
Coleman Livingston "Coley" Blease (8 October 1868-19 January 1942) was the Democratic Governor of South Carolina from 17 January 1911 to 14 January 1915 (succeeding Martin Frederick Ansel and preceding Charles Aurelius Smith) and a US Senator from 4 March 1925 to 3 March 1931 (succeeding Nathaniel B. Dial and preceding James F. Byrnes).
Biography[]
Coleman Livingston Blease was born in Newberry, South Carolina in 1868, and he practiced law in his hometown after being expelled from university for plagiarism. A protégé of Benjamin Tillman, he served in the State House from 1890 to 1894 and from 1899 to 1901, in the State Senate from 1901 to 1910, as Mayor of Newberry in 1910, as Governor from 1911 to 1915, and as a US Senator from 1925 to 1931. Blease broke from Tillman to form his own populist and white supremacist coalition of white textile mill workers opposed to reform, but he shared Tillman's opponents: the newspapers, the railroads, corporations, Charleston aristocrats, and urban businessmen. He played on racial, religious, and class prejudices to win elections, and he opposed compulsory education, health and safety inspections of private factories, Black education, and patronage requests, while staunchly advocating for lynchings and becoming known as the embodiment of all that was wrong with "Jim Crow". Blease was famous for his nonsensical campaign slogan, "Roll up your sleeves, say what you please... the man for the job is Coley Blease!" He also called Coca-Cola and Pepsi "evil concoctions" and opined, "It would be better for our people if they had nice, respectable places where they could go and buy a good, pure glass of cold beer, than to drink such concoctions." He initially opposed American involvement in World War I before changing his mind, and he briefly departed from politics until the economic crises of the 1920s led to his popularity rebounding. He served in the US Senate from 1925 to 1931, supporting anti-miscegenation legislation, criminalized unlawful entry into the United States, and read a racist poem in protest of President Warren G. Harding inviting the wife of Black congressman Oscar Stanton De Priest to the White House (so racist that it was expunged from the Congressional Record). He lost renomination in 1930 and died in 1942.