The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

11. The Republican Rise

11 the republican rise Although Democrats seemed to have retained their dominance in 1970, the 1974 Democratic primary for governor reflected submerged party tensions that would push open the door for Republican growth. A reform element in the party sought progressive change,both in addressing long-ignored issues of public policy and in opening the process to new ideas. Two of the legislative “young Turks” were Senator Richard W. Riley Jr. of Greenville and Representative Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston. Although unrelated , they shared a common vision, and both would achieve prominence as political leaders. Dick Riley would become a progressive two-term governor whose leadership as a reformer in public education attracted national acclaim. Joe Riley, elected in 2007 to his ninth four-year term as mayor of Charleston, transformed his beloved city into an internationally recognized urban oasis that combined restoration and architectural preservation of a historic past with a panoply of modern cultural attractions ranging from high art to fine food. He narrowly lost the Democratic nomination for governor in 1994. In 1974, however, the Democratic Party imploded in a battle between traditional and reform elements. That election’s long-term impact fueled Republican growth. Reform newcomer Charles D.“Pug”Ravenel became a catalyst for change. After growing up in Charleston, he led the Harvard football team as quarterback , became successful on Wall Street, and returned home to challenge the Democratic establishment. In winning the party nomination as a reformminded newcomer in a bruising campaign against the Democratic “good ol’ boys”in his first political race, however, Ravenel once referred to the S.C. Senate “as a den of thieves.”1 The legislature in South Carolina elects all judges, and former legislators held almost all top-level judgeships at that time. In a lawsuit challenging Ravenel’s eligibility because of the state constitution ’s five-year residency requirement for a governor, Circuit Judge Julius B. “Bubba”Ness (a former state senator and future S.C.Supreme Court chief justice ) ruled Ravenel ineligible. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld that ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Meanwhile native South Carolinian William Westmoreland, a four-star general who commanded American forces in Vietnam, sought the Republican nomination after being courted by both parties. He demonstrated surprising ineptness as a political candidate, however, losing decisively in the Republican primary to party activist James B. Edwards. An oral surgeon and state senator from Charleston, he shared the conservative philosophy of Barry Goldwater and rising icon Ronald Reagan. Edwards entered the primary—the first in which voters rather than the state GOP convention would nominate their candidate —in part to increase the turnout and thereby help build the Republican Party. But Edwards, by then an established party activist, also believed he could win. In the turmoil that followed, Democrats reopened their state convention and nominated veteran congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn, who had lost the primary runoff election to Ravenel. Dorn narrowly defeated Dick Riley, the choice of Ravenel supporters. Ravenel announced he would vote for Dorn but would not endorse him, which angered and embittered many loyal Democrats, who saw it as a rebuff to the party. In contrast Riley remained a party loyalist, endorsing Dorn as a symbol of party unity and chairing an issues committee for him. (Dorn’s subsequent endorsement of Riley, four years later, would play a decisive role in Riley’s 1978 election as governor.) Despite his Old Guard, ultraconservative image, Dorn’s voting record in Congress showed a progressive streak. He had supported President Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty programs and stood alone among southerners in the House in opposing antibusing legislation. Near the end of the campaign, in response to a hostile questioner at a forum in Greenville,Dorn made one of the most forthright statements on race heard from an American politician in the 1970s, although the press barely noticed it: Do you think we’re going back to the days when the bus went around and picked up the black children and took them to school and came back and picked up the white children? Those days are gone forever. My children ride the bus 10 miles each way to school, and they go to a good consolidated high school, and it’s part of a child’s education these days to the republican rise 147 go to school with children of different races...