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“Could We Be Wrong?”
ON OCTOBER 10, THE SAME day Dewey made his statement regarding the Vinson mission, Strom Thurmond sent the president of the United States a telegram. “Again renew my challenge to debate you face to face on the same platform, on your ‘so-called civil rights program,’” Thurmond’s telegram read. “Suggest we debate it in Virginia, Texas, or Missouri . . . You name the time and place.”
The telegram was ignored.
Thurmond’s Dixiecrat ticket, like the Progressive campaign, had long since begun to deflate, especially outside Thurmond’s base in the Southeast. Not only was there little new material to keep reporters’ typewriters crackling, polls showed Thurmond’s numbers at just 2 percent nationally, behind even Henry Wallace, who was polling 4 percent. The only major financial support the States’ Rights Democratic Party was getting came from the oil industry. Under the Truman administration, the federal government and private oil concerns were in a feud over who owned the rights to tidelands off the US coast, where inestimable amounts of oil lay pocketed under a shallow sea. Oil drillers in the Gulf states—such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—wanted the rights to drill, and wealthy oil executives saw in the States’ Rights movement an opportunity to leverage power over the tidelands away from the federal government and back into the hands of local lawmakers and business organizations. But even this source of support was drying up.
“The oil men’s generous enthusiasm for the Dixiecrats is now said to be waning,” noted the Alsop brothers in their syndicated column on October 20.
Thurmond’s campaign was further injured by an unfortunate incident. As a publicity stunt, his staff mailed out letters to all the governors across the country, inviting them to visit South Carolina and stay in the governor’s mansion in Columbia. One of those letters went to William Hastie, the governor of the US Virgin Islands. Hastie had been appointed by Harry Truman as the first African American governor in the United States. Thurmond had no idea that Hastie was African American, and when Hastie politely declined the invitation, in mid-October, Thurmond’s letter was leaked to the press. Only then did Thurmond learn of Hastie’s race.
Humiliated, Thurmond issued a statement to the press claiming that the letter to Hastie was an “understandable mistake,” the result of a clerical error. Thurmond’s statement attacked “pro-Truman” newspaper columnists for publishing it. Then he blamed the incident on Harry Truman. Thurmond said he “did not know that Harry Truman, in his all-out bid for Negro votes, had gone so far as to take the unprecedented action of appointing a Negro governor of the Virgin Islands . . .
“I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro,” Thurmond went on. “Of course, it would have been ridiculous to invite him . . . Gov. Hastie knows that neither he nor any other Negro will ever be a guest at the Governor’s house in Columbia as long as I am Governor or as long as the Democratic Party of South Carolina continues to elect Governors of my State.”
Thurmond continued to tour through Kentucky and Tennessee. At a Memphis rally, he called Truman “an inefficient and confused little man,” and Dewey “a pennyweight glamor boy.” His barbs got rises out of his crowds but were unlikely to have any effect on his election prospects.
One American who was closely following Thurmond’s campaign was Governor Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae. She celebrated her twenty-third birthday on October 12, 1948. She had recently married Julius Williams, a black man who had served in the US military in World War II. One night they were watching the news on television in a hotel in North Carolina, where they had gotten jobs, and she saw her father on the TV. “His endless attacks on President Truman had made him so popular below the Mason-Dixon line,” she later recalled.
Essie Mae’s identity was so secret, not even her husband knew that she was Strom Thurmond’s daughter, and as they watched Thurmond speak, she felt consumed by despair. She remembered hearing him say these words: “On the question of social intermingling of our races, our people draw the line. All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, our schools, our churches, our homes.”
“I don’t like that man,” Essie Mae’s husband said as they watched Thurmond talking on the screen. “I fought Hitler to end up with that? What’s the difference?”
Essie Mae’s father had always been kind and gentle with her, but now, he had been “brainwashed,” she recorded, “if not by the Ku Klux Klan, then by the ghost of Pitchfork Ben Tillman.”
“If the South had been stabbed in the back by Harry Truman,” she wrote in her memoirs many years later, “my mother and I, and the blacks of South Carolina, had been stabbed in the back by Strom Thurmond.”
“We went through Illinois and Indiana,” the reporter Robert Nixon recalled of riding aboard the Truman Special in early October. “Indiana was normally a Republican state, but in towns where you knew the population was 20,000, in several instances, there would be a hundred thousand to see Truman. They would be jammed in for blocks around where loud speakers would have been set up. They had come from towns in the whole surrounding countryside, maybe as far away as a hundred miles . . . You didn’t have to be very smart to say, ‘Look here, something is going on.’”
Assistant press secretary Eben Ayers took a break from the White House to ride the Truman campaign train through the Midwest in early October. He returned to Washington and told his wife, “There is something happening. I think something’s going to happen.” Remembered Richard Strout, one of the most widely read political writers: “The Truman crowds had just changed in that last three
