Quote:
Originally posted by Superbelt
Personally I see Strom as having been an opportunist. A shrewd politician.
He looked at his constitutents and told them what they wanted to hear. When segregation would get him elected, that was his platform. When the world changed and he had to be for civil rights, yet still for denying Martin Luther King Jr a day in his honor, that is what he stood for.
He truly was a mouthpiece for his state.
Him having this child while still pushing for segregation, reinforces my thoughts of him as an opportunist.
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While the blame for having disagreeable (and vocal) platforms can be placed on both the representative and the represented, you do have to chicken/egg it and wonder how much of his beliefs were politically motivated by his voters and how much of his voters beliefs were validated/maybe even swayed by his rhetoric.
Sorta like Hitler and anti-Semitism, Strom and segregationism is a self-feeding machine of perpetual-motion in politics. Certainly the seed was there for them to grow, but I doubt Germany's situation would have been brought to the gruesome level that it was were it not for someone to really yell about it.
Remember, part of the failure of the south to keep from integrating lies in the fact that they were kept in this union by the blood of Civil War soldiers.