Representative Elizabeth J. Patterson of South Carolina
carved out a political career as a Democrat in a conservative-leaning district, portraying herself as a budget hawk and
opponent of tax increases, though not at the expense
of providing for working-class needs. The daughter of a
powerful politician, Patterson’s long experience in public
service, fiscal austerity, and ability to capitalize on the
South Carolina GOP’s internal divisions gave her narrow
majorities over her opponents. Ultimately, her “middle-of-the-road” approach lost its appeal in a conservative state.1
Elizabeth Johnston was born on November 18, 1939,
to Olin DeWitt Talmadge Johnston and Gladys Atkinson
Johnston in Columbia, South Carolina. Her father, Olin
Johnston, was a political fixture in South Carolina politics,
serving in the state house of representatives before being
elected governor in 1935. He served a total of six years as
governor (1935–1939; 1943–1945), before resigning in his
second term after he had won election to the U.S. Senate.
Johnston served 20 years in the Senate and was the longtime
chairman of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee.
“We were always together,” Elizabeth Johnston recalled of
her political family. “We went to conventions together, the
Democratic Party conventions, postal conventions because my dad was chairman of that committee [Post Office and
Civil Service].”2
She attended public schools in suburban
Maryland but graduated from Spartanburg High School in
Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1957. In 1961 she received
her bachelor’s degree at Columbia College in Columbia,
South Carolina. She subsequently studied political science
at the University of South Carolina. On April 16, 1967,
Elizabeth Johnston married Dwight Patterson, and they
raised three children: Dwight, Olin, and Catherine.
Elizabeth Patterson, worked as a recruiting officer for the
Peace Corps and VISTA, as a Head Start coordinator for
the South Carolina Office of Economic Opportunity, and
as a staff assistant for South Carolina Representative James
Robert Mann from 1969 to 1970 where she helped with
administrative and constituent work. Patterson made her
debut in elective politics when she won an open seat on
the Spartanburg County council in 1975. She served in
that capacity for two years, securing a reputation as a fiscal
conservative who trimmed county expenses while opposing
a tax increase.3
“I got a lot of flak when I ran for county
council,” Patterson recalled. “It was sort of interesting, a
woman running. And it was countywide, so I had a lot
of funny experiences. You know, people talking about a woman running, and ‘Does she know what she’s doing? She
should be home with her family,’ and that sort of thing.”4
In 1979 Patterson was elected to the South Carolina senate,
where she served through 1986. She worked diligently on
the finance committee to reduce and restructure the state
budget. She also served on the governor’s task force on
hunger and nutrition.
Patterson declared her candidacy for a South Carolina
U.S. House seat in 1986, when four-term Republican
Representative Carroll Ashmore Campbell Jr. declined
renomination in order to run for governor. “Well, first of all
it was open seat, and open seats make it easier,” Patterson
noted when explaining why she first ran for Congress. “And
it was that same old thing, federal government telling the
states and local governments what they’ve got to do and
then not giving us money. So when I saw it was an open
seat, and I saw that nobody really was coming forth to
run, I said, ‘You know, I bet I can do this.’”5
The district
encompassed the Greenville and Spartanburg area, which
had swung Republican in the 1960s. With the exception of
the 1976 election, South Carolina had voted for the GOP
presidential candidate since 1964, and the district had been
a mainstay of conservatives. As a stronghold of evangelical
and fundamentalist conservatives, the district increasingly
was contested between religiously conservative Republicans
and more “commerce-minded” Republicans and moderate
to conservative Democrats.6
Patterson campaigned as a
fiscal conservative with a social conscience. As a moderate,
she supported abortion rights legislation citing that, “the
government should not interfere with this most personal
decision.”7
She advocated giving aid to the Nicaragua
Contra rebels, opposed gun control, and also supported
the death penalty. In the general election, Patterson faced
Republican William D. Workman III, a former newspaper
editor, the mayor of Greenville, and the son of a man who
had once opposed Olin Johnston for the Senate.8
Workman
had survived a heated GOP primary in which he’d been
attacked by religious fundamentalist opponents as a tool
of big business. Though polls favored Workman, Patterson
skillfully exploited divisions in the GOP between her
opponent and religious-right critics by painting him as a
friend of corporations and the district’s bluebloods. When
Workman charged that Patterson was a free-spending
Democrat, she countered with television advertisements
that declared, “I’m one of us”—in which she was portrayed
as a homemaker and family values candidate.9
Patterson won by a plurality of about 5,400 votes out of more than
130,000 cast, a margin of 51 percent.10 She made headlines
as the first woman elected to Congress in her own right
from South Carolina. “There was a lot said about it, and
the longer I stayed, of course,” Patterson observed, “the
more people would mention things. ‘She’s going to be
a rising star,’ and all that sort of thing, so we got good
press coverage.”11
In subsequent elections, the district remained
competitive. Less than a month on the job, Patterson was
specifically targeted by the GOP for defeat.12 Although
President George H. W. Bush carried the district with 68
percent in the 1988 presidential elections (six points ahead
of his statewide percentage), Patterson held on against
Knox White, another business-oriented Republican,
winning with 52 percent of the vote. During the 1990
midterm elections, because an economic downturn
eroded support for President Bush and Patterson cast a
popular vote against a federal tax increase, South Carolina
voters gave her a third term with her largest margin—61
percent against Republican Terry Haskins, the South
Carolina house minority leader who was supported by
religious conservatives.13
While in the House, Patterson sat on three committees:
Veterans’ Affairs; Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs; and
the Select Committee on Hunger. “Veterans at that time,
one in nine people in my district was a veteran and so I felt
like I was representing them,” Patterson noted.14 From her
Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs post, Representative
Patterson weighed in on the savings and loan industry
crisis. High interest rates in the early 1980s made many
of these institutions insolvent. In 1988 alone, more than
190 savings and loan banks failed, and by the time new
regulatory practices were in place, the government bailout
of the industry through the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation (FDIC) was estimated to cost more than $160
billion. “We must protect the depositors. We must protect
the taxpayers. And finally, we must protect the safety and
soundness of our banking industry,” Patterson declared
on the House Floor. She argued that uninsured deposits,
foreign or domestic, should not be protected at a cost to the
bank insurance fund.15 She also opposed a radical overhaul
of the FDIC, while allowing it greater power to intervene to
close down insolvent banks. The Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation Improvement Act, passed in 1991, greatly
revised the agency’s operations.16
In 1990 Patterson chaired the Conservative Democratic
Forum’s Task Force on Budget Reform and eventually voted
against the 1990 proposed tax increase (a move which
aided her re-election later that year). She also served on
the Speaker’s Task Force on Budget Reform, and, in 1991,
introduced the Budget Simplification and Reform Act,
which would have amended the Congressional Budget
Act of 1974 to limit the use of continuing resolutions and
expedite the rescission process. Her bill also contained
a clause that would have required Members to provide
explanatory statements identifying the sponsor and the cost
of projects that benefited 10 or fewer people, as a means
of combating pork barrel legislation. “Let us spread a little
sunshine on Capitol Hill,” Patterson said.17
Patterson also defended the beleaguered textile industry,
which, until the 1980s, when it began losing to foreign
competition, had been a major employer in her district. She
joined the bipartisan Congressional Textile Caucus and, in
1992, Patterson was appointed chair of the panel. Patterson
often expressed frustrations felt by her constituents who not
only were losing jobs but were unable to “buy American.”
Patterson told of one occasion when her daughter went
shopping in the district for a simple cotton shirt and had to
resort to buying a foreign-made item. “It was made in China . . . where human rights abuses are rampant and where wages
are slave wages,” Patterson lamented to colleagues. “At the
same time, a shirt factory in my district is closed, a factory
where shirts were made of better quality and sold for a
cheaper price. Those people cannot buy the clothes that I
bought for my children because they are out of work.”18
In the 1992 elections, a year eventually dominated
by Democrats and women candidates, Patterson faced a
tough campaign against Robert Durden Inglis, a 33-yearold Republican challenger. Inglis, a corporate lawyer
and the Greenville County GOP chairman, was highly
organized and targeted 11 precincts which he believed
would determine the election in the district. He also won
the support of the Christian Coalition, which distributed
material that accused Patterson of supporting “abortion
on demand,” although she had consistently opposed the
procedure in all cases except rape, incest, or when the
mother’s life was in danger.19 Inglis, meanwhile, depicted
Patterson as a liberal who supported abortion rights and
as a political tool of banking interests. Inglis pledged to
take “not one dime” from political action committees and
declared that he would honor a pledge to serve just three terms in the House. He also attacked her for using the
informal House “bank” maintained for Members by the
Sergeant at Arms (she bounced two checks) by distributing
bumper stickers in the form of a check that read, “Bounce
Liz.”20 One observer noted that the Patterson campaign was
slow to respond: “one problem was that she was so moderate
she was hard to define. Nobody thought that she would
lose.”21 Patterson eventually did lose by a margin of about
5,600 votes, 50 to 47 percent.
After leaving Congress, Patterson sought the lieutenant
governorship of South Carolina in 1994. While she won
the closely contested Democratic primary, she eventually
lost in the general election. Patterson settled into a
teaching job as a political science professor at Spartanburg
Methodist College. In 1999 she received an MA in liberal
arts from Converse College. Elizabeth Patterson died on
November 10, 2018.
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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