Dixiecrat

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States' Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats)
Founder(s) Strom Thurmond (Presidential nominee)
Founded 1948
Disbanded 1948 (though Dixiecrats remained an active political faction within Democratic Party)
Political ideology State's rights, Conservatism, Populism, Racial segregation

The States' Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat Party for short) was a segregationist, populist, socially conservative splinter party of the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century who were determined to protect what they saw as the Southern way of life against an oppressive federal government.[1]

During Reconstruction, the Republican Party used the Union Army to occupy the South and forcibly reengineer Southern society according to northern interests. In response, conservative Southerners ended military occupation and restored the Southern politico-economic position, making a solidly Democratic South.

During the 1930s the Democratic Party began to drift toward social engineering and the Southern Democrats remained an anchor to traditional Democratic policies of localized populism and progressivism. At the beginning of the Cold War, the National Democratic Leadership embraced a more centralized, socialized, secularized, and multicultural program. This was seen as a return to the tyranny of Reconstruction and many Southern Democrats began to drift from the National Party. As a result they became termed Dixiecrats.

The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a splinter (or offshoot) from the party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. For more than a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but in 1948 many bolted from the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States.

Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage. For example, it was used to refer to those members of the Electoral College who voted for Harry F. Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960, and to the white Southern voters and electors who supported George C. Wallace in 1968.

Contents

[edit] 1948 presidential election

See also main article, U.S. presidential election, 1948

The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The States' Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party's slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party were often known as Dixiecrats.

During the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. Minneapolis, Minnesota Mayor Hubert Humphrey gave a speech urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank, causing thirty five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama to walk out. When President Truman endorsed the civil rights plank, governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights.

The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and governor of Mississippi Fielding L. Wright for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the official Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Benjamin Travis Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him in the 1950 governatorial election, but McMath won the position handily.

Efforts by Dixiecrats to paint Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates. Among these moderates was Rep. Brooks Hays of the 2nd District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus. Faubus had notoriously used the National Guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a Federal court order.

Image:ElectoralCollege1948-Large.png
1948 electoral votes by state. The Dixiecrats carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received one additional electoral vote in Tennessee. The blue–red color scheme is opposite that adopted for more recent elections.

On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and thirty nine electoral votes. Although he did not carry any states, Henry A. Wallace drew off a nearly equal number of popular votes (1,157,172) from the Democrats' left wing. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman was able to narrowly win election.

[edit] Subsequent elections

The States' Rights Democratic Party dissolved after the 1948 election. The South still remained a strongly Democratic voting bloc for local, state, and Congressional elections. However, this was not true of Presidential elections.

[edit] 1960 Election

In 1960, instead of being pledged to Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, Democratic electors in Alabama and Mississippi appeared on the ballot as "unpledged electors." All eight of Mississippi's electors, six of Alabama's eleven electors, and one stray elector from Oklahoma (a state carried by Richard Nixon) cast their votes for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. Alabama's remaining five electors voted for Kennedy.

[edit] 1968 Election

[edit] American Independent Party

In 1968, former Alabama governor George C. Wallace ran for President on the American Independent Party ticket, and swept the electoral votes of the Deep South. However, the American Independent Party failed to keep its foothold in the South. Its 1972 candidate was John G. Schmitz, a John Bircher from California, whose strongest showing in the election was 10% in Idaho, but he did poorly in the South. Subsequent southern Dixiecrats running on the American Independent Party ticket included Lester Maddox and John Rarick, but these campaigns did not succeed either.

[edit] Southern Strategy

In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party and it did. When the Democrats pushed for civil rights, the Republicans reaped the political benefits of a Southern white backlash. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

Senator Strom Thurmond switched parties and became a Republican as a result of his support for the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. Jesse Helms also switched his party registration to Republican in 1970 and won a Senate seat in North Carolina in 1972. Phil Gramm of Texas, at the time a member of the House of Representatives, switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1983. Several other Southern senators, such as Richard Russell, Jr. of Georgia and James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi remained in the Democratic Party. They went on to become prominent senators who served multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority and put them in positions of power and prestige.

Into the late 20th century, the South changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. This change, which became quite evident in 1972 with the electoral success of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", peaked with the elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George Bush in 1988. It was consolidated in 1994 when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

[edit] Notable members

[edit] Senators

[edit] State governors

[edit] Others

  • Floyd Spence state representative from South Carolina
  • Albert Watson while U.S. Representative from South Carolina
  • Walter Sillers JR, Mississippi Speaker of the House
  • Harvey T. Ross, Mississippi State Legislature
  • Thomas P. Brady, Associate Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court
  • Gessner T. McCorvey, Alabama state Democratic Executive Committee Chairman
  • Leander Perez, Parish Judge in St. Bernard Parish and political boss of the parish.
  • Horace C. Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney defender of the Klan and political "leader"
  • Ross Lillard
  • Tommy Irvin, Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture since 1972
  • John Kasper
  • Mrs. Anna B. Korn
  • Mrs. Ruth Lackey
  • Clark Hurd
  • William E. Jenner
  • Francis Haskell
  • John Oliver Emmerich, Speech writer
  • Hugh Roy Cullen

- NOTE: check state legislature history for name and/or association.

  • T. Coleman Andrews
  • John Steel Baston
  • Dr. Frazier
  • O. L. Penny
  • Clifton Ratlift
  • M. F. Ray
  • Howell Tankerbell
  • Thomas Jefferson Tubb
  • J.K. Wells
  • Barney Wolverton
  • Governor White
  • Thomas H. Werdel

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ See description in Inside USA Gunther, J ( London, Hamish Hamilton 1947) pp 675-678

[edit] External links

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