Risen From White Poverty, Lott Undone by White Politics

The son of a hard-drinking sharecropper from one of the most historically segregationist of Mississippi’s 82 counties, Chester Trent Lott was always ambitious, always conservative, always congenial.

Like other famous sons of alcoholic fathers, such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, he wanted to be liked. And so, from an early age, he learned how to count -- amassing an impressive campus victory as head cheerleader at the University of Mississippi, winning a competitive primary for the House at the age of 30, besting Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming by one vote in a gutsy run for Senate whip in 1995. Now 61, Lott is the only man in history to serve as the whip, the chief vote-counter, in both the House and the Senate.

But if his career was born in the hungry ambition of white poverty, it crashed on the hard shoals of white politics. When Lott tried, as he put it, “to flatter an old man” on his 100th birthday, the core conviction of a childhood rearing in racism escaped his lips. The code words that had sustained him in Mississippi politics -- that the nation would have been better off if the segregationist platform of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign had prevailed -- no longer played on a national stage.

“Trent is a neo-Confederate,” said Bill Minor, a longtime columnist and observer of Mississippi politics. “He thought he was talking to the good ol’ yahoos down here. Suddenly he had a national audience.”

To some it may seem awfully late in the nation’s history to bury states’ rights. Jimmy Carter, on being sworn in as governor of Georgia, declared an end to segregation in 1970. Time magazine put his picture on its cover, trumpeting a new kind of Southerner.

But Douglas Brinkley, a historian at the University of New Orleans, thinks the political fall of Trent Lott more than 30 years later is still a signal moment. “This is the last hurrah of the prejudiced white Southerner,” he said.

For years, Brinkley said, Republicans stoked white fears about African Americans. “They didn’t want to lose the Confederate vote, and all it took was waving the flag,” he said. Now, he said, a new generation of conservatives will be scrutinized for prejudice. Call it the Trent Lott test.

It is not the political legacy he would have preferred. A meticulously groomed man -- he irons his starched shirts when they come back from the laundry and sprays his full head of hair for tighter control -- Lott values order. Now he will be remembered for creating chaos.

An only child, Lott grew up negotiating between often-feuding parents. “I was born to parents that had very meager means,” he said Monday night in one of the most revealing segments of his interview on Black Entertainment Television. “My dad was a sharecropper. He raised cotton on somebody else’s land. My mother did teach school in a three-room schoolhouse. When they came to Pascagoula my dad worked the shipyard. And so, you know, there was a society then that was wrong and wicked. I didn’t create it, and I didn’t even really understand it.”

He was born in Carroll County, one of the counties most feared by civil rights leaders trying to register blacks to vote in the 1960s. His uncle, Arnie Watson, was an early influence. A local leader of the White Citizens Council -- the businessman’s version of the Ku Klux Klan -- he was a teacher who preached segregation.

As late as the 1980s, Minor recalled, when Carroll County dedicated a library, Watson suggested the audience recite the pledges of allegiance to the United States and to the Confederacy. And Friday, after Lott announced that he was bowing out as Republican leader but retaining his Senate seat, the Council of Conservative Citizens -- a holdover segregationist group active in Carroll as in few other counties in Mississippi -- still posted two items of note on its Web site. One was the Confederate battle flag. The other was a headline about the Lott controversy that said, “Sucker Punched.”

Lott’s struggling family moved to Pascagoula, where the father worked in the shipyards and the son soaked up the local culture. Mississippi’s Gulf Coast was largely white territory, unlike the Delta, where so much of Mississippi’s black history and music is centered. In Pascagoula, Lott saw the mansion of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, a man he would later in public life praise. He played tuba in the band, sang in the Baptist church choir, was voted Most Likely to Succeed of the class of 1959.

Lott does not remember his childhood unkindly, and in fact bristles at comparison to Clinton’s similar experiences in Arkansas. “I’d like to think that my family was not quite as dysfunctional as his,” he once told an interviewer. He called his mother “opinionated” (Iona Watson Lott once wrote a letter to a local editor who editorialized in favor of integration, saying she hoped “you not only get a hole through your office door but through your stupid head.”) and his father a “little bit of a happy-go-lucky guy.” After Lott left for college, the couple divorced, and his father died in 1969 in an automobile accident linked to drinking. “It’s not a sad story of oppression,” Lott said. “It’s not something I go home and brood about.”

He remembers fondly all the talk of politics on the family’s front porch. His grandfather was a county commissioner in northern Mississippi, and he loved to eavesdrop on the shop talk. “Grandpa would sit in his rocker and the boys [Trent’s father and uncles] would sit on chairs around him on the steps and they’d talk,” Lott told the Baltimore Sun in a 1997 interview. “I used to get up under the edge of the porch and listen. I thought it was a wonderful event. I loved to hear them.”

He took his first electoral steps at Ole Miss, launching a campaign -- complete with banners, calling cards, a campaign manager and even a musical group -- that made him the top vote-getter. In a school and a state where football was second only to church as a revered weekend activity, he was the head cheerleader.

Perhaps the most remarkable chapter of Lott’s career at Ole Miss came during his senior year. He was president of the Sigma Nu fraternity when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the university. With federal marshals guarding Meredith, riots broke out, cars burned, tear gas flared. In the melee, two people were shot dead and 150 were arrested.

Lott did not believe that the federal government should dictate integrationist policy to Mississippi. But he saw his role that night not as blocking Meredith’s admission but as protecting his frat brothers. He took to the phones, rounded up his members, got them home unscathed. It was a model for his later years as House and Senate leader. Until recently, he made no apology for his ideology. He saw his role as a pragmatist.

In recent years, some Senate colleagues grumbled that Lott was not ideological enough, that he compromised too easily -- letting a treaty banning chemical weapons come to the floor where, to the anger of conservatives, it passed; agreeing to a 1998 budget deal that escalated federal spending, something conservatives opposed. The grumbling grew louder still in 2001, when Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont defected from the Republican Party, becoming an independent and costing the GOP its hold on the Senate.

Lott said at the time that he learned from his mistakes. That he had not was evident at Thurmond’s birthday party on Dec. 5. Lott watchers note that he had provoked controversy by his warm embrace of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He should have been on notice, they believe.

To many in Mississippi, the national furor over Lott’s remarks was itself instructive. “It wasn’t a surprise to us that Trent Lott had these ideological leanings,” said Leslie McLemore, a political scientist at Jackson State University. “We just never figured he would utter them nationally.”

Wilbur Colom, a black Republican attorney in Columbus, Miss., was philosophical. “He always made those harsh remarks,” he said. “I guess he just rose too high to get away with it.”

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Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.