Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers

By: Karl E. Campbell

Narrated by: David Stampone

Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Many Americans remember Senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985) as the affable, Bible-quoting, old country lawyer who chaired the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Ervin's stories from down home in North Carolina, his reciting literary passages ranging from Shakespeare to Aesop's fables, and his earnest lectures in defense of civil liberties and constitutional government contributed to the downfall of President Nixon and earned Senator Ervin a reputation as "the last of the founding fathers.

"Yet for most of his twenty years in the Senate, Ervin applied these same rhetorical devices to a very different purpose. Between 1954 and 1974, he was Jim Crow's most talented legal defender as the South's constitutional expert during the congressional debates on civil rights. The paradox of the senator's opposition to civil rights and defense of civil liberties lies at the heart of this biography of Sam Ervin.Drawing on newly opened archival material, Karl Campbell illuminates the character of the man and the historical forces that shaped him.

The senator's distrust of centralized power, Campbell argues, helps explain his ironic reputation as a foe of civil rights and a champion of civil liberties. Campbell demonstrates that the Watergate scandal represented the culmination of an escalating series of clashes between the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon and a congressional counterattack led by Senator Ervin. The issue central to that struggle, as well as to many of the other crusades in Ervin's life, remains a key question of the American experience today how to exercise legitimate government power while protecting essential individual freedoms.

©2007 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Engrossing

I found the biography of Senator Sam Ervin most interesting considering the similar problems we face today. I remembered Senator Ervin from the Watergate hearings but knew little about him except he was a southern democrat against civil rights. I learned from this book that I can thank him for his long fight for individual rights to privacy both related to job applications and to police searches. He also led the fight for limiting consolidating power in one area of government which led to his battles with Nixon and the Army surveillance of American citizens. If I had read this book two decade ago, I would not have learned how Senator Ervin’s battles in the past relate to the current times. It is interesting how looking at information from different viewpoints we can learn so much more. I can remember my great-grandmother say don’t wear blinders you are not a horse.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is fourteen hours and fifty-four minutes. David Stampone does a good job narrating the book.

Good Biography of Senator Sam Ervin

I was looking forward to learning more about one of the great senators from my state of North Carolina, Sam Ervin. While I did learn more than when I started, the book focused too much on the apparent contradiction between opposing civil rights and defending civil liberties. This narrow focus almost presented a false dichotomy in Ervin's constitutional and cultural perspective.

What really bothered me about this book was its narrator. He seemed to have no interest in the subject of the book and he mumbled a great deal. I will not listen to this narrator again unless he took voice lessons from Bob Souer or Peter Francis James.