Strom Thurmond is 20 Years Dead And Gone. Here's Why We NEITHER Party Should Forget His Legacy

 

For a man whose life almost completely spanned the twentieth century, who spent almost his entire life in politics and half of it each of our major parties, and for a man who was elected to the Senate more times than any one (his colleague Robert Byrd surpassed him), America has spent the twenty years since he’s died basically wanting Strom Thurmond to go away, with one party using him as a model of everything that was wrong with America and the other trying to pretend he wasn’t part of it.

For the Democrats, that part is understandable (and in a sense, not entirely based in fiction) . During a period when the lion’s share of the Democrats influence was in the South and most of those members of Congress were virulently racist, Strom Thurmond has a place among the most virulent ones. When the Democrats began to move in the direction of Civil Right, he was the Presidential candidate of a Party that utterly represented the desire to stop the clock and if possible turn it back further.  Nor did he moderate his views one bit when he came to the Senate in 1954; he was the one of the most prominent signatories of the Southern Manifesto and his record for the longest filibuster in history was to stop the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 – an act that infuriated even his fellow Southerners.  He spent his career as a Democrat tearing apart even the slightest move to give African-Americans anything resembling equality. Thurmond, like Reagan before him, could argue that he did not leave the Democratic Party, the Party left him – but in Thurmond’s case few could argue that he did so for a truly righteous reason. The Democrats use him as the cautionary tale – the man who rallied behind Goldwater, befriended Nixon and pried votes away from George Wallace in 1968 to give Nixon in the election. This led to the ‘southern strategy’, the conservative takeover the GOP and the end of the Democrat Party’s presence in the South.

The Republicans consider Thurmond one of their own, but don’t want to truly include him as part of the conservative movement.  They will gladly embrace Barry Goldwater as its father, Reagan the man who carried it to fruition and Jesse Helms as the man who made it work in the Senate. Thurmond just seems to have been a bystander. And because the narrative that has been built by conservatives is that it is economic change that led to their movement and that racism had no part in it – even in the South – they would like to pretend that Strom Thurmond had nothing to do with their movement at all, when there’s a very good argument that he was ahead of the curve.

African-American culture has always seen him as the boogeyman of American politics and his hypocrisy became apparent to the world when not long after he died, Essie Washington-Williams held a press conference in which she told the world what was known by many in South Carolina for years – Thurmond was her father and had provided financial support for her and her mother throughout her life. Even those who tried to defend Thurmond for his actions ran into a problem that the media basically overlooked in their eagerness to cover the story  - it is relatively certain that this child was the result of rape.  Slave owners had been raping their female slaves for generations; white men saw no reason to stop doing so to African-Americans merely because of the 13^th Amendment.  Those who think his career could have been ruined because he had a black daughter miss the point as to why he had it in the first place.

I had reason to revisit all of this when I reread Strom Thurmond’s America by Joseph Crespino (2012).  I remember reading it several years ago and being fascinated by the picture of America it took at the time. Given the state of our politics today, it is fascinating to see that Thurmond was never the cautionary tale that the Democrats want to argue he is, nor the Republican who hitched his wagon to the conservative movement but rather a politician who represents to much of what both of our political parties represented – and what they’ve decided to become.

There is a fairly decent argument that Thurmond may have been a Democrat in name only as early as 1944.  Thurmond rise in politics came at the moment when the South was beginning to lose its influence in the Democratic Party. In the 1936 Democratic Convention the ‘two-thirds rule that essentially gave the South the power to choose any nominee for President since 1840 was repealed. ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith walked out of the convention that year because of the mere presence of an African-American preacher.  Two years later, as part of ‘The Purge’ FDR targeted him in a Democratic primary for defeat and failed.

Thurmond enlisted and served valiantly in World War II, winning the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star among numerous other metals. Like so many white Southerners, Thurmond had no problem ignoring the fight for fascism abroad against Jim Crow in the South. If he had been told that the Nazis had modeled their war against Jews on that of Jim Crow, there is little doubt that he would have dismissed it as Communist propaganda.

From the start of Thurmond’s national career being elected governor of South Carolina in 1946, one sees the model of the opportunist, someone who will do anything in order to keep his political future viable regardless of the mood of the majority.  This model, sad to say, has become the de facto methods of so many recent members of Congress of both parties though few have done so with so much pure racism at their heart.

After the 1948 Democratic convention, the first one which endorsed civil rights, the Dixiecrat party was founded in Birmingham. Thurmond was not the first or even second choice of most people at the convention, and the convention itself was disorganized and had almost no major elected officials present, save from a handful from Mississippi. Many conference goers were dressed in Confederate uniforms and some of the most noted racists were in attendance (one man had been kicked out of the KKK for being too extremist) and by the time the afternoon session took place ABC, covering the convention, cut away because the rhetoric was so inflammatory. Thurmond’s speech played to the racism there but then he tried to backtrack. It failed, even across the South.

What is generally forgotten was that so much of the White Southern movement was an attempt to link civil rights to Communism. Thurmond’s campaign coincided with the testimony of Whitaker Chambers before the House. Furthermore, conservative economic forces throughout the South consolidated their anti-New Deal constituency for the first time. Thurmond was more than willing to align with them.

After Thurmond took four states and 39 electoral votes, he returned to South Carolina faced with the fact that Truman was taking the party in a direction they could not go and no other place to go in politics as an exit strategy. Thurmond ran for Senate against Olin Johnston in the Democratic Primary in 1950. He was one of many anti-Truman Democrats running in the South. Thurmond lost. Not long after Thurmond made the acquaintance of Roger Milliken, who would become a key financial contributor to the Republican Party in South Carolina. One of his allies helped organize the South Carolina Democrats for Eisenhower.

For a man who spent nearly half a century in the Senate, two things have long been  forgotten. First his opportunity only came after the Senior Senator dropped dead in the fall of 1954. And second, Thurmond earned his victory in the election because he was then – and still is – the only Senator to win by virtue of a write-in vote. And he won by nearly two-to-one.

The argument that Thurmond was never truly  a Democrat is strengthened that he spent his first term in the Senate basically isolated from the Southern Democrats who were his colleagues.  He was known in his first term as ‘the cactus of the Senate’ and it did not help matters that the last time he voted Democrat would be for FDR in 1944.  And even then he voted with Eisenhower nearly 90 percent of the time.

This had nothing to do with racial politics but his skepticism to labor politics and ‘free enterprise’.  He was the only major Democrat who spent his time curbing unions during his time on the Committee of Labor, Education and Public Welfare.  He spent much of his early career raging against the Warren Court, not just on civil rights but their increasingly liberal record. And he was one of the largest voices in the anti-Communist far right that those members of the Birch society included. Combine that with his embrace of the missile defense system that began as early as 1961 and you can see Thurmond was a Republican in all but name well before he switched parties in 1966.

Those who wish to condemn Thurmond also ignore the fact that by the time he was openly a Republican many Americans were beginning to turn to the points of view he had been publicly espousing for decades as a member of the Democratic party. The racial protests and riots that were going on during the 1960s were leading to a more sympathetic hearing across the country after Goldwater lost in a landslide.  The idea of law and order became a watchword for people in both parties, and it was happening in the North as well as the South. In 1966, one year after the Voting Rights Act was passed, another civil rights bill never made it to the floor of the Senate.  Thurmond didn’t even have to put up a fight to make sure a filibuster was maintained.  By the time he won his first election to the Senate as a Republican, there’s an argument that the party had actually  caught up to him.

And yet what should have been his finest hour – Nixon’s embrace of him leading to his nomination and the Presidency in 1968 – led to conditions that actually hurt Thurmond’s political capital. Much is made of LBJ’s statement after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I think we just handed the South to the Republicans for a long time.” Left out of the fact is that while that happened on a Presidential scale, it was not felt on a Congressional or Senatorial one for a long time.

A lesson about this became very clear in Thurmond’s campaign for Albert Watson for Governor of South Carolina in 1970. Watson was a segregationist Democrat turned conservative Republican. The Democratic governor Robert McNair had a reputation as a progressive Democrat who in 1970 went on television to argue that the state could no longer preserve segregation in the schools.  Watson scoffed at this publicly. On March 3, outside a Lamar high school, two hundred white parents showed up as African-Americans attempted to desegregate the schools.  The mob attacked the buses and turned them over and tried to set them on fire. Law enforcement turned tear gas on the crowd, and the rioters only left before pelting them.

Thurmond chose to blame the rulings on integration and McNair. Thurmond had misread his electorate: the integration of schools took place and in other places the sky hadn’t falling. Watson continued a race baiting campaign a la Thurmond, but he lost to Democrat John West. It was a sign that the campaign of ‘passion, prejudice and polarization’ which had led white supremacy to lead for decades in the South had ended.

And its worth noting this was a trend that continued throughout the south, not merely in 1970 but much of the seventies. That year, Dale Bumpers became governor of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia. During the next three decades, numerous ‘New South Democrats’ managed to win seats in both houses of Congress by moderating their messages. The more the Republicans ran to the right in the South, the more this energized the black voters in the South.  Democrats needed less than a third of the white vote to ensure victory and the heritage of the New Deal appealed to working class whites.  Fritz Hollings won election to the Senate for six terms in South Carolina and he was far from alone in having success: Sam Nunn became a Democratic senator in Georgia, Dale Bumpers in Arkansas, and Bill Clinton soon became governor.  Most Southern Republicans had a hard time beating them. It is worth remember that during the 40 years of Republican dominance in the White House, the only Democratic victories were Southern governors: Carter and Clinton, and in Clinton’s case his running mate was Tennessee Senator Al Gore, another Southern moderate.

Crespino points out something near the end of his book that I imagine many leftists would like to forget in regard to the Voting Rights Act, The reapportionment battles that took place in the 1980s and 1990s were often marked by an alliance of white Republicans – and black Democrats.  They worked together to concentrate the black population in one district to ensure the election of a black representative. This created districts that became ‘whiter’ and more likely to elect Republican candidates. The revolution of voting rights  led to moderate White Democrats being the victims. Since 1965 they had combined black votes with working-class whites to frustrate GOP growth.

Much as the left wants to blame so much of the problems of today’s Congress on the right’s gerrymandering, the fact remains they collaborate to do this as part of an embrace of identity politics.  There seems little sign that they wish to go back from this going forward. Considering how much leftist debate is about the South being irredeemable, it leaves out the fact that this in part because the left has no interest in redeeming. Thurmond, Crespino said, saw the danger in this because he was not in a position to write off the black vote in South Carolina – something conservatives like Helms were.  Neither side was interested in listening to Thurmond at all by that point but the fact remains the Democrats have effectively written off any chance of having elected Senators in many deep South states as a result of writing off the white working-class vote.

 As this election day nears, the governorship of Kentucky and Mississippi are at state. There has been little coverage by major progressive newsletters of any events involving either, even though Kentucky has a Democratic governor and Mississippi’s governor Tate Reeves is in danger in the polls. The strength Democrats show in a statewide race seems to indicate a possibility for Democratic growth there. But that would involve either moderating leftist messaging for white voters, something that many in the Democratic party seem to loathe to do to risk isolating the left that makes up their base.

In recent years, the embrace of identity politics has again and again come at the cost of the white working class voter, something that has hurt the Democrats both on a national and state level. Unlike so many of his fellow conservatives Thurmond could never afford to entirely isolate the African-American vote in South Carolina. Today’s Democrats seem to be just fine with that of identity politics even if it comes at the cost of the white vote and even if they have to effectively write off entire sections of the country.,

In his introduction Crespino makes it clear that the birth of the conservative movement was based not merely on the struggle for white Southerners but disaffected Democrats across the North and West who were in revolt over how liberal social reforms were transforming the racial composition of America. In that sense he argues that men like Thurmond had a Northern strategy  - which he says without saying is the vote of people who are racist. Both sides want to pretend they don’t exist and they don’t court their voters but since the alternative seems to be to not let them vote, are we supposed to be shocked that one side tried to court them? In a section called ‘All Strom’s Children’, Crespino tells the story of several people who followed in Thurmond’s footsteps ideologically. It should come as a shock to no one that one of them is Lee Atwater, who Thurmond helped get his job at the Reagan White House.  Atwater is considered the inventor of the ‘dog whistle’ ads such as those involving Willie Horton during George H.W. Bush run for the Presidency.  Not to excuse Atwater one iota, but he learned what Thurmond did during his later years in South Carolina –  if you can’t say the N-word in your speeches, you can imply in your ads.

Our politics has gone out of its way in the twenty years since Thurmond died to try and pretend he was little more than the elderly grandfather in politics who said racists things that we pretended wasn’t really who our family really was. In that sense both parties want very hard to pretend that his legacy was not part of the political reality. But it is. Much as we want to pretend otherwise there are just as many Thurmonds in America today as there were in 1903, 1948 and 1968. They will never go away because we cannot erase how people think or how people react to any changes in society. That the Democratic Party wants to pretend it can have a long term future without acknowledging the Thurmonds of our world is as foolish as the Republicans wanted to pretend he isn’t a vital part of so much of what they are.

Crespino ends his book with the description of  a statue to Thurmond that stands in Columbia that was dedicated in 1999. I don’t know if it still stands today; I have little doubt there is controversy about it being there and that many want it torn down as if, like with the Confederate monuments that cause such outrage to this day, it’s simple destruction can erase the legacy of Thurmond and what he represents. ‘Changing a monument does not change the past,” Crespino writes, any more than tearing it down would.  We live in Strom Thurmond’s America as much as we live in Ronald Reagan’s or Barack Obama’s or Jimmy Carter’s or Richard Nixon’s. If our country is to find a way forward, we have to find a way to reconcile or at least accept that all of them are part of who we are as a nation and a democracy.