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South Carolina's Original Sinners
Strom in his day was far more complicated than Mark Sanford. When Carrie Butler, mother of their daughter Essie Mae, brought her to meet Thurmond in 1940 in the small office that still stands in his native Edgefield, he clearly had a choice. Blacks at that time were totally segregated and with no political power. Thurmond, then a state judge with sights set on becoming governor, could have dismissed this woman with whom he had been intimate for many years and told her, “I don’t believe I know you.” She would have been totally powerless.
Instead he agreed to meet with her and Essie. He entered the waiting room from his private office, looked at Essie with her high cheekbones for which Thurmond women were noted, and then turned to Carrie and said, “That’s a beautiful daughter you have.”
In a firm voice, she replied, “She’s your daughter, too.” That was Essie’s introduction to her father, about whom she had known nothing.
Strom then began to talk to Essie on matters always close to his heart, the value of exercise and eating right and the importance of education, explaining to her that the state of South Carolina had a fine college for black students. He wrote to his daughter while on active duty in World War II, where he talked his way aboard the final D-Day glider that landed in an apple orchard beyond German Army lines at Normandy—enough to allow this assigned noncombat officer to return home a war hero. Just before announcing his candidacy for governor, Strom met Essie in 1946 in Philadelphia, near her hometown of Coatesville, Pennsylvania.
As governor, he provided full support for her college education, visited her once or twice a year with his universally beloved first wife, Jean, who was 22 and he 44 when they married after Strom became governor. She often joined him on trips to South Carolina State in Orangeburg as ex officio chairman of its board of trustees, where the president’s administrative assistant’s job on such occasions was to go find Essie Mae.
The driver for Sue Logue’s final auto trip had become “chief of colored help” at the statehouse. Thurmond told him, “I guess I can trust you.” He would drive to pick up Essie at the train station on visits to Columbia, take her to the city’s top department store for shopping, and drop her off at the side entrance of the granite statehouse.
Inside the governor’s office, Jean sometimes joined Strom when Essie visited. Jean died tragically at the age of 33 of brain cancer in their 11th year of marriage, still early in Strom’s Senate career.
When he became the segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948, Essie asked how he could say the things he was saying in light of their relationship. Strom, a man who compartmentalized his life, seemed surprised, telling her, “That’s got nothing to do with us. That’s political.”
Strom quietly supported her financially until his death, went out of his way to meet her children, sent them graduation and other gifts, and stayed in touch by telephone. After her husband died, Essie flew at least annually from her home in Los Angeles to Washington to quietly visit her father in his Senate office and accept envelopes stuffed with $100 bills.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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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