The advocate

WHEN AMERICANS SEE John Edwards face off against Dick Cheney in the vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night, they'll see a white, Southern, liberal trial lawyer. A fusion of a political progressive and a plaintiff's attorney, Edwards represents a more complicated picture than meets the eye -- one that requires an understanding of Southern politics and history to untangle.

It's no secret, of course, that to be considered a liberal in the South is to be put in a precarious position. Conservatives have managed to demonize the word "liberal" in the national dialogue, equating it with wimpy, bleeding-heart One Worldism. Yet even before the strategy to turn "liberal" into a dirty word was launched in earnest by the tag team of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the term had an odoriferous connotation in the South. Simply put, during the days of segregation, a liberal was one who sympathized with the plight of blacks.

Back then, white Southern liberals were so few in number that the man who best symbolized them was fictitious: Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer who defended a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in Harper Lee's 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," played powerfully by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version. In real life, not many liberals raised their heads in the states of the old Confederacy. To do so invited crank telephone calls, threats, beatings, nocturnal visits by the Ku Klux Klan, and social ostracism. The Old Guard that was intent on preserving segregation linked Southern liberals with communists.

Those who spoke out tended to be ministers, professors, lawyers, writers, and some brave housewives rather than politicians. Several names from the period following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 come to mind. Rev. Will Campbell broke with his conservative Southern Baptist denomination to join the civil rights insurgency. James Silver, a history professor, wrote "Mississippi: The Closed Society" and was then drummed out of the state for his views. William Faulkner delivered eloquent parables of racial injustice. Lillian Smith was even more explicit in novels like "Strange Fruit," with its broadside attack on racial mores.

Morris Dees used the fortune he made in direct mail services to found the Southern Poverty Law Center, which drove several Klan operations into bankruptcy with innovative lawsuits. And Virginia Durr, the wife of a prominent Alabama lawyer, "decided there were only three options available to her," according to Lynne Olson's "Freedom's Daughters," an account of women's roles in the civil rights movement. She could "become an actress and play the Southern belle; go crazy like Blanche DuBois; or become a rebel, step outside the magic circle and challenge the Southern way of life. Durr chose the third." She spent her adult life as an activist and led several organizations.

No fewer than three different editor-publishers in Mississippi were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their daring during the Jim Crow era, but across all of Dixie the names of liberal US senators from that same period could be counted on one hand: Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr., North Carolina's Frank Porter Graham, and Florida's Claude Pepper. Of those four, Gore, Graham, and Pepper were eventually beaten in campaigns where they were smeared as miscegenationists, fellow travelers, and traitors to "the Southern way of life."

John Egerton, author of "Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement," which deals with white and black Southerners who risked their lives standing up for civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, says the term Southern liberal "is very complicated." It depends, he says, "on a Southern definition of liberal."

Racial sensitivity is still an imperative for the Southern liberal, but there are other issues involved as well. This is where Edwards's background as a trial lawyer, and his particular brand of populism, comes in. He built his reputation as an advocate for the poor and middle class, both black and white, in confrontations with big corporations and institutions, and his ability to translate his courtroom success into a political message helps explain the wide support he attracted outside the South in the Democratic primaries. Edwards may not be an old-fashioned white Southern liberal (for one thing, he's too young to have fought in the civil rights struggle), but his work as a trial lawyer seems to qualify him for membership in an historically small club: a Southern populist who appeals across racial lines.

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When Edwards wrote his campaign autobiography last year, he chose to call it "Four Trials," an unapologetic reminder that he comes from a profession that Southern conservatives in particular loathe.

Before he entered politics, the 51-year-old North Carolina Democrat spent two decades as a trial lawyer, representing plaintiffs in personal injury suits. He wanted, he wrote, to achieve a dream he'd awkwardly articulated as an 11-year-old in a school essay: "To protect innocent people from blind justice the best I can." In many cases -- far more than the four he writes about -- Edwards won his clients massive judgments in cases involving accusations of medical malpractice and corporate negligence and became a multimillionaire along the way.

Edwards engaged in a practice that has taken on sharp partisan tones. Though many trial lawyers have grown as wealthy as the richest of Republican plutocrats through their contingency fees, which generally amount to about one-third of the awards, their clientele generally comes from the ranks of the working class, and the lawyers have themselves become a principal source of financial support for Democratic Party interests.

In the latter part of the 20th century, trial lawyers have emerged as the new tribunes of the powerless, banes to such giant lobbies as the American Medical Association and the US Chamber of Commerce, which are usually allied with the Republican Party. (Indeed, this year the US Chamber of Commerce is helping to finance a new organization called the November Fund, the purpose of which is to attack trial lawyers, John Edwards foremost among them.) Trial lawyers' practice has flourished in the South, where strong strains of populism still course through the veins of the body politic.

"It's a very Southern thing," says Peter Pringle, who wrote about the legal offensive against the tobacco industry in his 1998 book, "Cornered: Big Tobacco at the Bar of Justice." That fight, which resulted in literally billions of dollars in settlements, was led by such attorneys as Don Barrett and Dicky Scruggs of Mississippi, Ron Motley of South Carolina, and the late Wendell Gautier of Louisiana. "These guys go in and champion the little guy against a company not regulated by government," says Pringle. "And big business hates them because they take huge amounts of money and bring regulations."

Scruggs is now targeting nonprofit hospitals, charging that they are price-gouging uninsured patients, who are mostly poor. Earlier, Scruggs and other lawyers in the Deep South won millions of dollars for men and women exposed to asbestos in the workplace.

Although Scruggs and Trent Lott, Republican senator of Mississippi, are brothers-in-law, Scruggs is a major benefactor to Democrats. He recently hosted a fund-raiser at his Oxford, Miss., office for Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. (While mostly Democrats, trial lawyers are not necessarily a tightly knit fraternity: Scruggs's relationship with Edwards, for instance, is strained because Edwards opposed the nomination of a Mississippi judge, Charles Pickering, to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.)

Edwards's own cases involved fatal automobile accidents and debilitating drug prescriptions. In his most celebrated victory, he won $25 million for a young girl dreadfully injured because of a malfunctioning swimming pool drain. It was the largest verdict in North Carolina history, but it pales beside the decision by a jury in New Orleans to hit five companies with $3.4 billion in punitive damages as a result of a 1987 chemical accident on a railroad siding that caused hundreds of residents of a black neighborhood to flee their homes.

That judgment was subsequently reduced, but the wave of staggering verdicts has set off a political war in the South, in which there are sometimes racial implications. One rural county in Mississippi with a predominantly black population has been dubbed a "judicial hellhole" because of the tendency of local juries to hand out extravagant judgments.

Conservatives operating under the banner of "tort reform" have expended countless hours of energy in state legislatures in an attempt to impose limits on damages in civil lawsuits. "Tort reform" was one of the three or four issues that George W. Bush focused on when he first ran for governor of Texas in 1994. In Mississippi, a US attorney appointed by the Bush administration is currently spearheading the prosecution of one of the most high-powered trial lawyers in the state, charging him with racketeering in connection with fund-raising for the reelection of a state Supreme Court justice, who has also been indicted.

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When Edwards broke into politics by running for a Senate seat six years ago, the Republican incumbent, Lauch Faircloth, assailed him as a "Bill Clinton liberal" and all but branded Edwards with a Satanic "666" because of his background as a trial lawyer.

Edwards would never pigeonhole himself as a liberal, and in response to the charge has pointed to his record in the Senate as proof that he's a mainstream national Democrat. The latest edition of the Almanac of American Politics describes Edwards's voting record during his first term as "in the moderate to conservative range of Senate Democrats" (though National Journal magazine, based on that same voting record, ranked him the second most liberal Democrat in the Senate, tied with Ted Kennedy and right behind John Kerry).

As he pursued the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year, Edwards's earnestness and his youthful appearance appealed to voters across the country during the primary season, and he demonstrated surprising durability. When John Kerry chose him as his running mate, Kerry seemed to be doing so because of Edwards's broad support, not out of any illusion that his presence on the ticket would suddenly swing Southern states into the Democratic fold.

There's an irony in all of this. The populist themes Edwards has struck throughout the campaign, as when he speaks of "two Americas," have roots in the Southern tradition from which he comes. That Edwards's liberal populism finds more support outside the region than inside it speaks volumes not only about the success of the Republican Party's Southern strategy -- including its demonization of trial lawyers like Edwards -- but about the Democrats' failure to fashion a winning populist message of their own.

Curtis Wilkie, who covered seven presidential campaigns for the Globe, holds the Kelly Cook chair in journalism at the University of Mississippi.