Southern Revolt

(See Cover)

James Strom Thurmond, a Southern politician little known and therefore possibly underrated in the North, made a sortie last week into political no-man's land. Appearing in Baltimore, in the border state of Maryland, he was met by a college student dressed in the full regalia of a Confederate brigadier and a mildly interested audience. Standing just over on his side of the Mason-Dixon line, the governor of South Carolina sounded his defiance of the "No'th."

"Those who follow the banners of the States' Rights Democrats," he cried, "are determined that the evil forces which have seized control of the national party shall be cast out. The tides of that great party will flow like muddy water over the sands and rocks and be purified. The impurities of that party--Harry Truman and all his followers--will be deposited like sediment on the banks."

There was every likelihood that J. Strom Thurmond would be an even smaller deposit of sediment than Harry Truman. As the Dixiecrats' candidate for President, he did not stand a chance in the world. He might capture as many as 50 electoral votes--next to Bull Mooser Theodore Roosevelt's 88 in 1912, the biggest block ever won by a third-party candidate. He was the result of Harry Truman's political courage--or lack of political acumen. His appearance had marked the collapse of the compromises which had held the Democratic Party together for 16 years.

Symptom rather than symbol of the South's revolt, Strom Thurmond was the South's spokesman for an old, still smoldering issue. Thanks to Harry Truman, that issue had erupted again and was splitting the Solid South. The issue was black v. white.

The "Fo'ce Bills." Candidate Thurmond would never admit that the issue could be put in such black & white terms. He draped his case in the dialectics of states' rights. In his harsh, flat voice he denied the authority of Washington to interfere with the South's pattern of behavior. These were the "fo'ce bills" which he denounced:

An anti-poll tax law: "It would take from you the right to regulate your own elections."

An anti-lynching law: "It would provide the opening wedge for federal control of your police powers."

An anti-segregation law: "When will they learn, as the South has learned, that you cannot legislate racial harmony?"

An FEPC law: "It would force all business and business relationships into a Washington pattern guided and enforced by a federal Gestapo."

But if it was states' rights that Thurmond was battling for, what was the theoretical difference between him and a lot of Northern U.S. citizens who were equally apprehensive of Big Government? The main front of the Dixiecrats, indeed, was a Southern upper crust of mill owners, oil men, tobacco growers, bankers, lawyers, who might have felt more comfortable voting Republican. Would the Dixiecrat party be a kind of political decompression chamber for conservative Southerners, on their way to the Republican party? No; for Tom Dewey also advocated civil rights for the Negro. The Southerners wore their states' rights with a significant difference.

No decent citizens in the South condoned the night rides, the fiery crosses and the lynch mobs. No one but a fool condoned them. But what about the Negro's right to an education, a job? As far as Strom Thurmond was concerned, he would not deny the Negro the right to an education and a job. Thurmond had to accept a federal judge's decision that the Negro had a right to vote; 35,000 voted in the South Carolina primaries this year. The so-called Southern "liberal" went further: he would and did encourage the Negro to better education, to enfranchisement as a self-respecting citizen.

But what about segregation, which was also a denial of rights? Segregation was not peculiar to the South--it was simply more universally enforced there. In the North, not only in the eyes of hotel owners and real estate dealers, but in the eyes of the vast majority of people, the Negro was still a second-class citizen. Those whites who considered the Negro their social equal were a minute exception to the general rule. As a Southern Regional Council report recently pointed out: "The South certainly has no monopoly on prejudice and discrimination." But, added the report, this is no excuse for the South. It is no good for the South simply to say: "You are as guilty as we are; therefore leave us alone in our guilt."

Because of the Negro, guilt haunts the whole U.S., South and North. But the North's guilt is glossed over by the hypocritical assumption that it has "solved" the Negro problem--in principle and on paper. Behind the South's gloss of "states' rights" is defiance and fear.

Beyond a certain point, the Southerner will not or cannot give a reasonable answer to the Negro problem. It is not, he feels, a reasonable problem. And it was not a problem that he brought on himself. It is his business to live with it, but it is no more capable of overnight solution than any other vexation he inherited. This sense of irrational frustration reduces most Southerners to the flat statements of defiance with which they commonly respond when a Northerner--especially a Northern "liberal"--attacks them on the subject.

On his part, the Northerner--and not just the Northern "liberal"--often finds this Southern attitude baffling, incoherent or plain infuriating.

The Line Drawn. The Southerner talks about his personal solicitude for the Negro, but to the Northerner it seems much closer to the solicitude of the master for his slave than to the friendliness of neighbor toward neighbor. What most Southerners seem to deny the Negro is human dignity, even in such small ways as refusing to call them "Mr." or "Mrs." "You've got to keep niggers in their place," they say.

Said Douglas Southall Freeman, the noted Southern historian: "There were two abolitionist movements, the Civil War movement and Mrs. Roosevelt's movement to abolish segregation. The South is too much influenced in its treatment of the dividual Negro by the ignorance of the mass But the North is too much misled the ability of a few conspicuous Negroes. Mrs. Roosevelt has been hopelessly misled because she has seen only the best. The South is going to keep the line drawn between civil rights and social privilege. Civil rights should be recognized; social privilege is a matter of individuals. The South is going to keep that line drawn and that's all there is to it."

Wrote Geoffrey Gorer, British anthropologist and journalist, in the Georgia Review: "They are haunted by fear of rape; but though this is mostly envisaged in the crudest physical shape, it is probably a second spiritual violation which they dread even more. Terrified of being overwhelmed by violence, they use violence and the threat of violence to avert this disaster."

That was why the voice of Strom Thurmond, with its counterfeit arguments for states' rights, and the voice of his cousin, Georgia's "Hummon" Talmadge, with its white demagoguery, were listened to and generally, if not unanimously, applauded in the Southland. These were the voices of the apologists and the defenders.

Measure of Emotions. Thurmond claimed that he might win as many as 140 electoral votes. This was grossly exaggerated and he knew it. By the best expert reckoning, he would not get North Carolina, which was cool to all the candidates and coolest to a third-party candidate. He would not get Arkansas, although he might have enough strength there to spoil an outside chance for Dewey. He would not win Florida, Kentucky or Virginia, but he might get just enough there to give those states to Dewey. He was a fair bet to win Georgia and Louisiana, a very good bet to win Alabama, and a sure thing in his own state and in Mississippi. The popular vote which he polled would be a partial measure of the South's emotions and a measure of the extent of the Southern political revolt.

That revolt could be dated roughly from October 1947, when President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights dropped a match into the dry and prickly underbrush of Southern pride and fear. Franklin Roosevelt had always been careful to keep any such brush fires from spreading. He had imposed FEPC in 1941 by executive order, as a temporary wartime measure, which had angered the South. The South had flared up over Mrs. Roosevelt's well-meaning efforts on behalf of the Negro. But F.D.R., who did more to impose federal authority on the states than any man since Lincoln, had known how to mollify Southern politicians. His portrait hangs in Strom Thurmond's office alongside a blank space where Harry Truman's portrait once hung.

The Civil Rights Committee flatly recommended outlawing the anti-Negro practices of the South. Such fiery Southerners as Fielding Lewis Wright, governor of Mississippi, forthwith raised the cry of secession--from the Democratic Party, not the nation. When President Truman urged Congress to enact his committee's recommendations into law, the outcry could be heard from Charleston to Little Rock.

The Crossfire. Privately, publicly, in conventions, by petition, by resolution, Southerners shouted at one another that, as Fielding Wright had said, the time had sure come to bolt. The difficulty was that, politically, the South had no place to go.' Was there no way out of this dilemma? Southern governors, meeting at Tallahassee, passed a resolution urging Harry Truman to back up.

Harry Truman, son of a Confederate father, might have found some way out. But by now he was caught in a crossfire. Northern labor leaders and old New Dealers, whooping for disciplinary action against the unreconstructed South, and fishing for liberal and Negro votes, seized control of the Democratic Convention at Philadelphia and rammed the President's civil-rights recommendations into the party platform. That did it. Harry Truman was stuck with his civil rights and the South was stuck with its revolt.

Strom Thurmond had not been an original, out & out advocate of bolting. At Philadelphia he had supported the nomination of Georgia's Senator Richard Russell as a way of registering a protest without walking out. But in the end he decided that the State's Rights Party was the best thing for him. South Carolina was a hot center of revolt and Thurmond had his eye on the Senate seat of Olin D. Johnston for 1950. He probably had more to gain than to lose by running as the rebels' candidate for President. He was picked because he was the most willing and eager. Fielding Wright, 53-year-old lawyer, who is as smooth and cold as a hardboiled egg --and whose home town of Rolling Fork, Miss., has more Negroes than whites--was glad to run as the vice presidential candidate.

The Runner. Strom Thurmond has been running for something all his life. At first he ran for exercise, trotting around his father's farm in Edgefield, S.C., 54 miles from Columbia. When he went to Clemson Agricultural College he ran on the college cross-country team. He was a determined student who overcame a speech impediment by reading slowly for an hour every afternoon to a patient professor. Once his classmates threw him into the swimming pool for trying to shine up too much to the faculty. After graduation he taught school and began running for political offices. He became county superintendent of education, state senator, county judge.

Strom Thurmond's Southern politics was bred in his bones. His grandfather, George Washington Thurmond, a corporal with Lee, had trudged home from Appomattox to find Columbia in the ruins left by Sherman's march. Eighty-four of Columbia's 124 blocks had been gutted by fire. Some 1,400 buildings had been destroyed.

A Candidate's Roots. Grandpa Thurmond had known the poverty of the post-bellum South and the bitterness of the days when the Carpetbaggers swarmed in. South Carolina's legislature had been packed and dominated by illiterate and bewildered Negroes. Grandpa Thurmond and his neighbors had heard the voice of Pennsylvania's sadistic Thaddeus Stevens thundering out the need for holding the South "as a conquered people," for forcing the South to "eat the fruit of foul rebellion."

Grandpa Thurmond's son John saw the South meet violence with violence. John studied law and hitched his star to "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman,* South Carolina's demagogic Governor and Senator. Ben Tillman had a short answer for the Negro problem. He told the U.S. Senate: "We shot them. We are not ashamed of it ... We will not submit to Negro domination under any conditions that you may prescribe."

John Thurmond became Tillman's attorney and boss of Edgefield County. One day, when a drummer for a drug company used "hot language" about John being a Tillmanite and threatened John with a knife, John shot him dead. The jury's verdict: not guilty of murder.

John's wife was a charter member of the W.C.T.U., and a leader in the First Baptist Church of Edgefield. On the small farm which John bought to supplement his modest earnings as an attorney, they brought up three sons and three daughters. James Strom Thurmond was the next to eldest.

Dictation from the Governor. The war interrupted Strom's political career. He had had an outstanding but not distinguished record as a judge: the state supreme court reversed a higher percentage of his decisions than those of any other judge. But his record in the war was one to point to with pride. He volunteered, served with the 82nd Airborne Division, landed in a glider in Normandy, won a chestful of decorations for gallantry, transferred to the Pacific and came home a lieutenant colonel. He spun through a gubernatorial campaign against ten opponents like a maverick planetoid, and became the tenth South Carolinian governor from Edgefield County.

Strom, then 44, and catching his breath for the moment, had time for other matters, particularly pretty Jean Crouch, 21-year-old daughter of an old family friend. He appointed her "Miss South Carolina," to preside over Charleston's Azalea Festival; he brought her to the mansion to serve as his personal secretary. One day he dictated to her: "My darling Jean . . . Loving you as much as I do ... I want you to be my wife without too much delay . . ." She retired to the next room and typed out her acceptance.

Life at the Executive Mansion is bustling and informal. While the governor is running for President, everyone else is running for Thurmond. To get him to engagements, State Police Sergeant Huss Fennell drives him around at 80 m.p.h.

His wife, whom he calls "Sugar," almost always goes with him. Both Strom and Sugar are Baptists, teetotalers and nonsmokers. The virile governor keeps himself in trim by riding, walking, and standing on his head (see cut).

A Changing World. After November, what about the Dixiecrats? The chances are that they will disappear as a political entity. Having made their protest under the most dramatic circumstances possible --a presidential election--their well-to-do but amateur backers will probably return to their businesses. It is doubtful whether there are enough politicians in the party to keep it going after that. The chances are that the Dixiecrats will once again become indistinguishable from regular Southern Democrats. With the Northern Democrats out of power in Washington, the authority against which the Dixiecrats revolted will have been removed. All hands can unite once again against the common enemy--the Republicans.

A shift of forces within the Democratic Party, however, might change that. If the leaders of organized labor and the Northern liberals who asserted themselves at Philadelphia should capture the Democratic Party in its defeat and guide its policies, then the South's revolt, instead of subsiding to a smolder, might flare out again and this time bring about a permanent political realignment.

Whatever happens to the Dixiecrats, the emotions which produced them will still be there. In his flattest, harshest public utterance to date, and in an arrant distortion of the meaning of Truman's civil-rights bill, Strom Thurmond cried: "There's not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.'"

But politics, especially demagogic politics, is a symptom of social forces, not their cause. The Dixiecrats might dry up and blow away; but "states' rights" (the Negro problem) will remain as the fundamental problem of the South. No solution will be found until the South climbs back from the poverty in which the Civil War left it and finds the solution for itself. Said the Southern Regional Council: "Most of those who have spoken for the South have not spoken wisely. They have blinded themselves to a changing world that will no longer be content with old ways . . . [But] as anyone knows, the denial of human rights in the region goes hand in hand with poverty and backwardness."

The Negro was still a problem, a challenge to North and South alike. No new behavior pattern could be forced on the South overnight by federal fiat. The sick South needed health; the North needed wisdom.

*He was always talking about using pitchforks on his enemies. He even threatened to pitchfork President Cleveland, that "old bag of beef . . . in his old fat ribs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.