All Through the Night with Strom Thurmond

Fifty years ago today, on August 29, 1957, Sen. Strom Thurmond, the South’s champion of states’ rights and white supremacy, secured a place in the annals of congressional history when he finally yielded the floor after speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes straight. His speech set the record for a Senate filibuster.

Exploiting a provision in the Senate’s parliamentary procedure that allowed an individual senator to hold the floor until two-thirds of his colleagues compelled him to relinquish it, Thurmond began speaking at 8:54 p.m. on August 28 and steadfastly refused to yield until 9:12 p.m. the next evening. Over the course of a long and hot summer night, he recited the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Washington’s Farewell Address, and other historical documents. “He read these monotonously, even listlessly from the lectern,” The New York Times reported, “so that the classic phrases might have been so many items from the telephone directory.”

Few people outside the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit knew then that the previous record holder was Wayne Morse, an independent from Oregon who four years before had filibustered an offshore oil bill for 22 hours and 26 minutes. To most Americans, it was Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, the wide-eyed reformer, who embodied the best tradition of the filibuster, a parliamentary tool often used by a minority of Senators to stall or indefinitely postpone a final vote on legislation favored by the majority. In Frank Capra’s classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart’s character filibusters a motion presented by his corrupt foes to expel him from the Senate so they can pass a graft-ridden land-use bill. Thurmond was no less sincere than Stewart’s Jeff Smith, but he was considerably less noble when he took to the floor to stall passage of an altogether different measure: the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

A World War II veteran and former Democratic governor of South Carolina, Thurmond had first come to national attention in 1948 when he broke with President Harry Truman and ran as the presidential candidate of the breakaway States Rights Democratic Party, known popularly as the Dixiecrats. The Dixiecrats were formed in opposition to the Democrats’ civil rights platform, which called for anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to enforce job equality for African-Americans. Thurmond’s 1948 run attracted more than a million votes and carried four states, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

At the time, Thurmond claimed he was “not interested one whit in the question of white supremacy,” and insofar as he publicly opposed lynching and avoided the crude racial invective that had been preferred by earlier Southern politicians like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo and Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge, he represented a new, more low-key breed of racist. But a racist he was, in any true meaning of the term.

Staunchly opposed to racial integration, he gave a campaign speech in 1948 in which he promised that “there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” He warned his followers, “Think about the situation which would exist when the annual office party is held or the union sponsors a dance.” His focus on constitutional questions like “states’ rights” and “federalism” was a matter of political expediency rather than noble conviction. After World War II, in which America had defeated a state built on racist ideology, it was simply no longer fashionable or acceptable to shout racial epithets from the rostrum.

The 1948 Dixiecrat revolt was the segregationist South’s last show of real strength. A decade later, the great postwar migration of African-Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North, the Midwest, and California had created a new political equation, as Northern politicians from both parties were forced to consider the concerns of their new black constituents. In 1957 a coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans worked to pass President Dwight Eisenhower’s relatively strong civil rights legislation, which imposed federal penalties on anyone who interfered with the right of citizens to register and vote. Though Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson ultimately had to water down the bill to get it passed—he did so by, among other things, stripping it of a provision that allowed federal judges to jail violators for contempt of court without a jury trial—it was anathema to the solid South.

Thurmond’s filibuster made for good political theater, but it never stood a chance of derailing the bill. Most of his Southern colleagues were reluctantly willing to swallow the watered-down and ultimately ineffective bill rather than risk outraging Northern legislators who might very well respond by eliminating the right to filibuster altogether. Such a move would make it impossible for Southerners to stave off even stronger civil rights measures in the future. Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia (the son of Eugene) denounced the bill but also rebuked Thurmond for his “grandstand” performance. “If I had undertaken a filibuster for personal aggrandizement,” added Sen. Richard Russell, of Georgia, “I would have forever reproached myself for being guilty of a form of treason against the people of the South.”

But outside the nation’s capital, many Southerners loved Thurmond’s performance. Georgia’s governor, Marvin Griffin, defiantly promised, “We’re not going to let a Federal judge tell us who can vote,” while South Carolina’s governor, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., proudly announced, “I don’t have any intention of cooperating.” Thurmond’s grandstand may have been legislatively ineffectual, but it almost certainly encouraged white Southerners in resisting federal law, as they had begun doing three years earlier after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Thurmond was something of a health fanatic, eschewing alcohol and tobacco and boasting of a strict regimen of one-arm pushups and vigorous bicycle rides, but he didn’t exactly adhere to the most rigorous filibuster tradition. Neither Wayne Morse nor Jimmy Stewart had sat down to take a break during their filibusters; Strom Thurmond did, several times, with the cooperation of his colleagues. His theatrical showing, at the close of a long summer session, seemed to entertain more than a few bored senators. Even his ideological opponents gave aid and comfort. At one point, Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois, a staunch liberal and supporter of civil rights, poured his South Carolina colleague a glass of cold orange juice.

In its immediate goal, Thurmond’s stand proved unnecessary. Stripped of its teeth, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 proved an ineffective safeguard of black voting rights. It would take a much stronger measure, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to get the job done. It’s hard to say who won in the long run. In 1964 Thurmond, a Democrat, switched political affiliation again, this time for good, leading a massive exodus of white Southerners to the Republican party. Since then, Democratic presidential candidates have been entirely shut out of the solid South in five of ten elections; in two others (1968 and 1980) the Democratic candidate won only one Southern state. Strom Thurmond couldn’t stop the civil rights movement, but the electoral realignment he helped initiate between 1948 and 1964 has fundamentally reshaped American politics.

As her husband read documents from the Senate floor that long day in August 1957, a physician asked Jean Thurmond, “Why don’t you stop him?”

“How can I?” she replied. “He is the only one to stop.”

He remained in the U.S. Senate until 2003, when he was 100. He remains the oldest person ever to serve in it.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).