Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina—as he defected from the Democratic Party to the GOP—menacingly warned that the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 would lead to “upheaval of social patterns and customs,” leading to violent revolt by white Southerners. Similar patterns of Southern opposition emerged when the Truman administration introduced the concept of mandatory national health insurance in 1945 and when the Johnson administration introduced Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, eliciting widespread white concerns that Southern hospitals would have to integrate in order to receive funding.
