Screw You Guys, I'm Going Home (For Four Years, Tops)
Thirty-five delegates, four states, and a comeback nobody made them earn
I was reading a David French “Newsletter” and it was classic French. Not terrible, but missing his own complicity in how we got to this place. But the comments were solid, and French engaged.
One of the featured comments said that the Democrats can’t actually put MAGA to bed, for it to be extinguished, it needs the Republican party to do the deed.
That got the Dude thinking. Yeah, that makes sense, but has it really happened in the past? This came from his research.
So I’m at the alley last week, minding my own business, working on my seventh frame, and some kid two lanes over rolls a gutter ball, screams “THIS LEAGUE IS RIGGED,” and storms out into the parking lot. Big exit. Real dramatic. Slammed the door so hard a pitcher of Lucky Lager jumped off the table.
He was back the next Tuesday. Nobody said anything. He just... bowled. Like it never happened.
And I’m not saying that’s a metaphor, man, I’m saying that’s literally the entire Dixiecrat walkout, except instead of a gutter ball it was Hubert Humphrey standing up at the 1948 Democratic convention and saying, out loud, in public, that maybe the party of Jim Crow shouldn’t also be the party of Jim Crow forever. Wild idea. Really out there.
Here’s the thing about that walkout, the thing everybody skips: it was small. Thirty-five delegates. Out of two hundred and seventy-eight. Thirteen from Alabama, the whole Mississippi delegation — twenty-two guys who, credit where it’s due, at least walked out as a unit — and twenty-three Alabama alternates who I guess figured if the real delegates were leaving they might as well tag along. Everybody else? Georgia’s whole delegation. Richard Russell, the guy who almost beat Truman for the nomination. They all just stayed in their seats and voted no. Grumbled. Went home to their regular hotel rooms. Did not drive to Birmingham to invent a country.
Because that’s what the thirty-five did. They reconvened in Birmingham three days later, formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, ran Strom Thurmond for president on the platform “Segregation Forever” — genuinely the whole platform, they did not workshop that slogan for very long — and won four states. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina. Thirty-nine electoral votes. Over a million people voted for a guy whose entire pitch was “no.”
Truman won anyway. Obviously. This is not a suspenseful story.
Donny leaned over at this point, because Donny had clearly only heard the last part, and said, “Wait, so what happened to them? Did they get kicked out?”
And that’s — Donny, man, that’s the whole bit. Nobody kicked anybody out. There was nothing to kick out of. By 1952, four years later, most of the Dixiecrat leadership had wandered right back into the Democratic Party. Same party. Same seats, near enough. Nobody made them sign anything. Nobody made them apologize. They were, and I’m using the actual word here, “restive” — which is a fancy way of saying pissed off but still cashing the checks.
Walter did not take this well.
“You’re telling me thirty-five guys threw a tantrum, formed a splinter party, ran on segregation forever, lost, and then just walked back in? No probation? No sanctions? That’s not how this works, Dude. There are rules. You break the rules, there are consequences. This is not ‘Nam, this is a political party, there are —”
“Walter, there weren’t rules.”
“THERE HAVE TO BE RULES.”
There weren’t. That’s the actual finding here, man, not my opinion, this is just what happened: nothing happened. No trial, no excommunication, no permanent mark. The walkout wasn’t a rupture. It was a long weekend.
Maude, who had been standing in the doorway this whole time watching Walter escalate over a seventy-eight-year-old convention floor vote for reasons that remain unclear to everyone including Walter, delivered the part that actually matters, and delivered it the way she delivers everything, which is to say without blinking.
“Thurmond didn’t join the Republican Party until 1964. Sixteen years after the walkout. Not because anyone finally punished him — because Goldwater’s campaign finally gave him somewhere better to be. The exit wasn’t a consequence of the 1948 vote. It was a scheduling decision he made a decade and a half later, for reasons having nothing to do with 1948 at all.”
Sit with that one a second. The dramatic exit and the actual defection were sixteen years apart, and not causally related to each other in any way anybody can point to. The walkout was theater. The party switch was real estate. Two completely different transactions that happened to share a guy.
I keep hearing people talk about “walking out” like it means something. Like a guy standing up, calling the whole thing rigged, and leaving the building is a consequence in itself. It’s not, man. It’s a bit. It’s a bowling league guy screaming about a gutter ball. The only thing that actually determines whether an exit means anything is what happens four years later, and what happened here is: nothing. He came back. Everybody came back. The rug got peed on, the guy who did it stormed off yelling about his rights, and then he strolled back in a few years later and nobody even mentioned it.
I bring this up now — not at random, man, nothing’s at random around here, Walter would kill me — because we are about to spend a whole lot of collective energy over the next few years waiting for somebody, somewhere, to do a dramatic exit. Waiting for the walkout that finally means something. And I think it’s worth remembering, before you get your hopes up: the walkout has happened before. Multiple times. It has never once, on its own, meant anything. It’s just the loud part before the quiet part, which is everybody sitting back down.
The Dude abides. He does not walk out. There’s nowhere to walk out to, and also the seventh frame isn’t gonna bowl itself.
Next up: what happens when a party actually tries to purge the faction instead of just watching it flounce out the door for a long weekend. Spoiler, man: it’s not better. Stay tuned.