Strom Thurmond's America

FAIN: FT-56918-09

Joseph Crespino
Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322-1018)

I am writing a political biography of Strom Thurmond, the longtime U.S. Senator from South Carolina, yet this book is not a conventional biography. It will use Thurmond's life and career as a lens through which to interpret and analyze the role that white southerners played in shaping modern conservative politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Thurmond's story is important because he has long served as an avatar of the Republican "southern strategy", the effort to lure away traditional southern white Democrats to the GOP by exploiting their racial resentment of civil rights. This narrative of the racist origins of the modern right is one of the more controversial topics in contemporary American politics. My book will provide the most dispassionate, historically contextualized and analytically nuanced story to date of the role that Thurmond and other conservative white southerners like him played in shaping modern conservative politics.

Associated Products

Strom Thurmond's America (Book)
Title: Strom Thurmond's America
Author: Joseph Crespino
Abstract: “Do not forget that ‘skill and integrity’ are the keys to success.” This was the last piece of advice on a list Will Thurmond gave his son Strom in 1923. The younger Thurmond would keep the words in mind throughout his long and colorful career as one of the South’s last race-baiting demagogues and as a national power broker who, along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, was a major figure in modern conservative politics. But as the historian Joseph Crespino demonstrates in Strom Thurmond’s America, the late South Carolina senator followed only part of his father’s counsel. Political skill was the key to Thurmond’s many successes; a consummate opportunist, he had less use for integrity. He was a thoroughgoing racist—he is best remembered today for his twenty-four-hour filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957—but he fathered an illegitimate black daughter whose existence he did not publicly acknowledge during his lifetime. A onetime Democrat and labor supporter, he switched parties in 1964 and helped to dismantle New Deal protections for working Americans.
Year: 2012
Publisher: New York: Hill and Wang
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780809004806
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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