Political Culture and the Legacies of Antisemitism: The Heller-Campbell Congressional Race in South Carolina 1978

In early November 1978, Don Sprouse, an independent candidate running for South Carolina's Fourth District congressional seat, convened his first major press conference of the campaign. The owner of a garage in downtown Greenville, Sprouse originally had garnered attention for his complaints about the city's economic and political elite, as he championed interests of the white Christian working class through populist appeals. This reputation fueled his bid for Congress, where he billed himself "the people's candidate" with a slogan of "Fight On Sprouse!"²

Sprouse could not have differed more from the Democratic nominee for the seat, Max Heller. A Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Heller became first a self-made millionaire and then the two-term Greenville mayor. Sprouse had spent most of his 1978 effort calling for lower taxes and fewer government regulations. In the final week of the campaign, however, his rhetoric turned bitterly personal, portraying Heller as someone who "cannot turn to Jesus Christ in time of need."³ In rhetoric splashed on front pages throughout the district, Sprouse urged the overwhelmingly Christian district to elect a Christian congressman. The blatant nature of Sprouse's attack upon Heller's religion and identity was rare for a modern US House race.

Until his congressional campaign, Heller's Jewish identity had benefited his political career, but Heller had only run in the city of Greenville, not the more blue-collar Spartanburg or the rural portions of Greenville County that also formed part of the Fourth District. Two-thirds of the district's voters worked either in blue-collar jobs, most notably in the textile industry, or in the service industry; the median education level was only the eleventh grade.⁴ The district offered fertile ground for populist appeals, even those pitched toward ugly beliefs.

On election night, Heller's defeat seemed like a major upset. In retrospect, his political fate seems all but inevitable. By the early 1970s, the combination of the Cold War and school desegregation had heightened antisemitic sentiments in the South, especially the rural South.⁵ The nature of Greenville politics—where integration occurred through aggressive intervention by the business elite—rendered Heller, a member of that elite, uniquely vulnerable to a linkage between antisemitism, anti-elite sentiments, and a backlash to integration.⁶

Ironically, while Sprouse's attacks helped to end Heller's career, they also tarnished the winner in the race, Republican Carroll Campbell, who would serve four terms in the House and eight successful years as South Carolina's governor. But in a rapidly modernizing state, Campbell never quite escaped the ugly environment surrounding his path to Congress.

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The historiographical discussion regarding antisemitism and American populism focuses on the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Richard Hofstadter saw populism as stimulating American antisemitism; critics urged greater context, as in Charles Postel's argument that populism's "anti-Semitism was metaphorical and absent discussion of actual Jews."⁷ Examples from the era's Southern populist politics bolstered both lines of interpretation. The career of Georgia's Tom Watson, the Populist Party's vice-presidential candidate and later US senator (D-GA), showed how populist sentiments fueled antisemitism.⁸ By contrast, Mississippi governor and US senator James Vardaman (D-MS) shared Watson's radical economic beliefs and intense racism, but hailed Jews as "wise, conservative, patriotic, and provident."⁹

Debate over the Hofstadter thesis, however, provides little insight into how populist sentiments shaped Heller's electoral fate. Unlike at the turn of the century, Sprouse's unapologetic antisemitism did not typify community attitudes. Indeed, Sprouse's comments received such attention because of their striking nature. And the latent antisemitism the comments exposed was hardly incidental to the political climate—the issue dominated the campaign's final week.

The term "populism," of course, is amorphous. But in the postwar southern context, most populists lived in non-urban areas, distrusted the (political or economic) "Establishment," worried about changing cultural values, especially about race, and lacked a college degree. These sentiments sometimes empowered anti-Establishment...