![]() After Thurmond’s retirement, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott said, “ When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. Governor Thurmond became a Democratic Senator, but switched to the Republican Party in protest against the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected the rights of African-Americans to vote and have equal access to schools. Strom Thurmond is such an interesting part of the story that he deserves a paragraph of his own. The Dixiecrats rejoined the Democratic party (at least temporarily). However, in the end, the Dixiecrats only carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and Truman eked out a surprise victory against Republican Governor Thomas Dewey. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President on a platform of segregationism and states’ rights.Īlthough no one expected Thurmond to win the Presidency, the loss of support from these former Democrats seemed to doom Truman’s candidacy. Thirty-five Southern delegates to the convention walked out in protest, and the “Dixiecrats” were born: they nominated Gov. (This was as controversial at the time as repealing the ban on gays in the military would later be.) That same year, the Democratic National Convention nominated Truman as their Presidential candidate, on a platform that included a call for greater civil rights. In 1948, he ordered that the US military be desegregated. Vice President Harry Truman succeeded to the Presidency upon the death of FDR in 1945, and began to lead the Democratic party in a new direction on racial issues. However, when she annoys me, I sometimes threaten to sign her up behind her back.) She has made quite clear that, like Eleanor Roosevelt, she has no interest in being associated with the DAR. (My daughter is entitled to membership in the DAR through her mother’s side. Eleanor also resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow Marian Anderson, an African-American singer, to perform in one of their halls. She repeatedly tried to get FDR to support an anti-lynching bill in Congress, but he declined for fear of alienating Southern senators. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was no more progressive on race than were earlier Democrats, but his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was. In addition, Bryan supported openly racist political candidates, and, like Trump, earned the strong support of white supremacist groups like the KKK.Ĭracks began to show in the Solid South, though, as the mainstream Democratic party gradually adopted a more progressive attitude on race. Bryan famously opposed evolutionary theory, taking the stand for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial, where he was skewered by Clarence Darrow. The early Democratic party’s racism was combined with anti-intellectualism. William Jennings Bryan was the (unsuccessful) Democratic candidate for President three times, and later became Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State. Whether one agrees with the Princeton students who are pushing to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from buildings and facilities, the undeniable fact is that as President he openly supported segregation. (African-Americans were also largely Republican voters during this time, at least when they were allowed to vote: Jim Crow Laws and physical intimidation disenfranchised many African-American voters in the South.) For almost a century after Reconstruction, the Democratic party had a history of very ugly racism. For almost a century after the Civil War, the former Confederate States were “the Solid South” of the Democratic party, largely because Lincoln was a Republican. are the unfortunate outcome of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy,” which was strategically clever in the short term but turned out tragically for the party. ![]() What went wrong with the GOP? And what surprising implications does this have for the future of the Democratic party? Senate“), and of course Trump (“ You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass“). Now it is the party of Rubio (“ We need more welders and less philosophers“), Cruz (“ We need 100 more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. The Republican Party was formerly the party of thoughtful intellectuals like Lincoln (who loved to cite the ancient classic of geometry, Euclid’s Elements, in his speeches), Teddy Roosevelt (Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude graduate of Harvard), Hoover ( who translated the Renaissance work of metallurgy De Re Metallica out of Latin), Eisenhower (graduate of West Point, war hero, and President of Columbia University), Nixon (who hired Harvard professor Henry Kissinger as his National Security Advisor, and took the courageous and strategically brilliant step of renormalizing relations with mainland China), and George H.W.
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