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| Reflecting the political mood, the cover of the 1958 legislative manual featured a statue of ex-Confederate Wade Hampton in front of a Confederate flag From the South Carolina State Library |
One of the long-lasting consequences of the political attacks on Benedict College and Allen University was the creation of the Committee to Investigate Communist Activities. The committee appears to have had its origins in Governor Timmerman's January 15, 1958 annual message to the General Assembly. A large part of his speech was devoted to accusing Allen University and Benedict College of harboring highly trained communist workers. His speech ended with a recommendation that the General Assembly create a committee to investigate communist activities in order to protect the state from the "communist menace."
The legislature quickly took up the governor's suggestion. The proposed bill was read for the first time in February. It was ratified into law two months later, on April 16, 1958.
The committee was charged with investigating communist activities within the state and regularly reporting to the state General Assembly. They were also to recommend legislation when their investigations suggested that new laws were needed to preserve the state government.
The committee's main power was to the ability to subpoena witnesses to testify before hearing and provide records like personal books and papers. The committee also was allowed to administer oaths and enforce them by charging witnesses with perjury. The history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and committees like it demonstrated how significant these powers could be. Just subpeona-ing someone to testify could draw the press's attention and lead to the person being fired from their job and generally ostracized by the community.
The committee members were also given financial resources. They were allowed to employ an executive secretary or general counsel and clerical staff, and were reimbursed for their work via a per diem of ten dollars and milage. For its first year, the committee was appropriated ten thousand dollars (comparable to $100,000 in 2022) from the state general fund for the first year.
An observer knowledable about the history of HUAC-like committees would have sounded alarm. A committee like this provided legislators with a powerful political weapon, creating pressure to expand it beyond its original scope.
Florida's Johns' Committee illustrated how the dynamic could play out. The committee was created two years earlier (in 1956) to investigate organizations that participated in violence or in violation of state law. This type of language was often used to target communist organizations, which were believed to support the violent overthrown the United States government. The committee began by investigating civil rights groups like the NAACP with the goal of establishing ties between these groups and communism. However, in 1961, the legislature broadened the committee's charge to include investigating homosexuality. The committee's activities began to focus on universities, and it started investigating not only suspected homosexuals but also research and teaching activities that committee members found objectionable. Activities that raised concern included the publication of a scholarly article on Beat writers which included mild profanity. The committee questioned university students and faculty, and a number of them ended up being expelled from university.
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| Senator Rebert C. Dennis, a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
Remarkably, none of this happened in South Carolina. In its first report (issued in May 1959), the committee reported that they found no substantial evidence of Communist Party activity within the state and expressed the opinion that no new legislation was needed to combat "subversive activities." Two years year (in May 1961), the state legislature expanded the committee's charge to include creating an educational program that informs South Carolinians about the threat posed by communism.
The committee's activities became focused on its educational mission. In its public reports, the committee continued to advocate remaining vigilant against communism activities, but they also acknowledged that they had found no evidence that such activities were taking place. The sole activity they reported was that a Black self-help organization on Johns Island (the Progressive Club) had received twenty-eight thousand dollars in funding from the Highlander Folk School, a social justice center that many conservatives believed was a communist front.
Although it existed for decades, the committee never held a public hearing and never used its power to subpoena. Its investigative function appears to have been limited to passing on tips it received to state law enforcement, especially SLED (the statewide investigative law enforcement agency).
In its 1971, committee members expressed concern about the growth of the New Left and student activism on college campuses. Anticipating that its focus would shift to these new political movements and away from communism, the committee asked the legislature to be renamed the Internal Security Committee. The name change was made 1973.
At the time of the name change, the committee was still meeting twice a month, but it had become largely irrelevant in the public's eyes. The Columbia Record newspaper described the committee as "long inactive" in a 1973 article on the name change. The committee issued no further public reports, and it's unclear what, if anything, the committee did as its records have been lost.
Remarkably, the committee remained in existence until 1993 when it was disbanded as part of a general reorganization of the state government. In the early 1980s, one state representative (Jarvis R. Klapman) proposed that the committee should focus on guarding against terrorist attacks on critical facilities like the Savannah River nuclear power plant. Nothing came out of this, and by the late 1980s, the committee members were spending their time addressing safety concerns about the Statehouse parking garage.
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| Senator Francis C. Jones, a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
The failure of the investigative committee can be attributed to political factors. The committee's most vocal supporter was Governor Timmerman, and he left electoral politics shortly after the committee was created. Under the state constitution, Timmerman was limited to a single 4-year term in office, and when his term ended (on January 20, 1959), he was appointed as a federal court judge. He remained in the judgeship until his retirement.
While Timmerman served as governor during a pivotal time in South Carolina's history, his political influence was limited. He had been elected in the first gubernatorial election held after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Throughout the south, voters (who were overwhelming white because of voter suppression laws) were outraged at the prospect of school desegregation, and gubernatorial elections were largely decided by candidates' positions on segregation. Timmerman had won the election by being the most vocal segregationist.
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| Senator John C. West, a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
Timmerman's overt and heavy-handed attacks on desegregation ran counter to the approach taken by many state politicians. In 1991 newspaper interview, the investigative committee's first chairman, John C. West, later said that the committee was "kind of a hot potato" and senior legislators did not want it. West said that he'd been given the chairmanship because he was a junior state senator looking for more experience on committees.
West's remarks should be viewed critically. He had a long and successful career in politics, and the investigative committee looked like an embarrassment by the 1990s, so he had every reason to downplay the support for the committee. A close examination of the historical record both supports and complicates West's statements.
Once the initial shock of the Brown court decision wore off, South Carolina legislators avoided the sort of overt repressive measures that Timmerman advocated. Instead, they planned for a managed compliance with desegregation in which major elements of racial segregation were preserved through covert means. For example, public teacher salaries had been determined by a pay scale that was explicitly racist: the set wage for a black teacher was lower than that of a white teacher with the same experience. This system was replaced by one that used standardized test scores to determine salary after legislatures discovered that they could set score cutoffs in a way to largely replicate the older, overtly racially biased system.
The evolution of the investigative committee shows a similar strategy at play. A major component of the committee's educational activities involved working with the University of South Carolina (especially the international studies professor Richard L. Walker) to develop a summer program for public school teachers designed to train them on how to educate students about the purported dangers of communisms and the superiority of American democracy. By doing so, they made university administrators and faculty complicit in the state government's efforts to suppress leftist politics, but unlike more heavily-handed efforts like demanding the firing of left-leaning professors, this collaboration was unlikely to draw public criticism.
In the long-term, Timmerman's attacks on higher education were a dead end. The dismissal of the Benedict and Allen professors was the last effort by state politicians to force out left-leaning professors. However, those attacks demonstrated South Carolina politicians' interest in controlling and repressing higher education within the state. Those politicians were successful in their efforts. In the years that followed, the state government desegregated its higher educational system while simultaneously implementing measures (like the use of standardized test scores in admissions) designed to largely leave intact the system of white supremacy that segregation had produced. This was done with the acquiescence, and sometimes even the cooperation, of university professors. Ultimately, the hope expressed by the dismissed Allen University professor Edwin D. Hoffman, that resisting Governor Timmerman would "encourage teachers to stand on their own hind legs and be men," was not realized.
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| Rep. Paul S. McChesney, Jr., a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
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| Rep. James A. Spruill, Jr., a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
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| Rep. T. Emmet Walsh., a member of the investigative committee From the 1958 SC legislative manual via South Carolina State Library |
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