The Full Strom

Senator Thurmond's life: the good, the bad, and the old

By Lewis Lord

Posted 9/9/01

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.

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.

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.

Even so, Truman admired nothing about Thurmond's campaign. When South Carolina's float passed by in Truman's parade, Thurmond doffed his hat to the president. Truman shot him a frosty stare. But South Carolina's white citizenry gave him a hero's embrace. As the Dixiecrat movement faded, Thurmond returned to Democratic ranks and renewed his attacks on Truman's "un-American, communistic, and anti-Southern programs."

For the first time since Reconstruction, meaningful numbers of blacks were appearing on Southern voter rolls--a result of a 1944 Supreme Court decision banning the all-white nature of Southern primaries. South Carolina's party leaders tried to outfox the judges by having voters sign a white-supremacy vow. When a court blocked the runaround, Thurmond complained that "every American citizen has lost a part of his fundamental rights."

Some 50,000 South Carolinians, however, soon gained the fundamental right to vote--a sliver of the black population but sufficient, Thurmond would learn in 1950, to make a difference. That year, he tried to unseat a U.S. senator, Olin Johnston, in a contest that deteriorated into a question of who liked segregation more.

Watching the showdown in a Darlington auditorium was 10-year-old Dan Carter, now a University of South Carolina history professor, who sat with his father among the whites on the main floor while blacks occupied the balcony. Johnston spoke up for regional mores, touching off boos and hisses among the blacks. Thurmond followed with his defense of the status quo. More boos and hisses. "Strom got real excited," Carter recalls. "Then he said, `Listen! Listen! They're booing me louder than they booed him!' "

Sure enough, blacks loathed Thurmond more. He won the white vote, but African-Americans voted solidly for Johnston and kept the senator in office.

Thurmond wouldn't be denied for long. In 1954, he beat a party boss in the only successful write-in campaign anyone ever waged for the Senate. The maverick Democrat entered a chamber that was intent on keeping an armistice on civil rights issues--but he would have none of it. In 1956, he helped draft and circulate a "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" assailing the Supreme Court's school segregation ban as an illegal "abuse of judicial power" and vowing to use "all lawful means" to reverse it. Dubbed "the Southern Manifesto," the litmus test on segregation drew signatures from 90 percent of the region's lawmakers. Tennessee's Sen. Albert Gore Sr., one of the few holdouts, walked away when Thurmond asked him to sign. The document, Gore said, was "dangerous, deceptive propaganda" that would cause people to defy the government.

In fact, defiance already was rampant. Legislatures across the South enacted laws to keep schools segregated. Heartened by their politicians' militancy, working-class whites revived the Ku Klux Klan. Doctors, lawyers, and merchants formed White Citizens' Councils, ready to wage what Thurmond would call "unremitting war on the court's unconstitutional usurpations."

For Thurmond in 1957, the war included a stint in the Senate steamroom. After drying out his 54-year-old body so he wouldn't have to go to the restroom, he droned on for 24 hours and 18 minutes against a diluted civil rights bill--still the Senate's longest solo filibuster.

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."

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."