Excerpts from Crespino's Strom Thurmond's America
Page 128 in the chapter "Outside Agitators."
Isolated and superannuated though they seemed to many opinion makers, Strom's Americans--that misshapen collection of Dixiecrats and John Birchers, conservative businessmaem and Kennedy haters--were no marginal group in American politics in the early 60's. They were at the center of a fight that would soon transform the Republican Party--and, by extension, national politics.
In 1962 right winger Will Workman whose rhetoric Roger Milliken was sending on through Harry Dent to Thurmond, ran as a Republican against sitting sitting Democrat US Senator Olin D Johnston. Workman got 42 percent of the vote, which Dent explained to Thurmond as a pretty good poll going forward. Soon Thurmond had changed parties and was backing Goldwater. Of Workman's 62 race Crespino says on page 134: "It was a flash frame of future party politics in South Carolina and the nation."
And last paragraph of the intro which for me nullifies the reservations in the following TNR review
As galling as Thumonds hypocrisy was, the disclosure that he fathered a black child has made it all the more easier to relegate him to a distant past that is no more. There he remains as a caricature of an older, unambiguously racist south, not a flesh and blood person who helped create the America we live in today. It is easier that way. By categorically condemining Thurmond, we reaffirm our own morality. Liberals can remember him as the simpleminded dinosaur evoked in the southern strategy narrative, a villain who party switching and kingmaking explain all one needs to know about the rise of the Republican right. Conservatives can dismiss him as an anachronism a colorful but ultimately irrelevant figure in the rise of "real" conservatism. In truth, Thurmond was neither. He remains today one of the great American hypocrites yet there is more than just hypocrisy to his story. And the hypocrisies that exist are not just his or the White South's alone; they were also America's. Staring these facts in the face is uncomfortable, yet it is what makes our looking all the more essential.
The New Republic Review:
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-hypocrite-strom-thurmond%E2%80%99s-lasting-legacy-joseph-crespino#
Isolated and superannuated though they seemed to many opinion makers, Strom's Americans--that misshapen collection of Dixiecrats and John Birchers, conservative businessmaem and Kennedy haters--were no marginal group in American politics in the early 60's. They were at the center of a fight that would soon transform the Republican Party--and, by extension, national politics.
In 1962 right winger Will Workman whose rhetoric Roger Milliken was sending on through Harry Dent to Thurmond, ran as a Republican against sitting sitting Democrat US Senator Olin D Johnston. Workman got 42 percent of the vote, which Dent explained to Thurmond as a pretty good poll going forward. Soon Thurmond had changed parties and was backing Goldwater. Of Workman's 62 race Crespino says on page 134: "It was a flash frame of future party politics in South Carolina and the nation."
And last paragraph of the intro which for me nullifies the reservations in the following TNR review
As galling as Thumonds hypocrisy was, the disclosure that he fathered a black child has made it all the more easier to relegate him to a distant past that is no more. There he remains as a caricature of an older, unambiguously racist south, not a flesh and blood person who helped create the America we live in today. It is easier that way. By categorically condemining Thurmond, we reaffirm our own morality. Liberals can remember him as the simpleminded dinosaur evoked in the southern strategy narrative, a villain who party switching and kingmaking explain all one needs to know about the rise of the Republican right. Conservatives can dismiss him as an anachronism a colorful but ultimately irrelevant figure in the rise of "real" conservatism. In truth, Thurmond was neither. He remains today one of the great American hypocrites yet there is more than just hypocrisy to his story. And the hypocrisies that exist are not just his or the White South's alone; they were also America's. Staring these facts in the face is uncomfortable, yet it is what makes our looking all the more essential.
The New Republic Review:
http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-hypocrite-strom-thurmond%E2%80%99s-lasting-legacy-joseph-crespino#
posted by foxofbama | 1:11 PM
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