Ol' Strom has a successor in 'Ol Trent

Ol' Strom has a successor in 'Ol Trent
By: Bill Minor, Capitol Correspondent
12/12/2002

Mississippi's vote in 1948 presidential election was nothing about which to boast.

JACKSON - Well, Strom Thurmond has turned 100, the oldest guy to ever sit in the United States Senate.

My, it doesn't seem that long ago when I heard a South Carolina Democratic governor named J. Strom Thurmond make a fire-eating states' rights speech lathered with white supremacy here in Jackson's old City Auditorium.

It was May 10, 1948. A crowd of 2,000 like-minded rebellious Southern Democrats whooped and hollered. Billed as a Southwide rally of states' rights Democrats, it became the starting point of the historic Dixiecrat break with the National Democratic Party.

Though later years those connected with the Dixiecrat movement, including Thurmond, would contend it was about the constitutional question of states' rights and not about race, they conveniently forget the racist rhetoric they used back then to rally the troops.

Thurmond in 1948: "I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

As history records, all-white delegations or parts of delegations from several Southern states, led by Mississippi's Gov. Fielding L. Wright, walked out of the National Democratic Convention at Philadelphia, Penn., in July 1948 when the convention adopted a pro-civil rights platform plank.

Thurmond's South Carolina delegation was not among them. Their reason, says South Carolina historian Jack Bass, was that either of two challenging delegations, one mostly black, was ready to move into the delegation's seats.

Less than a week after leaving Philadelphia, several thousand Mississippi-led states' righters from a half-dozen Dixie states convened in a Confederate flag-waving rump convention at Birmingham to nominate their own presidential ticket aimed at blocking the re-election of President Harry Truman.

The mild-mannered and gracious Wright had let two of us reporters from Jackson who covered his administration hang out in his hotel suite - something that would be unthinkable these days - and hear some of the horse trading that went on.

Practically every Southern state official on hand wanted Mississippi's Wright to head the ticket. But he modestly declined the top spot, though agreeing to become the vice-presidential nominee.

The ticket-makers next turned to Gov. Ben Laney of Arkansas for the top spot. But Laney, after listening to some of the bellicose rhetoric being hurled by speakers at the convention, packed his bags and went home to pledge himself for Harry Truman.

Thurmond, who had shown up at Birmingham to lend his backing to Wright and Laney, suddenly became the only available governor to take the top slot, and he promptly accepted it with gusto.

The Thurmond-Wright ticket, despite the best-laid and ballyhooed plans of the bolt architects to garner enough Southwide votes in the electoral college to block Truman's re-election, won only four Dixie states - Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina - far short of jamming the electoral machinery.

More than a half-century later, it seems incomprehensible that the same Strom Thurmond who ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 as a thundering white supremacist, is the U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, who now is stepping down at age 100 as a patron saint of the Republican Party.

Ol' Strom, they call him in South Carolina, in the early 1960s switched to the GOP. More importantly, he is identified as the key player in Richard Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," that eventually lured most of the once-solidly Democratic South into the GOP column.

Long ago, Thurmond set about to repair his former segregationist image by becoming the first member of the South Carolina delegation in Congress to hire a black staffer and later the first Deep South senator to nominate a black for the federal bench.

As several authors have written in their assessments of Thurmond's rather phenomenal career, rather than make an admission or apology to blacks for his past sins, Ol' Strom simply reshaped his political outlook to conform to the realities of a new electorate in his state.

Still, the most uncouth remark to come out of the occasion of Strom's 100th birthday party last week on Capitol Hill came from Mississippi's own Republican Sen. Trent Lott, soon to be the Senate majority leader.

Boasting that when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948, "We (Mississippi) voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we (the U.S.) wouldn't have had all these problems over all the years, either."

Was our Trent just kidding? That's how one right-wing talking head on TV dusted off the episode.

Mississippi voted 85 percent for Dixiecrat Thurmond in 1948 and only 15 percent for President Truman. However, not one black Mississippian was able to vote in that election. Zilch. Zero.

Is such a record of invidious discrimination against the African-American population of Mississippi (then higher percentage-wise than it is now) anything to kid about?

Strom is history. But Trent is still very much a prime-time actor on the national stage and carries a heavier burden to do penance for insouciant remarks.

That wasn't the only Trent transgression of the past week. He also violated a long-standing courtesy code of the Senate that one member will not invade another state to campaign against a fellow senator.

Lott joined the other Republican heavyweights, including George Bush, who swooped into Louisiana in an all-out drive to unseat Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.

However, the moderate Landrieu whipped the whole army of GOP invaders, Lott included. In the least, Trent needn't expect an invitation to next year's Louisiana Mardi Gras ball in Washington.