Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 97)

on political books servatives on the one hand and big business, the Christian right, and anticommunism on the other. Crespino, a history professor at Emory University, presents the right blend of narrative, scholarly analysis, and restrained outrage, reminding readers that Thurmond cared about far more than segregation. In 1957 the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action gave him the lowest score of any Democrat in the Senate: a zero. As Crespino writes, “Thurmond was the first southerner in the postwar period to bring together on a regional scale the visceral politics of white supremacy with southern business and industrial opposition to the New Deal.” Thurmond sat on the board of trustees of Bob Jones University, loathed communists, and never met a weapons program he didn’t like. As South Carolina’s governor from 1947 to 1951, he developed a talent for attracting companies to his state, trading his early pro-labor bona fides for reflexive hostility to unions. In 1962, the Kennedy administration incensed him by “muzzling” military leaders who had forced their troops to read material from the John Birch Society and other far-right groups. During a series of Senate hearings, Thurmond snarled invective in a high-pitched voice that merged the grievance of Dixie with the paranoia of Joseph McCarthy. Two figures prompted Thurmond’s switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party, a move that reflected a fundamental realignment of American politics. The first was Harry Truman, and the second was Barry Goldwater. Thurmond and other southern Democrats broke with Truman in 1948 after the president issued executive orders desegregating the armed services and the federal workforce. A career grandstander, Thurmond seized the opportunity to grab the limelight by leading an informal association of southern Democratic governors and then becoming their impromptu presidential candidate in 1948. He won four southern states in the electoral college and made a national name for himself. Although he returned to the Democrats and remained with the party for sixteen years, its leaders never trust- stemmed from different places (racism ed him again. for Thurmond; libertarianism for GoldAfter winning election to the Senate water), the result was the same. Thurin 1956, Thurmond became one of the mond’s entrance into the party horriSouth’s most aggressive opponents of fied moderate northern Republicans court-ordered desegregation. Invoking like George Romney and Nelson Rockevarious Confederate rallying points, he feller, and pushed the party’s platform declared “total and unremitting war on to the right. At the time, Goldwater was the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional unapologetic: he said he was merely usurpations and unlawful arrogations “hunting where the ducks are.” Yet later of power,” denouncing the Court’s “false he had second thoughts. He awkwardly and vicious ideology.” An outrageous declined to write a foreword for Thurdemagogue, Thurmond called civil rights mond’s 1968 book, The Faith We Have Not legislation “involuntary servitude” for Kept, citing Thurmond’s enduring hoswhites, and subjected Thurgood Mar- tility to the Brown decision. shall to the equivalent of a literacy test The party switch reflected the shiftduring his Supreme Court confirmation ing allegiances of southern whites, but hearings by quizzing him on arcane sub- also revealed Thurmond’s expedient jects as a means of embarrassment. Yet Thurmond coyly protested his innocence when racial violence ensued, as it did in his home state when a mob of white residents in Lamar attacked school buses ca r r y ing bl ac k children. As the Washington Post observed, Thurmond and his fellow travelers “have been playing with matches in public for some time now, and yet they want us to know immediately and for the record that if side. Facing the prospect of a Demothere is one thing they deplore it’s fire.” cratic primary challenge in 1966, Thurmond realized that years of infidelity arry Goldwater lured Strom Thur- to his party might finally cost him his mond to the Republican Party like a Senate seat. And if he stayed Democratrancher sweet-talking a mustang. Aware ic and won, party leaders might punish that the party needed southern white him for supporting Goldwater by stripvoters in order to take back the pres- ping him of his committee assignments. idency in 1964, Goldwater told South Despite his carefully cultivated image as Carolina audiences that he wished there the last southern man, all backbone and were more Thurmonds in Washington— principle, Thurmond throughout his cathis while Thurmond was still nominally reer sold out in spectacular moments of a Democrat. Thurmond made the break cravenness. His calculated decision to in September 1964, dramatically declar- back Nixon over George Wallace in 1968 ing himself a “Goldwater Republican” was another of those moments. Thurand tirelessly campaigning for the Ari- mond archly defended the move based zona senator. Goldwater and Thurmond on fidelity to his party. In truth, he figfound common cause in right-wing ured Wallace for an also-ran from the anticommunism—Goldwater too partic- beginning, and recognized that an alliipated in the Senate muzzling hearings— ance with Nixon meant real proximity and if their opposition to desegregation to power. The existence and extent of an Aware of the changing racial attitudes, Thurmond ostentatiously accompanied his daughter to her first day at an integrated public school—only to move her to a private school in Virginia once he was safely reelected in 1978. B Washington Monthly 97

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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