
          Laments on the Demise of Tom Turnipseed
          By Gaillard, FryeFrye Gaillard
          Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, p. 31
          
          I hated to see it a few weeks ago when ole Tom Turnipseed went up
in flames. Turnipseed, of course, was a candidate for lieutenant
governor of South Carolina, who lost a primary runoff to Mike
Daniel.
          Daniel may make a terrific lieutenant governor. Turnipseed might
have been a disaster. But it seems to me that his demise--and there
are those who predict this was his last campaign--is part of the
depressing homogenization of modern politics.
          In both North and South Carolina, we've always had our
mavericks. Today, they're still around in the form of Thurmond, Helms
and East, but the color and the flair are not what they could be.
          Helms and East are mostly just peculiar--stodgy ideologues with
kamikaze instincts.
          Thurmond may still be wrestling with Reconstruction--a quaint
anachronism in 1982--but he's gotten so pragmatic about it that he
even voted to extend the Voting Rights Act.
          Turnipseed is different. As a South Carolina state senator in the
late 1970's, he was dapper and charming, outrageous and
impolite--affronting his legislative colleagues by, among other
things, appearing with a couple of disc jockey buddies on the floor of
the Senate and singing country songs about rising gas prices.
          He was a brilliant rock-thrower with some self-destructive
tendencies--declaring a war he couldn't win on special interest
groups, particularly utilities, and on a semi-corrupt system of
legislative seniority.
          But it seems to me that Turnipseed's importance goes beyond the
dash and color of his quixotic crusades. He made, I think, an
ideological pilgrimage that's not uncommon in the South.
          As it happened, he grew up on the same street that I did. He was
older, and I didn't know him until later. But when you're from Mobile,
Ala., raised in privilege in the dappled shade of live oaks, amid
people who regret the outcome of the Civil War, you're apt to see the
world in strange colorations.
          You'll have a strong sense of privilege, of your own special place
near the center of things. And unless you're extremely lucky, blessed
with a quirky and aberrational understanding of fairness, you'll also
be a racist.
          It's easy and natural for sons of the Old South, and neither
Turnipseed nor I escaped the maladies of our birthright. But chances
are also strong that one day it will hit you, often with a shattering
suddenness, that you're hideously wrong about the things that you
believe.
          A way of life that seemed easy and genteel and supremely civilized
becomes abruptly horrifying, and you develop a tendency toward reverse
social climbing--toward a compensatory identification with the
underdogs around you.
          I became a newspaper reporter with a righteous impulse to write
about injustice. Turnipseed became a populist politician, a champion
of have-nots, whose stridency, in the end, was his undoing.
          He was once the campaign manager for Alabama's segregationist
governor George Wallace. But the truth finally hit him in South
Carolina and he tried to build a coalition of blacks and whites--of
ordinary people victimized by the institutions around them.
          He campaigned against the death penalty, rising utility prices and
legislative apportionment plans that effectively excluded blacks. None
of those causes are easy ones to win, and Turnipseed's ratio of
success was not impressive.
          He was angry and shrill, and even some of the people who agreed
with him finally wished he'd go away. He tried to change his style for
his last campaign, but it was apparently too late.
          So he lost.
          That's a shame, however, because politics can do with a little more
passion. And particularly so when that sense of being right comes, as
Turnipseed's did, from a deeply felt knowledge of what it means to be
wrong.
          
            Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the
Charlotte Observer, where this article originally
appeared.
          
        