Sunday Book Review: "Strom Thurmond's America"

Jonathan Yardley reviews "Strom Thurmond's America," a new book by Emory University history professor Joseph Crespino which traces the critical role the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (Racist Rethug-SC) played in the evolution of the New Confederate/ Rethuglican Party. Here's a snippet:

"Here we have one of the most perfervid racists of the 20th century — one to rank with Theodore Bilbo, Leander Perez and George Wallace — fathering a child by a black servant and then keeping that child’s existence a secret while riding white hatred of blacks to a political career that spanned seven decades. [snip]

"It is possible that Thurmond didn’t believe in anything, that the fiery rhetoric of racial hatred that he spouted for the first four decades of his career was as calculated and opportunistic as his eventual retreat from it. [snip]

"But Thurmond was a child of his time and place. The time was the early 20th century, when the South was firmly in the grip of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, and the place was a state with a history of racism as deep as that of Mississippi or Alabama. If there ever really was such a creature as a 'Southern gentleman' — a highly debatable proposition — Strom Thurmond most surely was not one. In every sense that matters, his legacy is malign, as is evident now in the sub rosa racism that fuels the appalling changes in the Republican Party that he did so much to bring about."