Mugged (31 page)
Liberals leaped on the meaningless praise at an old-timer’s birthday party to remind everyone that Thurmond had run for president on a segregationist platform! This led to a new round of racism accusations against the Republican Party—which Thurmond joined sixteen years after his 1948 segregationist presidential run.
Assuming—contrary to common sense—that Lott was intending to praise Thurmond for his segregationist stance two decades earlier, what we had here was: one former Democrat praising another former Democrat for what was once a Democrat policy. The Lott incident reminded us that Republicans have to be careful about letting Democrats into their party.
In 1948, Thurmond did not run as a “Dixiecan,” he ran as a “Dixiecrat.” As the name indicates, the Dixiecrats were an offshoot of the Democratic Party. When he lost, Thurmond went right back to being a Democrat.
All segregationists were Democrats and—contrary to liberal fables—the vast majority of them remained Democrats for the rest of their lives. Many have famous names—commemorated in buildings and statues and tribute speeches by Bill Clinton. But one never hears about their segregationist pasts, or even Klan memberships. Among them are: Supreme Court justice Hugo Black; Governor George Wallace of Alabama; gubernatorial candidate George Mahoney of Maryland; Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama; Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; and Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia.
But for practical purposes, the most important segregationists were the ones in the U.S. Senate, where civil rights bills went to die. All the segregationists in the Senate were of course, Democrats. All but one remained Democrats for the rest of their lives—and not conservative Democrats. Support for segregation went hand in hand with liberal positions on other issues, too.
The myth of the southern strategy is that southern segregationists were conservatives just waiting for a wink from Nixon to switch parties and join the Reagan revolution. That could not be further from the truth. With the exception of Strom Thurmond—the only one who ever became a Republican—they were almost all liberals and remained liberals for the rest of their lives. Of the twelve southern segregationists in the Senate other than Thurmond, only two could conceivably be described as “conservative Democrats.”
The twelve were:
Senator Harry Byrd (staunch opponent of anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy);
Senator Robert Byrd (proabortion, opponent of 1990 Gulf War and 2002 Iraq War, huge pork barrel spender, sending more than $1 billion to his home state during his tenure, supported the Equal Rights Amendment,
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won a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America and a 71 percent grade from the American Civil Liberties Union in 2007);
Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana (McCarthy opponent, pacifist and opponent of the Vietnam War);
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina (McCarthy opponent, anti-Vietnam War, major Nixon antagonist as head the Watergate Committee that led to the president’s resignation);
Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee (ferocious McCarthy opponent despite McCarthy’s popularity in Tennessee,
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anti-Vietnam War);
Senator James Eastland of Mississippi (conservative Democrat, though he supported some of FDR’s New Deal, but was a strong anti-communist);
Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas (staunch McCarthy opponent,
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anti-Vietnam War, big supporter of the United Nations and taxpayer-funded grants given in his name);
Senator Walter F. George of Georgia (supported Social Security Act, Tennessee Valley Authority and many portions of the Great Society);
Senator Ernest Hollings (initiated federal food stamp program, supported controls on oil, but later became a conservative Democrat, as evidenced by his support for Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court);
Senator Russell Long (Senate floor leader on LBJ’s Great Society programs);
Senator Richard Russell (strident McCarthy opponent, calling him a “huckster of hysteria,”
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supported FDR’s New Deal, defended Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur, mildly opposed to the Vietnam War);
Senator John Stennis (won murder convictions against three blacks based solely on their confessions, which were extracted by vicious police floggings, leading to reversal by the Supreme Court; first senator to publicly attack Joe McCarthy on the Senate floor; and, in his later years, opposed Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court).