WAY DOWN SOUTH

Senate Republicans have a reappraisal to make. Last week they heard their next majority leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, say he believes the nation would have been better off had the Dixiecrats of 1948 won the presidential election because then “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” The Dixiecrats’ primary policy was to ensure racial segregation.

Such an outrageous statement from one of the nation’s most powerful leaders should shock his fellow party members and lead them to loudly condemn Mr. Lott’s opinion. Maine GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins should demand their party address this issue and consider another leader.

Sen. Lott was speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina and the Dixiecrat presidential candidate. Sen. Thurmond was a strong segregationist who later became a supporter of civil rights. Times and politics change, but the ill-considered remark goes on forever. According to The Washington Post, Sen. Lott said, “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Republicans must ask themselves how someone who believes this can lead the Senate and his party in 2003. The Dixiecrats were a splinter group of Southern Democrats who despised the civil-rights agenda supported by President Harry Truman and opposed him in the ’48 election. Mr. Truman backed a strong stand against racial discrimination and was the first president to speak before the NAACP when, in 1947, he addressed 10,000 people in Washington, calling for state and federal action against lynching.

“Many of our people still suffer the indignity of insult, the narrowing fear of intimidation, and, I regret to say, the threat of physical and mob violence. …” President Truman said then. “The conscience of our nation, and the legal machinery which enforces it, have not yet secured to each citizen full freedom from fear. We cannot wait another decade or another generation to remedy these evils. We must work, as never before, to cure them now.”

Sen. Lott apparently wishes such fervor for justice had been banished from the White House, that the segregationist attitudes of some in the South had replaced them. It is easily understandable that a friend would become sentimental at an occasion such as Sen. Thurmond’s celebration. But it is inexcusable for the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, to accept these comments from the man who is supposed to lead them.