Dixiecrat Totally Explained

Everything about States Rights Democratic Party totally explained

The States' Rights Democratic Party (a.k.a. Dixiecrat Party) was a segregationist, socially conservative splinter party of the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century determined to protect what they saw as the Southern way of life against an oppressive federal government.
   In the period following the Civil War the Radical Republicans used the Union Army to occupy and forcibly reengineer Southern society. When conservative white Southerners ended military occupation and restored the Southern politico-economic position, the region gave its political allegiance almost entirely to the Democratic Party, creating the solidly Democratic South.
   In the 1930s, when the Democratic Party began its drift toward more centralized socialized engineering, the Southern Democrats remained an anchor toward traditional Democratic policies of localized populism and progressivism. After the crisis of the Great Depression, World War Two, and the beginning of the Cold War, the National Democratic Leadership fully embraced a more centralized, socialized, secularized, and multicultural program. This was seen as a return to Reconstruction and many Southern Democrats began to drift from the National Party. As a result they became termed Dixiecrats.
   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 (or offshoot) from the party in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. For more than a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but in 1948 many bolted from the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States.
   Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly realigned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage. For example, it was used to refer to those members of the Electoral College who voted for Harry F. Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy in the election of 1960, and to the white Southern voters and electors who supported George C. Wallace in 1968.

1948 presidential election

ť 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's slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party were often known as Dixiecrats.
   During the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces. The Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota Hubert Humphrey gave a speech urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank, causing thirty five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama to walk out. When President Truman endorsed the civil rights plank, governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond 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, Benjamin Travis Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him in the 1950 governatorial election, but McMath won the position handily.
   Efforts by Dixiecrats 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. Faubus had notoriously 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 A. Wallace drew off a nearly equal number of popular votes (1,157,172) from the Democrats' left wing, although he didn't 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 election.

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 bloc for local, state, and federal Congressional elections. This wasn't 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 former 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. Its 1972 candidate was John G. Schmitz, a John Bircher from California, whose strongest showing in the 1972 election was 10% in Idaho, but who did poorly in the South. Subsequent southern Dixiecrats running on the American Independent Party ticket included Lester Maddox and John Rarick, but these campaigns didn't succeed 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. 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. 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. They 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 late 20th century, the South 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 elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George Bush in 1988. It was consolidated in 1994 when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

Notable members

Senators

(D)VA Harry F. Byrd, 1933-1965
(D)VA A. Willis Robertson, 1946-1966
(D)MS John C. Stennis, 1947-1989
(D)MS James O. Eastland, 1941-1941, 1943-1978
(D)LA Allen J. Ellender, 1937-1972
(D)LA Russell B. Long, 1948-1987
(D)OK Thomas Pryor Gore, 1906-1921, 1931-1937
(D)AL J. Lister Hill, 1938-1969
(D)AL John J. Sparkman, 1946-1979
(D)FL Spessard Holland, 1946-1971
(D)FL George Smathers, 1951-1969
(D)SC Olin D. Johnston, 1945-1965
(D,R)SC Strom Thurmond, 1954-1956, 1956-2003
(D)AR John McClellan, 1943-1977

(D)GA Richard B. Russell, Jr., 1933-1971

(D)GA Herman E. Talmadge, 1957-1981

(D)TN Herbert S. Walters, 1963-1964

State governors

Benjamin Travis Laney, Arkansas Governor

Fielding Wright, Mississippi Governor

Frank M. Dixon, Former Alabama Governor

William H. Murray, Former Oklahoma Governor

Mills E. Godwin Jr. Governor of Virginia

Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkansas (1955-1967) during the Little Rock Nine Crisis and presidential candidate.

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

Gessner T. McCorvey, Alabama state Democratic Executive Committee Chairman

Leander Perez, Parish Judge in St. Bernard Parish and political boss of the parish.

Horace C. Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney defender of the Klan and political "leader"

Ross Lillard

Tommy Irvin, Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture since 1972

John Kasper

Mrs. Anna B. Korn

Mrs. Ruth Lackey

Clark Hurd

William E. Jenner

Francis Haskell

John Oliver Emmerich, Speech writer

Hugh Roy Cullen - NOTE: check state legislature history for name and/or association.

T. Coleman Andrews

John Steel Baston

Dr. Frazier

O. L. Penny

Clifton Ratlift

M. F. Ray

Howell Tankerbell

Thomas Jefferson Tubb

J.K. Wells

Barney Wolverton

Governor White

Thomas H. Werdel Further Information

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