Challenging a Southern Legend

Pug and his friends vs. Strom and his family

Huck Nelson was only seven when his father first took him down to the steps of the courthouse in Chester, S.C., to hear fiery segregationist Strom Thurmond give one of his tub-thumping speeches. Thurmond was waging a winning write-in campaign for the U.S. Senate. Last week, 24 years later, Nelson, now a Thurmond campaign aide, slouched against the door of the National Guard armory in Greer, S.C., where, after a rousing performance by the Fairview Baptist Church Choir, Thurmond railed against the Panama Canal "giveaway" and the Labor Law Reform bill. Mused Nelson: "There's Thurmond, there's South Carolina."

For more than a generation, Strom Thurmond has been a legend in South Carolina. As Governor in 1948, he indignantly walked out of the Democratic National Convention to protest the civil rights plank in the party platform and ran for President as a Dixiecrat. In the Senate he became the foremost filibusterer against civil rights legislation, declaring that there would never be enough laws on the books or troops in the Army to force the South to integrate. In 1964 he bolted the Democrats for good, joined the Republican Party, and later was part of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy.

This year Thurmond faces the strongest challenge of his Senate career, and from a Democrat who is as much a symbol of the New South as Thurmond is of the Old South: clean-cut, ruggedly handsome Charles ("Pug") Ravenel Jr., 40. The son of a sheet-metal worker--from the poor side of a distinguished South Carolina family--Ravenel won scholarships to Exeter and Harvard (where he was quarterback of the football team). Then after seven successful years as a Wall Street investment banker, he returned in 1972 to his home state, started an investment firm and prepared to run for Governor. His seemingly sure election in 1974 was snatched out of his hands: he had won the Democratic nomination but the state supreme court ruled him off the ballot for not meeting South Carolina's five-year residency requirement for gubernatorial candidates. Ravenel thereupon antagonized many party regulars by refusing to support his replacement on the ticket, William Jennings Bryan Dorn, who lost.

Nonetheless, Ravenel easily won the Democratic nomination to oppose Thurmond. Ravenel attacks Thurmond for being ineffective at using his seniority in the Senate--charging that only seven of his 185 proposed bills have become law --and negative in his approach to legislation. Says Ravenel: "The pattern of Thurmond's positions has been to resist things like integration, things like Social Security, things like Medicaid. This is a pattern I think the state of South Carolina has outgrown." Even at the cost of votes, Ravenel has come out in favor of the Panama Canal treaties and the Senate version of the Labor Law Reform bill, which is highly unpopular among most South Carolina voters because they believe it would promote unionization of the state's textile and other industries. But on fiscal matters he is more attuned to the Deep South voters: he proposes freezing federal spending for two years at current levels, which he says would allow revenues to catch up and eliminate the budget deficit.

Thurmond's age has become an unspoken issue of the campaign. But the trim, fit Senator, who can do as many push-ups and sit-ups as his years (75), effectively defuses the issue with the help of his 31-year-old wife Nancy, a former Miss South Carolina. All summer she barnstormed the state in a van dubbed the Strom-Trek with their four young children, ages two to seven, who wear T shirts emblazoned VOTE FOR MY DADDY.

Thurmond is the consummate courthouse-square politician, meticulously sending constituents congratulations for birthdays, weddings and graduations, and taking care of their problems with Government bureaucrats. Nowadays blacks as well as whites get such treatment. This has been the case ever since 1970, when a segregationist friend lost a bid for Governor. That caused Thurmond to realize the importance of the political power of the blacks; at present 30% of South Carolina's electorate is black. Thurmond appointed his first black staffer that year. More recently he voted for congressional representation for predominantly black Washington, D.C., and supported the appointment of a black federal judge in South Carolina. His oldest child, Nancy Moore, 7, attends an integrated school in Columbia, S.C. This has ensured that Thurmond will get some black votes. But most of them are expected to go to Ravenel.

Thurmond's willingness to change with the times helps keep him the front runner in the most recent polls, even though Ravenel has benefited from appearances on the hustings by some prominent out-of-staters: Jimmy Carter, his mother, his son Chip, and two Cabinet Secretaries. Vows Thurmond: "I'm gonna whup 'em all."

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