Word: lotte
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...they tended to look to the courts, whose juries could be quite populist. Southern Mississippi is home to a small but aggressive plaintiff's bar, featured twice over the past year on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and on episodes of 60 Minutes. For all of Lott's passion for tort reform, one of the nation's wealthiest tormentors of tobacco companies is his brother-in-law Dick Scruggs, beside whose pool the majority leader can often be found, sipping a Coke and working his cell phone, whenever the Senate is out and the weather is warm...
...Trent Lott's attitudes toward the role of government and racial issues were shaped by his upbringing in Pascagoula, which was quite different from most of the South. The town was defined by the Ingalls shipyard, which offered training and good wages and lured workers from all over the region. Most workers reckoned that whatever the state and local governments did to satisfy Ingalls--and the paper mill and the oil refinery and the shrimp-and crab-processing houses along the river--was money well spent...
Pascagoula was settled over the years by immigrants from France and Spain, Lebanon and Yugoslavia--but by very few slaves. In Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites did not feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were available to everyone...
Most people earned roughly the same wages and lived in the same four- and five-room houses. "It was a society with almost no distinctions based on wealth or social standing," says Lott's friend Robert Khayat, who grew up in a neighboring town, went on to play pro football with the Washington Redskins and now serves as chancellor of Ole Miss...
There were, of course, many distinctions based on race, including the segregated schools that some of Lott's friends came to see as unjust. But Lott had enough trouble at home; he didn't need to stir up any more if it could be avoided. And in Pascagoula, it could. Most of his white classmates could say, as Lott does, that "race just wasn't that big an issue for me growing...