Book of the Day: when things really did get done in smoke-filled rooms

W.D. Workman, Jr, The Bishop from Barnwell: The Political Life and Times of Edgar Brown (Columbia, SC: R.L. Bryan Co., 1963, 1st ed stated). LOC 63-22368. Hardcover, unclipped dustjacket. Wear to edges and spine of dust jacket, 16 pp photographed; color portrait of Brown at frontispiece with tissue intact.

Autographed by Workman on the front endpaper; inscribed by Brown- on legislative stationery pasted inside the front board, “To my personal friend for many years, Sloan Gable, with highest regards, Edgar Brown 10/26/63.”

Senator Edgar Brown (1888-1975) was a charter member of the “Barnwell County Gang” that ran South Carolina politics for decades in the middle 20th century. Elected to the state house in 1921, he was speaker in 1925 when he ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate. He returned to Columbia in 1928 as a state senator; by 1941 he was president pro tem of that body and chair of the finance committee, posts he held for the next thirty years.

After so many years at the pinnacle of state power, Brown’s dream to go to Washington seemed assured in 1954. Then Strom Thurmond entered the race and defeated him as a write-in candidate.

Mildly progressive on occasion, Brown was a trustee of both the College of Charleston and Clemson University;  he played a leading role in negotiating the latter’s racial integration. He advocated for roadbuilding and maintenance paid out of gas tax revenues, and created South Carolina Public Television in the late 1950s.

Brown retired from the Senate in 1972 and died in a car accident three years later. A state office building and a lake are among many things named for him.

Students of South Carolina’s turbulent politics in the decades from the Depression to Vietnam will find this book fascinating. Workman provides a biographical framework into which Brown’s extensive memories and comments are inserted.

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