At 74, Senator Samuel J. Ervin Jr. looks and sounds like the quintessential Southern Congressman. Jowls drooping and eyebrows cascading, he drawls tall tales about good ole boys back home in hill-country North Carolina. In rambling Senate speeches, he quotes the Bible, Jefferson and Kipling; he opposes most civil rights bills and accuses the Supreme Court of killing the Constitution's meaning by "verbicide." But for all his Claghornian pomp and ceremony, Sam Ervin is no archetypal Southern reactionary. He is in fact one of the Senate's ablest civil libertarians.
As chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Ervin has long taken positions that startle conservatives and liberals alike. Despite his Bible-Belt constituency, he successfully opposed the late Senator Everett Dirksen's proposed amendment that would have allowed voluntary prayers in public schools. "I believe in a wall between church and state so high," says Ervin, "that no one can climb over it." Though a strong law-and-order man, he vainly fought the Nixon Administration's District of Columbia crime bill with its controversial "no-knock" and preventive-detention provisions. He called it "a garbage pail of some of the most repressive, intolerant, unfair and vindictive legislation that the Senate has ever been presented."
Dossier Dictatorship. More recently, Ervin has criticized two institutions that most conservatives hold dear: the FBI and the U.S. Army. He accuses both of snooping on Americans in ways that endanger First Amendment freedoms of speech, thought and privacy. "If we are going to be a free society," says Ervin, "the Government is going to have to take some risks; they can't put everyone under surveillance."
Last week Ervin's subcommittee began hearings on his biggest concern to date: how to safeguard the political liberties of U.S. citizens from what one witness called "dossier dictatorship"—the vast files that are now being computerized by assorted snoopers, ranging from credit bureaus to Army agents, who allegedly concentrate their spying on war protesters. Dramatizing his worries about computers, Ervin displayed two props: a 1,245-page Bible and a two-inch-square piece of microfilm, each containing 773,746 words. "Someone remarked that this meant the Constitution could be reduced to the size of a pin-head," he drawled. "I said I thought maybe that was what they had done with it in the Executive Branch because some of those officials could not see it with their naked eyes."
Linguistic Abomination. Ervin has been a wide-eyed lover of law ever since his childhood in Morganton, N.C. (pop. 13,000). As a boy, he hung around the Burke County courthouse watching his lawyer father argue cases dressed in Victorian cutaway tails. After graduating from Harvard Law School ('22), Ervin married his home-town sweetheart, joined his father's law firm, and polished his oratory as a young state legislator. He once quashed a bill that would have outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools with the objection that "such a resolution serves no good purpose except to absolve monkeys of their responsibility for the human race."