Posted on 12/21/2002 4:18:06 AM PST by jalisco555
There's an odd, poetic justice in Trent Lott's downfall over his incautiously fond reminiscences about Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's Democratic re-election campaign. Thurmond had an opponent in that race whom almost no one has mentioned, because he and his followers were swept immediately into history's dustbin after that election. Now is the time for that untold half of the story.
Everyone knows by now that Thurmond's States' Rights Party meant to thwart Truman's unprecedentedly strong commitment to civil rights. The segregationist apostates didn't expect Thurmond to win the election (he carried only four Southern states); they meant to divert enough Electoral College votes from Truman to throw his contest with Republican Thomas Dewey into the House of Representatives. There, the next President would have to sell out civil rights to win all-powerful Southern committee chairmen's backing.
But Thurmond wasn't the only "third-party" candidate endangering Democrats and civil rights. If anything, he was the fourth-party candidate in the 1948 popular vote, coming in behind another candidate who, like him, had bolted the Democrats to run on an insurgent ticket. Never mind that this challenger was running left, accusing Truman of timidity on civil rights. Because this challenger had held a higher public office than Thurmond and was far better known, his defection gave segregationists an unexpected, unintended boost by drawing more votes from Democrats than Thurmond did.
Like Ralph Nader's voters in 2000, the leftist insurgent's supporters in 1948 cost Democrats several states: Michigan, New Jersey, and New York went narrowly to Dewey, whose civil-rights posture was at best platitudinous and ephemeral and whose antipathy to labor was legendary. Dewey carried his own state, the solidly New Deal New York, by 61,000 votes only because nearly half a million votes which should have been Truman's went instead to the leftist challenger, who claimed to be Roosevelt's true legatee.
I'm being a bit cute in withholding the mystery man's name, to tease those whose recent accounts of the 1948 campaign never mentioned him. Last week, the New Republic did mention someone else's passing mention of him on TV. But the magazine didn't mention that when Henry A. Wallace decided to run in 1948, he had recently become editor of…. the New Republic. Why the eerie silence about Wallace, who was Vice-President of the United States during Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term (1941-1945) and became the 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Citizens of America party? A visionary but quixotic New Dealer with impeccably Midwestern roots in agriculture and business, he would have become president upon FDR's death had he not lost re-nomination as vice president to Truman at the tumultuous 1944 Chicago convention. Roosevelt seems to have dropped him because Wallace was drifting too far left: Out of office, he fell into the Communists' grip by agreeing, after mysterious visits to him at The New Republic, to head their PCA ticket.
There is no ambiguity about the PCA's backing and strategy. Leftist journalists such as I.F. Stone spoke proudly of it, for many of Wallace's positions were ahead of their time. He was a stout foe of racism and sexism when most Americans still sentimentalized them. He risked his life to address integrated audiences in Thurmond's South during the campaign. And his "vision of a vibrant American economy stimulated by government and generating vast number of jobs closely resembles what actually happened-and what almost no one else anticipated-in the postwar years," according to the centrist-conservative writer Michael Barone.
But these positions dovetailed or got hopelessly entangled with darker Communist goals, and Wallace stopped drawing distinctions. He kept denying Stalin's brutalities and the war-ravaged Soviet Union's imperialistic, nationalistic designs on Europe. He attacked the Truman Doctrine and even the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe against Stalinist advances. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, Wallace even attacked Truman's airlift to keep it free. Wallace thus handed segregationists an excuse to link civil-rights activism with Communist subversion.
By the end of the campaign, he had become an embarrassment and a threat to liberals such as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the journalist James Wechsler, and the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who rallied to Truman against Wallace, Thurmond, and Dewey. Wallace had held some real power in the early 1940s, but he and his Communist backers lost it all--and not only because J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy made sure of it, viciously, thereby tainting even the anti-Communist liberals' efforts to outflank him. No wonder that no one today, conservative or liberal, wants to be caught sounding as sentimental about the Wallace campaign as Trent Lott did about Thurmond's. Some old leftists still do reminisce about the warm glow of old struggles, denying that, wittingly or not, they, too, wound up defending a system that, even then, was enslaving and murdering as many people as racism had.
Unlike American racism, Communism did most of its dirty deeds abroad. Shouldn't we indeed forget the illusions of its American apologists like Wallace?
Forgetting has its uses, of course: In daily race relations, it can help Americans of all colors make fresh starts. "The old strategies of accusation, isolation, and containment have broken down," the late black historian C. Eric Lincoln wrote. "It is time now to reach for the hand that is reaching for tomorrow, whatever color that hand may be."
As for ideologues and their apologists, we can only hope that those who've "forgotten" the Wallace campaign in this month's accounts of the 1948 election aren't condemning themselves to repeat its mistakes. Unacceptable as Thurmond and Lott's politics have been, the antidote can't be to whitewash everything that has passed for anti-racism since the 1940s. Journalists' and historians' job is to help us all by telling the whole story.
Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and former political columnist of the New York Daily News, is writing a book about American national identity.
The Nation once again...
My late brother was a bit like Wallace : all caught up in the civil rights aspects of what the party was doing , but almost totally unaware the Reds were pushing civil rights as a means of tearing America apart once more. The Reds wanted nothing less than an armed Black insurrection : something they figured would be good for the party whichever way it went.
If the Blacks succeeded, the party would have the inside track in whatever government resulted. If they failed, the party would have martyrs to shout about.The best case scenario, they reasoned, would be a Black guerilla movement :lots of bloodshed, American military forces bogged down, lots of repression, etc.
What's left of the party faithful now calls themselves "Progressives" - same name Wallace's party used. Their aims are still about the same : splinter the Nation by setting factions against one another - something you may have noticed the major media networks also attempt...
Sort of like modern day Democrats, eh?
That's true. Thurmond was only on the ballot in Southern states (and South Dakota as the one exception in the North.) So it was quite impossible for him to win the election.
Yes, you're right. The majority of the democratic voters aren't communists. They're just camp followers.
We only worry about the camp followers because they are the ones who put the communists into office. They (the camp followers) understand that they can use the government as an instrument of plunder and don't hesitate to do so. And the Democrat leadership fully understands how to keep the camp followers in their camp. Government largess at the productive taxpayers' expense.
Here is what Mencken had to say about the Dixiecrats (p. 94):
The result today [of the South's previous history of misdeeds] is that the Dixiecrat movement is getting a great deal less sober attention than it deserves. It looks, from across the Potomac and Ohio, like nothing more than a fresh pestilence of Longs, Bilbos, Tillmans, Bleases, Talmadges and Pappy O'Daniels. It is, in fact, nothing of the sort, whatever the excrescences that now burden it. It is fundamentally quite as serious in purpose, and quite as rational, as any other regional movement that has appeared in recent years, and some of its leaders are worthy of the highest respect. Certainly it would be absurd to dismiss such men as Governor J. Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina, and former Governor Dan Moody, of Texas, as windbags of the common sort. They are men of intelligence, and they are men of honor, and when they take to the bush it is safe to assume that they have a genuine grievance.
Name File alert.
Me ? I believe in reasonable compassion - can't seem to help myself there !
When compassion becomes a cottage industry for giver and recipient, and well-meant assistance becomes an "entitlement", and when entitlements are used to buy voting blocs,compassion ceases to be anything but self-interest.
Unfortunately, I can remember when Wendell Wilkie ran against Franklin Roosevelt - and can also remember Wilkie tried to out-do Roosevelt in the special offers department ; but didn't quite have the charisma to win over the voters. I can remember Tom Dewey trying to look more like Santa Claus than Harry Truman, etc., etc.
'Tain't party label that makes the difference !
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.