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I remember Thurmond… I read of Strom Thurmond’s demise at the ripe old age of a century and it sent me digging madly through an old trunk for this most memorable magazine photo of his 1970 visit to my alma mater:
This was at the hieght of the Viet-nam anti-war movement at CMU and Pitt and students of those universities formed a coalition of the willing to pepper the good Senator with Marshmallows.
My guerilla theatre troop later used the deadly Cluster Marshmallow against the Pittsburgh Federal Building with equally devastating results. One of the troop told me a checkout clerk at the grocery store asked him, “What Senator is in town this week?”, when he purchased the case of them for our “event”.
Oh the Horror! The Horror… and the memories. God it was fun!
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Dale, considering Stron Thurmond has just died your choice of photo makes the writing on the wall behind him strangely apt!
So…what did the marshmallows mean?
Having grown up in South Carolina, I never understood how he kept getting re-elected. I suppose it’s the same reason why Senator Helms kept getting re-elected in North Carolina …
A friend of mine in high school took a postcard of his and added some artwork that made Thurmond look way too much like Adolf Hitler.
D-Day, he led a glider full of infantry into battle. That makes up for a little.
Since those gliders had a terrible mortality rate, that really stood for something at the time.
Senator Thurmond did indeed have a fine World War II record (which makes the “Nazi” tag shoved at him by the left a bit stupid – almost as stupid as when the tag was used against Ian Smith).
Also (had they bothered to do any research) the students would have known that Senator Thurmond was an open critic of the way the Vietnam war was faught.
We here the word “segregationist” and, quite rightly, we think “boo” – but a man may be a segregationist (for some of his life) and still be other things as well. Even in 1948 some parts of the States Rights Party platform stand up well in comparison to the Democratic and Republican party platforms of the same year.
It is easy to support such things as black voting rights in South Carolina now that black people are greatly outnumbered in the State – but Thurmond was taught politics by people brought up when black people were a far higher proportion of the population (indeed many of the people Thurmond knew in his youth were around during Reconstruction). Most people (although not all people) tend to lose a lot of their antiracism when it looks like they are going to be ruled by another race – or else they go to another country (like all the white antiapartheid people who are in Britain).
In a better world race would not matter in voting – let us hope we live to see such a world.
As for Senator Helms – well by the (rather low) standards of the Republican party he was normally quite free market
“what was the significance of the marshmallows”
You could hit someone (or something) with a hail of them without the slightest chance of actually hurting them or causing damage.
If only they’d used marshmallows instead of rubber bullets here in Belfast!
Thurmond was no marshmallow.
If I’m not mistaken Thurmonds third party was called the States Rights Party not the Segregationists Party. Although Thurmond was for
continued “equal but separate” (the spin masters
“segregation”) he made a valiant effort to defend
the concept of States Rights. His was the “Last Hurrah”.
We won’t see his likes again for awhile and I for
one regret it.
Mike Halbert
The socialists bankrupt city:
http://www.post-gazette.com/neigh_city/20030627cityfinanc1.asp
Dale, It wouldn’t have worked… If they’d used marshmallows in Belfast you would have had loads of claims from all those “poor” little rioters that would have “slipped” on them “hurting” themselves…
…although, on second thoughts – if you had House sized marshmallows that you could DROP on the buggers …SPLATT!!! .. now there’s an idea that that might make them think twice… once one or two of the dear little petrol bombers finds themselves stuck in the middle of a humungous marshmallow with a lit petrol bomb… toasted marshbomber … mmmmmm 😉
Glad you liked my photo!!!!!
I sold the picture of Strom & the marshmallows to Reuters on Friday.
You can see it at:
http://www.reuters.com/newsPhotoPresentation.jhtml?type=topNews&imageID=1000581077