November 2, 1948: "Dewey Defeats Truman"

November 2, 1948: The most famous newspaper headline of all time? It might be the New York Daily News of October 30, 1975: "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD." Or it might be the one the Chicago Tribune (a proud Republican paper at the time) put up the morning after today's Presidential election.

As it turned out, despite all predictions and despite all polls, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the Republican nominee, did not defeat the incumbent Democrat, President Harry S Truman. This made Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, the patron saint of every Presidential underdog since.

The problem is, Harry was smarter than most of them. Which is why he's enjoying himself so much in the photo above: He fooled 'em all.

But Dewey was dumb to have blown what should have been a sure win. How dumb was he? Well, maybe not that dumb:

Dewey remains the only major-party Presidential nominee

with facial hair since the Republicans nominated

Charles Evans Hughes in 1916.

The Republican Party didn't give him the support he needed, because they presumed he wouldn't need it. The polls all indicated a Dewey romp. 

Why? Because the Democratic Party had been splintered, from both wings. From the left: Henry A. Wallace, who had been Secretary of Agriculture in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1st 2 terms, Vice President in the 3rd, and Secretary of Commerce in FDR's 4th term before he died and it became Truman's 1st.

He was the darling of what's now called the progressive movement, but, then, it was an actual group named the Progressive Party. Aside from the name, it had no connection to the previous parties of that name, nominating Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert La Follette in 1924.

It was feared that Wallace would take the black vote. He did, but not as much as was feared. It was feared that he would take organized labor with him. He did, but with this, too, not as much as was feared. It was feared that his campaign would swing New York to Dewey. It did. It was feared that his campaign would swing California to Dewey. It didn't. And it was feared that losing New York and California, with a combined 72 Electoral Votes, would cost Truman the election. Even if Truman had lost California's 25 EVs, he still would have won.

From the right: Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina, who welcomed the Southern Delegates who walked out of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia (both parties held their Conventions at the Philadelphia Civic Center that year), following a pro-civil rights speech by the Mayor of Minneapolis, who was running for the U.S. Senate, and won: Hubert Humphrey.

Thurmond was happy to accept the Presidential nomination of the States' Rights Party, a.k.a. the Dixiecrats. A precursor to the 1968 independent candidacy of George Wallace (no relation to Henry), he managed to win his home State of South Carolina, plus Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and 1 Electoral Vote in Tennessee.

Later famously the oldest U.S. Senator ever,

Thurmond was just 45 years old at this point.

I don't think a picture of him looking young exists.

And Dewey himself seemed to be a great candidate. A crusading District Attorney in Manhattan, he had put some of the nation's nastiest organized crime bosses in prison, including the creator of the governing body of the American Mafia, "the Commission," Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

He was in his 2nd term as a successful, popular Governor. He had been the Republican nominee for President in 1944, running against wartime Commander-in-Chief Roosevelt, and had done well enough to earn himself a shot at a vulnerable peacetime President in Truman. And he was a young, good-looking guy: Just 46, and there was the thought that he could redeem the idea of mustaches after the bad reputation they had recently gotten from Adolf Hitler.

Surely, with Dewey popular, Thurmond splitting the formerly "Solid South," and Wallace moving New York and California from the Truman column to the Dewey column, Dewey would win. Interviewed in 1995, even Thurmond -- who wasn't even on the ballot in all 48 States, and knew he had no chance, but was very much willing to spoil things for Truman -- admitted, "I thought Dewey would win."

On the day before the election, the nation's foremost political columnist, Drew Pearson of The Washington Post -- no relation to the later black football star of the same name -- wrote that any chance of a Truman victory was "impossible," and his column printed the day after the election stated that Pearson had "surveyed the closely-knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over the White House 86 days from now." Another national columnist, Walter Winchell, reported that gambling odds were 15 to 1 against Truman.

More than 500 newspapers, accounting for over 78 percent of the nation's total circulation, endorsed Dewey. Truman picked up 182 endorsements, accounting for just 10 percent of America's newspaper readership, being surpassed by Thurmond, who got the remaining 12 percent from many Southern papers.

Alistair Cooke, writing in England for the Manchester Guardian, published an article on the day of the election entitled "Harry S. Truman: A Study of a Failure." For its 1st-ever television coverage of a Presidential election, NBC News had constructed a large cardboard model of the White House containing two elephants that would pop out when NBC announced Dewey's victory. Since Truman's defeat was considered certain, no donkeys were placed in the White House model.

As Truman made his way to his hometown of Independence, Missouri, 10 miles east of downtown Kansas City, to await the election returns, some among his inner circle had already accepted other jobs, and not a single reporter traveling on his campaign train thought that he would win. Some prominent Republicans, anticipating serving in a Dewey Presidency, had already bought homes in Washington.

But the Republicans got too complacent. Truman did win California after all, by a razor-thin margin of 18,000 votes. And there was no State that Thurmond threw from Truman to Dewey -- although Maryland was close enough, and its largest city Baltimore black enough, that Wallace, who got 10,000 votes there, might have thrown it to Dewey.

The Cold War was supposed to be Dewey's winning issue. Instead, it was Truman's, with the Truman Doctrine protecting Greece and Turkey from Communist takeover, the Marshall Plan aiding Western Europe before the Soviet Union could, and the Berlin Airlift preventing the Soviets from starving West Berlin into capitulation.

Also, after 16 years, voters still didn't trust the Republicans with the economy. Truman never mentioned Herbert Hoover, the last Republican President and the man who presided over the start of the Great Depression, by name, because they were on good terms. (Whereas Hoover was definitely not on good terms with FDR -- or with his own Republican predecessor, Calvin Coolidge.) So he blamed the Republicans in general for the Depression of the 1930s, and it worked.

Hoover at the 1948 Republican Convention in Philadelphia.

They continued to invite him to every Convention,

and he kept coming until 1960.

From their days as fellow members of the U.S. Senate, Truman was good friends with Alben Barkley, the Kentuckian who was the Democrats' Senate Leader, and had no problem accepting him as the nominee for Vice President. But he hitched his wagon to the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, effectively making the New Deal his platform (his 1949 State of the Union Address would update it for the times as "the Fair Deal"), and FDR's ghost his running mate.

Truman and Roosevelt, at FDR's Hyde Park estate,

after the 1944 Democratic Convention

Truman knew he could win, and he knew how he could do it: By going to the people themselves, in what the GOP derisively called "a whistle-stop campaign," a phrase Truman ran with, and explaining the truth to people where they were, and in terms they could understand -- without talking down to them, as Donald Trump does today. He connected with people the same way FDR did, even though they were very different men.

The crowds Truman got at the "whistle stops" were huge. Writers for conservative papers tried to say that it was just people coming out to the political equivalent of a vaudeville show. Walter Lippman, often called "the Father of American Journalism," pointed out that it took Truman away from Washington for 16 days, and inadvertently proved how little he mattered.

But Lippman had never left Washington. Nor had most of the tour's critics seen it. As would be said today, they remained inside their bubble. Or, as Bob Dylan would sing in 1965, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"

On Election Night, NBC announcer H.V. Kaltenborn announced, "Well, the President is leading by over a million votes in the popular vote, but we believe that when the country vote comes in, he will be defeated by an overwhelming majority." Indeed, at one point, he saw something that suggested that the election had swung to Dewey, and proclaimed him the winner.

On his way back from Kansas City to Washington, Truman stopped at Union Station in St. Louis, and was presented with a copy of that morning's Chicago Daily Tribune. The publication calling itself "The World's Greatest Newspaper" (hence the call letters of the radio station they founded, WGN) was published by "Colonel" Robert McCormick, the Rupert Murdoch of his era: A man who would tell any lie and spread any rumor, so long as it fulfilled his principle of electing more Republicans, so he could make more money.

But the Trib had violated what would later be called the Felix Unger Rule: "You should never assume, because, when you ASSUME, you make an ASS of U and ME." The result was the most famous headline in newspaper history, and Truman was delighted to see his old enemy the Colonel make an ass of himself. After all, it wasn't enough for the Colonel to have his paper say, in a huge headline, "DEWEY WINS" or "DEWEY ELECTED." He wanted to rub it in, telling the President he hated so much that he had lost: "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Oops.

At a celebratory dinner in Washington a few days later, Truman threw the guests into laughter, imitating Kaltenborn's clipped delivery. He also thanked those who had stood by him, and those who should have: "The September Democrats and the October Democrats... and the Monday Democrats, and the Tuesday Democrats, and the Wednesday Democrats!"

Ever since, Ol' Harry S has been the patron saint of political underdogs, of the people who are told they can't possibly win.

(There's no period on his middle initial, since it legally didn't stand for anything, as his parents couldn't agree on whether to name him after one of his grandfathers, Anderson Shippe Truman or Solomon Young. So his entire middle name was the letter S, with no period. His mother's brother was Harry Young, and the name was "Harry," not "Henry" or "Harrison." His legal name was "Harry S Truman.")

Even Republicans cite him as an inspiration. As Truman himself would have said, "Well, that's just political conversation." Or, as his only child, Margaret, who became a noted writer of mystery novels after a failed singing career, put it while editing one of her father's books, and seeing the words "political conversation" written down, "My father originally used a shorter word here, but decided to change it." Clearly, Margaret was too much of a lady, even then, to say what the word was. Just as clearly, the word was "bullshit."

Truman did love him some of what I like to call "George Carlin words." Legend has it that Harry and his wife Bess (formerly Elizabeth Wallace) toured a greenhouse, and Harry, a former farmer himself, told the owner, a woman, that she "must have used some good manure." The owner pulled Bess aside and said, "Can't you get the President to say, 'Fertilizer'?" And Bess said, "It's taken me this long just to get him to say, 'manure'!"

Truman won 24.1 million votes, Dewey 22.0 million, Thurmond 1,175,930, Wallace 1,157,328. Popular vote share: Truman 49.5 percent, Dewey 45.1, Thurmond 2.41, Wallace 2.37. States: Truman 28, Dewey 16, Thurmond 4, Wallace none. Electoral Votes, with 266 being a majority: Truman 303, Dewey 189, Thurmond 39, Wallace none. Wallace got 8.2 percent of the popular vote in New York, 4.7 percent in California, and in no other State did he get more than 4 percent.

After the election, a study by the University of Michigan revealed that "14 percent of Truman's voters, or 3,374,800, had decided to vote for him in the last fortnight of the campaign." In the last 2 weeks.

Gallup and Roper also did an analysis of the votes: They "learned that one voter in every seven (6,927,000), made up his mind in the last two weeks before the election. Of these, 75 percent picked Truman."

The Democrats also swept back into power in Congress, taking 75 seats in the House of Representatives and 9 in the Senate. Notable newly-elected Senators included Democrats Humphrey, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Paul Douglas of Illinois, and Bob Kerr of Oklahoma. Only 2 new Republicans were elected: Margaret Chase Smith of Maine (making her the 1st woman to serve in both houses of Congress) and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey. Indeed, of the 91 Republicans newly elected to the House in 1946, more than half of them went down to defeat.

Charles Bennett of Florida was the last Congressman elected in 1948 still continuously serving, retiring before the 1992 election. However, Sidney Yates of Illinois, elected in 1948, left the House in 1962 to run for the Senate. He lost, but regained his House seat in 1964, and remained until retiring before 1998.

The truth was, it wasn't that close. People who voted for Dewey were basically voting for him simply because he was the Republican nominee. Outside New York State, he was not especially popular. Even people who met him didn't find him personally likable. In 2 elections as the Republican nominee for President, he only won a total of 288 Electoral Votes, barely enough to win 1. This time, the non-Republican vote was 54.3 percent. Truman had made the election a referendum on the Republicans, and it worked in his favor. 

The polls had gotten it all wrong. Radio comedian Fred Allen used a horse racing metaphor: He said that Truman had become the 1st man to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk. 

If Dewey hadn't been so complacent, he would have realized that Truman was reaching the hearts and minds of the people. And he might have gone out to answer Truman's charges against him and "that do-nothing Republican 80th Congress." Maybe the Republicans, as a party, blew it for Dewey. But he also blew it for himself.

No friend of Truman's, or any Democrat's, Time magazine boss Henry Luce named Truman his magazine's Man of the Year for 1948, as he had for 1945. I suspect it was more for the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift than it was for the election.

Truman could have run for what would have amounted to a 3rd term in 1952, but didn't. He went back to Independence, where he built, opened, operated, and lectured at his Presidential Library, until a broken hip in 1965 put an end to his public life. He died in 1972.

Vice President Barkley ran a half-hearted campaign to succeed Truman in 1952, but, already 74 years old and a Southerner, he knew he had little chance. He died in 1956.

Dewey was elected to a 3rd term as Governor of New York in 1950, and left office after that 3rd term. The New York State Thruway is also known as the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Despite being 17 years younger, he died in 1971, a year before Truman.

Wallace drifted into obscurity, and wrote books about farming, his specialty. He died in 1965, of Lou Gehrig's disease. Thurmond returned to the Democratic fold, was elected to the Senate in 1956, became a segregationist leader, switched to the Republican Party after the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and kept getting re-elected to the Senate until 2002, when, approaching his 100th birthday, even he had to admit that he wouldn't survive another term. He died the next year.

Truman's Presidential Library opened in Independence, 10 miles east of downtown Kansas City, on July 6, 1957. The USS Harry S Truman is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, CVN-75, a.k.a. The HST, in service since 1996. There are high schools named for Truman in Independence (naturally), New York City (as part of the Co-Op City complex in The Bronx), the suburbs of Philadelphia (Levittown, Pennsylvania), Detroit (Taylor, Michigan) and Seattle (Federal Way, Washington). And there is a Truman College in Chicago.

Statue, U.S. Capitol Building

Truman remains the only President born in Missouri, or representing it in politics. Aside from Ulysses S. Grant, he remains the only one to have lived there for a significant amount of time; and, unlike Grant, it was for his entire life.

He has been played by Robert Vaughn in The Man from Independence in 1974, James Whitmore in Give 'em Hell, Harry! in 1975, E.G. Marshall in Collision Course: Truman vs. MacArthur in 1976, Ed Flanders in MacArthur in 1977, Harry Morgan in Backstairs at the White House in 1979, Walker Edmiston in J. Edgar Hoover in 1987, Richard Dysart in Day One in 1989, Gary Sinise in Truman in 1995, David Patrick Kelly in Flags of Our Fathers in 2006, and Bob Gunton in Project Blue Book in 2019. (UPDATE: He was played by Gary Oldman in Oppenheimer in 2023.)

Charles F. Brannan was the last surviving member of the Truman Cabinet, serving as Secretary of Agriculture in the 2nd term. He lived until 1992.

As for Dewey, in 1964, the New York State Thruway, which he got built as Governor, was officially renamed the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, although most people in the State call it just "The Thruway."

Robert McCormick died in 1955. The Tribune dropped "Daily" from its name in 1963, and began its shift away from doctrinaire conservatism in 1969. Still, it didn't endorse a Democrat for President until 2008, with home-State Senator Barack Obama.

*

November 2, 1948, like all modern Election Days in America, was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over. There were no football games played. The NBA season had started the day before, but there were no games on this day. And the NHL also had no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 29, 1957: The Longest Senate Filibuster

August 29, 1957: Strom Thurmond spends 24 hours making a racist ass of himself.

That was not his goal. He failed to achieve his goal.

Thurmond was born in 1902, was elected to the South Carolina State Senate in 1934, and a State judge in 1938. In World War II, he served with the U.S. Army's famed 82nd Airborne Division on D-Day, and rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. In 1946, he was elected Governor.

In 1948, he was one of the Southern members of the Democratic Party who formed the States' Rights Party that split over the issue of civil rights, and was nominated by them for President. In an interview late in life, he said he thought the Republican nominee, Governor Thomas E. Dewey in New York, would win, because he would win the Southern States, taking them from the Democratic incumbent, President Harry S Truman. Truman won anyway, and Thurmond finished a distant 3rd.

In 1954, Thurmond became the 1st person elected to the U.S. Senate as a write-in candidate. In 1956, he co-wrote the Southern Manifesto, with Southern members of both houses of Congress promising "massive resistance" to federal laws backing up the U.S. Supreme Court's decision striking down State laws segregating public schools.

In 1957, the Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced a civil rights bill, imposing expansion of federal supervision of integration in Southern States. It would establish the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. On June 18, the U.S. House of Representatives passed it, by a vote of 286-126. On August 7, the Senate passed an amended version, 72-18. On August 27, with the differences worked out, the House passed it again, 279-97. It became the Senate's turn to try again.

To block even a vote on the bill, Thurmond began a filibuster: A a tactic used in the Senate to delay or block a vote on a measure by preventing debate on it from ending. The Senate's rules place few restrictions on debate: In general, if no other Senator is speaking, a Senator who seeks recognition is entitled to speak for as long as they wish. Only when debate concludes, whether naturally or using a "cloture" vote, can the measure be put to a vote. One Senator can "hand off" a filibuster to another Senator, to further delay a vote, or to convince the sponsor to withdraw it.

Before 1957, the record for the longest filibuster was set on April 24, 1953, when Wayne Morse a Republican-turned-Independent (and eventually a Democrat) from Oregon spoke for 22 hours and 26 minutes, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Submerged Lands Act. That broke the 1908 record of 18 minutes and 23 seconds, by Robert La Follette Sr., Republican of Wisconsin, trying to stop the Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which established the National Monetary Commission.

On May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional. On June 12, Democrats tried to pass an amendment they believed would make it constitutional. But one Democrat, Huey Long of Louisiana, opposed it, and spoke for 15 hours and 30 minutes, filling the time by, among other things, reading recipes from a cookbook he had written: "Now, I come to pot likker... "

Thurmond shattered all records, going more than one full day: 24 hours and 18 minutes, spewing invective against the federal government and anti-racist crusaders, and reading aloud from The Case for the South, by W.D. Workman Jr., a reporter and a friend of his. 

Other Southern Senators, who had agreed as part of a compromise not to filibuster this bill, were upset with Thurmond, because they thought his defiance made them look incompetent to their constituents. Thurmond sent copies to each of his 95 Senate colleagues, and also to Vice President Richard Nixon,

Finally, the Senate invoked cloture, ending his filibuster, and approved the bill, 60-15. President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law on September 9. Just 15 days later, he sent the U.S. Army to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

New Civil Rights Acts were passed in 1960, 1964, 1965 (the Voting Rights Act) and 1968 (the Fair Housing Act). After a multi-Senator filibuster was broken to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Thurmond switched to the Republican Party, the 1st major American politician to do so.

Southern Democrats' switch to the Republicans over the issue of race would be a long process. However, by the time Thurmond finally retired from the Senate in 2002 -- at the age of 100, dying a few months later, on June 26, 2003 -- nearly every Southern State had 2 Republican Senators, including some who had previously been Democrats, and nearly every State had no white Democrats in the House, only white Republicans and black Democrats.

Republicans used the filibuster to stop 2 notable Supreme Court nominations, in the hopes that they could delay until after a Presidential election, when a Republican President would give them a Justice more to their liking: In 1968, to stop President Lyndon Johnson's intended promotion of Associate Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice, resulting in President Nixon's appointment of Earl Warren; and in 2016, to stop President Barack Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland, resulting in Donald Trump's appointment of Neil Gorsuch.

Alfonse D'Amato, Republican of New York, twice tried to break Thurmond's record: On October 17, 1986, against the Defense Authorization Act, getting to 23 hours and 30 minutes, within 48 minutes of the record; and on October 5, 1992, against the Revenue Act, getting to 15 hours and 14 minutes.

On September 24, 2013, Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, tried to stop a Continuing Appropriations Act to keep the government funded, because it included funding for the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. "Obamacare." He went 21 hours and 18 minutes, and included reading Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss aloud.

The point he wanted to make is that he didn't like "socialized medicine" here or there, he did not like it anywhere. It was pointed out to him that he had completely missed the point of this book that was so simple, a child could understand it: The point was that, if you try something new, however weird it might seem, you might like it. The move deepened Cruz's already-established reputation as a buffoon, who could not get elected outside a Southern State.

UPDATE: On March 31 and April 1, 2025, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, gave a speech lasting 25 hours and 5 minutes, protesting the policies of Republican President Donald Trump. That broke Thurmond's record for the longest Senate speech. But, since it was not done to block a vote on a Senate bill, Thurmond still holds the record for the longest Senate filibuster.

*

August 29, 1957 was a Thursday. Jockey Jerry Bailey was born. There were only 3 scores on this historic day, all in baseball:

* The New York Yankees beat the Chicago White Sox, 2-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Enos Slaughter, 41 years old, hit a home run in the top of the 11th inning. "Country" wasn't really known as a hitter: He retired after the 1959 season, with just 169, but also with a .300 lifetime batting average.

Whitey Ford was the winning pitcher, pitching 5 shutout innings in relief of Tom Sturdivant. Hank Bauer also hit a home run. Mickey Mantle went 2-for-5, and Yogi Berra went 1-for-3 with 2 walks.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Baltimore Orioles, 13-4 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. The Tribe scored 6 runs in the 1st inning and 3 in the 2nd, and never looked back. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-2 with a walk.

* And the Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 6-1 at Briggs Stadium in Detroit. (The ballpark was renamed Tiger Stadium in 1961.) Ted Williams went 0-for-1 -- with 4 walks. Al Kaline went 0-for-4.

March 12, 1956: The Southern Manifesto

Southern Senators, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina

March 12, 1956: The Declaration of Constitutional Principles is signed, by 19 members of the U.S. Senate and 82 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all from States that had been in the Confederate States of America.

Since there was not a goddamned thing about it that was constitutional, it became known as the Southern Manifesto, allowing people on the right side of the struggle for civil rights to do what these rednecks had been doing to them for years: Comparing them to Communists.

The main author was Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. In 1948, as his State's Governor, he had briefly left the Democratic Party to run as the nominee for President of the States' Rights Party. From that point onward, Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights were known as "Dixiecrats."

It was written in response to the unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, 2 years earlier, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

The Declaration included these words: "The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law."

This was a bald-faced lie: The decision was warranted, and it was a strike against naked power, in the form of "Jim Crow" laws that overturned established law.

It also said: "The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the 14th Amendment nor any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the 14th Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States."

This was true, but it covered up the text of the 14th Amendment: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This is known as the Equal Protection Clause.

It also said: "This unwarranted exercise of power by the Court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the States principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding."

This was a lie: There had not been friendship. And the Court's decision didn't create confusion; it clarified the law.

Three Democratic Senators from Southern States did not sign: Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and the Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas. In the House, 16 of 21 Democrats from Texas refused to sign it, including the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, and a future Speaker, Jim Wright. Also refusing to sign were 3 of the 11 Democrats from North Carolina; and 1 of the 7 from Florida, Dante Fascell.

The following year, Thurmond launched the longest filibuster the Senate had yet seen, in a vain attempt to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, he became the 1st Dixiecrat to switch to the Republican Party. There would be many more.

Thurmond turned out to be the last-serving member who signed the Southern Manifesto, serving until 2003, shortly after his 100th birthday, and dying a few months later. The last surviving signer was Richard Poff of Virginia, who died in 2011.

The last-serving member who refused to sign was Jack Brooks of Texas, who served until 1994. The last surviving refuser was the aforementioned Jim Wright, who died in 2015.

*

March 12, 1956 was a Monday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. No games were scheduled for the NHL. There was 1 game played in the NBA: The Syracuse Nationals beat the St. Louis Hawks, 97-92 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.