A further look at the 1948 Presidential Campaign of Strom Thurmond
8-11, Strom Thurmond speaking at a Watermelon festival: “I have advocated the repeal of the poll tax in my state. A Question, since I keep seeing this phrase: Had the state actually managed to enact the repeal by 1948? I know other Southern States, and a few districts in the North, are liking to keep the “people of bad moral character” from the polls. But I cannot agree that the Federal Government has the right to force any state to abolish this tax if the people of the state want it. Lynching is murder. And murder is a violation of state laws. We do not intend to let the Federal Government come in and take over our state courts.”
And the side-winder, a thinly veiled threat akin to “Nice home: it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”, but one picked up on the “Southern Liberals” as a reason to be cautious: “If the segregation program of the President is enforced, the results in civil strife may be horrible beyond imagination. Lawlessness will be rampant. Chaos will prevail. And there will be the greatest breakdown of law enforcement in the history of our 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.” just as it is impractical to let the homos into the military, I hear. Ah, never mind.
8-11: Governor Thurmond tonight linked Harry S Truman, Thomas E. Dewey, and Henry Wallace together and charged that they would lead America to “the rocks of totalitarianism.” He charged that the Federal anti-poll tax bill would allow Congress to invade the power of the states, and that the Federal anti-lynching bill was a Federal seizure of police powers”. And, the proposal for a Federal Employment Protection Act, Thurmond said, was patterned after a Russian law written by Joseph Stalin in 1920 and “was made to order for Communist use in their designs upon national security.”
8-21: “President Truman and other Government officials are making a desparate effort to hide the extent to which Communists and Communist sympathizers have honeycombed the Administration and have dictated his policies.” To be fair, Dewey was making the same basic accusations, on the behest of the Committee of UnAmericans Activities, and the partnership of Robert Kennedy and Joseph McCarthy. But, as to what policies in particular are being dictated by the Communists… well: “The so-called civil rights program which this Administration wishes to foist upon the country has its origins in Communism.”
9-25: “Tonight the candidates of the Republicans, the radical Democrats, and the Wallace Reds claim to have discovered the road to great new freedoms and human rights. But the detour they ask us to take is the road to totalitarianism. These candidates pose as bearers of the torch of liberty. But the flame they carry is a firebrand from the steppes of Russia.
The so-called civil rights program is a cheap political trick designed to buy the votes of small but powerful racial minorities in big city states. [The opposition to the civil rights program] quickly developed in the Southern States, the cradle of American civilization. The radicals, the subversives, and the reds are now in complete control of the national Democratic Party.”
10-13: “A move to gain control of election within the states is disguised by a so-called anti-poll tax bill. A precedent for gaining Federal power of state law and state courts is hidden beneath the pretense of the anti-lynching bill. A move to build Federal power over the relationship between one man and another on the social level is disguised under the anti-segregation proposals. A precedent for the eventual control of business by Washington is concealed in the presences of the Federal Employment Protection Committee. A angerous precedent is hidden beneath the promise that a national police system will be established to enforce these proposals, yielding to the demands of the parlor pinks and the subversives.”
10-25: Governor Thurmond charged tonight that an FEPC law “would be carried out by a national police force already being trained” by President Truman. “This means,” he declared, “You would be hounded by Federal Police whom you never saw before and who neither know nor care what your problems are.”
10-26: “States rights are the only guarantee we have that a kind of Kremlin will not be established in Washington.”