Preaching vs. Practicing

The case of Essie Mae Washington Williams, the mixed-race daughter of arch segregationist Strom Thurmond now acknowledged by his family, is an example of one of the great underreported stories of American cultural history -- the surreptitious mixing of blacks and whites. But this story is more than that. It’s also a cautionary tale about public figures: Beware those who make their names and livelihoods from playing moral superior.

History in the United States and elsewhere is full of accounts of politicians who said one thing and did another. Most compelling, and most repugnant, are those like Thurmond who elbowed their way into the history books, onto talk shows or behind the pulpit by, as Shakespeare wrote, “laying perjury upon [their] soul.”

For FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, zealous gay-baiting was the perfect cover for his 40-year relationship with another man. Disgraced televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, who preached Christian virtue and humility to the camera while bed-hopping offstage, used millions from the poor faithful to pay for diamonds and mansions. In the 18th century, Irish dramatist Oliver Goldsmith described this version of hypocrisy perfectly: “Thus ‘tis with all; their chief and constant care is to seem everything but what they are.”

Other influential hypocrites were more sinister in purpose: The 19th century soapbox nativists were mostly immigrants themselves, albeit from England, yet they railed against Irish and Italian immigrants who they feared would destroy democracy.

To his daughter, Strom Thurmond dismissed his rabid anti-integrationism as a show to “please his supporters.” That’s a generous excuse for the man who, in 1948, warned “there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

When blacks became a significant voting constituency, Thurmond backed away from his leading role in the nation’s race wars. But that doesn’t erase the fact that he built his 48-year Senate career on the suffering of African Americans. It makes his daughter’s forgiveness that much more poignant, and it ought to make all Americans that much more suspicious of the ambitious demagogues whose rise comes at the expense of whole groups of people.