The South

I watched a very interesting documentary about Hubert Humphrey last night. One of the events they covered was a speech that Humphrey gave at the Democratic Convention in 1948. Humphrey was then the mayor of Minneapolis and he spoke in support of a platform plank on civil rights. It is easy to forget (I certainly had) that the Democratic Party, at that time, was dominated by the so-called Dixiecrats. At any rate, Humphrey's speech was passionate and convincing; the majority of the Party voted to keep the civil rights plank. As a result, the Dixiecrats walked out of the convention and formed a third party they called the States' Rights Democratic Party and ran Strom Thurmond for president against Dewey and Truman. In spite of the split, Truman won the election by a narrow margin.

The documentary went on to explore the fight for civil rights legislation in the '60s --- in particular, the major fight in spring and summer 1964. By that time, Humphrey was one of the senators from Minnesota and Lyndon Johnson, a former ally in the senate, was president. The fight was violent, especially since the Dixiecrats, who had dominated Southern senatorial positions for decades, mounted a sustained filibuster in order to prevent the bill from coming to a vote. In the end, Johnson and Humphrey were able to mount enough support to end the filibuster and the vote was successfully taken.

What fascinated me about the documentary is that the same people were trying to block civil rights in 1964 that walked out in 1948 and were saying the same crazy things about "Southern life styles and culture" to protect their "Jim Crow Laws" and their total segregation of blacks and whites in the South. But it wasn't just the similarities between 1948 and 1964 that amazed me, it was the fact that similar Republicans and Democrats in the South today are saying the same things and acting in the same ways. The argument has not changed in 150-160 years. All the Civil War achieved was the death and maiming of countless men, women, and children. Southerners still want their own way, separate from the Federal government's interference --- no matter that they suck off of the Federal government to a larger extent than other states.