Key to the traditions of white supremacy was the suppression of the black vote, and the black vote at the time was overwhelmingly for the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln). The paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party in South Carolina created a “Plan of the Campaign” to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote. “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro,” the plan read in part, “by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine how he may best accomplish it.”
The year the Red Shirt movement crystallized, the nation saw one of its most controversial presidential elections, and one that would have a profound effect on the racial and political identity of both the South and the Thurmond family. The election was so close it became a matter of bitter dispute. The Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio trailed the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York by nineteen electoral votes, but the results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were unclear. Both sides claimed victory, leading to a crisis in leadership. Congress created an electoral commission to solve the problem, made up of members of the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court. Ultimately, a deal was struck: All of the disputed electoral votes from these three southern states were given to the Republican Hayes, who won the presidency 185–184, and in exchange, Hayes agreed to withdraw the federal troops occupying the South, thus ending the period of Reconstruction.
The so-called Compromise of 1877 had two major consequences: (1) White supremacy returned to the South, and (2) politically, the Democratic Party controlled the South. The South became a single-party system—the so-called Solid South, right up until 1948 and the Dixiecrat revolt. White politicians created laws that made it difficult or impossible for black Americans to vote in many southern states, and the federal government left lawmaking to the lawmakers in these states.
Meanwhile, riding on the coattails of the Compromise of 1877, “Pitchfork” Benjamin Tillman cemented his political power, ultimately becoming governor of South Carolina. His personal lawyer was Strom Thurmond’s father, John Thurmond.
John Thurmond had designs on a political career himself. One day five years before Strom was born, John Thurmond got in an argument over a political appointment, and he shot and killed a man named Willie Harris. A jury acquitted him of murder, determining that he had acted in self-defense, and that the victim was raging drunk at the time. However, the killing derailed Thurmond’s political career. Strom would grow up to achieve the political stardom that was denied his father. “He was my idol,” Strom later said. “I tried to imitate him as much as I could.”
Strom Thurmond was raised in a society in which segregation and white supremacy were the unquestioned norm. He was six years old when he experienced his first political handshake. His father took him via horse and buggy to meet Ben Tillman—who was by this time a sixty-one-year-old United States senator. When the Thurmonds reached Tillman’s farm, the one-eyed senator greeted the boy.
“What do you want?” Tillman asked.
“I want to shake your hand,” young Strom Thurmond said.
The senator reached out his hand and Strom grabbed it, then stood awkwardly holding hands with the old man.
“You said you wanted to shake,” Tillman said. “Why the hell don’t you shake?”
As Thurmond later recalled, “I shook and I shook, and I’ve been shaking ever since.”
Thurmond attended Clemson College (now University) in his home state, then worked as a teacher and an athletic coach. He lived at home, and among the servants at the family’s estate was a young black woman named Carrie Butler. Around the time that Butler, just sixteen years old, gave birth to a baby girl she named Essie Mae, Strom Thurmond left his post in Edgefield to work for a real estate firm in Virginia.
Essie Mae was, in fact, Thurmond’s daughter, and she would remain a highly guarded secret for the rest of Thurmond’s life.
By the time he returned to South Carolina, Essie Mae had been shuttled off to be raised by black relatives in Pennsylvania. Thurmond, meanwhile, began to climb in stature, becoming Edgefield County’s superintendent of schools in 1928, then a state senator four years later. The year Thurmond was elected to the South Carolina legislature, FDR won 98 percent of the state’s vote; such was the power of the Democratic Party’s Solid South, of which Strom Thurmond was a member. The rules of white supremacy were well cemented in the state, and Strom followed the racial ideology of his father. Whites and blacks kept separate establishments, neighborhoods, and public schools. African Americans were prevented from voting.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Thurmond took a leave of absence to join the US Army. During the D-day landings in Normandy in 1944, he was aboard an invasion glider when fleets of these aircraft came whistling over the beaches of Normandy, crash-landing on French turf. Over the next year, he saw heavy combat, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He witnessed the hell of Buchenwald. “Men were stacked up like cordwood,” he recalled, “ten or twelve feet high. You couldn’t tell whether they were living or dead . . . I had never seen such inhuman acts in my life. I couldn’t dream of men treating men in such a manner.”
When he returned to South Carolina, he was a war hero with substantial political experience for a man just forty-three years old, and perfectly situated to realize his father’s dream—the governorship of South Carolina. But the South that Thurmond found waiting for him when he returned was different from the one he had known before. African Americans who had served in the military were emboldened by their own patriotism and a desire for justice. Blacks in northern states had organized into groups like the
