Strom Thurmond's America
The late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond long courted controversy: he was behind the Dixiecrat Party of the late 1940s, the Southern Manifesto of 1956, the daylong filibuster in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the flight of white Southerners to the Republican Party in 1968 that gave Nixon the White House. His personal life is equally notorious, especially his refusal to acknowledge his illegitimate African American daughter. Even before his death in 2003, historians had cast him as a curiosity of a bygone era. Joseph Crespino’s Strom Thurmond’s America is a stunning correction.
Crespino shows not only that Thurmond’s extreme politics and racial hypocrisies were not his alone, but more important, that the rise of the Republican right is inconceivable without Thurmond, who led a national charge against labor, the left-wing movements of the sixties, and the antiwar movement. A Democrat until he switched parties in 1964, he spurred the realignment of Southern and national politics, making the South the base of mainstream Republicanism.
Crespino reveals how a man whose politics seemed to be out of lockstep helped foster modern conservatism and altered the course of the nation.
Hardcover Book : 416 pages
Publisher: Hill & Wang ( September 04, 2012 )
Item #: 13-634599
ISBN: 9780809094806
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 23.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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