by Scott Farris
This switch meant that the Republican Party lost what was once the substantial support of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. What the Republicans gained in return was the allegiance of white Southerners who had previously been devoted to the Democratic Party for generations. Both changes in allegiance can be dated to Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.
The idea of realigning the two parties so that one party was fundamentally liberal and the other fundamentally conservative did not begin with Goldwater. Franklin Roosevelt, for one, had tried and failed to force a similar political realignment while president. He tried to purge Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party after his court-packing scheme failed in 1938. He then tried to lure liberal Republicans into the Democratic fold in 1944 by suggesting that Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate Roosevelt had defeated in 1940, rejoin the Democratic Party, perhaps as Roosevelt’s running mate. FDR had thought economic issues alone had the power to force a change in party loyalty, but economics did not trump culture. Southern whites were not yet ready to leave the Democratic Party, and Willkie and other liberal Republicans were not ready to come in. Goldwater, then, would achieve in a landslide loss a feat that a man elected president four times could not, providing one of history’s great examples of how losing campaigns, even ones defeated overwhelmingly, can have greater consequences than winning ones.
A number of prominent Republicans, since and including Goldwater, have argued that race was not the issue that turned the South from the center of Democratic power to a bedrock of GOP electoral strength. They instead cite Goldwater’s role in founding the modern conservative movement, which reached its apex in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan. That is certainly a huge part of Goldwater’s legacy, but it, too, is rooted in the issue of race. Surveys by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center suggest, in the words of authors Thomas and Mary Edsall, that the issue of race was still so powerful in the South in 1964 that it “actually produced an ideological conversion of poor Southern whites from a deeply held economic liberalism to economic conservatism.”
The role race played in prompting this conservative conversion was masked because Goldwater could speak to “white backlash”—white resentment at the assertion of minority rights—in ways that were understood by his audience but that were not overtly or condemnably racist. Goldwater’s use of “new political images and code words of racial antipathy,” his biographer Robert Alan Goldberg points out, unfortunately, still remains the roundabout way race is generally discussed in our society.
In the half-century after Goldwater’s campaign, the Republican Party failed to attract much support from minority groups, not just African Americans. In recent elections, for example, Republicans failed to win even a third of the Hispanic vote. By 2008, the GOP was receiving so little support from Hispanics and African Americans that a Republican candidate for president would need to win 60 percent of the white vote to win election. With non-Hispanic whites scheduled to be in the minority for the first time in the nation’s history by 2045, these demographic changes pose a significant long-term challenge for Republicans.
The seminal event in turning the white South from Democratic to Republican was Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to oppose the measure, which passed the Senate by a seventy-three to twenty-seven vote. The legislation was favored by virtually all Republican congressional leaders plus the most recent GOP presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, and the early frontrunner for the 1964 Republican nomination, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. This landmark legislation, which had dominated national news coverage for more than a year before it was finally approved on July 2, 1964, banned racial discrimination and segregation in public education, employment, and in the use of public accommodations. The bill was a pet project of Lyndon Johnson that was promoted as fulfilling the legacy of the martyred president John Kennedy.
Before casting his “no” vote, Goldwater specifically repudiated the position of segregationists by stating that he was “unalterably opposed to discrimination of any sort.” But the problem of discrimination, Goldwater said, “is fundamentally one of [the] heart.” He acknowledged, “Some law can help, but not law that embodies features . . . which fly in the face of the Constitution and require for their effective execution the creation of a police state.” Goldwater said the act was unconstitutional because nowhere in the Constitution is promoting racial equality listed among the functions of the federal government. On the other hand, he said, the federal system outlined in the Constitution did provide the states wide leeway to “nourish local differences, even local cultures.” This seemed an implicit endorsement of the “Jim Crow” laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.
Goldwater was particularly opposed to provisions in the Civil Rights Act that prohibited landlords from refusing to rent to people based on race and that prohibited employers from refusing to hire people based on race. On the campaign trail, Goldwater explained, “No law can make a person like another if he doesn’t want to.” A few commentators praised Goldwater’s political courage in taking what was perceived to be an unpopular stand on civil rights, while others charged he was intent on returning blacks to near servitude. A politically shrewd judgment came from the occupant of the White House who had pushed the legislation through Congress. In signing his civil rights legislation into law, Johnson told his aide, Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
Goldwater certainly hoped so. He had been mulling such a remarkable political development for quite some time. Goldwater once famously declared, with a self-deprecation that charmed many, “You know, I haven’t got a really first-class brain,” but he possessed exceptional political intuition. As early as 1953, having just arrived in Washington, D.C., as a freshman senator, he wrote in his journal that he was detecting “a cleavage that was new” in American politics and that the opportunity for future Republican growth lay in recruiting Southern Democrats “who believe in states’ rights and who believe that the federal government should be out of the state and local government picture entirely, and out of the affairs of business as well.”
Goldwater would have observed that South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist “Dixiecrat” campaign for president just a few years before had demonstrated that the civil rights issue had the power to break the century-long hold of the Democratic Party on the South. Thurmond had received only a small fraction of the national popular vote (2.4 percent), but he carried four Deep South states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—that Goldwater would carry as well.
Goldwater further recognized that in the post-war period, the South and the Southwest were the fastest-growing regions in the country, and the regions shared not only an abundance of sunshine, but also an antipathy to a federal government that seemed a distant interloper in local cultures and economies. He began to ponder, in his words, “a realignment of Southern conservative Democrats with Democrats and Republicans of the West and Middle West” united in their opposition to federal authority. The new Republican Party Goldwater helped form would be a fusion of Southern race-based populism with Western libertarianism and the remnants of traditional Midwest conservatism.
Interestingly, the South and the West had both once been hotbeds of populist activism that had demanded federal intervention to counter the injustices the regions’ residents believed they suffered from railroads, banks, and other business interests. But it was another achievement of the Goldwater campaign that it began a process that redefined populism, replacing traditional populist antipathy toward big business with antipathy toward big government. Where the populism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen blacks and whites as suffering from the same economic inequities, the new conservative populism espoused by Goldwater argued that big government was tipping th
e balance in favor of minorities at the expense of low- and middle-income whites. It was the Democrats’ misfortune that where Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had been seen as providing government help based on economic need, Johnson’s “Great Society” was perceived as being based on race and providing more benefits to minorities than whites. Goldwater, it was said, had discovered how to exploit the type of populist discontents that “appear in an affluent society, and this he did with unusual self-awareness and clarity,” said historian Richard Hofstadter.
The early 1960s were certainly a time of many discontents. Traditional values seemed under assault. The Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, an Eisenhower appointee, had issued a number of controversial decisions. The court ruled that mandatory prayer in the public schools was unconstitutional at a time when pornography and a perceived decline in sexual morality was a growing concern. The civil rights of accused criminals were expanded at the very time Americans were increasingly concerned about rising street crime.
The push by African Americans to assert their civil rights was perceived as more than just another sign that the traditional norms of society were under assault. An influential study published in 1991 by Thomas and Mary Edsall argues that the high profile issue of civil rights triggered a “chain reaction” that exposed middle class white anxieties on a host of issues, all of which had a racial component—even the surge of rock ’n’ roll and the youth culture that frightened many parents was blamed on the infusion of wanton and promiscuous black culture into an otherwise polite white society.
Goldwater saw the civil rights protests, the coddling of criminals, and the increasing burden of the welfare state as all of one package, and he was able to address the collective anxiety around these issues, the Edsalls noted, “without the liability of being labeled a racist.”
As a Westerner from Arizona, Goldwater was not saddled with the South’s history on race. It is notable that all the Republican presidential nominees since Goldwater, with the exception of Michigan’s Gerald Ford in 1976, have identified themselves as Westerners even as they have built upon the Republicans’ so-called Southern strategy. Even both presidents Bush, each born in New England but hailing from Texas, emphasized the Western nature of that state, never its legacy as a member of the old Confederacy. With no Southern vice presidential nominees either, the GOP’s “Southern strategy” seems to refrain from placing any true Southerners on the national ticket lest the issue of race become too explicit.
Goldwater also averted the racist tag because he demonstrated no racism in his personal life. Some of his relations with minority groups smacked of paternalism, but at an individual level, Goldwater enjoyed positive personal relationships with African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. He did take some provocative stands on race during his career, such as when he argued in 1968 that apartheid should be given time to work in South Africa. Yet, a friend said, “nothing was more distressing to Goldwater” than to be accused of being a racist.
He admonished his children to never use the word “nigger”; his family’s stores, called Goldwater’s, were among the first in Arizona to hire black clerks (though they could only wait upon white customers during the Christmas rush); and when approached by black veterans of World War II, Goldwater, as a senior officer, personally desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces. He even expressed empathy for the impatience felt by black civil rights protesters in the early 1960s. He simply argued that the federal government had no constitutional authority to do anything for their plight beyond guarantee their right to vote.
What seemed genuinely shocking about Goldwater’s narrow view of the federal role in enforcing civil rights is that it was at odds with the more than one-hundred-year-old tradition of the Republican Party (although it must be acknowledged that from Reconstruction on, the GOP mostly paid lip service to civil rights for blacks, appearing enlightened only when matched against the Democrats; “The Party of Lincoln” was more slogan than a commitment to a set of policies that might elevate the status of African Americans).
Still, Republicans had maintained the allegiance of a significant number of African-American voters through the 1960 election. From Reconstruction until the New Deal, those relatively few African Americans who were allowed to vote overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. Most African Americans, however, still lived in the South, where more than 90 percent of eligible blacks were denied their right to vote by a host of state initiatives, including poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as outright intimidation.
Between 1915 and 1970, six million African Americans migrated out of the South and into the North, where they were slowly recruited into the urban Democratic political machines. They began switching party allegiance during the New Deal, which offered some hope for unemployed blacks as well as whites. Roosevelt captured an estimated 60 percent of the African-American vote in 1936. Black movement into the Democratic Party accelerated in 1948 when Truman desegregated the federal work force, including the Armed Forces, and Democrats finally adopted, at Hubert Humphrey’s urging, a strong civil rights plank to their party platform—the act that led Thurmond to launch his independent candidacy.
But Republicans had maintained a commitment to civil rights, at least as stated in their party platforms, through 1960. So Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote in 1956 and Nixon received 32 percent in 1960. But African Americans took Goldwater’s nomination as a sign that the Republicans had abandoned them. The break was decisive. Goldwater received but 6 percent of the African-American vote, and no Republican presidential candidate has been able to win even 15 percent of the black vote since.
It was extraordinary how rapidly Goldwater’s candidacy changed perceptions of the two parties in regard to race and civil rights. In 1962, a survey conducted by National Election Studies found that the public saw virtually no difference between the two parties on the issue of civil rights. Asked which party would most likely ensure blacks received fair treatment in jobs and housing, 23 percent said Democrats, 21 percent said Republicans, and 56 percent felt there was no difference. Just two years later, the same survey found 60 percent of the respondents believed Democrats would do more to ensure fair treatment for African Americans, 33 percent felt there was no difference between the parties, and just 7 percent thought the Republican Party would do more to help blacks.
Since most other Republican leaders remained at least publicly committed to civil rights, it seems that the new perception of the Republican Party’s position on the issue was due mostly to Goldwater’s nomination and candidacy. Former New York congressman Jack Kemp, who was the party’s 1996 vice presidential nominee, has called the GOP’s “Southern strategy” a “disgrace,” adding, “The Democrats had a terrible history [on civil rights] and they overcame it. We had a great history, and we turned aside.”
Goldwater understood his views would cost the Republican Party the support of African Americans, but he had made the calculation the GOP could win far more white votes than it would lose black votes. In 1961, Goldwater told a group of Georgia Republicans that a GOP organized along conservative principles was “not going to get the Negro vote . . . so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
Some, including Goldwater himself, have suggested that the Republican appeal below the Mason-Dixon Line was centered in the less racially restricted and more economically diverse states of the so-called New South. Yet, Goldwater failed to carry the New South states of Florida, Tennessee, and Texas that Eisenhower and Nixon had carried in their campaigns. Rather, all five states that Goldwater won in the South were in the Deep South, and no Republican presidential candidate had won Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina since Reconstruction. Yet Goldwater carried these states by overwhelming percentages, winning nearly 60 percent of the vote in South Carolina, 70 percent of the vote in Alabama, and
87 percent of the vote in Mississippi—which, not coincidentally, was the same percentage that Thurmond had won in 1948.
Goldwater won 55 percent of the total white vote in the South in 1964, but given the scope of his landslide loss, Johnson was able to win a majority of the white vote nationally. LBJ was, however, the last Democratic candidate for president to win the white vote. Ronald Reagan carried 61 percent of the Southern white vote in 1980 even while running against a Southerner; in 1984, Reagan won 71 percent of the Southern white vote.
The Goldwater campaign’s seminal role in triggering this dramatic racial shift has been obscured by three subsequent events. First, George Wallace’s independent campaign for president in 1968 carried the states of the Deep South that would otherwise likely have gone to the Republican Nixon. Second, Nixon’s 1972 rout of George McGovern was so overwhelming that race was not an obviously identifiable factor in such a landslide.16 Third, the Democrats’ nomination in 1976 of a Southerner, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, made it appear as if Democrats would again aggressively compete in the South at the presidential level. After Carter, however, no Democrat has been able to win more than four Southern states, and Democrats did not carry a single Southern state in the presidential elections of 1984, 1988, 2000 (even though their nominee that year was from Tennessee), or 2004.
Republican success in the South is not limited to presidential races. By the 1990s, Southern Republicans dominated the party’s congressional leadership, and in 2010, Republicans swept away the last vestiges of Democratic power in the South by winning a majority of the region’s state legislatures. A disheartened Democratic 2010 U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana said, “White male Democrats in the South are becoming extinct.” African Americans make up 20 percent of all voters in the South, but they represent a majority of Democrats in the region. In the South, the two parties are stratified along racial lines just as they were during Reconstruction—only the parties have switched roles.