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Strom Thurmond

American politician (1902–2003)

James Strom Thurmond Sr. (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 to 2003. Prior to his 48 years as a senator, he served as the 103rd governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. Thurmond was a member of the Democratic Party until 1964, when he joined the Republican Party for the remainder of his legislative career. He also ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate, receiving over a million votes and winning four states.

Strom Thurmond in 1961

Thurmond served three times as President pro tempore of the United States Senate and chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1981 to 1987 and the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1995 to 1999. He retired in 2003 as the only member of either chamber of Congress to reach the age of 100 while still in office and the oldest-serving senator. His 48 years as a senator, a record at the time, is the fourth-longest in U.S. history, behind Robert Byrd, Daniel Inouye, and Patrick Leahy. At 14 years, Thurmond was also the longest-serving Dean of the Senate in United States political history.

Quotes

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  • I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.
    • Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat presidential nominee, in a speech met with loud cheers by his assembled supporters during his 1948 presidential campaign
  • No other man has had the distinction of serving this long in Congress, and I venture to say it will be a long time before another does.
    • Remark on Carl Hayden, as quoted by Johnson, James W. (2002). Arizona Politicians: The Noble and the Notorious, illustrations by David `Fitz' Fitzsimmons, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. pp 155. ISBN 0-8165-2203-0.

Quotes about Thurmond

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  • For a quarter of a century, in the Congress of the United States, we tried to get passed an anti-lynching bill. A simple law to protect the lives of black citizens below the Mason-Dixon line. This was not legislation, as our protesting brethren so often take us to task for—the legislation of brotherly love with they say is impossible. It was a law making it a federal offense to hang a human being from a tree, cover him with kerosene and cremate him. But the loudest cheerleaders of our current law and order rallies—the Eastlands and the Strom Thurmonds—were the very gentlemen who fought against that legislation until it was ultimately passed.
 
Overreacting?!
These people named an elementary school after J. Edgar Hoover and I’m overreacting? Am I the only person who’s heard of “COINTELPRO”? I mean, why Hoover? Why not, oh, Strom Thurmond? Or George Wallace. Huh?!
Granddad: Now, just calm down, boy. You’re overreacting.
Huey: Overreacting?!
These people named an elementary school after J. Edgar Hoover and I’m overreacting? Am I the only person who’s heard of “COINTELPRO”? I mean, why Hoover? Why not, oh, Strom Thurmond? Or George Wallace. Huh?!
Granddad: I think they named the middle school after George Wallace…
Huey: WHAT?!
Granddad: That was a joke, boy. Loosen up already.
Huey: I hate this place.
  • I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.
  • For one hundred years, southern politics had remained frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of states' rights. To white southerners, the Republican Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had forced them to release their Negro property. After Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negroes, so for another century white southerners stayed true to their party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was making in his independent run for president was that southern Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic Party was offering, even though they were not going to become Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as the candidate for president for a party significantly named the States' Rights Party.
  • On December 5, 2002, the Senate threw a party for Strom Thurmond's hundredth (and last) birthday. … The event was naturally taken up with comments on Thurmond's extraordinary life force—and his legendary eye for the ladies. Ol' Strom married his second wife, a twenty-two-year-old former Miss South Carolina, when he was sixty-six. The happy couple went on to have four children. He remained flirtatious well into his nineties, despite his gruesome-looking hair transplant. "When he dies," a fellow senator once remarked, "they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid."
    • John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation (2004), "How It Could Go Wrong: Too Southern, Too Greedy and Too Contradictory"
  • Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes.
    • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)
  • The Republican presidential candidate in 1964 also opposed the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater had been an enthusiastic backer of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, both overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats. He was a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He hired many blacks in his family business and pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard. He had a good-faith objection to some features of the 1964 act, which he regarded as unconstitutional. Goldwater was no racist. The same cannot be said of Fulbright, on whom Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom. Fulbright was one of the 19 senators who signed the “Southern manifesto” defending segregation. Okay, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate.
  • I have taught in South Carolina and lectured in the state numerous times. I have unfailingly been treated with courtesy and respect. Roof does not speak for all the white people in the state. Nonetheless, South Carolina has never really come to terms with its tortured history. Here are a few highlights of the state's extreme pro-slavery, white-supremacist past. In 1776, South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress forced Thomas Jefferson to remove a clause condemning slavery from the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, South Carolinians were primarily responsible for the constitution's fugitive slave clause and provision allowing the importation of slaves from abroad to continue for twenty additional years. Until 1860, a tight-knit coterie of plantation owners controlled the state; they did not even allow the white citizens to vote in presidential elections, the legislature chose the state's members of the Electoral College. Before the Civil War, South Carolina was one of two states, along with Mississippi, where nearly a majority of white families owned slaves, and had the largest black majority in its population, nearly 60 percent in 1860. This combination produced a unique brand of extremism in defense of slavery. The state was the birthplace of nullification, the first to secede, and the site of the first shot of the Civil War. During Reconstruction, black Carolinians enjoyed a brief moment of civil equality and genuine political power, but this ended with a violent 'Redemption', followed by decades of Jim Crow. More recently, South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest a civil-rights plank in the party's platform, and supported its native son, Strom Thurmond, who ran as the 'Dixiecrat' candidate for president.
  • The flag that has caused so much trouble in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Battle Flag served as the flag for Lee's Army of Northern Virginia for the entire war, but it was never the flag adopted by the Confederacy. After the war, the United Confederate Veterans adopted the flag for its use, and it became the rebel flag, the Southern Cross, the Dixie Flag, or most commonly the Confederate flag. Most importantly, it was the flag of white supremacy. The Mississippi legislature put the Confederate Battle Flag on their state flag in 1894 after the white supremacists took over and rewrote the state's constitution in 1890. However, it became most popular after World War II when the Dixiecrat party under Strom Thurmond used it. The flag became a symbol of resistance to integration and equal rights. Georgia placed the Confederate Battle Flag on the state flag in 1956 to protest racial integration. John Coski argued that more people used the Confederate Battle Flag between World War II and the early 1970s than ever fought under it from 1861 to 1865. Today, the Confederate Battle Flag continues to serve as a marker of white supremacy movements in the United States and around the world. And I had it in my house along with the Stainless Banner and the Blood-Stained Banner for my entire childhood.
    • Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2020), p. 18
  • In 2002, Strom Thurmond, the unrepentant white supremacist and segregationist, turned one hundred years old. His birthday party was attended by then-president George W. Bush, among a roster of other political figures. Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the Senate, said in celebration, "I want to say this about my state [Mississippi]: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Segregation and Jim Crow had been part of Thurmond's platform during that campaign.
    • Mary L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal (2021), 1st Edition, New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 155
  • The end of a lengthy political career is almost invariably sad, whether the final act is defeat, infirmity, or death. Ted Kennedy and John McCain both fought valiantly in public to remain active senators despite the dire diagnosis of aggressive brain cancer. Former segregationist Strom Thurmond treated the Senate as a high-class rest home as he— barely able to recognize his surroundings— nominally served the people of South Carolina until he died in office at age 100.
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