THIRD PARTIES: Dixiecrat Medley

Clicking along at an 18-hour-a-day clip, the Dixiecrats’ Candidate J. Strom Thurmond turned up one night last week with his pretty wife Jean for an outdoor supper in Augusta, Ga. and a rally in the Municipal Auditorium. The crowd of 3,000 was well-scrubbed, well-dressed and soberly attentive. Candidate Thurmond’s appeal, it was clear, was to Augusta’s upper classes.

With his forefinger chopping at the microphone, Thurmond told his listeners that what they had to fear was “a new kind of police state with all power centered in Washington.” Cried he: “There are forces at work in this country today which would lead our people down the same pathway to the total state that was traveled by the people of Germany, of Italy, of Russia. Harry Truman, Tom Dewey and Henry Wallace are birds of one feather. All three are kowtowing to minority blocs by advocating the so-called civil-rights program. This time they can not fool the people and especially the Democrats of the South. The Jeffersonian Democrats have spewed out of their mouths that mongrel outfit which captured our party at Philadelphia.” That went fine in the Dixiecrat South.

This week Candidate Thurmond would take his campaign as far north as the District of Columbia and the border state of Maryland.