“If we throw the election into the House of Representatives, we will hold the balance of power,” Thurmond shouted. “[The South has been] stabbed in the back by an accidental President with his desire to win the support of a minority bloc [black voters].”
After Thurmond spoke, Frank Dixon, the former Alabama governor, took the floor. “In Philadelphia,” Dixon shouted, “a definite decision was made to enforce Truman’s plan for a social revolution in the south. You heard the deliberate adoption of a program meant to destroy us.” With Truman’s plan, Dixon charged, blacks could go to white schools, and sit on white buses. Truman aimed to “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.”
The South was mobilizing, and a new pro-segregation movement was born that day in Birmingham. One attendee called it “a riotous rebel convention.” For the most part, the crowd was made up of ordinary southern white men along with a few women, people who considered themselves American patriots who wanted to defend the American traditions they had known all their lives, and their parents had known all of their lives. They saw no reason why outsiders from the North should force them to change. There were also some militant extremists in the crowd, a lineup of the country’s most hardline white supremacists, including J. B. Stoner, who had been pushed out of the Ku Klux Klan for being too extreme and would later be quoted saying Hitler was “too moderate,” and Gerald L. K. Smith, a hardline anti-Semite and racist. (Smith’s extremist views got him banned from future Dixiecrat events.)
The Dixiecrats put forth a series of anti–civil rights and anti-Truman proposals—a “declaration of principles” to protect Americans “against the onward march of totalitarian government.”
“We stand for the segregation of the races and the integrity of each race,” the Dixiecrat platform stated.
Another conference was scheduled for August for the official nomination of a new presidential candidate—Thurmond, whose running mate would be Fielding Wright, governor of Mississippi. When critics suggested to Thurmond that the civil rights program embraced in the current Democratic platform was not much different from Roosevelt’s platform in 1944, Thurmond responded, “I agree, but Truman really means it.”
Officially, the Dixiecrats called themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party. The federal government, they claimed, had no right to dictate how states would police themselves, what their voting laws should be, and how their social traditions should play out. Thurmond himself claimed in a conference call from the governor’s mansion in Columbia that the States’ Rights Party was “not interested one whit in the question of ‘white supremacy.’” It was federal encroachment on the states that fueled the southern revolt, he said. But this was a transparent fiction. Thurmond’s rhetoric continued to focus on segregation. Democratic congressman Sam Rayburn of Texas—who had been a longtime Speaker of the House and was a close friend of Harry Truman’s—summed up the whole controversy before a group of fellow Texas politicians. “All your high-flown political vocabulary boils down to just three words,” Rayburn said. “Nigger, nigger, nigger!”
The political anxiety and anger among whites in the South was now aimed at one man. “The president has gone too far,” Thurmond told members of the South Carolina Democratic State Committee. “As far as I am concerned, I’m through with him.”
On July 23, a week after the Democratic National Convention, Henry Wallace arrived in Philadelphia for the first-ever Progressive Party convention, amid a political firestorm. The Progressives were gathering in the same hall where Truman and Dewey had been nominated. Before the first gavel pounded, conventioneers were on edge.
Two days earlier, the Justice Department had arrested twelve members of the Communist Party USA, charging them with a plot to overthrow the federal government. Among them were party leaders Eugene Dennis and William Z. Foster. One of the twelve was arrested in Detroit, most of the others in New York City. Progressive Party members were furious, as the timing was clearly aimed to vilify their movement. The Communist Party USA put out a statement saying the organization had been the subject of a “monstrous frame-up.”
“The American people can now see to what desperate provocations Truman is driven in an effort to win the election, by hook or crook,” the Communist Party’s statement read. “The reported indictment of the Communists is neatly timed to embarrass the new people’s party now holding its founding convention in Philadelphia.”
On the Progressive Party convention’s opening day, Wallace greeted reporters in the ballroom at the Bellevue-Stratford, unaware he was walking into a trap. Staring down two hundred reporters, the candidate began his press conference by announcing he would refuse to repudiate the support of Communists.
“So you can save your breath,” he said.
Martin Hayden of the Detroit News stunned the crowd with a very different question: “Have you ever repudiated the authenticity of the Guru letters?”
“A tense, terrible silence seeped into the room,” one attendee recalled. The cogs in Wallace’s mind turned. He knew that most of the people in the room knew about the guru letters through the lurid columns of Westbrook Pegler, who had been writing about them relentlessly. Attempting to steer the conversation from the subject of the letters, Wallace said, “I never discuss Westbrook Pegler.”
A tall man with greased-back gray hair then stood up and spoke. “My name is Westbrook Pegler,” he said. Again, a hush fell over the crowd. Pegler reiterated the guru letters question.
“I never engage in any discussions with Westbrook Pegler,” Wallace said.
Another reporter asked the same question. The tension in the room increased as two hundred reporters watched Wallace hanging on a pin. Wallace said, “Nor will
