Coleman Livingston Blease

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Coleman Livingston Blease (October 8, 1868–January 19, 1942) was a politician from the U.S. state of South Carolina known for his populist appeals and racism. He served as a state legislator, as governor of South Carolina, and as a U.S. Senator.

1 Early life and career
2 Blease as Governor
3 Blease as Senator
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Early life and career

Coleman Livingston Blease was born near the town of Newberry, South Carolina, on October 8, 1868, the year that South Carolina's new Reconstruction constitution was adopted and African Americans began participating in public life. Blease's attitudes about race were almost certainly shaped by the violent confrontations of this period. Blease was educated at Newberry College, the University of South Carolina, and Georgetown University, where he graduated from the law department in 1889. Blease returned to Newberry to practice law and enter politics. He began his political career in the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1890 as a protege of Benjamin Ryan Tillman. But whereas Tillman drew his support from South Carolina's poor white farmers and never quite trusted the growing numbers of white textile mill workers, Blease came to see that these workers lacked a political voice. His own rise to power, as he moved from the South Carolina House of Representatives to the South Carolina Senate in 1900, was built on the support of mill workers, an increasingly important segment of the electorate in South Carolina in this period.

[edit] Blease as Governor

Blease was elected governor in 1910 and re-elected in 1912. His administration was bizarre, but not criminal. He pardoned extravagantly and answered the snubs of the opposition with abusive language. Blease supported the practice of lynching both by public statements and by not using the powers of his office to prevent lynchings or prosecute mob members. Although the combined opposition of Tillman and the upper classes could not prevent his reelection in 1912, he lost the election of 1914 and spent a decade outside the mainstream of politics. The administration of Governor Richard Irvine Manning III (1915-1919) brought many Progressive Era reforms to the state, but as the political climate turned more reactionary after 1919, Blease's popularity rebounded. Blease lacked a constructive program and the prudence of a successful organizer. But his agitations had permanently quickened the political consciousness of the cotton-mill operatives and other poor whites.

In virtually all of his campaigns, Blease used a catchy, nonsensical, non-specific campaign jingle that became well known to virtually every voter in South Carolina in the era: "Do what you want, say what you please...the man for the job is Coley Blease!"

[edit] Blease as Senator

In 1924, Blease defeated James F. Byrnes in the Democratic primary and was elected to the U.S. Senate. His campaign showed that he was the same politician he had always been and foreshadowed his style as Senator. Blease's defeat of Byrnes was widely credited to a rumor campaign that Byrnes, who was raised a Roman Catholic in Charleston, had not really left that faith when he entered politics. Such an assertion in an overwhelmingly Protestant state in the years when the Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its power ruined Byrnes's hopes that year, though it was Byrnes who defeated Blease in his 1930 run for re-election.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

Ronald Dantan Burnside (1963). "The Governorship of Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina, 1911-1915". Indiana University.
Daniel W. Hollis (1979). ""Cole Blease: The Years Between the Governorship and the Senate, 1915-1924"". South Carolina Historical Magazine 80: 1-17 –.
Daniel W. Hollis (1978). ""Cole L. Blease and the Senatorial Campaign of 1924"". Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association: 53-68 –.
Anthony Barry Miller (1971). "Coleman Livingston Blease". University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Bryant Simon (1996). ""The Appeal of Cole Blease of South Carolina: Race, Class, and Sex in the New South"". Journal of Southern History 62: 57-86 –.
Bryant Simon (1998). A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4704-6.
Clarence N. Stone (1963). ""Bleaseism and the 1912 Election in South Carolina"". North Carolina Historical Review 40: 54-74. –.
James Truslow Adams (1940). Dictionary of American History. Charles Scribner's Sons.

Preceded by Martin Frederick Ansel	Governor of South Carolina 1911 – 1915	Succeeded by Charles Aurelius Smith
Preceded by Nathaniel B. Dial	United States Senator from South Carolina 1925 – 1931	Succeeded by James F. Byrnes