page_title: Strom Thurmond
section_title: Run for President
hierarchical_section_title: Strom Thurmond / Early career / Run for President
caption_attribution_description: English: Strom Thurmond statue located behind the South Carolina State Capitol
context_page_description: James Strom Thurmond Sr. was an American military officer and politician who served for 48 years as a United States Senator from South Carolina. He ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate on a States' rights platform supporting racial segregation. He received 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes, failing to defeat Harry Truman. Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Southern Democrat and, after 1964, as a Republican.
  A magnet for controversy during his nearly half-century Senate career, Thurmond switched parties, primarily because of his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and endorsed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In the months before switching, he had "been critical of the Democratic Administration for ... enactment of the Civil Rights Law", while Goldwater "boasted of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and made it part of his platform." Thurmond left office as the only member of either chamber of Congress to reach the age of 100 while still in office, and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
context_section_description: In 1948, President Harry S Truman ordered the end of racial discrimination in the U.S. Army, proposed the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, supported the elimination of state poll taxes (which effectively discriminated against poor people in voting), and supported drafting federal anti-lynching laws.
  In response, Thurmond became a candidate for president on the third party ticket of the Dixiecrats (also known as the States' Rights Democratic Party). It split from the national Democrats over the threat of federal intervention in state affairs regarding segregation and Jim Crow. Thurmond's supporters took control of the Democratic Party in the Deep South, and Truman was not included on the presidential ballot in Alabama because that state's Supreme Court ruled void any requirement for party electors to vote for the national nominee. Thurmond stated that Truman, Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace would lead the U.S. to totalitarianism. He called civil rights initiatives dangerous to the American constitution and making the country susceptible to communism in the event of their enactment, challenging Truman to a debate on the issue. Thurmond carried four states and received 39 electoral votes, but Truman was reelected.
  During his 1948 campaign, Thurmond said the following in a speech, being met with loud cheers by the assembled supporters: listen 
  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 Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.
  Thurmond quietly distanced himself from the States' Rights Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 1948 campaign, despite saying shortly before its conclusion that the party would continue as opposition to the national Democratic Party. After Thurmond missed a party meeting in December of that year in which the States' Rights Democratic Party announced the creation of a state's rights institute in Washington, columnist John Temples Graves, disappointed in Thurmond's absence, opined that his campaign had been the best argument that the States' Rights Democratic Party was a national movement centered around the future of liberty and restrained government. Thurmond concurrently received counsel from Walter Brown and Robert Figgs to break from the party and seek reclaiming credentials that would validate him in the minds of others as a liberal. Biographer Joseph Crespino observed that Thurmond was aware that he could neither completely abandon the Democratic Party as it embraced the civil rights initiative of the Truman administration nor let go of his supporters within the States' Rights Democratic Party, who he courted for support in his 1950 campaign for the Senate.
  Concurrently with Thurmond's discontent, former Senator and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes began speaking out against the Truman administration's domestic policies. Throughout 1949, Thurmond delivered addresses similar to that of Byrne's earlier in the year, asserting that the United States was inching closer to socialism and the welfare state as they lost their local sovereignty under the Truman administration. Walter Brown sought to link the 1950 gubernatorial campaign of Byrnes with the Thurmond Senate campaign as part of a collective effort against President Truman. Within a day of each other, as Byrnes delivered remarks opposing Truman and Thurmond was elected Chairman of the Southern Governors Conference, the effort by Brown appeared to have been a success. Byrnes indirectly criticized Thurmond when asked by a reporter in 1950 about his governing if elected South Carolina Governor, saying he would not waste time "appointing colonels and crowning queens", the remark geared toward the image of Thurmond as not serious and conniving. Brown wrote to Thurmond that the comment was a death to any potential alliance between the two South Carolina politicians and Thurmond and his wife are described as looking "like they had been shot" when reading the 
caption: Statue of Thurmond outside the South Carolina State Capitol
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