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Conclusion: Dialectical Rhetoric as the New Rhetoric of Southern Identity
- University Press of Mississippi
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154 Conclusion: Dialectical Rhetoric as the New Rhetoric of Southern Identity Astrong case may be made that if any one person embodied the changing order of the South in the twentieth century, it was Strom Thurmond. As Delaware senator Joseph Biden noted in his July 2003 eulogy, “Strom Thurmond was the only man I knew who in a literal sense lived in three distinct and separate periods of American history. . . . Born into an era of essentially unchallenged and unexamined mores of the South, reaching his full maturity in an era of fully challenged and critically examined bankrupt mores of his beloved South, and living out his final three decades in a South that had formally rejected its past on race—in each of these stages . . . Strom represented exactly where he came from.” Thurmond was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, in December 1902, and died there just over a century later. The son of a small-town lawyer, Thurmond grew up in the shadow of Edgefield’s other famous political son, the populist but virulently racist Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, a family friend. In 1925, Thurmond fathered his first child, Essie Mae Washington, with the daughter of his family’s African American housekeeper. He started his political career as a Democrat, moved to the States’ Rights Democratic Party in 1948, returned to the Democratic Party fold, and then, during the 1960s, in the days of Barry Goldwater, switched to the Republican Party. In the 1970s, he became the first Southern senator to hire black staff members, and in the 1980s and 1990s he cast votes in support of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and Clarence Thomas’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice.1 At the peak of his political career, Thurmond ran for president on a platform rooted firmly in the defense of the Southern states’ right to remain segregated . And as Diane McWhorter observes, “Thurmond has always been an ornery redemption project. He did not repent. Even so, his illegitimate daughter further complicates the moral picture. . . . We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that someone who ran for president on an antipool -mixin’ platform was party to an integrated gene pool.” McWhorter argues that this aspect of Thurmond’s life story was not more widely reported because the “particulars of this family saga simply do not fit into the ‘redemption narra- Dialectical Rhetoric as the New Rhetoric of Southern Identity 155 tive’ Americans tend to impose on our more regrettable bygones: Better that ol’ Strom ‘transformed’ from the Negro-baiting Dixiecrat presidential candidate of 1948 to One of the First Southern Senators To Hire a Black Aide in 1971.”2 So whose interpretation of Thurmond’s life is more believable—Biden’s more hopeful narrative, or McWhorter’s more skeptical one? According to Biden, although “it’s fairly easy to say today” that Thurmond’s evolution resulted from “pure political expediency,” he believes instead that “Strom knew America was changing, and that there was a lot he didn’t understand about that change. Much of that change challenged many of his long-held views. But he also saw his beloved South Carolina changing as well, and he knew the time had come to change himself. . . . Thurmond was doing what few do once they pass the age of 50: He was continuing to grow, continuing to change.” McWhorter argues, however, that Thurmond’s racial demagoguing “was just ‘bidness,’” a fact that “may account for why Strom Thurmond never felt compelled to ask the forgiveness of a race he devoted so much public capital to making miserable—a race that included members of his own family. Then again, he had always been an integrationist .”3 Biden argues that as America and the South shifted their paradigms from that of division to that of identification, Thurmond in turn adjusted his paradigm accordingly—not for “political expediency” but rather because he, like his nation and his region, over time had come to accept identification as the more moral order. McWhorter argues that Thurmond’s racist rhetoric of his earlier career was politically expedient for a politician representing a South that valued the order of division, while Thurmond’s personal life and even some of his political actions of that period bespoke someone who embraced, at least on some levels, the order of identification. There may be some truth in both Biden’s and McWhorter’s interpretations of Thurmond’s life. Since we...