The Dixiecrats - Would We Have Been Better Off Had Thurmond Won in 1948?

Lew Rockwell Report ^ | 1949 | Murray Rothbard

[Wallace T.]

May 11, 1949

370 Central Park West
New York 25, N.Y.

Headquarters,
States Rights Democrats
Jackson, Miss.

Gentlemen:

The New York Times this morning carried a report which, if true, is just about the best political news of the year. Indeed, it may be the most significant development since the advent of the New Deal.

Although a New Yorker born and bred, I was a staunch supporter of the Thurmond movement; a good friend of mine headed the Columbia Students for Thurmond, which I believe was the only such collegiate movement north of the Mason-Dixon line.

My support, however, was not extremely enthusiastic, because, although I agreed wholeheartedly with the platform and Thurmond’s campaign speeches, I felt that it was keyed too much to purely Southern interests. Sure, the Civil Tyranny program must be combatted, but what about the myriad invasions of states rights in other fields by the power-hungry Washington bureaucracy? In other words, while you always claimed that yours was a national movement, by talking only of the Civil Tyranny program you threw away any attraction to Northern and Western voters.

I have always felt that it is imperative for the States Rights movement to establish itself on a nation-wide scale. Obviously, we are now living in a one-party system, a party of Socialists in fact if not in name, and only courageous Southern Democrats in Congress have so far blocked their program. But as far as Presidential elections go, the Republicans are through – the Socialist Administration has too much power to bribe voters with wild promises. If things go on as they are, it is only a question of a few years for the socialist program to go through and destroy this land of liberty.

Therefore it is essential to form a new party, of States Righters, consisting of Southern Democrats and real Republicans (omitting the me-too Republicans) to launch a dynamic offensive against National Socialism in this country before it is too late. I am greatly elated over your new platform because I believe it points in that direction.

Would you please send me a copy of your new platform and constitution? Do you plan to start a newspaper of nation-wide circulation? This would be of great help in establishing a national States Rights movement.

I would like to add that, as an economist, I enthusiastically support your proposals on national debt and taxes – in fact, taken all and all, from the news reports I would say that your new platform is one of the best in American history. Indeed, it is one of the finest political statements in America since Calhoun’s Exposition.

It could grow into a mighty movement if you have the will and vision. There are millions of Americans throughout the country, Republicans and Democrats, who would flock to your banner. They are weary of being led by the nose by New Deal politicians of both parties – they are tired of being deprived of their votes because there is no anti-socialist and pro-liberty party to which they can turn.

You, gentlemen, can be a means of succor for these millions - and not only these, but America itself. National Socialism has always meant poverty, tyranny, and war. America is slipping down the road and has already gone far; it must be restored to the right path if the great dream of our forefathers of a nation dedicated to liberty is not to vanish from the earth. Yours can be that mission.

Sincerely yours,
Murray N. Rothbard

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty and many other books and articles. He was also academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Copyright © 2002 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Murray Rothbard Archives

     

[vbmoneyspender]

No. I only desire that the Federal government be restricted to only those powers delineated to it under the Constitution. I would also prefer that governmental authority, especially on the Federal level, not restrict the exercise of property rights nor inhibit freedom of association. If that leads to greater mingling or increased separation of the races, so be it.

That is all fine and well, but explain to me how you would have gotten rid of Jim Crow, or slavery for that matter, without federal involvement.

[FreedomCalls]

I imagine had the Dixicrats won in '48 that the UN would not be as powerful, there would be no N. Korea and China would be nationalist.

And on the territory of what used to be both the United States and what used to be the Soviet Union, there would be a vast unpopulated smoldering nuclear wasteland far too radioactive for anyone to inhabit.

[Mike Darancette]

And on the territory of what used to be both the United States and what used to be the Soviet Union,...

And how would that have happened between 1949 and 1953???

[Wallace T.]

Neither Taft nor Goldwater were Southerners, nor were, for that matter, other GOP opponents of civil rights laws like William Knowland of California. To my knowledge, none of them held white supremacist views. However, they, unlike many who call themselves conservatives in 2002, recognize that there are limits to Federal power, specifically, the Constitution, in its original intent, as outlined in The Federalist Papers and other writings of the framers of that document. If the 14th Amendment is legitimate, then the Federal government does have the responsibility to ensure that State and local governments treat their citizens equally. Thus, at least the portion of civil rights legislation intended to end inferior treatment in public schools and denial of voting rights was Constitutional. However, in neither the 14th Amendment nor any other portion of the Constitution is the Federal government empowered to dictate to a business owner whom he may hire or to a property owner to whom he may sell his house. Further, affirmative action, which the current administration has not denounced or corrected, gives an unfair advantage to minorities and women as opposed to white males.

What is our heritage as conservatives? Are we the heirs of Washington or George III? Grover Cleveland or William Jennings Bryan? Calvin Coolidge or Franklin Roosevelt? Robert Taft or Harry Truman? Barry Goldwater or Lyndon Johnson? Ronald Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller? In all too many cases, some who call themselves by the name conservative choose the "big government" member of the above couplings.

[Mike Darancette]

Now imagine the world without Isreal.

Since Thurmond would not have taken office until 1949 I don't have to.

[CatoRenasci]

I recall the fifties and the segregationists of both liberal and conservative stripe well.

I think support of segregation is a moral issue, one that has caused pain even within my own family as family members have disagreed.

Your point that the victime of ill will and of a failure of will has been wronged in either case is true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. The former, ill will, is definitely morally culpable, while the latter, while not praiseworthy, represents only a failure to adhere to an ideal superogatory standard.

[FreedomCalls]

And how would that have happened between 1949 and 1953???

Are you implying that he would have been a one term [gasp!] President?

[Don'tMessWithTexas]

At the time of the enactment of the Civil Rights acts, there was some question as to how to address the constitutional challenges. The 13th amendment to the constitution not only eliminated slavery but clearly gave to Congress the authority to eliminate the vestiges of slavery. The Congress could have used the 13th Amendment to not only pass anti-lynching laws but civil rights legislation. However, Nicholas Katzenbach, the assistant attorney general at the time chose to defend the Civil Rights Acts on the grounds that Jim Crow restricted interstate commerce. That proved to be the winning argument before the USSC. It avoided the political ramifications of invoking the 13th amendment.

Jim Crow was economically disafvantageous to the South. It suppressed the advancement of the region especially in the post-War period. While southern states would have probably jettisoned Jim Crow eventually for those economic reasons, but it would have taken awhile. However, I think that the federal government had the authority through the 13th or the commerce clause.

[dfwgator]

Of course this is coming from the people that believed that the Civil War wasn't over slavery.

[Mike Darancette]

Are you implying that he would have been a one term [gasp!] President?

It is a real intellectual stretch to even imagine that Thurmond would be a one term President. Strom's election would have so splintered the national Democrat party that Eisenhower would have probably been elected in '52 anyway

[Wallace T.]

The Constitution can be amended, as it was in the early 1960s to prohibit a poll tax in Federal elections, and in 1865 to prohibit slavery. Where the Constitution, specifically the 14th Amendment, requires the states to treat its citizens equally and grants the Federal government the authority to require that the states do so, this would be a legitimate exercise of Federal authority. An example of this would be the higher standards required of blacks to pass State sanctioned bar and medical licesning tests in many Southern states. However, the Equal Housing Act of 1968 and the public accomodation sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went beyond the 14th Amendment provision for equality in governmental action and into the area of private business and personal association. Said proposals should have been proposed as amendments to the Constitution and ratified by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures.

It is not the business of government to correct all social ills, especially those caused by the decisions of free people, wise or not. Whites, and members of other races, prefer to associate with members of their own race, by and large. This is even true of white liberals: I dare say that in 2002 Beverly Hills, Chicago's Gold Coast, and Philadelphia's Main Line are as lily white as the congregation of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, South of Jackson, Mississippi, was in 1932. Laws by themselves do not change human nature; they only affect behavior, at least when the cops are in sight.

Would that neo-conservatives and liberals recognize these facts!

[JohnGalt]

Rothbard, bump.

The FDR and Truman apoligists are out in force. Truman (a brief member of the KKK) was part of an administration that actually stripped rights away from American citizens and hauled them into concentration camps, and then they have the gaul to say somehow that Thurmond was the racist bad guy?

[vbmoneyspender]

The Constitution can be amended, as it was in the early 1960s to prohibit a poll tax in Federal elections, and in 1865 to prohibit slavery.

So I take it that until the Constitution was amended after the Civil War had ended, the Federal Gov't had no business bothering itself with a 'social ill' like slavery.

[CatoRenasci]

Of course this is coming from the people that believed that the Civil War wasn't over slavery.

Right. Well, The War (as my Southern grandmother used to say, avoiding all the questions whether it should be called the War of Northern Agression -which made her laugh-, the War Between the States -which she used when talking to those who might not know what she meant by The War-, or the Civil War - a term she did not find nearly so objectionable as many today) was surely about things other than slavery and it was surely about slavery. I imagine the relative importance of issues varied for various Southerners. One of my Southern greatgrandfathers who supported his native Tennessee in The War also freed his 75+ slaves before The War because he believed slavery was incompatible with his being a Christian minister. Go Figure.

[Wallace T.]

As Nicholas Katzenbach was a liberal, he was wedded to the concept of the Constitution as a "living document." In other words, the Constitution could be stretched to cover almost any action by the Federal government. This concept, pioneered by such liberal Supreme Court justices as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, was supported by Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal proposals were often struck down by conservative justices selected by his GOP predecessors. Although his court packing scheme of 1938 failed, the replacement of conservative justices by liberal ones by Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower meant that the "living document" proposition became the dominant one.

(Someone once asked Eisenhower if he had made any mistakes as President. He replied that he did and that they both were sitting on the Supreme Court. Eisenhower's reference was to justices Warren and Brennan.)

To say the 13th Amendment could be stretched to cover anti-lynching laws and other civil rights legislation is as specious an argument by many libertarians that said amendment prohibits the military draft. The clear intent of the authors of the amendment was to prohibit chattel slavery, not to rectify social customs or unjust laws that stemmed from that institution. If said amendment provided the authority to end unequal treatment of blacks under state laws, there would not have been a need for the 14th and 15th Amendments, passed within a few years of the 13th Amendment.

Don't forget that many Northern states, where slavery never existed or had been abolished decades before Fort Sumter, had de iure segregation, de facto segregation, and anti-black laws. Both Illinois and Ohio restricted the settlement of free blacks in their states before the Civil War. Blacks were lynched in Indiana and Delaware in the early 1900s, not just in Alabama and Louisiana. Public school segregation persisted in New Jersey until 1950. California and other West Coast states placed numerous restrictions on Orientals, in terms of property rights, voting rights, etc. Other states imposed restrictions against American Indians. None of these injustices could be pinned on the after effects of slavery.

As for the "interstate commerce" clause, now there's a "wax nose" if ever there was one! The clear intent of that clause was to create a common market by preventing restrictive tariffs, quotas, etc., on goods from the other states. The Framers of the Constitution clearly did not intend to use this clause as a tool for economic, much less social reform, intervention. That Earl Warren and the Supreme Court accepted the "interstate commerce" argument only speaks to the justices' embrace of a very loose construction of the nation's basic law.

All in all, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were better guides to what the Constitution was intended to effect than were Nicholas Katzenbach, Earl Warren, or their ilk.

[Catspaw]

Ah, yes. Let's talk about couching a yearn for segregation, Jim Crow laws & keepin' dem n--gras in their place in hifalutin' words.

[Wallace T.]

When the Constitution was written, slavery existed not only in the South but in the Middle Atlantic states, except Pennsylvania, where it had only recently been abolished, and in the New England states, except Massachusetts. In that period, there was not only chattel slavery of African-Americans, but also indentured servitude of whites of British and Irish origins. That the Founders were not proud of the institution is evidenced by the banning of slavery in the Northwest Territory and the cessation of the African slave trade after 1808. Their failure to eliminate chattel slavery at the founding of the Republic was a serious error that led to the Civil War 72 years after George Washington took the oath of office as the first President.

Slavery should have been abolished in 1788 by mutual consent, not in 1865 after the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the ruination of much of the South.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Rothbard also supported Adlai Stevenson because he hated Eisenhower and, in fact, used to go to Democratic meetings in this role. Do you also want to defend Stevenson? At other times in his life, Rothbard praised the black panthers, supported Ross Perot, supported Buchanan, and finally voted for George Bush.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Yee-Hah!!!!