The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
Thanks to poverty, lynchings, and the likes of Sen. Theodore Bilbo, the Mississippi demagogue who asked Congress to deport America's blacks to Africa, outsiders six decades ago tended to hold a dismal view of the South. In 1947, that opinion fell further with publication of John Gunther's bestselling profile of America, Inside U.S.A. Except for New Orleans cuisine, the Chicago writer found little in the region to commend. This "utterly foreign land" is "the problem child of the nation," he wrote, and its one-party political system "is the chief single factor in the United States militating against the progress of the nation as a whole." But Gunther viewed one Southerner with hope. Although South Carolina "is a `white supremacy' state par excellence," he reported, its new Democratic governor, "J. Strom Thurmond, a youthful war veteran, is a distinct liberal."
Gunther never imagined the scene 54 years later. Republicans nationwide were hoping that James Strom Thurmond, at 98 a distinct conservative, would hang on till his planned retirement in January 2003--the end of his eighth U.S. Senate term and a month past his 100th birthday--so the GOP could keep ruling the Senate. Equally astonishing would have been the upheaval that cost the Republicans their control: James Jeffords of Vermont bolting the party. Gunther in 1947 ranked Vermont as "the most impregnable stronghold of Republicanism in the United States."
What drove Jeffords out, many New Englanders believe, was the GOP's pronounced shift to the cultural right. That same shift actually attracted Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who recently announced his retirement, and Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, whose own retirement news last week added to the tension in the struggle for Senate control. But it was a change that resulted largely from the Southernization of the Republican Party, a multidecade evolution unwittingly initiated by Strom Thurmond, whose political life in many ways forms the bookends of U.S. politics from World War II to the present day. Others may have done more to convert the white South from thoroughly Democratic and largely ignored to mostly Republican and nationally potent--Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan deliberately; Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and George McGovern unintentionally--but Thurmond was the pioneer. He put the first crack in the Solid South, the Democratic monolith that had ruled the region since the 1890s.
Free rein on race. The Solid South emerged from a political bargain--"a shared understanding that the Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy," political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black call it in their book The Vital South. Half of the deal gave Southern states total freedom to handle racial matters, including the power to deny blacks the ballot. In return, the South provided the party control of Congress and faithfully backed its presidential nominees. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt won 98 percent of the popular vote in South Carolina, his strongest state. His weakest, at 41 percent, was Vermont.
Thurmond entered the governor's office in 1947 as a "progressive Democrat," a D-Day Bronze Star recipient who claimed his opponent didn't like Roosevelt enough. Within weeks, he became the first Southern governor ever to crack down on a lynch mob--an action the New York Times hailed as a "victory for law." He asked legislators to form kindergartens, enact a minimum wage, put women on juries, and scrap the state poll tax. His call for rent controls, critics moaned, could have come from the Communist Party.
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