Download Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers AudioBook Free
Many Americans keep in mind Senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985) as the affable, Bible-quoting, old country lawyer who chaired the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Ervin's reviews from down home in North Carolina, his reciting literary passages ranging from Shakespeare to Aesop's fables, and his earnest lectures in security of civil liberties and constitutional administration contributed to the downfall of President Nixon and gained Senator Ervin a reputation as "the last of the founding fathers. "Yet for the majority of his two decades in the Senate, Ervin applied these same rhetorical devices to a very different goal. Between 1954 and 1974, he was Jim Crow's most proficient legal defender as the South's constitutional expert during the congressional debates on civil privileges. The paradox of the senator's opposition to civil privileges and security of civil liberties lays in the centre of this biography of Sam Ervin.Drawing on newly exposed archival materials, Karl Campbell illuminates the character of the man and the historical pushes that shaped him. The senator's distrust of centralized electricity, Campbell argues, helps clarify his ironic reputation as a foe of civil privileges and a champion of civil liberties. Campbell shows that the Watergate scandal symbolized the culmination of any escalating group of clashes between your imperial presidency of Richard Nixon and a congressional counterattack led by Senator Ervin. The issue central compared to that struggle, as well concerning lots of the other crusades in Ervin's life, remains a key question of the American experience today how to exercise legitimate government electricity while protecting essential individual freedoms.
