The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
Far more momentous was Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act of 1964 integrating restaurants and hotels--"the worst, most unreasonable, and unconstitutional legislation," Thurmond thundered, "that has ever been considered by the Congress." Congress, he said, had been "steamrollered" by "Negro agitators, spurred on by Communist enticements to promote racial strife." President Johnson, signing the act, told an aide: "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."
Exodus. Thus began a profound exodus of white Southerners from Democratic ranks, with Thurmond leading the way. "The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups," he said as he stood before a portrait of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, and declared himself a Republican. LBJ would win in a landslide, even taking Vermont. But for the first time, more Southern whites voted Republican than Democratic--a habit that remains unbroken.
Nixon saw the South as his 1968 key to the White House--and Thurmond as his key to the South. "Strom is no racist," Nixon told the Carolina media. "Strom is a man of courage." At his first GOP national convention--"truly Strom Thurmond's convention," it was called--the appreciative senator handed Nixon the nomination by convincing Southerners that Nixon, not Reagan, was their best hope. He then helped Nixon win half of the South and the election by warning that a vote for independent George Wallace would be a vote for Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
Two years after Nixon entered the White House, Thurmond's kingmaking ended. His choice for governor, a segregationist, lost to a moderate Democrat. Black voters, swollen in number to almost a quarter million by Johnson's 1965 Voting Rights Act, provided the winner's margin. The electorate had changed, Thurmond realized, and so too must he.
Soon was born "the new Strom." Thurmond hired a black civil rights activist to address African-American needs. Into heavily black towns flowed Thurmond-announced grants for housing, day-care centers, and water and sewer projects. For the federal bench, he nominated a former NAACP lawyer. He voted to extend the Voting Rights Act, backed a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and sent his children to an integrated school. His reward has been 15 to 20 percent of the black vote--enough, when coupled with sizable white majorities, to make his 46-year tenure the longest in Senate history.
The new Strom, however, has yet to voice regret for what the early Strom did. In contrast to a repentant George Wallace, the senator repeatedly insisted that his concern all along was the Constitution. Fans agree. Race goes unmentioned in the Dixiecrat segment of a Web site biography by Clemson University's Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Thurmond ran his Dixiecrat campaign, the profile says, on principles lauded today as "the New Federalism."
Southern McCarthy. A differing view comes from Dan Carter, the historian who saw Thurmond in action in 1950. Carter, author of The Politics of Rage, a biography of Wallace, finds Thurmond masking racial appeals in code words before Wallace turned such language into an art form and practicing McCarthyism before Joseph McCarthy did. "Strom Thurmond was the Joe McCarthy of Southern politics," Carter says. "He constantly tried to discredit mainline civil rights activists as being pinks or proto-Communists or dominated by such. He hurt a lot of people of goodwill."
advertisement
