From downstairs:

re: #429 The Vicious Babushka

This is a historical fact. The Southern Democrats became known as “Dixiecrats” but they were never in step with the liberal Democratic party of FDR, Adlai Stevenson or even LBJ. (Woodrow Wilson was a Dixiecrat but CMIIW)

Dixiecrats voted 3rd party in 1960, and since 1964 have gone GOP.

About half right: “Dixiecrat”, though a common term for segregationist Southern Democrats, really only applies correctly to the breakaway rump movement that nominated Strom Thurmond for President in 1948 (after liberals pushed a civil-rights plank into the Dem platform at the DNC). Since Reconstruction, the Democratic Party had always been more-or-less of a coalition between Northern and Southern interests (just like in antebellum days) - FDR kept them in line by (disgracefully) making sure that the New Deal would mainly/only benefit whites, but it was the Civil Rights movement that really split the Party: sending the segs right into the waiting arms of the GOP (who started shedding/alienating their moderates in 1964). The rest is, literally, history.

As for Woodrow Wilson, I’m not sure the “Dixiecrat” label would apply: Wilson was a Southerner through-and-through (his father had been a Confederate officer): but the Democrats preferred to present him, when he ran in 1912, as being “from” New Jersey (where he had been a noted educator and, briefly, Governor) to shroud his Virginia origins; Confederate connections still being considered somewhat louche.
He was a thorough racist, though: Wilson spent a great deal of effort to turf out as many black people from Federal employment as he could, and diligently segregate the rest.