by MARK POWELL
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We’re about to wrap up a heated, divisive U.S. Senate race – one nobody saw coming just four months ago. And one that has turned several political rules of thumb on their head.
That makes this the perfect opportunity to look back at another highly contentious campaign here in the Palmetto State – one that was similarly set in motion by an unexpected death.
The country was stunned when Franklin D. Roosevelt died without warning on April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia. After occupying the Oval Office for a record-setting 12 years, many folks found it impossible to imagine anyone else sitting there.
Roosevelt was followed in office by Harry Truman, a little-known, mild-mannered former U.S. senator who hadn’t even wanted the job. People likened it to a third-rate understudy stepping in for an ailing Broadway star on opening night.
Truman turned out to be anything but mild-mannered. He ordered the atomic bomb dropped (twice), stood up to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin (who was staying busy launching the Cold War), and put powerful labor leaders on notice that they wouldn’t have the free rein they’d known during the Roosevelt years.
And all that was just his first 100 days in office!
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When it came time to seek a full term of his own in 1948, almost everyone was pissed as hell at Harry Truman about something. Republicans thought he was pursuing a socialist agenda even more radical than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Liberal Democrats felt he was dragging his feet and wasn’t radical enough. So they bolted the Democratic Party and nominated former Vice President Henry Wallace on the Progressive ticket.
That left the Democrats’ powerful conservative wing (yes, such a faction once existed.) Then and now, the South was its heart and soul – and its followers were hopping mad at Harry, too.
One area where Truman broke with his predecessor was civil rights. Where FDR had been dragged into the issue reluctantly, his successor plunged ahead willingly, fully aware he was waving goodbye to desperately needed Southern votes.
The 1940s were still the era of Jim Crow segregation in the Deep South; the ruling Democratic elites weren’t willing to go gently into that good night and kiss their power base goodbye. So, around 3,000 people from thirteen states gathered in Birmingham, Alabama’s Municipal Auditorium on July 17, 1948 to begin the first (and only) national convention of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats.
Delegates wasted no time getting down to business. That very day, they nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond for president, with Mississippi governor Fielding L. Wright as his running mate.
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Exactly nine days later, Truman threw gasoline on the political fire by signing Executive Order 9981, racially integrating the United States Armed Forces.
If the Dixiecrats had been mad at Harry before, they seethed with fury following his order… which brings us back to the Palmetto State.
The Democratic Party had dominated politics here for more than 70 years after Reconstruction ended. Thurmond was personally popular at home (or else he couldn’t afford to wage his quixotic campaign). But several strains existed in the SCDP then, and not all of them were happy campers. Many liberal Democrats were at least favorable to ending racial segregation, if not overtly calling for its demise.
Doris Armfield was a rare woman’s voice in that era. She was the daughter of the Newberry Sun’s publisher, and although she worked in Washington, D.C., in 1948, her “By the Way” column was widely read across the state. Writing a few days before Thurmond’s nomination, and referencing a Jewish friend she had made in the capital, Armfield wrote, “why should I break faith with her by swearing to support the social segregation of races?”
She later wrote, “I cannot see denying the Negro his legal rights as a citizen.”
At the same time, a pro-Thurmond column in that very newspaper countered with an argument of its own.
“America herself is in danger,” its author warned. “And indeed, there are several episodes of threats and violence around the state, with an undercurrent of tension brewing beneath the surface.
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That led John H. McCray, the black editor and publisher of Columbia’s Lighthouse and Informer newspaper, to run an August 29 editorial entitled “Governor Thurmond Should Withdraw.”
“We ask that our Governor give serious thought to withdrawing his name as a candidate for the office of president,” he wrote.
For his part, Thurmond bellicosely decreed, “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation.”
Election day eventually rolled around as it always does. Despite the ruckus, Thurmond easily won about 72% of the state vote and all eight of South Carolina’s electoral votes. In all, the Dixiecrats carried the deepest of the Deep South — nabbing Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as well — for a total of 38 electoral votes.
But it was all for naught. Despite his party fracturing on the left and right, and in spite of a popular Republican opponent, Truman eked out an improbable win that nobody saw coming. It was the greatest upset in presidential politics until Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In a classic case of sour grapes, a columnist groused in the Sun that South Carolina had “declared that it was done with Harry Truman and the Democratic Party.”
Doris Armfield crowed “the States Rights crowd took a thumping licking,” adding that if the Dixiecrats couldn’t carry the South in 1948, they would never do so. She was right. The infant party quietly rode off into the political sunset.
And as for Strom Thurmond… well, you know how his story turned out.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
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