces that shaped Thurmond's personality and political record in an effort to reconcile the man that was known as a progressive, a segregationist, and later a Senator that voted for the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday. The book neither vilifies nor extols the way Strom conducted his life, or the decisions he made. Instead, the reader is left to assemble their own image of Strom through a well-researched assembly of interviews, personal correspondences, press clippings, and a very long voting record (over 15,000 in the US Senate alone).
To better comprehend who Thurmond was, authors Bass and Thompson peer into the Senator's ancestry. Going back generations in Thurmond's hometown of Edgefield, South Carolina, the reader gets a glimpse of how the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its' subsequent abandonment all played a role in the Thurmond family both personally and politically. Many prominent Confederate and anti-reconstruction leaders had roots in the town of Edgefield. And many of those prominent people were related to the Thurmond family. This no doubt had a lasting effect on how Strom would relate to his constituents - black and white.
Growing up on a farm taught him many of the blue collar lessons that served him well when elected as a progressive New Deal state legislator and later governor in South Carolina. However his ancestral roots and the popular view of the role of blacks in South Carolina set him up to be a splinter third-party candidate in 1948 running on a segregationist platform (he later bolts the Democratic Party over the issue of Civil Rights).
Growing up on a farm taught him many of the blue collar lessons that served him well when elected as a progressive New Deal state legislator and later governor in South Carolina. However his ancestral roots and the popular view of the role of blacks in South Carolina set him up to be a splinter third-party candidate in 1948 running on a segregationist platform (he later bolts the Democratic Party over the issue of Civil Rights).
Strom works in many ways as a primer for anyone interested in the political process. Thurmond was often praised on both sides of the partisan aisle for being known as a man of his word. Time and again Thurmond could have turned his back on political allies for his own gain, or sought retribution from enemies. Whether it was promising to support (then long shot candidate) Ronald Reagan in 1976, or making sure a South Carolinian (black or white) was able to navigate through federal red tape, it did not matter to him whether the individual was a constituent or a candidate for president. Thurmond's word was his bond. Perhaps the least known fact about Thurmond's success in the US Senate was his dedication to constituent outreach. His outreach machine was prompt and effective (regardless of race). This won him many votes and a devoted loyalty. Thurmond helped gain Federal grants to local municipalities throughout his home state, and his responses were always prompt and courteous.
