To Live and Die in Dixie
VALELLY, RICK
To Live and Die in Dixie Strom Thurmond and the transformation of southern politics. BY RICK VALELLY In The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South 1932-1968, Kari Frederickson, a...
...Meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, in July 1948, just days after the Democratic party nominated Truman at its Philadelphia convention and sent him out to campaign on a strong civil rights plank, the southern wing gathered to plot strategy...
...The conservative white South could cut a grand bargain to protect itself...
...Led by Strom Thurmond and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, the Birmingham convention set a goal of winning the South's 127 votes in the Electoral College...
...But, in December 1946, responding to a wave of violent white-on-black murders and assaults that seemed targeted against returning black servicemen in the South, President Truman established the president's Committee on Civil Rights...
...In 1950 Thurmond challenged incumbent South Carolina senator Olin Johnston...
...After that, Truman went on to take the strongest civil rights stances a president had taken since Ulysses S. Grant...
...BY RICK VALELLY In The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South 1932-1968, Kari Frederickson, a University of Alabama historian, offers a lively and perceptive account of the last important case when a dissident party faction played a desperate card once it had failed at the nominating convention—bolting and running on its own ticket: the 1948 revolt of the Dixiecrats, led by South Carolina's governor, Strom Thurmond...
...From 1940 to 1943, the total vote registered in five southern states in gubernatorial elections was only 24 percent, on average, of the total vote registered in the Democratic gubernatorial primary or runoff...
...In the short run, however, the Dix-iecrats' role was considerably less benign...
...This was very bad news for southern Democrats...
...his choice of a running mate was no small matter, and getting rid of Henry Wallace, his left-wing vice president, seemed vital...
...But the Dixiecrats nonetheless triggered a process of long-run partisan change that led to today's situation in which the South is not wholly owned by either party...
...Rick Valelly is a professor of political science at Swarthmore College...
...On the eve of the election Truman campaigned to cheering throngs in Harlem, the first president to do so...
...Indeed, the longest national political career in American history will soon end...
...In 1944, southern Democrats had supported, for Franklin Roosevelt's running mate, Missouri senator Harry Truman, grandson of a slaveholder, because they saw him as the Deep South's insurance policy: Roosevelt would almost certainly die in office during his fourth term...
...In 1971, he became the first southern senator to hire an African American on his full-time staff...
...By then, the Supreme Court had held that the Texas Democratic party's all-white primaries were "in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment...
...But the bolt from the party hardly affected Truman's stance...
...And a Texas Democrat became attorney general...
...The contest became a spectacle of rabidly white supremacist posturing...
...It fell to Thurmond to fight the last fight for white supremacy—and then gracefully to concede the proposition that America is, after all, a place for political and racial equality...
...So southern Democrats had high hopes for Truman...
...Truman and his campaign advisers recognized what political scientists and other analysts began to describe and analyze in the 1950s—the key role of black voters in northern and western cities...
...The Democratic party cracked from the pressure of its reorientation...
...Tenaciously perpetuating his Senate career, Thurmond became, instead, a symbol of regional tradition and adaptation...
...But when the curtain comes down it will not be just any old career retirement...
...Although Thurmond distanced himself from the Dixiecrats' formal organization, he and James Byrnes, the former Supreme Court justice and secretary of state, energetically threw themselves into the defense of segregation and white supremacy...
...In 1964, he played a major role in organizing the South for Barry Goldwater and switched to the Republican party...
...He co-authored the Southern Manifesto, a statement against civil rights, and filibustered against the 1957 Civil Rights Act for over twentyfour hours...
...For when Thurmond first strode onto the national stage from his perch as a vigorous, forward-thinking, and reformist governor of South Carolina, he adopted the role of national spoiler...
...One way or another, Strom Thurmond has always managed to make a difference in American politics...
...If black voters were mobilized and turned out at high rates, their participation could spell the difference between victory and defeat in states with relatively large numbers of votes in the Electoral College...
...History is showing great cunning in how it is scripting Thurmond's exit, for it may deprive the Republican party of unified control of the federal government...
...In an August 17, 1948 memorandum, Clark Clifford, special adviser to Truman, told the president that "Negro votes in the crucial states [would] more than cancel out any votes" lost in the South...
...The bolters anticipated doing this either by assuring (through state conventions or legal action) that Democratic electors were legally unpledged to Truman, or by electing separate electors under a different label than the Democratic label...
...Thurmond's switch, like many others involving former Dixiecrats, helped to endow the Republican party in the South, and eventually the national Republican party, with an anti-civil rights tinge—a tremendous irony, given the party's historic role in eliminating the enslavement of African Americans and in writing the Civil War amendments to the Constitution...
...So was "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a friend of Thurmond's father...
...Still, Thurmond proved to be the only prominent segregationist politician to adjust to white supremacy's collapse...
...senator ever elected on a write-in vote...
...The South Carolina Democratic executive committee handed Thurmond an ideal issue when it sought to push through a Truman loyalist...
...Thurmond became the first U.S...
...Born in 1902 in Edgefield, South Carolina, Thurmond is probably the last of the great Edgefield politicians...
...Given the anticipated strength of the Republican presidential candidate, Thomas Dewey, they had reasonable hopes for creating a powerful phalanx of unpledged or third party electors...
...Energized by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he rode a groundswell of white popular opinion, becoming a nationally vocal opponent of civil rights...
...On Election Day, Truman's bet paid off, of course...
...Preston Brooks, who caned Charles Sumner nearly to death in 1856, was from Edgefield...
...There will be a certain symmetry, then...
...In 1956, as promised, Thurmond ran again...
...Though Johnston won, Thurmond then had a stroke of luck when South Carolina's other senator died in office in 1954...
...The Senate has been Thurmond's political home since 1954...
...In the House of Representatives, where the vote would be by state delegation, the ex-Confederacy would then vote as a bloc controlling 11 of the 48 votes deciding the outcome...
...Such an outcome would prevent either major party candidate from gaining the necessary 266 votes to win the Electoral College...
...The Dixiecrats were poorly organized and funded, and Thurmond carried only those states in which he appeared on the ballot as a Democrat...
...When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, they took satisfaction in Truman's appointment of a South Carolinian to be secretary of state, the first major cabinet appointment for the South in decades...
...The Democratic primary, after all, was the general election in nearly all of the ex-Confederate states...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 33
