Truman was set to begin his campaigning in Detroit over Labor Day weekend, with a speech that would court organized labor. Dewey’s staff decided to wait and kick off the GOP campaign two weeks later. Instead of rebutting Truman himself in Detroit, Dewey was going to send a representative, and he chose Harold Stassen of Minnesota. When the phone call came in to Stassen from the Dewey campaign, Stassen was surprised.
“Why doesn’t Dewey answer Truman?” he asked.
“The Governor doesn’t want to start his campaign for another two weeks,” a Dewey aide answered.
Later Stassen’s aide Vic Johnston took a call from Dewey himself. Johnston reiterated the Stassen camp’s surprise at the request to have Stassen make the rebuttal to Truman in Detroit. Wasn’t there animosity between the Stassen and Dewey camps, following their clash in the primaries and at the national convention in Philadelphia?
“I’m the man who beat you in Wisconsin,” Johnston said, as he had managed Stassen’s Wisconsin primary campaign.
“That’s exactly why I want you,” Dewey answered.
18
“As for Me, I Intend to Fight!”
ON JULY 31, STROM THURMOND headed up the first official election-season States’ Rights Democratic Party rally, at a watermelon festival in Cherryville, North Carolina. Some five thousand people turned out on an uncomfortably humid day. Tucked deep into a rural backwater, Cherryville was home to cotton mills, farms, and old-school southern sentiment, a climate in which Thurmond’s message would hit home.
If the civil rights program of the president is enforced, Thurmond rallied his crowd, “the results in civil strife may be horrible beyond imagination. Lawlessness will be rampant. Chaos will prevail. Our streets will be unsafe. And there will be the greatest breakdown of law enforcement in the history of the nation. Let us tell them that in the South the intermingling of the races in our homes, in our schools and in our theaters is impractical and impossible . . . I did not risk my life on the beaches of Normandy to come back to this country, and sit idly by, while a bunch of hack politicians whittles away your heritage and mine. As for me, I intend to fight!”
Thurmond was determined to position his campaign as the last stand against a constitutional crisis. Federal encroachment on states’ ability to make their own laws would cause “a virtual revolution in the Southern States,” he said in Cherryville. As Thurmond put it in a letter to Governor Dewey: “The South’s fight is not being waged on the theory of white supremacy but on State sovereignty,” an issue of “vital importance not only to the South but to the entire Nation.” Still, it was the threat to segregation that drew a voracious response from Thurmond’s listeners.
Many were asking: Who was this man, Strom Thurmond, who was so suddenly making a name for himself on the national scene? Americans came to recognize Thurmond, with his broad, toothy smile and his shiny bald head, from media coverage of the southern governor. Readers of newspapers and magazines learned that he was newly married to a former Miss South Carolina—Jean Crouch, who at twenty-two was roughly half his age. To prove his athletic prowess, he had posed standing on his head for a Life magazine photographer on his wedding day, less than a year earlier.
He became known in the inner sanctum of American intelligence too; the special agent in charge of the Savannah, Georgia, FBI office, E. D. Mason, described the governor’s personality in detail in a 1948 memo to the FBI chief in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover. “Governor Thurmond is a thoroughly honest, reliable man,” wrote the special agent. “He cannot be bought financially. He is slightly sluggish mentally . . . The Governor has admitted that he did not aspire to the leadership of the States Rights Party, but that it was virtually thrust upon him . . . His political future in the State of South Carolina seems somewhat assured as evidenced by almost unanimous acclamation of his States Rights Program, which seems to be a result of resentment on the part of South Carolinians to interference by outside interests in what they consider purely local problems.”
The more Americans learned about Thurmond, the more it became clear that the history of segregation in the South could be illuminated through the family saga of this one man.
Thurmond was born the same year as Thomas Dewey—1902. But he came from a place so far removed from the Michigan where Dewey grew up, it might as well have been a different country. Thurmond hailed from Edgefield, South Carolina, and his political story begins with his father, John Thurmond, who was three years old when the Civil War ended in 1865. The Republican president Abraham Lincoln and his Union army had won; slavery was to be abolished, and newly freed male slaves in the South were to be granted civil rights, including the right to vote. To ensure that these laws were respected in places like South Carolina, Union troops remained during the period of Reconstruction, led federally by a Republican administration.
In the 1870s, a paramilitary group called the Red Shirts, whose members were spread out across the southern United States, and especially in South Carolina and Mississippi, began a campaign to restore white supremacy, to destroy the Reconstruction, and to put the Democratic Party back in power. In Edgefield, a prominent Democrat and Red Shirt leader named Benjamin Tillman became a leader of a white supremacist movement. Like many white politicians in the South, Tillman—who had lost an eye to illness as a teenager—viewed the Republican Party as an instrument of northern oppression. Tillman’s white supremacist views matched those of thousands of white people living in the South at the time, and his voice became their voice. “The struggle in which we were engaged meant more than life or death,”
