The Full Strom
Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old
The historian believes Thurmond's departure will be followed by "a gentle looking back" on his career with emphasis on his deferred support of black causes. "Americans and particularly Southerners love redemption," Carter notes. But emerging from "the long run of history," he adds, will be "a negative portrait of someone who capitulated to the worst aspects of white Southern fears and anger. Thurmond will come down clearly on the side of those who exploited the race question rather than on the side of those who tried to deal with it or ameliorate it."
Still, the old warrior sparked one unanticipated change that anyone with a dab of Southern pride might applaud. Before Thurmond's Dixiecrat drive cracked the Solid South, the only Southerner elected president since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, the Virginia-born governor of New Jersey. Rarely did a candidate waste time chasing Southern votes. But since the one-party system collapsed in the '60s, every White House winner has been a Democrat born and raised in Dixie--or a Republican heeding Goldwater's advice to head south and "go hunting where the ducks are."
Further reading
BOOKS
Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, by Nadine Cohodas
Ol' Strom, by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson
Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, by John Egerton
The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968, by Kari Frederickson
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