steve flowers
Right now, in most parts of the country, and certainly in Alabama, all politics is nationally partisan-driven. Alabama is a one-party state when it comes to national and state general elections. For about 80 years, our country was a democratic one-party dictatorship. For the past 60 years, our country has been a single-party Republican state in presidential elections.
Republican candidates are always going to run for state office in Alabama, and Republican candidates are always going to carry Alabama. This is due to the philosophies of both parties regarding national politics. All politics is national.
When George Wallace was governor of Alabama, he traveled the country running for president. In exploring Don Quixote as an independent, he often said there was not a dime’s worth of difference between Democrats and Republicans. He couldn’t say that with a straight face today, even with inflammatory rhetoric. The Republican Party is very conservative. The Democratic Party is very liberal, and most Alabamians are very conservative. It’s that simple.
Some naive political writers have tried to place the blame or take credit for the election results behind the leadership of the Alabama Democratic Party or the Alabama Republican Party. Political parties in Alabama have as much relevance and influence over election outcomes as elephants and donkeys. They have no power or influence over elections. Its only real purpose is to set qualifying dates and rules. In Alabama, it doesn’t matter who the Democratic or Republican chairman is, and it always has been. Criticizing Alabama’s party leadership is like criticizing the PTO. For anyone to think they are involved in a political campaign when they are doing thankless, irrelevant, and powerless work reveals a naivety of Alabama politics. It turns out.
There has been one presidential election in Alabama’s history where party leadership made a difference. The year is 1948. Race was an issue. For 80 years, Alabama and the South have voted straight Democratic in presidential elections. However, Democratic presidential candidate Harry Truman was a strong advocate of civil rights. The strong South was becoming unstable.
Mississippi and South Carolina had floated the idea of incorporating the South into a political party called the Dixiecrats. Although most white Democrats in Alabama were in favor of racial segregation, they were not crazy about the idea of leaving the party. In 1948 there were two politically distinct groups in the state. There was a strong progressive wing, encouraged and loyal to the national Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was respected in Alabama. Our entire Congressional delegation was FDR New Deal Democrats.
However, the Democratic Party machine was dominated by conservative black belts who later allied with Dixiecrats. The chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party was the racist Gessner McCorvey. McCorvey instituted a policy in which Democratic electors and Alabama delegates could not support candidates pledging to civil rights. It was enforced by a signed oath. Alabamians elected a variety of delegates to the Democratic convention, but they were chosen based on popularity and name recognition. So when the Democratic National Convention nominated Truman and adopted a civil rights platform, about half of the Alabama delegates followed McCorvey and walked out of the convention, while the other half, who were progressives, remained.
McCorvey’s racist group joined with other Southern states to form the Dixiecrat Party. They met at a convention at Bootwell Auditorium in downtown Birmingham and drafted Strom Thurmond from South Carolina. Thurmond and the Dixiecrats would rule five states in the Deep South.
McCorvey and his racist Dixiecrats cleverly stole the state Democratic Party’s rooster symbol. In 1948, candidates’ names did not appear on the ballot. People can only vote for their party. Your choice was to vote Republican or Democrat. The Alabamian has been pulling the Democratic Party’s cock all his life. It will never be known who they voted for, Truman or Thurmond. The state Democratic Party, controlled by McCorvey’s Dixiecrats, had essentially hijacked the party’s label. I suspect that many Alabamians who were helped by the New Deal felt like they were voting for the referendum and for Truman. But McCorvey’s Alabama Democratic Party machine voted for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in the Alabama Democratic primary.
See you next week.
Steve Flowers is Alabama’s leading political columnist. His weekly column appears in more than 60 Alabama newspapers. He served in the state legislature for 16 years. Steve can be reached at (email protected).
