Mr. Lott’s Good Ol’ Days

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) insisted Monday that his fawning testimonial last week to Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), once an outspoken segregationist, was just part of “a lighthearted celebration” of the retiring senator and his “legendary” life.

When that explanation didn’t fly, Lott tried again, issuing an apology to “anyone who was offended.” Lott said he didn’t mean to “embrace discarded policies of the past” when he paid homage to Thurmond’s ignominious history as the standard-bearer for the racist Dixiecrat Party in 1948.

What Lott said at the retiring Thurmond’s 100th birthday party was: “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, the truth is often spoken as jest. If there was truth-telling in Lott’s dreadful lionization of Thurmond, it must be this: That Lott and perhaps others toasting the frail, wheelchair-bound Thurmond in the Dirksen Senate Office Building last week still pine for the good ol’ days.

Those were the days before federal lawmakers, judges and federal troops stirred up “problems” like school desegregation, voting rights guarantees, an end to “white” and “colored” drinking fountains and laws against the lynchings that kept this regime of humiliation and terror in place. Those were the days indeed.

The Dixiecrat Party formed to freeze these remains of an antebellum world in place as President Harry Truman announced his intention to temper some of its most reprehensible features. In late 1947, a presidential panel that Truman convened after a particularly brutal wave of racial violence proposed anti-lynching legislation, the integration of interstate transportation and the armed forces and an end to the poll tax that blocked many blacks from voting.

The Dixiecrats broke with the Democratic Party over these proposals, only thinly disguising their racism by asserting that the federal government could not dictate to sovereign states. The new party’s ticket of Thurmond and Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright carried four Southern states in 1948, drawing a million voters. Some may have been on hand last week for the off-color jokes and off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

The historian Robert Dallek has suggested that instead of lauding Thurmond’s segregationist policies, Lott might have chosen instead to salute Thurmond for finally moderating his views on civil rights as he saw racism becoming politically untenable. But to do that, Lott would have to see “these problems” for what they really are: part of this nation’s long and difficult struggle toward social justice.

If Lott cannot shed his nostalgic view of racial segregation he can hardly claim to be a national leader.