Dixiecrat

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The Dixiecrats were a splinter-party of the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century who were determined to protect what they saw as the southern way of life against an oppressive United States federal government.

The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a splinter from the party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election: for over a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but that year many bolted the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States. The emergence of the solid Democratic South followed the end of Reconstruction Period when the then Republicans used the post-Civil War period to help African-Americans emerge from slavery and secure their political and voting rights. When white Southerners reclaimed political control in the late 1800s with the aid of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the lynching of black activists, the region gave its political allegiance to the then Democratic Party.

Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly re-aligned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage, including, for example, with reference to the members of the Electoral College who in the election of 1960 voted for Harry Flood Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy, or the white Southern voters and electors who in 1968 supported George C. Wallace.

The term has also been used to refer to conservative white Southerners who remain within the Democratic Party, and those who were formerly Democrats but now identify as Republicans.

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[edit] 1948 presidential election

1948 electoral votes by state. The Dixiecrats carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received one additional electoral vote in Tennessee. The blue–red color scheme is opposite that adopted for the 2000 election.
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1948 electoral votes by state. The Dixiecrats carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received one additional electoral vote in Tennessee. The blue–red color scheme is opposite that adopted for the 2000 election.
See also main article, U.S. presidential election, 1948

The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The States' Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party were often known as Dixiecrats.

The party was formed after thirty-five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank in the platform, which it did. Even before the convention started, the Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces.

After President Truman's endorsement of the civil rights plank, Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the official Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Ben Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him during his 1950 re-election bid which McMath won handily. Efforts to paint other Truman loyalists as turncoats generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates. Among these moderates was Rep. Brooks Hays of the 2nd District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus, who had used the National Guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a federal court order.

On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. Henry Wallace drew off a nearly equal number of popular votes (1,157,172) from the Democrats' left wing, although he did not carry any states. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman was able to narrowly win reelection.

[edit] Subsequent elections

The States' Rights Democratic Party dissolved after the 1948 election.

Regardless of the power struggle within the Democratic Party concerning segregation policy, the South remained a strongly Democratic voting block for local, state, and federal Congressional elections. This was not true of Presidential elections.

In 1960, Democratic electors in Alabama and Mississippi appeared on the ballot as "unpledged electors" instead of as electors pledged to Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy. All 8 of Mississippi's electors, 6 of Alabama's 11 electors, and one stray elector from Oklahoma (a state carried by Richard Nixon) cast their votes for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia. Alabama's remaining 5 electors voted for Kennedy.

In 1968, Alabama's Democratic governor George C. Wallace ran for President on the American Independent Party ticket, and swept the electoral votes of the Deep South. The American Independent Party failed to keep its foothold in the South, as its 1972 candidate was John G. Schmitz, a John Bircher from California whose strongest showing in the 1972 election was 10% in Idaho, but did poorly in the South. Subsequent southern Dixiecrats running on the American Independent Party ticket included Lester Maddox and John Rarick but these campaigns did not fare so well either.

In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised that his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party and it did. When the Democrats pushed for civil rights, the Republicans reaped the political benefits of a Southern white backlash. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

Senator Strom Thurmond switched parties and became a Republican as a result of his support for the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964. Former Democrat Jesse Helms also switched his party registration to Republican in 1970 and won a Senate seat in North Carolina in 1972. Phil Gramm of Texas, at the time a member of the House of Representatives, switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 1983. Several other Southern senators, such as Richard Russell, Jr. of Georgia and James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi remained in the Democratic Party and went on to become prominent senators who served multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority and put them in positions of power and prestige.

Into the twenty-first century, the South has changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. This change, which became quite evident in 1972 with the electoral success of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", peaked with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and was consolidated in 1994 when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

[edit] Notable members

[edit] Senators

[edit] State governors

[edit] Others

  • Floyd Spence state representative from South Carolina
  • Albert Watson while U.S. Representative from South Carolina
  • Walter Sillers JR, Mississippi Speaker of the House
  • Harvey T. Ross, Mississippi State Legislature
  • Thomas P. Brady, Associate Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court
  • Ross Lillard
  • John Kasper
  • Mrs. Anna B. Korn
  • Mrs. Ruth Lackey
  • Clark Hurd
  • William E. Jenner
  • Francis Haskell
  • John Oliver Emmerich, Speech writer
  • Hugh Roy Cullen
  • T. Coleman Andrews
  • John Steel Baston
  • Dr. Frazier
  • O. L. Penny
  • Clifton Ratlift
  • M. F. Ray
  • Thomas Jefferson Tubb
  • J.K. Wells
  • Barney Wolverton
  • Governor White
  • Thomas H. Werdel

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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