States' Rights Party. In 1948, disgruntled southern Democrats, nicknamed Dixiecrats, launched the States' Rights party. While conservative, white southern Democrats had for many years decried the
Democratic party's liberal drift and particularly its courting of northern black voters, the support of a moderate
civil rights program by President Harry S.
Truman and national Democratic party leaders provided the immediate impetus for the party bolt.
The Dixiecrats initially tried with limited success to convince southern state Democratic parties to oppose Truman's nomination, but the Democrats' convention, meeting in Philadelphia in July, nominated Truman and adopted a pro–civil rights plank. Two days later, a convention in Birmingham recommended that southern Democratic parties put Governor Strom Thurmond (1902– ) of South Carolina on their ballots as the official Democratic presidential candidate, along with Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as his running mate. Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana complied, but when the Dixiecrats proved unable to control other state Democratic parties, they organized a third party and held a convention in Houston that nominated the Thurmond/Wright ticket.
In the fall election, the Dixiecrats failed to garner national support or even regional solidarity for their party, carrying only those four states where the ballots listed Thurmond as the Democratic nominee instead of Truman. Their revolt, however, represented the beginning of the end of the solid Democratic South and revealed the potential divisiveness of the civil rights issue for the New Deal Democratic coalition. Strom Thurmond, rejoining the
Republican party, went on to become one of the longest‐serving U.S. senators in American history.
See also
New Deal Era, The;
Political Parties;
Segregation, Racial;
States' Rights.
Bibliography
Robert A. Garson , The Democratic Party and the Politics of Sectionalism, 1941–1948, 1974.
Numan V. Bartley , The New South 1945–1980, 1995.
Charles C. Bolton
