By Gadi Dechter
Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Representative Joe Wilson’s mother-in-law, Martha Dusenbury, retrieved from the tidy yellow house built by the congressman’s grandfather a photo she said was evidence the South Carolina Republican is no racist.
The framed photo depicts a blonde Wilson as a preschooler in a horse-drawn wagon with one arm draped over a black child that Dusenbury, 84, referred to as her son-in-law’s “playmate,” the child of a household employee.
“You see?” she said, three hours before Wilson was formally admonished Sept. 15 by his House colleagues for shouting “You lie” at President Barack Obama during a joint session to Congress on Sept. 9. “We said Joe started it.”
Started what? “Integrating,” Dusenbury said, as she displayed the photo of Wilson “with the little colored boy.”
Wilson’s two words set off a national debate over whether racism was at the root of some criticism of the first black U.S. president. The controversy also could cement voter cynicism about race and politics, and undermine progress symbolized by Obama’s election, said Todd Shaw, an expert on race and politics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Former President Jimmy Carter stoked the controversy Sept. 15, when he told a town-hall audience he believed Wilson’s comments were “based on racism.”
‘Name-Calling’
At a news conference in his district Sept. 18, Wilson called himself the “number-one target of Washington Democrats” and dismissed Carter’s remarks as “name-calling.” He said that if he could do it over again, he would “absolutely not” shout “you lie” at the president.
Critics have seized on past controversies involving Wilson, including his defense of the Confederate flag and his criticism of a black woman who disclosed she was illegitimate daughter of former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, a onetime segregationist. These incidents have been cited as evidence that the congressman’s outburst was an expression of whites’ lingering frustration with a black man’s ascent to the presidency.
Wilson’s supporters conjure the image of a Southern gentleman devoted to patriotism and his Eagle Scout children, a man who immediately apologized for a rare breach of decorum that had nothing to do with race.
At stake in the fight over these conflicting biographies is more than the outcome of the 2010 election for South Carolina’s 2nd congressional district.
‘Not an Accident’
“A Southern congressman making an off-the-cuff and regretted remark in the context of a speech by the first African-American president, that’s not an accident of history,” Shaw said. “As important as it is for us to talk about race, it can be a conversation-stopper and we can’t get beyond it at times if we deploy it too easily.”
Wilson’s relative anonymity in the House, even after eight years there, may be allowing allies and detractors alike to define his personality however they wish. “Before this outburst it would be difficult to find people outside the 2nd District who really knew who he was,” said Robert Oldendick, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina.
An advocate of small government, low taxes and a strong military, Wilson in 2005 co-founded the House Victory in Iraq Caucus and was rated by the National Journal in 2006 as voting with conservatives more than 90 percent of the time on economic and social issues.
‘Thurmond Mold’
“He is not a legislator in the lawmaking sense,” said Charles Bierbauer, dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina. “He’s an affable guy who loves being a congressman, cut out of the Strom Thurmond mold in the sense that he believes in taking care of the people back home, not writing bold, dramatic, groundbreaking legislation.”
Alan Stedman, a roommate of Wilson’s at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, described his Sigma Nu fraternity brother as “a kind of bland character. There’s never anything wild about him.” Stedman called Wilson’s shouting at Obama “astonishing.”
Born in 1947, Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson was raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where his father worked for the Esso gas company, as had his father before him, according to Dusenbury. Wilson was educated in Charleston’s public schools and was a popular kid who recruited friends to join the Young Republicans club, said Jeanne Gerhardt, a high-school classmate.
In 1965, his senior year, Wilson was president of his high- school class, Gerhardt said. “He did not smoke. I don’t know that he drank,” she said. “We were not wild hippies. It was Charleston.”
Dogwood and Crepe Myrtle
After college, Wilson built a home next to his grandfather’s in the Springdale suburb of Columbia, and attended law school at the University of South Carolina. When his grandmother died, Wilson inherited a rambling dogwood and crepe- myrtle studded oasis -- complete with fishing pond -- in an unassuming neighborhood of low-slung homes on small lots.
A real-estate attorney, Wilson was founding partner in a West Columbia law firm. About one weekend a month, he also served as a Staff Judge Advocate for the South Carolina Army National Guard, helping soldiers prepare wills and advising them on legal matters, according to Alan Wilson, his eldest son.
Wilson was a member of the state legislature from 1984 to 2001, when he won the congressional seat vacated after the death of Floyd Spence, who had served 30 years.
Confederate Flag
In the mid-1990s, Wilson resisted efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the dome of the South Carolina Statehouse. As a U.S. congressman, he said in an interview with The State newspaper that the disclosure by Essie Mae Washington-Williams that she was the mixed-race daughter of Thurmond was “a smear” on one of his “heroes.” Wilson said the revelation was “unseemly” even if true. He later apologized, though he said Williams shouldn’t have come forward with the information.
Wilson declined requests for comment.
His son Alan, a former prosecutor and now candidate for the state attorney general’s office, declined to discuss the flag or Thurmond issues, but said any suggestion that his father is a racist is “absolutely ridiculous.”
“I’ve never heard him say a negative thing about another person,” Alan Wilson said.
On Sept. 15, the U.S. House voted 240-179 to admonish Wilson for his outburst, which was in response to the president’s assertion that undocumented immigrants wouldn’t be covered in his health-care overhaul proposal.
Wilson’s Apology
Though he apologized in a phone call to the White House, Wilson refused to do so on the House floor as Democratic leaders had demanded. Several black leaders, including Democratic Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, said the incident wouldn’t have happened with a white president.
Obama, meanwhile, has played down the race issue while others kept the discussion alive. Clyburn told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that he wondered about Wilson’s “feelings about his whole notion of white supremacy.”
Clyburn’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In Wilson’s district, supporters expressed dismay at the tone of the debate.
“If you take a different position than the president and your skin color is lighter, they immediately call you a racist,” said Grace Rentier, 57, a Republican activist in Wilson’s district.
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