The Myth of Ol’ Strom: US Political Realignment Part II

The previous post addressed the great American political realignment of the twentieth century, offering Daisy Lampkin’s partisan work as an important inflection point. When Lampkin, Robert Vann, and others advocated that African American voters repudiate the Republican party and support the Democrats in the 1930s, after a decade’s worth of intense activism and advocacy, it was a watershed moment in American political history. It was the Republican party, after all—the “party of Lincoln—that as Lampkin herself once pointed out had stood foursquare behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, the Constitutional revisions in the wake of the Civil War that defined citizenship for African Americans. Up until this point the Democrats, especially in their southern stronghold, had always been the party of Jim Crow and segregation.

But after the 1930s, prompted in part by the mass influx of African American voters represented by Lampkin and Vann’s defection, the Democratic party increasingly (though always imperfectly) began to embrace a civil rights agenda. In response, over the course of the 1950s and 60s, conservatives began to leave the Democratic party and take their segregationist views into the Republican party. The once solid Democratic south remained solidly in support of segregation, but by now it was the Republican party, and not the Democratic party, that championed these views. The two-party system had realigned itself, primarily around the topic of race.
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Today let’s look at the other end of that pivot. If many voters were streaming into the Democratic party and realigning its views on race, many voters (and their politicians) were also streaming out of the Democratic party into the Republican party, also realigning its views on race. The career of long-time South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, still a revered figure in the state, is a case in point.

When Thurmond ran for President in 1948 as a so-called “Dixiecrat,” he did so because the views of the Democratic party had already begun to evolve sharply. The Truman administration, reacting to a wave of postwar racial violence (including the blinding of US Army veteran Isaac Woodard in Batesburg, South Carolina, in 1946) had begun to explore a firmer civil rights policy. This was the proximate cause for the “Dixiecrat” splinter and explains why Thurmond made segregation the fundamental plank of his campaign. Southern conservative Democrats remained deeply disconcerted about the evolution of their party on the issue of race in the 1950s and 60s, a concern made vivid in the launching by southern conservatives of the “massive resistance” campaign in 1956 shortly after the Brown decision. “Massive resistance” defined the determination of southern segregationists to defy the Court’s ruling and maintain segregation. It is why so many southern school systems did not integrate even decades after the Brown decision. This was a campaign for which Thurmond remained a stalwart, as evidenced by his role in drafting the Southern Manifesto and rendered with heroic aplomb in his historic anti-civil rights filibuster in 1957.

By 1964 the outlines of a major party realignment were already well in evidence. The bruising battle between liberal and conservative Republicans for the 1964 nomination, between the moderate Rockefeller and the conservative Goldwater, was one such harbinger. Thurmond’s historic party switch from Democratic to Republican in advance of the primary fight affirmed for many that the segregationism for which Thurmond had long stood would find a comfortable home under the banner of Goldwater’s “states rights.” Goldwater himself, though he had earlier supported civil rights, by 1964 had come around to opposing the civil rights bill then famously wending its way through Congress, further solidifying the linkage between segregation and states’ rights. Thurmond’s first political activity after becoming a member of the Republican party was to whip support for Goldwater. (Liberal Republicans, it might be noted, were instrumental in the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights bill. That support would drive many of them out of the party or out of office in succeeding years.) As historian Kevin Kruse has recently noted “The Goldwater/Thurmond moment was transformative in how Americans understood the two parties on civil rights. Until 1964, it seemed clear that Democrats were the party of economic liberalism and the GOP economic conservatism, but civil rights had been left out of the picture. . . .[After 1964] [t]here was a stark change in popular perception about the two parties on civil rights.”

The South had been since before the Civil War dominated by the Democratic party—the “solid south” as it has been often referred. The Republican party in the region “scarcely deserves the name of party” as V. O. Key put it in 1949. The events of the early 1960s began to change this. The victory of John Tower in Texas in a special Senate election in 1961, making Tower the first Republican to win in Texas since Reconstruction, showed that it was possible for Republicans to win in the south if they campaigned appropriately and played to the region’s racial fears; Tower had publicly denounced the Kennedy administration’s nascent civil rights plans in a formulation that anticipated Goldwater’s strategy a few years later. Goldwater’s massive national defeat in 1964 continued the pattern, showing his defeated party that the way back to national prominence ran through the South; Goldwater’s success in the region refocused party energies, especially in the coming Nixon campaign. The civil rights movement had by now punctured the effectiveness of old-fashioned, crude appeals to racial prejudices. But the new generation of conservative that Goldwater and Nixon represented, needing desperately to expand its appeal to segregationist voters, was learning how to express the same racialized fears with a new political language. This is the essence of the “southern strategy” documented thoroughly in political discussions at the time and captured in published form in the book by Nixon-advisor Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).  Thurmond played a leading political role in the establishment of the “southern strategy.”

Following Goldwater, from the mid-1960s a new conservative emphasis on “states’ rights” would take center-stage in Republican party rhetoric. “States’ rights” would be supported by other rhetorical formulations, notably appeals to “law and order,” as a supposed counter to the tumult in the streets witnessed in the era; bussing and local control of schools (and, indeed, the private school movement of the period) as a proxy for massive resistance; the continued red-baiting of the civil rights movement with ongoing accusations about communist infiltration of the movement; and stoking fears about a runaway welfare state making handouts to the undeserving poor. In every case, the subtext, of white fears that black Americans were overstepping, enjoying unearned access to (white) public goods, or unduly asserting their political and cultural voices, is clear enough. The “southern strategy,” in short and in plain language, was the rhetorical disaggregation of structural racism into its component parts, and the subsequent appeal to segregationists without giving formal voice to segregation. 

Because he enjoyed such prestige in the Republican party at this point, Thurmond played a pivotal role in the establishment of the “southern strategy” and the political reconsolidation of segregationist politics, as he helped to meld the racialized fears of his southern region to the western “freedom” rhetorics of Goldwater and Reagan. This legacy is clearly seen in the brokering work he did to win over Wallace voters to the GOP in 1968 and in stumping for Nixon in the general election that year. Historians are in agreement that Thurmond’s support for Nixon, in which he assured nervous southerners that Nixon would not employ federal power to enforce civil rights mandates in the region, was crucial to Nixon’s success in that narrowly contested election.

This “southern strategy” was widely discussed in Republican circles at the time, and well-understood to be a rhetorical strategy to appeal to the south’s racial fears. Ronald Reagan’s (in)famous launching of his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in close proximity to the most heinous event to occur in that place, the murder in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan of three young civil rights workers, is clearly indicative. Further evidence comes from the mouth of Lee Atwater himself who in a recorded interview laid bare the political logic at work:  Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy - YouTube. Many histories have been written about the “southern strategy” (see references, below).

By Nixon’s second term the small trickle of party defections from Democrat to Republican that Thurmond had pioneered in 1964 had become a flood, and dozens and dozens of formerly conservative Democrats had by the mid-1970s made the party switch, at both the national and state levels. Jesse Helms is another prominent example, as is Reagan himself. There are scores more. Some old-line party stalwarts, such as James Byrnes, did not make the switch formerly, but as early as the 1950s Byrnes had been fully supporting Republican candidacies at the local and national level, largely for racial reasons. The flood of conservative politicians into the Republican party continued throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Political identity is harder to change for voters than for opportunistic politicians, and voters did not follow these defections in a linear fashion. The victories of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 showed that the traditional party label could in some instances overcome the racial liberalism of the candidate. But over time the “southern strategy” developed into a genuine watershed in American political life, hardening the increasing polarization between the two parties so well in evidence in our day. With a few exceptions, the South has become increasingly aligned behind the Republican party, still “solid” but with different party labels attached. (The particular and vehement animosity directed to both Carter and Clinton helps illustrate these transformations, as both were seen more as traitors to a cause than simple political rivals.)

There is a persistent legend about Senator Thurmond, that late in his career he repudiated the segregationist views to which he had devoted the entirety of his career and embraced a colorblind position. This myth should be buried once and for all. No evidence that Thurmond ever made such a recantation has ever surfaced. He did make certain token appointments to office, and he remained shrewdly effective at constituent service. His supporters allege that such political outreaches constitute evidence of his newly softened views. But in a state whose voting constituency is approximately one-quarter black, these are only the operations of a shrewd political operator and do not constitute an apology for a career spent as a prime agent of systemic racism in America. Indeed, he never uttered a word in such apology. Moreover, Thurmond’s direct political descendants both extended and refined his earlier, cruder segregationist principles. These include Albert Watson, a protege, whose 1970 campaign for governor—strongly supported by the senator—made common cause with school segregationist dead-enders. The political operative Lee Atwater, leading practitioner of the “southern strategy,” was another protege. Thurmond never repudiated any of it.

It is in the context of the “southern strategy” that Thurmond’s most lasting contribution to the politics of segregation are best understood. Thurmond never abandoned the fundamental conviction that racial segregation was a fitting social and political practice. His remarkable consistency on this score helps to illustrate vividly that it was the American political system that had realigned itself in the middle decades of the twentieth century, not Thurmond’s views nor, indeed, the views of many within his constituency.

Thurmond’s political career is a remarkably consistent roadmap to twentieth century American politics. Like so many conservative Democrats in the 30s and 40s, Thurmond welcomed New Deal federal largesse into his state. But he grew alarmed at the potential reach of federal power into the region when the civil rights movement started to win victories in the courts and in the court of public opinion. He was one of the first to leave a liberalizing Democratic party as the Democrats increasingly (though imperfectly) embraced the cause of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. While the old segregationist rhetoric no longer commanded public approval by that time, opponents to the civil rights movement found (and forged) a new language centered on anti-federal power and which stressed local rights, local prerogatives, the defunding of public goods, and the political illegitimacy of those advocating for the other side. Thurmond was a leading agent in this shift and indeed one of its prime architects. Like the segregation for which he always stood, his language moderated itself over time, but his fundamental commitments never wavered.
                 
Select References
Earl Black & Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Harvard, 2002)

Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (LSU Press, 2000)

Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (Hill & Wang, 2012)

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
(Princeton, 2007) (Kruse also has a very accessible and popular series of threads on his Twitter account clearly and deeply explaining the party realignment outlined above: Kevin M. Kruse on Twitter: "The more people talk about my pinned thread of threads as a "mini-course" on modern American political history, the more it bugs me that it's not arranged in chronological order. So, here it is, with threads sorted together by era." / Twitter)

Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (Oxford, 2019).

Also, Maxwell and Shields on the “southern strategy”: The Long Southern Strategy | 2019 - YouTube

​Pat Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (UNC, 1996)

--David J. Snyder