Posted on 12/13/2002 9:42:53 AM PST by an amused spectator
The Dixiecrat Party, prominent in the current discussions on Trent Lott, was a branch of the Democrat Party. This is important to note. These Democrats never left the Party, and I believe that the Democrat Party has never apologized for their actions.
Dixiecrat Party United States (Political Parties)
Four states voted for the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948:
"...Truman's own civil rights initiatives, including the formation of the Committee on Civil Rights and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, had advanced the civil rights debate to a new level, and he could not turn the clock back. The planks were adopted, prompting thirty-five southern Democrats to walk out. They formed the States' Rights [Democrat] party, which came to be popularly known as the Dixiecrats."
South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond [veteran of D-Day as a member of the 82nd Airborne] and Mississippi Governor J. Fielding Wright were nominated, respectively, for president and vice-president.
"Alabama was one of the most important Dixiecrat states thanks especially to three men who may be properly referred to as the "Dixiecrat triumvirate": former-Governor Frank M. Dixon, state Democratic Executive Committee chairman Gessner T. McCorvey, and Birmingham attorney and political boss Horace C. Wilkinson."
Louisiana is an interesting part of the list, too.
What's infinitely more telling is that they were never asked to leave.
The Democratic Party evolved away from the rural and Southern party it had been back when it was the National Democracy and Stephen Douglas had been its leading light in the Old Northwest.
The tipping point was 1928, when the urban component of the Party (Tammany Hall and other urban machines, backed by Jewish, Irish, and Italian ethno-Democrats) succeeded in nominating Al Smith.
Franklin Roosevelt held the coalition together, but the South became increasingly the junior partner and urban socialists, Brain Trusters, and Marxists proliferated in the Democratic command structure. After World War II, the South's participation in Democratic politics was limited to its congressional delegation for the most part, and the old Southern chairmen's hold on national policy through the appropriation power.
Which is what a) the Imperial Presidency and b) the liberals' embrace of the civil rights movement were all about, IMHO -- defeating the brake the "mossbacks" exerted on galloping socialism.
Saying "I Left the KKK" is like saying "I was a little bit pregnant" or "I regret being a death camp guard".
SOrry, apologies don't wash for Kleagle Byrd.
To put it bluntly, the Democrats haven't changed much at all in the last 70 or so years.
The adoption of the phony civil rights platform was because some Democrat sharpers figured out that they could enslave the minorities on new plantations - this time centered in the big cities.
54 years after the Dixiecrat revolt, the Democrat overseers reign supreme in the festering urban centers of this country. Hell, they even got the American Indians in South Dakota to pick a few bales of cotton for them this cycle.
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