In the Capitol on January 7, Truman climbed the stairs to the rostrum and stared out at a hostile Eightieth Congress. Robert Taft sat in the third row beside the outspoken Truman critic, Republican senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan. The secretary of state, General Marshall, was in the first row. Truman began his speech in his familiar drone—a flat voice with a distinct inability for emotional impact—and he delivered a message he knew would infuriate half the room. He wanted to raise spending on all kinds of benefits: unemployment compensation, old-age benefits, benefits for the surviving families of fallen soldiers.
Central to the message was civil rights. The president called “the essential human rights of our citizens” democracy’s “first goal.”
The United States has always had a deep concern for human rights. Religious freedom, free speech, and freedom of thought are cherished realities in our land. Any denial of human rights is a denial of the basic beliefs of democracy and of our regard for the worth of each individual. Today, however, some of our citizens are still denied equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement, and for the expression of their views at the polls. Most serious of all, some are denied equal protection under laws. Whether discrimination is based on race, or creed, or color, or land of origin, it is utterly contrary to American ideals of democracy.
On seven occasions during his address, Truman paused in the expectation of applause, only to be met by deafening silence. Not even his own party, nor any of his close friends, offered any indication of support. One reporter present described “almost a half an hour of complete silence . . . Not even in the days of awful Congressional hostility to President Herbert Hoover . . . was there any such embarrassing reaction.” When Truman’s speech was over, his motorcade took him back to the White House. In the Oval Office, he pulled bottles of scotch and bourbon from a desk drawer and, with staffers gathered around his desk, toasted to “success in ’48!”
But the response was devastating. In his GOP rebuttal, Senator Taft referred to Truman as “Santa Claus” for his spending policies, with “a rich present for every special group in the United States.”
Truman doubled down. Soon rumors of another major speech began to spread through Washington. The impetus for this speech came from Truman adviser George Elsey, who argued that the president and the Democrats should push even further on civil rights. Elsey and others contributed to the speech, and Truman completed it with a few editorial markings. When staffers read the draft, they had mixed emotions.
“[Political adviser Charlie] Murphy and [press secretary Charlie] Ross were nervous,” recalled Elsey. “They predicted a political firestorm from southern Democrats. Truman agreed with their forecast but was undeterred . . . It was time to lay it on the line in bold, clear terms. Thus, the landmark February 2, 1948, message to the Congress on civil rights.”
Truman released the message to Congress via his press office, less than a month after his State of the Union and before he had made any official mention of a 1948 candidacy. The address read in part:
The founders of the United States proclaimed to the world the American belief that all men are created equal, and that governments are instituted to secure the inalienable rights with which all men are endowed. In the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, they eloquently expressed the aspirations of all mankind for equality and freedom.
Truman called for a ten-point plan that included passage of federal laws against lynching, a Fair Employment Practice Commission to prevent discrimination in the workplace, and laws protecting the right of minorities to vote, in all states, in every election.
As predicted, Truman’s February 2 civil rights message blew the proverbial roof off governors’ mansions in states across the South.
On February 7, a conference of southern-state governors drew large crowds and cameras to the small town of Wakulla Springs, Florida. A parade of white men and women clutching Confederate flags marched into a speaking hall. The hall’s air grew heated as, one after the other, governors demanded action against Truman’s civil rights proposals.
“We have been betrayed by the leadership of the Democratic Party,” roared Governor Benjamin Travis Laney of Arkansas. “If these [laws] are to be imposed upon us, I for one would rather they come from a Republican than from the party for which I have given my allegiance.”
Governor James Folsom of Alabama demanded that candidates pledge to uphold traditions of “white supremacy” at the Democratic National Convention.
The man emerging as the leader of this group was Strom Thurmond, the forty-five-year-old war hero who had been elected governor of South Carolina in 1946. Thurmond spoke with a heavy southern accent as he promised to lead a delegation to Washington to fight Truman’s civil rights promises “in the strongest possible language.” He could sum up his message in a sentence: “We may as well have a showdown once and for all.”
Four days after Wakulla Springs, some four thousand rowdy politicians and their supporters gathered in Jackson, Mississippi, emitting rebel yells, waving Confederate flags, and adopting a resolution charging that Truman’s civil rights plan “intrudes into the sacred rights of the state.” On that same day, South Carolina’s General Assembly adopted its own anti-Truman resolution, calling the civil rights proposals “un-American.” Soon after, Alabama did the same. Then Virginia. Then Mississippi, where political leaders issued a resolution calling upon “all true white Jeffersonian Democrats” to stage a “fight to the last ditch” against Truman and his civil rights proposals.
Weeks earlier, Truman had read in the Rowe-Clifford memo that it was “inconceivable” Southern Democrats would
