Tripped Up By History

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Most of those who know him best, foes as well as friends, say they don't consider Lott a racist in the sense of someone who hates blacks and plots to hold them down. His brother-in-law Scruggs, a longtime civil rights proponent and major financial contributor to Democratic politicians, says, "Trent and I disagree about almost everything in term of politics. But he's a fair-minded man who I've known well 32 years, and I've never seen anything remotely suggesting racial animus in him." Rather, friends say, Lott has believed--at least until last week--that government has no business forcing one group of people to associate with another, nor should it compensate anyone for past injustices. He is convinced, as he emphasized at his press conference last week, that he is living proof of the opportunity America offers to those of humble origins. His close friend, Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, says, "Trent thinks that if he could make it, anybody can."

To understand that, it helps to look at the rock bottom he came from. Chester Trent Lott was born in October 1941 in the north-central Mississippi hill town of Grenada, 246 miles from Pascagoula--and a world away, economically and socially. He was, from the start, considered a "miracle" boy. He was born six years after his parents began trying to conceive a child. They were never able to have another. Lott's first name, like his father's, came from the county in South Carolina where the Lotts first settled after emigrating from England, making their way by the early 1800s to Mississippi. Iona Lott, 89, recalls that she chose her son's middle name from a radio show that she enjoyed, The Romance of Helen Trent.

At his press conference last week, Lott emphasized his roots as the son of a sharecropper, one who dropped out of school in the ninth grade and farmed cotton on another man's land in return for a share of the harvest. But the land was hilly and so poor that, as locals put it, you couldn't grow anything on it but old. The Lott family didn't have an indoor toilet or bathtub until Trent was 10, but they had their priorities straight, as far as he was concerned; he had a pony and a .22 rifle, which he used mainly to shoot snakes. And he was taught to share. "People used to say that an only child would be spoiled and selfish," Iona recalls, "and I was determined that he wouldn't be that way."

Trent eagerly absorbed an interest in politics from his grandfathers. His mother's father, a large man with a rich bass singing voice, served as a justice of the peace, sported a handlebar mustache and carried a .38 pistol in a shoulder holster that Lott prizes. His paternal grandfather was a county supervisor. Young Trent loved sitting under the edge of the porch listening to the men talking about campaign tactics and patronage. (Decades later, when he moved from the House leadership to become a junior Senator, Lott said, "I felt like I'd been sent back under the porch again.")