Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change.

• Author: Gross, Daniel

Strom Thurmond is one of the great ideological losers in post-war American politics. At every essential juncture in the forties, fifties, and sixties, the veteran senator from South Carolina came down hard on the wrong side of history. He fought even the mildest of civil rights measures, employed demagogic rhetoric, and cloaked calls for a white-dominated Southern culture in the code of states' rights. Worse, Thurmond's moral vision appeared so narrow that he professed not to understand how Jim Crow hurt blacks.

Nadine Cohodas, a former reporter for Congressional Quarterly, has written a balanced, fair, comprehensive, and useful account of Thurmond's lengthy public life. She rightly sees Thurmond's political career and life--for Thurmond, the two are indistinguishable--as the struggle of a man of great political talent but little vision to cope with the shifting dynamics of race in the 20th century.

Thurmond was born in 1902, the son of a prosperous lawyer and farmer in the town of Edgefield. His father, John William Thurmond, became a state senator and ally of "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the charismatic, viciously racist South Carolina governor and senator whom six-year-old Strom met and idolized.

In a straightforward narrative style, Cohodas dutifully tracks Thurmond through his student years at Clemson University, his career as a school teacher, and his first campaign, a race for county school superintendent in 1926. Cohodas then moves on to Thurmond's run for the state Senate, his state judgeship, his heroic service in World War II, and his election as governor in 1946.

Thurmond emerged on the national stage in 1948, when Southern Democrats rebelled after President Truman insisted on including civil rights planks in the party's platform. Thurmond didn't lead the Southern revolt at first, but after several state delegations bolted from the party's Philadelphia convention, the South Carolina governor seized the banner of the States' Rights Party and carried it with gusto. The 1948 break was the first in the long series of political shifts that, 20 years later, would produce the solid Republican South after a century of Democratic dominance in the region.

Thurmond's 1948 segregationist campaign fell flat. He picked up just 3 percent of the nation's popular vote but did carry four states in the old Confederacy. His rhetoric was affecting and fearful, springing from the deep well of South Carolina's historic resistance to national efforts to...