by A. J. Baime
Strom Thurmond was raised in a society in which segregation and white supremacy were the unquestioned norm. He was six years old when he experienced his first political handshake. His father took him via horse and buggy to meet Ben Tillman—who was by this time a sixty-one-year-old United States senator. When the Thurmonds reached Tillman’s farm, the one-eyed senator greeted the boy.
“What do you want?” Tillman asked.
“I want to shake your hand,” young Strom Thurmond said.
The senator reached out his hand and Strom grabbed it, then stood awkwardly holding hands with the old man.
“You said you wanted to shake,” Tillman said. “Why the hell don’t you shake?”
As Thurmond later recalled, “I shook and I shook, and I’ve been shaking ever since.”
* * *
Thurmond attended Clemson College (now University) in his home state, then worked as a teacher and an athletic coach. He lived at home, and among the servants at the family’s estate was a young black woman named Carrie Butler. Around the time that Butler, just sixteen years old, gave birth to a baby girl she named Essie Mae, Strom Thurmond left his post in Edgefield to work for a real estate firm in Virginia.
Essie Mae was, in fact, Thurmond’s daughter, and she would remain a highly guarded secret for the rest of Thurmond’s life.
By the time he returned to South Carolina, Essie Mae had been shuttled off to be raised by black relatives in Pennsylvania. Thurmond, meanwhile, began to climb in stature, becoming Edgefield County’s superintendent of schools in 1928, then a state senator four years later. The year Thurmond was elected to the South Carolina legislature, FDR won 98 percent of the state’s vote; such was the power of the Democratic Party’s Solid South, of which Strom Thurmond was a member. The rules of white supremacy were well cemented in the state, and Strom followed the racial ideology of his father. Whites and blacks kept separate establishments, neighborhoods, and public schools. African Americans were prevented from voting.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Thurmond took a leave of absence to join the US Army. During the D-day landings in Normandy in 1944, he was aboard an invasion glider when fleets of these aircraft came whistling over the beaches of Normandy, crash-landing on French turf. Over the next year, he saw heavy combat, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He witnessed the hell of Buchenwald. “Men were stacked up like cordwood,” he recalled, “ten or twelve feet high. You couldn’t tell whether they were living or dead . . . I had never seen such inhuman acts in my life. I couldn’t dream of men treating men in such a manner.”
When he returned to South Carolina, he was a war hero with substantial political experience for a man just forty-three years old, and perfectly situated to realize his father’s dream—the governorship of South Carolina. But the South that Thurmond found waiting for him when he returned was different from the one he had known before. African Americans who had served in the military were emboldened by their own patriotism and a desire for justice. Blacks in northern states had organized into groups like the NAACP, which was well funded and staffed with highly trained lawyers. A new alignment of racial power was taking root. But the real shift occurred in the nation’s judicial branch.
In 1944 a landmark Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright challenged all-white elections in the South as never before. A black dentist named Lonnie E. Smith had sued an election official named S. S. Allwright for the right to vote in the Texas Democratic primary. The NAACP supplied the brilliant young lawyer Thurgood Marshall to argue the case, and the court had found Smith in the right.
“The United States is a constitutional democracy,” the Supreme Court ruled. “Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race.”
The first full election cycle following Smith v. Allwright was in 1946, the year Strom Thurmond ran for governor. For the first time in generations, black people in the South were hoping to freely participate in the elections.
On August 13, 1946, a black man named George Elmore attempted to vote in a Democratic primary in Richland County in South Carolina. Since the South was a one-party system (the Solid South), the winner of the Democratic primary would be the winner of the office. Election officials refused to accept Elmore’s ballot. With the help of lawyers from the newly empowered NAACP, Elmore sued. The outgoing South Carolina governor at the time, Olin D. Johnston, gave a speech to the state legislature in response to the Elmore case.
“We will have done everything within our power to guarantee white supremacy in our primaries and in our State in so far as legislation is concerned,” Governor Johnston said. “Should this prove inadequate, we South Carolinians will use the necessary methods to retain white supremacy in our primaries and to safeguard the homes and happiness of our people. White supremacy will be maintained in our primaries. Let the chips fall where they may!” His audience understood what he meant by “necessary methods.”
Yet a white judge in South Carolina decided the case in Elmore’s favor. “For too many years,” Judge J. Waties Waring ruled, “the people of this Country and perhaps particularly of this State have evaded realistic issues . . . Racial distinctions cannot exist in the machinery that selects the officers and law-makers of the United States; and all citizens of this State and Country are entitled to cast a free and untrammeled ballot in our elections.”
By the time the ruling was issued, the 1946 South Carolina gubernatorial election was over. Strom Thurmond won the Democratic primary, and ran unopposed in the November general election. Thurmond was now one of the nation’s youngest governors. But his white constituents knew they faced a battle over voting rights. Roughly 40 percent of the state’s population was African American.
Throughout his adult life, Thurmond kept a secret relationship with his daughter Essie Mae. Her existence was highly dangerous to Thurmond the more he moved into the political spotlight. But he found ways to visit her regularly, and he helped her financially. She was a grown woman living in New York City when he became governor, and he convinced her to come back South to attend the all-black South Carolina State College. She would remember traveling out of New York on a nonsegregated train car, having to change trains in Washington, DC, and getting on a segregated car. Now back in the South, there were separate bathrooms, water fountains, waiting rooms—those for blacks and those for whites.
“Why I thought the world war might have changed things I’ll never know,” she later wrote in her memoirs. “I guess I felt that if our black soldiers could fight for America, America could fight for them, but that was not to be.”
Shortly after Thurmond took office, on February 16, 1947, the phone rang in the Columbia governor’s mansion. When Thurmond picked up the line he heard the nervous voice of the city editor of the Greenville Piedmont, a local newspaper serving a town one hundred miles northwest of South Carolina’s capital. The editor told Thurmond a terrifying story: A black man named Willie Earle had been accused of the robbery and fatal stabbing of a white taxi driver. Earle had been arrested, but a white mob had taken him from the county jail by force. He’d then been stabbed, beaten, and shot through the head.
Police claimed to have substantial evidence that Earle was guilty of murdering the white taxi driver, Thomas W. Brown. But even if true, that did not condone the murder of Earle—not as far as the new governor Strom Thurmond was concerned. Thurmond knew he was on the spot. Would the rule of law hold up? The facts emerging were disturbing, and it was clear the case was going to get national attention.
Thurmond immediately ordered the FBI on the case, and brought in the strongest prosecutor he could find, Sam Watt of Spartanburg, who had successfully prosecuted 471 of 473 cases in the past year. Thurmond wanted to bring a murder case. Numerous witnesses were interviewed. The jailer, whose name was Gilstrap, told how a mob of some thirty white men had come to the jailhouse. “I knew they meant business,” he told inve
stigators. “They had a shotgun.” The county physician said Earle had been stabbed five times, in the chest, stomach, forehead, neck, and thigh, before he was shot to death through the right temple. Numerous mob members named the man who pulled the trigger: R. Carlos Hurd Sr., a forty-five-year-old taxi dispatcher. Right before the victim was shot in the head, according to court testimony, he muttered his last words: “Lord, you done killed me.”
This type of mob violence of white men against a black victim was not new. The South’s darkest secret was one that stretched back decades. But in this case, unlike others, white men named a fellow white person as the triggerman in the lynching of a black American. Numerous newspapers, including the New York Times, called the case the biggest lynching trial in the history of the South. The courtroom was filled with reporters from national news outlets. A photo of the defendants being led into the courthouse ran in newspapers near and far. The governor faced fears that race riots could break out across the state, no matter which way the trial ended.
On May 27, 1947, predictably, an all-white jury found all the defendants not guilty. The New York Times and Washington Post ran editorials denouncing the verdict. “At least in that part of South Carolina, it’s all right for a mob to take the law into its own hands and to commit murder—provided its victim is Negro,” the Post stated. “That’s the way they want it here. And they want no interference from the world outside.” Governor Thurmond’s role in the case left him unscathed. He was praised by outsiders for seeking justice, and excused by white constituents satisfied with the verdict.
Seven months later, Harry Truman gave his 1948 State of the Union address, his kickoff to the election season, calling for civil rights for all Americans. To white southerners like the Earle jury, it was a direct attack.
In the 1948 presidential contest, black Americans were hoping to vote in greater numbers than ever before. By the NAACP’s estimate, the number of black voters registered in the South rose by 700,000 to 800,000 leading up to 1948. Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, and Henry Wallace were fighting for the black vote. Strom Thurmond was fighting to hang on to the past. Thurmond’s presidential run would be a historic litmus test—of federal versus state power, of black southerners’ ability to exercise their right to vote, and of the Democratic Party’s hold over the South.
19
“They Are Simply a ‘Red Herring’”
ON JULY 31 TRUMAN LEFT the White House at 12:45 p.m., bound for National Airport, where he boarded the president’s airplane—the Sacred Cow. He was flying to New York to dedicate the new Idlewild Airport. The event would give the US military the opportunity to showcase cutting-edge American aerial technology, before a crowd of some 215,000 people.
Everything about the ceremony was outsize. The navy flew in a group of Washington officials aboard a Lockheed Constellation—the largest air transporter in the world. Truman stood among political luminaries watching the largest display of airpower ever seen in peacetime, as the fastest airplanes streaked by at six hundred miles per hour, and the world’s biggest bombers—the new B-36 and the B-50—dove from the blue sky.
For the president, the scene was a reminder of the power of human curiosity and the speed of innovation. He had grown up in a horse-and-buggy world. He had fought in World War I when he was in his thirties, riding on horseback. Today he was watching some nine hundred airships thunder over an “airplane city”—Idlewild, now the largest public airport on earth.*
On a speaker’s platform, Truman shook the hand of his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. The president stood a couple of inches taller than the New York governor, and his white hair made him look old enough to be Dewey’s father. It would be the only time during 1948 that Truman and Dewey would meet face-to-face. With their hands clasped, their noses just inches apart, they smiled, an offering of genuine political sportsmanship, as the camera flashes popped around them.
Truman leaned over and whispered in Dewey’s ear, “Tom, when you get to the White House, for God’s sake, do something about the plumbing.”
At 4:05 p.m., Truman’s plane took off from Idlewild, flew to Washington, dropped off some passengers, and departed seven minutes after landing, bound for Missouri, where the president was to vote in the state’s Democratic primary—a formality, since he had already been nominated. While he was in flight, the most sensational domestic nonelection story of 1948 was breaking, in newspapers and over the radio.
* * *
On July 31, the day of Truman’s appearance at Idlewild, in the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington, DC, the committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey called a meeting to order at 10:15 a.m. The committee figures sat in a row at one end of the room, eight men in ties, including the freshman Republican congressman Richard Nixon of California and his colleague, Republican Karl Mundt of South Dakota.
The committee was conducting hearings on what these congressmen believed to be an underground Communist conspiracy that was infiltrating the ranks of American government. Chairman Thomas called for the first witness of the day: Elizabeth Bentley, a Connecticut woman who—in earlier testimony—had admitted to spying for the Soviet Union. Bentley, forty, walked to the front of the room and sat at a table just a few feet from the row of congressmen who would be questioning her. Crowds filled the room behind her, and directly to her right, a soundman wearing earphones sat hunched over recording equipment. Wearing a plain black dress and a bow in her hair, Bentley looked like any American woman who might have walked in off the street.
“Miss Bentley,” Congressman Mundt said, “please stand and raise your right hand.”
Once Bentley was sworn to oath, Senator John E. Rankin of Mississippi took the floor. He pointed out that leaders of the Communist Party of the United States, Eugene Dennis and William Z. Foster, had been arrested in July on charges of advocating for the overthrow of the American government.
“That has been known to President Truman and Governor Dewey of New York all this time,” said Rankin. “It is about time that they got behind this committee and helped . . . drive these rats from the Federal, the State, and the municipal pay rolls.”
Under questioning, Bentley began to unravel her story: she had been wooed into the Communist Party USA in the late 1930s as “an average run-of-the-mill member,” she had cultivated relationships with people in government positions and had used them to “furnish information” to contacts within the Communist Party who were, she believed, Soviet agents.
“What kind of information?” asked Robert Stripling, the committee’s chief investigator.
“All sorts of information,” said Bentley. “Political, military, whatever they could lay their hands on.”
Over the course of hours, Bentley named twenty-eight government officials and employees who had served as her informants, including Lauchlin Currie of Scarsdale, New York, who had been a close assistant to the late president Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Dexter White, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. (The shock of being named in this testimony was likely the cause of a heart attack that killed White, sixteen days later.) Currie, Bentley told the committee, “furnished inside information on this Government’s attitude toward China, [and] toward other governments. He once relayed to us the information that the American Government was on the verge of breaking the Soviet [military] code.”
When the questioning was over, reporters scrambled to get their stories out. Bentley had named two well-known American government officials as members of an underground Communist conspiracy. According to her testimony, this underground conspiracy had tentacles that reached all the way inside the White House. The Capitol Hill spy scare was only getting started.
Three days later, HUAC members heard the testimony of a disheveled Time magazine editor named Whittaker Chambers, who had been brought in to corroborate Bentley’s testimony. Chambers had joined the Communist cause in New York City in 1924, when Communism in the United States was a fresh intellectual experim
ent in some circles. He said that he had been part of a group that aimed to infiltrate the ranks of American government, and that, when he decided to leave the Communist Party, he feared for his safety because of “the insidious evil . . . communism secures on its disciples.” He lived for a year sleeping by day and “watching through the night with [a] gun or revolver within easy reach,” because he had “sound reason that the Communists might try to kill me.”
Chambers said, “The Communist Party exists for the specific purpose of overthrowing the Government, at the opportune time, by any and all means; and each of its members, by the fact that he is a member, is dedicated to this purpose.”
When the congressional committee’s chief investigator, Stripling, asked Chambers to name names, he offered a list including Lee Pressman and John Abt, two of the most powerful officials guiding the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. Chambers also named one Alger Hiss.
“A ripple of surprise went through the room,” remembered Richard Nixon, “because Hiss, who had not been mentioned in Miss Bentley’s testimony, was a well-known and highly-respected figure in New York and Washington.” Alger Hiss had ranked near the top of the State Department until recently, and had served as the secretary general at the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations was founded in 1945. President Truman knew him well. According to Chambers’s testimony, not only was Hiss a Communist, his wife and his brother were, too.
When the revelation appeared in the next day’s papers, many simply refused to consider that the handsome and all-American-looking Alger Hiss could be a Communist conspirator. Hiss was esteemed by high-ranking Democrats and Republicans. For his part, Hiss vociferously denied the charge.
