Sam Ervin
Samuel James Ervin, Jr. (1896-1985) was an American politician best known for his role in the Watergate investigation and his expertise on the United States Constitution. He was a member of the Democratic Party and served in the Senate from 1954 to 1974, representing the state of North Carolina.
Ervin graduated from college in 1917 and then served in the U.S Army in France. After the war, he was admitted to the practice of law, and only later attended law school, graduating from Harvard in 1922. He served three separate terms in the North Carolina General Assembly (state legislature) during the 1920s and 1930s, where he helped to defeat a proposed law that would have prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. As a result, North Carolina never passed a so-called "monkey bill" like the one that led to the Scopes trial in Tennessee during that period.
Ervin was elected to fill a Congressional vacancy in 1946, taking the seat of his deceased brother for a year, and served in various state judicial posts, culminating in an associate justiceship on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1948 to 1954.
Soon after being appointed to the Senate to replace the deceased Sen. Clyde Hoey in 1954, Ervin took part in the successful effort to censure Sen. Joe McCarthy for abuses committed during McCarthy's investigations into alleged Communist infiltration of the government and the military.
During the infamous Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon covered up his campaign committee's illegal secret break-in into the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, Ervin chaired the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (informally known as the Watergate Committee). He presided over numerous hearings and investigations, and the committee's work ultimately led to Nixon's resignation from the presidency.
Ervin was an expert on matters regarding to the U.S. Constitution and was a strict constructionist on constitutional interpretation. He defended free speech and separation of church and state, and opposed what he saw as governmental violations of privacy and civil liberties, such as "no-knock" searches and preventive detention, in such legislation as the Omnibus Crime Act of 1968 (which he ridiculed as the "Ominous Crime Act"). Like many white Southerners, Ervin opposed civil rights legislation; he also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. During his Senate years, he was once the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights and held hearings on U.S. Army spying on civilians.
Sources
- Congressional Biographical Directory
- U.S. Senate featured biography
- Biography of Sam Ervin
- Watergate files: Sam Ervin
- CIFA: Pentagon’s COINTELPRO
- Watergate info
Further reading
- The Whole Truth: Watergate by Sam Ervin, ISBN 0394480295
- Just a Country Lawyer: A Biography of Senator Sam Ervin by Paul R. Clancy, ISBN 0253145406