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Dixiecrat

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 The term Dixiecrat is a portmanteau of Dixie, referring to the Southern United States, and Democrat, referring to the United States Democratic Party. Initially, it referred to a 1948 splinter from the party: for over a century, white Southerners had overwhelmingly been Democrats, but that year many bolted the party and supported Strom Thurmond's third-party candidacy for president of the United States. Over the next several decades, as the white South slowly re-aligned from the Democrats to the Republicans, the term came to have a broader usage, including, for example, with reference to the members of the Electoral College who in the election of 1960 voted for Harry Flood Byrd rather than John F. Kennedy, or the white Southern voters and electors who in 1968 supported Wallace.

The term has also been used to refer to conservative white Southerners who remain within the Democratic Party, and those who were formerly Democrats but now identify as Republicans.

1948 presidential election

The States' Rights Democratic Party was a short-lived splinter group that broke from the Democratic Party in 1948. The States' Rights Democratic Party opposed racial integration and wanted to retain Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. The party slogan was "Segregation Forever!" Members of the States' Rights Democratic Party, were often known as Dixiecrats.

The party was formed after thirty-five delegates from Mississippi and Alabama walked out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. The walkout was prompted by a controversial speech by then-Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, Minnesota urging the party to adopt an anti-segregationist plank in the platform, which it did. Even before the convention started, the Southern delegates were upset by President Harry S. Truman's executive order to racially integrate the armed forces.

After President Truman's endorsement of the civil rights plank, Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina, helped organize the walkout delegates into a separate party, whose platform was ostensibly concerned with states' rights. The Dixiecrats held their convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi, for vice president. Dixiecrat leaders worked to have Thurmond-Wright declared the "official" Democratic Party ticket in Southern states. They succeeded only in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; in other states, they were forced to run as a third-party ticket. These included Arkansas, whose governor-elect, Sid McMath, a young prosecutor and decorated World War II Marine veteran, vigorously supported Truman in speeches across the region, much to the consternation of the sitting governor, Ben Laney, an ardent Thurmond supporter. Laney later used McMath's pro-Truman stance against him during his 1950 re-election bid which McMath won handily. Efforts to paint other Truman loyalists as "turncoats" generally failed, although the seeds of discontent were planted which in years to come took their toll on Southern moderates, among them Congressman Brooks Hays of the Second (central) District of Arkansas, whose efforts at reconciliation during the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis made him vulnerable to defeat in 1958 by a segregationist surrogate fielded by forces loyal to then-Governor Orval Faubus, whose justification for using the national guard to bar entry to black pupils in defiance of a federal court order echoed much of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform.

On election day 1948, the Thurmond-Wright ticket carried the previously solid Democratic states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, receiving 1,169,021 popular votes and 39 electoral votes. The split in the Democratic party in the 1948 election was seen as virtually guaranteeing a victory by the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York, yet Truman won re-election in an upset.

Subsequent elections

The Dixiecrat Party largely dissolved after the 1948 election. Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms eventually switched parties and joined the Republicans. Several others remained in the Democratic Party and went on to become prominent Democratic Senators. These former Dixiecrats, turned Senators, went on to serve multiple terms in the service of their respective states. These long careers in the Senate elevated their seniority putting them in positions of power and prestige.

None of these Representatives and Senators who bucked the Democratic party ever suffered punishment from their caucuses by expulsion or demotion of seniority or removal from prized committee chairmanships.

Regardless of the power struggle within the Democratic Party concerning segregation policy, the south remained a strongly Democratic voting block for local, state, and federal Congressional elections. This was not true of Presidential elections.

In the 1960s, the courting of white Southern Democratic voters was the basis of the "southern strategy" of the Republican Party's Presidential Campaigns. Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater carried the Deep South in 1964, despite losing in a landslide in the rest of the nation to President Lyndon B Johnson of Texas. Johnson surmised that his advocacy behind passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would lose the South for the Democratic party and it did. The only Democratic presidential candidate after 1956 to solidly carry the Deep South was President Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.

Into the twenty-first century, the South has changed from a Democratic monolith to a majority Republican sector of the country with GOP gains in state legislatures. This change, which began in 1972 with Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", was followed up by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the reconquest of the House of Representatives in 1994 by Newt Gingrich, reached its ultimate pinnacle in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush

Notable members

Senators

State governors

Others

  • Floyd Spence state representative from South Carolina
  • Albert Watson while U.S. Representative from South Carolina
  • Walter Sillers JR, Mississippi Speaker of the House
  • Harvey T. Ross, Mississippi State Legislature
  • Thomas P. Brady, Associate Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court
  • Gessner T. McCorvey, Alabama state Democratic Executive Committee Chairman
  • Orval Faubus candidate for president.
  • Leander Perez, Louisiana political "leader"
  • Horace C. Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney defender of the Klan and political "leader"
  • Ross Lillard
  • John Kasper
  • Mrs. Anna B. Korn
  • Mrs. Ruth Lackey
  • Clark Hurd
  • William E. Jenner
  • Francis Haskell
  • John Oliver Emmerich, Speech writer
  • Hugh Roy Cullen
  • T. Coleman Andrews
  • John Steel Baston
  • Dr. Frazier
  • O. L. Penny
  • Clifton Ratlift
  • M. F. Ray
  • Thomas Jefferson Tubb
  • J.K. Wells
  • Barney Wolverton
  • Governor White
  • Thomas H. Werdel

See also

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