The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968

Kari Frederickson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807849101, 9780807825945
• eBook ISBN: 9780807875445
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1948, a group of conservative white southerners formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, soon nicknamed the “Dixiecrats,” and chose Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Thrown on the defensive by federal civil rights initiatives and unprecedented grassroots political activity by African Americans, the Dixiecrats aimed to reclaim conservatives' former preeminent position within the national Democratic Party and upset President Harry Truman’s bid for reelection. The Dixiecrats lost the battle in 1948, but, as Kari Frederickson reveals, the political repercussions of their revolt were significant.

Frederickson situates the Dixiecrat movement within the tumultuous social and economic milieu of the 1930s and 1940s South, tracing the struggles between conservative and liberal Democrats over the future direction of the region. Enriching her sweeping political narrative with detailed coverage of local activity in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina — the flashpoints of the Dixiecrat campaign — she shows that, even without upsetting Truman in 1948, the Dixiecrats forever altered politics in the South. By severing the traditional southern allegiance to the national Democratic Party in presidential elections, the Dixiecrats helped forge the way for the rise of the Republican Party in the region.

Chapter 1: Challenging the Laws of Nature

The New Deal and Southern Politics

As long as men live some will be in want, and all shall live in some sort of fear. To attempt to provide otherwise will meet with about as much success as an attempt to change the laws of gravitation. It is against nature and cannot be done—not even by the New Deal and its horde of crack-pot professors and communistic theorists.

WALTER SILLERS

Mississippi planter and Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives

To the casual observer, life in the broad, flat alluvial plains of Bolivar County in the 1930s seemed to go on pretty much as it had since the first white settlers arrived in the early nineteenth century. In this county where blacks outnumbered whites four to one, cabins once inhabited by black slaves were now filled with black and white sharecroppers and tenants who, lacking effective political voice, found themselves trapped in an economic vice from which they saw few means of escape. But to Walter Sillers, scion of a prominent Bolivar County family, proprietor of several plantations, member of the influential Delta Council, and Mississippi state legislator, the New Deal years were ominous. From his home in tiny Rosedale, Sillers fretted while New Deal Democrats in Washington, D. C., passed legislation protecting the rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively. Quite used to having a free hand to exploit his laborers as individuals, Sillers now worried that his field hands were “easy prey for the CIO and communist organizations.”¹

Since the turn of the century, southern agricultural and industrial leaders like Walter Sillers had (with some state-by-state variations) succeeded in fashioning a relative lock on a one-party political system that disfranchised black voters and some poor whites, demanded allegiance to white supremacy, and undergirded an economic system that served their interests, which included minimal governmental interference, low wages, and limited social welfare spending.² For people such as Sillers and his fellow Mississippi planter Oscar Bledsoe III of Greenwood, the political and economic structure that ensured the rule of white over black merely systematized what was at heart a natural hierarchy. “The inexorable law of eternal fitness,” Bledsoe confidentially proclaimed, “produces a top and bottom to everything that no man-made law can reverse.”³ The upheavals of the nation’s worst economic crisis, however, initiated a decade of economic experimentation that threatened to disrupt the laws of nature, redefine economic and political relationships in the South, and undermine the iron-fisted control of men such as Sillers and Bledsoe. The Roosevelt administration’s New Deal and the accompanying growth of federal power in the 1930s and 1940s threatened the South’s ideal of states’ rights and limited federal intervention. Although large southern agricultural operatives such as Sillers benefited from New Deal subsidies and from their control of New Deal agencies, conservative southern Democrats viewed warily the potential of New Deal programs to threaten the region’s economic dependence on cheap labor while stirring the democratic ambitions of the disfranchised and undermining white supremacy. The New Deal, as one historian has noted, changed forever the relationship between southerners—both white and black—and the state.⁴

The Great Depression and the New Deal inaugurated a new era in the South’s economic and political life. National focus on the South’s economic rejuvenation sparked a contentious dialogue concerning the best route to lift the South out of poverty. The innovative ferment spawned by New Dealers in Washington who spoke of economic justice and parity between regions inspired southern liberals desperate to change the region’s economic and political backwardness while it inflamed and threw on the defensive conservative southern leaders who believed that the region’s economic salvation lay in the traditional cure of low wages to attract new industry.⁵ At the national level, New Deal programs that spoke to the needs of the working classes and alleviated the misery of the poor and black drew new and powerful voting constituencies to the Democratic Party that changed the face of national politics. The creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 and the prominence of organized labor and northern blacks in the New Deal coalition following the 1936 election signaled to white southern Democrats that their former position of dominance within the national party was threatened.

The 1930s delivered a wake-up call to traditional southern elites as they faced political challenges at the state and national levels. The magnitude of the economic crisis and the impact—sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes merely symbolic—of New Deal programs on southern communities opened the door for liberal candidates who eschewed traditional appeals to racism for platforms focused on economic issues. Working-class white voters, buoyed by a president and a national agenda that spoke to their particular needs, found their voices and exercised their political muscle, while other white liberals reached across the color line to dedicate themselves to dismantling barriers to voting. Although no New Deal programs directly addressed the particular needs of black southerners, they nevertheless took strength and hope from New Deal liberalism and radical working-class activism and stepped up their participation in civil rights organizations, as well as Socialist- and Communist-led labor unions. These local challenges, as well as struggles over the direction of national policy, threw southern industrial and agricultural elites on the defensive in many political contests throughout the decade. Neither side could declare political victory during the New Deal years; rather, the decade marked the opening salvos in a long battle for economic and political control of the South.

The first fissures between the South and the national Democratic Party appeared amidst the exigencies created by the Great Depression. For three years the American people rode a downward economic spiral that by 1932 left them exhausted and desperate. During that time Americans saw personal incomes cut in half. Unemployment skyrocketed from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933, from 3 percent to 25 percent of the labor force. Farmers, already in trouble when the depression hit, faced catastrophe as commodity prices were cut in half. More than 9,000 banks closed during the period, factories and mines shut down, entire towns were abandoned, and thousands of farms were sold for debt.⁶

Compared to other regions, the South had always wallowed in poverty, and when the depression struck, it was already prostrate and suffering. A predominantly rural region, the South by 1929 was crippled by the ravages of a prolonged agricultural depression and a series of natural disasters.⁷ The depression only compounded the privation endemic to the region’s outdated tenant farming system. During the 1930s approximately one-quarter of all southerners and one-half of all southern farmers were tenants and sharecroppers. The depression hit them the hardest. Hurt by low commodity prices as farm income fell by half, many landlords discontinued the sharecrop furnish system, displacing hundreds of thousands of tenants and swelling the ranks of the landless.⁸ Southern industry did not fare much better. During the first four years of the depression, southern manufacturing fell by 50 percent in Atlanta and New Orleans and by more than 70 percent in Birmingham, far surpassing a national manufacturing decline of one-third. Unemployment in the South exceeded the national average and overwhelmed local relief agencies.⁹

Even in relatively flush times, rural southerners suffered a poverty that was pervasive and intractable. Their personal possessions few, most lived in squalor, scratching out a meager existence in cramped, cheaply made cabins that often lacked plumbing or adequate sanitation. But the extra burdens of the depression took their toll on an already worn-out region. Mississippi congressman Frank Smith later recalled that “people were bowed low” from the privations of the depression.¹⁰ A state report on Sumter County, South Carolina, noted that nearly 1,500 families were unemployed, hungry, and practically naked.¹¹ In Columbia in 1932, officials discovered some one hundred persons living at the city garbage dump.¹² Federal relief officials in the Deep South noted that approximately one-fifth of their rural clients had never owned a mattress until given one by the federal government. In addition, southern tenant families survived on an inadequate diet that rarely included fresh meat, vegetables, or fruit, and they were plagued by the diseases of the impoverished: malaria, rickets, pellagra, and hookworm.¹³

The inability or unwillingness of the federal government to act only intensified these desperate conditions. President Herbert Hoover, while more of an activist than his predecessor, was paralyzed by his personal “bootstraps” philosophy. Operating under the principle that the economy was basically sound, Hoover prescribed a hefty dose of confidence. In speech after speech he exhorted the public to keep up hope and asked businessmen to keep mills and shops open, maintain wage levels, and spread the work to avoid layoffs. In return union leaders agreed to refrain from wage demands and strikes.¹⁴ However, as one historian has noted, “individual self-reliance, a cultural bedrock, proved to be completely ineffectual in countering personal misfortune.”¹⁵

Clearly, by the fall of 1932 the economy was not going to cure itself; moreover, Herbert Hoover was not going to take control. Anyone, it has been argued, could have beaten Hoover in 1932. Not just anyone did, however. New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born in New York in 1882, the only child of a wealthy patrician father and an imperious mother, and a distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, had the advantage of a superior education at prestigious Groton School and Harvard University, followed by a stint at Columbia Law School. While Roosevelt’s campaign program was vague, voters were drawn by his irrepressible confidence. Although Roosevelt had a genuine concern for the welfare of the less fortunate—the patrician’s sense of noblesse oblige—he was also a shrewd judge of human nature. Roosevelt had a sure feeling for public opinion, and he won a landslide victory against Hoover. With the exception of William Howard Taft in 1912, no Republican candidate had ever been so thoroughly defeated.¹⁶

Franklin Roosevelt’s relationship with the South had not always exhibited the prickly quality it assumed in the latter years of his administration. The South early provided him with physical and spiritual succor as well as crucial political support. Roosevelt possessed a strong personal affinity for the region and considered Georgia his adopted state. Venturing south in the mid-1920s in search of therapeutic relief for his polio-stricken legs, Roosevelt made his way to the healing waters of Warm Springs, Georgia, where he eventually acquired a farm. Warm Springs provided a welcome respite from the harried pace of Washington. The president took quickly to the Georgian countryside, his patrician upbringing not unlike that of the traditional southern squirearchy.¹⁷

More crucial than his appreciation for the finer qualities of southern living was Roosevelt’s understanding of the importance of the South within the national Democratic Party, and he knew he needed southern support to win the presidency in 1932. National party rules gave southern Democrats virtual veto power over the party’s nominee. Roosevelt also hoped to avoid the debacle of four years earlier, when five traditionally Democratic states, unable to stomach Al Smith’s candidacy, had bolted the party. Seeking to avoid another split, Roosevelt worked to build a solid relationship with the region. Southern political leaders were impressed by Roosevelt, especially by his apparent desire to forge regional alliances, to mend sectional differences, and to focus on economic as opposed to social and cultural issues. With a few exceptions—U. S. Senators Huey P. Long of Louisiana and Hugo Black of Alabama, for example—traditional conservatives dominated the southern political landscape in 1932. The pragmatic and philosophically elusive Roosevelt could look forward to working with such conservative stalwarts as Mississippi’s Pat Harrison and Georgia’s Walter George as well as the demagogic Ellison Durant “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, men not given to radical experimentation and who had no interest in disrupting regional power relationships.¹⁸

Roosevelt’s attempts to address and alleviate the national economic crisis came closer than any other federal program since Reconstruction to undermining traditional social, economic, racial, and political relations in the South. Ultimately, the New Deal failed to achieve economic recovery. Though it never realized its primary objective (and even, in the case of agricultural workers, further undermined their already precarious hold on life), the New Deal initiated changes in the South’s economic and social structure that by the 1980s would render the region almost unrecognizable. Southern politicians provided minimal input into New Deal administrative policy. Although southern Democrats held a powerful lock on Congress, no southerner occupied an influential position within Roosevelt’s inner circle. Likewise, no southerners participated in the Brain Trust, Roosevelt’s informal group of advisors drawn primarily from academia. The Cabinet included three southerners, but their influence on the development of New Deal policy was limited.¹⁹ Nevertheless, Roosevelt enjoyed relatively strong southern congressional support through the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Challenging the Laws of Nature: The New Deal and Southern Politics
• Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line: World War II, Race, and the South’s Political Crucible
• Chapter 3: Out of the Bag?: The Search for Southern Unity
• Chapter 4: Setting the Postwar Agenda: Civil Rights, States’ Rights, and the Tale of Two Conventions
• Chapter 5: The Dixiecrat Presidential Campaign
• Chapter 6: The Cause Lost: The Decline of the Dixiecrat Movement, 1949–1950
• Chapter 7: Cut Free from the Moorings: Presidential Politics in the South in the 1950s and 1960s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index