The Rise of Charleston by W. Thomas McQueeney

Author:W. Thomas McQueeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Senator from Charleston

FRITZ HOLLINGS

At some point in a career, a politician has a chance to deserve an upper-level moniker that goes well beyond being labeled by a party affiliation, a career accomplishment or gaffe or even by longevity to a cause. There is a plane reached when one thinks of a career politician in another light—that of being a statesman. Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings earned that status earlier in his career than many others.

The venerable six-and-a-half-term United States senator from South Carolina retired from office in 2005. He served the people of South Carolina thirty-eight years in the United States Senate alone. Add in four years in the executive branch of state government and ten more in the state legislature. Oh, and add another three overseas in the United States Army during wartime.

If you’re still counting, that amounts to fifty-five years of high-level service to his state and country. He is a resolute and committed statesman.

Hollings grew up on the peninsula of Charleston—on the “shade-tree end” of President Street. He was born of a German family that settled in the Holy City several generations back. Hollings honed his people skills at Charleston High School—just a few blocks away by foot—and at The Citadel. The Citadel was in the opposite direction, also by foot.

He related his childhood memories, especially the youthful working years.

“Our parents were insistent upon culture, manners and ethics. We worked to help the family from early ages. I worked as a night clerk at the Francis Marion Hotel. I was only fifteen,” Hollings remembered. “Oliver Riley Strohecker, the principal, got me the job. Everybody worked then.”

Growing up in Charleston meant a wide range of things to those of Hollings’s generation. He remembered the times, because he remembered his father’s mandate to be personally responsible.

“My parents and others in the community grew up with an attitude,” Hollings noted. “They demanded, ‘We have to work hard, help others, be responsible, and we’ve got to get better.’ Getting better was a mandate.”

His reference of betterment was in the context of Southern Reconstruction followed by the Great Depression. A misery index had persisted for nearly one hundred years. Hollings would become a major part of the concept of Charleston’s well-overdue betterment. He loved the Holy City and wanted it to benefit from its long road back from the Civil War.

“The Historic Charleston Foundation and the Board of Architectural Review came alive in the 1950s,” Hollings noted. “I believe they were trying to protect the community from structures like the People’s Building.”

The People’s Building was completed in 1911 of an ugly, yellow brick.26 It rose nine stories as Charleston’s first brush with modernity. It was like a part of New York or Chicago that nobody wanted in Charleston. It had the city’s first elevator. Tour guides repeat the story of when President William Howard Taft came to Charleston shortly after the completion of the People’s Building. Taft rode the new elevator to the roof deck. When he strutted out to the parapet wall, Taft is said to have pronounced the view to be the best in all of America.

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