JACKSON - Appropriately, a new book, "The Dixiecrat Revolt and the end of the Solid South," begins with this quote from Oliver Emmerich, the late editor of the Enterprise-Journal of McComb:
"In the light of history, the states' rights campaign of 1948 can be seen as an outgrowth of the thinking of the rednecks, the coon-asses and the hillbillies. But it was acceptable to the political elite as well."
Emmerich was in a unique position to view the Mississippi-born political phenomenon that became known as the "Dixiecrats," because he was an intimate part of it when it was born, and then later, as journalist, he was able to critically view it from a distance.
Why the 1948 Dixiecrat movement is of paramount significance to the understanding of our 2003 politics is because it was actually the launching pad for the modern Republican Party in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South.
Kari Frederickson, assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama, has come out with "The Dixiecrat Revolt," published by the University of North Carolina Press ($25), after obvious exhaustive research into the South's political upheaval from 1932 to 1968.
As the title implies, Frederickson's book centers on the historic Southern bolt from the National Democratic Party over civil rights in the 1948 presidential election, in a movement aimed at using the South's 127 electoral votes to block the re-election of President Harry Truman.
It succeeded in getting only the votes of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina, far short of enough to stop Truman from winning. But it marked the first time in nearly a century that the Deep South states voted for a regional ticket rather than the national party.
South Carolina's Gov. Strom Thurmond (and later the nation's longest-serving United States senator) was the States' Righters' candidate for president and Mississippi's Gov. Fielding L. Wright their vice-presidential nominee.
Both, of course, were, as all other Southern governors, Democrats. An enterprising South Carolina writer had labeled the ticket as the "Dixiecrats," and the name stuck in both the Southern and national media.
Back then I had written that the disaffected Mississippi Democrats who joined the bolt movement might well find it the "bridge" that would eventually take them into what was then the hated Republican Party. Dixiecrat leaders pooh-poohed the notion.
However, Frederickson's 300-page book pretty well confirms that theory. And, it amplifies in detail that the Dixiecrat bolters of 1948 became the starting point for the rise of the Republican Party in the South as we know it today, and the creation of viable two-party system in the region.
She uses 1932 and 1968 as the parameters for her book because each of those years marks a particular milestone in the transformation of Southern politics, hinged together by the Dixiecrat revolt.
The year 1932 was when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, ushering in his New Deal and policies that first brought unease to Black Belt white Democratic economic conservatives. That unease by 1944 found their long unquestioned loyalty to the party seriously weakening.
The year 1968 at the other end of the spectrum marks Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," the definitive point when Republicans instituted a major regional drive to lure disaffected Southern Democrats into the GOP fold, on the heels of Sen. Strom Thurmond's party switch.
Mississippi was already fertile ground for the Southern Strategy. It had given - by an amazing 88.2 percent - conservative Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater its presidential vote over President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Naturally I was pleased to see in her credits Frederickson had extensively used the Dixiecrat file in the collection of my personal papers which years ago I gave to Mitchell Memorial Library at Mississippi State University.
Although her book makes no mention of it, I am possibly the only still-active Southern journalist who actually covered the Dixiecrat movement and the States' Rights convention on July 16 and 17, 1948, in Birmingham, a week after several Deep South states had walked out of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
Sporting with Confederate flags and with bands blaring "Dixie" (one student even toted a picture of General Robert E. Lee around the hall), the Birmingham convention nominated the Thurmond-Wright ticket.
Frederickson's book recalls that former Alabama Gov. Frank Dixon in a keynote address set the racial tone for the Birmingham convention, charging that Truman's program would "reduce us to a mongrel, inferior race … our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery."
The American Broadcasting Company, which was covering the convention on its radio network, stopped broadcasting because it found the speeches too inflammatory to air around the country.
The bolters proceeded to adopt a "statement of principles" vowing their opposition to "elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment … by the misnamed civil rights program."
This was the platform on which Thurmond and Wright were nominated as the Dixiecrats' standard-bearers, leaving little doubt racial origins undermined the movement's supposed states' rights facade and their insistence that they were still the "real" Democrats.
Frederickson describes it thusly: "Perched atop a platform of racial and economic conservatism, the Dixiecrats led the exodus of Black Belt whites from the solid Democratic South."
It's eerily poetic that the same Strom Thurmond who was a central figure in the 1948 political drama that helped give birth to a strong Republican Party in the South, a half-century later would unwittingly become the focal point in the downfall of Trent Lott, one of the GOP's most powerful Southern leaders.
The moving finger that has writ the South's political history, moves on … and in strange ways.
