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South Carolina's Original Sinners
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Mark Sanford’s affair looks relatively tame compared to earlier Palmetto State sex scandals, including Strom Thurmond’s secret family and his death-row lover. Thurmond’s biographer shares the juicy details.
For South Carolinians, Gov. Mark Sanford has presented the gift of a full week of great conversation among friends, neighbors, and strangers for what can be described as the state’s most bizarre happening since World War II. (The word “recession” has gone unmentioned.)
The story is so universally known among Americans that a writer need provide no background about the adulterous governor who lied about his whereabouts, used a specially designed business trip that allowed him a stopover in Buenos Aires (by end of the week he announced he would reimburse the state $12,000), and kept his staff in the dark, telling them to inform the press he was clearing his mind on the Appalachian Trail.
The driver of the car transporting Sue Logue from the women’s penitentiary to the death house once told me that “Strong” Thurmond was in the back seat with her. Asked what they were doing, he said, “a-hugging and a-kissing the whole way.”
It all does bring back memories of Strom Thurmond—and others in this traditionalist state’s sometimes impetuous past. There was Sen. James H. Hammond, who shouted on the Senate floor on the eve of Civil War that “Cotton is King.” In today’s context, he is best recalled as the husband of a daughter of Wade Hampton II, father of Wade Hampton III—one of the wealthiest and most powerful dynastic figures in South Carolina. (All this knowing about who’s related to whom and their relationships with others is necessary for understanding this one great big small town of a state. Those who currently settle here are said by many South Carolinians to be from “off.”)
Getting back to Hammond—the story is mostly known to historians of his intimate affairs with two of his wife’s younger sisters (they remained single). The story also goes that when he left serving as governor, he feared that one of the Hampton men would kill him. Hammond also left a written record telling his son to take special care of a specific male slave, whom Hammond identified as “your half-brother.”
The more recent, but similarly bizarre liaison harkens back to 1943, and the electrocution of Sue Logue, who was Strom Thurmond’s longtime lover. As I have written in a pair of biographies of Thurmond, the opening paragraph in the applicable chapter of both books is as follows:
Of all the women ever romantically linked to Strom Thurmond, none was as deadly as Sue Logue. The judge who sentenced her to the electric chair for murder called her crime “the most cold-blooded in the history of the state.”
The driver of the car transporting her from the women’s penitentiary to the death house once told me that “Strong” Thurmond was in the back seat with her. Asked what they were doing, he said, “a-hugging and a-kissing the whole way.” She stayed in a private bedroom in the death house while awaiting the final judicial rejection of an appeal.
Her nephew involved in the crime, a former policeman who had his sentence commuted after his head was shaved to prepare for execution, later ran the bloodhounds for the State Law Enforcement Division, known statewide as SLED. A former governor (governors appoint the chief of SLED) once told me that the graveyard talk around SLED was that Joe Frank Logue always said his Aunt Sue was the only woman ever seduced on the way to the electric chair.
Racism in the Republican Party
Conor Friedersdorf, a Daily Beast columnist, also writes for The American Scene and The Atlantic Online's ideas blog.
American Striptease
Rachel Kramer Bussel is the editor of Peep Show: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists, Bottoms Up and over 25 other erotica anthologies, and hosts and curates In The Flesh Reading Series.
Never understood the phrase: It's not personal, it is just business and Strom T. just took that already dumb enough utterance to a place beyond stupid with his similar: that's not us, its politics... If this is a story to give us an idea about his amount of devotion toward his secret family, well, my thimble has greater capacity!
God save the South.
At the least, we know how do an affair proper.
This is the exact same spin they original put on Blago in Chicago, that he was way less corrupt than some of his historic predecessors. That's interesting and all, but I don't think there's any point. It doesn't make the current losers and more justified or sympathetic and it doesn't mean that the places they represent are inherently bad.
The bottom line is politicians of both parties used to be able to get away with virtually any private sin without it affecting their public standing. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower were all known by the media at the time to have had affairs but nothing was reported. Kennedy was a slime ball in private, but is remembered for Camelot...
What changed was not only the media, which is easy to blame, but the politicians themselves. Republicans knew about Kennedy's womanizing but didn't turn it into a political scandal. I think it was the politicians who moved the media on this, not the other way around. The Republicans in Kennedy's day recognized that they shouldn't throw stones from glass houses, but somewhere along the way (probably Clinton) all sense was lost and they started getting this mentality that you could wield sex scandals as a political weapon under the banner of family values and still manage to hide your own hypocrisy in the process. That's why Sanford is such a big deal: The hypocrisy, not the crime or the betrayal. And it is party neutral. The same reason is why Spitzer was instantly ruined by one prostitute while his successor quickly admitted to being a serial adulterer and didn't even see his popularity sag (his incompetence later took care of that). In Spitzer's case it wasn't the hypocrisy of family values buy law and order. He committed what is usually treated as a very minor crime and often not prosecuted at all, but this was still hypocrisy for a guy who's entire reputation was based on going after people for crimes previously not pursued.
The net result is I have no sympathy for the politicians now. They brought this merging of public/private life completely on themselves and are reaping what they sowed. I'm all for restoring the separation, but I'm not sure you can put that genie back in the bottle and even if you could it needs to go back to being party neutral - the GOP can't continue to claim a monopoly on family values.
Dismal, stomach turning reading. Like a grey, foggy morning sometimes soothes and sometimes it's just plain dismal. This tale of South Carolina (and the South's brain-mushing, dance of death between the racist and the slave legacy), Thurmond's autocratic nose-thumbing at democracy and Sanford's weak-hearted copy-catting, makes America seem just a collection of Somali gang-lords spouting the faith but really in it for the wealth, sex and whatever else is the favored vice.. Only difference is the Bible has replaced the Quran. Without the biblical passages, SC and the Dixie South are just dark, seamy, Faulkneresqe sewage. So much cruelty, truth twisted and lives made miserable in the name of Jesus.
In the era when Strom Thurmond "seduced" the house maid and impregnated her the maid had no choice in the matter. She was poor, black, uneducated and powerless, she really needed that job. Strom was white, wealthy and in power, he had the power to fire her. I think their relationship could more accurately be described as "rape".
This writer makes it sound like a wonderful, humanitarian gesture that Thurmond didn't send Carrie Butler and Essie away.
Thurmond was a rapist. Don't sugarcoat it.
It's called RAPE
you only have to work in the deep south about 2 weeks to understand why they lost the civil war.
you only have to work in the deep south about 2 weeks to understand why they lost the civil war.
There are moments... when I wonder why we fought the Civil War.
Thank you.
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