Breaking the hate-mongering tradition

The outburst by that South Carolina Congressman during President Obama’s speech to Congress comes from a state has been an angry place since before the Civil War, when its most famous son, John C. Calhoun, preached that slavery wasn’t a necessary evil, as some southerners rationalized, but a positive good.

It was also Calhoun who first urged the slave-holding states to secede from the Union if the nation wouldn’t go along with his theory of nullification. Calhoun said the 10th Amendment gave a state the right to declare laws it considered unconstitutional null and void, which may be why descriptions of the theory are often accompanied by the word “crackpot.â€

Nullification was last revived during the south’s resistance to giving blacks basic rights like voting and equal education in the 1960s. Interestingly, it is being invoked once again by not only southern governors like Rick Perry of Texas, but also Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who sees nullifying the federal health-care law as a way to appeal to the crackpot wing of his party.

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Calhoun died a decade before his dream of nullification or secession came true, but he had gotten things off to a good start, especially in the old home state. In 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks, offended by a speech that attacked South Carolina and its political leadership, strode onto the Senate floor and, with his gutta-percha walking stick, beat abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts senseless. Sumner would not regain his health for three years, but Brooks survived an expulsion vote and then resigned from the House. His constituents sent him hundreds of canes to replace the one broken on Sumner’s head. Some were inscribed, “Hit Him Again.â€

Four years later, when South Carolina became the first state to secede in response to Lincoln’s election, a former congressman named James Petigru, memorably described his state as “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.†By that time, Petigru, one of the state’s few defenders of the Union, had wisely retired from public life.

Nothing much has changed in the Palmetto State since then. The state still cherishes its loudmouths and bullies, as we saw last week when Congressman Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama’s speech before a Joint Session of Congress to call the president a liar. But instead of sending canes, Wilson’s constituents are sending campaign contributions.

And, lest we forget, South Carolina also gave us Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat candidate for president who proclaimed “there’s not enough troops in the Army to force southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.â€

This great man went on to serve as a senator from South Carolina until he retired in 2002 at 100. He distinguished himself for both his longevity and his staying power in speaking nonstop for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

He didn’t know it at the time, but Thurmond also contributed to South Carolina’s sad legacy by hiring, near the end of his career, an aide named Joe Wilson, who would become famous just last week.

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Wilson, the Thurmond protégé, hasn’t had a terribly distinguished Congressional career. He was known for impugning the patriotism of those who opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars, though he sat out the former with a student deferment. He was also among those defending South Carolina’s right to fly the stars and bars of the Confederacy over its capitol. So, even before he disgraced himself and his state by calling the president a liar in the Halls of Congress, Wilson kept alive the South Carolina tradition of electing haters.

But there’s hope. While the legacy of the South Carolina haters lives on, so does the spirit of that solid citizen, former Congressman Petigru. Just a few weeks before Wilson’s eruption in the House, a federal judge quoted Petigru’s assessment of his state as too big to be a republic and too small to be an insane asylum in ruling against Gov. Mark Sanford’s grandstanding plan to reject $700 million in federal stimulus funds.

Sanford, South Carolina’s first 2009 embarrassment, had what proved to be premature aspirations to the presidency in 2012 and thought he’d impress the legions of Obama enemies by turning down a federal handout at the expense of the mostly black kids in his state’s worst schools. That was, of course, before the governor hit the Appalachian Trail for Argentina and political oblivion.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.