Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign generated controversy for the rest of his life. In this, the third of five excerpts from "Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography" (Longstreet, 1998, 2003), authors Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson explore the reason for Thurmond's campaign and how it forever changed South Carolina politics.

For decades, a favorite item on the breakfast menu at Cogburn's Grill in Columbia was the Dixiecrat -- link sausage wrapped with a slice of plain white bread. A Charlotte News headline writer coined the term for the States' Rights Democratic Party, Strom Thurmond's presidential vehicle in 1948.

The campaign transformed Thurmond's image from progressive governor of South Carolina to reactionary national champion of white supremacy. Thurmond forever denied that he had run a racist campaign.

"When I ran for president as a States Righter," he explained in 1980, "some people considered that a racist fight. But it wasn't that. They misconstrued the whole thing. It was a battle of federal power versus state power. That was my fight. That was the way I viewed it."

Here's what he said in a nationwide radio hook-up on the eve of his defeat by Harry Truman: "Don't forget that the so-called civil rights program would bring about the end of segregation in the South, forcing mixing of the races in our hotels, in our restaurants, in our schools, in our swimming pools, and in all public places. This change in our customs is not desired by either the white or the colored race... ."

Southern Progressives lost a champion they could have used. Thurmond had never before exploited racial politics. Until 1948 the term "States' Rights" barely existed in his political vocabulary. His leadership in prosecuting the white mob that murdered Willie Earle, his ultimately successful effort to repeal a state poll tax, and his concern about improving educational and economic opportunities for blacks provided a foundation for leading his state and region into an era of new racial relationships. Had he continued in that direction, a man of his political skill, determination, and energy might well have pulled it off.

Instead, he helped generate forces that over the next half century moved his state, his region, and his country in a different direction. The role of defending white supremacy was one he chose. One interpretation is that he reacted viscerally to his internalized Edgefield County heritage, hearing again the echoing hooves of the Redshirts. Another is that for all his talk of constitutional principles and "States' Rights," Thurmond acts on the basis of politics. Here, principle and expediency may simply have melded.

A governor could not then succeed himself in South Carolina (Olin Johnston was elected twice, but not in succession), and any political future for Thurmond meant a seat in the U.S. Senate... .

Although Thurmond was eyeing the Senate, he also was responding to events. In his words, "I did not run for president just to get in line for the Senate. I ran for president because I felt very deeply that Truman would not represent what I felt was the best type of government for this country. I ran to give people a choice." He would add that he defended segregation as law and custom, and "it was the thinking of the people I represented."

After Judge (J. Waties) Waring struck down the white primary in the summer of 1947, U. S. District Judge George Bell Timmerman, Sr., Thurmond's old opponent and then the father of Thurmond's lieutenant governor, issued a stay order. But a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond unanimously upheld Waring... .

This political context existed in South Carolina when President Truman finally responded to the 1947 report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, "To Secure These Rights." ...

On January 7, 1948, Truman promised in his annual address to Congress to present a comprehensive civil rights program. Two months earlier, presidential advisor Clark Clifford had presented him a strategic political memo, "The Politics of 1948." He predicted Truman would face two opponents, former Vice President Henry Wallace as a liberal third-party challenger and New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey as the Republican nominee. The outcome would be decided, Clifford wrote, by the urban black vote in four states -- California, Illinois, New York, and Ohio.

To cut the loss of liberals to Wallace and to rally black voters, Clifford recommended a civil rights package to Truman. He dismissed as "inconceivable" any possibility of a Southern revolt, explaining, "As always, the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in forming national policy can be safely ignored." Later, after Thurmond raised the Dixiecrat banner and the president issued an executive order to desegregate the military services, Clifford wrote in a shrewd subsequent memo to Truman, "The Negro votes in the crucial states will more than cancel out any votes the President may lose in the South." ...

Truman delivered his civil rights program to Congress on February 2. He proposed eliminating the poll tax, making lynching a federal offense, ending segregation in interstate commerce, and creating a statutory Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)... .

Thurmond's initial response was guarded. Congressman Bryan Dorn demanded that Southern governors "march on Washington," but Thurmond wired support for "holding the line as far as ... possible" in resisting all efforts "to invalidate the practices, customs and institutions which we in South Carolina cherish." ...

At a March 16 rally, he (Thurmond) cited a passage from the "To Secure These Rights" report and bitterly complained, "They have the idealism and prestige; we in the South are the wayward." With the echoes of Preston Brooks, Martin Witherspoon Gary, and John C. Calhoun seemingly rising from the ground, Thurmond declared, "No fight was ever won by staying out of it. Our cause is right and just. We shall honor ourselves by pressing it to the end." ...

In Philadelphia, a week after Republicans nominated New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey for president and California Gov. Earl Warren for vice president, Thurmond found little support for a southwide revolt. On Sunday night, July 11, a caucus that attracted less than a third of the 600 Southern delegates heard him berate the president, saying, "We have been betrayed, and the guilty shall not go unpunished." The New York Times reported the next morning that the Southern revolt against Truman's nomination had collapsed... .

Meanwhile, the platform committee adopted a compromise civil rights plank, ambiguously urging that "Congress should exert its full constitutional powers to protect these rights." On the convention floor, several Southerners argued for specific "states rights" language. They contended the party was repudiating its historic position, but former Gov. Maurice Tobin of Massachusetts pointed out that no states rights plank had appeared for twenty years in the Democratic National Convention platform, not since 1928.

Hubert H. Humphrey, the dynamic thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, ... spoke out for a minority report drafted by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action that would "support our President in guaranteeing these basic and fundamental American principles: The right of full and equal political participation, the right to equal opportunity of employment, the right of security of persons, and the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of our Nation."

Humphrey's speech reflected one of those electric moments, with applause interrupting him eight times. "To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on States Rights," Humphrey said in making his first impression on a national audience, "I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of States Rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."

By a vote of 654½ to 582½, the convention adopted his position. In the tumult that followed, half the Alabama delegation walked out (one who remained was state Rep. George C. Wallace), followed by the entire Mississippi delegation... .

Thurmond returned home from Philadelphia on Friday, with plans to head to Camp Stewart, Georgia, to inspect a South Carolina National Guard unit the next morning. The Mississippi delegation and others had gathered in Birmingham, ... and Govs. Wright (Mississippi) and Laney (Arkansas) called Thurmond, urging him to attend. He decided to go.

After stopping at Camp Stewart, he flew on to Birmingham. Laney and former Gov. Frank Dixon of Alabama already had turned down offers to become the group's presidential nominee. Thurmond had hardly arrived at the boisterous gathering of 7,000 Confederate flag-waving, Dixie-singing enthusiasts than he was offered the nomination. He had an hour to decide.

Thurmond recalled, "I knew that accepting the nomination would have future political repercussions, but I had little time to make up my mind, and I thought somebody ought to do something, so I finally decided to take the plunge."

One can only speculate if the future political repercussions involved alienating himself from the Democratic Party nationally or raising his profile for greater stature at home as a prelude to the 1950 senate race. Thurmond presumably weighed both.

By the time he came to the podium, earlier speakers had warmed up the audience with a statement of principles endorsing "racial integrity" in specific detail... . Thurmond ... drew a roar of approval even before he began speaking, and he didn't disappoint his audience. He used notes on pieces of paper, stuffing each page into his pocket as he finished.

Thurmond biographer Nadine Cohodas tells of showing film clips from Movietone News footage to two top Thurmond aides forty years later, young men accustomed to his version of standing on constitutional principle and not running a racist campaign.

They watched the footage of an energized Thurmond gripping the podium with both hands and exclaiming, "I want to tell you that the progress of the Negro race has not been due to these so-called [and here he spit out the word as if he had bitten into a rotten apple] e-MAN-ci-PATERS -- but to the kindness of the, good Southern people." Then ... he jabbed his right index finger at the crowd to emphasize each point and declared, "I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches." The crowd loved it... .

With Fielding Wright (the Mississippi governor) as his running mate, Thurmond campaigned with the vigor of a man who expected to win. In the end he carried the four states in which he was on the ballot as the official candidate of the Democratic Party. He received more than a million votes and got 38 electoral votes from these four states, plus a 39th from an elector in Tennessee.

In one of the major upsets in American political history, Harry Truman won -- and Clark Clifford was vindicated. Political analysts later concluded that a switch of some 21,000 votes in Ohio and Illinois from Truman to Dewey would have shifted enough electoral votes that Truman would have failed to get a majority... .

The important political reality isn't what might have happened in 1948, but what did happen. Thurmond's campaign both foreshadowed the coming politics of massive resistance and broke loose the psychological moorings that tied the Deep South to the Democratic Party. It would never again be "like religion." ...

From never voting more than five percent Republican, South Carolina went almost fifty percent for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. As Thurmond said, the South was no longer in the bag. Future presidential candidates of both political parties did campaign in the South. Social and demographic forces would drive political change, but the Dixiecrat campaign unlocked the flood- gates... .