Posts

Guest Essayist: Professor William Morrisey

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1948: The Dixiecrats

The primary elections of 2016 have invited comparisons to political factions in American politics that haven’t appeared in such clear focus for nearly seventy years. Although the Republican Party of 1948 had papered over its divisions between moderate-to-liberal business interests on the East Coast—represented by New York Governor Thomas Dewey—and Middle-Western conservatives—represented by Robert Taft and, behind him, Herbert Hoover—Democrats split bitterly into three groups. The mainstream of the party nominated President Harry Truman; the left wing (which included democratic socialists and some communists) ran Henry Wallace on the ticket of the Progressive Party; and the segregationist, southern Democrats ran South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond on the ticket of the States’ Rights Democratic Party or “Dixiecrats.” In one of the most famous upsets in American political history, Truman overcame his party’s fracturing and defeated Dewey, although the Dixiecrats won the combined 38 electoral votes of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. The Progressives failed to win a single electoral vote.

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Guest Essayist: Professor Forrest Nabors

 

We remember 1865 as the year when our Civil War ended. But by another measure, the standard of von Clausewitz, that war is politics continued by other means, the political conflict that erupted into formal war did not end until after Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president in 1877. The period known as Reconstruction after the war continued that political conflict and was also violent, though the combatants were paramilitaries and its wars were not wars of maneuver with grand armies.

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