“Strom Thurmond’s America” Joseph Crespino, Emory University 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 Northwestern University, acquired (and I just discovered this today), a master’s in education from the University of Mississippi, and took his PhD in history at Stanford University 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 United States 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, South Carolina 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 New York 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 www.as.ua.edu www.scss.as.ua.edu “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.