Kirkus Reviews QR Code
MAKING GOVERNMENT WORK by Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings

MAKING GOVERNMENT WORK

by Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings with Kirk Victor

Pub Date: June 10th, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57003-760-3
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina

Thorough memoir makes brisk work of former South Carolina Senator Hollings’s five decades of public service.

The author barely touches on his early years growing up in Charleston, attending The Citadel, serving in World War II and completing law school. “Instead of writing an autobiography,” he explains, “I tell a story of how government once worked and can be made to work again.” First elected to the South Carolina state legislature in 1948, Hollings moved on to become the state’s governor in 1959. He pushed for a sales tax to boost education needs and delicately straddled the line between segregationists and integrationists amid the fallout from Brown v. Board of Education. (He ensured that black student Harvey Gantt was safely admitted to Clemson College without calling in federal marshals.) Hollings’s aggressive attempts to bring big business to South Carolina and his close ties with the Kennedys both worked against him in an increasingly conservative (and decreasingly Democratic) state, and he lost a bid for re-election. However, in 1966 he filled out rival Olin Johnston’s Senate term and was re-elected in 1968. Trips to Southeast Asia opened his eyes to the mistake America was making in trying to “build and destroy a nation at the same time”; the government is using the same “wrongheaded strategy” today in Iraq, Hollings believes. Some of the highlights of his career: the valiant but failed attempt to get South Carolina judge Clement Haynsworth appointed to the Supreme Court; early progress on environmental issues and campaign-reform measures; The Case Against Hunger, a 1970 book rallying against poverty in his state; advocacy of a balanced budget and spending reductions that culminated in the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1986; and opposition to NAFTA. In his substantial final chapter, Hollings hectors against the evils of “free trade” and offers a cohesive litany of ways to “rebuild” the United States.

A sound account of a half-century’s functioning of the legislature.