Dixiecrat

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Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond

The States' Rights Democratic Party , whose members commonly Dixie crats (dt .: Dixiekraten are called), is a former US political party. Her top candidate Strom Thurmond took part in the 1948 presidential election and won 39 electoral votes. Then the Dixiecrats broke up. As an informal term for members of the Democratic Party who came from the southern states and advocated racial segregation , the term remained popular until the 1960s.

history

In 1948 the southern states had been a stronghold of the Democratic Party ( Solid South ) for decades , as the Republicans there were seen by many whites as ineligible due to the experience of the Civil War . In 1948, the Democratic President Harry S. Truman decided on extensive measures against racial segregation and was supported by many liberal Democrats from the north. Many whites in the southern states saw this as breaking a taboo. The Democrats there split off and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party . In their nine-point party program they advocated maximum self-government of the citizens and strict racial segregation “for the benefit of the southern states”. The Democratic and Republican parties were explicitly denounced as " totalitarian , bureaucratic police states".

The name Dixiecrat quickly became commonplace for its members , a portemanteau of the words Dixie for an American southerner and Democrats , a supporter of the Democratic Party.

1948 presidential election

1948 presidential election. The Dixiecrats (orange) won in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, and received an additional electoral vote from Tennessee.

With leading candidate Strom Thurmond , the Dixiecrats presented the presidential election of 1948. It only occurred in about half the states and dispensed in various northern states like Michigan , Minnesota and New York or states with few electoral votes, including Iowa , Montana and Nevada , entirely on an election campaign. The party received votes in only 17 of the then 48 states.

The Dixiecrats gained 2.4% of the vote nationwide. They reached 38 of the 531, or 7.2%, electors because they got an absolute majority of the vote in Solid South, Mississippi , Alabama, and South Carolina , and a relative majority in Louisiana . Since, according to the electoral law, all electors went to the candidate with a relative majority, the number of electors was high. Later, a Democratic elector from Tennessee voted against his party line for Thurmond ("faithless elector"), which earned him the 39th vote.

In other countries Thurmond could not achieve any great success. Despite the sometimes high regional shares of votes in Arkansas and Georgia , the Dixiecrats did not get more than 20.3% of the votes there either.

After 1948

The Dixiecrats dissolved their party after the 1948 election. Thurmond and other higher-ranking SRDP politicians went back to the Democrats, in which the civil rights activists initially lost influence again; others tried their luck in splinter parties like the American Independent Party . Although their party no longer existed, the Dixiecrats movement remained significant within the Democratic Party. Because, from their point of view, the Democrats were drifting further and further to the left, many whites in the southern states increasingly voted for the Republican Party, which in turn moved to the right. The Democrats' turn to the left and their renunciation of racial segregation was sealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ; in the subsequent presidential election, Strom Thurmond supported the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater , who advocated a return to racial segregation, and a little later became a Republican himself; Solid South has been a republican stronghold since Richard Nixon's election in 1968 . The last time the four states that won the Dixiecrats in 1948 all went to the Democrats was in the 1976 election , in which Southern Jimmy Carter ran for the party. In 1980, Ronald Reagan managed to tie the vast majority of white southerners to the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy .

See also

literature

  • Glenn Feldman: The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat, Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 2015, ISBN 978-0-8173-1866-6 .
  • Kari Frederickson: The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 . University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill / London, 2001, ISBN 0807825948 (Ln.), ISBN 0807849103 (Pb.)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerhard Peters: Platform of the States Rights Democratic Party, Unanimously Adopted at Oklahoma City, August 14, 1948 (English) ( Memento of May 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

Web links