“Strom Thurmond’s America” by Joseph Crespino

As Joseph Crespino approaches the end of this biography of Strom Thurmond, he shows signs of softening toward the senator from South Carolina known primarily during his long career for racism, cynicism, opportunism, hypocrisy and ruthlessness. “Thurmond’s courteousness became part of his legend,” he writes. “His staff adored him for his quirky, old-fashioned manners.” He quotes someone who worked with Thurmond during the 1990s: “I didn’t know the Strom Thurmond from the 1940s. The Strom Thurmond I knew was warm, inspiring, smart, kind, a demanding boss, and the last gentleman I think I’ve known in my life.” Just when you think Crespino has gone gaga, he closes by reminding us of the “racially charged” politics that characterized Thurmond’s career and of the younger Southern Republicans who adapted it as part of their party’s swing to the far, hard right.

Thus Crespino returns in the end to the theme he sets forth in the beginning: that Thurmond is a far more important figure in the development of the modern Republican Party and the Southern strategy that had so much to do with it than is commonly conceded. If he was “one of the last of the Jim Crow demagogues,” he was also “one of the first post-World War II Sunbelt conservatives,” who went beyond race to embrace “Cold War anticommunism, antilabor politics, conservative religious beliefs and opposition to liberal church groups, criticism of judicial activism, and hyper-militarism.” Thurmond, Crespino argues, “is left out of not only Sunbelt history but also the history of conservatism more generally.” The “foundational figures” are assumed to be Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, yet:

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(Hill and Wang/ STROM THURMOND INSTITUTE ) - \"Strom Thurmond's America\" by Joseph Crespino

“In 1948, when Goldwater was still a year away from running for the Phoenix city council and Reagan was still an actor, Thurmond was a presidential candidate denouncing federal meddling in private business, the growing socialist impulse in American politics, and the dangers of statism, themes that would dominate the postwar conservative movement. . . . Thurmond became a national figure at a time when ‘conservatism’ was still a dirty word in American politics and anathema in his native South. He could never have used the term in 1948 and survived politically. Conservatives were ‘economic royalists,’ the greedy Wall Street Republicans who had plunged the country into the Depression.”

The South when Thurmond made his political debut — he was elected to the South Carolina Senate in 1932 — was not only solidly Democratic, it was Democratic to the very core. Republicans were almost invisible, and such of them as could be found tended to be moderates, loyal to what was still seen as the party of Lincoln, though not necessarily champions of civil rights. It was as a Democrat that Thurmond went on to become governor in 1947 and a U.S. senator in 1955. To be sure, he ran for the presidency in 1948 as the candidate of the States’ Rights Democrats, commonly known as the Dixiecrats, but he resumed his Democratic identity after losing the election decisively, with only 2.5 percent of the vote, and maintained it until 1964, when he switched to the GOP to give his full support to Goldwater and to place himself at the vanguard of the Republican tide that was beginning to sweep through the South.