States' Rights Party (Dixiecrats)

THE STATES' RIGHTS Democratic Party, or Dix-iecrat Party, was founded in 1948 in response to the Democratic Party's growing support of civil rights and opposition to segregation. The solid south had been staunchly and reliably Democratic since the Civil War, but President Truman's integration of the army and the party's adoption of a civil rights platform in its presidential campaign ended that relationship. At the urging of South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond, 35 delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention, and reconvened in Alabama, where they nominated Thurmond as their presidential candidate, with Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as his running mate. In four states, Thurmond's South Carolina, Wright's Mississippi, and the deep south states of Louisiana and Alabama, the Dixiecrats took the Democrats' spot on the ballot, and carried the electoral votes in just those states. With the addition of a single electoral vote from Tennessee, the Dixiecrats had a total of 39, well below what was needed, but a significant number for a third party.

Meanwhile, further demonstrating the identity crisis among the Democrats, liberal Democrats formed the Progressive Party (unrelated to previous parties by that name) on an anti-war platform; it earned no electoral votes, but Progressive candidate Henry Wallace won nearly as many popular votes as Thurmond. The three-way split among the Democrats was expected to hand the election to Republican Thomas Dewey (though Truman won, in the end).

Though the States' Rights Democratic Party disbanded after the election, the Dixiecrats remained a power in politics. The Democratic hold over the white south's electoral votes crumbled between 1948 and the 1960s. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Southern Manifesto was signed in 1956 by 19 senators and 77 congressional representatives: all but two of the 96 signatories were southern Democrats.

The Manifesto declared that the ruling had been an abuse of judicial power, and accused integrationists of worsening southern race relations by interfering with the balance that had been “created through 90 years of patient effort.” The author of the Manifesto was Virginia [Page 767]Senator Harry Byrd, who received 134,000 votes in the 1956 presidential election (even though he was not a candidate). In 1960, when the Democrats nominated John E Kennedy, Byrd (still not a candidate) received 15 electoral votes, all from southern states, and he actually carried Mississippi. Outspoken Alabama Governor George Wallace, a charismatic and popular segregationist, ran for president in every election 1964–76 (as the candidate for the American Independent Party in 1968), consistently garnering more votes than anyone expected, though not nearly enough to be a serious contender.

All of these events were a signal to the supposed party of the opposition, that Democrats in the south could be lured away; if nothing else, the two parties were on closer to equal ground, each of them representing a different period of federal imposition on the sovereignty of southern states. Republican Richard Nixon's southern strategy worked by targeting southern Democrats and highlighting the differences between their values and those of the Democratic National Party. A number of prominent Democrats changed their party affiliation, tossing their hats in with the Republicans (including Thurmond, who endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964 and was an important unofficial advisor to Nixon). Beginning with presidential elections, the south gradually shifted allegiance to the Republican Party, with the Grand Old Party (GOP) winning more and more statewide elections as the 20th century waxed on.

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