Jim Hodges - Governor

Governor

As South Carolina's 114th governor, Hodges worked to add the Martin Luther King Holiday to the state's official calendars. He played an instrumental role in moving the Confederate flag from the state Capitol's dome to its grounds. He also instituted the construction of the New Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, which is North America's longest cabled spanned bridge.

He endured harsh criticism for mistakes during the evacuation of Charleston and the Low Country during 1999's Hurricane Floyd. Newspapers across South Carolina, particularly Charleston, chastised Hodges for not making traffic along South Carolina's I-26 one-way, to avoid the severe traffic jams that occurred as residents tried to flee the storm's path.

Hodges defended his evacuation plan, telling the press in 1999 that the process of moving hundreds of thousands of people inland still occurred in a timely manner. "I think we need to put things in perspective here," Hodges said. "This was the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the United States, and it was all done in about a twelve or a twenty-four hour period. When you have 800,000 South Carolinians leaving the coast, coupled with over a million from other areas below us in Georgia and Florida, you're going to have traffic problems."

During his tenure, Hodges also signed a bill encouraging schools to get students to say "Yes, sir," and "Yes, ma'am" to teachers. He announced a plan to raise teacher salaries to the national average by 2007, and opposed tying the raises to teacher performance. However, despite his electoral promises on education, many South Carolina schools were severely underfunded during his term.