States' Rights Democratic Party

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States’ Rights Democratic Party
Conf Navy Jack.png
Party Chairman Ross Lillard[1]
Senate Leader James Eastland (de facto)[note 1]
House Speaker
House Leader Felix Edward Hébert (de facto)[note 1]
Founded 1948
Headquarters Oklahoma City[1]
Political ideology • White supremacy
• Segregation
• Anti–civil rights
• Anti–Fair Deal
Political position Fiscal: Jeffersonian
Social: Segregationist
International affiliation N/A
Color(s) Red, white, and blue
Website N/A

The States' Rights Democratic Party, also known as the States' Rights Party or SRP, was a United States political party formed by a splinter faction of Southern Democrats in 1948 which opposed President Harry S. Truman and the national Democratic Party.[note 2] Hardline segregationists in the South with a firm progressive tradition rooted in Jeffersonianism and Jacksonianism, disenchanted with the increasing alliance between New Deal liberalism and civil rights, stormed out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention when it enacted a strong civil rights plank at the advocacy of Minnesota mayor and future vice president Hubert Humphrey. Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party were known as "Dixiecrats."

Contemporary historians and scholars designate the Dixiecrat party as "right-wing" and an outgrowth of anti–New Deal politics despite the vast ranks among the movement which had aligned with the liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. (only some factions affiliated with the old Southern Bourbon element) This is attributable to the inability for academic revisionists to distinguish between the old-school progressivism (once prominent in the South for decades) which predates the New Deal with the modern liberalism that became developed in the 1940s.

Background

“ C. Vann Woodward has called Progressivism in the South, "progressivism for white men only'. The activities of Woodrow Wilson and his Secretary of War, Josephus Daniels, both native southerners, support this view. Daniels could defend the "color lines while attacking political corruption and the activities of the trusts. Wilson while calling for progressive banking and anti-trust legislation was endorsing D.W. Griffith's, 'Birth of a Nations film and allowing segregation in the United States armed forces. Theodore Roosevelt while inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House and noting upon his political suggestions, never called for antilynohing or antidisfranohisement laws. ”

—"Voices of Protest: W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington," p. 6[2]

Many Dixiecrats were New Deal–aligned supporters of FDR in the 1930s.

New Deal and World War II impact: shift in left–right ideology and civil rights

During the First and Second New Deal, the majority of Southern Democrats lined up behind President Roosevelt, supporting left-wing economic relief measures at the expense of traditional free-market principles. The New Deal enforced institutional white supremacy to appease the Democrats of the "Solid South" who ardently opposed any federal legislation which would interfere with the region's Jim Crow laws; the Federal Housing Administration not only enforced segregation, but even refused to insure houses for black families.[3]

However, Southern Democrats increasingly broke with FDR and the New Deal for both economic and civil rights–related reasons. Author Glenn Feldman notes that "many prominent Southern New Dealers" including Leander Perez, Theodore Bilbo, and Horace Wilkinson, who "can hardly be called racially enlightened," eventually opposed the mainstream economic progressivism of the New Deal when it began to align with civil rights—the old Southern progressives, although economically left-wing in nature, prioritized white supremacy and abandoned modern liberalism only when it interfered with their racial order.[4]

John E. Rankin, a Democratic representative, progressive, and lifelong white supremacist who broke from the New Deal by the early 1940s and joined the Dixiecrats in '48.

Although mainstream encyclopedia articles, books, and other various sources portray the Dixiecrat movement and typical Southern racial demagoguery in the 1930s (and onwards) as stemming from anti–New Deal sentiment, Feldman writes that in Alabama, for example, the most virulent racists "could be found on both sides of the New Deal."[5] Bull Connor, later an SRP member and known as the Birmingham police commissioner who perpetrated violent police attacks against civil rights activists including children, was among the staunch supporters of FDR and the New Deal, regarding him as a "fine President."[6]

Feldman also writes in "The Great Melding":[7]

“ Part of [William D.] Barnard's confusion no doubt stems from his faulty assertion that the former-economic progressives who became Dixiecrats (Wilkinson, Locke, Connor) "had not followed the route of Bibb Graves and Handy Ellis. They had not become partisans of the New Deal." But, in fact, they had. Wilkinson (aided by Locke) had been perhaps Bibb Graves's most important lieutenant during the progressive New Deal years. He had actually overseen Graves's election campaign. Bull Connor had been an ardent New Dealer. And John Temple Graves [II], a former progressive and New Deal adherent, also became a prominent Dixiecrat—only one so refined that Barnard had placed him in a protected category with the genteel Dixon-McCorvey class of "better sorts"—as with Ellis, a New Dealer who later populated the Dixiecrat ranks. This pattern extended well beyond Alabama. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina had been a New Dealer as had even Louisiana's Leander Perez and, to some degree, Mississippi's James Eastland. ”

—"The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism," p. 256

In addition, as the developing modern liberalism of the New Deal exemplified using Hamiltonian, centralized big-government means to achieve its ends, the Jeffersonian economic tradition of the South which emphasized states' rights increasingly resented Roosevelt's policies. The political effects of World War II carried the greatest impact in shaping left-wing politics towards centralization as opposed to states' rights and Jeffersonianism, whose progressive ideology all but died out subsequently. Rural whites, the traditional constituency of the Progressive Movement in the region, eventually found themselves no longer being beneficiaries of wartime price controls, leading to resentment among the old progressives towards Roosevelt, further intensifying in anger at Truman.

Fair Deal: nail in the coffin for old Southern progressivism

By the presidency of Harry Truman following Roosevelt's death, civil rights had already began to take priority among New Deal liberalism. The Fair Employment Practice Committee was enacted by FDR in 1941 to prevent segregationist laws from impeding the war effort, and Truman expediently abandoned his racism on the public level in seeking to strengthen civil rights provisions,[note 3] all but alienating the old progressive wing of the Southern Democrats.

Platform[1]

J. Strom Thurmond, featured on TIME Magazine, Oct. 11, 1948, which reads, "Is the issue black and white?"[8]
“
  1. We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man.
  2. We oppose all efforts to invade or destroy the rights guaranteed by it to every citizen of this republic.
  3. We stand for social and economic justice, which, we believe can be guaranteed to all citizens only by a strict adherence to our Constitution and the avoidance of any invasion or destruction of the constitutional rights of the states and individuals. We oppose the totalitarian, centralized bureaucratic government and the police nation called for by the platforms adopted by the Democratic and Republican Conventions.
  4. We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.
  5. We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting, and local law enforcement.
  6. We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.
  7. We stand for the check and balances provided by the three departments of our government. We oppose the usurpation of legislative functions by the executive and judicial departments. We unreservedly condemn the effort to establish in the United States a police nation that would destroy the last vestige of liberty enjoyed by a citizen.
  8. We demand that there be returned to the people to whom of right they belong, those powers needed for the preservation of human rights and the discharge of our responsibility as democrats for human welfare. We oppose a denial of those by political parties, a barter or sale of those rights by a political convention, as well as any invasion or violation of those rights by the Federal Government. We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.
  9. We, therefore, urge that this Convention endorse the candidacies of J. Strom Thurmond and Fielding H. Wright for the President and Vice-president, respectively, of the United States of America.
 ”

—Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party, August 14, 1948

Economically "right-wing"?

Sen. J. Lister Hill branded Dixiecrats as right-wing on economics despite its voter base hardly objecting to beneficial New Deal legislation.

Lister Hill, a lifelong New Deal liberal from Alabama who served as a U.S. senator from the state since 1938 (and previously a congressman from 1923–38), aligned with the Democratic regulars in 1948 and denounced the Dixiecrat movement as a puppet of landlords conspiring to facilitate a Republican Party victory by disrupting Democratic Party unity in the South:[9]

“ As your Senator, I have worked and labored and fought for these measures with all my heart and soul. As I talk to you at this moment I fight to preserve them, that their benefits and blessings may continue to flow to you, to Alabama, and to all our people.

The Dixiecrat leaders would destroy these measures. They join hands with the Republicans and denounce the measures as socialism. The Dixiecrats and the Republicans seek to tear down that which the Democratic Party has built for us. Dixiecrats and Republicans are birds of a feather.

”

—J. Lister Hill, April 12, 1950

Contrary to Hill's claim of the Dixiecrat movement inherently opposing New Dealism,[10] seized upon by some contemporary left-wing academics to brand the States' Rights Democratic Party as "conservative," scant, if any evidence substantiates the notion of the whole movement being unified under economic conservatism. Dixiecrat supporters were criticized for their "states' rights" hypocrisy because of their history of supporting liberal federal programs—in Mississippi, a student of Millsaps College from the city of McComb addressed a convention with a sharp rebuke against States' Rights backers:[11]

“ You have never objected to flood control programs, subsidies for farmers and education, and TVA or any of the other things the government has brought in to your profit. ”

—George Maddox to Dixiecrat supporters, 1948

Remaining fragments—Democrat or Republican?

Liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson won most of the Dixiecrat vote in 1952.

In "Myth America," popular left-wing revisionist historian and Twitter personality Kevin M. Kruse,[note 4] along with Julian E. Zelizer, quotes author Kari Frederickson, who stated, "there was a strong correlation between counties that supported the Dixiecrats and those that endorsed Eisenhower."[12] Kruse cites several Dixiecrat leaders who went on to endorse Eisenhower, such as Leander Perez of Louisiana, several South Carolina Democrats, and several others as alleged proof of a Dixiecrat–Republican correlation.

However, this did not hold true for all states—Alabama, for instance, saw a correlation between the Dixiecrats in 1948 and the national Democrats in 1952. In addition, an analysis by Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston in "The End of Southern Exceptionalism," far more reliable than the narratives of standard academics, concludes that 25 out of 29 Southern congressional districts which supported the Thurmond/Wright Dixiecrat ticket would subsequently back Adlai Stevenson rather than Eisenhower in 1952.[13] Despite a faction of Dixiecrat leaders throwing support to Eisenhower, the constituencies mostly aligned with the national Democrats at the presidential level in 1952 and to a remaining significant extent in 1956.

According to Figure 5.13 in "The End of Southern Exceptionalism," crossover Democratic support for Eisenhower in the South by congressional district came primarily from 1948 Truman voters, while Dixiecrat voters favored Stevenson.[13] "O"/"Others" represents the Dixiecrats.

Party members/supporters

James O. Eastland, one of the few outspoken Dixiecrats in Congress.

Misuse of the phrase "Dixiecrat"

For a more detailed treatment, see Dixiecrat#Misapplication_of_the_phrase.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 August 14, 1948. Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party. The American Presidency Project. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  2. ↑ Barnes, Harry W. (August 8, 1969). Voices of Protest: W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  3. ↑ Little, Becky (June 1, 2021). How a New Deal Housing Program Enforced Segregation. History Channel. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  4. ↑ Feldman, Glenn (August 31, 2015). The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism, p. 287. Google Books. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  5. ↑ Feldman, Glenn (May 31, 2013). The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944, p. 94. Google Books. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  6. ↑ "The Irony of the Solid South," pp. 192–93.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "The Great Melding," p. 256.
  8. ↑ October 11, 1948. The Dixiecrats’ J. Strom Thurmond. TIME Magazine. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  9. ↑ Appendix to the Congressional Record (April 12, 1950). Congressional Record Proceedings and Debates of the United States Congress · Volume 96, pp. 3,614–15. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  10. ↑ Barnard, William D. (1974). Dixiecrats and Democrats: Alabama Politics, p. 140. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  11. ↑ Frederickson, Kari (2001). The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968, p. 145. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  12. ↑ Kruse, Kevin M.; Zelizer, Julian E. (January 3, 2023). Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Shafer, Byron E.; Johnston, Richard (2006). The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South, p. 167. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  14. ↑ Kirkland, Scotty E. (November 18, 2013). Gessner T. McCorvey. Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  15. ↑ Feldman, Glenn (February 13, 2008). Frank M. Dixon (1939-43). Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  16. ↑ Baggett, James L. (March 9, 2007). Eugene "Bull" Connor. Encyclopedia of Alabama. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Zwiers, Maarten (July 11, 2017). James O. Eastland. Mississippi Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 2017. The Mississippi Encyclopedia, p. 352. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  19. ↑ Billy Hathorn (1985). The Journal of Mississippi History: Volumes 47-48. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  20. ↑ Zwiers, Maarten (July 11, 2017). John Elliott Rankin. Mississippi Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Savage, Sean J. (1997). Truman and the Democratic Party. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Harris, Richard A.; Tichenor, Daniel J. (2009). A History of the U.S. Political System: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions, p. 354. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  23. ↑ Jeansonne, Glen (1977). Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta, p. 178. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  24. ↑ Kurtz, Michael L.; Peoples, Morgan D. (1990). Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  25. ↑ King, Larry L. (February 21, 1971). Creed of a Congressman. The New York Times. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Mickey, Robert (2015). Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America's Deep South, 1944-1972, p. 150. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  27. ↑ Crabbe, Rita. Cullen, Hugh Roy (1881–1957). Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  28. ↑ Congressional Record—Senate (July 27, 1968). Proceedings and Debates of the United States Congress · Volume 114, Part 18, p. 23,832. Google Books. Retrieved May 15, 2023.
  29. ↑ Crawley, William (December 22, 2021). William M. Tuck (1896–1983). Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  30. ↑ Egerton, John (1994). Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, p. 500. Google Books. Retrieved May 16, 2023.
  31. ↑ Cohodas, Nadine (1993). Strom Thurmond & the Politics of Southern Change, p. 188. Google Books. Retrieved May 16, 2023.

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 The Dixiecrats as a party was distinguished from the national Democrats in the presidential cycle, though was not known to have organized itself from more than a loose movement within Congress, where only a minority of Southern Democrats had actually joined and openly supported the SRP. (practically all senior, powerful Democratic legislators in Congress from the South either supported Truman or stayed quiet due to the perceived impracticality of the SRP movement) Eastland and Hébert are listed here as the "de facto" leaders of the SRP in the Senate and House respectively not because they were official leaders, rather due to their greater seniority/influence within the chambers.
  2. ↑ In this specific context, "national Democratic Party" with a lowercase "national" is in reference to the Democrats at the national level, not to be confused with the "National Democratic Party" during the early Progressive Era.
  3. ↑ Truman was well-known as a racist and even faced suspicion of Ku Klux Klan membership, though publicly declared his support for civil rights following antiblack violence against veterans since the onset of the post–World War II era.
  4. ↑ Kruse, an icon for leftists who antagonize conservatives as racist, notably fails to distinguish who is and isn't a Dixiecrat despite being an exalted Princeton professor with a Ph.D. from Cornell University. For instance, he claims in "Myth America" that James F. Byrnes was a Dixiecrat (see result 3/10 here) despite Byrnes expediently refusing to support neither Truman nor Thurmond in 1948. In addition, Kruse incorrectly labeled numerous individuals as Dixiecrats in a Twitter debate with Dinesh D'Souza.
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