Strom Thurmond says he was wrong. Holy crap! Some people on this site stun me.
Thurmond: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."
The Dixiecrat Party platform: "The negro is a native of tropical climate where fruits and nuts are plentiful and where clothing is not required for protection against the weather ... The essentials of society in the jungle are few and do not include the production, transportation and marketing of goods. [Thus] his racial constitution has been fashioned to exclude any idea of voluntary cooperation on his part." "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."
The Dixiecrat Ballot:[A vote for Truman is a vote in suppport of Truman's civil rights program]...This means the vicious FEPC--anti-poll tax-- anti-lynching and anti-segregation proposals will become the law of the land and our way of life in the South will be gone forever."
That you would try to defend this sickens me.
Secondly, do you support the idea of an FEPC law? It is a highly Socialistic idea. (See "Civil Rights" vs. A Free Society.) Instead of getting sick, why don't you see what you are endorsing and be certain that you really want to be endorsing it.
As for the anti-lynch law that Truman had advocated. The South considered that insulting. They already had local laws on the subject, and they were being enforced. Unfortunately, I do not have the statistics handy, perhaps you do, but was any one lynched in South Carolina while Strom Thurmond was Governor? He was not advocating lynching, just opposing dictation from Washington. That is quite a different thing.
Personally, as a school boy in 1948, I was an enthusiastic supporter of Harry Truman and his Civil Rights proposals. It was only as I grew up over the next few years that I realized that I had bought a proverbial "pig- in-a-poke"; that the issue was not fairness, at all, but one of the allocation of power and control.
You can certainly disagree. But to want to crucify Lott because he agrees with the Southern view of the time is the sort of ludicrous thought control that really should sicken any Conservative.
William Flax