White Southerners In The 1940s

During the years between 1960-1970, there was an increase in involvement of white southerners in the Republican Party compared to the previous years of whites in the Democratic Party. This is seen as a result of a southern strategy of Conservative Republicans to centralize their campaign towards the Southern United states by appealing to racism against African Americans. “By isolating white southerners as carriers of the racist gene…the southern strategy narrative understates the role of racial reaction on the right.” Not only did they pursue southerners, but also those in the North and West who were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party; a majority of whom did not agree with the ideals set in place by the New Deal, which transformed the
racial makeup of their communities. When the history of civil rights is looked at from Strom Thurmond’s perspective, it can be seen just how important the South’s northern strategy is. “Thurmond was convinced that whites in the North and West would feel the same as white southerners did about racial issues if presented with similar circumstances.” Alongside this northern strategy came a realignment of American politics brought on by social and economic developments. During the 1940s there is abandonment by the Democratic Party of their longtime enmity of African American civil rights.
As this withdrawal takes place, Thurmond and his followers move over to the Republican Party. “He [Thurmond] quit the Democratic Party at high mark of the civil rights revolution…and led a historic shift of white southerners into the GOP.” This switch was greatly brought on by a document written by President Harry Truman’s Civil Rights Committee, To Secure These Rights. This report called for an end to discrimination, both racially and economically, the desegregation of all public facilities, the passing of an anti-lynching law, as well as various ideals to create a more equal living environment between whites and
blacks. To rebuttal Truman’s attempts to create Civil Right’s for African Americans, Thurmond creates the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly referred to as the Dixiecrats Party. In his first speech as the Dixiecrats recommended, but not officially nominated, presidential candidate, Thurmond sates that “there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation.” Although the topic of racism was one of the main reasons Thurmond and the Southern United States migrated to the Republican Party, there are reasons to believe that many of the new converts were motivated by anticommunism. Thurmond used rumors that there was a communist infiltration of the State and Treasury Departments during the New Deal to claim that the Fair Employment Practices Committee was being used to invade the United States defense industries.
He argued, “The FEPC was made to order for communist use in their designs upon our national security.” Thurmond drew this idea from Stalin’s “All-Races Law” that was passed in Soviet Russia. Because three of his opponents supported the idea of racial equality in the workplace, Thurmond concluded that communistic ideas had penetrated the United States government. While this belief was seen to have the threat of Communism as its basis, Thurmond used it as one of many ways to bash the FEPC. President Roosevelt signed the FEPC in 1941 and it lit a fire under the battle for racial equality in the work place, which became a defining issue in the Civil Right’s movement. Thurmond argued that this order interfered in the matters of private business owners by forcing them to hire employees they didn’t want; mainly African Americans, and added on to his opposition of desegregation of all public
facilities. Thurmond was correct in assuming that the issue of race would realign American politics. But, he was wrong in thinking that Northern and Western whites would share the same views of him and his white Southern followers. His shift between parties was brought on by the desertion of the Democratic Party’s anti-civil right’s views for African Americans. White Americans in the Northern and Western hemispheres of the United States were on board with the ideas of desegregation and equality between whites and African Americans. It was Thurmond and the Dixiecrat Party that opposed the idea of desegregation and caused the political realignment that is still in effect. In today’s time, Democrats cannot aspire to compete with Republicans in the South as it is now as Republican as it once was Democratic.