Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, the immaculately coiffed six-term senator from South Carolina, has died.
Family spokesman Andy Brack, a longtime advisor to the senator, confirmed that Hollings passed away on Saturday. The Democrat was just three years — exactly 1,001 days — shy of reaching his centennial.
A southern gentleman
Hollings was a skilled orator known for his debonair style and rhetorical flourishes, a southern charm that helped cement a colorful political career that included a failed presidential bid in 1983. Other than this defeat on the national stage, Hollings only lost one other race: his first Senate bid in 1962.
Four years later, at just 44 years old, the South Carolina Democrat won a special election, and in 1966 he went on to win the first of his six full terms as a U.S. senator.
Although Hollings’ career spanned 38 years and was one of the longest in Senate history, he remained the junior senator from South Carolina for every year of service but his very last. First elected in 1954, Sen. Strom Thurmond outranked Hollings until his retirement in January 2003, at the age of 100.
Hollings’ own retirement a year later marked the end of an era of influential Democratic lawmakers who dominated southern politics up until the 1990s, when Republicans started to win a majority of seats south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Controversial past
While campaigning for governor in 1958, Hollins joined numerous Democrats who opposed desegregation. However, he came to develop a reputation for moderation when, during his gubernatorial farewell address, he reversed course and asked the state legislature to accept integration in public schools and universities.
“This General Assembly must make clear South Carolina’s choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men,” he told fellow lawmakers during the civil rights movement. Shortly after Hollings’ speech, Clemson University was integrated.
Thinking back on his early political career during the 1950s, Hollings wrote in his 2008 autobiography that “no issue dominated South Carolina more than race.” Unlike most southern Democrats from this era, Hollings was not fully and militantly committed to segregation.
“I was ‘Mister-In-Between,'” he said. “The governor had to appear to be in charge, yet the realities were not on his side. I returned to my basic precept…the safety of the people is the supreme law. I was determined to keep the peace and avoid bloodshed.”
Hollings’ experience on the Senate floor eventually earned him chairs on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and he held a seat on Appropriations and Budget committees. He held onto these influential posts despite making statements that would have him censured in today’s political arena.
For instance, he once called Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D) the “senator from the B’nai B’rith,” and in 1983 he used the term “wetback” to describe an opponent’s campaign aide.
From hawk to dove
Hollings started out his career as a military hawk, lobbying hard for military spending in his economically underdeveloped state. However, after making three trips to Vietnam to meet with troops and tour the battlefields, Hollings became an adamant opponent of the conflict in Southeast Asia.
“It’s a mistake to try to build and destroy a nation at the same time,” he wrote in his autobiography. He also warned that America was “repeating the same wrongheaded strategy in Iraq.”
In 1991, as the U.S. prepared to push Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, Hollings voted against a congressional resolution authorizing President George H.W. Bush to use force against Iraq. This decision upset his constituents at the time but would come to be viewed as prudent in the post-Saddam era.
Hollings finally retired in 2004 after a political career that spanned 56 years and included stints as a state senator, lieutenant governor, and governor. In his final speech as a lawmaker, Hollings denounced the role of money in governance, calling it “the main culprit” in contemporary politics and a “cancer on the body politic.”
“We don’t have time for each other, we don’t have time for constituents except for the givers,” he said. “We’re in real, real trouble.”
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