1. Sam Ervin is remembered for his work in the investigation committees that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 and especially for his leadership of the Senate committee's investigation of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
Sam Ervin served in the US Army in combat in France during World War I with the First Division at Cantigny and Soissons, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.
Sam Ervin graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he was a member of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, in 1917 and from Harvard Law School in 1922.
Sam Ervin was fond of joking that he was the only student ever to go through Harvard Law "backwards", because he took the third-year courses first, then the second-year courses, and finally the first-year courses.
Already admitted to the bar in 1919, before completing law school, Sam Ervin entered politics straight out of Harvard.
In 1927, in his role as attorney for Burke County, NC, Sam Ervin served as the legal advisor to the local sheriff during the hunt for Broadus Miller, a black man believed to have murdered a teenaged white girl.
Sam Ervin was elected and served as a state judge in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
In 1948, Ervin was appointed to a seat as an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court vacated by the resignation of Michael Schenck, and was serving in that capacity when he was appointed in June 1954 by Governor William B Umstead to fill the US Senate seat of Clyde Hoey, who had died in office.
Sam Ervin ran successfully for the seat in November 1954.
In 1956, Senator Ervin helped organize resistance to the 1954 Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision calling for desegregation of schools by drafting The Southern Manifesto; this influential document encouraged defiance of desegregation and was signed by all but a few of the Southern members of Congress.
Defenders of Sam Ervin argue that his opposition to most civil rights legislation was based on his commitment to the preservation of the Constitution in its pristine formulation, and a general belief that the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution only applied to white men.
Sam Ervin repeatedly stated that the Constitution encapsulated civil, human and equal rights for all those he considered worthy.
Sam Ervin said he disliked what the Warren Court "has done to the Constitution".
On March 30,1965, Sam Ervin announced that he would offer a substitute to the Johnson administration's voting rights bill.
Sam Ervin referred to the administration's bill as cockeyed and unconstitutional, and that his version would provide for federal registers being appointed in areas certified to having findings of racial discrimination as defined under the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Sam Ervin said he would seek approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee and that he would carry the fight to the Senate floor in case the committee rejected his legislation.
Sam Ervin was a staunch opponent of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which abolished nationality quotas beginning in 1968.
Sam Ervin felt that the principle of tying allowed numbers of immigrants from a given country to the number of people who had ancestral origins in that country and lived in the United States should be retained.
In 1966, Senator Sam Ervin played a major role in the defeat of Senator Everett Dirksen's Constitutional amendment to allow prayer in public schools.
Sam Ervin favored the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment, which made illegally seized evidence inadmissible in criminal trials.
In November 1970, Sam Ervin was one of three Senators to vote against an occupational safety bill that would establish federal supervision to oversee working conditions.
Sam Ervin became involved in Senate investigations before Watergate, when in January 1970 it was revealed by Christopher Pyle, an investigator for Ervin's Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, that the US Army was performing domestic investigations on the civilian population.
Sam Ervin gained lasting fame through his stewardship of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices, known as the Senate Watergate Committee, from the 1972 presidential election.
Sam Ervin famously sparred with Nixon chief domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman about whether constitutional law allowed a President to sanction such actions as the White House Plumbers' break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex and their break-in at the office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, the former assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs who had leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Applause ensued, and Sam Ervin had to bang his gavel to restore order.
Sam Ervin was initiated into the Freemasons, where he was elevated to the 33rd and highest degree of Master Mason.
Sam Ervin died in 1985 at a hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from complications of emphysema.
Sam Ervin's funeral was attended by numerous dignitaries, including former president Richard Nixon and members of his administration.
Sam Ervin compared a recent Great Society initiative by then-president Lyndon B Johnson, the National Data Bank, to the use of information by advertisers and argued for increased data privacy measures to ensure that information did not find its way into the wrong hands.
The essay inspired Sam Ervin to fight what he saw as Johnson's flagrant disregard for consumer privacy.
Sam Ervin criticized Johnson's domestic agenda as invasive and saw the unfiltered database of consumers' information as a sign of presidential abuse of power.
Sam Ervin was a staunch opponent of the polygraph calling the tests "20th century witchcraft":.