by Scott Farris
Republicans and Goldwater admirers are understandably reluctant to acknowledge that this realignment, which has helped Republicans win seven of the eleven presidential elections between 1968 and 2008, was rooted in opposition to the struggle for black equality. In a 2010 interview, Mississippi Republican governor Haley Barbour insisted that those “who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican were a different generation from those who fought integration.” Goldwater had made the same claim in a 1971 letter to Business Week magazine, where he said that the growing Republican strength in the South “has nothing to do with busing, integration, or any other of the so-called closely held concepts of the Southerner. The South began to move into the Republican ranks because of the influx of new and younger businessmen from the North who were basically Republican. And they were aided by young Southern Democrats who were sick and tired of the Democratic stranglehold on the South and switched over to the Republican Party.”
This was certainly not the prevailing view then, and it does not seem supported by the facts now. Kevin Phillips, a campaign aide for Richard Nixon in 1968 who published the influential study The Emerging Republican Majority that promoted a “Southern strategy,” declared Goldwater’s presidential campaign to be the South’s “final battle against Negro voting rights.” Columnist Robert Novak, in a 1965 book on the Goldwater campaign, The Agony of the GOP 1964, said that Goldwater’s strategy was clearly to “forget all the sentimental tradition of the party of Lincoln” and to “soft-pedal civil rights” without “actually endorsing racial segregation.”
Novak also said that Northeastern Republicans still committed to the GOP’s civil rights tradition were shocked by the “unabashed hostility toward the Negro rights movement” expressed at a 1963 convention of Young Republicans dominated by pro-Goldwater conservatives. “For the Young Republicans . . . their party was now a White Man’s Party,” Novak wrote. Nixon was equally blunt. He said flatly that Goldwater “ran as a racist candidate,” and Nixon, who had nonetheless stumped for Goldwater, resented insinuations that his campaigns in 1968 and 1972 were a continuation of Goldwater’s “Southern strategy.” Nixon saw his own efforts as far subtler and less crude than Goldwater’s.
Despite Goldwater’s attempts to distance himself from overt racism, Southern segregationists were drawn to him. South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, even though still nominally a Democrat, had been one of the first persons to urge Goldwater to run for president as far back as 1959. When Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964, Thurmond not only endorsed him, he switched parties, becoming the first Republican senator from the Deep South since Reconstruction.17 Thurmond said he was “not under any false illusions that [Goldwater] is a segregationist,” but Johnson’s choice of civil rights advocate Hubert Humphrey to be his vice presidential nominee was a clear signal that segregationists were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party. Thurmond’s hometown newspaper, the Charleston News and Courier, saw that Goldwater had opened the way for “a realignment of political power in this country, with the South, Middle West, and Far West joined together in a new alliance.”
George Wallace even imagined an alliance that would make him Goldwater’s running mate in 1964. Far more an economic populist than a conservative, the Alabama governor found common cause with Goldwater on the issue of race. Wallace told an aide it would be “apparent to a one-eyed nigguh who can’t see good outa his other eye that me and Goldwater would be a winning ticket. We’d have the South locked up, then him and me could concentrate on the industrial states and win.” There was some basis for Wallace’s bravado. He had run as a protest candidate against Johnson in the Democratic primaries and had won more than a third of the vote in the Wisconsin primary, 30 percent of the vote in the Indiana primary, and 43 percent in Maryland where, as Wallace put it, “If it hadn’t been for the nigger bloc vote, we’d have won it all.”
Goldwater was uncomfortable embracing the overt racism practiced by Wallace. When an intermediary advised Goldwater of Wallace’s desire to be his vice presidential running mate, an observer said Goldwater “looked as though someone had just reported a death in the family.” Goldwater rejected Wallace’s gambit. He did not need Wallace to win the Deep South, while Wallace would drive away all hope of support from racial moderates. Besides, Wallace was a Democrat, not a Republican. But Goldwater did talk Wallace into abandoning an independent presidential campaign that would have ruined the GOP candidate’s chances of taking the South.
Even without Wallace, Goldwater had difficulty keeping some of the most noisome racists in the country from jumping on his bandwagon. Robert Creel, Alabama Grand Dragon for the Ku Klux Klan, made headlines when he endorsed Goldwater, saying, “I like Barry Goldwater. I believe what he believes in. I think the same way he thinks.” Goldwater’s vice presidential running mate, the conservative and irascible New York congressman William Miller, said, “Senator Goldwater and I will accept the support of any American citizen who believes in our posture, who believes in our principles, who believes in our platform.” Only after considerable public criticism did the Goldwater campaign rebuff Creel’s endorsement.
Goldwater campaign advisor J. William Middendorf II, who would later serve in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, acknowledged, “It was not Barry’s intention, but indeed was a fact, that racists thought he was their friend. While [the Goldwater campaign] tacitly accepted their support, to charge Barry with consciously appealing to racism was specious.”
Goldwater, however, had always seemed ambivalent about race. Back in Arizona, he had been a member of the Tucson chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also made significant contributions to the Phoenix chapter of the Urban League, but he funneled the contributions through a friend so that his involvement could remain anonymous. Later in life, Goldwater seemed embarrassed that he had not done more to further the cause of black equality in his community. In his 1988 autobiography, Goldwater takes credit for integrating Phoenix’s lunch counters. In truth, the only action the Phoenix City Council took while Goldwater was a member in the early 1950s was to order the restaurant at the city-owned airport to serve black customers—and Goldwater was not present for either the deliberations or the vote on that issue.
At other times, Goldwater claimed to have been unaware that Arizona had any racial problems, even though his own African-American butler said that Phoenix in the 1940s and 1950s was as segregated as any city in the South, and another local African-American businessman said Phoenix in the 1950s was “just like Mississippi.”
Adding a layer of complexity to Goldwater’s views on prejudice was his Jewish ancestry on his father’s side. Raised an Episcopalian in a prominent family, he claimed never to have experienced anti-Semitism in Arizona. His best friend, a practicing Jew, did, however. Yet, when his friend was barred from the University of Arizona fraternity where Goldwater was a member, Goldwater neither left the fraternity nor made an effort to get his friend admitted. Later in life, when that same friend was prevented from joining the restricted Phoenix Country Club where Goldwater served as president, he forced the other members to admit his friend—but made no effort to get the club to lift its anti-Semitic restriction and no other Jew joined the club for another decade.
Goldwater could empathize with an individual who experienced prejudice and could be moved to do something about it personally, if it was within his power. But he had, in the words of his biographer, Robert Alan Goldberg, “an inability to conceptualize prejudice and discrimination beyond the individual experience to institutional or societal conditions.”
This view was certainly shaped by Goldwater’s own privileged background. The man who became the epitome of the politics of self-reliance guilelessly noted, “You might say I was a success by being born into a successful family.”
Equally incongruous for the man who despised government handouts, Goldwater’s family dry goods business
struggled on the Arizona frontier until the government moved to aggressively subdue the local Apache tribe, which proved to be a tenacious adversary. By the 1880s, a full 20 percent of the U.S. Army’s soldiers were stationed in Arizona and the Goldwater’s store provided a large share of their food and clothing. Later, federally funded dam and reclamation projects created the booming state’s agricultural industry. By the 1920s, 15 percent of Arizona’s gross domestic product was from federal spending. Yet, later in life, Goldwater was in no way being intentionally ironic when he said, “We didn’t know the federal government. Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.”
Goldwater said his motto for employee relations was, “Treat people right and they will treat you right.” Goldwater provided his workers with good wages, a forty-hour week, health insurance, paid sick leave, profit sharing, a pension, and a host of other perks that included use of a Goldwater-owned recreation area just outside of town. This had the intended result of discouraging his employees to unionize. Goldwater believed unions were in league with racketeers and infringed on his rights as a businessman. It was apparently the New Deal’s promotion of organized labor that led Goldwater to conclude he was a conservative Republican when his parents had been Democrats.
Goldwater had little interest in business, though he had a flair for merchandising, starting a national fad when he designed and sold men’s underwear printed with red ants and marketed under the slogan: “You’ll rant and dance with ants in your pants!” Goldwater preferred to pursue his primary interests: photography and flying. Goldwater was such a fine photographer, with Arizona’s Native American culture a particularly favored subject, that he was elected to the Royal Photographic Society of London. He was an even more avid flyer, owning a multitude of planes throughout his life. When war came in 1941, poor eyesight kept Goldwater from becoming a fighter pilot, but he later flew dangerous supply missions in South Asia over the Himalayas. He remained in the Air Force Reserve until he retired as a major general in 1967.
He cut a dashing figure in Arizona, and his place in Phoenix’s business community ensured he would become active in civic affairs. He had a tremendous aptitude for politics. He managed local campaigns and served on the Phoenix City Council before emerging as a national figure because of his stunning upset victory over Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland in 1952.18 By 1955, most leaders of the conservative GOP old guard had departed, and Goldwater was already a leading national spokesman for the conservative cause. General Douglas MacArthur had retired from public life, Ohio senator Robert Taft had died in 1953, and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy had been censured and discredited in 1954. Most other party leaders were following the Thomas Dewey–inspired “Modern Republicanism” of the Eisenhower administration, which Goldwater derided as “a dime store New Deal.”
But it was not just by default that Goldwater became the nation’s leading conservative, it was also the Goldwater persona, the “tanned, square-jawed, ex-Army Air Corps pilot with horn-rim glasses, straight talk, and sardonic humor,” that set conservative hearts aflutter. In a period when Westerns represented virtually all of the top-rated shows on television, Goldwater, sans glasses, wearing a cowboy hat and sometimes holding a rifle, seemed to embody the mythic West that enthralled the rest of the nation. His emergence as a national personality coincided neatly with the growing conservative intellectual movement, which included William F. Buckley’s founding of the National Review in 1955. Buckley, too, was smitten with Goldwater, later recalling that he “brought a supernal charm and utterly American savoir-faire into twentieth-century politics.”
When Goldwater made such pronouncements as, “I would rather see the Republicans lose in 1960 fighting on principle, than I would care to see us win standing on grounds we know are wrong and on which we will ultimately destroy ourselves,” conservatives knew they had found their man. Clarence Manion, the former dean of the law school at the University of Notre Dame and a wildly popular conservative commentator on radio, was one of those most strongly urging Goldwater to become a presidential candidate in 1960. While flattered by Manion’s attentions, Goldwater thought Nixon was a near shoo-in for the nomination. He told Manion he would do nothing to encourage or discourage a “draft Goldwater” effort but would actively campaign for the nomination only if it appeared that Rockefeller was poised to take the nomination from Nixon. Privately, Goldwater expressed doubt that Americans would elect a candidate of Jewish descent.
Goldwater, however, did like Manion’s idea that he write a book. He approached L. Brent Bozell, Buckley’s brother-in-law, to serve as his ghostwriter because, he acknowledged with charming humility, “my complete incapacity to be an author is well known to everybody.” Goldwater provided Bozell with some general thoughts and a rough outline, and Bozell did most of the rest of the work. Goldwater did not even come up with the title. He was fine with Manion’s suggestion: The Conscience of a Conservative.
The slim, 124-page book was a publishing sensation. Even though Manion had it published through a small “vanity house,” by November 1960 it had sold a half-million copies (with the help of bulk purchases by various conservative groups), and it would go on to sell three million more copies over time, making it one of the most successful political treatises in American history. The book’s slimness emphasized its theme, encapsulated by the following excerpt:
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
Popular scholarship in the post-war period had been insisting that America had finally reached a liberal consensus and that there were no conservative ideas in circulation worthy of serious consideration. Now, here came Goldwater with a conservative creed that seemed both fresh and defiant. As such, it had a near electric appeal to young conservatives. Largely ignored while the media lavished attention in the 1960s on the youth movement from the left, the kids on the right represented a counterculture to the counterculture. Many young Goldwater supporters would later report that they felt a “thrill” in being part of what seemed almost a conspiracy against the prevailing liberal mindset. Goldwater’s campaign became “a Woodstock of the right” that attracted a host of clean-cut young people, among them a seventeen-year-old “Goldwater girl” in Park Ridge, Illinois, named Hillary Rodham who attended rallies wearing cowboy boots, a red, white, and blue sash, and an “AuH2O” button. Eight years later, she worked on the George McGovern campaign with her future husband, Bill Clinton.
The Conscience of a Conservative also directly addressed the issue of civil rights, tipping Goldwater’s hand on where he would stand on future legislation. Goldwater would note elsewhere that he had voted in favor of civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960 because, he said, those bills were narrowly focused on protecting the right of African Americans to vote and the guarantee of the right to vote could be found in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But nowhere in the Constitution, Goldwater argued, was there anything that mandated integration, most particularly in the public schools, where jurisdiction was strictly a local, not a federal, affair.19
It might be “wise and just” to have black children attend the same schools as white children, Goldwater acknowledged. “I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what
pace should be kept in striving toward that goal. That’s their business, not mine.” Goldwater even questioned whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education, desegregating the nation’s public schools, “is the law of the land.” For Goldwater, states’ rights trumped even the right of black children to receive an equal education.
While The Conscience of a Conservative was a runaway best seller and dramatically increased Goldwater’s national profile, Nixon was, as Goldwater predicted, the Republican nominee in 1960. Of conservatives, Nixon said, “They don’t like me, but they tolerate me.” Goldwater allowed his name to be put in nomination at the Republican National Convention and then withdrew with a challenge to his followers: “Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work.”
Goldwater was already hard at work, particularly as the chair of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, the person designated by the Republican Senate caucus to help elect more Republican senators. The chair of the complementary National Republican Congressional Committee was Goldwater’s future running mate, William Miller, and together they poured money into a Republican initiative that was called “Operation Dixie,” whose goal was to build a Republican Party worthy of the name in the South.
Operation Dixie showed results in 1962. In South Carolina, William D. Workman Jr., a recent GOP convert who was a popular columnist and television commentator, astonished observers by receiving 44 percent of the vote, an extraordinary total for a Republican in South Carolina. Workman had argued that his opponent, three-term Democratic senator Olin D. Johnston, was a “fine segregationist,” but Johnston was hindered in those views by his allegiance to a national Democratic administration that was becoming increasingly pro–civil rights. In Alabama, another Republican recruit, oil distributor James Martin, did even better, losing to thirty-seven-year congressional veteran Lister Hill by less than a single percentage point. Goldwater could see that his theories were correct: Gains could be made in the South if Republicans accommodated the segregationist sympathies that dominated the region.