Goldwaterism Triumphant? Race and the Republican Party, 1965–1968
2007; Wiley; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-5923.2007.00221.x
ISSN1540-5923
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoFor many observers of contemporary American politics, the Republican Party's nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 signaled the arrival of Sunbelt conservatism as a potent political force. Once dismissed as historically insignificant given the magnitude of his loss to Lyndon Johnson, Goldwater now appears to many as the forerunner to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. There are indeed important roots of the contemporary Republican Party in the early 1960s, but narratives of conservative triumphalism overstate the degree of conservatives' success within the party and the nation. Scholars must avoid painting too straight a line between Goldwater and later politics and policy. Rather, the history of the Republican Party in the mid-1960s should be viewed from the starting point of Goldwater's defeat rather than through the prism of subsequent Republican success. Such an approach foregrounds a sense of contingency and shows that conservatives' takeover of the party, though real in the long run, was neither inevitable nor immediate. Sectional and ideological tension remained strong well after 1964. Goldwater made a breakthrough with conservatives across the nation and especially among whites in the Deep South, but, as Richard Nixon and others astutely realized, his approach could not be copied directly if the GOP wanted to overtake the Democrats as the majority party. This article will look at divisions within the Republican Party between 1965 and 1968 over racial matters. Race was one of several issues that figured prominently in a vigorous debate about the party's identity and future. In recent years, numerous scholars have crafted a rich history of the grassroots rise of Goldwater and battles to control the party in the early 1960s, but they have paid too little attention to the political and ideological tug-of-war within the GOP after 1964. The image of Goldwater delegates at the 1964 Republican convention booing Governor Nelson Rockefeller (New York) as he called for a more progressive stand on race and other matters symbolizes to many the death of liberal Republicanism. That was a moment of conservative triumph, but the next four years were a time of ebb and flow as various factions battled to define and control the party. Sunbelt conservatives, led at first by Goldwater and then by figures such as Strom Thurmond (South Carolina) and Ronald Reagan (California), scored some notable gains, but liberal Republicans, including figures such as Senator Jacob Javits (New York) and Governor George Romney (Michigan), continued to shape civil rights policy in Congress and influenced debates about the role of race in Republican political strategy. Meanwhile, moderate congressional leaders, such as Representative Gerald Ford (Michigan) and Senator Everett Dirksen (Illinois), sought to bridge these two camps. By 1968, a synthesis had emerged with the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.1 Goldwater wanted Republicans to reject the eastern leadership of the party and offer "a choice not an echo" on several issues, including civil rights. His views on racial issues stemmed mostly from his conservative interpretation of the Constitution. The Arizona senator was not a bigot; he denounced discrimination and voted for the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, which dealt mostly with voting rights. Though he supported integrated schools in the abstract, however, he sided with segregationists by opposing federal intervention to achieve that goal. Goldwater was also one of just six Republican senators to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Warning of a "police state," he found the law's public accommodations and equal employment opportunity provisions unconstitutional assaults on the rights of property owners. Education and moral suasion, Goldwater repeatedly argued, would reduce racism more effectively than statutes or court rulings.2 Goldwater also encouraged Republicans to chart a new political course by making the South central to his campaign. Well aware that Republicans had registered sizable gains among whites across Dixie during the 1950s, Goldwater urged his party in 1961 to abandon pursuing black votes in the urban North, as some Republicans had advised, in favor of "hunting where the ducks are." Goldwater's claim that southern whites' interest in the GOP stemmed from postwar economic modernization rather than racism misrepresented political trends in the South, as whites' growing disaffection with the Democrats dated to the 1930s and was to a considerable extent, though not completely, tied to race. Race, the South, and the Goldwater campaign intersected in a myriad of ways. Republican party-building efforts left little room for African Americans. Under the leadership of Goldwater allies, the Republican National Committee (RNC) had, since the early 1960s, poured substantial resources into the pursuit of southern whites through "Operation Dixie" while making token appeals to African Americans in both the North and the South. Goldwater forces across the South drove out black Republicans from state party leadership posts in the hunt for convention delegates, while at the convention itself they rebuffed efforts to have the GOP take a stronger pro-civil rights stand. Goldwater backed off racial matters for much of the summer out of a sincere worry over exacerbating tensions in the wake of riots in several northern cities, but in the fall he denounced "forced integration" and employment "quotas" in Chicago and defended "freedom of association" at a South Carolina rally with Strom Thurmond, who, a month earlier, had switched parties largely over the Democrats' stand on race.3 Goldwater's role was nonexistent or unclear on other racial matters, but many whites eager to defend Jim Crow saw him as an ally. Goldwater enjoyed solid support among members of the White Citizens' Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. Alabama's Republican chairman wooed white voters by consciously stoking fears of racial equality and job losses to African Americans, while in Arkansas a Republican worker in Little Rock attached to car windshields a flyer picturing Lyndon Johnson with black leaders. The Republican Party engaged in "Operation Eagle Eye," a national effort ostensibly aimed at reducing voter fraud that included monitoring polling places, photographing voters, and challenging voters suspected of breaking voting laws. Many of these activities occurred in heavily minority precincts and drew protests from the NAACP. Three months after the election, the well-known African American scholar Henry Lee Moon noted how Republicans in several cities had aimed to reduce African American turnout by warning blacks that their votes would not be counted if they had been in trouble with the law on items such as traffic tickets. An African American worker at the RNC, meanwhile, tried to suppress the black vote for the Democrats by mailing out 1.5 million flyers to African Americans instructing them to write in Martin Luther King Jr.'s name on the ballot. Goldwater's desire to sharpen party distinctions worked. Though Republicans in both the House and the Senate had played integral roles in the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, polls showed that voters perceived a clear difference between the two parties on racial issues.4 That fall the Republican Party suffered one of the worst defeats in American political history. Goldwater won only six states (five states in the Deep South plus Arizona) and 38.5 percent of the vote. The Arizona senator carried sixty congressional districts; just sixteen were outside the South, and five of those were in conservative Southern California. Throughout the summer, pundits had forecast a white racial backlash that would hurt Democrats in the North, but such predictions proved erroneous. Compared to Richard Nixon in 1960, Goldwater lost substantial ground in urban areas and among northern Protestants. No group underwent a larger swing than African Americans. Goldwater totaled just 6 percent of the black vote, a steep drop from the 32 percent Nixon had won and the 38 percent received by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. Republican problems extended well beneath the top of the ticket, as the party suffered a net decrease of thirty-eight House seats and two Senate seats. After increasing in 1960 and 1962, the percentage of votes won by Republicans in congressional and state legislature races declined.5 Goldwater's loss precipitated a rancorous debate over the Republican Party's identity as well as strategy for electoral rebirth. Conservatives elatedly pointed to the twenty-seven million votes for the Arizona senator as a healthy start to a larger movement. Goldwater supporters in the South were buoyed by his easy triumphs in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. With the exception of Louisiana, this was the first time since Reconstruction that the GOP had won these states. The first Republican presidential candidate in the twentieth century to run better in the South than in the North, Goldwater won a majority of white votes in every ex-Confederate state except Texas. White turnout across the Deep South also jumped dramatically. Republicans gained seven new congressmen from the South (five in Alabama, one each in Georgia and Mississippi), all of whom had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many southern conservatives staunchly denied that Goldwater or southern Republicans had run racist campaigns, and forecast a bright future for the party in Dixie based on economic appeals and a conservative philosophy of minimal government. The party, they contended, had to build upon Goldwater's showing to counter Democratic strength in the North and West. Others, such as Georgia state senator Joseph Tibble, maintained that pursuing black votes was folly. He mused, "Suppose you register three whites and are reasonably sure two of them will vote for you; then you register three Negroes believing that only one of them will vote for you. Where should you spend time and money?"6 Liberal Republicans, who tended to favor a strong role for the federal government on racial matters and mostly hailed from the Northeast or Midwest, maintained that the election results had borne out their fears that the Goldwaterites were too extreme on race and several other issues. They noted that Goldwater won approximately seven million fewer votes than Nixon had in 1960. Interpreting GOP advances in Dixie as built on racial hatred, they viewed support for civil rights initiatives, especially the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as keeping with the tradition of Lincoln and necessary for electoral success. The failure of the white backlash to materialize in the North, as well as steep declines in African American support, indicated that the Goldwater approach meant continued losses in large industrial states. Goldwaterism, liberals feared, would turn the GOP into a sectional party. The Ripon Society, a group of Republican intellectuals centered in Boston, cited poll results showing that Goldwater's stand on civil rights alienated more voters than his approach to any other issue. Shortly after the election, Javits wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine proclaiming that the party was at its lowest ebb since 1936, denouncing Goldwater's talk of law and order as a cynical ploy for white racist votes, and calling for a change of direction on civil rights. "Democrats will be running against … the 1964 platform for years to come if we do not take steps to nullify these liabilities," he predicted. Oregon Governor Mark Hatfield argued to RNC Chair Dean Burch, "Let's tell segregationist Republicans that they just are not Republicans." No Republican member of the House of Representatives who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act lost in November, while nearly half of the twenty-two northern Republicans who opposed it were defeated. There were many factors behind these losses, but to liberals they showed the absence of a racial backlash as an overriding force. Indeed, several Republicans who had lost state or congressional races blamed their defeat in part on miniscule black support. Charles Percy, who had suffered a narrow defeat in the Illinois gubernatorial race, bluntly declared, "We have got to get the party away from being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant white party."7 Liberal Republicans did not want to write off the South, however. They welcomed the GOP advances that had occurred in Dixie since the 1950s and, like southern conservatives, saw continued growth there as essential to remaining a viable party nationally. Noting that the Republicans had controlled Congress for only four of the previous thirty-five years, Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, a strong civil rights supporter, declared in January 1965 that the party would never be able to win enough Senate and House seats in the rest of the country to reach majority status if it ignored the South. He observed that failure to compete in Dixie meant that the GOP would not control Congress unless it achieved the nearly impossible task of winning two-thirds of the races in the rest of the country. The Republicans, liberals argued, had to look to the South to counter Democratic gains in other parts of the country that had, until the arrival of the New Deal, voted Republican.8 Liberals differed sharply with conservatives on how to boost Republican strength in the South. First, they insisted that the party aggressively woo black voters. This conclusion was driven in part by a sincere commitment to racial justice, but also by political calculation. Black ballots had provided Johnson with his margin of victory in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The Ripon Society forecast that by 1968 an expanded African American electorate would shift the Goldwater states of Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina to the Democrats unless the GOP changed course. The number of registered African American voters across the South had climbed steadily since the 1940s, and Morton predicted continued expansion so that "in a few years… the negro vote will be just as important to the total state vote as is the Harlem vote in New York City today—or the southside vote in Chicago—or the Negro vote in Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, or San Francisco." The party needed 20 to 30 percent of the black vote to be competitive, he announced. Liberals believed that since Republicans could not get to the right of segregationist Democrats on racial issues, a racially progressive Republican party could win back at least some of the African American vote. Just as they had been in the first Reconstruction, black voters were to be an integral part of the Republican southern coalition.9 At the same time, liberal Republicans looked to hitch the party's wagon to what they saw as an emerging, racially moderate white South. Goldwater enjoyed his greatest success in rural areas and the Deep South (places where Thurmond had done well in his segregationist 1948 Dixiecrat campaign) but he did worse than Eisenhower had in 1956, and Nixon had in 1960, in Atlanta, Charlotte, Orlando, and other rapidly expanding metropolitan areas. Five southern states that had voted Republican at least twice since 1952 (Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) went Democratic in 1964. To liberal Republicans, Goldwater had abandoned the future of the South to appeal to its retreating past. Liberals urged ongoing efforts in the upper South and in fast-growing urban and suburban locales. Economics was the lynchpin of their strategy. Southern politics, the Ripon Society predicted, would gradually move away from its traditional focus on race as the region continued its rapid economic modernization and political convergence with the rest of the nation. A strategy based on the dying theme of white supremacy thus "could have a price which will be paid back in costly installments over the next several generations," the group claimed. Though not a liberal, outgoing RNC Chairman Burch expressed the liberals' outlook in February 1965 when he observed, "You don't have to go down there and wave the Confederate flag." Wooing this new South would also pay dividends nationally, for liberals were also convinced that whites in the North and West would never support a Republican Party too closely allied with segregationists.10 Neither liberals nor conservatives were able to gain control of the party in the immediate aftermath of Goldwater's defeat. Rather, each faction remained wary of the other, took heart from particular developments, and believed the future was still up for grabs. The Goldwater model continued to drive Republicans in the Deep South in 1965. The Alabama GOP issued a statement declaring that any attempt to woo black voters was tantamount to reverse discrimination, while in Mississippi the state party proclaimed segregation "absolutely essential" and Republicans won two mayoralty elections there following Goldwater's footsteps. House Republicans welcomed the defection of South Carolina's Albert Watson in February after the Democrats had stripped him of his seniority for his backing of Goldwater. The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee shoveled financial resources to Watson, who won a special election in June. Similarly, the House Republican leadership refused publicly to criticize Alabama Republican William Dickinson when he charged civil rights protesters on the Selma to Montgomery march in February with drunkenness and sexual immorality. Though House Minority Leader Gerald Ford had privately tried to dissuade Dickinson from making his inflammatory speech, he later simply defended Dickinson's "right to make any comment." Contrary to liberal wishes, then, there would be no purge of southern conservatives. Given the decimating losses of 1964, party leaders like Ford were eager to accept success anywhere they could find it.11 At the same time, conservative southern Republicans resented efforts by liberals to shape the party in Dixie. Soon after the 1964 election Thurmond advised Nelson Rockefeller and other "radical leftists" to join the Democratic Party. When reports surfaced in the fall of 1965 that John Bell Williams, an avid segregationist congressman from Mississippi, was contemplating joining the GOP, Governor William Scranton (Pennsylvania) told reporters that white southerners were welcome provided they renounced racism. "If any of these people came to us as anti-Negro in 1964, they entered the party—or voted for it—under false pretenses," he said. Likewise, the Council of Republican Organizations, which was composed of several liberal groups, denounced Williams as "a symbol … of white supremacy, race-baiting, and the rebellious spirit of the Old Confederacy" and urged party leaders to sharply differentiate the party's stand on civil rights from those of converts such as Williams. This drew a heated rebuke from Congressman Prentiss Walker (Mississippi). "It is no business of these liberal splinter groups," he contended, "to pass judgment on any individual who may wish to become a Republican as long as he is elected a Republican and receives the welcome of his colleagues."12 Quarrels over party leadership gave liberals ample reason for concern. Liberals flexed their muscles at the RNC meeting in Chicago in January 1965 by joining with moderates to oust RNC chair Dean Burch, a close Goldwater ally. Ohioan Ray Bliss took over the post. At first glance, Bliss's ascendancy looked like a victory for liberals. Following the 1960 election he had chaired a committee that had concluded that Nixon had lost due to a poor showing in large cities. Future success, that group argued, lay in part in greater outreach to African Americans through a revitalized Minorities Division. Now, however, Bliss was more interested in party unity than in taking sides in the ideological battle between liberals and conservatives. Black Republicans appealed to the RNC in Chicago, and then to Bliss throughout the remainder of the year, to increase black representation on the RNC and to give more attention and resources to wooing African American voters. Several times Bliss expressed a general interest in doing so, but he sought to stay above the fray rather than make this a high priority. Asked about segregationist statements in southern Republican platforms, Bliss replied, "I'm not going to get into a discussion of issues… . My job is to press for organization." He added, "If the Democratic Party is big enough for Adam Clayton Powell and Russell B. Long we are certainly able to cope with our own differences." For Bliss, the broadest possible coalition was the key to electoral success.13 This neutrality dismayed liberal Republicans, who insisted that bold leadership by the RNC offered the best hope for victory. Bliss and the RNC, one liberal activist privately contended, could halt the conservatives' march to power in the South by aggressively organizing African Americans and progressive whites into a vibrant coalition that renounced the old segregationist politics. Officials would then see that it was in their self-interest to support racial justice, he added. Whereas Goldwater had posited the existence of a silent but large conservative vote across the nation in 1964, liberals assumed that there was a quiet but real groundswell of liberalism in the South waiting for release.14 Other developments gave liberals reason for optimism. The Deep South remained under conservative domination, but the upper South appeared to be more favorable territory. In Tennessee, the racially moderate Howard Baker assumed party leadership from Harry Carbaugh, who had banned African Americans from the state's delegation to the 1964 convention. In North Carolina, GOP party head Howard Saxon talked publicly of the need to pursue the black vote. The Republican candidate for mayor of Louisville captured 52 percent of the black vote on his way to victory in 1965. In elections for the Georgia state legislature, a moderate Republican won approximately half of the black vote in Atlanta and became the first Republican to carry Fulton County. Similar electoral trends appeared in the North. John Lindsay, who had helped steer the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the House of Representatives, won the mayoralty of New York City with approximately 40 percent of the black vote. In Philadelphia, Arlen Specter won 29 percent of black ballots on his way to victory in the district attorney's race. Whereas Goldwater's abysmal showing among African Americans had helped drag down state and local candidates a year earlier, liberal Republicans interpreted these results as proof that the party's fate among black voters had not been sealed, provided it moved quickly and aggressively. Pointing to growing black registration in the South, Hugh Scott asserted in December that the GOP had to "act now" to win some of that vote. Appealing to newly enfranchised African Americans would pay dividends not only in Dixie, Scott maintained, but among progressive whites and blacks across the nation as well. Liberals also saw opportunity in growing African American criticism of the Johnson administration's civil rights enforcement efforts and disappointment over its November 1965 conference, "To Fulfill These Rights."15 A more crucial test for the soul of the party would come with the 1966 elections. Liberals continued to push their case aggressively. In April 1966 two groups, Republicans for Progress and Republican Advance, released a joint study on the GOP and the South entitled "Southern Progress Report." The former group was a sixty-member organization formed shortly after the 1964 election by Charles Taft, brother of the late Senator Robert Taft (Ohio), to battle Goldwater conservatives. The latter, in existence since 1950, was composed mostly of faculty and students at Yale Law School and harkened back to Dwight Eisenhower's moderate "Modern Republicanism." The report echoed earlier liberal arguments about how economic modernization was transforming southern society, the need to appeal to a growing black electorate, and emerging racial moderation among whites. The groups expressed grave concern over a Republican Party based in the Deep South and built on white racism. Such a strategy might offer immediate gains, they observed, but guaranteed long-term disaster. Whites would soon realize that civil rights advances would not mean the loss of their jobs to blacks, and, instead of voting their racial hatreds, they would vote their economic interests. Those economic concerns, liberals argued, would include a strong demand for government services such as education and infrastructure as the dynamic southern economy continued its rapid ascent. African Americans, meanwhile, would reward their allies in the struggle to participate in the region's political affairs. The "Southern Progress Report" boldly forecast that the Voting Rights Act would "shortly make race a dead-end political street" in the South. Nothing short of a fundamental restructuring of southern politics was at stake, for the creation of a viable, integrated Republican Party there would, "in the long pull of history, remove completely race as an issue in the last area of the country where it still remains one."16 Believing that the rise of a southern Republican Party wedded to racial hatred had been due largely to the failure of liberals and moderates to offer a viable alternative, the groups presented a specific ten-point plan for the national party. Some proposals, such as helping to register more black voters, requiring state parties to remove segregationist clauses from their platforms, welcoming southern Democrats into the party only if they renounced segregation, and reactivating the Minorities Division, had been made by liberals before. The groups charted new ground in urging the RNC to appoint an ethical standards committee to monitor party nondiscrimination efforts and hold a civil rights conference in the South in 1966. They regarded poor communication as a fundamental problem inhibiting the growth of a progressive Republican Party in Dixie. The RNC, they recommended, urgently had to mount vigorous public relations efforts with black colleges and churches, while moderate and liberal southern Republicans needed aggressively to counter conservative rhetoric with a publicity blitz of their own. The groups found Bliss's neutrality and call for a diversity of voices in the GOP outdated and insufficient. The Democrats, the organizations maintained, had resolved their sectional divisions over race in 1964 by casting their lot in favor of racial justice. Segregationist southern Democrats obviously still existed, but to these liberal Republicans they no longer dominated the party. To liberals, the political terrain was shifting in the South and the nation, and it was time for the Republicans to make a similar choice.17 The liberals' optimistic interpretation of racial politics proved divisive. Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Thruston Morton cited the "Southern Progress Report" in announcing that senatorial candidates who favored segregation would receive minimal financial support. He expressed hope that Republican candidates in upper South states would run as racial moderates, though he conceded that the situation in the Deep South was more worrisome. "We must go after the Negro vote in the South as well as in the North," he declared. Three months later, elements of the liberals' viewpoint could be found in a study on long-term voting trends released by the U. S. Senate Republican Policy Committee. The Committee pointed to growing African American populations, and thus expanding political clout, in large urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest and urged the GOP to work more aggressively for black support there through assorted economic initiatives. Conversely, Republicans in the Deep South continued to dismiss the liberals' analysis. Harry Dent, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, retorted that the authors of the "Southern Progress Report""[didn't] know what they [were] talking about." He added, "This is no lily-white set up. The people of South Carolina are accepting of the changes that are coming about. There are no whooping, hollering, chest-thumping segregationists in the Republican party here." Developments in the Palmetto State belied Dent's claim, however, as the state party nominated former segregationist Democrats for several offices and had no black delegates at its convention. Likewise, Republican leaders in Mississippi boycotted a speech by Charles Percy that spring in which he called for a southern GOP free from racism.18 As the campaign moved into high gear that fall, several ominous signs appeared for liberal Republicans. Racial tensions were escalating in the urban North over housing, crime, and school integration as middle- and lower-class whites resented what they regarded as African American pleading for special treatment that they themselves had never received. These whites also voiced anger at politicians, whom they viewed as eager to cater to African Americans but indifferent to their economic struggles. Polls showed that whites increasingly believed that President Johnson was pushing integration too fast. Racial animosity was strong in the South, too. A survey of South Carolina voters noted that some favored better jobs and higher salaries for African Americans, "but aligned against them are many more who want segregated schools, want to stop integration." The pro-civil rights mood on Capitol Hill had eroded as Congress rebuked Johnson's call for open-housing legislation in September. By October, several reports showed the white backlash to be strengthening. The Gallup organization reported that 52 percent of the public believed the Johnson administration was pushing integration too fast; this was the highest
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