Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change. - book reviews

Reason, June, 1993 by John Shelton Reed

Ironically, for a South Carolina Democrat in the first half of this century, the young Thurmond was something of a progressive. As late as 1947, he was praising the Truman-Roosevelt record. But within a year, of course, he was running against Truman himself, as the candidate of the States' Rights Party, the "Dixiecrats."

Cohodas carefully examines the evidence and essentially accepts Thurmond's account of his motives. She concludes that he was acting as a genuine conservative, consistently (for a politician) opposed to the extension of federal power into matters reserved by the Constitution to the states. In 1948, of course, many other Southern politicians had no interest in limited government except in defense of white supremacy, but Thurmond has always denied that he was ever a racist and, in a narrow sense, he is apparently correct. As a South Carolina NAACP official put it, "I never thought Strom Thurmond actually hated black people. He just never really needed them."

Whatever his motives, his act of disloyalty put Thurmond in the national Democrats' doghouse for good. Although he ran successfully to fill a vacant Senate seat in 1954 (beating the state organization's handpicked candidate and becoming the first person ever elected to the Senate by a write-in vote), he was doomed by the times and his principles to a stance of perpetual opposition, whatever party was in power. When one of his staffers during the Kennedy-Johnson years was asked if he worked for the government, he replied, "No, I work against the government." Thurmond's career had seemingly topped out at leader of the Southern diehards. No influential assignments, cabinet posts, or vice-presidential nomination; for him.

But the man had moves in reserve that no one had suspected. After Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Thurmond changed parties, in what was seen at the time as an act of daring. Campaigning for his friend and political ally Barry Goldwater, he explained that if Lyndon Johnson was re-elected "freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intimidation, and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington." (He got that fight, anyway.)

Goldwater lost big, of course, and Democrats sneered about rats swimming to a sinking ship, but four years later the election of Richard Nixon began an era of Republican dominance of the White House and got Thurmond inside the tent. So many of his friends and advisers were in the Nixon administration that some called the White House "Uncle Strom's cabin." The Reagan landslide of 1980 installed Thurmond as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, replacing none other than Ted Kennedy, to the dismay of right-thinking liberals everywhere.

That didn't last, but he's still in the Senate, and still campaigning. (He shook my hand at a stock car race last fall.) Now in his 90s, he's certainly entitled to rest on his laurels, but he just keeps going, and going. One has to suspect that he doesn't know how to do anything else. Cohodas's portrait of the old man is almost sad. Unintentionally, I suspect, she portrays him as a goofy old duffer handled by savvy staffers who recognize that their jobs and influence depend on his popularity back in the sticks but who labor mightily to keep him from weird acts of self-expression while he's in Washington. Republicans, meanwhile, not knowing what else to do with him, have begun to treat him as a venerable elder statesman. The waning days of the hapless Bush administration saw many strange sights, but none stranger than Thurmond's being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first (and presumably the last) segregationist champion to be so honored.