Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers

Introduction

Senator Sam Ervin interrupted his questioning of a witness during the televised Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973 and, with a twinkle in his eye, slowly drawled, I just can’t resist the temptation to philosophize just a little about the Watergate. Then the old country lawyer from North Carolina launched into one of his famous impromptu political sermons: Men upon whom fortune had smiled benevolently and who possessed great financial power, great political power, and great governmental power undertook to nullify the laws of man and the laws of God for the purpose of gaining what history will call a very temporary political advantage.¹

This was live television. No one could stop him. Ervin’s fellow senators, the committee staffers, the witness, the press corps, the restless spectators packed into every spare inch of the historic Senate Caucus Room, and the thousands of viewers in the national television audience watching from homes and offices across the country all had to wait for the seventy-six-year-old chairman of the committee to finish his ruminations before the Watergate investigation could proceed.

Sam Ervin was a disaster on television, at least by the standards of the slick, sound-bite world of broadcast journalism in the 1970s. His eyebrows twitched nervously up and down his forehead when he became excited and he tended to stumble over his words as ideas passed through his mind faster than he could explain them. On camera he came across ruffled, almost archaic, and very southern. He seemed to be a walking, talking anachronism, or as one reporter described him, a last lingering elder from the time of pre-technological man.²

The laws of God are embodied in the King James version of the Bible, Ervin continued. He was becoming agitated and his voice was growing stronger. And I think that those who participated in this effort to nullify the laws of man and the laws of God overlooked one of the laws of God which is set forth in the seventh verse of the sixth chapter of Galatians, ‘Be not deceived. God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’³

There was a short pause, an awkward silence of a second or two. Bible quoting was not fashionable in 1973. Popular culture, especially on television, was secular, youthful, and dominated by the esthetic of cool. Ervin was none of these. The contemporary myth, if not the fact, suggested a nation defined by anti–Vietnam War protests, civil rights demonstrations, and the counterculture’s famous trinity of drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. Where did Sam Ervin’s old-fashioned moralizing fit into this liberal context? For those few seconds of silence no one seemed to know exactly how to respond. Ervin, sensing the awkwardness, added an uncomfortable nod of his head as if to signal that he was done with his philosophizing and it was time for the committee to get back to work.

Then came the applause. It exploded from the public galleries and enveloped the whole room. Clapping, laughter, and cheers rolled out of the hearing room and over the airwaves into the nation. Even some members of the press and committee staffers joined in. The senators and the witness smiled awkwardly as some of the spectators rose in a standing ovation. Sitting there in the blazing light of the television cameras, Ervin, too, let a slight, knowing smile slip across his face before gaveling the hearings back to order.⁴

No doubt they were not smiling at the White House. The hearings were not going as they had expected. When the Senate announced that Sam Ervin would chair its select committee to investigate Watergate, President Richard M. Nixon and his aides thought the old North Carolinian could be handled. Chief of Staff H. R. (Bob) Haldeman assured the president that Ervin was not the great constitutional authority he sets himself up to be. Charles Colson, special counsel to the president, reported that Ervin was bordering on senility and a phoney. But Ervin’s investigation began to unravel the cover-up that Nixon and his men had worked so desperately to maintain since the botched break-in of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building on 16 June 1972. The Senate hearings revealed evidence of political dirty tricks, illegal campaign contributions, an administration enemies list, a secret Plumbers unit for conducting illegal espionage, hush money payoffs, and other attempts to obstruct justice and subvert the democratic process. And to make matters worse, the charming, Bible-quoting chairman of the committee was skillfully shaping the revelations into a devastating indictment of the administration and even the president himself. By the end of the summer the opinions, and language, in the White House had grown harsher. Nixon’s aides leaked complaints to the press that Ervin was out to get the president. In private, the new chief of staff, Alexander Haig, began referring to Ervin as the sonofabitch. To the president, Ervin had become the old incredible bastard.⁵

The Senate Watergate hearings made Ervin a national celebrity during the summer of 1973. Note the television cameras surrounding the committee members (seated from left: Senators Weicker, Gurney, Baker, Ervin, and Inouye). Sam Ervin Library and Museum, Western Piedmont Community College, Morganton, North Carolina.

While Nixon and his aides fumed behind the secretive walls of the White House, Senator Ervin and his hearings were becoming a media sensation. Television, newspapers, and radio were filled with accounts of the latest disclosures and explanations of the expanding plot. The major networks carried the hearings live from gavel to gavel. Public television stations replayed the hearings at night and the most exciting segments were part of the evening news. For thirty-seven days the nation watched as present and former government officials testified before Ervin and his committee.

By all accounts Ervin’s Watergate show was a hit. Worried network executives who had taken a big risk replacing their popular soap operas and game shows with live Senate hearings were delighted when the Watergate coverage earned higher Nielsen ratings than the regular daytime programming. By the end of the summer a Gallup survey reported that nearly 90 percent of all Americans had watched some part of the hearings. Over one and a half million Americans had written letters to the Ervin Committee expressing their concerns about Watergate. Never before had so many citizens written to a congressional committee. Richard Nixon, who had received the third largest mandate in the nation’s history when he won reelection in November 1972, had the lowest public approval rating of any president in twenty years when the hearings recessed in August 1973.⁶

As Nixon’s ratings fell, Ervin’s popularity skyrocketed. The senator’s moonshiner stories from down home in North Carolina, his quaint verses ranging from Aesop’s fables to Shakespeare, and his earnest lectures in defense of constitutional government endeared him to a disenchanted public suffering through a long national crisis. As the Watergate hearings progressed, the national press increasingly portrayed Ervin as a genuine American hero. The senator’s craggy face seemed to be everywhere—from the front cover of Time and Newsweek to the Senator Sam T-shirts worn by surfers in California. The Watergate [scandal] has given us a person we believe, and believe in, explained Rob Coughlan, founder of the National Sam Ervin Fan Club. He says he’s just an ‘old country lawyer,’ but when he talks about the Constitution he makes you want to stand up to pledge allegiance.⁷

Almost every day of the hearings provided another example of what one reporter called Ervin’s genial blend of con law and corn pone. Ervin’s confrontation with John D. Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former domestic policy adviser, demonstrated how effective the senator’s style could be. Ervin asked Ehrlichman about a blatantly illegal incident in which the White House Plumbers—the same team of undercover operatives that was caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex—attempted to steal the psychiatric records of Daniel Ellsberg, a prominent member of the White House enemies list. Ehrlichman confidently answered that the president had an inherent power to break the law and violate a citizen’s right to privacy whenever he deemed it necessary to protect national security.⁸

An outraged Ervin delivered another of his famous extemporaneous lectures. He drew his initial arguments from theology and history. The concept embodied in the phrase ‘every man’s home is his castle’ represents the realization of one of the most ancient and universal hungers of the human heart, Ervin began. One of the prophets described the mountain of the Lord as being a place where every man might dwell under his own vine and fig tree with none to make him afraid. Next, he recited from memory the words of William Pitt the Elder before the American Revolution: The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement. Staring across the witness table at Ehrlichman, Ervin snapped: And yet we are told here today, and yesterday, that what the King of England can’t do, the President of the United States can.⁹

John Ehrlichman (left, at witness table) testifying in the Senate Caucus Room during the Watergate hearings, 1973. Ervin is seated third from the left at the committee table. Sam Ervin Library and Museum, Western Piedmont Community College, Morganton, North Carolina.

The senator was just getting warmed up. Turning to constitutional law, he discussed the famous Civil War case Ex parte Milligan, which he proposed to be the greatest decision that the Supreme Court of the United States has ever handed down. Ervin reviewed the case history like a teacher in a beginning law class. He explained that President Abraham Lincoln had arrested citizens during the Civil War whose only crime had been to exercise their First Amendment rights and criticize the war effort. But in Milligan the Court rejected the president’s argument that during an emergency, even one as great as the Civil War, he had an inherent power to suspend constitutional rights. Quoting Justice David Davis, again from memory, Ervin recalled the wisdom of the founding fathers:

The good and wise men who drafted and ratified the Constitution foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper, and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be put in peril unless established by irrepealable law. And for these reasons, these good and wise men drafted and ratified the Constitution as a law for rulers and people alike, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.¹⁰

In only a few minutes, Ervin had undercut Ehrlichman’s national security defense and challenged the entire notion of Nixon’s imperial presidency.

On another occasion Ervin applied his down-home wit directly against the president. After the committee’s dramatic discovery of a secret taping device in the White House, Ervin and his colleagues voted to issue a subpoena for the tapes. These secret recordings seemed to be the perfect means to answer the famous question posed by Senator Howard Baker during the hearings: What did the president know and when did he know it? But Nixon wrote to Ervin claiming executive privilege and refusing to surrender the tapes. Discussing the president’s letter the next day during the hearings, the senator reduced the complex legalities of the situation to simple and understandable logic. The president’s message is rather remarkable, he suggested tongue-in-cheek. If you will notice, the president says he has heard the tapes or some of them, and they sustain his position. But he says he’s not going to let anybody else hear them for fear they might draw different conclusions. Once again the audience laughed, the senator beamed, and the television cameras kept rolling.¹¹

Ervin became the darling of the print media as well that summer. Journalists had a field day describing Ervin to their readers. Sam Ervin smiles, grins, chortles, guffaws and harpoons witnesses with barbed anecdotes, reported the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times portrayed him as "the shrewd, jowly Tarheel [sic] who looks so much a senator that he seems almost a caricature." The Virginian-Pilot praised the fellow from Morganton, N.C. with caterpillary eyebrows, a querulous expression and a down home voice that drawls from a pair of cheeky jowls that appear to be stuffed plumb full of grits. In its cover story on Ervin, Time magazine defended the media’s obsession with the senator: On the uptight scene in Washington, newsmen flock to any Ervinchaired session because there are few genuine colorful characters around. And besides being totally fearless, incapable of intimidation by anyone, there are those stories.¹²

Sam Ervin well understood the power of a good story. He told them frequently during the Watergate investigation, as he had throughout his career. The New York Times Magazine quoted him as joking (in exaggerated southern accent), Mah wife, of course, says ah haven’t heard a new stowry in ages, and she’s gettin’ tired of laughin’ at these old ones. Ervin added, Ah have always found if you got a good stowry that sort of fits things, a good stowry is worth an hour of argument. Ironically, however, the senator could have been speaking of the media’s own use of him to frame the story of Watergate. Just as Ervin told cracker-barrel stories and home-grown similes to illuminate his points during the hearings, so did the press tell Sam Ervin stories to shape its reporting during the summer of 1973.¹³

The Watergate scandal was very complex. It did not emerge in one storyline all at one time but came out in bits and pieces at uneven intervals. Reporters struggled to make sense of the scandal, to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. They searched for stories and symbols that would catch the essence of the unfolding scandal and grab the attention of their audience. Ervin’s witticisms made for good copy, but so did the senator himself. Thus, as the Senate hearings wore on, Sam Ervin the storyteller became Senator Sam the character in the emerging Watergate drama.

All stories have an internal structure or organization, and in the summer of 1973 reporters trying to tell the Watergate story tended to follow one of three basic forms. First, in some news stories Ervin served as a foil to the president, or in the words of journalist Mary McCarthy, the humble, ‘low’ reality principle. McCarthy thought Ervin to be virtually Shakespearean, and showing the Bard’s own fondness for character parts and honest common-sense rustics.¹⁴ The media also drew from a second dramatic form in its presentation of Senator Sam and Watergate—the morality play. Dating from the Middle Ages, these stories featured characters who personified various abstract vices and virtues. In some newspapers Ervin became the embodiment of the stern values of another age and the voice of truth seeking. In others he was portrayed as the graven image of Congress and the symbol of the wounded institution trying to recover its strength and self-respect.¹⁵

Eventually the press settled on a third dramatic form, the classic tragedy, to organize the story of Watergate. By the time the president resigned in 1974, a year after the Ervin hearings, the main plot of Watergate centered on the president himself and especially on the dark side of Richard Nixon’s moral character. Nixon became the archetypal Oedipal hero who rose to the pinnacle of power only to succumb to his own fatal moral flaws. In this classical tragedy Senator Sam still played a leading role, but he was demoted to one of several Nixon challengers—including investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and Special Prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski—who each played a part in bringing retribution to the corrupted president. This classic tragedy has become the standard historical narrative of Watergate.¹⁶

But history is not theater. The past can certainly be dramatic, and historians often write in a narrative style, but history cannot be reduced to fit theatrical contrivances. Life is indeed messier than fiction. Watergate was not Shakespeare, or a morality play, or a classical tragedy about the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. It was a complicated constitutional crisis that revealed deep and systemic challenges to the nation’s democratic form of government. Likewise, Sam Ervin was not a character actor chosen from central casting to play the role of the old country lawyer in the Watergate drama. Sam Ervin, the man, was never as simple as Senator Sam, the Watergate hero. He was much more complicated than the folksy caricature the news media created for its Watergate drama. But as Watergate developed into a blockbuster of epic proportions, the media fell victim to its own simple caricature. The sensational outcome of the story—Nixon’s dishonorable resignation and Ervin’s triumphant retirement occurring within months of each other in 1974—only served to cement the semi-fictional Senator Sam character in the press, the public mind, and history.¹⁷

Yet even at the height of the Watergate frenzy a few columnists sought to correct the emerging Ervin mythology. Tom Wicker of the New York Times urged his readers not to be deceived by the Watergate Chairman’s new clothes. Wicker wanted the public to remember that the likable head of the Watergate Committee, who was being praised nationally as the Senate’s champion defender of civil liberties, had also been the intellectual leader of the South’s crusade to deny African Americans their civil rights. Wicker, a fellow North Carolinian, pointed out that Ervin had one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate, having opposed not only civil rights, but also Medicare, Medicaid, consumer protection, the minimum wage, health and safety regulations, and the equal rights amendment. Wicker expressed gratitude to Ervin for his great part in the Watergate drama, for his personal rectitude, occasional grace, and undoubted learning. But he suspected that underneath Ervin’s new liberal clothes there still beat the heart of a conservative southern constitutionalist. To Wicker, the most significant aspect of Ervin’s career was the challenge of trying to reconcile the record of ol’ Massa Sam with the actions of Uncle Sam, the last of the founding fathers.¹⁸

From the beginning of his senatorial career, Sam Ervin defied definition. He was a man full of paradoxes. An opponent of labor unions, he nevertheless fought for the rights of professional basketball players to switch teams against the economic enslavement of the giant sports trusts. A hawk on Vietnam, he defended the rights of anti-war protesters to distribute literature on military bases, and he opposed the Army’s domestic surveillance of peace marchers. A law-and-order conservative, Ervin led the fight against Nixon’s tough crime control package that gave the police new preventive detention powers and allowed no-knock drug raids. As one North Carolina journalist observed in 1967: If stereotypes are always misleading, they are downright laughable in the case of Sam Ervin. After 13 years in the Senate, Ervin still regularly enrages first the liberals and then the conservatives. He defies all the easy generalizations of political journalism.¹⁹

Ervin explained his seemingly inconsistent political behavior by claiming to be just preserving the Constitution. He argued that he would oppose any government action that threatened to interfere with an individual’s constitutional rights, no matter if it was a liberal proposal to guarantee civil rights or a conservative program to protect national security. Ervin distrusted government power. When they drafted the Constitution, he explained, the Founding Fathers accepted as verity this aphorism of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: ‘Freedom is political power divided into small fragments.’ Above his desk Ervin hung a sign that read, No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. Ervin contended that all of his political actions reflected a single consistent theme: his vigilance against the excesses of government power in order to maintain maximum individual freedom.²⁰

Ervin’s defense of his seemingly contradictory record fit nicely with his heroic image during Watergate, and it became the orthodox interpretation of his career. The vast majority of both journalists and scholars have, to varying degrees, accepted the senator’s portrait of himself as a consistent civil libertarian and constitutional purist. Sen. Ervin’s apparent inconsistency does not stem from want of conviction, one reporter concluded, but from the reverence with which he regards the Constitution. Another writer observed, Whatever the current fashion is in liberal or conservative, you won’t find him on either side. While everybody else is running from right to left and back, he’s following an inner-directed course, [which is] … the straight line, solid concept he holds of what the U.S. Constitution means.²¹

But not everyone accepted such a positive interpretation of the senator and his career. Many of the senator’s critics—especially activists in the civil rights, labor, and women’s movements—saw more contradiction than consistency in his career. Some disputed his reputation as a great constitutionalist, describing him as an overblown constitutional lawyer who had stopped reading cases in 1936 and whose limited view of the Constitution did not go past the Tenth Amendment.²² Others grudgingly admired the senator’s legal abilities but considered him a rational segregationist who knowingly misused the Constitution as a convenient cloak for his racism as well as his anti-women and antilabor agenda.

But neither the orthodox defense of Ervin as a consistent constitutional libertarian nor the critical attack on the senator as an inconsistent southern obstructionist can withstand a close review of the historical record. Like the simplistic old country lawyer caricature created by the news media during Watergate, these interpretations are more mythical than substantive. They served the political needs of their adherents more than they help to resolve the contradictions of Sam Ervin’s career. The first interpretation of Ervin as a consistent civil libertarian rests on the simplistic theory that political ideology is the wellspring of all human behavior. The second interpretation is ridiculously monocausal in assuming that any white southerner who opposed civil rights can be dismissed as a racist and no further analysis is necessary. Both of these theories are too presentist, static, and incomplete to resolve the central paradox of the senator’s career—his unrelenting opposition to civil rights and his uncompromising defense of civil liberties.

The key to understanding Sam Ervin lies deeper in the past. While some of the issues that led the senator down the road to Watergate first emerged soon after Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968, others had their genesis over a decade earlier during battles over civil rights and civil liberties. Even before that, as early as Ervin’s first year in the U.S. Senate, the basic outlines of his conservative civil libertarian and race-based ideology became apparent. But the core beliefs of the man who would eventually lead Congress’s counteroffensive to Nixon’s imperial presidency had been formed long before, down home in North Carolina.

Chapter One: Tar Heel Born, Tar Heel Bred

Standing on the front porch of his home in Morganton, North Carolina, Senator Ervin liked to joke with guests by pointing across the street to an old white house surrounded by oak trees. Yes, I was born right over there, he would say. So you can see I haven’t gotten very far in life.¹ The irony was obvious, but so was the truth behind his self-deprecating humor. All his life Ervin held fast to the eternal truths he learned in his youth. In spite of his long and successful career in the U.S. Senate, neither his heart nor mind ever strayed far from his North Carolina home. Ervin lived in his native state for fifty-eight years prior to going to Washington, D.C., and he epitomized its political culture and its dominant ideals. Senator Ervin is the most North Carolinian of North Carolinians, a reporter explained. This kind of man seems to be an ornament of Tar Heel History. As Sam Ervin himself explained, quoting the lines of Chapel Hill’s favorite song: I am a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred, and when I die I’ll be a Tar Heel dead.²

The world in which Ervin was born in 1896 was drastically different from the world in which he died in 1985. He experienced so many remarkable changes during his lifetime that he seemed to be constantly struggling to adapt to new conditions. The often repeated fact that Ervin’s generation witnessed both the first flight of an airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and the landing of the first man on the moon remains a remarkable symbol of the extraordinary transformations that the senator and his contemporaries experienced. But change came to Ervin in both profound and simple ways. Common items of daily life during Sam’s boyhood—buggy whips, pickle and cracker barrels, ice trucks, horse collars, washboards, outhouses, corsets, high button shoes—had become quaint relics of Americana by the time he was an adult. Over the course of Ervin’s lifetime he went from riding a horse and buggy to driving a V8 Chrysler, from muddy roads to superhighways, from water wheels to atomic reactors, and from hand-carved pencils to desktop computers.³

The pace of change was especially rapid in the South. The Civil War had ended slavery only thirty-one years before Ervin was born, and Reconstruction was only two decades in the past. Emotions from both events still ran deep. Young Sam grew up knowing many former slave owners and Confederate soldiers, including members of his own family. During his boyhood North Carolinians struggled to transform their economy from the precapitalist, slave-based Old South to the free-enterprise, industrialized New South. Such a transition did not come easily to a region mired in poverty and resentful of defeat. In North Carolina, however, the traditional staple-crop economy gradually gave way to a new economy dominated by textile, tobacco, and furniture factories and the banking, transportation, and marketing industries that supported them.⁴

The industrialization of the postwar South brought revolutionary changes to nearly every aspect of southern life, especially to race relations. Everything dealing with race, from law to language, underwent traumatic and always contested change during Ervin’s life. For instance, not long after Sam was born the North Carolina legislature passed Jim Crow laws dividing public space into black and white sections; years later as a senator he fought and lost numerous battles to sustain that segregation. As a boy Sam had black house servants whom he called nigras, but by the time Ervin retired he had congressional colleagues called African Americans. Senator Sam was not the product of some sleepy solid South, as the media so often suggested. He lived during a tumultuous era of radical southern transformation.⁵

Historians, however, have found both change and continuity in the twentieth-century South. As the rapidly modernizing southern economy and an increasingly activist federal government challenged traditional social relationships, the South’s white leaders fought to maintain control over their local communities. In spite of the numerous challenges, North Carolina’s ruling class struggled to keep white men at the head of their households, businessmen in charge of their workers, traditional leaders in control of state and local government, and whites in power over blacks. As the old saying goes: the more things changed the more they stayed the same—at least for a while.⁶

A central problem for North Carolina’s white leaders during Ervin’s life was reconciling their traditional ideology with the new ideas that accompanied their evolving capitalistic economy. Key remnants of antebellum southern thought, such as the importance of social hierarchy and the inequality of people (based primarily on race and gender), did not conform with the basic tenets of a market economy, such as individual rights and equal opportunity. In the Old South, elite white men justified their complete control over slave society by claiming a God-given superiority in a naturally unequal world. How then in the New South could they rationalize their exclusive access to opportunity and power in a modern society supposedly based on fair and equal competition among all individuals? How could they harmonize modernity with their fears of runaway individualism, instability, and social equality? These contradictions between the past and the present, between the nostalgia for the Old South and the opportunities of the New South, between embracing individualism yet fearing the loss of social hierarchy, had a profound impact on Ervin’s boyhood and coming of age in North Carolina.⁷

Sam was born in Morganton, a small town lying below the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western part of the Tar Heel State. In 1896, the year of his birth, it had fewer than 2,000 residents. It was a small town then, Ervin remembered, so small that you not only knew all the people, you knew all the dogs and cats.⁸ During Ervin’s boyhood Morganton had a distinctive character that derived, in part, from its unique geographical setting. Like Ervin, the town was part old South, part Carolina hill country, part New South, and part Appalachian mountains.

Morganton has long been the political and commercial center of Burke County, which is located on the western edge of the Piedmont region of North Carolina—an area of wooded, rolling hills and valleys that covers the vast middle section of the state. The Catawba River flows through the county and down into South Carolina. Its fertile river bottoms and lowlands attracted Scotch-Irish, English, and a few German settlers who established successful farms, some of which grew into large estates supported by African and African American slave labor. Later arrivals built smaller homesteads in the surrounding hills and hollows. These mostly self-sufficient frontiersmen made periodic trips into Morganton for their furnishings, but the townsfolk and wealthier planters looked further south, to Charleston, South Carolina, for their supplies. So significant was Charleston in the minds of Morganton’s early civic leaders that they named the original roads of their frontier town after the streets in that historic low country city.

As the North Carolina Piedmont developed in the late nineteenth century, Burke County reoriented itself eastward and closer to home. By the time Sam Ervin was born, the railroad connected Morganton to the growing industrial centers of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and Charlotte. During his boyhood a cotton mill, a hosiery mill, a furniture factory, and a new bank began to change the face of the little town. In the twentieth century Morganton increasingly became drawn into the nexus of the urban-industrial center of North Carolina and began to reflect the culture of the New South.⁹

Ervin was seventeen years old in 1913 when this shipment of new Fords was displayed along West Union Street in downtown Morganton. Courtesy of R. M. Lineberger, Picture Burke Photographic Collection, Burke County Library.

While first Charleston and then the North Carolina Piedmont shaped the economic culture of Ervin’s hometown, it was the mountains that gave the community its special appeal. Two-fifths of Burke County is located in the rugged terrain of the southern Appalachians. The Blue Ridge Mountains rise just beyond Morganton, providing a temperate climate and spectacular views, especially at dusk when the darkening silhouettes of Grandfather Mountain, Table Rock, and Hawksbill dominate the evening skyline. According to Ervin, Burke folks know that the most beautiful pictures painted by the Lord are those of the sun setting behind old Table Rock.¹⁰

Townspeople trekked up into the mountains for fishing, hunting, and mission work, while the mountaineers came down to Morganton to buy necessities and sell what they could, including farm produce, natural products such as holly, mistletoe, honey, and firewood, and homemade items ranging from quilts and hand-woven baskets to moonshine liquor. Susan Graham Erwin, who was a few years younger than Sam and later married his brother Joe, remembered one particular mountain woman named Polly Malindy who rode an old mule named Jake through the town streets calling out Kindlin wood and hand wove baskits! Galax leaves—holly berries and mistletoe! Come and git ’em whilst ye may. The children adored the old woman and would run up and down the streets ringing everyone’s doorbell to help her attract business. Then, as now, the mountaineers’ hard poverty was sometimes romanticized as being folksy by local residents and visitors. During Ervin’s childhood it was still common to see poor mountain families camping in vacant lots or on the outskirts of town in old-fashioned wagons, especially during court week.¹¹

Morganton was born a court town and much of its history revolved around the courthouse and adjacent public square. The law was important to the town’s identity, and its legal culture had a large impact on the Ervin family. The North Carolina General Assembly established Morganton during the Revolutionary War to serve as the court for a new judicial district. During the antebellum period Morganton hosted the County Court, District Court, and Superior Court terms, becoming the legal center for the western Piedmont and northwest mountains. Between 1847 and 1862 even the North Carolina Supreme Court held its August term there, abandoning the heat and humidity of the state capital in Raleigh for the cooler mountain breezes of Morganton. The town earned a reputation as the Western Capital of North Carolina and was nicknamed the little gem in the wilderness.¹²

Some of North Carolina’s most celebrated nineteenth-century legal dramas took place in Morganton’s courthouse, including the sensational trial of Frankie Silver in 1832. Frankie, a young bride with a newborn child, was charged with killing her husband in their remote log cabin and hacking his body to pieces with an axe to hide her crime. According to Senator Ervin, who later researched the case, she should have been acquitted. He believed that if the law at the time had allowed her to testify in her own behalf the jurors would have heard evidence that her husband abused her and probably would have concluded that she acted in self-defense. Instead, the jury found her guilty of murder. Frankie Silver was the first white woman to be hanged in North Carolina.¹³

Another famous event occurred in 1851 when a local lawyer and politician, William Waightstill Avery, got away with a murder he committed right in the middle of a session of the Superior Court in Morganton. A few weeks earlier, in the nearby town of Marion, Avery had vigorously defended a man accused of cheating a merchant named Samuel Fleming. After the trial Fleming accosted Avery outside the courthouse and beat the unarmed attorney with a bullwhip. When Fleming later came to Morganton on business and entered the Burke County Courthouse to talk with another attorney, Avery calmly pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot Fleming dead right in the courtroom. A biased local jury found Avery innocent by reason of temporary insanity.¹⁴

This photograph of the Burke County Courthouse from approximately 1912 is believed to be of a gathering of the local Democratic Party. Both Senator Ervin and his father practiced law in the old courthouse, which was originally constructed in 1837 and was covered with stucco in 1885. Courtesy of R. Douglas Walker, Picture Burke Photographic Collection, Burke County Library.

Incidents such as these became part of the legal lore that helped attract throngs of visitors to Morganton during court weeks. Lawyers and their clients converged on the town from adjacent counties. Town residents, would-be jurors, mountaineers, farmers, peddlers, and musicians gathered in the square where, according to one witness, they would swap horses, drink, sing, drink, tell tales, drink, and in general catch up on all the news and gossip.¹⁵ Inside the courthouse the lawyers matched wits before the bench and bar. The attorneys and judges were among the most recognized and respected members of the community. They were the stars of the court week show, sometimes playing to packed galleries as much as to judge and jury.

Near the end of the nineteenth century one of the most respected local attorneys distinguished himself not only through his knowledge of the law and spirited legal argumentation but by his distinctive appearance. A serious and stern man, he dressed in such an outdated fashion that children sometimes mistook him for the character pictured on the front of the Prince Albert Tobacco can. The dapper gentleman who wore a neatly trimmed goatee, old-fashioned white cravat, and traditional Victorian cutaway tails was Samuel James Ervin Sr., the senator’s father.¹⁶

Samuel Ervin had come to Morganton from South Carolina in 1874 with his mother and father when he was nineteen. He found an entry-level job in the post office running errands and carrying bags of mail. Whenever possible he took on extra jobs to make a little extra money. At night he began to study law under the tutelage of a local judge who had been impressed with his enterprising spirit. But Ervin proved to be a stubborn student who had his own ideas of how to interpret the law. His disagreements with the judge became so heated that he quit his lessons and taught himself by reading in various lawyers’ offices late in the evening. He passed the bar in 1879 and soon built a successful law practice.¹⁷

The elder Ervin epitomized the term southern gentleman. The local newspaper observed that his gracious manner, his dignified appearance, even to his long-tailed coat—all combined to link him in the mind of fellow townsmen with the graces associated with the Old South.¹⁸ Mr. Ervin adhered to a strict daily schedule. He rose early, worked in the garden before breakfast, dressed and ate, walked the mile or so to his law office downtown (he never once accepted a ride), walked home for lunch, took a ten-minute nap, walked back to town, came home at 5:30, worked in the garden again, ate supper, and sat on the front porch in the swing or out in the yard until bedtime.¹⁹

At home, Ervin maintained a strict but loving countenance. His family remembers him having great integrity and an intolerance for dishonesty, as well as a soft spot for his children. My father was a rare combination of austerity and jovialness, Senator Ervin remembered.²⁰ He had the external dourness of his Scotch ancestry, but was extremely kind and genial.²¹ He did not laugh readily or play games, but he loved to spend time reading aloud to whomever was around the house in the evening, usually from his favorite authors such as Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Byron, Browning, Tennyson, and Kipling—many of the same writers his son later quoted from memory on the Senate floor. When his legal practice took him out of town he wrote home daily with instructions for fulfilling family responsibilities, tending the garden, and caring for the babies: Kiss them all for me, he would conclude.²²

Senator Ervin’s father, Samuel J. Ervin Sr. (1855–1944). Ervin Family Papers, 4498, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The children waited anxiously for these letters and would complain if they were not each mentioned by name. According to family legend, the first letter Sam Jr. ever wrote came out of a tantrum he threw at age four when he did not get his own letter from his father. With the help of his older sister Catharine, Sam wrote: My dear papa. Bring me some chestnuts. Samuel J. E.²³ When the children grew older their father took each of them on a trip to Washington, D.C., to see the nation’s capitol. Senator Ervin later remembered his father standing in front of the Supreme Court and explaining in a tone of reverential awe: The Supreme Court will abide by the Constitution though the heavens fall. It was a story Ervin repeated often in his many battles with a more activist Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s.²⁴

Back in 1874 when the Ervins had first moved to Morganton, the Powe family (pronounced Po) lived across the street. Their daughter, Laura, was ten years younger than Samuel. One Sunday evening in the summer of 1886 Morganton was shaken by tremors from a major earthquake centered in Charleston, South Carolina. As Samuel ran out of his house he noticed that Laura had the presence of mind to blow out all the candles before leaving her home. He made up his mind that such a sensible young woman would make a fine wife, and they were married later that year.²⁵

Known to her neighbors as Miss Laura, or Mother Ervin later in life, Laura Ervin complemented her husband’s awkward formality with a comfortable warmth. One of her contemporaries suggested that if there had been a vote for the most loved woman in Morganton, Miss Laura would have undoubtedly won. She was, in many ways, the embodiment of the nineteenth-century ideal of southern womanhood. She volunteered in the Presbyterian Church, supported mission work, became the first president of the town’s Red Cross, and shared in the personal lives of the families in her community—all while raising ten children.²⁶

Senator Ervin’s mother, Laura Powe Ervin (1865–1956). Ervin Family Papers, 4498, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Laura was a very strong individual who managed her household without compromise, yet always referred to her husband as Mr. Ervin in front of both family and friends. None of the Ervin children could recall an instance of their mother ever telling them how to behave or reprimanding them in any way. Jean, the youngest of ten children, explained: All the teaching, I think, in this family was by example. Sam Jr. later wrote: She taught much by example, little by precept. Sam revered his mother. In his autobiography he described her in glowing terms: Her quiet strength, gentleness, and patience seemed illimitable. She was utterly unselfish and completely self-effacing; spoke no unkind words of others, … [and] endeared herself to all who knew her by her encouraging and gentle ways, her compassion for the unfortunate, and her sympathy for the bereaved or hurt; and accepted life’s heaviest blows without complaining or losing heart.²⁷

Sam’s mother suffered with her children through a series of tragedies. When Margaret, her third child, came down with tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, she cared for her alone during the last few months, isolating and scalding all her dishes and clothes to protect the rest of the family. Edward, the fourth child, suffered from a virulent strain of asthma until his death as a young man. Joe, the eighth of the Ervin children, was only a young boy when he fell from an apple tree and broke his left leg. Osteomyelitis, a painful and debilitating disease, developed in his left thigh, leading to repeated operations and physical disability. Psychological illness and drug addiction also touched the Ervin family. Yet Miss Laura retained her optimism and faith in the future. She expected much from her children, and they responded with great accomplishments. Many years later, when Sam was appointed to the U.S. Senate, a reporter asked Mother Ervin what she thought of her son’s outstanding success. With characteristic graciousness she responded, I am proud of all my children.²⁸

Sam’s mother and father built a traditional two-story white frame house in 1877. They called their homestead Fern Hill because of the numerous wild ferns that grew on the thirty acres the family owned on the outskirts of town. It had a fireplace or pot-bellied stove in each room for heat, a separate kitchen with a large woodstove for cooking, and an outdoor privy that the Ervins politely referred to as the Garden House. By the time Sam was born in 1896 the family’s growing numbers and rising social status had led to the addition of more living space and several fashionable Victorian-era renovations, but electricity and indoor plumbing did not arrive until he was a young man in the 1920s. The house fronted a well-maintained village street that ran about a mile into the heart of Morganton, but the backyard rolled out into the countryside. The Ervins had a barn for their milk cow, Daisy, a henhouse, a smoke house, a sixty-foot deep well for drinking water, a large vegetable garden, a small cornfield, an apple orchard, a pigsty off in the distance, and a woods with a springfed creek in which the boys could go skinny-dipping in the summer.²⁹

At the turn of the century, before the conveniences of modern living, every member of the family had to pitch in to keep the household running. The chores were generally divided up by gender, with the five girls assigned to housework such as washing clothes in a big black pot over a fire in the backyard, cleaning, shucking corn, snapping beans, and canning vegetables and fruits for the winter. The five boys usually worked outside the house hauling wood, weeding the garden, hoeing corn, and caring for the animals. Family legend holds that Sam was the only boy who never learned how to milk the cow. There is some debate as to whether his lack of ability was natural or intentional. He also never became much of a gardener. One story relates that as an adult during World War II he spent an afternoon planting potatoes in his victory garden. When his brother Hugh asked if he had made sure to have an eye on each piece of potato that he buried in the ground, a bewildered Sam asked, What’s an eye? Sam had a reputation for being the child who spent more time reading than working, but he insisted that he still did his fair share. While I must confess that I was not too fond of physical labor, Ervin later admitted, I had assigned tasks which I performed. My mother and father believed that everyone should be taught to work, but did not require any of us to work very hard.³⁰

As was customary among upwardly mobile southern families in the early twentieth century, the Ervins hired African American servants to help them maintain their growing household. Jean, Sam’s youngest sister, remembered that there was always a cook who reigned dogmatically in the kitchen, usually a nurse for the current yard baby, someone who came in to do the wash on Mondays and the ironing on Tuesdays, someone to work the garden in the summer and chop the wood in winter.³¹ The black help usually remained in the employment of the Ervin family for years at a time; a few stayed with them for most of their lives. Sam especially remembered Betty Powell, the tall cook who ran the kitchen as her personal kingdom. Her daughter, Polly, inherited the job when her mother died and continued to rule the Ervin kitchen for another fifty years. One summer afternoon a very agitated Polly blamed the growing number of ants in the kitchen on Mr. Sam. He had stolen some flour to sprinkle around anthills in the yard because he thought they were hungry. Evidently, Sam liked to imagine the ants carrying the food to little houses under the ground with miniature furniture and little frying pans. Another servant, an elderly black man whom Sam called Uncle Settlemyre, cleaned the outhouse and the pigpen. Family members remembered Miles Tanner as the old darky who came to cut the firewood during cold weather.³²

The Ervins considered these servants as friends and even referred to them as unofficial members of the family, although both blacks and whites carefully followed the intricate social strictures of the Jim Crow South. Sam Ervin grew up believing that this racially determined world was the natural order of things and that the folks on both sides of the color line were equally comfortable with its restrictions. He later insisted that during his childhood Negro discontent was not noticeable in Morganton.³³

Every Sunday morning the whole Ervin family spruced up and went to church. Sam’s father looked as he did every other day in his black suit with the cutaway tails, but the children had to clean up, dress up, and pass their mother’s inspection before heading off to morning services. The First Presbyterian Church in Morganton had a well-to-do congregation that included bankers, lawyers, and many of the town’s merchants. Sam’s father served as an elder for over a third of a century, and the rest of the family was active as well.³⁴

As in most southern churches, a male minister conducted the service and an all-male session determined policy, but it was the women who ran the church. In a society that limited public roles for women, the church provided opportunities for expression, leadership, and the pursuit of issues that mattered to them. The Ervins’ church hosted several very active missionary societies that reflected the deep paternalism rooted in both Christian doctrine and southern society. Women raised funds and volunteered to bring salvation and uplift to the foreigners, the Negroes in the South, the mountain people, the Indians, and the fatherless ones at the Barium Springs Orphanage. There was even some outreach to the Colored Women’s Conference for joint projects in the region. Mother Ervin served as the treasurer of the Ladies’ Aid Society for some time at the turn of the century, but as her daughter Catharine later recorded in her booklet The History of Women’s Work, published in the 1930s, the fact that all the Society’s records are in the handwriting of Mr. Ervin may be an indication of the status of women at that time.³⁵

During one particularly hot summer, Miss Laura convinced her husband that his regular black suit was far too warm for the season and that she was going to purchase a fashionable grey Palm Beach suit for him to wear. Soon it arrived and she persuaded him to wear it that Sunday to church. As the service began the whole family sat in their normal pew, the fourth from the front, but their father’s space was empty. Not until the congregation stood for the first hymn did he sneak down to his seat, and he slipped out just as they stood to sing the last hymn. When the family arrived home, Samuel Sr. was seated in the swing on the front porch, wearing his old Prince Albert suit. I have never felt so conspicuous in my entire life, he snapped. I don’t know which of you boys can wear that suit, but I will never wear it again. And he never did.³⁶

Sam Jr. described his boyhood as a carefree time, a very happy time. He spent his days doing chores, playing baseball, swimming with friends in the nearby Catawba River, playing hide-and-seek in the Presbyterian Church, and reading books on the front porch in summer or by the fireplace in winter. Those were great days, really, Ervin recalled. You had time to live.³⁷

Those who knew Sam as a boy described him as being somewhat shy but good-natured and a bit of a prankster. Jean remembered that even at a very young age Sam saw the funny side of things and knew what would provoke laughter in his contemporaries. Gladys Tillet, who grew up playing with the Ervin children in Morganton, recalled: He was the sort of person you liked very much because he had those qualities of a young person coming along. He was always serious but humorous. He was a very well-mannered person, very devoted to his mother. I think of him as always in a good humor.³⁸

A summer outing in 1916. Sam is lying under the running board looking up at Margaret Bell, who is perched on the rear fender. Two of his sisters are in the picture: Catharine is sitting behind the wheel and Laura is behind the front hood. Sam Ervin Library and Museum, Western Piedmont Community College, Morganton, North Carolina.

Sam also had a reputation for being able to close out the world around him when he was engaged in one of his own projects, be it reading, writing, or drawing. He spent a lot of time alone, so engrossed in his own work that friends, family, and servants could come into the room, even clean around his feet, and he would not notice. As a child he drew and cut out a whole baseball team of rabbits in full uniform. He made detailed paper soldiers for reenacting the Civil War and a whole flotilla of little ships with sailors to play out adventures on the high seas. Sam was also an avid reader. He even read books while walking his little sister Eunice to school. She complained that it took forever because her brother would get so engrossed in his reading that he would just stop and stand with his head in the book until she nudged him forward. She claimed that on several occasions she had to stop him from walking into the street in front of wagons or carriages.³⁹

In both appearance and temperament Sam resembled his grandfather more than his father. John Witherspoon Ervin was tall, lean, sensitive, and scholarly, while Samuel Ervin Sr. was of average height, very formal, and more practically oriented. Although Sam was only five when his grandfather died, the old man nevertheless had a profound impact on the boy. He spent hours tutoring his grandson and taught him to read by the age of four. I don’t remember so much his teaching, Sam recalled, but when I didn’t learn right quick he’d thump me on the head with his finger and say, ‘Mighty thick, mighty thick.’⁴⁰ A more important legacy, however, was the connection his paternal grandfather provided to the Ervin family’s past—back through Reconstruction, the Civil War, the American Revolution, to the misty legends of his Scotch-Irish ancestors.

Sam Ervin loved history. As a boy he absorbed the stories passed down to him from his grandfather and father. In school he excelled in the study of history and in college he won awards for essays he published about his family’s heritage. As an adult, one of the senator’s favorite distractions from his work in Washington was visiting Civil War battlefields. In retirement, Ervin dedicated hours to genealogy and studying Ervin family history. Writing during the height of Watergate, Paul Clancy, Ervin’s first biographer, suggested that the study of family history is not just a hobby with men like Ervin. It is more like a passion. It places them in time. It gives them a fix on themselves in man’s long journey through history and whispers to them that theirs is a noble tradition.⁴¹

For southerners, especially of Ervin’s generation, the obsession with history was especially profound. Having inherited from their fathers and grandfathers the sting of defeat in the Civil War and the humiliation of occupation during Reconstruction, the southern men of the twentieth century then endured a lifetime of condemnation from the rest of the nation for their rigidly segregated society. Eventually they, too, faced defeat as the civil rights revolution overwhelmed their defenses, reformed their society, and dismissed them as mere racists. As the scholar Fred Hobson has explained, this unique historical experience has created in southerners a need to tell about the South, in order to explain, to justify, to defend, or to affirm themselves and their southernness. Some followed the lead of William Faulkner into literature; others turned to scholarship, like W. J. Cash, who analyzed the mind of the South; still others wrote polemics or poetry. Sam Ervin studied history, especially the themes of patriotic duty, Presbyterianism, and the principled defense of constitutional law that dominated his family’s self-perception and tradition.⁴²

Sam was descended from Scottish Presbyterians who left Scotland in the late seventeenth century, settled in Northern Ireland for a generation, and then migrated to Williamsburg County, South Carolina, in 1732. Having been persecuted for their religion and mistreated by the English crown, these Scotch-Irish settlers prided themselves on their independence of mind and stubborn adherence to principle. The Presbyterian faith, with its love of book learning, its deference to bedrock doctrines, its commitment to paternalism, and its strong individualism, had a profound impact on Senator Ervin’s worldview, and even his personality. It’s like the old Scotch Presbyterian used to pray, the senator later explained. ‘Lord, grant me to be right, for as thou well knowest, right or wrong, I never change my mind.’⁴³

The men of the Ervin family, including Sam’s great-great-grandfather Colonel John Ervin, fought with General Francis Marion’s brigade against the British during the American Revolution. After the war Colonel Ervin built a successful plantation along the Pee Dee River and was listed in the census of 1790