Total Commitment

When the 1974 South Carolina governor's race began, the Republican Party had not elected a governor in 100 years. In the middle of the campaign, Richard Nixon resigned as president and Republicans all over the country looked forward to defeat in the general elections. The morning of the election, the Republican candidate had a voter recognition factor in the lonely neighborhood of twenty percent. That evening when the votes were counted, the Republican candidate had won by an overwhelming margin. It was a strange year in the state that had elected Strom Thurmond to the United States Senate on a write-in vote some twenty years earlier. The Vietnam War had ended a year earlier, and the Baby Boomers were entering the workforce. In this humorous view from the bottom of South Carolina politics, Harry Lee Poe describes the unlikely scenario of the clash between old party politics and youthful idealism, the party leaders and the precinct workers, and the party bosses and the voters. It is a story of how Gen. William Westmoreland could have an incontestable lead in the statewide preference polls but lose the Republican primary to a dentist who had none of the backing of the GOP leadership. It is the story of how a young mortgage banker from New York who had no political experience and only a few months residency in South Carolina could defeat Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn and Lieutenant-Governor Earle Morris in the Democratic primary. It is the story of what the insurance companies refer to as an act of God in many more ways than one. It was the time when the great mass of Baby Boomers had come of age but did not know what to do with themselves. It was the time that the South began to change. In the midst of it all Hal Poe, the twenty-three year Finance Director of the South Carolina Republican Party, was trying to sort out the GOP and GOD.