…And The Real Secret In Strom Thurmond’s Past
It’s not an easy thing to be a politician. One never knows when the media will suddenly pick up an offhand remark—the same sort of thing that one has said for years, really—and suddenly focus withering, national attention on it. No wonder that most politicians would rather history be an infinitely malleable subject, a record that they could rewrite at will.
Such was the case for Senator Trent Lott, who recently lost his Senate majority leadership over remarks he made at a farewell party for South Carolina’s centennarian senator, J. Strom Thurmond. It was widely reported that Senator Lott, in recalling Thurmond’s 1948 run for the presidency, as the candidate of the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” party, remarked upon how Lott’s own Mississippi was one of the few states to vote for Thurmond in that contentious season, and how if the rest of the United States had followed suit, “we could have avoided all of these problems we’ve had.”
It is understandable that Lott was stunned by the ensuing firestorm. No reasonable observer could have considered such remarks a great departure from Mr. Lott’s past, which included a political apprenticeship with one of the South’s most avowedly racist congressmen; his continued, respectful appearances before a white racist organization; or his professed admiration for Jefferson Davis, that traitor who attempted to set up a rump republic of slaveowners back in the 1860s.
In the light of the 21st century, though, Lott’s remarks suddenly seemed much more ugly. The senator himself seemed a little taken aback by what he had said, and the opprobrium he brought down upon himself. This is, perhaps, the professional danger of becoming too comfortable talking in code for too long. But in any event, before long Senator Lott was twisting himself into paroxysms of remorse, both apologizing abjectly and protesting that he had been misunderstood—that he had not been referring to Thurmond’s unyielding defense of American apartheid, but to the other things Strom stood for in 1948.
Unfortunately, this defense only serves to distort the actual, historical record. The Dixiecrats, for those of you who may be a little younger than Strom, were an impromptu third party, breakaway Southern Democrats attempting to punish President Harry Truman for his support of civil rights. Neither Strom nor his supporters thought he would actually be elected, but the Dixiecrats were hoping, at the very least, to cost Truman the presidency and teach civil rights’ advocates among the Democrats a lesson they would never forget.
The trouble with Lott’s assertion that he liked the Dixiecrats’ other, non-racist ideas, was that they didn’t have any. So dedicated were they to the cause of preserving Jim Crow, that the states’ righters did not bother to write an actual party platform. Instead, they issued a “declaration of principles” that asserted above all, “We stand for the segregation of the races and racial integrity of each [sic] race.”
Nor did Thurmond expand upon this. As Louisville Courier-Journal writer Allan M. Trout remarked on Thurmond’s campaign, “Ordinarily you would expect a candidate for President to discuss the issues of domestic and foreign policy, what he would like to do for labor, agriculture and business…But Thurmond’s harp has only five strings, and the only tune he plucks is ‘The Civil Rights Blues.’” John Ed Pearce, writing in the same paper, was more blunt: “States’ Rights is the issue only insofar as it concerns the right of States to solve—or refuse to solve—their race problems. The real issue is one word, and that word is never spoken. It is one thought, and that thought is never expressed. The issue is Nigger…Mr. Thurmond, of course, never says the words; he’s not the type. And it is comical to listen as he tiptoes around the issue, like an old-fashioned father trying to explain sex to his son without saying the words.”
But there is another problem with Senator Lott’s protest—something that the national media, reverting to its usual inattention, managed to miss. Way back in 1948, ol’ Strom was a liberal.
This may seem scarcely credible today but it is true, and it speaks to how much both Thurmond and the South have changed in the last half-century. There was a strong tradition of economic populism in the South dating back to the 1870s and, for all of their intransigence on race, most leading Southern politicians of the 1940s were at least rhetorical liberals to one degree or another. They had seen the terrible toll the Great Depression had taken on their states, and welcomed the federal programs that had done so much to modernize the region and bring relief to its people.
“…Thurmond had a reputation as a liberal-minded governor,” confirms Irwin Ross, in his fine history, The Loneliest Campaign. “He had sought to abolish South Carolina’s poll tax, institute the secret ballot in general elections and modernize the state constitution; he had received a good deal of favorable publicity, a few weeks after becoming governor in 1947, when he had moved swiftly to arrest a large number of suspects after a Negro was lynched.”
Strom, in fact, had been something of a liberal from the beginning of his political career. In her informative biography, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, Nadine Cohodas notes that, in his early races for school superintendent (in 1928!), and the state senate, Thurmond supported acts to protect bank deposits, and to increase revenues for education at all levels—even when this included black schools and colleges, and even when it meant “taxing income, inheritance, and intangibles.” He campaigned for federal funding to improve soil conservation and to build dams that would provide rural South Carolina with cheap, publicly owned electrical power. As school superintendent, he instituted “a program of free health examinations from local doctors and dentists for white and black schoolchildren.”
After serving his country with distinction in France, Thurmond ran for governor in 1946, caliming that “we can quickly modernize and expand our public school and college facilities.” He stood for higher teacher pay, and increased public health and welfare programs, including aid for the aged, the young, and the handicapped. During the campaign, he castigated an opponent who had opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944, and on at least one occasion described the late president as having been the world’s greatest leader.
“We need a progressive outlook, a progressive program and a progressive leadership,” Strom insisted, and South Carolina voters agreed, electing him by a wide margin. In his inaugural address, Governor Thurmond not only called for abolishing the poll tax, but also advocated expanding workmen’s compensation laws, and better working conditions in plants and factories. He repeated his call for better public education, and told his constituents that “more attention should be given to Negro education.” Perhaps most surprising of all, he demanded “equal rights for women in every respect” including “equal pay for equal work for women.”
Nor did he immediately back away from these principles. Strom’s first education budget contained more funding for African-American schools than the state of South Carolina had ever allocated before—even if it was far from equal to the money allocated for white schools. When a white mob beat to death a black man accused of stabbing a white cab driver, Governor Thurmond saw to it that most of the men were arrested—even if an all-white jury subsequently found them not guilty.
“We who believe in a liberal political philosophy,” Thurmond told the nation in a national radio broadcast on October 2, 1947, “in the importance of human rights as well as property rights, in the preservation and strengthening of the economic and social gains brought about by the efforts of the Democratic party…will vote for the election of Harry Truman and the restoration of Congress to the control of the Democratic Party, and I believe we will win.”
It is difficult to see how any of this jibes with the conservative, free-market philosophy that Lott and today’s Republican party espouse. Later, Lott tried to clarify his remarks by saying that he had meant Thurmond’s opposition to communism, and for a strong military. Yet Strom seems to have had little or nothing to say on either issue during the 1948 campaign. Certainly, he had no great disagreement on these subjects with Harry Truman, who would—for better or worse—soon require federal employees to take loyalty oaths, and who was in the midst of rebuilding the military, constructing the Marshall Plan and the NATO pact, and otherwise instituting the policy of containment that would eventually strangle the Soviet regime.
Most of the South seemed to agree at the time; Thurmond was able to carry only four states and 2.5 percent of the national vote, as Truman swept back into the White House. The nation would change, and Strom would change—which is what is ultimately most disappointing about Lott’s assertion that we have had “all these problems” over the past 55 years.
This was, after all, the period in which we won the Cold War, cemented our status as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history, and made the United States a truly inclusive nation, with rights for all, for the first time. There were many problems, even tragedies, involved in achieving this—but was it really so bad? Was it worse, say, than the 55 years before 1948, which included two world wars and the two worst depressions in our national history?
What Mr. Lott chooses to see as our problems are the natural convulsions of any great democracy. For all the disparate criticisms we might make about our country, liberals and conservatives alike, they will none of them be addressed by sweeping them behind a euphemism; by pretending that institutionalized racism is only a question of “states’ rights,” or that silence is the equivalent of peace. Mr. Lott’s failure to understand this, alone, should disqualify him from the leadership of our senate, no matter what he said at a party.