Thurmond, J. Strom (1902–2003)

PERHAPS THE MOST significant third-party presidential candidate of the 20th century, J. Strom Thurmond was also the oldest serving senator, and at the time he left office, had served the longest senatorial career. A South Carolinian lawyer, Thurmond served in the state Senate and as a judge in the Eleventh Circuit Court before joining the army during World War II. He returned heavily decorated, and was elected governor in 1946. As a young man, he fathered an illegitimate child with an African-American woman, Carrie Butler, a fact that was only revealed after his death, though throughout his daughter's life, he offered her financial and emotional support.

During his term as governor, the national debate over segregation intensified. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, a number of the conservative Southern Democrats, Thurmond included, expressed their outrage over Truman's growing support of integration, and his integration of the U.S. Army. When the party adopted an antisegregation platform over southern protests, 35 delegates walked out. These delegates formed the States' Rights Democratic Party (also known as the Dixiecrats), which upheld segregation as a matter to be determined by individual states according to rights guaranteed them by the Constitution. It was a drastic split with tradition: since the Civil War, the solid south had been staunchly Democratic.

Thurmond had organized the walkout, and was nominated the Dixiecrat candidate, with Mississippi governor Fielding Wright as his running mate. In several southern states, including Thurmond's South Carolina, the Dixiecrat candidates were listed as the official Democratic ticket, which accounted for Thurmond's success in garnering 39 electoral votes (of 531). Though Thurmond had only 2.4 percent of the popular vote, compared to third-party candidate Ross Perot's 18.9 percent in 1992, Perot won no electoral votes. That Thurmond's share of the electoral vote was quadruple that of his popular support demonstrates the strong regional nature of his appeal.

After losing a senatorial campaign in 1950, Thurmond was forced to run as a write-in candidate in 1954, when the South Carolina Democratic Party refused to nominate him because he had supported Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election. He became the only senator elected as a write-in candidate, and pursued his anti-integration platform aggressively in the Senate. When the majority of southern Democrats agreed not to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Thurmond ignored them. His filibuster set a still-unbroken record of 24 hours and 18 minutes, [Page 794]though the bill passed. In 1964, discontent with the civil rights platform of the Democratic Party, he switched affiliation to the Republican Party, and drummed up support in South Carolina for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

In the 1968 presidential election, Thurmond's support of Richard Nixon was one of the factors that informed Nixon's “Southern strategy,” by which electoral votes were courted in the south, long-ignored by the GOP as a Democratic stronghold. Thurmond, as a sort of unofficial southern ambassador to the party, was instrumental in Nixon's choice of Maryland governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate, and became a significant force in 1970s Washington, after spending the previous decade and a half concerned with little beyond his opposition to civil rights. This power waned in the Reagan years, though, because of Thurmond's broken promise to support Reagan's candidacy (he endorsed dark horse John Connally, who like Reagan and Thurmond was a Democrat turned Republican). His views on race mellowed as the times changed, and his blanket opposition to the nomination of African Americans to various positions ended; he was one of the senators who voted to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

...