Washington ? He was the leading states’-rights voice of his time. He was the first Southern senator to hire a black staff member. He was the only member of the Senate ever to be elected on a write-in vote. He bolted the Democratic Party of his birth not once, but twice. He won 39 electoral votes in a presidential election a half-century ago. He single-handedly created the two-party system in his state. He filibustered a civil-rights bill for 24 hours. He was in public office for nearly three-quarters of a century. He won election to the Senate eight times.

Strom Thurmond, who turned 100 on Thursday, may have lived and made more history than any American ever.

In the Thurmond century, he experienced and prompted almost every human emotion, including hope and despair, hate and love. In his life, if not in his own heart, is the whole story of America in the modern era.

In his century-long journey from ferocious to feeble, the South went from segregation to integration, from Democratic to Republican, from agricultural to industrial, from the nation’s back hedge to its leading edge. Thurmond fought some of it, caused some of it, accommodated to all of it.

He was mean, he was courtly. He was stubborn, he was supple. He was bullheaded, he was charming. He was crafty, he was transparent. He was hardboiled, he was romantic. He was doctrinaire, he was flexible. He had orange hair and had his first child when he was 69 years old.

But in the biggest domestic battle of the age, Thurmond was firmly, unambiguously and unapologetically wrong ” and on the wrong side of history.

He was rewarded by longevity but not redeemed by it. He neither questioned nor confronted the moral basis of his belief in a segregated society. But unlike some of his allies in the drive to resist integration, Thurmond’s life was long enough so that it could not be said that he used all his energy to preserve a repugnant social system.

At one of his birthday parties ” and each of Thurmond’s birthdays was celebrated with a youngster’s enthusiasm ” someone once said he was a man who outlived his causes.

Those causes were states’ rights and anti-communism, and in his last years, when the very phrases passed into history, they made him seem antiquarian.

Thurmond was one of the last practitioners of old-school Southern politics. He knew his roots were in the up-country farm regions and he never forgot them, not when the Piedmont politicians were running things, not when South Carolina’s cities began to blossom, not when the tax breaks and the anti-union culture drew manufacturing and high-tech plants to his home state.

His own first Senate election was the sort of spectacle that Thurmond lived, celebrated and symbolized. When South Carolina’s senior senator, Burnet R. Maybank, died unexpectedly in 1954, the leaders of the Democratic Party met privately and decided that Edgar A. Brown, the president of the state senate, should get the nomination, tantamount to election in a one-party state like South Carolina.

Thurmond was outraged ” and he saw an opening. He traveled the state, bellowing that he and the voters were not about to let “31 men” decide who should sit in Washington. As a populist touch, he vowed to resign the seat if he won it and hold another, unfettered election. He won, resigned, ran again ” and won.

He ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, proving he was the property of no party ” and suggesting, more fatefully, that the South was the property of no party. He was a populist who challenged the Democratic establishment with a write-in Senate campaign in 1954 but became the personification of the GOP party establishment two decades later. He began his career as a fire-breather but ended it as an ornament of the Senate, a vestige much like the polished spittoons that sit in the chamber but are more valuable for their symbolism ” in both cases, reminders of the agricultural heritage of the South ” than for their utility.

For years, Thurmond, and the loving handlers who protected him from embarrassment, worked to remake the senator’s image, softening it, polishing it, wiping away the ugly blemishes from one of the ugliest periods in the nation’s history, trying to make the nation forget that, as a Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948, he once declared that there were “not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to … admit the Negro race into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

Thurmond lived for a century, but he never outlived his involvement in the fight against integration. In his gubernatorial years, in his 1948 presidential election and in the Senate, Thurmond was a passionate battler, fighting to maintain segregation, vowing to perish in that fight.

Today Thurmond’s supporters argue that he was less a segregationist, more a states’-righter. The distinction was difficult to discern at the time, or now. Other politicians ” Georgia’s Richard Russell and Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo and James Eastland ” may have been more outspoken in their opposition to civil rights. But Thurmond will be forever linked with the 1948 presidential race, which he ran in defense of segregation, and with the filibuster, which he helped raise to an art form in 1957.

But of all his achievements, this may be the greatest: At 100, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina is known less for his ideology and more for his longevity.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.