Eugene N. Zeigler. When Conscience and Power Meet: A Memoir. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. xviii + 378 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-744-3.
Reviewed by Laura Thomson McCarty (Georgia Humanities Council)
Published on H-SC (March, 2011)
Commissioned by Phillip Stone (Wofford College)
When Conscience and Power Meet
Eugene N. Zeigler Jr.’s When Conscience and Power Meet: A Memoir is an interesting addition to the growing body of memoirs of southern leaders from the seminal period of change that the Great Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement brought about. As future historians refine their accounts of this period, they will benefit from using memoirs like Zeigler’s as evidence, but they will also have to correlate and cross-check the recollections with other pieces of evidence in order to determine what took place and why. In fact, this memoir may be of greater interest to future scholars of literature or sociology, studying the narrative flow and style of representation that a person of Zeigler’s position used in describing his life during the twentieth century.
Zeigler did not serve in leadership positions during his tenure in the South Carolina legislature and he is perhaps best known for his failures to be elected to statewide office in 1972 (when he ran against Senator Strom Thurmond) and in 1974 (when he was part of a crowded and dysfunctional field of Democratic candidates in a race that led to the election of the first Republican governor since Reconstruction). He sums up his life in the preface to the memoir, “it has never been my good fortune to be the prime mover of some great reform or the hero of some outstanding political movement” (p. xvii). However, his life includes involvement in a variety of efforts in community development in his home town of Florence, work to improve education and build cultural infrastructure in South Carolina, and the fostering of improved human relations as South Carolina emerged from the civil rights movement. Zeigler recounts his life, including the false starts and failures, with humor, which makes for an appealing read.
Early in the memoir it becomes apparent that the major influence on Zeigler’s life has been his classical education gained at Sewanee (the University of the South) and Harvard Law School. Zeigler structures the memoir around his efforts to live according to the Greek concept “know thy self.” Both this influence and his Episcopal faith have led him to be involved in efforts for reform. In addition, involvement with theatre, classical music, and the arts have brought meaning to Zeigler’s life by giving him the capacity to think about things differently and to shape and reshape his life path as a result of his encounters with people, events, and ideas.
Throughout the memoir, Zeigler takes pride in coming across as an outsider or even maverick. As a teenager, he tells us that he shocked his classmates by announcing that he favored socialism after reading a book on that topic. In terms of sectional loyalties, he notes that throughout his life he became more “southern” the farther north he went and more “northern” the farther south he went. After his retirement, he relishes upsetting the members of the Florence Rotary Club with his talk, “Why I Am a Democrat.” Zeigler states his definition a “liberal” and embraces that position despite living in a region where the vast majority of his peers have embraced conservatism.
Zeigler’s reflections on race relations in South Carolina constitute another major emphasis of the memoir. Zeigler tells us that at his birth, Moloch Smalls, an elderly African American minister, visited the hospital to proclaim him born “with more nationality than most babies generally gets here with” (p. 3). Throughout the book, he recounts being influenced by the changes in society brought about by the civil rights movement. The next-to-last chapter, “Understanding Each Other,” notes the impact that a variety of African Americans had on his life.
Despite his professed sympathy for the civil rights movement, Zeigler never called or acted to bring about radical social change. He preferred to work within the system, rather than to overthrow it. When his fellow church members got upset over the publication of the pamphlet “South Carolinians Speak,” Zeigler and the Reverend Joseph Horn wrote an opinion essay for the vestry of their church that asked Christians to test their views on segregation in light of the obligation to love one’s neighbor. While that stand may have garnered him a reputation among the white community as sympathetic to African Americans, it did not guarantee his acceptance among the broader African American community in Florence, and Zeigler really does not include many details about the civil rights movement in Florence in the memoir.
After losing his first campaign for the legislature, Zeigler notes his disappointment that “the black vote was literally up for sale” and says that he learned the meaning of “walking around money” in politics through this episode (p. 154). Later in the movement, when a committee of African American citizens brought a long list of grievances to the Florence city and county government in 1969, Zeigler notes that he “was puzzled by some of the demands that involved action in areas where city and county governments had no authority” (p. 227).
As South Carolina moved into the 1970s and the debate moved from integration to the building of a biracial state government work force through affirmative action, he chaired the Human Relations Commission when asked to do so by his friend Governor John West, making sure that each agency had a plan for the integration of African Americans into its workforce, and working towards a standard that he called “simple fairness” (p. 272).
All of these encounters with African Americans in the memoir are complicated by the history of Jim Crow and the color line, and Zeigler is not a maverick in terms of working to overthrow that history. The people whom he recounts as “friends” in this culminating chapter are all employees of his or his family’s. While their lives include a variety of responses to Jim Crow, their voices are gone, leaving readers to wonder what they would have said about their relationships with the Townsends, Lides, and Zeiglers.
The title of the memoir comes from a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) that Zeigler kept in his desk to remind him of the necessity of compromise in leadership: “Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors in human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises” (p. 301). Throughout the memoir, this quotation is appropriate for a variety of the situations in Zeigler’s life, including race relations. However, Zeigler’s tone is lighter than Niebuhr’s, and he finds joy in recounting how he worked through the journey of his life, which makes for an enjoyable and worthwhile read.
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Citation:
Laura Thomson McCarty. Review of Zeigler, Eugene N., When Conscience and Power Meet: A Memoir.
H-SC, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32529
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