The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
Many Americans that year knew the 44-year-old fitness buff as the "Virile Governor"--the headline on a Life magazine photograph of him impressing his 21-year-old fiancee with a headstand. In a coast-to-coast radio hookup before the 1948 presidential race, the celebrity governor urged listeners "not to trust their economic future to the tender mercies of the Republican Party. . . . We who believe in a liberal political philosophy . . . will vote for the election of Harry Truman."
Weeks later, Thurmond shelved his liberal reputation for a generation of headlines as a champion of segregation. Instead of backing Truman, he took charge of a breakaway band of cotton-country "Dixiecrats" and ran against him. Joining the Senate in 1954--the year the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools--he rallied the defiant white South, first as a Democrat, then as a Republican. He rose to GOP kingmaker, lining up support that made Nixon president. Finally, after decades of fighting racial change, he embraced it, an about-face that assured him 30 more years in Washington. The wily nonagenarian, whose first election victory--as education superintendent of Edgefield County, S.C., in 1928--came by glad-handing Confederate veterans, now endures with the help of small-town black mayors, the beneficiaries of federal pork.
Time and his racial turnaround have diminished memories of Thurmond's stand-up-and-fight era. These days, the nation sees him as a joke target on late-night TV, a randy relic who, after his first wife died at 33, wed an ex-Miss South Carolina a third his age and sired children in his late 60s and 70s, including Strom Jr., 28, whom he recently proposed as the state's U.S. attorney.
In South Carolina, Thurmond remains revered. On the Statehouse lawn stands his statue, 17 feet high and facing south. His name adorns buildings, a lake, and a dam. In 47 years, his office has tended 700,000 constituent requests for help. Countless widows, their names gleaned from obituaries, cherish his condolence letters, most of which end with "let me know if I can be of service." Above all, he is admired as a man of his word, ever ready to defend his region and its values.
Enter Truman. Thurmond abandoned liberalism partly because he felt the South was being taken for granted--and indeed it was, as can be seen in a 1947 memo. In it, aide Clark Clifford told President Truman that the key to a full-term victory in '48 was a civil rights agenda. Without the urban North's "Negro bloc," Truman was advised, he probably would lose Illinois, New York, and Ohio. But what about the South, the region FDR had carefully avoided alienating? "As always, the South can be considered safely Democratic," Clifford said, "and in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored."
Truman took the civil rights path. In early 1948, he asked Congress to make lynching a federal crime, abolish state poll taxes, and ban segregation on interstate buses and trains. Truman has "stabbed the South in the back," Thurmond responded. "Let's fight this battle to the end." Warning that the South no longer was "in the bag," he carried his fight to Philadelphia, site of the Democratic National Convention. "We have been betrayed, and the guilty shall not go unpunished," he protested as the party nominated Truman.
advertisement
