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The Crossfire. Privately, publicly, in conventions, by petition, by resolution, Southerners shouted at one another that, as Fielding Wright had said, the time had sure come to bolt. The difficulty was that, politically, the South had no place to go.' Was there no way out of this dilemma? Southern governors, meeting at Tallahassee, passed a resolution urging Harry Truman to back up.
Harry Truman, son of a Confederate father, might have found some way out. But by now he was caught in a crossfire. Northern labor leaders and old New Dealers, whooping for disciplinary action against the unreconstructed South, and fishing for liberal and Negro votes, seized control of the Democratic Convention at Philadelphia and rammed the President's civil-rights recommendations into the party platform. That did it. Harry Truman was stuck with his civil rights and the South was stuck with its revolt.
Strom Thurmond had not been an original, out & out advocate of bolting. At Philadelphia he had supported the nomination of Georgia's Senator Richard Russell as a way of registering a protest without walking out. But in the end he decided that the State's Rights Party was the best thing for him. South Carolina was a hot center of revolt and Thurmond had his eye on the Senate seat of Olin D. Johnston for 1950. He probably had more to gain than to lose by running as the rebels' candidate for President. He was picked because he was the most willing and eager. Fielding Wright, 53-year-old lawyer, who is as smooth and cold as a hardboiled egg —and whose home town of Rolling Fork, Miss., has more Negroes than whites—was glad to run as the vice presidential candidate.
The Runner. Strom Thurmond has been running for something all his life. At first he ran for exercise, trotting around his father's farm in Edgefield, S.C., 54 miles from Columbia. When he went to Clemson Agricultural College he ran on the college cross-country team. He was a determined student who overcame a speech impediment by reading slowly for an hour every afternoon to a patient professor. Once his classmates threw him into the swimming pool for trying to shine up too much to the faculty. After graduation he taught school and began running for political offices. He became county superintendent of education, state senator, county judge.
Strom Thurmond's Southern politics was bred in his bones. His grandfather, George Washington Thurmond, a corporal with Lee, had trudged home from Appomattox to find Columbia in the ruins left by Sherman's march. Eighty-four of Columbia's 124 blocks had been gutted by fire. Some 1,400 buildings had been destroyed.
A Candidate's Roots. Grandpa Thurmond had known the poverty of the post-bellum South and the bitterness of the days when the Carpetbaggers swarmed in. South Carolina's legislature had been packed and dominated by illiterate and bewildered Negroes. Grandpa Thurmond and his neighbors had heard the voice of Pennsylvania's sadistic Thaddeus Stevens thundering out the need for holding the South "as a conquered people," for forcing the South to "eat the fruit of foul rebellion."