What if Thurmond had won in 1948? On the Thurmondification of American politics Note: This essay also appears on the CommonDreams.org website

by Tony Palmeri

December 15, 2002

Senator Trent Lott is under fire for suggesting, at a birthday bash for his mentor Strom Thurmond, that America would have been better off had Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat campaign for the presidency been victorious. Lott's comments have been met with the typical round of sanctimonious and self-righteous posturing from establishment pundits and hypocritical politicians--Democrat and Republican--expressing dismay at the Senator's insensitivity and shock at how anyone today could find anything appealing about Thurmond's segregationist campaign of 1948.

The sanctimonious posturing got me to thinking: what if Thurmond had won in 1948? What kinds of policies might have been followed by the federal government since that time? Maybe the following?:

• During the late 1940s and into the mid 1950s, the Federal Government would have ruined scores of lives and reputations in the name of fighting communist infiltration of America's sacred institutions. An "Un-American Activities Committee" would have been formed to try suspected traitors in public.
• The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover would have been allowed to ride roughshod over the Constitution, also in the name of fighting communism. In the 1970s it would have been revealed that Hoover's "Counterintelligence Program" (COINTELPRO), designed "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" those the Bureau considered "enemies of the State," frequently targeted innocent citizens whose only crime was to demand the right to vote or to have a seat at a lunch counter.
• Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy all would have been assassinated at the high point of the Civil Rights Movement.
• By 2001 Human Rights Groups would report that 111 nations have abolished the death penalty completely in law or in practice. Yet in that same same year Amnesty International would report that 90 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the USA.
• In 1968 the Kerner Commission, put in place by President Johnson after the violent 1967 summer of race riots, would conclude that America had become two nations, one White and one Black, separate and unequal. In 1998 the Kerner Commission would reconvene and conclude that the problems found in 1968 had in many ways become worse.
• The Vietnam War would be fought disproportionately by children of the lower middle class and poor.
• The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, started in 1932 and involving the federal government's intentional use of black men as guinea pigs, would continue on until 1972. The government would not apologize for the experiments until 1997. In 1993 it would be revealed that during the Cold War government sanctioned experimenters had fed "radioactive oatmeal" to mentally retarded children in Massachusetts and commited a host of other atrocities.
• The government would have spent trillions of dollars building the National Security State from 1948-1990, at the same time lamenting the growth of "entitlement" spending for the population at large.
• As a result of federal laws, union organizing would have been made more difficult. By 2003 only about 15% of the private sector workforce would be unionized.
• Aid to Familes With Dependent Children (AFDC), the New Deal commitment to the poor, would have been repealed.
• In the name of smaller government, a "deregulation" era would have begun and culminate in taxpayers bailing out the Savings and Loan Industry. Gradual weakening of supposed corporate watchdogs like the Securities and Exchange Commission would have led to a situation in which Enron, WorldComm, and others could cavalierly cook their books for years while the Congress in a bipartisan way took their cash and looked the other way as pensions were squandered and CEOs gave themselves golden parachutes.
• By the late 1990s it would be revealed that the U.S. incarcerated a greater proportion of its population than any countries except Russia and Rwanda. By the year 2002 we'd have almost 2 million people in prison or jail, reflecting an incareration rate of about 650 per 100,000 residents, double the rate of 10 years before. Human rights organizations would show that approximately one in every 117 males in the United States was in prison.
• The federal government's suggestion as to what to do about continuing racism in America would be to have a "dialogue" on it.
• By the year 2000, the percentage of black elected officials among all elected officials would be only 1.7 percent.
• College campuses like the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh would have had more African American students in 1968 (114 enrolled) than they do in 2002 (99 enrolled).
• Much of America by 2003 would remain stubbornly resistant to racial integration. In 2001 the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State University of New York in Albany would analyze the 2000 census and conclude that "the average white person in metropolitan America lives in a neighborhood that is 80% white and only 7% black." A "typical black individual," they would find, "lives in a neighborhood that is only 33% white and as much as 51% black. Residential segregation remains high in cities and suburbs around the country."

So to Trent Lott, sanctimonious pundits, and hypocritical politicians: what exactly is it that Strom Thurmond would have done in 1948 that did not actually happen in America since then? The evidence presented above suggests to me that we have surely had a Thurmondification of politics since 1948. Yes, we have had a Lott of that, aided and abetted every step of the way by some of the Senator's most vocal critics.

Tony Palmeri welcomes your feedback

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