Dixiecrats Court Texas In 1948 Presidential Election

Two weeks after accepting the Dixiecrat nomination for president, Strom Thurmond spent Aug. 25, 1948, politicking across the Lone Star State.

That the governor of South Carolina was seen as a serious candidate reflected the unprecedented unpopularity of the incumbent. With the Democratic Party split into three warring camps, how could Harry Truman hope to defeat Republican Thomas Dewey?

Left-wing critics already had turned on the president and formed the Progressive Party to wreck his reelection. Their standard bearer was Henry A. Wallace, who resigned as commerce secretary in 1946 in protest of the new cold-war policy toward the Soviet Union.

President Truman then alienated Deep South Democrats by sending to congress a civil rights bill that posed the greatest threat to racial segregation since Reconstruction. hen the controversial plan was incorporated into the party platform, the entire Mississippi delegation stormed out of the national convention followed by half of the Alabama contingent.

Defiant dissidents from all corners of the old Confederacy as well as California, Maryland, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Kentucky met the next weekend in Birmingham, Alabama. The most influential Texan in attendance was Longview judge Merritt Gibson, who was chosen chairman of the executive committee.

To Strom Thurmond, 45-year-old first-term governor of South Carolina, went the dubious honor of leading the uphill charge. Fellow governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi agreed to be his running mate.

The States