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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Nia Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
John Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
Nia Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?
John Aughenbaugh: I'm good. I'm feeling a little contradictory.
Nia Rodgers: I can't imagine that from you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Say it isn't so.
John Aughenbaugh: Listeners, this episode is a continuation of the story behind the name series that we have commenced, and the individual we're going to look at is Senator Sam Ervin. The reason why I'm feeling a little contradictory is that in doing research on Senator Ervin's life, I felt like I was having whiplash. Because I would find one thing where I was just like this was impressive. Then I would find something else, and I'm like Sam no.
Nia Rodgers: Sorry, I realized that we didn't spell Carrie Buck's name in our previous episode. S-A-M E-R-V-I-N.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Sam Ervin. Sam Ervin is from North Carolina.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes, from your home state.
Nia Rodgers: Yes. He is full of multitudes, like many people from North Carolina.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Sam Ervin, and later we'll talk about Jesse Helms at some point, probably, and other people in this series. By the way, I don't know what we're going to call this series yet. Aughie calling it the story behind the name and I'm calling it Why You Should known that name. Basically, we don't know what we're going to call this series. But these are interesting people that we think you should know about one of the reasons this came up, was because he ran the Watergate hearings.
John Aughenbaugh: In the United States Senate, yes.
Nia Rodgers: He was the one who was in charge of running the Watergate hearings, and Aughie sent me a text and said, there is so much. I was like and then I looked at his notes, his notes are three pages long. I'm like remember how we were going to keep the short. This one might be a little bit longer because Sam Ervin has multitudes. He's quite the character.
John Aughenbaugh: In particular, Sam Ervin plays a rather important role in the political life and development of both of us. Because Watergate was one of the first political events in our formative years.
Nia Rodgers: Because they were starting to study it when we were coming like it happened in our lifetimes, but it was also being hotly studied when we were starting to be aware of politics. That's going on in politics.
John Aughenbaugh: When we get into middle school and high school, Sam Ervin's name came up all the time. It was his Senate hearings that exposed the fact that President Nixon had a recording system in the Oval Office.
Nia Rodgers: With the infamous missing 17 minutes.
John Aughenbaugh: Ervin insisted that Nixon turn over the tapes to the Congress and to the special prosecutor investigating the White House's role in the cover up of the Watergate break in.
Nia Rodgers: We would all support. We're all like, yes, go Sam Ervin. That is what should have to happen here.
John Aughenbaugh: On the other hand, he was an unrepentant states rights advocate. He objected to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus board. Voted against pretty much all of the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s and for good measure, he also voted against the Equal Rights Amendment.
Nia Rodgers: He didn't like. I don't know whether he liked them personally or not. He didn't think that African Americans should have rights. He didn't think women should have rights. There's that guy.
John Aughenbaugh: But then we got the whiplash effect.
Nia Rodgers: On the other hand.
John Aughenbaugh: He advocated such strict readings of various constitutional amendments that furthered the protection of those accused of crime. You're of defendants.
Nia Rodgers: Criminal rights defendants.
John Aughenbaugh: Right defendants.
Nia Rodgers: Pick a hat and answer is I have 40 of them, and I'm just of them pop them off and on my head, depending on.
John Aughenbaugh: As we pointed out, Samuel James Ervin was born in 1896 in Morganton, North Carolina. He served in the US Army in combat in France during World War I, and he was actually awarded here's the other thing. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, a silver star in two purple hearts.
Nia Rodgers: He was coolly valorous. He was clearly a person of valor. He protected his men.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Or his fellow soldiers. He did all these things.
John Aughenbaugh: He comes home from the war, goes to the University of North Carolina, graduates, by the way, graduates early, goes to Harvard law and gets a Harvard law degree in 1922. He was admitted to the bar in North Carolina before he finished his law degree program. I'm like.
Nia Rodgers: Yes.
John Aughenbaugh: Are you?
Nia Rodgers: That's how respected he was.
John Aughenbaugh: Almost immediate.
Nia Rodgers: Although annoyingly. He called himself a simple country lawyer.
John Aughenbaugh: Really did.
Nia Rodgers: Get out of here. Nobody gets to call themselves a simple country lawyer if they went to Harvard and if they were admitted to the bar before they even got to Harvard. Come on.
John Aughenbaugh: Before he even received his degree, the Democratic Party in Burke County, North Carolina, nominated him in absentia to run for the North Carolina House of Representatives.
Nia Rodgers: He was elected.
John Aughenbaugh: He was elected.
Nia Rodgers: And he was elected in absentia. He was elected. He didn't even have to show up to win and not only was he elected, he was elected in 22, 24 and 1930. He kept getting elected.
John Aughenbaugh: Then he gets elected as a state judge in the late 1930s. By 1948 before the dude's even 50, he is selected as an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. He serves in that capacity for six years, and then he gets appointed to fill a vacancy in a US Senate seat, United States Senate seat.
Nia Rodgers: That's because Clyde Howe died in office.
John Aughenbaugh: Clyde Howe died.
Nia Rodgers: They looked around and said, we'll take Sam Ervin.
John Aughenbaugh: We'll take Sam.
Nia Rodgers: But then he gets appointed, but then he runs for the seat. Because he only has it for like six months. Runs for a seat, and he gets it.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes and almost immediately.
Nia Rodgers: Now he's in American politics at the federal level.
John Aughenbaugh: Level.
Nia Rodgers: I know North Carolina House of Representatives is an important thing but not really. Now we're at the federal level. He's already a young man and he's a senator.
John Aughenbaugh: Almost immediately he gets appointed to serve on the committee that's investigating, Senator Joseph McCarthy, because of the McCarthy hearings. It was known as the Ervin Committee. The dude's been in office as a US senator for like two years. He's already got his own committee, where he aggressively goes after Senator Joe McCarthy. Because of McCarthy's efforts to smear anybody in the United States that had any kind of communist thought in their life. This is incredible.
Nia Rodgers: McCarthy had gotten out of hand, and Ervin is supposed to rein him in. Basically, Ervin's supposed to say slow down there, Cheetah. Nobody needs to be moving as fast as you're moving and making the accusations that you're making. Because of the work he does there, 20 years later, we see him doing the same work with Richard Nixon. He has a history of being able to run a commission like this and do this investigative work.
John Aughenbaugh: He believes in checks and balances. It's one of the core values of the US nobody. That's right. Yes and that means if you investigate one of your own, Senator Joe McCarthy, or you investigate a president, who I mean, let's face it. Sam Ervin in terms of ideology and policy preferences, was on the same side as Richard Nixon. Didn't matter. He went after him. Because President should be transparent to the public. That's the good. Now here's the bad. In 1956, Ervin helped organize resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus Board. He had an important role in drafting the infamous Southern Manifesto, which was the document that encouraged open defiance of desegregation.
Nia Rodgers: Giving a timeline? He investigates McCarthy and then immediately turns around and says, no desegregation .
John Aughenbaugh: That's right.
Nia Rodgers: He's doing this great thing, we think, with McCarthy, where he's like get rid of that guy cause that guy's a nut job and then he does this whole.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: The Southern states don't have to do this, and you can defy the court.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then he starts a long series of votes that I would say puts him on the wrong side of history. He votes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1968. He votes against the 24th Amendment of the US Constitution, which is the banishing poll taxes. He votes against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 I love this. I saw this in a number of books about Sam Ervin. Historians considered Ervin's position to be one of cognitive dissonance because he opposed federal legislation to combat race based discrimination, but did not do so in harsh terms. Like cognitive dissonance. He hated the Warren Court.
Nia Rodgers: I think the quote there that's important is Americans are entitled to their prejudices as well as their allergies. Entitled to their prejudices. It's okay for you not to want your kids to go to school with Black kids.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Because same Ervin's white. We should have mentioned Sam ran.
John Aughenbaugh: He's white.
Nia Rodgers: I thought that was obvious right like he's such an obnoxious thing to say.
John Aughenbaugh: Allergies are on this, same spectrum.
Nia Rodgers: Like, you can control your allergies. You can control your prejudices, but you really can't control your allergies. If you're allergic to hay, you're allergic to hay.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Anyway. Sam Ervin he's a character.
John Aughenbaugh: He was a staunch opponent of the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965, which abolished nationality quotas, starting in 1968.
Nia Rodgers: He wanted nationality quotas, only 12 people from Mexico, only 41 people from Sweden, only 21 people from wherever.
John Aughenbaugh: On the other hand, again, now we're on the fourth hand. His strict constructionist view of the Constitution made him a hero of criminal defense attorneys. He opposed no knock search laws. He disliked data banks, lie detector tests because he thought they were invasions of privacy. He played a major role in the defeat of his colleague Everett Dirksen's constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools, which by the way, he took a huge hit in North Carolina for that.
Nia Rodgers: Yes, he did. Do you think that it was appropriate in terms of the establishment clause?
John Aughenbaugh: Clause. That's right. He also favored the exclusionary rule which prohibits the use of illegally seized evidence in criminal trials. Again, criminal defense attorneys loved him.
Nia Rodgers: Modernly, we agree with I agree with you shouldn't be able to use Fruit of the Forbidden Tree. That's what it's called when you find evidence or acquire evidence with an illegal search. We have modernly agreed with that like he is weird. He's got so many facets. He really is zirconium. Like, you turn him in a different direction, you're going to get a whole different.
John Aughenbaugh: Your view is going to be, yeah, your point of view is gonna be completely different. Huge proponent of the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and he once said, We ought to bomb the North Vietnamese out of existence.
Nia Rodgers: Why?
John Aughenbaugh: He voted again.
Nia Rodgers: What does North Vietnam do to same work?
John Aughenbaugh: Perfect.
Nia Rodgers: Whatever it was, it was personal.
John Aughenbaugh: He voted against one of the most important workplace safety bills. The authorizing legislation that created OSHA. He was against it.
Nia Rodgers: They should be able to cut off your hand and just keep on moving.
John Aughenbaugh: He said it should be left to the states.
Nia Rodgers: Except that State he was one of three Southern senators that came up with that James Eastland Strom Thurmond and him, where in the South, people were using equipment and in some ways, using it quite dangerously, so you lost a hand. Just get over it.
John Aughenbaugh: As we already mentioned, he voted against the Equal Rights Amendment.
Nia Rodgers: No, in '71, he does that thing where he's like, I'm not a fan of the ERA amendment, so I'm going to add something to it.
John Aughenbaugh: To it. Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Which is I'm going to exempt women from the draft.
John Aughenbaugh: That's right. Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Which was a good. Can argue good thing because that's argued back and forth. There's both sides of that issue of should women be in the draft, should women not be in the draft. But that amendment failed. That amendment to the ERA amendment failed.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: But he hated the equal rights eighth Amendment. The height of folly to command legislative bodies to ignore sex in making laws.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: His position, men and women are different, and that should be allowed to be within the law.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes. That was Sam Ervin.
Nia Rodgers: Yes.
John Aughenbaugh: The reason why we included Sam Ervin in the series is what he ends up doing in 1974. Nixon gets re-elected in '72 by early '74, the Washington Post had been reporting that the burglars of the Watergate complex had some connection to Nixon's re-election committee. Eventually Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield chooses Ervin to chair a Senate select committee to investigate campaign practices.
Nia Rodgers: He's chosen because he's not going to run for re-election in 1974.
John Aughenbaugh: That is correct.
Nia Rodgers: He's got nothing to lose. He can't lose an election based on what happens in this committee, nor can he be pressured by his colleagues because he's like, peace out, buddy, I'm out of here. It's the Tom Tillis position currently. North Carolinians tend to do this. I'm leaving, and I'm going to burn my way out.
John Aughenbaugh: I'm going to burn the house down as I leave.
Nia Rodgers: Nixon, I think, thought maybe because he has no aspirations, maybe he won't go so hard on me.
John Aughenbaugh: The reason why Ervin decided not to run for reelection is that the Democratic National Committee had already told him they would not give him any support to run for reelection. He was a Southern Democrat and the Democratic Party had begun to move away from.
Nia Rodgers: What is now the Republican Conservative point of view. Just remember those were like that until Nixon.
John Aughenbaugh: Mansfield thinking was, I can appoint a member of the president's opposite party, and do so with Ervin because I know Ervin doesn't feel any kind of responsibility to either his party. But also to the president, he's not running for reelection, so no matter how this plays out Sam's attitude more than likely will be, I'm out of here. You can't punish me politically.
Nia Rodgers: You can't hurt me, so I can just do whatever I feel is the right thing to do, and let us not forget that he has this enormous knowledge of the law and constitution and he has very deep feelings about the written words in the Constitution. Whether we agree with him or not, in some cases, he has those feelings.
John Aughenbaugh: Once he finds out about the tapes.
Nia Rodgers: Thanks, Alexander Butterfield.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Nixon taped everybody. I'm sorry, what? Nixon taped everybody we're going to need those tapes.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes, we're going to need those tapes. Ervin, to his credit, said publicly he thought Watergate had surpassed the American Civil War as the worst tragedy of the country's history. In some of the hearings and I've watched this hearing, this particular hearing over and over again. He went toe to toe with Nixon's chief domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman in regards to whether or not constitutional law allowed the president to take actions like the ones of the burglars.
Nia Rodgers: He wanted to approve them.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes, and Sam Ervin was just like, that's illegal.
Nia Rodgers: Ehrlichman is like, no, it's not illegal if the president wants to do it falls into the same argument as Nixon falls into.
John Aughenbaugh: Sam Ervin was just like, no, that's not right. There's nothing in the US Constitution that says the president is above the law.
Nia Rodgers: Keep in mind that during Watergate, not only did they break into the Democratic National Committee's office, they broke into Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
John Aughenbaugh: Curtis's office.
Nia Rodgers: Office because they wanted the notes on his private therapy. Remember when Aughie was talking about how there are some people in the world that have an immunity relationship with you like your doctor. Your psychiatrist falls into that category?
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: That's what Ervin was trying to point out and Ehrlichman was like nah.
John Aughenbaugh: By the way, Ellsberg and this touches upon a previous podcast episode. Ellsberg was the individual in the defense department who leaked the Pentagon papers which put Ellsberg on Nixon's infamous enemies list.
Nia Rodgers: Maybe we should do one of these on Ellsberg. It's interesting character.
John Aughenbaugh: We should do one on presidential enemies list.
Nia Rodgers: Because when you make it to the presidential enemies list?
John Aughenbaugh: My goodness.
Nia Rodgers: What's interesting about that is for different presidents, some of them will say, I don't have an enemies list because I can tell by your actions you do. But anyway, so is Ervin part of the group of people who goes to the president and says, you're going to lose this vote. You're going to lose the impeachment vote. You should go before you get embarrassed publicly. Is he part of that group?
John Aughenbaugh: No, I don't think he is, is he? You asked that question. My recollection is it was Republican members of Congress.
Nia Rodgers: It's not Ervin.
John Aughenbaugh: Who went to Nixon and said, Mr. President, no or neither there enough votes in the House to bring articles of impeachment against you? We've already begun to count votes in the Senate, and if we have an impeachment trial, you're going to lose.
Nia Rodgers: Ervin wasn't involved in it.
John Aughenbaugh: The interesting thing is, Sam Ervin left office shortly after Nixon left office. Ervin didn't even finish out his term. He resigned in December of 1974 before his term ended. He didn't even wait until January, 1975.
Nia Rodgers: He had things to do, man.
John Aughenbaugh: He was just like, No, I'm out of here.
Nia Rodgers: He's out. I'm done. But we should mention the proposed bills that he did just because after '72 he was trying to limit the power of the presidency.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: Part of that was because he didn't particularly care, I think, for Nixon personally.
John Aughenbaugh: He didn't care for Nixon personally, and he thought Nixon abused the office. He certainly had issues with LBJ. He thought LBJ was way too expensive in his use of presidential power. Again, in many ways, Ervin foreshadows what we end up seeing even today in American politics, which is, how do you institutionally control the president? He believed in checks and balances. Again, such a strange man.
Nia Rodgers: Some of these you guys would agree with probably our listeners. Two restricted the president's ability to use funds for reasons other than their appropriated purpose. I thought you would all probably agree with.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes.
Nia Rodgers: One allowed more congressional oversight of appointed officials. One banned the president from pocket vetoing legislation when Congress was not in session, and the final bill required the president to inform Congress of any executive agreements made with foreign governments. I don't know, like Greenland. All of those are things that modern folks would agree with, and so you look at him with that legislation and you're like, that's my guy. Then you look at all of the civil rights denial and you're like, that's not my guy.
John Aughenbaugh: I like it right.
Nia Rodgers: Man, he was all over the place.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes, let's bomb an entire group of people out of existence. No, that's not right.
Nia Rodgers: No. Let's deny women equal rights. But let's make sure that we actually limit the president from doing some crazy stuff. He's an interesting story behind the name.
John Aughenbaugh: A very fascinating character.
Nia Rodgers: If you can find a book on him to read, you should his in depth story is just really interesting. I think what we'll start doing is listing books because there was an author who wrote a book about Carrie Buck, our last one of our previous episodes. We'll start including that on the research guide so that people can go there, and if there's a book that Aughie uses to do his research or I used to do mine, we'll make sure we make note of it for y'all.
John Aughenbaugh: Yes. Thank you, Nia.
Nia Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie.