![]()
From Charleston to Columbia
The fourth of five children, Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings was born on January 1, 1922, in Charleston, South Carolina. The grandson of German immigrants and a Lutheran, he was not a member of the “patrician” class of Charlestonians, who typically resided south of Broad Street. He lived farther up the peninsula in the middle-class Hampton Park Terrace section, at 338 President Street. His father, Adolph, ran A. G. Hollings Paper Company, a business that sold brown paper bags to grocery stores and schools, while his mother, Wilhelmine, was a housewife. Hollings’s uncle J. D. Ernest “Major” Meyer, whose law practice Fritz later joined, also lived with the family. Growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, Hollings was one of the generation of politicians whose value system was shaped by the experiences of the Great Depression. After his paper business failed, Hollings’s father worked as a salesman for the Charleston Paper Company.1 In his unsuccessful run for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, Hollings’s biographical material recalled how the collapse of his father’s business during the Depression taught Hollings “the value of hard work and responsibility at a young age.”2
Although Hollings played down its importance, he had an unusual entry into South Carolina Democratic politics, in that he attended the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 1940 as part of the state party’s racially integrated delegation.3 He attended the convention as an eighteen-year-old page for the “Tieless Joe” Tolbert faction of the state party. At the time Hollings’s uncle was a member of the tiny state GOP, nicknamed the “Post Office” Republican Party, since its only apparent purpose was for its members to receive patronage appointments when there was a Republican in the White House. Major Meyer served as the Republican appointee for U.S. district attorney for the eastern district of South Carolina from 1922 to 1930.4 Hollings later emphasized that he never held a close affiliation with the state GOP: “That was it [attending the 1940 Republican National Convention]…. I never have been to a Republican Party meeting in South Carolina, period.”5 Despite getting an early taste of Republican politics, he could have had no illusions that the Democratic Party was the only viable avenue to political success in South Carolina in the 1940s. Although the Republican Party was competitive in presidential elections in South Carolina in the 1950s, it did not elect its first member of the state legislature in the twentieth century until 1961.6
Hollings (right) during service in World War II, 1943.
SOURCE: South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Financed by his uncle, Hollings went to college at the Citadel, a military institute in Charleston, in 1938 at the age of sixteen.7 He graduated in the class of 1942 alongside several others who went on to figure prominently in South Carolina politics, including future governor John West and future congressmen Jim Mann and Hugo Sims. Upon leaving the Citadel, Hollings served in World War II in North Africa, Corsica, France, and Germany, where he commanded a searchlight and antiaircraft artillery unit for the 353rd Coast Artillery Battalion of the Seventh Army. He was honorably relieved from active duty in February 1946 as a captain, after he had received five bronze service stars, the Bronze Star Medal, and the American Campaign Medal.8 Hollings’s Citadel class was remarkable for the number of graduates who went on to hold elective office, a fact attributed by West to the “special but demanding kind” of public service required during World War II.9
Once he had returned from Europe, Hollings enrolled at the University of South Carolina (USC) law school, where he graduated in August 1947. After a brief period working as a lawyer at his uncle’s firm, Meyer, Goldberg and Hollings, he ran for election to the South Carolina House in 1948. Here Hollings was an “accidental politician,” as he later described himself.10 At the time in South Carolina, it was illegal for lawyers to advertise for business, given the state’s barratry law. As a consequence many lawyers seeking clients would run for political office and let their profession be known in their campaign literature.11 The Jewish partner in the law firm, David S. “Rocky” Goldberg, had run twice for the South Carolina House already and lost on both occasions, so Hollings was pressured into entering the race.12 He won election to the Charleston House delegation and actually led the ticket in the 1948 election. In his memoir he attributed his success to the good relations his late father had built with local businesses as a result of his efforts to continue repaying debts after his company ceased to function.13
During his first House campaign, Hollings marked himself out as somewhat enlightened on racial matters compared with the prevailing political climate in the state. The 1948 Democratic primary, effectively the general election in South Carolina politics at the time, took place against the backdrop of the Brown v. Baskin district court decision. Brown v. Baskin ruled that South Carolina had to open its Democratic primary to black voters. South Carolina’s political class had taken some time to acquiesce to the abolition of the white primary. The Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision of 1944 established the precedent that suffrage restrictions based on race in primary elections were unconstitutional. Upon the issuing of the Smith ruling, Gov. Olin Johnston called South Carolina’s legislators to an emergency session, where they eliminated all state laws mentioning the Democratic Party. The party thus operated as a private club and would not be subject to Smith. After the Elmore v. Rice decision of 1947 outlawed this attempt to circumvent Smith in South Carolina, the state Democratic Party then adopted a lengthy loyalty oath that required voters to swear that they supported the principles of the Democratic Party, racial segregation in social, religious, and educational spheres, and states’ rights and opposed the “proposed federal so-called FEPC law.” This oath too was thrown out in federal court by Judge Waties Waring in Brown v. Baskin as “a clear and flagrant evasion of the law.”14 In protest against Brown v. Baskin, several Democrats pulled out of the Democratic primary and chose to run only in the general election. The Charleston News and Courier, described by one embittered observer as “conservative, if not downright reactionary, not only on the race issue but in all political, economic and social questions,”15 sent a questionnaire to each candidate that asked, “Do you or do you not solicit the Negro vote?” In an early example of his acid wit, which later caused him some political difficulty as a senator, Hollings responded simply, “Do you or do you not solicit Negro subscribers and advertisers to your newspaper?”16
Nineteen forty-eight was also the year that South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond ran for president as a States’ Rights Democrat or “Dixiecrat.” The Dixiecrat movement was dominated by economically and racially conservative black belt whites as well as industrial and agricultural elites, groups for whom grassroots civil rights activism and President Truman’s embrace of civil rights legislation in 1948 constituted the “last straw” for their support of the national Democratic presidential candidate.17 The Dixiecrat ticket carried four Deep South states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In each case that the Dixiecrats were successful, their candidates were listed as the official Democratic nominees. This was the case in South Carolina, where Hollings voted for Thurmond as the state’s official Democratic presidential candidate.18
There were many other World War II veterans elected to serve in South Carolina’s state government alongside Hollings in 1948. Of the House’s 124 members elected in 1948, 59 were veterans, of whom only 4 had served before the war.19 Hollings viewed the war as having had a formative effect on him and other returning veterans: in an oral history interview in 2008, he claimed that “it shaped my life and all of us veterans in public office.” Moreover the experiences veterans had endured made them more aware of the shortcomings of their home states. Hollings recalled that once elected to the legislature, “we immediately went to work playing catch-up ball.”20 Historian Jennifer Brooks observed a similar trend in her study of the impact of returning World War II veterans on Georgia politics. Military service directly impacted veterans’ political views “because it had exposed them to a more modernized world. The paved highways, efficient sanitation systems, advanced educational facilities, and public health services encountered in the course of their wartime journeys often revealed glaring deficiencies at home.” The war had a more complex impact on the state’s racial politics, though, as both progressive and reactionary white Georgian veterans used the legacy of the war as a justification for their own racial views: they disagreed whether World War II had been fought to ensure freedom at home and abroad or to maintain the southern system of race relations. Even the progressive veterans generally offered a racially limited political vision: in Georgia “it was the rare white southerner who had the moral conviction and courage to risk community censure, opprobrium, and personal safety for the cause of black political freedom.”21 Hollings was not one of those rare white southerners. Although unwilling to challenge the racial status quo at this stage in his career, once in office, like many other veterans turned politicians, he began to push for ameliorations of his state’s long-neglected system of public services, particularly its schools.
As a state representative, Hollings immediately became involved in efforts to improve the state’s school system through the implementation of a sales tax. In November 1948, the day after being sworn in, he traveled with the Charleston County superintendent for education, Creighton Frampton, to a single-story black elementary school on Johns Island ironically named the Promised Land.22 Inside there was one stove in the middle of the classroom to keep the building warm. One teacher was conducting two classes simultaneously, one consisting of forty-two pupils and the other of forty-seven, with three children sharing each desk. Frampton told Hollings that “the white schools are not much better.”23 Hollings later recounted details of his visit in talks to civic clubs, telling one such Charleston group: “On the walls were the U.S. and South Carolina Constitutions guaranteeing every child, white or black, an equal chance. I don’t think you are proud of things like that. I know I am not.”24
To address the sorry state of public schooling in the state, in his first term Hollings advocated for a sales tax to fund a program of school improvement, modeled on the tax already in place in North Carolina. Lacking support in the state senate, he introduced and had passed a resolution to appoint a six-member House committee, which he chaired, to study the implementation of a possible sales tax in June 1950. Although not as egregious as it had once been, in 1950 there remained a startling disparity in educational funding for black and white pupils. In that year white schools received 2.4 times as much in per-pupil expenditures as their black counterparts.25 With the help of the hugely prestigious incoming governor, James F. Byrnes, the bill providing for a 3 percent sales tax to fund a projected $75 million school construction program was passed during the 1951 legislative session. Historian Numan Bartley de...
