The Dixiecrats Depart

PETER: Well, we’re used to thinking about factions as insurgent forces that sweep into pre-existing parties and reset the agenda, groups like the Tea Party. But there’s another kind of faction that can be equally powerful, the old guard. The people left behind when the bulk of the party moves in a new direction.

We’re going to turn now to a case of that second type of faction, the state’s rights Democrats, nicknamed the Dixiecrats.

BRIAN: Ever since the Civil War, conservative, segregationist Southerners had controlled the Democratic Party. But in the 1930s, the party began changing. First, there was the New Deal. Then in 1948, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, asked Congress to pass civil rights legislation. At the party’s National Convention later that year, Northern Democrats re-nominated Truman for a run against Republican Thomas Dewey.

And if all that weren’t enough, those Northerners managed to insert a strong civil rights plank in the party platform. Southerners were outraged.

JOSEPH CRESPINO: The cooler heads knew that the only thing to do was to hold your nose and move forward.

BRIAN: This is historian, Joe Crespino. While most of the senior southerners at the convention didn’t want to relinquish the power they had attained within the party, Crespino says a few had had enough. Much of the Alabama delegation, as well as the entire Mississippi delegation– senators, governor and all– walked off the convention floor.

JOSEPH CRESPINO: As soon as they leave, they put out an all points bulletin, meet in Birmingham where we’re going to decide what we’re going to do. And it was a last-minute decision to go there. This was not predetermined.

BRIAN: So once they actually get to Birmingham, what is it that they decide there?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: They decide that they’re going to recommend two candidates to head an alternate presidential ticket. And the two candidates they chose were Strom Thurmond for president, Fielding Wright– who was the governor of Mississippi– as vice president.

The candidates were chosen in a series of hotel room caucuses, where the party brokers got together and offered it to several people before they finally got Strom Thurmond to accept to be the head of the ticket.

BRIAN: And is that because of party loyalty? If they couldn’t find another candidate, did seasoned pros say, hey, I’m not going anywhere near this?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: Well, it was certainly because of party loyalty. And to run against the Democratic Party was going to seriously imperil your political future in a region where the democratic party’s the only game in town.

The only way Strom Thurmond was going to have any impact on the 1948 campaign was to win enough southern states so that no one gets to 270 electoral votes, and the vote would be thrown into the House. And then you can bargain with either Harry Truman or Thomas Dewey to get concessions on civil rights.

BRIAN: Right. Now what did it look like at that convention? How did the organizers of the State’s Rights Party frame things? I know they only had a week, but what message did they try to send?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: The organizers were intent on having the national symbols of the United States be on display. They went out and bought bunting. Red, white, and blue bunting was draped around the auditorium. They had American flags and that kind of thing.

But there weren’t that many heavyweights there. In some cases, the organizers of the meeting had to go up and actually round up people to come sit in the seats to make it look like it was actually full. And so they would recruit college kids to come sit in the seats for Kentucky, because nobody from Kentucky had come down for it. That sort of thing was going on throughout this meeting.

BRIAN: And was there are some kind of tension between the rhetoric that the state’s rights people wanted to use and the rank and file that did fill those meeting seats?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: Well, there wasn’t much high-minded rhetoric at this meeting. All of the cant of southern segregationism was on display in the political speeches, talking about a white race that had brought a savage race to the new world and civilized it. This kind of thing.

The rhetoric was so inflammatory the some of the national radio broadcasting networks who were broadcasting live from the convention actually cut away, because the rhetoric became so racially inflammatory. So it was in this context that Strom Thurmond gave his speech, what would become the most infamous speech of his career.

Because if you had asked who Strom Thurmond was in 1947, you would have said that he was one of the most progressive young governors then in office in the south. But as he stood up there in front of the crowd, many of them would have been wondering about him, and wondering just what kind of leader they had gotten in this deal.

There’s not a full video record of this speech. There are only about four clips of it on video. And then the final clip is the line– I don’t have the quote in front of m. It’s the most famous line of his political career, where he talks about they are not enough troops in the army.

STROM THURMOND: There’s not enough troops in the army to force a sovereign people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

JOSEPH CRESPINO: And he uses the n-word there. But He doesn’t use that kind of racist inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.

BRIAN: Why is that, Joe? Why doesn’t he go with a winner?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: But he’s trying to run is a kind of national candidate who reaches out to, what he calls, states’ rights Americans, right? Folks across the country who believe and support the rights of states. And there’s a dissonance between what he’s saying rhetorically and the strategy he needs to run to actually have the effect he wants to have.

BRIAN: So what happened? How did Thurmond do? How did the States’ Rights Democrats do?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: So Thurmond ends up winning four southern states. They’re all the Deep South states. He wins his own state of South Carolina. He wins Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. And he wins several million votes.

But he doesn’t win the votes that he needs to throw the election into the House of Representatives, although it looked very close at the time. Of course, this is the famous campaign, right? Where newspapers printed Dewey’s victory. And if you look at the newspapers, everyone assumed that Dewey was going to win. But in the end, it wouldn’t come to pass, and Harry Truman didn’t need the Dixiecrat support.

BRIAN: Do the State’s Rights Democrats, these Dixiecrats, just go quietly into the night?

JOSEPH CRESPINO: Well, there’s great concern about what’s going to come of the party. Most of the major politicos did not sign up for the party in the first place. But there are efforts to keep the party going into the 1950s, and nothing really comes of it.

Strom Thurmond eventually wins election to the Senate. Not as a Democratic Party candidate, he actually wins the first ever write in candidate for the US Senate. Eventually, he votes with and meets with the Democrats. He caucuses with the Democrats.

But the first thing he says when he goes to the caucus of the Democrat senators, he says he stands up– and this is a way to win influence among your fellow Democrats– he says, I just want to go on record to say I didn’t get here because of any help I got from the National Democratic Party.

BRIAN: Joe Crespino is a historian at Emory University, and is the author of the biography, Strom Thurmond’s America.