TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/election/48elect/48elect.002

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                                                                                October 11, 1948

THIRD PARTIES

Southern Revolt



     James Strom Thrumond, a Southern politician little known and
therefore possibly underrated in the North, made a sortie last
week into political no-man's land. Appearing in Baltimore, in the
border state of Maryland, he was met by a college student dressed
in the full regalia of a Confederate brigadier and a mildly
interested audience. Standing just over on his side of the Mason-
Dixon line, the governor of South Carolina sounded his defiance
of the "North."

     "Those who follow the banners of the States' Rights
Democrats," he cried, "are determined that the evil forces which
have seized control of the national party shall be cast out. The
tides of that great party will flow like muddy water over the
sands and rocks and be purified. The impurities of that party --
Harry Truman and all his followers -- will be deposited like
sediment on the banks."

     There was every likelihood that J.Strom Thurmond would be an
even smaller deposit of sediment than Harry Truman. As the
Dixiecrats' candidate for President, he did not stand a chance in
the world. He might capture as many as 50 electoral votes -- next
to Bull Mooser Theodore Roosevelt's 88 in 1912, the biggest block
ever won by a third-party candidate. He was the result of Harry
Truman's political courage -- or lack of political acumen. His
appearance had marked the collapse of the compromises which had
held the Democratic Party together for 16 years.

     Symptom rather than symbol of the South's revolt. Strom
Thurmond of the South's spokesman for an old, still smoldering
issue. Thanks to Harry Truman, that issue add erupted again and
was splitting the Solid South. The issue was black v. white.

     The "Fo'ce Bills." Candidate Thurmond would never admit that
the issue could be put in such black & white terms. He draped his
case in the dialectics of states' rights. In his harsh, flat
voice he denied the authority of Washington to interfere with the
South's pattern of behavior. These were the "fo'ce bills" which
he denounced:

     -- An anti-poll tax law: "It would take from you the right
to regulate your own elections."

     -- An anti-lynching law: "It would provide the opening wedge
for federal contrast of your police powers."

     -- An anti-segregation law: "When will they learn as the
South had learned, that you cannot legislate racial harmony?"

     -- An FEPC law: "It would force all business and business
relationships into a Washington pattern guided and enforced by a
federal Gestapo."

     But if it was states' rights that Thurmond was battling for,
what was the theoretical difference between him and a lot of
Northern U.S. citizens who were equally apprehensive of Big
Government? The main front of the Dixiecrats, indeed, was a
Southern upper crust of mill owners, oil men, tobacco growers,
bankers, lawyers, who might have felt more comfortable voting
Republican. Would the Dixiecrat-party be a kind of political
decompressure chamber for conservative Southerners, or their way
to the Republican party? Not for Tom Dewey also advocated civil
rights for the Negro. The Southerners wore their states' rights
with a significant difference.

     No decent citizens in the South condoned the night rides,
the fiery crosses and the lynch mobs. No one but a fool condoned
them. But what about the Negro's right to an eduction, a job? As
far as Strom Thurmond was concerned, he would not deny the Negro
the right to an education and a job. Thurmond had to accept a
federal judge's decision that the Negro had a right to vote;
35,000 voted in the South CArolina primaries this year. The so-
called Southern "liberal" went further: he would and did
encourage the Negro to better education, to enfranchisement as a
self-respecting citizen.

     But what about segregation, which was also a denial of
rights? Segregation was not peculiar to the South -- it was simply
more universally enforced there. In the North, not only in the
eyes of hotel owners and real estate dealers, but in the eyes of
the vast majority of people, the Negro was still a second-class
citizen. Those whites who considered the Negro their social equal
were a minute exception to the general rule. As a Southern
Regional Council report recently pointed out: "The South
certainly has no monopoly on prejudice and discrimination." But,
added the report, this is no excuse for the South. It is no good
for the South simply to say: "You are as guilty as we are;
therefore leave us alone in our guilt."

     Because of the Negro, guilt haunts the whole U.S., South and
North. But the North's guilt is glossed over by the hypocritical
assumption that it has "solved" the Negro problem -- in principle
and on paper. Behind the South's gloss of "states' rights" is
defiance and fear.

     Beyond a certain point, the Southerner will not or cannot
give a reasonable answer to the Negro problem. It is not, he
feels, a reasonable problem. And it was not a problem that he
brought on himself. It is his business to live with it, but it is
no more capable of overnight solution than any other vexation he
inherited. This sense of irrational frustration reduces most
Southerners to the flat statements of defiance with which they
commonly respond when a Northerner -- especially a Northern
"liberal" -- attacks them on the subject.

     On his part, the Northerner -- and not just the Northern
"liberal" -- often finds this Southern attitude baffling,
incoherent or plain infuriating.

     The Line Drawn. The Southerner talks about his personal
solicitude for the Negro, but to the Northerner it seems much
closer to the solicitude of the master for his slave than to the
friendliness of neighbor toward neighbor. What most Southerners
seem to deny the Negro is human dignity, even in such small ways
as refusing to call them "Mr." or "Mrs." "You've got to keep
niggers in their place," they say.

     Said Douglas Southall Freeman, the noted Southern historian:
"There were two abolitionist movements, the Civil War movement
and Mrs. Roosevelt's movement to abolish segregation. The South
is too much influenced in its treatment of the individual Negro
by the ignorance of the mass. But the North is too much misled by
the ability of a few conspicuous Negroes. Mrs. Roosevelt has been
hopelessly misled because she has seen only the best. The South
is going to keep the line drawn between civil rights an social
privilege. Civil rights should be recognized; social privileges a
matter of individuals. The South is going to keep that line drawn
and that's all there is to it."

     Wrote Geoffrey Gorer, British anthropologist and journalist,
in the Georgia Review: "They are haunted by fear of rape; but
though this is mostly envisaged in the crudest physical shape, it
is probably a second spiritual violation which they dread even
more. Terrified of being overwhelmed by violence, they use
violence and the threat of violence to avert this disaster."

     That was why the voice of Strom Thurmond, with its
counterfeit arguments for states' rights, and the voice of his
cousin, Geogia's "Hummon" Talmadge, with its white demagoguery,
were listened to and generally, if not unanimously, applauded in
the Southland, These were the voices of the apologists and the
defenders.

     Measure of Emotions. Thurmond claimed that he might win as
many as 140 electoral votes. This was grossly exaggerated and he
knew it. By the best expert reckoning, he would not get North
Carolina, which was cool to all the candidates and coolest to a
third-party candidate. He would not get Arkansas, although he
might have enough strength there to spoil an outside chance for
Dewey. He would not win Florida, Kentucky or Virginia, but he
might just get enough there to give those states to Dewey. He was
a fair bet to win Georgia and Louisiana, a very good bet to win
Alabama, and a sure thing in his own state and in Mississippi.
The popular vote which he polled would be a partial measure of
the South's emotions and a measure of the extent of the Southern
political revolt.

     That revolt could be dated roughly from October 1947, when
President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights dropped a match into
the dry and prickly underbrush of Southern pride and fear.
Franklin Roosevelt had always been careful to keep any such brush
fires from spreading. He add imposed FEPC in 1941 by executive
order, as a temporary wartime measure, which had angered the
South. The South had flared up over Mrs. Roosevelt's well-meaning
efforts on behalf of the Negro. But F.D.R., who did more to
impose federal authority on the states than any man since
Lincoln, had known how to mollify Southern politicians. His
portrait hangs in Strom Thurmond's office alongside a blank space
where Harry Truman's portrait once hung.

     The Civil Rights Committee flatly recommended outlawing the
anti-Negro practices of the South. Such fiery Southerners as
Fielding Lewis Wright, governor of Mississippi, forthwith raised
the cry of secession -- from the Democratic Party, not the nation.
When President Truman urged Congress to enact his committee's
recommendations into law, the outcry could be heard form
Charleston to Little Rock.

     The Crossfire. Privately, publicly, in conventions, by
petition, by resolution, Southerners shouted at one another that,
as Fielding Wright had said, the time had sure come to bolt. The
difficulty was that, politically, the South had no place to go.
Was there no way out of this dilemma? Southern governors, meeting
at Tallahassee, passed a resolution urging Harry Truman to back
up.

     Harry Truman, son of a Confederate father, might have found
some way out. But by now he was caught in a crossfire. Northern
labor leaders and old New Dealers, whooping for disciplinary
action against the unreconstructed South, and fishing for liberal
and Negro votes, seized control of the Democratic Convention at
Philadelphia and rammed the President's civil-rights
recommendations into the party platform. That did it. Harry
Truman was stuck with his civil rights and the South was stuck
with its revolt.

     Strom Thurmond had not been an original, out & out advocate
of bolting. At Philadelphia he had supported the nomination of
Georgia's Senator Richard Russell as a way of registering a
protest without walking out. But in the end he decided that the
State's Rights Party was the best thing for him. South Carolina
was a hot center of revolt and Thurmond had his eye on the Senate
seat of Olin D. Johnston for 1950. He probably had more to gain
than to lose by running as the rebels' candidate for President.
He was picked because he was the most willing and eager. Fielding
Wright, 53-year-old lawyer, who is as smooth and cold as a
hardboiled egg -- and whose home town of Rolling Fork, Miss., has
more Negroes than whites -- was glad to run as the vice
presidential candidate.

     The Runner. Strom Thurmond has been running for something
all his life. At first he ran for exercise, trotting around his
father's farm in Edgefield, S.C., 54 miles from Columbia. When he
went to Clemson Agricultural College he ran on the college cross-
country team. He was a determined student who overcame a speech
impediment by reading slowly for an hour every afternoon to a
patient professor. Once his classmates threw him into the
swimming pool for trying to shine up too much to the faculty.
After graduation he taught school and began running for political
offices. He became county superintendent of education, state
senator, county judge.

     Strom Thurmond's Southern politics was bred in his bones.
His grandfather, George Washington Thurmond, a corporal with Lee,
had trudged home from Appomattox to find Columbia in the ruins
left by Sherman's march. Eighty-four of Columbia's 124 blocks had
been gutted by fire. Some 1,400 buildings had been destroyed.

     A Candidate's Roots. Grandpa Thurmond had know the poverty
of the postbellum South and the bitterness of the days when the
Carpetbaggers swarmed in. South Carolina' legislature had been
packed and dominated by illiterate and bewildered Negroes.
Grandpa Thurmond and his neighbors had heard the voice of
Pennsylvania' sadistic Thaddeus Stevens thundering out the need
for holding the South "as a conquered people," for forcing the
South to "eat the fruit of foul rebellion."

     Grandpa Thurmond's son John saw the South meet violence with
violence. John studied law and hitched his star to "Pitchfork
Ben" Tillman, South Carolina's demagogic Governor and Senator.
(He was always talking about using pitchforks on his enemies. He
even threatened to pitchfork President Cleveland, that "old bag
of beef . . . in his old fat ribs.") Ben Tillman had a short
answer for the Negro problem. He told the U.S. Senate: "We shot
them. We are not ashamed of it . . . We will not submit to Negro
domination under any conditions that you may prescribe."

     John Thurmond became Tillman's attorney and boss of
Edgefield County. One day, when a drummer for a drug company used
"hot language" about John being a Tillmanite and threatened John
with a knife, John shot him dead. The jury's verdict: not guilty
of murder.

     John's wife was a charter member of the W.C.T.U., and a
leader in the first Baptist Church of Edgefield. On the small
farm which John bought to supplement his modest earnings as an
attorney, they brought up three sons and three daughters. James
Strom Thurmond was the next to eldest.

     Dictation from the Governor. The war interrupted Strom's
political career. He had had an outstanding but not distinguished
record as a judge: the state supreme court reversed a higher
percentage of his decisions than those of any other judge. But
his record in the war was one to point to with pride. He
volunteered, served with the 82nd Airborne Division, landed in
glider in Normandy, won a chestful of decorations for gallantry,
transferred to the Pacific and came home a lieutenant colonel. He
spun through a gubernatorial campaign against ten opponents like
a maverick planetoid, and became the tenth South Carolinian
governor from Edgefield County.

     Strom, then 44, and catching his breath for the moment,had
time for other matters, particularly pretty Jean Crouch, 21-year-
old daughter of an old family friend. He appointed her "Miss
South Carolina," to preside over Charleston' Azalea Festival; he
brought her to the mansion to dictated to her: "My darling Jean .
. . Loving you as much as I do . . . I want you to be my wife
without too much delay . . ." She retired to the next room and
typed out her acceptance.

     Life at the Executive Mansion is bustling and informal.
While the governor is running for President, everyone else is
running for Thurmond. To get him to engagements, State Police
Sergeant Huss Fennell drives him around at 80 m.p.h.

     His wife, whom he calls "Sugar," almost always goes with
him. Both Strom and Sugar are Baptistis, teetotalers and non-
smokers. The virile governor keeps himself in trim by riding,
walking, and standing on his head.

     A Changing World After November, what about the Dixiecrats?
The chances are that they will disappear as a political entity.
Having made their protest under the most dramatic circumstances
possible -- a presidential election -- their well-to-do but
amateur backers will probably return to their businesses. It is
doubtful whether there are enough politicians in the party to
keep it going after that. The chances are that the Dixicrats will
once again become indistinguishable from regular Southern
Democrats. With the Northern Democrats out of power in Washington,
the authority against which the Dixicrats revolted will have been
removed. All hands can unite once again against the common enemy
-- the Republicans.

     A shift of forces within the Democratic Party, however, might
change that. If the leaders of organized labor and the Northern
liberals who asserted themselves at Philadelphia should capture
the Democratic Party in its defeat and guide its policies, then
the South's revolt, instead of subsiding to a smolder, might
flare out again and this time bring about a permanent political
realignment.

     Whatever happens to the Dixiecrats, the emotions which
produced them will still be there. In his flattest, harshest
public utterance to date, and in an arrant distortion of the
meaning of Truman's civil rights bill, Strom Thurmond cried:
"There's not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation
and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our
swimming pools and our theaters."

     But politics, especially demagogic politics,is a symptom of
social forces, not their cause. The Dixiecrats might dry up and
blow away; but "states' rights" (the Negro problem) will remain
as the fundamental problem of the South. No solution will be
found until the South climbs back from the poverty in which the
Civil War left it and finds the solution for itself. Said the
Southern Regional Council: "Most of those who have spoken for the
South have not spoken wisely. They have blinded themselves to a
changing world that will no longer be content with old ways . . .
(But) as anyone knows, the denial of human rights in the region
goes hand in hand with poverty and backwardness."

     The Negro was still a problem, a challenge to North and
South alike. No new behavior pattern could be forced on the South
overnight by federal fiat. The sick South needed health: the
North needed wisdom.