States' Rights Democratic Party

The States' Rights Democratic Party 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. 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 urging 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 vociferously aligned with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. (only some factions aligned 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

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.

However, Southern Democrats increasingly broke with FDR and the New Deal for both economic and civil rights–related reasons. 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. Wartime price controls failed to benefit rural Southern whites, the traditional constituency of the Progressive Movement in the region.

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, all but alienating the old progressive wing of the Southern Democrats.

Platform

“	We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man. We oppose all efforts to invade or destroy the rights guaranteed by it to every citizen of this republic. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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"?

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:

“	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 Dixiecrats inherently opposing New Dealism, seized upon by some contemporary left-wing academics to brand the States' Rights Democratic Party as "conservative," scant, if any evidence substantiates the claims that the whole movement united 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 stating:

“	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

Party members

• Bull Connor, notorious "public safety commissioner" who violently repressed civil rights advocates
• James Eastland, U.S. senator from Mississippi
• John Stennis, U.S. senator from Mississippi
• F. Edward Hébert, Louisiana congressman from the anti-Long faction
• Hugh Roy Cullen, Texas tycoon
• Coke Stevenson, unsuccessful neo-Bourbon Democrat primary opponent against Lyndon B. Johnson in 1948