Think the Sanford affair was odd? S.C. has a long history of political weirdness

Welcome to South Carolina, where we never have to make up anything peculiar because our peculiarities are way too peculiar.

The tales of Gov. Mark Sanford's affair with an Argentine woman he calls his "soul mate" will live in infamy. But the almost addictive daily Sanford episodes won't have to dance alone. This kind of story from the political class has plenty of company in South Carolina.

We may not have seen anything this racy since the ex-wife of a jailed congressman from Myrtle Beach told Playboy magazine they had sex on the Capitol steps.

And it hasn't been long at all since our jaws dropped at the news that the old Dixiecrat, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, had fathered a child with an African-American maid at his family home when he was a young man.

After Thurmond died at age 100 in 2003, retired school teacher Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealed that she was the daughter of the former champion of racial segregation.

"As much as I wanted to 'belong' to him, I never felt like a daughter, only an accident," Washington-Williams, then 79, wrote in her 2003 autobiography, "Dear Senator."

"Something, some strong feeling was definitely there. ... That was what was drawing him to me, and me to him. But that feeling was all bottled up. We both felt it, from opposite sides of an invisible wall. It was segregated love."

That was stunning news in a state that flew the Confederate flag atop the Statehouse dome until 2000.

But then again, Thurmond had requested that the primary eulogist at his televised funeral be his liberal colleague, today's Vice President Joe Biden.

REBELLION

Surprises can never really be surprising in a state that seceded from the Union to start a new nation.

In the buildup to that war of rebellion, South Carolina's hot contempt for staying within the lines led to one of the most despicable incidents on record in the U.S. Senate.

It was 1856, and Southern senators were being lectured repeatedly on the evils of slavery and its controversial spread to the West.

Walter Edgar tells us in "South Carolina: A History" how things turned nasty after Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a verbal attack on South Carolina Sen. A.P. Butler and the state itself.

"Sumner mocked the aged South Carolinian's unfortunate habit of expectorating when he spoke and said that although Butler considered himself a knight, he had 'chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight -- I mean the harlot slavery.'"

Butler's kinsman, Congressman Preston Brooks, was offended. Three days later, accompanied by another South Carolina congressman, he "entered the Senate chamber and beat Sumner senseless" with a cane, Edgar writes.

Sumner was a martyr to the North, but Brooks was a hero in South Carolina.

Fragments of the cane were begged as sacred relics, Edgar reports, and "admirers from all over the South sent him canes, silver loving cups and pledges of financial support for legal fees."

After the Civil War came this remarkable scene in the Statehouse in Columbia.

For four months, South Carolina had two Houses of Representatives and two governors. Both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory in the 1876 election that both sides had to admit was tainted by fraud. Most white Carolinians saw the vote as their chance to finally send Yankees, known to some as reformers and others as carpetbaggers, packing after their cause was lost.

Two Speakers, one white and one black, occupied the same desk in the House chamber. And two men claimed to be governor, both trying to collect taxes.

The standoff had been a long time coming, prompting one president to say "the whole army of the United States" could not enforce the authority of the Republican governor in South Carolina.

To settle the Statehouse standoff, President Rutherford B. Hayes eventually sided with the white Democratic upstart, war hero Wade Hampton. He issued orders for federal troops to withdraw from South Carolina. That was the end of Reconstruction.

'FAT AND UGLY'

A little more than a century ago, the state lieutenant governor shot and killed the editor of The State newspaper on a Columbia street in broad daylight. But a Lexington County jury saw no problem with that. Editor N.G. Gonzales was silenced, and Lt. Gov. James Tillman walked free.

Things certainly seem a lot tamer these days.

But in the 1980s, state representatives proudly calling themselves the "Fat and Ugly Caucus" tried to take power in the House. These were young Turk, good ol' boys who often found themselves doing battle with the reform-minded "Crazy Caucus."

Our own Harriet Keyserling of Beaufort was a member of the Crazy Caucus. In "Against The Tide: One Woman's Political Struggle," she gives a glimpse into how the Fat and Uglies expected to form public policy by being wined and dined by lobbyists.

The leader of the Fat and Uglies, she writes, once told a legislator seated across the aisle from him: "I can go home and pump gas in Roebuck or stay here and be treated like a king."

The Fat and Ugly uprising faded after the Statehouse was rocked by "Operation Lost Trust" in 1990. It was an undercover FBI vote-selling probe, and a number of legislators swept into the swirl of indictments and prison sentences were Fat and Uglies.

Legislators called it "The Sting." Outsiders called it "Bubbagate."

It actually led to some of the state government restructuring that Gov. Sanford was trying so hard to sell to the legislature.

Then along came Maria from Buenos Aires.

Welcome to South Carolina.