The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
The next week in Birmingham, Thurmond and 6,000 fellow Southerners--the Dixiecrats of the States' Rights Democratic Party--met amid Confederate flags, Robert E. Lee portraits, and rhetoric so crude that the ABC radio network ceased its coverage. Nominated for president, Thurmond accepted with a speech igniting rebel yells. "I want to tell you," he said, "that the progress of the Negro race has not been due to these so-called emancipators--but to the kindness of the good Southern people." Then he declared: "There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."
Four decades later, biographer Nadine Cohodas showed newsreel footage of the speech to two of Thurmond's top aides, young men attuned to his longtime claim that he ran in '48 purely on constitutional principles. "I couldn't believe I was working for the same man," one said. But as shocking as Thurmond's Dixiecrat speech may seem to baby boomer ears, it pales when compared with much of the language of the Jim Crow era. Nor was racist invective confined to the South. In the early 1900s, audiences across America paid to hear South Carolina's Benjamin R. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a power in the Senate, extol lynchings and slavery. Freedom, Tillman said, turned the black man into "a fiend, a wild beast . . . lurking around to see if some helpless white woman can be murdered or brutalized."
Thurmond knew Pitchfork Ben. As a boy in Edgefield County, he often hitched a horse to a buggy and rode with his father, a lawyer who was Tillman's campaign manager, to the orator's farm. When Strom was 6, Tillman taught him how to shake hands with a firm grip.
In time, Thurmond would be known as a Tillman protege--but never a Tillman clone. Thurmond "is not the classic race-hater," reported the Louisville Courier-Journal's John Ed Pearce during the Dixiecrat's swing across Kentucky. "He is a man deeply troubled by threat of social change that would destroy a way of life to which he is accustomed, and raise into a position of legal equality a people he has been reared to regard as inferior."
Deeming overt racist language old hat, Thurmond focused his rhetoric on states' rights and anti-communism, a strategy that set the pattern for 20 years of Southern resistance. A civil rights program, he warned, would create a "totalitarian, socialistic government" and "a federal gestapo," churning "the chaos and confusion which leads to communism."
Payoff. Election Day gave the Dixiecrats four states--Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--the best third-party showing since 1912. But instead of punishing Truman, Thurmond had helped him. Dixiecrat tirades swelled black turnouts in Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, providing Truman narrow majorities over Republican Thomas Dewey in Ohio, Illinois, and California--and hence the election. Equally important, Democrats saw that they could win without a Solid South. No longer would states' rights automatically trump civil rights.
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