Dixiecrat

Not to be confused with Southern Party.

Template:Infobox historical American political party The States' Rights Democratic Party (commonly known as the Dixiecrats) was a segregationist, socially conservative political party in the United States. The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. It split with 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. By the 1880s the South was heavily Democratic in national and presidential elections, apart from pockets of Republican strength. It was the "Solid South." The social system was based on Jim Crow, a combination of legal and informal segregation that made blacks second class citizens with little or no political power anywhere in the South.

In the 1930s, the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a realignment occurred. Much of the Democratic Party shifted towards economic intervention but rejected civil rights for blacks. However, white Southern commitments to Jim Crow grew stronger, and were indirectly challenged as two million blacks served in the military during World War II, receiving equal pay in segregated units, and entitles to equal veterans' benefits. The Republican Party, nominating Tom Dewey of New York in 1944 and 1948, supported civil rights legislation that the Southern Democrats in Congress almost unanimously opposed.

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.

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 white supremacy. The party's slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party were often called Dixiecrats by northern Democrats..

When the new president Harry Truman established a highly visible President's Committee on Civil Rights and ordered an end to discrimination in the military in 1948 and the Democratic National Convention in 1948 adopted the plank proposed by Hubert Humphrey calling for civil rights, 35 southerners walked out. The move was on to remove Truman's name from the ballot in the South. This required a new party -- the State's Rights Party, with its own nominee, J. Strom Thurmond. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. The Dixiecrats did not expect to win the presidency outright, rather they thought that if they could win enough Southern states then they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the House of Representatives where they believed Southern bargaining power could determine the winner. To this end 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.

In Arkansas, governor-elect, Sid McMath vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the state, 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 gubernatorial 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 previously 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, and South Carolina, as well as Alabama (whose Democratic party refused to recognize the Truman-Barkley ticket and had Thurmond on the ballot as its nominee), 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 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 election. The party thus did replace the regular Democratic ticket in five states, but did not block Truman's reelection. By 1949 the new party was dead.

Subsequent elections

The States' Rights Democratic Party dissolved after the 1948 election, as Truman, the Democratic National Committee, and the New Deal southern Democrats acted to assure that the Dixiecrat movement would not return in 1952 presidential election. Some local diehards such as Leander Perez attempted to keep it in existence. 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, but not in 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.

American Independent Party

In 1964 the South split three ways between Humphrey the Democrat (with a base in the black vote), Richard Nixon the Republican (with a base among middle class whites), and Wallace the [[ independent (with a base in rural areas and the Deep South). ticket, and swept the electoral votes of the Deep South. With Wallace gone the American Independent Party failed to keep its foothold in the South. Its 1972 candidate was Congressman John G. Schmitz from California, whose strongest showing 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 did not succeed either.

White South to GOP

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. However the most powerful committee chairmen, including Richard Russell, Jr. of Georgia and James Eastland and John Stennis of Mississippi remained in the Democratic Party.

Thus far the change was at the presidential level. In the 1990s the South changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures and local elections. This change began with the elections of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1988. It was consolidated in 1994 when Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives under the leadership of Newt Gingrich.

See also

• American Independent Party
• Blue Dog Democrats
• Boll weevil (politics)
• Conservative Democrat
• List of political parties in the United States
• Politics of the Southern United States
• Southern Democrats
• Yellow dog Democrat

Further reading

• Bass, Jack, and Marilyn W. Thompson. Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (2006)
• Black, Earl, and Merle Black. Politics and Society in the South (1989)
• Cohodas, Nadine. Strom Thurmond & the Politics of Southern Change (1995)
• Frederickson, Kari. The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (2001) 311 pp. ISBN 0-8078-4910-3. the major scholarly study online edition
• Karabell, Zachary. The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (2001)
• Lemmon, Sarah McCulloh. "Ideology of the "Dixiecrat" Movement," Social Forces Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1951), pp. 162-171 in JSTOR
• Perman, Michael. Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South (2009)

External links

• Scott E. Buchanan, Dixiecrats, New Georgia Encyclopedia.
• 1948 Platform of Oklahoma's Dixiecrats