The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party by John Nichols

Author:John Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The Return of the Segregationists

The Progressive Party actually outlasted Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat party, which dissolved shortly after the 1948 count was completed. But the Dixiecrats had a place to go. Thurmond finished his term as the Democratic governor of South Carolina in 1951 and a few years later would be sitting in the Senate as a member of the Democratic Caucus. Southern Democrats who marched out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention and gave the Dixiecrat party line that year to Thurmond were seated on the floor of the 1952 Democratic National Convention. They successfully nominated one of their own, Alabama senator John Sparkman, for vice president. Sparkman had announced in March 1948 that he could not support Truman. He then joined his fellow Alabama segregationists in securing the Dixiecrat line for Thurmond. Thanks to these machinations, the Dixiecrats won Alabama that fall on a platform that explicitly condemned proposals to ban lynching and the poll tax. Four years later, Sparkman was a star of the Democratic convention, where he crafted what was described as a “compromise” platform plank on civil rights. In fact, it wasn’t a compromise; it was a renewal of the awful calculus of a Democratic Party that Wallace had tried to change in 1944 and challenged in 1948.

The Democrats might send some good signals. Their presidents might, under pressure from Randolph and the March on Washington Movement and Eleanor Roosevelt and the liberals, issue executive orders to desegregate war industries and the military. But their leaders were determined to maintain the loyalty of the “solid South” at almost any cost—even the cost of nominating for the vice presidency a man who had refused to support the party’s previous nominee because that nominee was insufficiently racist. Remarkably, Sparkman gained that nomination by acclamation (“At no point had there been any serious rival,” the New York Times reported) and then campaigned as a fervent racist who explained that Truman’s attempts to move the party in a modestly more moderate direction had been a “colossal blunder.” The 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, told the delegates that Sparkman “will give me all of the strength that I need.” The hapless Stevenson was, as usual, wrong. The party’s ticket carried nine Southern and border states but lost the rest of the country—going down to defeat even in Stevenson’s home state of Illinois.

According to Curtis MacDougall: “The longer a person stuck to his Progressivism, the more likelihood there was that the price he would ultimately pay would be greater. Whereas the Dixiecrats of 1948 were welcomed back into the Democratic fold with everything forgiven, no such generous attitude prevailed toward the Progressives.”

Many Wallace allies were purged in the Democratic primaries of 1950. Senator Glen Taylor, labeled an incorrigible leftist after his 1948 alignment with Wallace, was beaten in Idaho. Senator Claude Pepper was beaten in Florida. California Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, dubbed the “Pink Lady” for her supposed sympathies with the Soviet Union, tried for the Senate in 1950; she survived

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