WASHINGTON �� Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, who helped smooth integration in South Carolina before spending 38 years in the U.S. Senate as an advocate for impoverished Americans and a voice for restraint in government spending, died Saturday at age 97, according to the Associated Press. No cause of death was given.
Hollings, a Democrat, steered his state past desegregation battles and toward an emphasis on job creation as governor from 1958 to 1962.
In the Senate from 1966 to 2005, he spoke out against hunger and poverty and became a leading advocate of government nutrition programs. Later in his congressional career, and during a campaign for president in 1984, he supported steps to reduce the growing U.S. budget deficit.
"He represents that transitional political figure between the old traditional South and the kind of New South that everyone talked about for years," said Dan Carter, retired professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of "The Politics of Rage," a 1995 book about southern conservatism.
At 6 feet, 2 inches tall, white-haired and slender in suits made for him by a tailor in Charleston, Hollings looked like a senator from central casting. He was famous for his booming voice and a southern accent that sometimes sounded like he was speaking with marbles in his mouth. As a result, he left some people wondering what he was saying.
What he said was often blunt, clever or offensive.
Dared by a Republican opponent to take a drug test, Hollings responded: "I'll take a drug test if you take an I.Q. test."
Referring to African delegates at a conference in Geneva, he said: "Rather than eating each other, they'd just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva."
He called a Jewish colleague, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, "the senator from B'nai B'rith," referring to the Jewish service organization.
And in announcing his presidential candidacy in 1983, Hollings took on his own party as well as Ronald Reagan, the incumbent Republican president.
"The Democratic Party lost the 1980 election because we lost the faith of the American people," he said. "Every time a special interest appeared, we responded. And every time a problem arose, we had but a single solution �� spend more money."
In 1985, Hollings joined two Republicans, Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who wrote legislation that required reductions in the deficit over five years. If lawmakers didn't achieve the targets, automatic, across-the-board budget cuts would kick in.
"The legislation was consistent with everything I had been saying and proposing for years," Hollings wrote in his 2008 memoir. "It was my effort to bring South Carolina values to Washington."
Congress changed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law in 1987, easing the deficit goals and extending the five-year deadline, and then abandoned the law in 1990.
In his later years in the Senate Hollings opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and defended textile import quotas, saying they were needed to stem the loss of industry jobs in his state.
Arguing that free trade helps other nations to the detriment of the U.S., he said in 2004, "We hear those in the national Congress running around and saying, 'Free trade, free trade, I am for free trade,' when they know free trade is like dry water. There is no such thing."
He also was known as a champion of Earth's oceans, helping create the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Ernest Frederick Hollings was born in Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 1, 1922. He got his bachelor's degree from The Citadel in 1942, and then served in the U.S. Army until 1945. He graduated from the University of South Carolina Law School in 1947 and worked as a trial lawyer.
Elected at 26 to the South Carolina House in 1948, he became lieutenant governor in 1955 and governor in 1959.
At first, he opposed racial integration by citing the right of states to govern themselves. "He yelled segregation and made promises about maintaining segregation," Carter said in a July 2007 interview. Privately, though, Hollings began telling fellow South Carolinians "this segregation thing was on its last legs and you need to begin preparing for it."
Hollings joined the U.S. Senate in 1966 after winning an election to fill the term of Olin Johnston, a Democrat who died the previous year.
For the first 36 of his 38 years in Washington, tenure, he was his state's junior senator, owing to the longevity of his Republican colleague, Strom Thurmond. Thurmond served 48 years in the Senate before retiring, at 100, in 2002. He died the next year.
A conservative at first, following Thurmond's lead, Hollings moved left on some issues. A crucial event was his "hunger tour" of South Carolina in 1969, an eye-opener for him and many others that forced Americans, sometimes reluctantly, to confront poverty.
Hollings acknowledged that, as governor, he'd ignored the problem out of concern that it would harm efforts to lure industry to the state. He wrote a book, "The Case Against Hunger," and his efforts contributed to creation of federal assistance programs, including food stamps and the nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC.
By 1980, Hollings, as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, had become a leading voice in Congress for limiting U.S. government spending on everything but defense. Seeking the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, he advocated a freeze on most domestic spending and said he was the candidate with the experience and skill to cut the federal budget.
As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Hollings was an author of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the industry.
He voted to authorize U.S. military involvement in Iraq in 2002. Eight months after the U.S. invasion, Hollings said he had been misled by the administration of President George W. Bush and proclaimed the war "a bad mistake from the very beginning."
With his first wife, Patricia, Hollings had four children. That marriage ended in divorce. In 1971 he married Rita Liddy, who died in 2012.
