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  • Race, Gender, and the Rise of Conservatism
  • Colleen Doody (bio)
Joseph Crespino. Strom Thurmond’s America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. 404 pp. Notes and index. $17.00.
Timothy N. Thurber. Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945–1974. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. 496 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.
Robert O. Self. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012. 528 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $17.00.

What role did race play in the rise of late twentieth-century conservatism? This has been a hotly debated topic amongst historians. Some of the earliest scholars of conservatism argued that the liberal consensus of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was fractured by a backlash against perceived excesses of the civil rights and antiwar movements during the late 1960s. According to this view, the formerly solidly Democratic South abandoned its support for the party and turned to politicians who exploited their racist fears, such as George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. White workers, who had been the backbone of New Deal liberalism, embraced traditional moral values of patriotism and respect for authority. They abandoned their former liberal allies, who increasingly seemed to condone radical critiques of the United States.1 More recent scholarship has challenged this thesis. In his 2007 book on Mississippi and conservatism, for example, Joseph Crespino argued that modern conservatism was born in the suburban Sunbelt, not the rural Deep South. Southern conservatives developed an ideology rooted in suburban homeowners’ embrace of small government and free markets, not in antediluvian views of white supremacy. This was an ideology that could resonate with non-Southerners. Both Crespino and Timothy Thurber extend that argument in, respectively, Strom Thurmond’s America and Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945–1974. In All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self explores how battles over sex, gender, and the meaning of family led [End Page 361] to the development of a conservative movement. For all of these historians, conservatism developed for far more complex reasons than merely a backlash against the 1960s.

In his excellent Strom Thurmond’s America, Crespino portrays Thurmond as one of the founders of modern conservatism. Years before Goldwater or Reagan rose to prominence, Thurmond ran for president in 1948 on a platform that criticized statism and warned of the dangers of creeping socialism. Crespino maintains that support for business and opposition to organized labor were central components of Thurmond’s ideology. Crespino certainly doesn’t downplay Thurmond’s racism and demagoguery. At crucial moments in his career, Thurmond’s ambition led him to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But Crespino makes the case that Thurmond was “one of the first of the post–World War II Sunbelt conservatives, a fact often eclipsed by his racial politics” (p. 6).

One of the most fascinating insights of this book is that Thurmond began his political career as a racial moderate (at least according to the standards of mid–twentieth-century South Carolina) and a pro-labor New Dealer. The latter stand was not surprising in the agriculturally devastated South Carolina of the 1930s. Neither was his racial moderation, which was driven by his desire to keep the federal government from meddling in Southern race relations. In response to the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle, for example, Thurmond denounced the execution as a “disgrace to the state” and vowed to apprehend the guilty (p. 52). Mob violence harmed South Carolina’s image and provided fuel to Northern liberal campaigns for a federal anti-lynching law. New Deal liberalism and Jim Crow were hardly incompatible as long as Southerners could limit federal intervention into racial issues.

Smith v. Allwright, the 1947 Supreme Court case that struck down the white primary, and President Truman’s 1948 report on civil rights profoundly changed the trajectory of Thurmond ‘s political career. Thurmond moved to the forefront of the states’ rights segregationists in response to these two events that threatened to politicize African Americans in the South and put the power of the...

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