To Face Down Dixie: South Carolina's War on the Supreme Court in the Age of Civil Rights

Abstract

Over the past three decades Supreme Court confirmation hearings have become media spectacles. Interest groups raise money, senators posture for the camera to position themselves for future elections, and judicial nominees remain tight lipped fearing an errant comment could sink their nomination. The politicization of the judicial nomination process did not begin with Robert Bork's doomed nomination in 1987. Rather, as the historian James O. Heath argues in To Face Down Dixie, the politicization of Senate confirmation hearings dates to the 1950s. Heath examines how South Carolina senators Olin Johnston, Strom Thurmond, and Ernest Hollings used confirmation hearings to oppose federal and Supreme Court justices in the 1950s and 1960s for political gain. None of the three men were close and did not coordinate their attacks against nominees. But they shared (more so with Johnston and Thurmond) vehement opposition to court decisions and federal legislation mandating civil rights. They used opposition to court nominees to burnish their state's rights credentials and ensure their reelections to the Senate. All three forged a process whereby, “‘Court-baiting,’ rather than race-baiting, was used by South Carolina's senators as a convenient means of asserting their state's independence by blaming presidents of both parties for making disastrous nominations” (p. 4).