The Dixiecrats

To better understand why Democratic presidential hopefuls lost hope in Lowndes County and many other counties throughout the South, we need to look back to the 1948 election.

Democratic Vice President Harry S. Truman became president in 1945 when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office.

At the 1948 Democratic convention, Truman was nominated to run for a term of his own, “but they took some time about it and, in the process, adopted civil-rights measures which led the South to bolt the party and form the Dixiecrats (the states’ rights Democratic Party), which nominated J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as presidential candidate,” says historian Paul Johnson.

On Election Day 1948, Truman received 1,856 Lowndes County votes but Thurmond came in a close second with 1,448 votes. In 1948, Lowndes County was ready to move away from national Democratic policies but apparently not enough to side with a Republican. GOP presidential contender Thomas E. Dewey received only 634 Lowndes County votes in 1948.

In the 1940s, the GOP was still viewed as the “party of Lincoln” — an anathema for many white Southerners. But as political winds shifted, white Southerners continued moving away from the national platforms of their own Democratic Party for a variety of reasons.

The change

Though Kennedy won Lowndes County by only 200 votes over Nixon in 1960, the region was still solidly Democrat in its presidential politics. During his inauguration in January 1961, The Valdosta Daily Times praised Kennedy as a fine American and urged local residents to support his administration.

By 1964, Kennedy had been assassinated, his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was president, the Civil Rights Act passed as law that same year, and an arch-conservative fringe in the GOP dominated the party’s convention and nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate.

Lowndes County and most of South Georgia’s counties, along with five Southern states, bucked their Democrat traditions in 1964 to give the majority of their votes to Republican Goldwater. In Lowndes County, Goldwater received 6,731 votes to LBJ’s 4,361 votes. Lowndes County and those five Southern states were about the only places to give Goldwater a majority. Nationally, Johnson trounced Goldwater. LBJ’s “61 percent of the vote exceeded FDR’s record of 60.8 percent in 1936, as well as Richard Nixon’s future mark of 60.7 percent (1972), for the remainder of the 20th century,” according to historian Taylor Branch in his book, “Pillar Of Fire.”

Goldwater’s candidacy, which strongly opposed the recently enacted Civil Rights Act, was seen as a betrayal within the party of Lincoln by many long-time black Republicans, who fled the party in support of Johnson and the Democrats. To many black voters, “Goldwater shot Lincoln in the head as surely as John Wilkes Booth,” according to one newspaper in 1964.

Though the 1964 election left the GOP in disarray, it realigned both parties’ constituencies in terms of race and political views. Southerners didn’t change their party affiliation — and Democrats picked up the black vote — but the majority of white Southerners no longer felt that the Democratic presidential nominees represented their views or interests.

Most election analysts predicted the South’s support for Goldwater was a mere political blip, similar to the Dixiecrat movement of 1948. Additionally, by allowing the conservatives to dominate the GOP, a few political observers believed in 1964, that the Republican Party was moving toward extinction.

These analysts were wrong.