Sculpting N.C. politics

Latest Ervin bio helps us carve a contemporary understanding of state history

North Carolina has produced some of the most provocative political figures on the American scene: Sen. Jesse Helms, attempting to roll back the liberal '60s; Sen. Sam Ervin, helping bring down Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy, Sen. Robert Reynolds, apologizing for Adolf Hitler.

This is a rich, historical vein, and thankfully it is being mined by historians and journalists as never before.

The most recent addition is Bill Link's excellent biography of Jesse Helms, "Righteous Warrior." That follows on the heels of Karl Campbell's take on Ervin, "Last of the Founding Fathers."

In fact, there has been a wave of biographies about Tar Heel politics in the past decade. More are on the way, with biographies in the works of former Gov. Jim Hunt, former Gov. Luther Hodges and Josephus Daniels, the editor of The News and Observer and a Democratic Party leader.

These North Carolina books come at a time of renewed interest in our past. Nationally, books about our Founding Fathers have found new life. Locally, old historical disputes are resurfacing.

The racial disturbances and coup d'état in Wilmington in 1898 were the subject of a report by a state commission. The Democratic Party is debating whether it wants to continue honoring Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock, whose name is on an annual fundraising dinner, because of his role in the white supremacy campaigns.

And there is renewed interest in George White, the only African-American to serve in Congress from 1898 to 1928. Only in recent years has he received the recognition he deserves.

A common theme running through many of the biographies is race, whether it was Ervin and Helms defending segregation or Sanford pushing the envelope for change, or White as a lonely voice for African-Americans at a time when white America did not want to hear it.

One of the most difficult figures to evaluate is Ervin, who was senator from 1954 to 1974. Liberals cheered when he led the Senate investigation of the Watergate scandal and when he championed civil liberties, including the press' role as government watchdog. But his role as the leading Senate theoretician for segregation -- and one of the authors of the Southern Manifesto -- are more problematic. Two biographies were written of Ervin in the '70s when he was still alive and at the height of his Watergate fame: "Just A Country Lawyer" by journalist Paul Clancy (Indiana University Press, 1974) and "A Good Man" by novelist Dick Dabney (Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Ervin also wrote an autobiography after he retired, "Preserving the Constitution" (Lexis, 1984).

In his new book on Ervin, Campbell, an associate professor of history at Appalachian State University, set out not to write a full biography but one that concentrated on the fundamental contradiction of Ervin's career -- his support for civil liberties and his opposition to civil rights. Campbell succeeds splendidly in threading the historical needle.

As New York Times columnist (and North Carolina native) Tom Wicker put it, how does one reconcile "ol Massa Sam" with "Uncle Sam, the last of the founding fathers." It is, of course, a question we could ask of many of the real Founding Fathers.

"In a time of uncertainty and peril," Campbell writes, "he reminded the nation that it must be ever vigilant against the concentration of centralized power in order to protect constitutional rights and individual freedoms, as indeed it should. Sam Ervin never acknowledged, however, that sometimes it is necessary to exercise governmental power in order to extend those same rights and freedoms to all Americans."

Campbell also sheds some new light on several aspects of Ervin's life. Ervin's heroism on the battlefields of France during World War I has been well documented. He led a successful charge of a German machine gun nest. But Ervin became a hero only after he first faltered -- panicking in the middle of a perceived German attack -- that led to the Army relieving him of his command. Ervin's heroism came only after he was reassigned as an ordinary doughboy.

The new biography also discloses that under Ervin's command, a National Guardsman bayoneted a striker to death during the 1934 United Textile Workers Union strike in Belmont.

Ervin was a towering figure in North Carolina political history -- idolized both by conservatives such as Helms and center/left Democrats such as Robert Morgan and Rufus Edmisten.

He had both the brilliant mind of a constitutional scholar and the common sense and humor of a country lawyer. But Ervin was also a flawed figure, who used his gifts to defend segregation and therefore ended up on the wrong side of history on the great question of his day. Because of his anti-civil rights record, Ervin is hardly ever mentioned today at state Democratic Party functions.

Campbell has written a sophisticated, clear-eyed and evenhanded biography of Ervin that is likely to stand the test of time as the best work on one of North Carolina's most famous sons.

Campbell's book on Ervin, like Link's biography of Helms, adds immeasurably to our understanding of the state and its politics.