“’s America” Joseph Crespino, Summersell Lecture Series

Alright, good afternoon. I’m going to go ahead and get started. My name is Josh Rothman. I direct the Francis Summersell Center for the Study of the South, which is the sponsor of tonight’s event. It gives me really great pleasure to introduce our speaker this afternoon, Joseph Crespino. He’s currently Professor of History at Emory University. Crespino was born and raised in Mississippi, attended college at , acquired (and I just discovered this today), a master’s in education from the University of Mississippi, and took his PhD in history at in 2002. Since receiving his degree, he’s become, I think it’s fair to say, one of his generation’s leading scholars in the postwar political history, bringing special attention to bear on his native south. His first book In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution was published in 2007. It makes a provocative argument that as whites in Mississippi reluctantly accommodated themselves to the changes in the Civil Rights Era, they linked their resistance to a broader conservative movement in the and thus made their own politics a vital component of what would become the modern Republican south. In Search of Another Country won multiple prizes, including the Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council, the McLemore Prize for the best book on Mississippi history from the Mississippi Historical Society, and the Non-fiction Prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. His most current book Strom Thurmond’s America, and this is the book from which he’ll draw the lecture today. This is really a great book. It’s a fascinating, engrossingly written political biography of a man whose political career spanned a remarkable eight decades. Strom Thurmond’s America follows its protagonist from his early years in Edgefield County, through his break with the Democratic party to run as a staunch segregationist in 1948 into his switch to the Republican party in the 1960s and on to his death in 2003, by which point Thurmond had served in the Senate for more than 45 years and had cast more than 15,000 votes before retiring at the age of 100. That is multiple records packed into a single sentence. Building somewhat on the argument made in his first book, Crespino portrays Thurmond as someone not merely as a race-baiting demagogue, a womanizer, and an opportunist who changed just enough to keep black voters from marching en masse to the polls to defeat him, he was all of those things too. Don’t get me wrong. But Crespino makes the case that Thurmond’s was a man whose pro-business, anti-union, pro-gun, and subtly or not-so-subtly white supremacist ideology pioneered the development of what has come to be recognized as “sunbelt conservatism.” Thurmond, in other words, was no retrograde curiosity, but rather one of the earliest of what is now a very recognizable breed of modern Republican. Strom Thurmond’s America is a fine example of scholarship that asks us to redefine what we think about the contours and the origins of southern politics and the American politics we inhabit today. It’s been reviewed in the Times, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and a wide range of other popular and scholarly venues. It was the clear choice among more than three dozen entries for this year’s Deep South Book Prize, awarded by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South. It’s an honor both to formerly present the prize to Professor Crespino today. It’s a plaque. Look at that! Fancy. Money comes with it too. I don’t have the money with me, but that’s really what matters. It’s an honor to present the prize to Crespino today and to hear what I’m sure will be a fascinating lecture today about one of more controversial figures of the modern political scene. Please join me in welcoming and congratulating Professor Joseph Crespino.

Thank you so much. It’s a great honor to be here. I’m very honored by this award. It’s a very important award that the Summersell Center has started. There are not as many book awards in southern studies and in southern history as there have been in the past, and these awards mean a lot

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series to people like me who go into the archives and spend a lot of time by yourself and wonder if anything’s ever going to come of worth out of those efforts, so to receive this recognition for it is very gratifying. I’m really appreciative. It’s great to be here in Tuscaloosa because I am from the Black Belt south. I’m from very close by in Noxubee County, Mississippi. In fact, one of the greatest things about today is that my sister, Mary Lou Mitchner, has been able to come over and see me give a talk, and I have proof now that people have actually read my books. This should be evidence that somebody does read these books. She wasn’t so sure for a long time. It’s great to have my family here and to be able to share some thoughts with you today about Strom Thurmond.

When I began this project, I would go over to South Carolina, and I would go to the archives there and I would tell people. They would ask me what I was working on, and I would tell them, you know, “I’m interested in Strom Thurmond.” And they would say, “Oh, wait a minute. I have a great story about Strom Thurmond.” You can throw a stone in South Carolina without hitting somebody who’s got a story about how Strom Thurmond did something for their uncle or did something crazy that they couldn’t believe he did or all kinds of things. Everybody in South Carolina has a Strom Thurmond story, and I, too, have a Strom Thurmond story. Of course, I have many Strom Thurmond stories that are part of this book, but I have a personal Strom Thurmond story that took place in, it would have been, July 1992. I was a college student. I had been interning on Capitol Hill for my home state senator, and it had been kind of a regret of mine that I had never seen Strom Thurmond. I saw many senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill, but I never saw him. And all my fellow interns had told me, “Oh, you’ve got to see Strom Thurmond. He has such an unusual appearance.” Well, the summer ended. I had never seen Strom Thurmond, but I had seen a lot of other people and had a great time. I’m flying from Washington, D.C. to Charlotte, North Carolina, and when I’m getting off the plane in Charlotte, I look in front of me. There’s an elderly gentleman who has kind of first generation hair plugs, and his hair’s kind of the color of Tang, you know the orange Tang. And this is how slow I am as an undergraduate. I think to myself, “oh, that must be what Strom Thurmond’s hair looks like.” Of course, it was Strom Thurmond. I didn’t realize this when there were people around shaking his hand and that kind of thing. Well, I wanted to shake his hand too because I had been on Capitol Hill, and I wanted to say that I had shaken Strom Thurmond’s hand. When I got out the plane, there was a line of people already there that had formed to see him and shake his hand. And this was a busy airport. There were a lot of people, a lot of different kinds of folks, and I got kind of self-conscious about standing in line to greet this man who is best-known for his old segregationist harangues. So I thought, you know what, it’s enough to say I saw him. I’ll just keep on walking. I walked down the concourse about 100 yards, and I turn around. I was just checking over my shoulder. By this time the crowd had dispersed, and there was a 92-year-old man. He had a brief case in one hand and a travel bag in the other and a package under the other, and he’s just kind of hobbling down the busy Charlotte airport. And if you’ve been to Charlotte recently, you’ll know they have long gates in between. They have those carts and things. So I went, I didn’t even think about it. I just went back and I introduced myself. I said, “Mr. Thurmond, I’m Joseph Crespino. I spent the summer on Capitol Hill. I’d be happy to help you get to your next flight.” And he said, “well, are you sure have enough time? I don’t want to delay you.” And I said, “No, sir. I’ve got plenty of time. I’d be happy to do it.” So I picked up his bags, and we walked together for about ten minutes. I was just wracking my brain trying to make conversation with Strom Thurmond. So what do you talk about with Strom Thurmond? We talked about the congressmen and senators and things like that from my home state. I told him I was actually going

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series to South Carolina, actually Florence, to see my then college girlfriend. That seemed like the kind of thing you would talk about with Strom Thurmond. I got him to his flight, and I shook his hand. He thanked me, and that was it. That’s my Strom Thurmond story.

I tell this story. Those of you who’ve read the book will know. I tell this story in a kind of author’s note at the beginning because I’ve thought about this story a lot as I was writing the book. Really, it’s a kind of like the challenges I had as Thurmond’s biographer in some ways. On the one hand, I was conscious in writing about this very controversial figure. I didn’t want to come off in a way where I was, you know, carrying his bags because the guy’s got a lot of baggage. You don’t want to exonerate. But on the other hand, you’re trying to capture a person, a real, live person. You’re trying to capture them in their complexity. So I didn’t want to, I wanted to not be scared to stand in line there and meet him face-to-face and to think about him on his own terms and to try to understand him in his context. That tension I felt as a college student encountering Strom Thurmond in the Charlotte Airport is related to the tension I felt as his biographer, but I wanted to write about Thurmond because I felt like he’s a critical figure for understanding this broad historical shift in southern political loyalties in the second half of the twentieth century.

So, let me tell you a little bit about what I argue in the book. You know, there have been books about Strom Thurmond before. There have been biographies, and then there have also been excellent political studies of movements in which Thurmond figured prominently, like the one written by my colleague Kari Frederickson on the Dixiecrat campaign of ’48. And Kari’s written several wonderful pieces about Thurmond, including a piece about masculinity and Thurmond, which I love and learned a lot from and borrowed from.

But we know who Strom Thurmond was. Strom Thurmond was the Dixiecrat candidate, right, for the third party in 1948. He was the record holder to this day, the lead author of the 1956 Southern Manifesto, the denunciation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. board of education. He is the record holder to this day to the longest one-man filibuster in Senate history. He spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, which was at the time the most significant piece of civil rights legislation that Congress had passed since Reconstruction. And of course, we learn, we remember him too for what we know about him after he died. We know he fathered an African American daughter, who he maintained a relationship with for his entire life, and this came out six months after he died. These rumors, of course, had followed him really from the time he was governor in the late forties of South Carolina.

So Strom Thurmond, clearly, from that record that we all know, is one of the last Jim Crowe demagogues, one of the last of the demagogues of this unique period of legalized racial segregation and subjugation in Southern history. But what this book argues is that he was that, absolutely. And that was part of the trick in writing this book, right? You don’t want to make light of that. But what I’m trying to do in this book is say that he was that, and he was also this other thing. And what this other thing was is that he was one of the first of the Sunbelt conservatives who emerged in the post- WWII period. And that’s the paradox that’s at the heart of this book. He didn’t start out as one and gradually morph into the other as he shed his racist, regional heritage. What this book argues is that he was both at the same time. From the late forties until sometime in the seventies and eighties, he was both one of the last southern demagogues and one of the first of the Sunbelt conservatives, and

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series understanding that, I think, is critical for understanding both southern demagogues and Sunbelt conservatives, both southern and national politics in this period.

Now, let me make the case for you. I don’t want to spend too much time in doing this, but I’ve got a couple of well-chosen pictures because pictures tell a thousand words. So I’m going to cut down on my word count by showing you some really fun pictures that help me make this case about Strom Thurmond as a Sunbelt conservative. What do we mean when I say Sunbelt conservative? The term “Sunbelt” was coined by Kevin Phillips, who was the pollster for Richard Nixon in his 1968 campaign who wrote this very influential book in 1969 Emerging Republican Majority, which kind of documented this shift in political loyalties across the nation that was shifting the power, the political power in the nation from the northeast to Midwest to the south and southwest. So he coins this term the “sunbelt” to refer to these states of the former confederacy combined with high growth states in areas of the country, like southern California and Texas and Florida, that are booming. This is where capital and population and political power are flowing in the post-WWII period, and it’s being fed by a number of different sources. There is immense defense spending in the Cold War thanks to the National Security Council resolution in 1968 that places the United States on a permanent war footing, and so much of those military dollars are going to sunbelt areas in the south and southwest, in part in the south because of the seniority of the congressional districts in the south—another topic on which my colleague Kari Frederickson has written much and very well on. But also in the south and southwest, the political culture that emerged was very important, right? It’s an anti-union, support for big business. These states are advertising. They’re staking their claim on growth in the postwar period by saying, “We are a business-friendly climate.” What does it mean to be a business-friendly climate in the 1950s and 1960s? It means you don’t have union mainly, right? You’ve got tax support from local governments, tax breaks, but mainly, it means you don’t have unions. The southern history of anti-unionization is very important in drawing, and folks like Strom Thurmond, some of his biggest allies in politics from the 50s on are not these segregation groups who are going to be dying out in the 60s, these kind of old Dixiecrats, but it’s the big business anti-union folks. We’ll see some of them in just a second.

And then other things. These states are growing with suburban areas. They’re building highways. All of these things are contributing to the growth of the South and the Sunbelt.

So what’s the case for Strom Thurmond as a Sunbelt politician? Well, here are my three pictures I want to give you. Here’s a great one. This is Strom Thurmond speaking at Madison Square Garden in late 1961. You can see the banner there behind him. It’s the Freedom Rally for World Liberation from Communism, and it was sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom, a student organization founded on the estate of William F. Buckley of 1960. They’re honoring, kind of, great freedom fighters, and Thurmond is being honored here because of what he had done in the senate in the fall of 1961 and having these special hearings held in the senate on alleged muzzling of military leaders by the Kennedy state department and defense department. What they were saying is that you’ve got these generals who know about the importance of taking the fight to the communists, and they’re going out and they’re speaking before these citizens organizations. A lot of them are John Burch organization meetings and other kind of rightwing anticommunist groups that are springing up. And they’re saying we’ve got to bomb them back into the Stone Age, and the state department is saying that’s not very helpful in our negotiations about a nuclear non-proliferation

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series treaty with the Soviets. That kind of mucks things up. They were trying to control these speeches, and Strom Thurmond and other people on the right are saying that’s censoring. They’re censoring people who know what’s best about how to fight the Cold War. So this was a kind of flash point in the early Cold War at a time when organizations, when grassroots anticommunist organizations like the John Burch Society and others who were springing up all across the south and the southwest, in particular, but really all across the nation. So this is an important moment when Thurmond is moving beyond his kind of southern constituency and making connections with a kind of broader anticommunist popular constituency that’s national in scope and is working very hard to nominate in 1964 for the presidency.

So this is the anticommunist, which is one piece of his identity as a Sunbelt politician. This, I think, could be a scene straight out of Mad Men. I don’t know if you watch Mad Men, but I imagine Don Draper in the back of the ballroom at the Waldorf. This is the Waldorf Hotel ballroom in 1962. It’s the Industrialist of the Year awards, and the winner is this man to Thurmond’s left, Charles Daniel. You’ll see that everybody has a wine glass except for Thurmond, teetotaler. He doesn’t have a wine glass. But they’re all in their tuxedos because Richard Nixon, the recently defeated presidential candidate, is going to hand out the gold statuette to Charles Daniel for being the industrialist of the year. So who’s Charles Daniel? Charles Daniel is head of Daniel Construction Company, which in 1964 was like one of the biggest construction companies in all the world. It was like two behind Brown and Root, or it was ahead of Brown and Root and like two behind Bechtel. You know, it was a big construction company. And Daniel, you know we talk about the building of the Sunbelt. He was the one who built the Sunbelt. He was the one who was building these factories that were springing up around South Carolina and all across the south, and he’s an example of these kinds of anti-labor, important business figures.

Another one is Roger Milliken. Roger Milliken is the textile magnate in South Caroline who’s also one of, if not the, most important funders of conservative and rightwing causes in post-WWII America. It was said that Roger Milliken owned the back page of the , particularly in the first decade of its existence when it was always kind of financially fraught. Whenever they needed to keep the magazine afloat, Roger Milliken would just make more ad buys. In William F. Buckley’s papers, you know, he said, “Thank God for Roger Milliken. What would we do without Roger Milliken?” And Milliken is kind of a shadowy figure. It’s very hard to find out information about him. He did no interviews. It’s a private company. There’s one interview that he did with press around the time of the 1964 Republican National Convention because Milliken was so influential in getting Goldwater nominated. He did one interview with the New York Times, and it was reprinted in the book. Really, it’s almost impossible to find out information because he would never talk to the press anymore after that. But he’s an enormously influential figure in South Carolina politics and Sunbelt politics and republican politics and in the career of Strom Thurmond. He was really one of the important people who made it possible for Thurmond to move over into the Republican Party when he switches party in ’64. He had built the Republican Party in such a way that Thurmond would not want to run independently of the Democratic Party. He would definitely want to go ahead and switch to the Republican Party all the way.

The final kind of piece of the Sunbelt. So students, who’s the most famous person in this photograph, and it’s not Strom Thurmond? Who’s an undergraduate?

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series

Is it Billy Graham?

It is. It’s Billy Graham, the tall, handsome man in the back. This was Billy Graham at the governor’s mansion in South Carolina during a rally he held in Columbia in 1950. And it was during this weeklong rally that Billy Graham was introduced to Henry Luce, the publisher of Time Magazine. It was in Thurmond’s governor’s mansion, Thurmond brokered the . . . But the other person’s who’s famous here, and you wouldn’t recognize him except real history nerds like me, is Bob Jones III. The religion historians will note that this is unusual. Bob Jones doesn’t like Billy Graham. Billy Graham is far too modern. Bob Jones is an fundamentalist. This was early on in the ‘50s. Billy Graham had just emerged on the scene. And what’s great about this picture is that it captures the story about Thurmond and the religious right. That’s a term that people aren’t talking about, the religious right, in 1950. That’s a term that’s only talked about in the 1960s and 1970s, when people notice this active politicization of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians that’s so important in kind of feeding the Reagan revolution in 1980.

But Thurmond joins the board of Bob Jones University in 1950 when he leaves the governorship, and he has this long relationship with Bob Jones and other anticommunist fundamentalist preacher, who, when he’s getting involved in the anti-muzzling campaigns, are important contacts for him. So Thurmond is kind of forging a kind of Sunbelt, religious right politics decades before that term would be in use, and that’s an important theme of the book, as well, in sketching out Thurmond as a politician.

So I think, you know, thinking about Thurmond as both the last of the Jim Crowe demagogues and also one of the first sunbelt conservatives does a couple of things for us. I think it forces us to think more, as I said, about both southern demagogues and Sunbelt conservatives. I think there’s too easy of a distinction that we often make between libertarians, western libertarians like Goldwater, on one hand, and southern racist like Strom Thurmond on the other. Placing Strom Thurmond in the context of the Sunbelt allows us to see more clearly this huge moral blind spot on racial issues that characterized so much, I think, of the modern right. It’s not like Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon or others are holding their nose as they’re welcoming Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party. They are eagerly recruiting him. They need him, right? They were, and certainly Goldwater was, as convinced as Strom Thurmond was about how the Civil Rights Movement was a kind of Trojan horse that was allowing liberal groups to promote various socialist causes that were injurious to free enterprise in the United States, right?

So, I think the Republican Party and the broader right’s embrace of Strom Thurmond grew naturally out of a shared political worldview, one that consistently ignored or dismissed the kind of moral imperative of the modern civil rights struggle. If you’re thinking historiographically, that’s one of the takeaways of this argument about Thurmond as both a southern demagogue and Sunbelt conservative. But I have to admit now, there’s a danger in this work. There’s a danger in doing this kind of thing, right? We can take Strom Thurmond so far into the sunbelt that we forget that he’s from the south, and not just any place in the south, South Carolina, that state about which it has been said that it’s too small to be it’s own sovereign nation but too large to be an insane asylum.

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series

Thurmond’s life is interesting because of the light it sheds on these broader political shifts, but it’s also interesting just as a life, right? It’s 100 years long. It’s a century long. It’s full of these emotional and psychological intrigues, twists and turns, deeply held secrets, and one of the most remarkable rumors of 20th century American politics is the fact that the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had a black daughter. It’s stranger than fiction. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is Essie Mae Washington Williams. This is Strom Thurmond’s daughter, his oldest child. This is at the press conference she held six months after he died. You know, the rumors about Thurmond having a black daughter had been around since the late 1940s. They were first published in Robert Sherrell’s book Gothic Politics of the South. He’s the first one to say, you know, “hey, there are these rumors for many years now that Strom Thurmond actually has a black daughter.” They were later published in 1972 by one of his political enemies, and then again in the early 1990s it comes up again with a couple of enterprising South Carolina reporters who go out and actually track down Essie Mae Washington Williams who was living as a school teacher, a widowed mother of four, in California, Los Angeles, where she moved in 1964 after her husband died. Now the first oblique reference that I found to this rumor was in the Chicago Defender in 1957. There was a great piece that came out around the time of Strom Thurmond’s record filibuster. There was this little news item that was speculating on how it was that Strom Thurmond was able to speak for so long and drink so much water with only one restroom break. He only had one restroom break. This was one of the first things the press asked him when he got off the senate floor. “How did you do that?” He had one restroom break, and Barry Goldwater was the one who helped him get it. None of his fellow southerners would have helped him at all because they were infuriated that Thurmond was making this one-man show of it and making them look bad in the process, but Goldwater helped him out. And what Thurmond told reporters at the time is that he had gone to the senate’s steam room ahead of the speech and intentionally dehydrated himself so that when he drank the liquids necessary to keep his whistle wet, his body would absorb them like a sponge. And I asked a dear friend of mine who’s a urologist how plausible that sounds, and he was awfully dubious about that claim. I was dubious too, and many other people were dubious at the time. And that’s what this news item was about. It was in the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper in Chicago, and it said that there had been rumors that Strom Thurmond was outfitted with a device designed for long car trips, a kind of catheter like thing. And what’s interesting is that this is a great story because it talks about, it shows that there’s this narrative in the established white press, and there’s a narrative in the black press. And this is true throughout. That’s why ProQuest has digitized, do y’all have ProQuest here? ProQuest has digitized these African American newspapers. It’s a fantastic source. It’s amazing because you can really see this. You can track how there are stories the white press doesn’t cover. And they didn’t touch this story about Thurmond being outfitted, but there’s an African American man from South Carolina, Bertie Bowman, who’s a longtime janitorial worker on Capitol Hill, who in his memoir, published in the early 2000s, said that he was there. He saw them outfit Thurmond with this bag, so there are two different sources that have suggested that there’s this device that was central to this filibuster. Of course, Thurmond didn’t talk about it at the time because he wanted it to seem like a manly act. Speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes is not a small thing for a man in his mid-50s, too. You men will know what I’m talking about. It’s part of his masculine persona that he could do this. But what’s fascinating about the Chicago Defender thing is not only is there this discrepancy between the white and black press, at the end of it, there’s an item, there’s this oblique reference that says it’s also been rumored that Strom Thurmond is not as

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series opposed to black people as it would seem. That’s all they say.

But there had been other stories published in black newspapers in the 40s at the time of his Dixiecrat run that were talking about different black cousins that were in the Thurmond family, so all of this was in the rumor mill in South Carolina politics. It was the worst kept secret at the time, and it was not until this press conference that it was finally confirmed. And Essie Mae Washington Williams who had said all along that, in protecting her father, said that no, we’re just old family friends. These are just rumors; they’re not true. She finally comes out and says, “I am Strom Thurmond’s daughter.” And the South Carolina legislature did a remarkable thing. There was an African American representative named Robert Ford from Charleston, and you know, the South Carolina legislature controls the grounds and buildings.

There’s a monument on the state capitol grounds to Strom Thurmond. That’s it right there. It was put up in 1997 before he passed away, and on the side of it, it lists all of his accomplishments. At the end it says, father of four, and it lists the children that he had with his second wife. You know Strom Thurmond was married twice. He married once when he was 44. He married a 22-year-old woman who died of a brain tumor in her thirties. Then he was single for a while and married again when he was 66. Again, he married a 22-year-old woman who bore him four children. And those were the names of those children. But what Robert Ford said, you know, was that Washington Williams was one of his children too, so she should be on there. And the Thurmond family supported this idea, so they put Essie Mae Washington Williams’s name on the monument here. There’s that old saying that if it’s written in stone, it’s permanent. You can’t change it. That’s not true. You can edit stuff, and people do it all the time. People get names wrong, birthdates wrong, so the stonemasons go out and do this work. They talked to the stonemason, the company, the guy who did the work on the Strom Thurmond monument, and what they did is, they took this granite powder. They pound this granite into a fine powder, and they sift it until it’s kind of finer than talcum powder, and they mix that with run-of-the-mill crazy glue. And they pound that into the areas that have already been carved, and they sand that smooth, right? So that’s what they did, and once that sets up, you can carve back over it. But you’ve got to be sure that you sift that powder really fine because, if not, it’s prone to chipping, so that’s what happened in this case. You can see here that they had to change “the father of four children” to “the father of five children.” You can more or less keep the F, but it’s really tricky turning the O into an I and they U into a V and the R into a V, so this is what they’ve done. It’s dark, and the discoloration is because of the sanding. They’ve opened it up to oxidation, and you can see they didn’t do a great job of sifting because there’s a chip at the top of the I and also the left side of the V is rounded instead of sharp and straight. I think that the story of this monument . . . This is the kind of lasting manifestation of Strom Thurmond’s life and legacy. And I tried to end with the book by ruminating on the life of this monument and the fact that it’s been changed like this because, at the time, when it happened, the newspaper articles had a kind of triumphal tone to them. They’re like, “Hey, look. History rewritten in stone.” This speaks to a time we could hardly imagine in southern history only a few decades earlier, and it’s true. It was kind of a remarkable thing that Strom Thurmond’s African American daughter, if you think about it . . . an African American woman makes a claim, a public claim on one of the most powerful people in South Carolina, and it’s borne out and recognized by the family. It’s a remarkable story and history is rewritten in stone.

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“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University Summersell Lecture Series

I go back in the final pages of this book and think about how one of the reasons the family is so eager to accept Essie Mae Washington Williams’s story is that she was always the picture of the loving and loyal daughter. She enabled him to have his career by keeping this secret. It was really controversial when she came out with her secret. There was a mixed set of emotions by people who said she handled a difficult situation with great dignity and restraint, and other people were saying but, yeah, she enabled this segregationist and racist to have a career. Why are we celebrating her restraint? It’s really complicated, you know. I try to present those in the book, but I also try to talk about the longer history in which white southerners honor, even memorialize, African Americans for their loyalty and devotion. If you think about the 19th century tradition of monuments of loyal slaves that emerged at the turn of the 20th century during the Jim Crowe era. These are common across the southern landscape. There’s one in Canton, Mississippi, my wife’s home. You can see it from her bedroom window. We never knew what it was until we walked by it one day. It’s a monument to loyal slaves who served their masters while they went off to the Civil War.

So I try to put this monument in that context, and I also try to think of it as a metaphor. It’s a scarred stone. The stone is scarred by this process. You can change stone. You can edit it, but you can’t do it easily. There’s a scar that remains. So I try to end the book by thinking about what’s the significance of scar. And I give three ways of thinking about how we read that scar as a metaphor in trying to make sense of Strom Thurmond’s life and legacy, and if you want to know those three ways, you really should by this book or check it out of the library. They have a copy. Thanks so much again for this award. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you.

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