Partisan Journalism and the Rise of the Republican Party in South Carolina,1959–1962

When political journalist William D. Workman, Jr., resigned from Charleston’s News and Courier and announced plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 1962, he said it would be “unethical” to combine “objective reporting with partisan politics.” Yet Workman’s personal papers reveal that, for three years, he and editor Thomas R. Waring, Jr., had been working with Republican leaders to build a conservative party to challenge Deep South Democrats. Workman’s story provides an example of how partisan activism survived in the twentieth-century American press, despite the rise of professional standards prohibiting political engagement.