Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change. New York: Simon and Schuster, Frederickson, Kari. Garson, Robert A. The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism,. In this Texas case, the Court ruled the white primary law violated the Fifteenth Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.
The states of the Upper South acquiesced in the ruling, but the decision was a political bombshell in the Deep South. White legislators across the region sought ways to circumvent the ruling, and African Americans organized voter-registration campaigns. Across the South, more than a half million African Americans registered to vote in the Democratic Party primaries. Donald Comer The Dixiecrat movement was strongest in southern states with large African American populations. In Alabama , the upheaval over Truman's civil rights proposals to repeal the poll tax, enforce job antidiscrimination laws, and make lynching a federal crime represented the latest reaction in a power struggle between the agricultural interests in the state's Black Belt region and industrial conservatives and the New Deal liberals that had been going on since the s and would continue into the next decade.
The titular head of Alabama's states'-rights forces was former governor Frank Dixon. Smyer, a corporate lawyer from Birmingham and former lobbyist for the Associated Industries of Alabama; and textile magnate Donald Comer. Gessner T. McCorvey Uninterested in creating a new party from the grassroots, the Dixiecrats counted on their ability to control party machinery and to hijack the state Democratic Party.
Chairman McCorvey turned Alabama's early May primary into a states'-rights referendum. In addition to voting for candidates for local and state offices, voters also chose the state's presidential electors and delegates to the upcoming July national convention. When the Democratic National Convention of voted for a stronger civil rights platform than even Truman supported, disgruntled southerners bolted. They reconvened in Birmingham, Ala.
Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright for vice president. Citing southern tradition, the Dixiecrats combined a belief in decentralized government with a passionate defense of their racially hierarchical, segregated society. The Dixiecrats gained a following of varying sizes in each of the former Confederate states, carrying South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana in the presidential election. In North Carolina, however, the Dixiecrat campaign failed to generate much enthusiasm for two reasons.
First, the powerful Raleigh News and Observer doggedly and vociferously opposed the Dixiecrats, describing their leaders on one occasion as possessing "an arrogance that has been rivaled only by their stupidity. Judging from the apparent lack of participation by North Carolinians in the Dixiecrat conventions in Birmingham and Houston, it seems that the News and Observer was largely correct.
At the Birmingham convention, reference to North Carolina came in the form of a Texas state senator castigating the liberal "pinks" in Chapel Hill. A second explanation for the failure of the Dixiecrats in North Carolina was dissension within the state party ranks. Lacking a full roster of candidates for state offices, North Carolina Dixiecrats awkwardly supported regular party Democrats for local election while still opposing Truman at the national level.
Whether arguing for or against the Dixiecrats, North Carolinians revealed the intimate connection white southerners made between issues of governance and race in the midtwentieth century. The Asheville Citizen criticized the Dixiecrats' third-party efforts as futile, yet at the same time it pronounced the national Democratic Party's support of civil rights the result of "the whipsawing of extremists" in the North.
Although the Citizen recommended avoiding the "hot-headed leaders" of the Dixiecrats, it chided national Democrats for forcing on the South a civil rights position that many whites found repugnant. The rise of the Dixiecrat Party, like that of the Tea Party sixty years later, was ostensibly the result of one faction within a political party coming to believe its policy interests had been neglected. But on a more fundamental level, it was the product of demographic changes in national politics.
The rebel Democrats wrote a defiant advocacy of racial segregation into their platform precisely because the national Democratic Party understood that its future lay with Northern black voters. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is remembered today for guiding the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War, but his greatest political achievement may have been holding together the irreconcilable Northern and Southern elements of the Democratic Party for as long as he did.
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