Dixiecrat

The States' Rights Democratic Party (whose members are often called the Dixiecrats) was a short-lived

Since the beginning of Reconstruction, Southern white voters supported the

In the 1930s, a political realignment occurred largely due to the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While many Democrats in the South had shifted toward favoring economic intervention, civil rights for African Americans was not specifically incorporated within the New Deal agenda, due in part to Southern control over many key positions of power within the U.S. Congress. Nonetheless, civil rights gained an outspoken champion in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and supportive approaches from the administration's "Black Cabinet".^[5]

With the entry of the United States into the Second World War, Jim Crow was indirectly challenged. More than one and a half million black Americans served in the U.S. military during World War II,^[9] where they received equal pay while serving within segregated units. (While equally entitled to receive veterans' benefits after the war, the vast majority of African American veterans were prevented from accessing most benefits due in part to Southern success in congress to have benefits administered by the states instead of the federal government.)^[10] Tens of thousands of black civilians at home were recruited in the labor-starved war industries across many urban centers in the country, mainly due to the promotion of Executive Order 8802, which required defense industries not to discriminate based on ethnicity or race.^[11]

Members of the Republican Party (which nominated

After Roosevelt died, the new president Harry S. Truman established a highly visible President's Committee on Civil Rights and issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military in 1948. A group of Southern governors, including Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi, met to consider the place of Southerners within the Democratic Party. After a tense meeting with Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman and Truman confidant J. Howard McGrath, the Southern governors agreed to convene their own convention in Birmingham, Alabama if Truman and civil rights supporters emerged victorious at the 1948 Democratic National Convention.^[16] In July, the convention nominated Truman to run for a full term and adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals led by Hubert Humphrey calling for civil rights; 35 Southern delegates walked out. The move was on to remove Truman's name from the ballot in the southern United States. This political maneuvering required the organization of a new and distinct political party, which the Southern defectors from the Democratic Party chose to brand as the States' Rights Democratic Party.

Just days after the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the States' Rights Democrats held their own convention at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, on July 17.^[17] While several leaders from the Deep South such as Strom Thurmond and James Eastland attended, most major Southern Democrats did not attend the conference.^[18] Among those absent were Georgia Senator Richard Russell Jr., who had finished with the second-most delegates in the Democratic presidential ballot.^[18]

Prior to their own States' Rights Democratic Party convention, it was not clear whether the Dixiecrats would seek to field their own candidate or simply try to prevent Southern electors from voting for Truman.

The States' Rights Democrats did not formally declare themselves as being a new third party, but rather said that they were only "recommending" that state Democratic Parties vote for the Thurmond–Wright ticket.[18] The goal of the party was to win the 127 electoral votes of the Solid South, in the hopes of denying Truman–Barkley or Dewey–Warren an overall majority of electoral votes, and thus throwing the presidential election to the United States House of Representatives and the vice presidential election to the United States Senate.^[18] Once in the House and Senate, the Dixiecrats hoped to throw their support to whichever party would agree to their segregationist demands.^[18] Even if the Republican ticket won an outright majority of electoral votes (as many expected in 1948), the Dixiecrats hoped that their third-party run would help the South retake its dominant position in the Democratic Party.^[18] In implementing their strategy, the States' Rights Democrats faced a complicated set of state election laws, with different states having different processes for choosing presidential electors.^[18] The States' Rights Democrats eventually succeeded in making the Thurmond–Wright ticket the official Democratic ticket in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.^[20] In other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket.^[20]

In numbers greater than the 6,000 that attended the first, the States' Rights Democrats held a boisterous second convention in Oklahoma City, on August 14, 1948,^[21] where they adopted their party platform which stated:^[22]

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.

The platform went on to say:^[22]

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.

In Arkansas, Democratic gubernatorial nominee

The States' Rights Democratic Party collapsed after the 1948 election, as Truman, the Democratic National Committee, and the New Deal Southern Democrats acted to ensure that the Dixiecrat movement would not return in the 1952 presidential election. Some Southern diehards,^{[clarification needed]} such as Leander Perez of Louisiana, attempted to keep it in existence in their districts.^[24] Wright continued to defend racial segregation, but conceded that complete obstinance along the lines of the 1948 departure from the Democratic Party would cause his home state of Mississippi to lose "its standing with everybody in America."^[25] Former Dixiecrats received some backlash at the 1952 Democratic National Convention, but all Southern delegations were seated after agreeing to a party loyalty pledge.^[26] Segregationist Alabama Senator John Sparkman was selected as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1952, helping to boost party loyalty in the South.^[26]

Legacy

The Dixiecrats are considered to have begun the weakening of the Democratic Solid South.^[27]

Regardless of the power struggle within the Democratic Party concerning segregation policy, the South remained a strongly Democratic voting bloc for local, state, and federal Congressional elections, but increasingly not in presidential elections. Republican

By the early 2010s, statistician and political analyst Nate Cohn wrote of the "demise of the Southern Democrat".^[27]

Presidential candidate performance

Year	Pres. candidate	VP	Popular votes	Percentage	Electoral votes
1948	Strom Thurmond	Fielding L. Wright	1,175,930 #3	2.4%	39

See also

• Boll weevil (politics)
• Politics of the Southern United States
• Southern Democrats

Footnotes

Works cited

• Smith, James Patterson (2019). "Fielding L. Wright (1946-1952): Legacy of a White-Supremacist Progressive" (PDF). The Journal of Mississippi History. LXXXI (1–2): 61–80.
  ISSN 0022-2771
  .

Further reading

• ISBN 978-1-58648-392-0
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.
• Black, Earl (1987). Politics and society in the South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  ISBN 978-0674689596
  .
• Buchanan, Scott E. (December 2005). "The Dixiecrat Rebellion: Long-Term Partisan Implications in the Deep South". Politics & Policy. 33 (4): 754–769.
  doi:10.1111/j.1747-1346.2005.tb00221.x
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.
• Ragan, Fred D. (April 1, 1995). "Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change". History: Reviews of New Books. 23 (3): 111.
  ISSN 0361-2759
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.
• Frederickson, Kari A. (2001). The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968. Univ of North Carolina Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8078-4910-1
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.
• Karabell, Zachary (2000). The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election. Knopf.
  ISBN 978-0-375-40086-5
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.
• Perman, Michael (2009). Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South. Univ of North Carolina Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8078-3324-7
  . Retrieved April 25, 2023.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dixiecrats.

• Scott E. Buchanan, Dixiecrats Archived October 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, New Georgia Encyclopedia.
• 1948 Platform of Oklahoma's Dixiecrats