Random Thoughts

There goes the South – Part 4

 

August 31, 2018



The 1948 presidential election was one of the most dramatic in U.S. history. Incumbent Harry Truman (who had assumed the office when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945) won in a huge upset.

Public opinion polling was in its infancy, but nevertheless all the polls and most prognosticators predicted that Governor Thomas Dewey of New York would win easily. But the majority of voters chose Truman.

Truman had not been a popular president. The economy at the end of World War II went through some tough times readjusting to a peacetime era. Some people thought that the tough-talking Truman didn’t act presidential enough.

But another thing that hurt Truman’s chances was that he had upset some of the white southern voters who had given Roosevelt all of their electoral votes each time he ran.

Truman did two things before the election of 1948 that caused some of the Democratic Party’s reliable white southern voters to reject his candidacy: (1) he desegregated the U.S. military; and (2) he supported the idea of “civil rights” (including the right to vote) for African Americans.

Truman’s actions prompted South Carolina’s Democratic segregationist governor, Strom Thurmond, to launch a presidential bid, hoping to deny Truman most of the South’s electoral votes.

Thurmond’s strategy worked only partially. He carried four southern states (South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) and picked up 39 electoral votes. Truman, however, received the former Confederacy’s other 87 electoral votes – enough to get him to the 266 he needed to win.

The final electoral vote count was: Truman 303, Dewey 189 and Thurmond 39. In future close elections, more and more white southerners would vote for Republicans. Thurmond and many other southern office holders abandoned the Democratic Party.

Within 20 years of Truman’s historic victory, most southern electoral votes were going to the Republican candidates instead of the Democrats. That phenomenon was aided by the support of civil rights legislation by the next two Democratic presidents – John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson – as we will see next week.

 

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