Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape 9780816521098, 2012029636

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Conscience of a Conservationist: Barry Goldwater and the Colorado River
2. Drafting a Movement: Barry Goldwater and the Rebirth of the Arizona Republican Party
3. Southwestern Strategy: Mexican Americans and Republican Politics in the Arizona Borderlands
4. Getting to Goldwater: Robert A. Taft, William F. Knowland, and the Rightward Drift of the Republican Party
5. The Dealers and the Darling: Conservative Media and the Candidacy of Barry Goldwater
6. Goldwater in Dixie: Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right
7. Goldwater’s “Moral Mothers”: Miscalculations of Gender in the 1964 Republican Presidential Campaign
8. Phoenix’s Cowboy Conservatives in Washington
9. Green Goldwater: Barry Goldwater, Federal Environmentalism, and the Transformation of Modern Conservatism
10. Time Is an Elusive Companion: Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, and the Dynamic of Modern Conservatism
Afterword: Barry Goldwater in History and Memory
About the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

barry goldwater and the remaking of the american political landscape

Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape Edited by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

tucson

© 2013 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barry Goldwater and the remaking of the American political landscape / edited by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-2109-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Goldwater, Barry M. (Barry Morris), 1909–1998. 2. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 3. Arizona—Politics and government—1951– 4. Conservatism—United States—History—20th century. 5. Political culture— United States—History—20th century. 6. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– ) — History—20th century. 7. United States. Congress. Senate—Biography. 8. Legislators—United States—Biography. 9. Presidential candidates—United States—Biography. I. Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy. e748.g64b37 2013 973.92092—dc23 [b] 2012029636

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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Part I. Goldwater’s Arizona and Arizona’s Goldwater 1 The Conscience of a Conservationist: Barry Goldwater and the Colorado River Andrew Needham

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2 Drafting a Movement: Barry Goldwater and the Rebirth of the Arizona Republican Party Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

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3 Southwestern Strategy: Mexican Americans and Republican Politics in the Arizona Borderlands Micaela Anne Larkin

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Part II. The Goldwater Moment 4 Getting to Goldwater: Robert A. Taft, William F. Knowland, and the Rightward Drift of the Republican Party Michael Bowen 87 5 The Dealers and the Darling: Conservative Media and the Candidacy of Barry Goldwater Nicole Hemmer

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6 Goldwater in Dixie: Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right Joseph Crespino

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7 Goldwater’s “Moral Mothers”: Miscalculations of Gender in the 1964 Republican Presidential Campaign Michelle Nickerson 170

Part III. Beyond 1964 and Goldwater Conservatism 8 Phoenix’s Cowboy Conservatives in Washington Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

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9 Green Goldwater: Barry Goldwater, Federal Environmentalism, and the Transformation of Modern Conservatism Brian Allen Drake

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10 Time Is an Elusive Companion: Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, and the Dynamic of Modern Conservatism William A. Link

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Afterword: Barry Goldwater in History and Memory Robert Alan Goldberg

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About the Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments

This volume arose out of a conference, Goldwater at 100: His Politics, Ideology, and Legacy, which I organized with Linda Whitaker and Susan Irwin of the Arizona Historical Foundation (AHF). Linda Wrst mentioned the idea over dinner, and I jumped at the chance. She had spent the previous few years reprocessing the late senator’s papers and opening up new AHF collections to researchers. The November 2009 symposium at Arizona State University (ASU) was a resounding success. Susan and Linda handled all local arrangements and were able to convince C-SPAN to tape and air the proceedings; support from ASU faculty members, particularly Mary Margaret Fonow, helped us secure much-needed space and attract a small audience; and Barry Goldwater Jr.’s talk at the conference dinner and his comments during the sessions added enormously to the entire venture. The commentators, panelists, and speakers made both days thought-provoking, enriching, and exciting. My thanks to Michael Bowen, Joseph Crespino, Brian Allen Drake, Laura Jane GiVord, Robert Alan Goldberg, Nicole Hemmer, Jason LaBau, Micaela Anne Larkin, Nelson Lichtenstein, William Link, Drew Meyers, Andrew Needham, Michelle Nickerson, Rick Perlstein, and JeV Roche. But all of us (especially me) were indebted to Linda and Susan. When I Wrst visited AHF in 2004, I was met with absolutely overwhelming, and much-needed, encouragement. At the time, they both believed that much of Goldwater’s Senate papers were closed, but, because I asked, it was discovered that they were intended to be open to researchers such as myself. They began reprocessing the hundreds

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of boxes in the Goldwater collection that year but generously provided scholars with unrestricted access in the Wve years it took to complete the project. They, in fact, made the new inquiries, investigations, and arguments in this volume possible. As such, it is to Linda and Susan that this collection is dedicated.

barry goldwater and the remaking of the american political landscape

Introduction

senator barry goldwater remains one of the towering Wgures in the history of modern conservatism, the American West, and the United States. Although his policy positions shifted throughout the course of his long political career, his hostility to the welfare state and his stance on many social and cultural issues have caused pundits, politicians, and policymakers to continually invoke his name to defend a multitude of positions, policies, and protestations; the senator had a heady legacy. His hostility toward organized labor and his eVorts to privatize Social Security were legendary, so too his early sensitivity to the western environment and his later open support of abortion rights and gender equality. This enigmatic man has also piqued the interest of historians and other scholars, particularly those interested in the American Right. Indeed, the last twenty-Wve years have witnessed an academic preoccupation with the modern conservatism for which Goldwater stood. Nuanced studies of movements fueled by racism, sexism, Christian moralism, anticommunism, and entrepreneurialism have eviscerated earlier narratives of a postwar, hegemonic liberal order, slowly ensuring a modern America where all—regardless of race or gender—enjoyed full citizenship. Goldwater has loomed large over this literature for good reason: his 1964 presidential run was a watershed moment for a building insurgency, a “Woodstock of American Conservatism” as biographer Robert Goldberg entitled the chapter on the race in his 1995 Barry Goldwater.1 But the scholarly work produced since this seminal biography appeared, the year after the Republican revolution in Congress, has 1

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illustrated that the senator had been more than just a protest vote or dark-horse candidate. This Anglo, western, business conservative has stood out in recent attempts to evaluate conservatism’s origins, internal conXicts, regional political diVerences, and permutations. This volume thus showcases a new generation of scholarship on Goldwater and modern conservatism in light of this new research. The collection does not memorialize Goldwater per se or just focus on his 1964 presidential eVort. The chapters instead place him among various political movements, legislative reform initiatives, and the everyday Americans whom he inspired, while emphasizing how these campaigns, policies, and people motivated him and shaped his public career and private life. Understandings of the senator, his politics, and his appeal begin in Arizona, because he was, as the press, his party, and especially the man himself reminded everyone, Wrst and foremost a westerner. Goldwater was born in Phoenix in 1909. He was the heir, along with his brother Bob, to a prominent chain of department stores, Goldwater’s, in this then-remote territory (Arizona would not become a state until three years later). But Barry’s talents and passions were not to be found in retail. He was an avid outdoorsman and adventurer, who in 1940 joined the Wrst trip through the Grand Canyon via the Colorado River since John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration. Goldwater captured his experience on Wlm, another hobby, and then took to the skies to share the movie with audiences across Arizona. Desert roadways were so poor at the time that Xying was often easier. But he had another motivation: the retailer loved planes, an enthusiasm well suited for a region that would become an epicenter of postwar aeronautics research, aerospace engineering, and airplane production.2 These early activities were central to his image as a modern cowboy, an ethos he cultivated and radiated as he entered into public service and movement building, both of which captivated the future senator far more than the day-to-day operations of his business. Yet his managerial experiences, wilderness adventures, and interests in aviation and electronics very much informed his politics. Like so many business conservatives in and at the helm of the postwar movement, his worldview was forged during the New Deal, when liberal statecraft, particularly in regard to taxation, union empowerment, and regulation, left him convinced that most Democrats were destroying

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industry, individual initiative, and democracy. The threat to free enterprise thus permeated his public denunciations of the New Deal. Yet he was also contemptuous of the Phoenix businessmen who accommodated liberals or who hesitated to embrace a manufacturing future that was both lucrative and sophisticated. Goldwater had no interest in keeping his hometown dependent on the state’s four C’s: cotton, copper, cattle, and climate. Agriculture, mining, ranching, and small-scale tourism were for Arizona’s territorial past, not its industrial future.3 As with so many southern and southwestern conservative standardbearers, Goldwater’s career was intimately intertwined with the Sunbelt’s creation. The dramatic postwar movement of companies, jobs, and people into the nation’s sunshine states depended on local boosters reengaging with politics to refashion local and state policymaking so as to privilege industries with generous giveaways, fewer taxes, and punitive restrictions on union organizing. Goldwater dedicated himself to the task of making Phoenix into such a free-enterprise oasis. Together with other Valley of the Sun businessmen, he worked to transform the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, city hall, and Arizona GOP into vehicles for his brand of antiliberal, business-Wrst Republican politics. Insurgent Phoenicians, the retailer foremost among them, campaigned their way into the city council, the state legislature, and the governor’s mansion, where they then busied themselves rewriting tax codes and legislative statutes to better attract new investment, and shoring up voter support for the nascent free-market Sunbelt conservatism that would redeWne regional and national politics.4 Goldwater brought these principles with him to Washington after his 1952 Senate victory. Like Ohio senator Robert Taft, Goldwater belonged to his party’s right wing, and he soon proved a persistent critic of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism.” But the Arizonan’s early years in oYce were deWned neither by an unusually strident anticommunism nor by the cultural and religious issues that would animate many conservatives in the 1970s. Rather, Goldwater was a business conservative whose fame came largely from the public attacks he launched against organized labor, then at its midcentury apogee. Goldwater supported punitive labor laws, opposed increases in unemployment beneWts and the minimum wage, and defended other business conservatives who fought unionism in their factories. Most famously, Goldwater denounced Walter Reuther,

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the powerful, progressive president of the United Auto Workers, whom he once declared to be “more dangerous to our country than Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do.”5 His outspokenness was a double-edged sword. Laborites, liberals, and some fellow Republicans denounced him. Trade union leaders, for example, poured money and resources into stopping Goldwater’s 1958 reelection. Public intellectuals, notably Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter, damned the senator’s brand of politics as “pseudoconservative,” a retrograde resistance to the contemporary era stemming from the upper classes losing their power and privilege to Jews, minorities, and liberals. The decade’s Modern Republicans also had little patience for Arizona’s junior senator. He not only defamed them and their politics but also represented the kind of resistance to the New Deal that they considered both wrong and strategically misguided (they too, after all, were desperate to reclaim Capitol Hill after twenty years of Democratic rule).6 Yet Goldwater’s brand of 1950s conservatism also endeared him to those building a movement designed to challenge postwar liberalism. His 1958 reelection to the Senate, in a midterm election year notable for sizable Democratic victories, made Goldwater an attractive presidential prospect for many in the GOP who had grown dissatisWed with the eastern Establishment’s moderates, Eisenhower included. But this counterreformation still needed a bible, a tract that Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, wrote for the senator. The slim, 123-page, best-selling Conscience of a Conservative (1960) oVered a powerful statement of the conservative worldview: “the radical, or Liberal, approach has not worked and is not working.” Goldwater and his ghostwriter went on to condemn New and Fair Dealers as well as moderate Republicans, including Eisenhower, because they allowed “socialism” to subordinate “all other considerations to man’s material well-being.” All of the chapters touched on issues dividing the nation: the balance between states’ rights and civil rights, the increase in taxes and farm subsidies, and the expansion of the labor movement and the welfare state.7 Conscience solidiWed the senator as an icon of the nascent conservative movement, a standard-bearer carried to victory in the 1964 GOP presidential primary by businessmen, young conservatives, and white suburbanites. Indeed, the 1964 convention proved a riveting

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spectacle, both for party moderates aghast that Goldwater had so easily trounced Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York, and for conservatives thrilled that they had a nominee unafraid to stand up for state autonomy and property rights while simultaneously defying Lyndon Johnson, moderate Republicans, and the entire trade union movement. Moreover, the hoopla at San Francisco’s Cow Palace shaped popular memory and scholarly accounts of his failed bid for a generation. The famed “Goldwater Girls” in their cowgirl outWts cheered for the senator alongside his delegates, predominantly white men under Wfty. Supporters drank the carbonated beverage Gold Water, wore clear plastic, water-drop-shaped jewelry with gold Xakes inside, and plastered their cars with AuH2O bumper stickers. Their behavior shocked and appalled mainstream journalists, who reviled such revelry as unbeWtting the serious business of selecting a candidate to run the country embroiled in a prolonged cold war and a very hot conXict in Southeast Asia.8 The senator’s historic defeat was far from the catastrophe that pundits and scholars had described it as. True, LBJ’s coattails gave him the power to shoehorn congressional passage of landmark civil rights, health care, and poverty legislation. But the Vietnam imbroglio and discomfort with his expansive domestic agenda made a 1968 reelection eVort anything but feasible. Goldwater, on the other hand, returned to the Senate in 1969, where he remained for another twenty years. The erstwhile nominee, moreover, had solidiWed the conservative movement’s base, that 40 percent of voters who sided with the senator in 1964. Moreover, during the 1970s stagXation crisis, his oncemocked reverence for individual initiative, entrepreneurial freedom, and Wscal austerity became orthodoxy.9 In many respects, this aging statesman had actually become mainstream but nonetheless struggled with the domestic issues that came to dominate post-1968 politics. Women’s equality, personal privacy, religious freedom, gay and lesbian activism, and environmentalism were challenges to liberals and conservatives alike. Yet it was, of course, the Right’s response to these controversies that transformed the senator’s 1964 losing minority into a winning majority for Ronald Reagan in 1980.10 Yet by then the Arizonan seemed at odds with the movement that he had once represented. Indeed, conservatives seemed as divided

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against themselves as Republicans had been when Goldwater Wrst went to Washington. In a moment when the Right seemed to have triumphed, he emerged as the unlikely champion of liberal causes. Yet his support hardly represented a political about-face. His famous defense of abortion access and gender equality stemmed from his longstanding aversion to federal power, in this case over the personal lives of its citizens, not over its enterprises. Goldwater had, in fact, always supported the right for a woman to choose. He had facilitated his daughter’s safe, medical abortion in Mexico in the mid-1940s. He remained steadfast on this issue, though he did equivocate publicly when he needed the endorsement of Arizona’s growing pro-life contingent when faced with reelection in 1980. He reemerged as a brazen ally after he retired from the Senate in 1989. Back in Arizona, he railed against a 1992 proposition to ban abortions unless needed to save the mother’s life and threw his support behind a city ordinance that prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public accommodations. He became a kind of national spokesman for these issues. In 1993, he even lambasted the ban on gays in the military and dismissed Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise as a farce.11 His 1998 death did not end his inXuence in American politics. Bitter Wghts over his worldview and legacy occurred during the 2000s, even among Republicans. For example, in the preface to the 2007 rerelease of Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, journalist George Will celebrated the Arizonan as a populist hero who did not look backward to the ideas of Edmund Burke or T. S. Eliot but forward to building a dynamic Republican Party that rejected New Deal liberalism and the old Northeastern GOP that had all but accepted it. But Will invoked the senator’s record to attack contemporary conservatives who seemed uninterested in minimal governance or entitlements, like those Republican congressional representatives who had voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, a new Medicare prescription drug beneWt, and historically large farm subsidies. But liberals have also resurrected Goldwater to attack the Right. In the edition’s afterword, Robert Kennedy Jr. decried a select few of the senator’s followers, those who “auctioned oV the planks of Goldwater’s conservative platform and sold the soul of the Republican Party to big business and the Christian Right.” The GOP thereafter dominated politics

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through “authoritarian preachers, mean-spirited cable-TV bully boys, and AM hate-radio jocks, who gull the movement’s foot soldiers with the reliable chestnuts of demagoguery: Xag waving, faux morality, scapegoating, and fear.” Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative, to Kennedy at least, were reminders “of a political age we have lost—and of a conservatism lost as well.”12 Even the Goldwater family has been divided over the senator’s legacy. In the run-up to Election Day 2008, his granddaughter CC asserted in a HuYngton Post article, “Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year.” “Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections,” she asserted. “Nothing about McCain, except for maybe a uniform, compares to the same ideology of what Goldwater stood for as a politician. The McCain/ Palin plan is to appear diverse and inclusive, using women and minorities to push an agenda that makes us all Wnancially vulnerable, fearful, and less safe.” Barry Goldwater Jr. publicly denounced his niece’s proclamation: “McCain may not be everything [CC] wants in a President or hold her exact values,” her uncle submitted, “but she should work within the party to promote the ideals Barry Goldwater stood for.” “Endorsing one of the most liberal Senators in Congress is certainly not the way to help Wx any problem she sees,” he asserted. “It is a betrayal of everything my father advocated government should be. My father would never endorse a candidate or a party that wanted to grow government, raise taxes or in any way step on our freedoms.”13 Acrimony over the late senator’s bequest illustrates the diYculty of reducing such an important public Wgure, who lived over eighty years and held some kind of public oYce for almost Wve decades, to one issue, moment in time, or group. Many studies within the millennial reconsideration of the modern Right have already helped revise the standard account of Goldwater’s rise to prominence and the conservative movement’s overall trajectory. Historians now understand that Goldwater’s 1964 nomination was not an aberration but the culmination of bitter postwar Wghts within the GOP over leadership positions, nominations, and platforms. Vital to this crusade were the business conservatives, like Goldwater, who resented unions, taxes, and regulations. These defenders of free enterprise now appear throughout historical accounts of the movement, taking their rightful

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place among the Right’s well-researched larger-than-life intellectuals, fervent anticommunists, and working-class whites, who resisted busing, aYrmative action, and equal opportunity for women and minorities.14 Yet the chapters in this volume make clear that more remains to be done to thoroughly interrogate the life, times, and legacy of Arizona’s favorite son. The three sections (“Goldwater’s Arizona and Arizona’s Goldwater,” “ The Goldwater Moment,” and “Beyond 1964 and Goldwater Conservatism”) each situate the statesman in a place, time, or milieu that represents a critical component of his larger career and inXuence. Together, this volume’s scholars, who admittedly do not always agree with one another, oVer a fundamental reconsideration of twentieth-century America. The West looms large in this retelling. Despite the evocative image of cowboy conservatives ruling these arid states, this territory was not innately conservative. Indeed, Goldwater Wrst sought public oYce because liberalism was so potent and powerful. The 1950s, moreover, were not a fallow period in national or GOP politics but a decade marked by movement building, intraparty warfare, and a concerted challenge to postwar liberalism. This book’s authors also highlight the importance of power, showcasing the relationship between the movement’s cadre of elite businessmen, newsmen, and intellectuals and their supporters at the grassroots, or sagebrush, level. In these pages, Johnson’s 1964 victory seems decidedly hollow. Goldwater and his handlers reached out to voters with electoral strategies and political arguments that established a base of support for modern conservatism and a blueprint for success in later campaigns. Yet contributors also make clear that winning the war in 1980 did not end political acrimony—not within Washington, the GOP, or the conservative movement itself. Social issues were divisive in these years, and even more so in the decade after the senator’s death, when religion continued to seem poised to tear apart the rightwing coalition that had once relied on faith and morality to forge a postwar challenge to a liberalism that the historians herein show to be far from hegemonic. The chapters in “Goldwater’s Arizona and Arizona’s Goldwater” begin this book with a reconsideration of the senator’s personal politics in regard to his speciWc relationship to the Arizona environment, the industry-minded Chamber of Commerce and Republican Party,

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and the Mexican national and Mexican American populations. Andrew Needham shows a Goldwater far diVerent than the one libertarians championed in the new millennium. The senator was a western explorer with a deep knowledge of and respect and reverence for the Colorado River, which snakes its way through the Grand Canyon. His famed 1940 trip catapulted him into Arizona politics, not on the city council—that came later—but on the Colorado River Commission, where Goldwater served as a spokesman for and champion of federal reclamation. These early experiences in the Arizona wilderness oVer new insights into his career, beyond his dedication to goodgovernment politics, opposition to liberal trade union policies, and antipathy toward the general increase in the number of federal agencies. His water politics also informed his developing views of federalism, which proved thoughtful of how to balance local, state, and federal power in the face of new public infrastructure demands, environmental catastrophes, and economic crises in this desert state. The government’s role in promoting industry remained a part of the senator’s politics even after he left the commission. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s work hence explores the business conservatism at the heart of Goldwater’s career but also the refounding of the Arizona Republican Party in the 1940s. In the postwar period, boosters worked within the state GOP to counter liberal-regulatory reforms that they considered roadblocks to economic dynamism and postwar prosperity. The retailer and his contemporaries, Phoenix’s business elite, had no interest in remaining a frontier outpost trading in commodities. But to entice investors, they Wrst went into politics. In public oYce, they were able to shape the labor, tax, and regulatory statecraft that would make Phoenix an oasis from the liberalism policing Steelbelt manufacturers. But Goldwater and the other investment-focused Republicans struggled to obtain political power. Registered Democrats outnumbered them four to one in the early postwar period. The GOP thus aggressively courted outside their ranks, including the Mexican Americans who, unlike in the South, Northeast, and Midwest, made up a signiWcant share of the western electorate. Micaela Anne Larkin demonstrates that Phoenix’s business conservatives used the language of individual freedom, opportunity, and advancement to court these voters. Republicans asserted that they and their party were colorblind and hell-bent on meritocratic advancement. To secure their support

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for anti-union legislation, for example, Arizona Republicans argued in English- and Spanish-language newspapers that these laws would prevent unions from discriminating against Mexican Americans seeking work, because jobs would not be assigned through segregated hiring halls. This race-neutral rhetoric was as transformative in Arizona as it was in the American South. By the 1970s, conservative, Chicano Democrats would challenge Republicans with platforms dedicated to the same business-Wrst, opportunity-focused principles that were once well outside the state’s mainstream politics. “ The Goldwater Moment” really took place far from the arid Valley of the Sun. This next set of chapters oVers new insights into the conXuence of forces that brought the senator into national politics, reshaped the conservative movement, and laid the foundation for its success after the 1964 election. These scholars draw out the importance of dramatic postwar Wghts within the GOP, battles waged by Republican women, conservative media kingpins, and Southern Democrats. Michael Bowen oVers fresh insights into the factionalism within the Republican camp during the 1950s, the very divisions that became the hallmark of the 1960 and 1964 GOP presidential primaries and a part of the rallying cry for conservatives frustrated with Eisenhower’s moderate politics. Bowen asserts that the early schism between Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft had more to do with personality and strategy than ideology. Philosophical diVerences within the GOP became more pronounced after Taft’s death early in that decade. Thereafter, liberal Republicans, with Ike as their champion, began to systematically use patronage and power to purge the party of conservatives. This campaign only heightened the very real policy and doctrinal conXicts between these wings, setting up the historic showdown between Goldwater and Rockefeller in 1964. The Right, as Nicole Hemmer makes clear, was aided in its quest to take control of the GOP and build an enthusiastic constituency by the media dealers. They shaped the tone, rhetoric, and argument for modern conservatism, and their Wrst real darling, Goldwater. Prominent publishers, most notably William F. Buckley and Clarence Manion, chose the face of their movement, but it was Goldwater’s tumultuous presidential run that extended conservative pundits’ reach. Interest in the candidate increased the readership of Human Events and National Review and conservative tracts such as A Choice Not an Echo (1964)

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and None Dare Call It Treason (1964). Thus, though Goldwater lost, the Right’s news magnates were poised to continue the Wght in the press and use their resources to expand their audiences, particularly as they leapt from the page to the small screen (Buckley’s talk show Firing Line was in fact well watched). The right-wing media thus became the center of a movement that only grew in size, strength, and respectability. Yet, in the process, the senator became just one of the movement’s fair-haired boys, especially as this shoot-from-thehip westerner became increasingly critical of the so-called movement conservatives who joined the cause after 1964. Region was also of critical importance to modern conservatism in these years. Joseph Crespino reconsiders Goldwater’s stunning victory in four southern states, the most important being South Carolina. These wins represented not only an early permutation of the infamous “southern strategy” to appeal to retrograde whites but also dedicated work by southern conservatives to keep the region under one-party rule, but now the Grand Old Party would reign. The notable early converts were businessman Roger Milliken, who pledged chunks of his textile fortune to National Review and other conservative causes, South Carolinian political columnist William Workman, and, of course, Senator Strom Thurmond. They laid the groundwork for Goldwater’s 1964 southern inroads. They promoted him among their contemporaries, Xew him out to meet white southern voters, and helped meld the Arizonan’s more moderate civil rights positions to the range of southern responses to the black freedom movement and federal civil rights policies. The early 1960s, Crespino asserts, constituted a critical moment for this nascent Sunbelt alliance, which became strained in later years as federal guarantees for equality, opportunity, and justice limited the extent to which headlining politicians, even Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, could openly align themselves with white southern reactionaries. Building a base also takes center stage in Michelle Nickerson’s work, which recasts the 1964 election as a critical moment for Republican women. Before the mid-1960s, housewives had not been the symbol of tradition and domesticity that second-wave feminists deWned themselves against. In the supposedly stagnant 1950s, homemakers, whatever their politics, had been active in and outside the home to care for their families, rally neighbors to various causes, and serve their

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country through political activism. When Goldwater ran into trouble in the last months of his run, when many voters recoiled at his tough, standoYsh persona, campaign staVers tried to transform the senator into a dedicated crusader for morality. His handlers created a “grassroots” women’s organization, the Mothers for Moral America (MMA), which included prominent conservative women, most memorably Nancy Reagan. Leaders at the state and local level sought members, but the organization was largely a front group for the Goldwater campaign, which released the ill-fated, controversial documentary Choice as an MMA production. Nickerson argues that this strategy represented the recognition of Republican housewives’ dedication to the cause during the movement building that had taken place in the decades prior to the senator’s storied run. Yet MMA also proved a harbinger of things to come. The very tone of Choice, with its lewd scenes of lawlessness and debauchery, and the group’s name preWgured a critical shift in twentieth-century housewife populism. By the 1970s, women tended to engage with politics on single issues, such as the Equal Rights Amendment or the right to an abortion, the very same controversies that threatened then and in later years to tear the nation, the GOP, and the conservative movement apart. The Wnal set of chapters thus traces Goldwater’s place within the conservative movement as the landscape of American politics shifted from dismantling the New Deal to battling over personal liberties, civil rights, federal land and water policies, religious freedoms, and social values. The senator remained a champion, as Elizabeth Tandy Shermer shows in her second chapter in this volume, of the kind of probusiness statecraft that he and his fellow Phoenix Republicans perfected back in Arizona. Yet this elder senator was no longer a lone voice on Capitol Hill. As Phoenix developed into a center of manufacturing and commerce, the city’s business elite forged alliances with national CEOs, who were also unhappy with liberal economic policies and inXuential in the broad conservative movement. These connections catapulted Arizonans into right-wing business groups and political networks. Goldwater played a critical role. With his prestige and inXuence, he ensured that Washington was well marbled with Phoenicians even before Reagan rode in from California in 1981. Goldwater, for example, helped name two Arizonans, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, to the Supreme Court. Both shared Goldwater’s

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economic views and made judicial decisions that further aided the rise of a governing philosophy antithetical to modern liberalism. Yet the rest of the chapters in this Wnal section reXect the way in which all conservatives, be they of Goldwater’s ilk or not, had to adjust to new expectations for environmental protections, personal and reproductive rights, and cultural norms. These issues transformed liberal– conservative political combat in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Brian Allen Drake describes the ways in which Goldwater accommodated, furthered, critiqued, and redirected key parts of the postwar environmental movement. On this issue, the senator was not a man left to the margins of the party but a western conservative who plunged into an issue that cut across social movements, party lines, and political ideologies. This ardent supporter of reclamation in the name of industrialization became a champion of Richard Nixon’s eVorts to employ national solutions to environmental threats and ended his career by embracing local control, wise use, and free-market solutions. In the process, Goldwater’s reversals and equivocations symbolize the ways in which conservatives did and continue to adapt their devotion to free-market capitalism to post-1964 political challenges. Yet business conservatives also found themselves adrift within national politics, the GOP, and their own movement in these years, an era deWned by the culture wars breaking out in courtrooms, on campaign trails, and in newspapers. William Link’s contribution explores the corporate Right’s dislocation by examining Goldwater’s relationship with Jesse Helms. The Arizonan proved both an inspiration and a frustration to the North Carolinian and other religious conservatives who were emerging as the conservative movement’s new icons. By comparing these two political luminaries, Link thus unearths the fundamental tensions that plague the movement today and inform the contemporary confusion about Goldwater conservatism. Still, is this secular, “Green Goldwater” the senator whom most of his contemporary champions remember and invoke? His esteemed biographer Robert Goldberg answers this question in an afterword that reXects on Goldwater’s place in history and memory. Goldberg traces how the Arizonan’s public image mutated after 1964, 1980, and 1994 and oVers a pointed critique of contemporary liberals, including Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who have famously claimed the senator’s politics as akin to their own.

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Taken together, then, these historians perhaps say the most, not about Goldwater, but about tectonic shifts in US politics over much of the twentieth century. The retailer’s early years in the West demonstrate that race, free enterprise, and the environment clearly shaped both the senator and his contemporaries. The chapters on the 1964 campaign emphasize that Goldwater may have lost the battle but he energized journalists, publishers, women’s groups, and white southerners to move past the defeat and ultimately, as George Will declared in Goldwater on Goldwater, “win the war.” But, of course, the victory came from issues not a part of Goldwater’s political bread-and-butter. Decisive changes in the postwar economy, the environment, and the state’s guarantee to personal privacy transformed both politics and the modern conservative movement after 1964. Goldwater remained an ardent champion of freedom, opportunity, and advancement even as the meanings of these familiar tropes changed after his run. In the end, he died in 1998 as respected, controversial, and famous as he had been thirty-four years earlier.

Notes 1. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Re-Inventing Goldwater Conservatism,” New Politics 12 (Summer 2008): 87–91; Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 723–43. 2. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 3–66; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Sunbelt Boosterism: Industrial Recruitment, Economic Development, and Growth Politics in the Developing Sunbelt,” in Sunbelt Rising, ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 31–57. 3. Shermer, “Sunbelt Boosterism.” 4. Ibid. 5. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95 (December 2008): 678–709, esp. 702. 6. Ibid.; Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955); Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); David Stebenne, Modern Republicanism: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 7. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 115–49;

Introduction

15

Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York: Victor, 1960), esp. 3, 10. 8. John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 169–220; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 149–240, esp. 149; PhillipsFein, Invisible Hands, 115–49; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 99–488; Michelle Nickerson, “Moral Mothers and Goldwater Girls,” in The Conservative Sixties, ed. David Farber and JeV Roche (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 51–62. 9. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 241–338. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., esp. 116, 308, 330–32. 12. Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (rev. 1961; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 134–35. 13. CC Goldwater, “Why McCain Has Lost Our Vote,” October 23, 2008, HuYngton Post, http://www.huYngtonpost.com/cc-goldwater/why-mccain -has-lost-our-v_b_137150.html; Barry M. Goldwater Jr., “Why Barry Goldwater Couldn’t Support Obama,” October 23, 2008, HuYngton Post, http://www .huYngtonpost.com/barry-m-goldwater-jr/why-barry-goldwater-could_b_137389 .html. 14. Julian E. Zelizer, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History 38 (June 2010): 367–92; Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “American Conservatism: A Historiographic Renaissance without Much of a Reconsideration,” Journal of American Studies 46 (April 2012): 481–88.

1 The Conscience of a Conservationist Barry Goldwater and the Colorado River andrew needham

on the evening of july 15, 1940, Barry Goldwater sat on a sandy beach beside the Colorado River. Contemplating the river running through canyons half a mile high, Goldwater wrote his thoughts on entering the river’s main stream that day. “One can sense the might of this river merely by looking at it, and even here, where it Xows wide and smooth, one knows that this water is diVerent from any we have traveled in.” Even in this calm section, the river’s potential power was evident. “Water that comes roaring through here goes on to sculpt rugged, beautiful formations, and to make a rough, fast, dangerous river that forever will challenge the ingenuity of man.” Both the river’s beauty and its diYculty, he wrote, required protection. In the pages of his journal, he praised Theodore Roosevelt, who saw “what private interests were doing and how far they were going in spoiling the area” and acted to protect much of the river. Even the resources made available by Boulder Dam did not reduce Goldwater’s feeling that the river required protection. As the light dimmed on the canyon walls, Goldwater closed his entry for Camp 5. “ The fact that downstream these waters are quieted by man for his use 19

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doesn’t impress me now. We are on the Colorado—that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.”1 The Barry Goldwater who sat on the banks of the Colorado seems to bear little resemblance to the Wgure now widely regarded as initiating the conservative revival that has lasted almost Wfty years. Once known primarily for suVering massive defeat in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater has come to be regarded as the most inXuential loser in American political history, the tip of the spear of a conservative movement that, by the 1980s, would dominate the Republican Party.2 Free-market conservatives, in particular, have claimed Goldwater as their own, arguing he represents an untainted conservatism, free of sentiment or piety. As George Will argued in a recent foreword to The Conscience of a Conservative, free markets and limited government alone mattered to Goldwater. “Conservatisms grounded in religious reverence, nostalgia, and resistance to the permanent revolution of conditions in a capitalist, market society,” Will wrote, were “unintelligible, even repellant, to Goldwater, if he had taken time to notice them.”3 Historians examining Goldwater’s early career have generally agreed, without embracing Will’s hyperbole, that Wghting the New Deal and protecting private enterprise represented the core of Goldwater’s early political philosophy.4 There is much truth in these claims. Goldwater’s Wrst overtly political acts were columns in the Phoenix Gazette excoriating Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. As a Phoenix city council member from 1949 to 1952, he touted business as the model for government. He ran for Senate in 1952, asking, “Do you believe in expanding federal government? Are you willing to surrender more of your liberty? Do you want federal bureaus and federal agencies to take over an ever increasing portion of your life?”5 Goldwater’s early politics seem clear. He was a businessman and conservative crusader, a man of simple principles who saw few contradictions within them. Goldwater’s experiences with the Colorado River show a diVerent side of his early career. In 1940, Goldwater Xoated the river from Green River, Utah, to the headwaters of Lake Mead. Following his trip, he traveled the state, exhibiting a Wlm of the journey and lecturing on the river. Goldwater’s renown as a river runner led to an appointment to Arizona’s Colorado River Commission, a board dedicated to claiming the river’s water for Arizona. Examining these experiences reveals

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a Goldwater incongruous to most portraits. Rather than seeing Arizona as a place that, in Will’s words, “had precious little past to conserve,” Goldwater aimed to walk in the footsteps of Spanish explorers, Mormon pioneers, and John Wesley Powell, and to understand eternity itself by experiencing the power and danger of the river Wrsthand.6 Rather than championing the market and limited government, he lobbied for federal projects he considered vital to Arizona’s development. These experiences shaped his politics. Service on the Colorado River Commission familiarized him with the key issues of western water development, and running the river helped form his conceptions of freedom and its limits. Knowing the Colorado, he would later write, “is to learn freedom and patience. . . . I like to think that all human eVort takes place within the context of something permanent, like the river and its canyons.”7 Exploring these little-examined parts of his career locates Goldwater’s political development in place. Arizona, like most of the American West, lay at the intersection of federal land policies and local growth politics. As Goldwater began his political career, the federal government controlled 75 percent of Arizona’s land. Even as he challenged the New Deal’s labor policies and business regulations, Goldwater argued that Phoenix’s and Arizona’s growth depended on gaining control of those resources, particularly the waters of the Colorado River. Like generations of westerners who preceded him, he called upon the federal government to enact policies that would spur local development.8 Such policies were not limited to development of the Colorado’s material resources. As the Southwest grew, Goldwater saw continuing value in preserving portions of the river from development. Flowing through majestic canyons far from the region’s growing metropolises, the river, he argued, represented the timeless natural beauty that held important lessons for modern society and distinguished Arizona from other places. Goldwater not only had deep aVection for the river’s beauty but realized that tourists from within and beyond Arizona would Xock to experience it. Goldwater’s early career thus illustrates the two visions of nature that underlay Arizona’s growth politics: a developmentalist ethos that viewed the river’s natural resources as rightful possessions of the state that were vital to Arizona’s growth, and a preservationist ethos that saw natural places like the Grand Canyon and Colorado River as central

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to Arizona’s unique character. In attempting to balance the development of natural resources with the preservation of places with particular natural beauty, Goldwater inherited dilemmas that had racked environmental politics since the conservation era. In addressing the dilemma of how both to use and preserve the river, Goldwater oriented his deWnition of “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time” to the needs of Phoenix and Arizona, creating a local version of conservation’s utilitarian dictum. In doing so, his interactions with the Colorado over time shaped both his politics and the river itself.

“ This Strange River”: Knowing the Colorado from a Boat In late 1939, Barry Goldwater wrote a letter to Norman Nevills, inquiring into the possibility of joining his upcoming expedition down the Colorado River. Nevills responded quickly, inviting him on the trip from Green River, Wyoming, to the headwaters of Lake Mead. For $600, Nevills wrote, Goldwater could share the experiences and adventures of southwestern explorers. “ The Colorado,” he wrote, “is just as tough rough and dangerous as it was when our forerunners Powell, Stone, Stanton, and others took it.”9 Despite Goldwater’s interest, accepting Nevills’s oVer proved diYcult. The trip would last approximately two months, and Goldwater’s wife, Peggy, was pregnant with their third child. Even so, Goldwater decided to make the trip after acceding to Peggy’s demands that he cut ten days oV the trip by beginning farther downstream. In early 1940 he wrote to a friend, “I have wanted to take this trip for so long that the very thought of it gives me the willies.”10 Goldwater arrived in Green River, Utah, on July 9, 1940, with two packs loaded with Wlm, three cameras, including a Kodak 8mm movie camera, and a fresh notebook. “Here I was,” he began his journal, “starting out to do something that has held a fascination for me ever since I Wrst heard of the Colorado River . . . the same river that intrigued my forefathers eighty years ago.”11 Goldwater’s journals provide an intimate look at his experience of the Colorado. Written each night after the day’s travel had ended, they record his experiences

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from mundane details—“We have two chief occupations: swatting deerXies that have the bite of a gimlet, and shoving boats oV sandbars”—to ontological reXections—“We were placing ourselves at the beginning of all time and gazing ahead to the years in which we live, high on the top.”12 Above all, though, the journals show Goldwater coming to know the river in a new way. He already “knew” the canyon and the river from trips since childhood, from studying their history, and from his photography from the canyon’s rims. Nevills’s boats, however, imparted new, intimate knowledge. Goldwater came to know the river’s taste by drinking boiled river water. He learned how its rapids created dangerous holes as they fell over barely submerged rocks and how to escape them with slight maneuvers of the oars. He found that swimming in the river produced a strange second skin, a coat of silt that “dries as tight as a wiener skin and is about as comfortable.”13 Goldwater’s understanding of the river changed signiWcantly over the course of his journey. In his Wrst journal entries, perhaps no word appears as often as “respect.” After the fourth day of his trip, he wrote, “It is diYcult for me to describe my feelings as we swung onto this broad stream. . . . But I think my strongest emotion was profound respect.” He professed respect for Nevills’s handling of his boats, for the farmers of southern Utah trying to eke a living out of arid Welds, and for John Wesley Powell, the Wrst American to travel by boat down the river. But most of all, he professed respect for the river itself. “I have never imagined the Colorado as impassible or killing,” he wrote at Camp 5, “but I have always known that when I did confront it my introduction would be tempered with a deep respect for these rapids and the power of the water that produces them.”14 Goldwater had good reason for this respect. River running was far from the popular recreational activity it would later become. Goldwater Xoated the river before Glen Canyon Dam controlled the river’s upstream Xow. Summer monsoons could produce Xoods that reached 200,000 cubic feet per second, sending boulders and tree trunks crashing through its canyons. He traveled in Xat bottom wood boats that Nevills had designed to fall stern Wrst through the rapids with an oarsman making the quick adjustments necessary to avoid submerged rocks. Unlike the enormous, buoyant rafts made of inXatable bridge pontoons that would become standard equipment after World War II,

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Nevills’s boats swamped easily and required constant patching. Given such diYculties, few people attempted the journey. Goldwater was only the seventy-third person to travel through the Grand Canyon by boat. In previous expeditions, several people had drowned or died of injuries incurred in the river’s rapids. During the trip, the party would have almost no contact with the outside world. Communication was available at only two spots on the river—Lee’s Ferry near the Arizona– Utah border and Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon. Leaving the river at any other spot required hiking steep canyons that reached up to a mile high.15 As Goldwater traveled down the river, he mentioned respect less frequently. This change owed partially to the exhaustion that accompanied his journey. In his next-to-last entry, Goldwater wrote of his longing for his own bed—“Sleeping in the open is one of the most overrated opportunities of camping”—and detailed the irritants that besieged his sleep: “At home nary a grain of sand Xecks my dreams. Out here where men are men, my dreams are born in sand, spend their childhood in the sand, and whirlwind around me in blasts of cutting, biting, itching, penetrating, everlasting emissaries of hell.” Respect no longer seemed his foremost emotion after bugs “carrying knives, sabers, and broken bottles . . . left a divers collection of tools and torture Wrmly implanted” in his Xesh.16 Respect also seemed less necessary as Goldwater grew accustomed to the river. Apart from his encounters with the river’s sand and insects, Goldwater sought to test himself against the river. While Nevills had outWtted his boats with small outboard motors, Goldwater spent much of his Wrst days on the river petitioning to row the boats. “Having set up a little howl, protesting that we should not row, Norm let me row for the Wrst forty-Wve minutes, towing the other two boats.” For Nevills, experienced on the Colorado, rowing represented unwise exertion. For Goldwater, however, rowing allowed him to match his own body’s energy against the river and surrounding environment. “Rowing a six-hundred-pound boat loaded with three people while the temperature is registering 105 in the shade (and little shade) is no fun but it is good exercise and I intend to row for at least one hour a day.”17 The relative silence of rowing also allowed Goldwater to note the birds and wildlife that gathered along the river’s shore. Noting how animals Xed at the motor’s sound, Goldwater wrote, “I prefer

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the whisper of oars to the roar of that damned little motor, and I’ll be glad when we reach the rapids and can take it oV.”18 In those rapids, Goldwater developed a new understanding of the river. The journal’s Wrst mentions of the river’s rapids are Wlled with trepidation and excitement. Viewing his Wrst major rapid in Cataract Canyon, Goldwater compared the “booming that reverberated in our ears” to “the might and fury of Niagra.”19 While asserting, “Any job, no matter how hazardous, can be accomplished safely if you keep all the dangers constantly in mind and do nothing to tempt fate into taking a crack at you,” he expressed anxiety about the rapids in Cataract for days, continually asking Nevills how they compared to small rapids the party had encountered upstream. After passing Cataract Canyon, Goldwater Wlled the pages of his journal with detailed accounts of particular rapids—“I will swear I hit bottom going into one hole, we went so deep”—as well as with diagrams of particular rapids and the position he took in the boat.20 As the party proceeded downstream, however, Goldwater became conWdent in his newfound abilities, asking to pilot boats himself through rapids he increasingly viewed with nonchalance. By Camp 9, only Wve days after Cataract, he wrote, “Boats become monotonous and rapids more so. Run one, you’ve run ’em all.”21 As he became increasingly attuned to the patterns of rapids, he dismissed his earlier anxieties as the misperceptions of those with little experience. “ These rapids involve nothing more than a little fast work and the possibility of a good dunking. . . . I have come to believe that if one disregards the ominous roar of these rapids and the halo of awesomeness that people have built around them, they present little more than physical problems that can be easily overcome.”22 As Goldwater gained physical experience with the river, he came to know it in a new way. No longer was it a dangerous torrent; it became a challenge that an experienced, self-reliant individual could easily manage. While Goldwater became comfortable matching his own energy against the power of the Xowing river, he remained in awe of the Colorado’s natural beauty. On the day his party entered the Grand Canyon, he wrote, “One senses an immediate change although none is visible at the moment one enters. The air seems to be charged with an aura of bigness: buttes tower, walls are higher, promise of beauty lies everywhere.”23 Already an accomplished photographer, Goldwater

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had developed a keen eye for the “promise of beauty,” but the canyon’s majesty held more than just aesthetic appeal.24 During their family trips to northern Arizona, his mother, Josephine Goldwater, a sporadic churchgoer, had taught her children that “you can Wnd God walking through the desert, or walking through the forest, or climbing the mountains just as easily as you can Wnd God in a church.”25 Goldwater’s journal echoed these beliefs. “At this sunset hour the canyon walls are indescribably beautiful, and I fear the magic of photography can never record what I see now. The tall spires near the rim of the canyon . . . look as though God has reached out and swiped a brush of golden paint across them, gilding those rocks in the bright glow of the setting sun.”26 Even when Goldwater did not articulate such experiences in terms of seeing God, he suggested the canyon’s beauty resisted representation. “ The lenses of my camera will never record,” he wrote, “what my eyes see and my hand so feebly tries to capture in words.” In personal experience with the river and canyons, Goldwater suggested, one could know a higher power, whether in the form of God or of time itself. Within the deepest, oldest section of the Grand Canyon, he wrote, “We were not merely looking up at the South Rim when we Wrst entered this canyon, nor were we looking up at the North Rim. We were placing ourselves at the beginning of all time and gazing ahead to the years in which we live, high on the top.”27 The seemingly unchanged nature of the river also allowed Goldwater to imagine the experiences of its original explorers. From the depths of the Grand Canyon, Goldwater wrote, “How often have I stood on the rims of this canyon and yearned for the day when I could explore the depths of this masterful creation of water and wind and time. . . . It is beautiful, but in a way diVerent from the top. My feelings of surprise and awe must equal the surprise of García López de Cárdenas, Wrst white man to see the canyon four hundred years before me.”28 Again and again, Goldwater returned to the history and experiences of explorers and pioneers, including Spaniards and Mormons as well as Anglo-Americans. At Hole-in-the Rock, Goldwater paused to acknowledge the Mormon pioneers who had carved a trail down the steep canyon walls in order to establish communities south of the river. “I tipped my hat, not to the beauty of the place . . . but to the courage, the will, and the zeal that drove these Mormons to

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accomplish their mission. . . . The West has never suVered from the migrations of people like the individuals composing the Mormon company.”29 Goldwater’s journal insisted that the journey down the river had allowed him to better understand the courage, bravery, and will of earlier generations that had made Arizona, as well as to better understand the individualism that westward expansion had supposedly imbued in the American character. While Goldwater’s journals provide an intimate look at his daily experiences on the river, they are far from an unmediated source. Goldwater traveled to the river carrying not only notebooks, cameras, and Wlm, but ideas about nature and wilderness characteristic of his moment in time. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, wilderness became, particularly for elite Americans, a newly meaningful space. Traveling to wild places supposedly allowed experience of the disappearing frontier, discovering self-reliance and individualism rarely accessible in the daily life of a businessman.30 By the time he arrived at the river, Goldwater had also spent years reading and collecting material related to previous exploration of the river, as part of his larger fascination with Arizona’s pioneer history. Indeed, Goldwater added extensive sections on the river’s natural and human history to his journal after his return to Phoenix. In acquiring a personal mastery of the wild Colorado and marveling at the sublime beauty of the Grand Canyon, Goldwater experienced what he came looking to Wnd, both a unique personal challenge and new connection to his home state. Goldwater also recorded those experiences for posterity, not only in his journal but on Wlm, forming the source material for a post-journey Wlm that was, in the historian Peter Iverson’s words, “part adventure story and part geology lesson.”31 That the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon were the places that Goldwater chose to display such experiences of wilderness, however, indicates the broader importance Goldwater placed on the canyon’s preservation. His journal detailed the vital necessity of protecting the Grand Canyon from economic development. Explaining the founding of Grand Canyon National Monument, Goldwater detailed that private interests, both local and national interests, had attempted to block the park. “Opposition came from stockmen, railroads, power companies, and Wnally from Coconino County oYcials,” as well as from tour guides and gold and silver miners. Goldwater described

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their political eVorts to block the park as a “snake . . . weaving its way in and out of the corridors of our senate chambers” and celebrated Roosevelt for taking executive action in establishing the park. “President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1908, seeing what private interests were doing and how far they were going in spoiling the area, made part of this canyon a national monument.”32 The interest in preserving the experience of an “untouched” canyon, for Goldwater, transcended the beneWts of commercial use, even those uses attached to accepted property rights.33 But Goldwater never viewed the river and canyon primarily as national property. While the federal government might be an important ally in their protection, the river and canyon remained particularly Arizonan. Recalling the moment his party crossed from Utah into Arizona, Goldwater wrote, “I noticed immediately a more bracing quality in the air; a clearer, bluer sky; a more buoyant note in the song of the birds; a snap and sparkle in the air that only Arizona air has, and I said to myself, without reference to a map, that we were now home.”34 While the conceit of Goldwater’s words—that the air of Arizona was literally diVerent—seems absurd, the passage highlights the powers Goldwater ascribed to his home state. He knew he was in Arizona because of his physical perception of the air, the sky, and the birds. Goldwater also sought to ensure that others would notice the diVerences. Pausing at what he approximated to be the state line, he used white lead to draw a line on the red sandstone wall of the canyon. On the upstream side, he wrote “UTAH”; on the downstream side, “ARIZONA WELCOMES YOU.”35 Goldwater did not intend this line as a personal marker. Indeed, he admitted that he had drawn a line “oV the actual state line by one hundred feet or so,” placing the line where it might be seen by people who followed. “ This spot is more accessible and easily visible, thus preferable to the spot designated on the map, which is a way back from the river; our eVorts,” he wrote, “would have gone to waste there.”36 What were those eVorts? Goldwater’s actions on the river—writing a journal he would distribute to friends and colleagues, creating a Wlm about the expedition that he would exhibit throughout the state—suggest that Goldwater viewed his adventure as a chance to spur broader interest in the river. But he also saw opportunities to promote his home state. Since the mid-1930s, Goldwater had been

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involved with Phoenix’s Chamber of Commerce eVorts to promote the “Valley of the Sun” as a vacation and residential destination. These eVorts focused not only on Phoenix, but on the diVerences between the populous, crowded East and vast, wide-open Arizona.37 By drawing a line on the canyon wall, Goldwater sought to mark the place the river became Arizonan. Such lines mattered to Goldwater. Far from arbitrary distinctions imposed on a natural system, the border between Arizona and Utah meant that the Colorado River, while within the state’s borders, belonged to Arizona. The river’s natural beauty, including the Grand Canyon, represented qualities that made the state unique, and worthy of attention from those future visitors that Goldwater’s words welcomed. As his trip reached its conclusion, Goldwater reXected on the changes the trip had wrought in him. His body, he wrote, was toned and tan from days on the river. A month and a half outdoors, especially given the party’s limited supply of bourbon, had left him rejuvenated. At Camp 24, Goldwater wrote, “ The wagon is a Wne thing . . . the lining has been restored to my stomach and I sweat water instead of Old Taylor.”38 Not only had the trip remade his body, it had revitalized his spirit and enthusiasm for life. “ The beauty and uniqueness of the river gave us suYcient spiritual rest to atone for the physical and mental rest we may have lost. . . . Back in civilization, clean and happy, I say good night and good-by.”39 “Back in civilization.” Those words illustrate the extent to which Goldwater’s new knowledge of the river was tied to a larger understanding of Arizona and the Southwest. Even before Phoenix and Arizona experienced some of the most dramatic growth in the nation’s history, Goldwater divided the state between spaces of modern economic life and antimodern refuges from it. Indeed, this was, for Goldwater, an ideal balance. Phoenix, Arizona’s urban capital, would provide the beneWts of civilization—economic opportunity, personal advancement, and bedding. The Colorado River and the canyon lands of northern Arizona, the state’s primitive wildernesses, would provide refuge from what Arizona Highways magazine called the “warped pavement-mindedness of our city streets.”40 Arizona, which brought modern civilization and unchanged nature in close proximity, represented one solution to the problems of modern life. Preserving natural spaces thus became central to the state’s promotional identity.

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But it also remained vital for Goldwater himself, who continually returned to northern Arizona even as his national proWle dramatically increased while Wlling his home and oYce with his photos of the canyon country. Though he valued the river as a spiritual place and as a potential tourist site, the needs of Arizona also demanded it be a material resource. As Goldwater and other Arizona oYcials increasingly looked to the Colorado River to satisfy their state’s demand for water and power, he saw the river in quite diVerent terms than from within Nevills’s boats. To meet this demand, the Colorado could not be separate from the modern world of Phoenix; rather, they needed to be brought together.

Arizona Must Have Water “or Die”: The Politics of Colorado River Water Eight years after his trip down the Colorado, Goldwater stood before the Kingman (Arizona) Rotary Club. After screening a Wlm of his trip through the river’s churning rapids, Goldwater brieXy told the capacity crowd of “the unsurpassed beauty that radiates from the tall sandstone canyon walls” and of the character and bravery of the river’s early explorers. Quickly, however, he shifted the tone of his speech and began explaining the “potentialities” of harnessing the river. “God put the river here for the service of man,” Goldwater told the crowd. The river’s resources—irrigation water and electrical power—would allow new development in Arizona, allowing it to escape the shadow of California, a state that received almost all of the beneWts from Boulder Dam despite contributing “absolutely nothing to the river” and wasting “a great percentage of the water it takes from the channel.” With “its rightful share” of the river’s resources, the state could become a center of new, clean industry, even while its farms continued to grow apace.41 Goldwater was uniquely suited to promote Arizona’s claim to the Colorado. His trip transformed him into a public authority on the river and its canyons. Goldwater thereafter worked to spread his new knowledge of the river. After a secretary typed his journal, Goldwater assembled the resulting forty pages into a pamphlet, distributing his observations and reXections on the river and canyon to friends and

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business acquaintances. Goldwater also produced a thirty-minute Wlm featuring footage he had shot during the journey. With melodramatic narration and music, the Wlm provided a unique vantage point of the inner canyon’s tumultuous rapids and the bravery of the river runners. Initial screenings of the Wlm for friends and clubs in Phoenix brought an enthusiastic response, and Goldwater soon began exhibiting it around the state. By the end of 1941, over nineteen thousand people had seen the Wlm. As he recalled, “I got to showing that damn thing as often as Wve times a day.”42 With free time, disposable income, and contacts across the state, Goldwater easily built his reputation as an expert on the river. The presentations themselves bolstered his image. Audiences not only viewed the Wlm and heard Goldwater’s lectures about the river but saw Goldwater himself, imagining him as the inheritor of the legacy of John Wesley Powell. As one viewer remembered, Goldwater appeared “a bronze god who had just beaten the river.” Ironically, Goldwater, the novice river runner, became far more widely known as a river expert than did Norman Nevills, who had led the trip down the Colorado. Goldwater himself claimed the Wlm gave him the statewide notoriety that enabled his political rise. It “gave me access to so damn many Arizonans that it was just a natural step for me to go into politics.”43 His new expertise made Goldwater a natural candidate for appointment to Arizona’s Colorado River Commission.44 Created by the Arizona legislature following World War II, the commission aimed to acquire Colorado River water for the irrigation of farms in central Arizona. During the 1920s, farmers in central Arizona had brought an enormous amount of new acreage into production, increasing their holdings by 80 percent over the course of the decade. Initially relying on irrigation water from dams and canals that tapped the Salt and Verde Rivers, as well as groundwater pumping, these farms appeared increasingly imperiled by the limits of these water supplies.45 In 1944, Senator Carl Hayden introduced legislation to create a Central Arizona Project (CAP), designed to bring Colorado River water into the state’s agricultural regions. After the legislation’s initial failure in Congress, the Arizona legislature created the Colorado River Commission to rally support for CAP both within and beyond the state.46 As a member of the Colorado River Commission, Goldwater came to know the river in a new way. Rather than a place of individual

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experience, the river existed as a quantiWable resource. In 1922, the states whose lands contributed water to the Colorado system had entered into the Colorado River Compact, which regulated the river’s development and divided its waters between the states. Setting the river’s annual Xow at 17.5 million acre-feet, the compact envisioned a rational, reliable river. Regardless of cycles of drought or Xood, reclamation oYcials, state authorities, and federal courts would treat the river as if it contained a consistent and steady annual Xow of water. The compact also divided the river, splitting it between an upper basin of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico and a lower basin of Arizona, Nevada, and California. According to the terms of the compact, each basin would receive 8.5 million acre-feet for use within their states.47 The compact represented an understanding of the river vastly different from the appreciation that Goldwater had gained from Nevills’s boats. Rather than a rapidly changing environment, in which distant thunderstorms could bring Xash Xoods roaring down canyons or low water could strand boats on sandbars, the river envisioned by the compact was a dependable quantity of water to be divided between the upper and lower river, ensuring the development of both basins. The legal structures set up by the compact and the political savvy to claim the Colorado’s water, rather than the actual conditions on the river, would determine the river’s course. The compact did not settle conXicts over the river. Disputes arose because the compact vastly exaggerated the river’s annual Xow. Rather than 17.5 million acre-feet, the river averaged closer to 13 million acrefeet.48 Furthermore, the compact did little to settle conXicts between states within the same basins. Beginning with the initial plans to build Boulder (Hoover) Dam, Arizona oYcials feared that river development would neglect their state to beneWt California. Indeed, Arizona was an afterthought in most plans. While the Boulder Canyon Act limited California to 4.4 million acre-feet of the Colorado’s water, California legislators opposed to such limits had their concerns eased by assurances that their state could receive Arizona’s share of 2.8 million acre-feet until Arizona had infrastructure in place to receive its water, infrastructure that the Boulder Canyon Act did not authorize. Such policies led to widespread resentment among Arizonans. Particularly galling was the fact that Arizona had more territory within the

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Colorado River’s watershed than any other state yet received none of the resources made available by Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947). As one Arizona oYcial complained, “The construction proWt goes to Las Vegas, the franchise goes to Nevada; the power goes to Los Angeles; the water goes to Mexico; and Arizona goes to hell.”49 Prior to the 1940s, Arizona oYcials attempted to block most plans to develop the river’s resources. The state legislature refused to ratify the Colorado River Compact, and Arizona’s senators attempted an unsuccessful Wlibuster of the Boulder Canyon Act, holding the Xoor for twenty-one hours before relenting. Governor Benjamin Mouer went as far as deploying the Arizona state militia onto a ferry boat— dubbed the “Arizona Navy” by the Los Angeles Times—in an attempt to block the construction of Parker Dam in 1934.50 These eVorts to stymie development yielded few results. By the end of World War II, the development of the Colorado was proceeding at a rapid pace. Boulder and Parker Dams had been completed, and Davis Dam was under construction, yet all the water and most of the power from these projects Xowed away from Arizona and toward California. Arizona oYcials feared that without a project dedicated to the state, Arizona would be left dry, its economic growth halted before it could truly begin. The Colorado River Commission represented a change in Arizona’s strategy of river development. Rather than attempt to block development that favored California, the commission would lead a campaign to pressure federal legislators and bureaucrats to grant Arizona its share of the river’s resources. Barry Goldwater was at the forefront of these eVorts. Well versed in public speaking and with a broad range of national contacts through his department store, he became the commission’s main spokesman. In public appearances, at screenings of his Wlm, in letters to customers and suppliers around the nation, and in congressional testimony, Goldwater emphasized that harnessing the Colorado River was vital to Arizona’s economic future. Without CAP, Goldwater warned a Phoenix audience in 1948, a third of Arizona’s agricultural capacity— 226,000 acres—would permanently go out of production. Writing to customers in California in 1947, Goldwater argued that Arizona must have its fair share of the Colorado “or die.” Failure to realize the state’s water rights “would wipe out many, many businesses whose relationship to farming is not evident to the unpracticed eye. . . . It

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would mean destroying that much of our real property tax base. It would mean the ruin of more than 4,000 farms.” Goldwater traveled to Washington in 1949 to testify before the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular AVairs. In his testimony, Goldwater contended that Arizona did not seek water to expand irrigated agriculture, merely “to keep land now under cultivation from going back to the desert.” He also wrote to his store’s eastern suppliers, asking them to contact their congressional representative to express support for CAP. In these appeals, Goldwater called not only on his authority as a member of the Colorado River Commission, but on his experience running the river, explaining that he “knew the river as well as anyone” from his journey “through its canyons.”51 Given his reputation as an advocate of limited government, it appears deeply ironic that Barry Goldwater’s Wrst direct experience with the federal government came while lobbying for a costly federal water project (and CAP would ultimately become the most expensive federal reclamation project in history). Close attention to his advocacy for CAP, however, suggests Goldwater held a more complicated view of federal spending than is normally portrayed. Even as he railed against the New Deal’s social legislation and increased regulation of business and led the campaign to pass Arizona’s right-to-work law, Goldwater advocated large-scale federal public works, “the New Deal’s central enterprise” in the words of the historian Jason Scott Smith. Public works, such as the dams built on the Colorado, did not bear the same taint for Goldwater as the New Deal’s support for a social welfare state. Colorado River dams were built by contractors rather than direct federal employees. They were designed to be “self-liquidating,” covering construction costs through the sale of electricity and irrigation water. Furthermore, rather than aiming to create entitlements, binding citizens to federal bureaucrats, they targeted local economic development, enabling the private sector rather than shackling it.52 Goldwater viewed public works such as CAP less as state actions and more as economic necessities. Indeed, after Newsweek’s conservative commentator Raymond Moley questioned the cost of CAP in 1949, Goldwater wrote, “If we go on arguing about the cost of these projects that must be built, we will reach a point some day where we will have starving people and land not producing food for these people.”53 Indeed, Goldwater would support CAP for much of his career,

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reiterating its diVerence from other federal programs. When Goldwater came under attack for his support for CAP during the 1964 presidential campaign, he labeled it a “loan project,” arguing that it was appropriate for the federal government “to do things that we cannot well do for ourselves.”54 Goldwater also insisted that CAP and similar water projects served to guarantee property rights in a desert climate. Growing up in Phoenix, Goldwater learned early in life that land without water had little value. He came of age when the lands around Phoenix became some of the most valuable farmland in the country, “reclaimed” from the desert by the federally sponsored Salt River Project. When he argued to Congress that CAP was vital to preserving “much of our real property tax base” as underground aquifers and local water supplies ran low, Goldwater suggested that water was less a commodity than a right attached to property. Furthermore, he, and the commission, contended that Arizona possessed existing rights to the Colorado that deserved fulWllment. Indeed, the commission’s charter explained its purpose as bringing “that portion of Colorado River water that rightfully belongs to the state” to the farms and communities of central Arizona.55 Federal reclamation, in his view, transformed the state’s legal water rights to a material reality. Much as he had marked the point where Arizona’s portion of the Colorado River began, Goldwater’s actions on the commission sought to delineate and to claim the resources he viewed as the rightful possessions of his home state. The connection he drew between water rights and property rights demonstrates the ways that Goldwater and his colleagues on the Colorado River Commission wove conservative beliefs about the sanctity of property into conservationist doctrine. Early-twentieth-century conservationists had advocated centralized federal management of resources in a quest to create sustainable economic growth and social stability. By the New Deal, they had embedded these beliefs within federal resource policy.56 While Goldwater critiqued the conservationist doctrine that such resources remain federal property in perpetuity, he endorsed the conservationist project in which the state acted to bring resources under development.57 Federally controlled resources could underwrite property rights and boost the local economy, creating long-term growth in central Arizona. Goldwater’s endorsement of the Central Arizona Project in the name of property rights suggests

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the beginnings of a conservative use of the institutions put in place earlier in the century by the conservation movement. Despite Goldwater’s eVorts on the Colorado River Commission, CAP failed to gain congressional approval prior to his Senate career. Passed repeatedly by the Senate, CAP legislation failed in the House of Representatives Wve separate times between 1944 and 1951. The bill faced a daunting coalition of eastern representatives protecting tax dollars and California representatives unwilling to endanger their state’s water supply. Stymied in Congress, Arizona turned to the courts. In July 1952, when Goldwater was in the midst of his inaugural Senate run, Arizona’s attorney general Wled suit against the State of California in federal court, seeking to limit California’s supply of the Colorado River and to force the federal government to provide Colorado River water to Arizona.58 Goldwater’s work on behalf of CAP certainly beneWted his rising political career. His service on the Colorado River Commission kept him in the public eye and established his credentials for defending Arizona’s interests far beyond his home base in Phoenix. Indeed, Goldwater’s 1952 Senate campaign would play on his connection to Arizona in contrast to the frequently absent Ernest McFarland. It also introduced him to the details of reclamation, which represented a vital aspect of Arizona politics. While Goldwater would never do the heavy lifting on CAP that Carl Hayden did, he remained active in its development. Once asked if an elected oYcial from Arizona could oppose a reclamation project, Goldwater quipped, “Well, if he didn’t mind staying home.”59 His early work on behalf of CAP shows more than just political realism, however. It demonstrates his early views about the borders between acceptable and unacceptable federal actions. National programs that underwrote local economic development, that contained at least the Wction of self-liquidation, and that promised to support existing property values and rights were acceptable. Indeed, Goldwater argued that CAP would create greater independence on the local level. Also acceptable, however, was federal action to protect landscapes with unique appeal to visitors within and outside Arizona. Dam-building and wilderness preservation were not antithetical, nor did they represent dependence on the federal government; instead,

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they represented actions to beneWt Arizona, preserving its identity and creating the potential for dynamic growth in local economies.

Afterword: A River Divided Barry Goldwater’s experiences with the Colorado River show a Wgure who Xies in the face of the caricatures of him held by the contemporary Right and Left. Not a pure free-market or limited-government absolutist, he advocated expensive federal public works programs to bring the waters of the Colorado to central Arizona, and the invalidation of land claims that threatened landscapes he held dear. That he did so does not make him a hypocrite. Rather, it reveals that his overriding early interest was the economic growth of Arizona. At times he believed Arizona’s development required frontal assaults on the New Deal state, especially in the form of anti-union right-to-work laws. At other times, however, he sought to utilize existing federal institutions, especially those that managed natural resources, to Arizona’s beneWt. In advocating both the river’s development and its protection from development, Goldwater’s views of the Colorado appear irreconcilable to modern audiences. We have come to believe there is scant middle ground between wilderness and resource development. There is little evidence, however, that Goldwater felt the same. His actions demonstrated a belief that development of the river and the protection of the moral truths that lay within its landscapes were far from antithetical. In believing both projects could be pursued simultaneously, he borrowed ideas about nature from the early-twentieth-century conservation movement and its most famous proponent, Theodore Roosevelt, who stated in his “New Nationalism” speech that “Conservation means development as much as it means protection.”60 Conservationists believed that, with proper management, rivers could provide water and power without impinging on the ability of individuals to experience nature. Later in his career Goldwater would articulate such beliefs directly. When endorsing dams near the Grand Canyon sought by advocates of CAP, he attempted to convince a skeptical audience of Sierra Club members gathered on the canyon’s rim that development would destroy neither the Grand Canyon nor people’s aVection for

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it.. “I know this river better than most people, and I love it as much as anyone here. This canyon is the greatest natural beauty we have in Arizona . . . but I believe a dam . . . would enhance the canyon.”61 Conservationists were utilitarian. Unlike later environmentalists who advocated that nature should be judged according to ecological standards, that nature should have autonomy, they believed that nature existed for human use. Goldwater shared this belief but with a decidedly diVerent orientation. The emerging professional classes of hydrologists, foresters, and engineers that made up the bulk of the conservation movement viewed the political boundaries that governed land, rivers, and forests as irrational impositions upon natural systems, which should be centrally managed by experts to attain the maximum sustainable use of resources over time.62 Goldwater, in contrast, placed the needs of people within Arizona at the forefront of his ideas about the use of nature. Whether encouraging the preservation of the Grand Canyon or advocating for water projects, Goldwater sought to put nature to work for the beneWt of Arizonans. While he used the utilitarian arguments of conservationists—stating in 1966, “When one weighs the needs of the landscape against the needs of man, it should be man who wins out”—the “needs” that Goldwater focused upon were particularly those of Arizonans.63 In the early years of his political career, Goldwater worked to introduce Arizonans, many of them new to the state, to their state’s unique natural characteristics even as he worked to claim resources he believed were theirs by right. In doing so, he sought to use nature to create the place he envisioned Arizona becoming. These eVorts changed Arizona. They also transformed the Colorado. Goldwater’s belief that the river could be both developed and protected was shared by many in Arizona. As these values and ideas were institutionalized, the river became partitioned, not according to the borders of states or watersheds, but by diVerent management policies that separated the river into developed spaces and “natural” spaces. About a hundred miles downstream from Green River, Utah, where Goldwater had begun his trip in 1940, the waters of Lake Powell rise up the walls of Cataract Canyon. The rapids that Goldwater had fretted about and had carefully diagrammed in his journal disappeared as water backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam. At Glen Canyon, the river is carefully manipulated by the engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation

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to generate power that Xows to Phoenix and elsewhere in the Southwest. Below Glen Canyon, the Colorado River Xows unimpeded through the Grand Canyon, newly protected after a compromise to power CAP with a coal-Wred power plant. These changes created a new river. Rather than a muddy torrent, too thin to plow and too thick to drink, it Xows cold and clear, its water taken from deep below the surface of Lake Powell. So many people today seek to run the river that the National Park Service has instituted a stringent permit system, regulating the ways in which people can raft the river, and requiring applications a year in advance. Finally, further downstream, giant pumps pull water from near Parker Dam. CAP’s engineers oversee the Colorado’s water as it travels through aqueducts to Phoenix, where, rather than irrigating farms Welds, it is mostly used as drinking water. The strict management of almost every mile of the new river is a Wnal ironic outcome of Goldwater’s conservation. The conservative icon helped give birth to a river that Xows not only through canyons but through government bureaucracies. Notes 1. Barry Goldwater, Delightful Journey: Down the Green and Colorado Rivers (Tempe: Arizona Historical Foundation, 1970), 16, 116. Throughout the chapter, I cite the 1970 edition of Goldwater’s Colorado River journal, as it remains the most publicly accessible account of his trip. While the 1970 edition included notes not included in his original journal, as well as additional essays on the river and its geology, its text remained almost entirely faithful to the original. 2. For accounts on the Goldwater campaign as the beginning of conservative emergence, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 54–186. For Goldwater as an icon of free-market conservatism, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 115–49. 3. George Will, foreword to Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960; repr. 2007), x. 4. See especially Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands. 5. Ibid., 119. 6. Will, foreword, ix. 7. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, iii. 8. The ability of western interests to deploy federal power to advance development and concentrate their power has been, perhaps, the central theme of the

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new western history. This position is most forcefully stated by Donald Worster. He writes that westerners’ water demands created “one loud, sustained chant that could be heard all the way to Washington, DC: ‘We need the state!’ ”— resulting in a region built more than any other by the power, expertise, technology, and bureaucracies of the federal government. Following Worster, Richard White has called the West “the kindergarten of the state,” the region where the federal government, with the encouragement of westerners, learned how to deploy its power. For such arguments, see, among many others, Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 131; Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 58. For the local politics of federal reclamation policy, see Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 9. Quote from Robert Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 52. On the details of the trip, see Barry Goldwater, Colorado River Guides Oral History, interview by Lew Steiger, May 5, 1995, Box 7, Folder 21, The Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe, Arizona [hereinafter cited as BMG, AHF]. 10. Goldwater interviewed by Steiger, Colorado River Guides Oral History, 53. 11. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, 1. 12. Ibid., 14, 128. 13. Ibid., 104. 14. Ibid., 22–26. 15. The best source for the history of Colorado River running before World War II is Otis “Dock” Marston, “Running the Colorado River: Oral History Transcript,” by Francis Farquhar, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1965, http://www.archive.org/details/runningcolorador00marsrich. For an account of the fatal expedition of Glen and Bessie Hyde, who disappeared while boating the Colorado on their honeymoon in 1928, see Brad Dimock, Sunk without a Sound: The Tragic Colorado River Honeymoon of Glen and Bessie Hyde (FlagstaV, AZ: Fretwater Press, 2001). 16. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, 176. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Ibid., 24. 20. Ibid., 26. 21. Ibid., 38. 22. Ibid., 144. 23. Ibid., 118. 24. For Goldwater as photographer, see Evelyn Cooper, “Prelude,” in The Eyes of His Soul: The Visual Legacy of Barry M. Goldwater, Master Photographer, ed. Evelyn Cooper and Michael Goldwater (Phoenix: Arizona Historical Foundation, 2003), 13–51.

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25. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 27. 26. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, 112. 27. Ibid., 112, 128. 28. Ibid., 118–20. 29. Ibid., 68. 30. William Cronon, “ The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 78. 31. Peter Iverson, Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 68. 32. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, 116. 33. His rhetoric appears much the same as preservationists’ early in the century who opposed development within particularly iconic natural environments. On the rhetoric of such preservationists, see Cronon, “ The Trouble with Wilderness;” and Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 96–181. 34. Goldwater, Delightful Journey, 80. 35. A photograph of Goldwater drawing this line is contained in ibid., 81. 36. Ibid., 80. 37. For such eVorts, see Michael Kotlanger, “Phoenix, 1920–1940” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1982) 227–50. 38. Ibid., 94. 39. Ibid., xx. 40. R. Alice Drought, “Camping under Western Skies,” Arizona Highways, January 1954, 29. 41. Quotations from Peter Iverson, Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 68. 42. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 57. 43. Ibid., 57. 44. In 1948, the state changed the commission’s name from the Colorado River Commission to the Interstate Stream Commission, a somewhat arbitrary change, considering the Colorado was Arizona’s only interstate river. I will refer to it as the Colorado River Commission to avoid confusion. 45. For the agricultural development of groundwater in the Salt River Valley, see Michael Logan, Desert Cities: An Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), ch. 3. 46. For Hayden’s lead role in creating the Central Arizona Project, see Jack August, A Vision in the Desert: Carl Hayden and Hydropolitics in the American Southwest (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999). For the history of CAP, see Byron Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), ch. 1. 47. For the Colorado River Compact, see Norris Hundley, Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

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48. For these miscalculations, see Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s–1990s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Worster, Rivers of Empire. 49. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 72. 50. Hundley, Great Thirst, 225–27. 51. Quotes from Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 73. 52. Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 53. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 73. 54. Ibid., 74. 55. Charter of the Colorado River Commission, Box 32, Folder 20, BMG, AHF. 56. For the importance to conservation of rational resource management, see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of EYciency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 57. For details of the similar beliefs among other Phoenix elites, see Andrew Needham, “Sunbelt Imperialism: Boosters, Navajos, and Energy Development in the Metropolitan Southwest,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region in the American South and Southwest, ed. Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 240–64. 58. Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs, ch. 1. 59. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 74. 60. Theodore Roosevelt, “ The New Nationalism,” in The New Nationalism (New York: Outlook, 1910, 1961), 33. 61. “Barry, Swinging Late, Hits Hardest at Canyon Forum,” Arizona Republic, April 1, 1966, 6. 62. For the transnational role of state experts in conservation, see James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 11–51. For expertise in American conservation, see Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–28, 81–98. 63. Barry Goldwater, “No More Ho-Ho-Kams,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1966, A5.

2 Drafting a Movement Barry Goldwater and the Rebirth of the Arizona Republican Party elizabeth tandy shermer

recent work on the modern conservative movement has, for the most part, focused largely on the racial and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s to explain the dramatic transformation of American politics. Frustrated homeowners, militant housewives, dogmatic antiCommunists, racist blue-collar workers, evangelical Christians, abortion opponents, and other crusaders in the dramatic culture wars populate these narratives. The American South also casts a long shadow over the Weld. Scholars, for example, have delved into the apparent “southernization” of America, the infamous “Southern Strategy,” the inXammatory politics of school and neighborhood desegregation, the trajectory of state Democratic parties, and the apparent need for southern politicians on Democratic presidential tickets. There is (and has been) far less attention to the power and place of business-minded conservatives and western Republicans. Yet the scant work done has shown, decisively, that both warrant more inquiry. These politicians, policymakers, and voters were among the most powerful, militant members of the broad postwar conservative movement, the ones who embraced Arizona retailer Barry Goldwater and helped propel him into the upper echelons of American politics.1 43

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Indeed, the business Right’s success is clear: deregulation, privatization, low taxation, and union insecurity have become the deWning characteristics of mainstream economic dogma. This philosophy represented an aVront to New Deal liberalism, which promoted a powerful, interventionist federal state that policed and regulated industry, redistributed wealth through an expansive social safety net, and empowered the citizenry, largely through the trade union movement, to help direct economic development. Some of the most famous critics of this midcentury liberalism were western Republicans, the famed “cowboy conservatives.” Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the constant presence of this strain of western Sunbelt conservatism on the GOP’s presidential slates. Two market-oriented mavericks, Barry Goldwater and John McCain, called Phoenix home, and scholars often invoke California transplant Ronald Reagan as a paragon of this antiliberal economic doctrine.2 These two western conservatives were not outliers but representatives of a broad, Sunbelt-wide movement that blended industrialization with political transformation. In the early postwar period, when southern and western states generally supplied the industrial core with foodstuVs and production materials, insurgents generally worked within chambers of commerce to launch electoral campaigns to win seats in city governments and state legislatures in the underdeveloped South and Southwest. True, as Andrew Needham points out in his chapter, many would make their peace with federal power in the name of rapid economic development. But even their complicated embrace of public infrastructure contained a fundamental distrust of, if not open hostility to, liberal economic orthodoxy. Goldwater, after all, had called the Central Arizona Project a loan. Hence, businessmen like the senator found common cause with CEOs eager to move out of the liberal-leaning Steelbelt and coastal California. Yet the diVerences in the South’s and Southwest’s postwar rejuvenation point to the importance of fully interrogating western booster Republicans’ role in the Sunbelt’s creation and the conservative movement’s maturation. Fighting the liberal regulatory state and organized labor, as historian Tami Friedman has shown, very much shaped the politics of the South’s boosters. Still, the decidedly more urban West gave promoters far more political power than their southern counterparts, who found themselves Wghting the old agricultural elite

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for control of governing bodies and state Democratic parties. Thus, western Republicans, not investment-focused southern Democrats, Wrst enjoyed the fruits of the genuine boom economy, which unorganized labor, deregulation, low business taxes, and laissez-faire attitudes toward income inequality fueled. Moreover, the resultant population surges gave western Sunbelt states increasing inXuence over national aVairs in the House and Electoral College, even though they had far fewer representatives in the early cold war period and before. As such, the West’s conservatives had an earlier entrée into the business and political organizations behind the nascent conservative movement.3 The Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Republican Party exempliWed this transformation of the West’s political economy. In the early 1930s, both the state GOP and the Phoenix Chamber were small and ineVective. But a new generation of boosters, with Goldwater prominent among them, set out to refashion these institutions. From the start, their vision of a bright, industrial future and a decidedly antiliberal Republican Party were interconnected. These Chamber men then looked beyond their immediate surroundings and sought to fundamentally reconstruct Arizona, a broad initiative that pushed a young Goldwater to draft Republicans to run for oYce and also inspired his Wrst bid to represent Arizona in the Senate.

A Revitalized Phoenix Chamber Goldwater and other Phoenix businessmen pursued a wholesale transformation of Arizona politics, the state GOP, and the Phoenix Chamber because of the threat and opportunity the New Deal represented. Leading liberals at the federal level had envisioned the South and West as centers of industry. DiversiWed economies, New Dealers predicted, would free denizens from the tumultuous commodities markets, thereby leading them to embrace liberalism’s social-democratic principles. Reformers in local, state, and national oYces did manage to lay the foundation for Phoenix and the rest of the underdeveloped South and Southwest to grow along a labor-liberal pathway. Massive infrastructure spending, huge agricultural subsidies, and the statesponsored protections of unionism had in fact made Arizona a solidly Democratic state in the 1930s and 1940s. A vigorous organizing eVort

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also helped transform Arizona and its labor movement, which had tremendous success in organizing both the private and public sectors.4 Liberalism’s inroads were rooted in local interest in diversifying the area’s economy. Many Phoenicians sought to end the city’s dependence on agriculture, cattle, and mining. The liberals and radicals among them considered industrialization a means to open the door to a set of unionized, high-wage jobs not only in factories and mines but also in the high-proWle service sector, namely, the city’s hotels, bars, and clubs but also in the municipal government. The presence of a powerful organized working class made possible the attempt to democratize municipal governance, exempliWed by eVorts to abandon the town’s Progressive Era, “good-government” charter. On the horizon was also an amelioration of the racism that kept the town divided between the wealthy Anglo population north of the railroad tracks and those of African, Mexican, Asian, and Native descent living on Phoenix’s south side.5 The New Deal for Phoenix and Arizona provoked an aggressive reaction from urban businessmen and professionals. For the town’s young retailers, lawyers, newspaper owners, and bankers, the collapse of the agricultural and mining economies had devastated their customers and thus weakened their portfolios and enterprises. Thus, they too wanted a more diversiWed economic base so as to insulate themselves and the town from the tumultuous commodities economy. Devastation yielded an opportunity for industry-minded young promoters to convince an aging membership to embrace manufacturing. But paralysis had also empowered liberals to promote union empowerment, regulation, taxation, and a general expansion of the federal government, which seemed as threatening to the desert’s business elite as the volatile cotton, copper, and cattle markets.6 One of the most agitated boosters was young retailer Barry Goldwater. He, like his largely male, Anglo Chamber brethren, did not eschew industrialization or moderate Wscal reform per se but did reject the more radical elements of liberal experimentation. He was also well placed to voice his disenchantment with the New Deal. His family’s department store, Goldwater’s, had made him a household name across the state even before the dramatic 1940 trip down the Colorado River. But Goldwater’s earlier renown had provided him with a pulpit prior to his 1940 descent into the Grand Canyon and later

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service to the Colorado River Commission. Editors of the Phoenix Gazette, one of the town’s dailies, tapped him to write opinion pieces in the 1930s. Goldwater used the invitation to publicly attack liberalism. “I would like to know,” he demanded in his 1938 “A Fireside Chat with Mr. Roosevelt,” “just where you are leading us. Are you going further into the morass that you have led us into or are you going to go back to the good old American way of doing things where business is trusted, where labor earns more, where we take care of our unemployed, and where a man is elected to public oYce because he is a good man for the job and not because he commands your good will and a few dollars of the taxpayers’ money?” “Your plans,” the Phoenician declared, “called for economy in government and a reduction in taxes. . . . In Wve years my taxes have increased over 250 percent and I fear greatly that ‘I ain’t seen nothin’ yet!,’ ” he exclaimed before accusing the president of “jump[ing]down the throats of everyone in business.” Now, Goldwater asserted, the American businessman “distrusts you and fears your every utterance.” The worst move, from Goldwater’s standpoint, was “turn[ing] over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital and then decide for yourself if that plan worked.”7 This portrait of the New Deal as dangerous earned Goldwater acclaim and helped unite Valley business owners also wary of New Deal policies. George Mickle of the Phoenix Title and Trust Company, whose facilities housed the Phoenix Chamber, wrote to Goldwater personally to commend him for taking a stand in the pages of the Phoenix Gazette. Local lender George O. Ford praised the merchant’s writing as “logical, fearless, and as far as it goes, truthful.” “Compared with the average citizen, as your writing shows, you are a goliath,” Ford gushed, “and I say to you openly and fearlessly and would publish it now if possible, I hold the masses in contempt and their leaders and masters.”8 Yet these Chamber men also found themselves frustrated with their fellow businessmen, who seemed uninterested in politics or industrial development. In “Scaredee-Cat” (1939), for example, Goldwater’s disgust for the “American businessman,” “the biggest man in this country

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. . . afraid of his own shadow,” was palpable. “He is the man who condemns, and sometimes justly so,” the Phoenician charged, “the politician over his luncheon tables and his desks and in his other very private conversations, but never in the open where his thoughts and arguments would do some good toward correcting the evils to which he refers in private.” He remained concerned with political acquiescence throughout the war. He even begged the chamber’s board of directors to think beyond Phoenix in 1946: “every unit of organized business in this country should do all it can to maintain and strengthen our system of free enterprise.” He was conWdent they could “become a model for the rest of the country,” but only if the Phoenix business community would “take a Wrm stand against evils which threaten our communities.”9 Goldwater and other upstarts began their broad assault on liberalism by transforming the chamber, an association of businessmen that actually represented a bulwark to the ambitious plans that young members had for Phoenix. Locals had founded the organization to promote agriculture in the territorial period. Early activities had been limited to petitioning the federal government for water storage facilities to improve the Valley’s agriculture and distributing information on the area’s farming output. The chamber grew little in size or scope in the interwar years. In 1925 there were just four committees, which were concerned with traYc, agriculture, membership, and information.10 Goldwater’s generation sought desperately to expand the institution that they were set to inherit. They, in contrast to their forebears, prioritized broadening Phoenix’s economic base away from agriculture, mining, and cattle in order to separate their businesses from Wckle commodity markets but also to build the kind of modern dynamic, aZuent metropolis in which they wanted to live. Their goals were clearly outlined in a three-hundred-page study that they commissioned, published, and distributed in the early 1940s. This plan for Phoenix’s economic development prioritized water, power, and manufacturing through policy proposals that bespoke their fundamental distrust of the New Deal regulatory state. Goldwater, for example, warned in his report on the future of retail, “It is sheer folly for any of our numerous branches of business to consider this money as a permanent source of income to business. If it continues, it will be at the expense of business and is, so to speak, robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Other submissions

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contained even more overt calls to action. One young Phoenix lawyer prioritized a revitalized, politically active chamber. “ The business of running our city is one worthy of the best business minds and talent,” he argued, “Instead of adopting an attitude of ‘Let George Do It,’ we should adopt one of ‘What can I do to help my city?’ ” He made governance synonymous with doing business. “We are all stockholders in a $70,000,000 corporation, a municipal corporation to be sure, but nevertheless a business one,” he asserted. “We are all interested in the conduct of its aVairs, we are all interested in its welfare for if the corporation should be improperly conducted all of us would suVer in proportion to our investment. We must learn to recognize that the city government is our aVair and we must not treat it lightly.”11 This generation of businessmen went on to reorganize the chamber dramatically in the name of well-managed industrialization. Lawyer Frank Snell, for example, redirected the group’s mission and modus operandi during his presidency. He, Goldwater, and other young renegades had long complained that members did not take an active part in the organization. Snell, for example, cited his peers’ frustrations when he blamed the leadership for allowing “special interests and small groups” to dominate the chamber and board of directors at the expense of participation from other motivated business owners. OYcial events, he asserted, had tended to be merely “ ‘hoopala’ with no real or constructive purpose behind them,” evidence as to why the organization itself was poorly administered, had $18,000 in outstanding bills, and had stockpiled only $8,000 in accounts receivable. He addressed these issues during his 1939–40 tenure. The chamber paid its debts, began a membership drive, generated a list of three hundred members eager and willing to become involved in committee work, and passed new by-laws to provide structure and accountability in all activities and programs. As a result, the old guard started to lose control of the chamber to Goldwater and other young activists who wanted to end the town’s reliance on cotton, cattle, and copper.12 Reforms continued throughout World War II and after. Leaders worked out new membership qualiWcations, changes in the board of directors’ duties, a $32,000 budget increase (bringing it to $70,000 a year), and new paid staV positions for the management of the association’s day-to-day operations. To better carry out the new growth agenda, the number of committees also tripled. SpeciWc departments

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now addressed industrialization, retailing, conventions, public relations, membership, and statistical information. The Post-War Development Committee even had subgroups, which included task forces for aviation and tourism. One of the most important amendments concerned real estate development. In Article III, boosters included a strong restatement of the organization’s purpose and committed the group to “promote and foster the civic, economic, and social welfare of its members and the City of Phoenix, the Salt River Valley, and the state of Arizona, and to acquire, hold, and dispose of property, and to do any and all things necessary or suitable to those ends.” This new clause was critical for the chamber’s new industrial program. Phoenix’s vast, undeveloped surrounding lands were a major draw for the military bases and defense plants that relocated to the Valley. During the war, both the chamber and the local government had to work out complicated, costly, time-consuming deals to buy this property either from private owners, the city, the county, or the state of Arizona. Now, under the revised 1945 framework, the chamber simply bought and sold parcels directly to Wrms, which streamlined the industrial recruitment process.13 Within two years, the chamber’s new leadership had altered the organization irrevocably. From its formal reorganization in January 1946 to the start of the 1948 Wscal year, membership grew from roughly 800 to almost 2,800, and income rose from $38,000 to $140,000. With these resources, the chamber formalized an industrial development program in March 1948, which inaugurated a more cohesive, systematic eVort to industrialize the Phoenix area, far beyond earlier ad hoc eVorts. Leading chamber members, including Goldwater, worked on the Industrial Development Committee (IDC), whose leadership recognized the importance of manpower and immediately declared the need for Wfty men to take on the many tasks within the larger eVort to recruit industry. Subgroups, for example, compiled information for new Wrms, improved advertising and publicity, engaged in industrial outreach, coordinated with other Arizona business organizations, and raised funds for recruitment campaigns.14 Within a decade, the chamber’s manufacturing drive grew into a multifaceted juggernaut to attract investment. In the process, leaders transformed the organization into a well-organized, eYcient, and powerful lobbyist for Phoenix. Their recruitment eVorts included increased

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spending for advertisements that targeted both manufacturers and their workforce, extensive trips to sell Phoenix as a lucrative investment for East and West Coast Wrms, lavish parties for visiting industrial scouts, and assurances that the chamber and the city’s electorate would deliver whatever the Wrm needed or demanded during investment negotations.15 The chamber may have been a voluntary association, but boosters always prioritized politics and policymaking. And they had just cause: local, state, and federal governments could either hinder or enable their ability to promote Phoenix and compete for investment. The very Wrst chairman of the chamber’s IDC, propane magnate Paul Fannin, even warned executive oYcers that “industry must have the assurance it will receive a fair deal from the locality in which it locates.” He thus prioritized convincing voters to support the chamber’s industrialization philosophy. Political involvement also Wlled a material need. When chamber members surveyed industrialists about their requirements in the mid-1950s, they discovered that industrialists considered elections “indicative of Arizona’s attitude of ‘independence from big Government.’ ” “ The continuing national publicity that both Goldwater and [Republican representative John] Rhodes are receiving was generally known by these people,” analysts reported. “ They openly expressed admiration for both men and for their conservative business attitude.” Moreover, Arizona’s congressmen served promoters and investors. Goldwater met with defense contractors, apprised chamber leaders of their needs, and distributed the organization’s promotional materials in Washington. Boosters subsequently considered political victories as a part of their broad push for investment. The association’s lengthy 1948–49 list of accomplishments, for example, highlighted lobbying eVorts that cajoled state legislators to pass new zoning and planning regulations and to weaken the workmen’s compensation law.16 Hence, control of the city government was high on the chamber’s agenda. In 1949, the leaders of the Phoenix business community, including Goldwater, seized the city council and mayor’s oYce by ousting a coalition composed of small-business owners, who had dominated city government since Phoenix’s Wrst charter revisions in 1915, as well as a new set of liberal reformers who held power brieXy in the mid1940s. These businessmen-politicians organized themselves within the

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nominally nonpartisan Charter Government Committee, a political machine that held power for roughly a quarter century. The organization included and named industry-minded Democrats to their slates, but founding members still considered the group to be “the nucleus of what turned out to be the Republican Party,” driven by the GOP’s “same hard workers.”17

Party Building Indeed, boosters channeled their energies into party politics, particularly the creation of a viable, anti–New Deal state GOP. The drive came out of Phoenix. Since the 1930s, top businessmen had espoused an interest in countering the state Democratic Party with a Republican Party opposed to modern liberalism. Both Goldwater and his childhood friend Harry Rosenzweig, a jeweler, considered a true “two-party” system imperative. Goldwater even argued politics was more important than their personal ventures. “I don’t think the future of Goldwater’s means a thing,” he told journalist and future Republican governor Howard Pyle, “unless we insure the political future of Arizona and the country.”18 The postwar GOP was thus fundamentally reborn in opposition to New Deal liberalism and transformed through the pursuit of investment. Reconstruction had predated the IDC. The State Committee chairman had urged drafters of the 1945 platform to take a stand against the Democratic Party’s “extremely liberal communistic and bureaucratic ideals.” He wanted the organization to “be the conservative party of Arizona and of America.” This Republican, and his supporters, envisioned an organization dedicated to principles at the core of the later modern conservative movement in their emphasis on “the importance of property rights and human rights, and protecting both from impairment or destruction” by “government by minorities . . . class or race prejudice, or . . . favoring one section of our population above any other.” Individual freedom from “leftist labor bosses and certain beneWciaries of the public payroll” informed this dedication to a “two-party system” with “a deWnite battle line between the two parties” so “the minority party . . . can hope to become the majority party.” Yet he buried a commitment to “the

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shaping of the industrial and agricultural future of Arizona” within these resolutions.19 But promoting free enterprise by reducing taxes and weakening unions would become a clarion call after the war when young Republicans took over the GOP. Many ran for precinct posts in 1948 and forty won critical seats, which took older members by surprise: “We did not think they ever would actually take over the party organization.” Business-minded Republicans quickly infused the party with their investment-focused politics. The 1948 state platform, for example, led with support for the recently passed amendments to New Deal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, as well as opposition to labor’s eVorts to repeal the state’s right-to-work law. Other planks asserted that current taxes were too burdensome on state property owners. Only in the Wnal sections did Republicans proclaim “support [for] a comprehensive program aimed at the development of aviation, both civil and military.” Two years later, with the IDC in full swing, labor still topped the 1950 platform, yet anti-unionism was now couched within a concern for investment, not militant calls for vigilance. The opening plank deemed workplace unrest harmful to the state’s economic welfare and set the tone for proclamations that “future development of Arizona is dependent upon the industrial expansion of our state” and that “industry goes where it is invited.” Republicans accordingly promised new favorable tax laws, studies and statistics for potential new investors, and “counsel and advice in securing land or facilities for their use.”20 Such persistence also emphasized how formidable the postwar Arizona Democratic Party was. GOP membership lagged far behind Democratic registration. The one-to-four ratio in sparsely populated Arizona meant that Republicans could easily meet in Phoenix’s Adams Hotel during the war (in, as one member recalled, “a room that was, ohhh, very, very small”). John J. Rhodes found little had changed after 1945. The Kansas native and Harvard Law School graduate had been stationed in Higley, Arizona, in 1941 and relocated to the Valley after the war. “I had been looking for Republicans,” Rhodes remarked about his early days in Phoenix. “I found two or three, a couple of young lawyers in Phoenix and others.” The litigator recalled that a justice of the peace had even discouraged his Plains State political proclivities: “ ‘You want to register as a Democrat, of course.’ I said, ‘No,

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Republican.’ He said, ‘Major, there aren’t any Republicans in Chandler. . . . You’re a nice young man and you might want to stay here and you won’t amount to anything as a Republican.’ ” Rhodes ignored the jurist and instead joined the chamber, founded a Young Republicans Club, and openly campaigned for anti-union ballot initiatives central to chamber-driven industrialization.21 Yet the postwar Democratic Party had hardly been the monolith that Rhodes implied. “Primaries were hotly contested, sometimes bitter aVairs,” a pundit once remarked. These run-oVs bespoke increasing divisions between liberal and conservative Democrats. These socalled JeVersonian or pinto Democrats had hoped, as one explained, to “purge the Democratic party of those Democrats of convenience who crawled aboard in 1932.” Swelling liberal ranks inspired some conservative Democrats to leave the party during the Depression. For example, Frank Brophy, an executive at the Phoenix National Bank, a leading member of the state GOP, and prominent John Birch Society member, had supported Roosevelt and the New Deal. “I voted for him the second time because his Wrst term, in the Wrst New Deal, was extraordinary,” Brophy explained. “ They did some remarkable things. They cleaned up.” The banker later broke with the Democrats because the 1938 court-packing plan “gave me a pretty good insight into what sort of man I later believed Franklin Roosevelt to be.”22 Liberal Democrats encouraged such defections. They began a sustained campaign in the 1950s to gain solid control over the state’s party. “We have much new blood in the Arizona Democratic party organization,” an activist reported to Senator Carl Hayden, a mainstay of Arizona’s Progressive and liberal Democratic circles since the territorial period. This oYcial promised these young Dems would help the “old guard” create “another Democratic stronghold.”23 “Pinto” Democrats, who hesitated to reregister, became increasingly nonplussed. “I am a registered Democrat,” a Tucson resident admitted in 1950, “and hoping the Republicans oVer a platform or plan a bit improved ove[r] the welfare and booze program of the Dems.” The Phoenix Republicans’ attacks on the federal government’s increasing power won over many. “I am registered as a Democrat,” one Phoenician explained in a 1950 letter to Republican gubernatorial candidate Howard Pyle, “but, I’d like to see you win. I liked what you

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said about JeVerson and the JeVersonian philosophy of government. I liked what you said about ‘too much government.’ ”24 Early drives rested on Goldwater and Rosenzweig’s policy of “drafting” candidates hostile to the New Deal order. Their insistence that Republicans run for oYce was critical: many state and local positions went uncontested prior to their eVorts. The Phoenix retailers theorized that they would capture voters who selected a straight ticket. Hence, Goldwater picked young, energetic Republicans to Wll out the ballot. He even told Rhodes prior to the 1950 election, “I’m drafting you to run for Attorney General,” which led to the following exchange: “ ‘Mr. Goldwater, there is something you need to know. I don’t want to be Attorney General.’ And he said, ‘Mr. Rhodes, there’s something you should know. You won’t be.’ ”25 The GOP nonetheless campaigned and recruited eVectively during the 1950s. An organizational overhaul, in many ways analogous to the chamber’s wartime refashioning, proved highly eVective. Stalwarts created a new bookkeeping system to better process contributions, began IBM card Wles of registered Democrats and Republicans in Maricopa and Pima counties, completed systematic voting analysis on past major elections, held a statewide fundraising drive, surveyed all Republican households, began clipping Wles on major events and issues, established a party newspaper, generated mailing lists for all members, helped start Young Republican clubs across the state, and sent oYcials to speak before audiences in each county. Party activists also campaigned outside their exclusive, Anglo neighborhoods, arguing that economic opportunity and growth through free enterprise would best serve the Anglo and minority working classes.26 Women, as in other GOP precincts across the country, were eVective shock troops in these electoral eVorts and organizational overhauls. State Republican women’s clubs canvassed neighborhoods, typed letters, stuVed envelopes, hosted fundraising coVees and lunches, and even “organize[d] some gals” on the party’s behalf. Winslow clubwomen hosted a Lincoln Day dinner for the entire town, showcasing a then-novel color Wlm of the 1952 inauguration that featured Goldwater as much as the new Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The FlagstaV chapter held an “old time dance” with “many more Democrats than Republicans there.” Women also made a concerted eVort to win over non-Anglo Arizonans by urging them with

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some success to form their own clubs. Clubwomen also availed themselves to the national party for “any information and material you may choose to send us as a guide to better club work.” “We need to know how we best can serve the Republican Party, how we may present ourselves to our community as an informed group of working women,” the Winslow chapter’s president enthused, “We also need encouragement and consideration.”27 As a result of these eVorts, the GOP grew rapidly. Membership rose steadily, while the number of Democrats declined brieXy in the mid-1950s. Political watchdogs blamed new arrivals from the Midwest on the surge in Republican registrations, but that inXux alone cannot account for the seismic shifts in Arizona’s politics. Growth came in part from pinto defections, which also left both parties much more ideologically cohesive. Nonetheless, unaYliated voters and new Democratic registrants prevented the Republican Party from eclipsing its rival’s membership until 1985.28 Yet the party was competitive long before this tipping point. Many observers claimed that Republicans had the opportunity for victory in only three counties (Maricopa, Pima, and Yavapai) in the early 1950s. The other eleven were “safe” for Democrats. Yet by 1958, only Wve of these counties remained a “sure thing” for the Democrats. The GOP even seemed to have a lock on Maricopa County, where Phoenix continued to mushroom. Republicans did continue to struggle in rural areas, where party oYcials could not always Wnd candidates to contest every election. Even in 1958, when some analysts already asserted that the state GOP had unheralded political legitimacy and inXuence, Republicans contested less than half of the open state senate seats. Republican power was still undeniably increasing. In the lower house, GOP ranks rose from twenty-Wve (seventeen from Phoenix) in 1959 to thirty-Wve in 1964. Democrats lost control of both chambers in 1966.29 The GOP still struggled to win congressional seats. Rhodes, who campaigned in Phoenix, won reelection easily throughout the 1950s, but the GOP failed to elect a candidate to the second seat, which initially encompassed all residents not living in Maricopa County, until the 1970s. Hayden also stayed in oYce until he chose to retire in 1968. The senator had represented Arizonans in Washington since statehood, where he proved himself instrumental to securing the big, federally

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funded, western water projects that Goldwater and his chamber counterparts viewed as vital for economic growth. Many of the leading members of the Arizona GOP thus supported Hayden’s continual return to Washington because he was a Senate workhorse and the driving force behind ensuring Arizona’s share of the Colorado River’s water through the federal Central Arizona Project. Hayden also distanced himself from his Progressive and New Deal Era allegiances to redistribution and trade unionism, which made him somewhat more acceptable to booster Republicans and an electorate that increasingly voted for a GOP dedicated to antiliberal industrialization.30 In contrast, Republicans and Democrats engaged in a protracted war for the governor’s mansion. Pyle’s 1950 run was the opening shot. He, Goldwater, and future Phoenix mayor and Republican governor Jack Williams started broadcasting on Phoenix’s KFDA as teenagers. Pyle and Williams stayed in the radio business and became successful broadcasters. Pyle then became well regarded throughout the state for his skillful, moving coverage of World War II battlefronts, which included interviews with Arizonan servicemen and coverage of Japan’s formal surrender. Goldwater hence wanted to draft the renowned newscaster into Republican political campaigns. The merchant had planned to run for governor in 1950 with the well-known Pyle serving as his campaign manager, a role intended to prepare the journalist for a 1952 Senate run. “I knew absolutely nothing about politics,” Pyle later admitted.31 He was a quick study. Pyle broke the gentleman’s agreement and ran for the 1950 Republican gubernatorial nomination, pressing issues at the heart of both the GOP’s revival and Phoenix’s industrialization. The candidate attacked opponent Ana Frohmiller, the state auditor who had won twelve previous elections, for her support of the current state tax code and Arizona’s liberal public assistance program. He deemed them impediments to industrialization, won a resounding 1950 victory, and then triumphed in 1952. While in oYce, he endeavored to impose the chamber’s free-enterprise conservatism on the state. “It won’t hurt us,” he told voters in his reelection bid, “to think and plan and act as . . . if this were a private enterprise and we were operating it with a proWt motive.” Restructuring the government, as boosters had refashioned the chamber and state GOP, topped his agenda. Pyle called for consolidating operations, eliminating elections

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for some state oYces, and cutting back on social services in the name of “increasing governmental eYciency.”32 But voters turned Pyle out of oYce in 1954. Self-proclaimed “Mr. Democrat,” Ernest McFarland, enlisted a slew of famous liberals, including then-senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, to back his challenge. McFarland called Pyle’s reforms “un-democratic,” because they removed “the right of the people to select their public oYcials,” implying that “you, citizens of the State, are incompetent to choose your public oYcials.” Pyle responded by insinuating that labor bosses were manipulating his critics. But scandal ultimately cost Pyle the election. He lost Maricopa County, particularly the city of Mesa, which had a large Mormon population, because he had ordered a raid on remote, isolated Short Creek, Arizona, where oYcials suspected residents practiced polygamy. Police arrested women and men, incarcerated some in faraway Kingman, Arizona, sent some children to foster homes, and left others with their young mothers. Many LDS followers stayed home on election day, and others voted for McFarland, which left the incumbent without the necessary support in urban Arizona to carry the day.33 Yet neither party could manage to hold the state’s highest oYce as long as Democrats had before 1950. Paul Fannin easily defeated his Democratic opponent on a booster Republican platform in 1958. He held this oYce until 1965, when he left the governor’s mansion to take Goldwater’s place in the Senate. Control of the executive branch Xipped back and forth in the ensuing decades, but Democratic victories never represented a repudiation of booster governance. Successful candidates generally made the same commitment to investment policies as their Republican opponents but also promised voters more consideration for civil rights and environmental issues.34 Goldwater, however, held onto his place in the Senate for decades. Pyle’s 1950 gubernatorial win had left Goldwater as the Republican draftee for the 1952 election, a contest against McFarland, who had won the Senate seat in 1940. The oYce enabled him to help draft the GI Bill of Rights and to negotiate demobilization agreements favorable to Arizona communities and taxpayers. Thus, Goldwater did not so much campaign against McFarland as position himself against FDR’s legacy and Truman’s administration. The merchant, for example, did not single out his opponent in his general denouncement of

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the “Powercrats,” whom he identiWed as a “small group of willful men who have recklessly exalted their personal power and seek to increase and perpetuate their selWsh control over the free men and free women of America.” The term was as loaded as his earlier indictment of Roosevelt in the pages of the Phoenix Gazette. Goldwater claimed there was but one reason for the seemingly expansive and illegitimate power of “Harry S.(for Spendthrift) Truman”: corruption. Goldwater pushed Arizonans to stop “big government” because “waste and wild experiments, and give aways in government . . . creats [sic] deWcits and deWcits create inXation and that in the end the ultimate consumer pays the total of government.” He, like other Phoenix Republicans, even cast himself as the true descendant of the JeVersonian Democrats. “[W]hat has happened to the great Democratic party,” he asked, “which historically and traditionally has always stood as the protector of the individual’s freedom and the individual’s liberty?” “[T]he Great Democratic party is . . . subservient,” he continued, “to the wishes of wilful, power hungry men who lust for dictatorship, but not for freedom, men who have stated in their private letters that you and I are too damned dumb to make the right decisions.”35 Goldwater and other business-minded Republicans won decisively in 1952. The senator-elect took a majority in fewer counties than McFarland but still edged his opponent by seven thousand votes, with support from men and women voters, and the young and elderly, as well as white-collar workers and professionals. The Arizona GOP, with aid from numerous registered Democrats, made substantial gains in all levels of governance. Republicans increased their seats in the eightymember lower house from eleven to thirty and gained four seats in the Senate, where they previously had none. Arizonans also elected Rhodes, the state’s Wrst Republican representative. Liberal strategists considered the 1952 results alarming. “From then on through the Wfties,” a Hayden staVer recounted, “I witnessed a steady swing to the right in the political climate of Arizona.”36 Goldwater went on to prove himself as adept at inXuencing national debates as he had been at transforming state politics. During his Wrst term, Goldwater spent much of his time traveling the country to deliver speeches for the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. When he did speak before the Senate, he preached the developing industrialization gospel that he and his compatriots had honed in

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Phoenix. Thus, he advanced a Phoenix, rather than a Dwight Eisenhower, Republicanism. Indeed, Goldwater’s attacks traversed party lines: he rebuked anyone still promoting the expansion, no matter how limited, of the welfare state. Hence, Goldwater found himself exasperated that the Wrst Republican president in two decades seemed to embrace the New Deal state. To his friends, he wrote, “It’s obvious that the Administration has succumbed to the principle that we owe some sort of living, including all types of care to the citizens of this country, and I am beginning to wonder if we haven’t gone a lot farther than many of us think on this road we happily call socialism.”37 Goldwater staked out his most distinctive and politically consequential positions when he challenged both Eisenhower moderates and Democratic Party liberals on issues that touched on the radical reform of federal labor policy. Goldwater was the Republican Right’s most outspoken and eVective critic of what he called “monopoly unionism.” He clashed publicly with supporters of the Eisenhower administration’s labor policy. In the summer of 1954, the Arizonan sponsored an amendment to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that would give much of the federal government’s power over industrial relations to the states. He argued that with these proposed revisions states could, conceivably, pass laws that would require 95 percent, not just a majority, of the workforce to support a union before certiWcation. Policymakers were aghast. One liberal senator charged that Goldwater’s proposals “are determined . . . to drive a blow at organized labor that will send it rolling and rocking for weeks and months and years to come.”38 Increased public concern over labor’s power gave Goldwater a chance to make himself a household name and spread the antilabor message that had laid the foundation for the investment-oriented, free-enterprise conservatism found in Phoenix and the rest of the emergent Sunbelt. In 1957, the US Senate created the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (also known as the McClellan or Rackets Committee) after headline-grabbing scandals, especially those involving the Teamsters, seemed to tie the labor movement to a vast network of organized crime interests. Goldwater and other Republicans on the Rackets Committee were critical of Teamster leaders, but they targeted Walter Reuther, the ambitious, visionary United Auto Workers (UAW) president. Goldwater

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expended little energy exposing Reuther’s earlier radical political aYliations but grilled him about UAW contributions to and inXuence on state and national Democratic Party leaders, the aggressive and sometimes violent nature of UAW organizing eVorts, and Reuther’s larger ideological and political ambitions.39 For the senator, Reuther embodied labor’s increasing power on both the shop Xoor and Capitol Hill. Goldwater disliked Reuther’s “bold statements on matters of domestic, foreign, and political policy which have only a most obscure bearing on the interests and welfare of labor union members.” This last concern was Goldwater’s greatest. He pushed Republicans to ask, “Do these statements of Walter Reuther constitute a proper function of his responsibility to the members of these unions? Indeed, what is Walter Reuther’s job?” In January 1958 Goldwater Xew to Detroit, where he chastised an Economic Club audience, well marbled with executives from the Big Three automakers, for their unwillingness to curb UAW economic or political ambitions. In a critique, which was reminiscent of the complaints he lodged against other timid businessmen in his Depression era editorials, Goldwater declared Reuther “more dangerous to our country than Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do.” A week later, Goldwater told the press, “ This man cannot meet the charges that I, as well as others have made about him and his obsessive drive for political power.” The antagonism between both men reached its zenith during a well-noted exchange at Reuther’s three-day interrogation before the Senate Rackets Committee, when Goldwater told the UAW president that he would “rather have HoVa stealing my money than Reuther stealing my freedom.”40 Goldwater’s 1958 reelection campaign became, in eVect, a national showdown with Reuther, a state-level referendum on the empowered Arizona GOP, and a test of the boosters’ industrialization philosophy. Indeed, Goldwater campaigned primarily against Reuther, not his opponent, then-governor Ernest McFarland. But Arizona Republicans and Phoenix boosters did well in a year that saw heavy GOP losses elsewhere: Rhodes was sent back to Washington, and Fannin was elected governor. Pundits considered this and other Arizona GOP victories as evidence of a profound shift in the state’s political character.41 Yet Goldwater’s victory also had national ramiWcations. The Wrst prominent cowboy conservative earned new respect and acclaim.

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Major news outlets such as Time and the Saturday Evening Post took notice of this rugged westerner and devoted pages to the Republican who had deWed labor and the Democrats. Republican senator Everett Dirksen praised Goldwater openly for his “courage, [his] singleness of purpose and [his] determination to get a job done in a Weld of endeavor which has frightened so many in public life because they were afraid of reprisal.” Richard Nixon reached out to the reelected senator in the hope that Goldwater could help revitalize the GOP. Soon after, when Goldwater accepted the chairmanship of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, he announced that he was “proud of being a conservative” and demanded “the party quit copying the New Deal,” statements that served as the fuel that Wred the Wrst “Draft Goldwater” movement.42 Goldwater’s political ascendancy had also mirrored the Arizona GOP’s rapid maturation. The party’s reorganization, growth, and success had established it as a major force within the national GOP apparatus by 1960. In 1961 the Arizona aYliate hosted the annual gathering of western Republican state parties for the Wrst time. Goldwater, still chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, even headlined the event.43 This coup for the state party and its standard-bearer represented just how far the GOP and Phoenix had come since 1945. Phoenix was no longer a remote farming outpost but an industrial juggernaut. Urban businessmen were, moreover, largely responsible. They, like boosters across the industrializing South and Southwest, had done the early groundwork for metropolitan growth and also the regional party realignment that would confound pundits, journalists, and scholars after Reagan’s 1980 election.

Notes Author’s Note: Portions of this chapter are also in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Sunbelt Boosterism: Industrial Recruitment, Economic Development, and Growth Politics in the Developing Sunbelt,” in Sunbelt Rising, ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 31– 57; and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95 (December 2008): 678–709.

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1. For an overview of this scholarship, see Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making American Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Julian E. Zelizer, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History 38 (2): 367–92. 2. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), esp. 321– 30; Robert Alan Goldberg Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Rick Perlstein Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift (New York: Random House, 1975); JeV Roche, ed., The Political Culture of the New West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2008). 3. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt: The Political and Economic Transformation of Phoenix, Arizona” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009); Tami J. Friedman, “Exploiting the North–South DiVerential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II,” Journal of American History 95 (September 2008): 323–48. 4. William S. Collins, The New Deal in Arizona (Phoenix: Arizona State Parks Board, 1999); Nancy Anderson Guber, “The Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona” (master’s thesis, University of Illinois, 1961); Gerald D. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West (Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1993); Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 1–2. 5. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 2–3; Matthew C. Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 6. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” ch. 3. 7. Quoted in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95 (December 2008): 678–709, 685. 8. Ibid., 686–87. 9. Ibid., 686; Quoted in Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” ch. 3. 10. Judith Anne Jacobson, “ The Phoenix Chamber of Commerce: A Case Study of Economic Development in Central Arizona” (master’s thesis, Arizona State University, 1992), 6–11; Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 3–4. 11. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” ch. 3; Arthur G. Horton, An Economic, Political, and Social Survey of Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun (Tempe, AZ: Southside Progress, 1941), quoted on 145 and 197. 12. Frank Snell, “Program for the Chamber of Commerce,” June 23, 1939, folder 10, box 1, Frank Snell Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation (Tempe) [hereinafter cited as Snell]; Frank Snell, “President’s Report for Fiscal Year May 1, 1939–May 1, 1940,” April 26, 1940, folder 15, box 1, folder 15, Snell. 13. Jacobson, “Phoenix Chamber of Commerce,” esp. 6–26, quoted on 25; Matthew Glenn McCoy, “Desert Metropolis: Image Building and the Growth

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of Phoenix, 1940–1965” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2000), 99–100; Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 3–4. 14. Board of Directors, Minutes of Meeting, July 21, 1947, 1–3, October 20, 1947, 5–6, bound volume labeled “1947–1948,” Board of Directors Records, Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce (Phoenix) [hereinafter cited as Phoenix Chamber]; Board of Directors, Minutes of Meeting, July 16, 1948, 1–3, bound volume labeled “1948–1949,” Phoenix Chamber; “Industrial Program Hits Full Stride,” Whither Phoenix 3 (April 1948): 1. 15. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 6–8. 16. Board of Directors, Minutes of Meeting, October 20, 1947, 5–6, bound volume labeled “1947–1948,” Phoenix Chamber; C. E. Van Ness, “1948–49: A Great Year of Accomplishment,” Phoenix Action!, 4 (May 1949): 1–2. 17. Michael F. Konig, “ Toward Metropolis Status: Charter Government and the Rise of Phoenix, Arizona, 1945–1960” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1983); William S. Collins, The Emerging Metropolis: Phoenix, 1944–1973 (Phoenix: Arizona State Parks Board, 2005); Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” ch. 5; Charles Walters interview by Robert Goldberg, transcript, August 31, 1991, 2–3, 7, 9, Robert Goldberg Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe. 18. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 3 and 6; Guber, “Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona,” 33–34; Barry Goldwater to Howard Pyle, May 1, 1954, box 1, folder 3, Howard Pyle Collection (Department of Archives and Special Collections, Arizona State University, Tempe); Orme Lewis interview with Kristina Minister, April 14, 1988, audiotape, side 2 tape 2, Chamber Centennial Oral History Interviews (Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce). 19. C. V. Gulley to Orme Lewis, October 26, 1945, box 7, folder 14, Orme Lewis Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation (Tempe) [hereinafter cited as Lewis]; Minutes of Meeting of Republican State Central Committee, November 3 and 4, 1945, 2, 8–9, box 7, folder 15, Lewis. 20. “Republican Party Platform–1948,” p. 2, box 7, folder 4, 2, Lewis; “Republican Party Platform–1959,” p. 1, folder 13, Lewis; Stephen Shadegg, Arizona Politics: The Struggle to End One-Party Rule (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1986), 32–33. 21. John J. Rhodes interview by Dean Smith, transcript, May 1, 1991, 8, 10, Oral History Collection, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Arizona State University (Tempe) [hereinafter ASU Oral History]; John J. Rhodes interview by Zona Davis Lorig, November 30, 1992, transcript, Phoenix History Project, Arizona Historical Society (Tempe) [hereinafter PHP]; Ruth Adams interview by G. Wesley Johnson, September 29, 1978, p. 19, PHP. 22. Frank Brophy interview by Patricia Clark, n.d., transcript, p. 2, ASU Oral History; Shadegg, Arizona Politics, 7. 23. Shermer, Creating the Sunbelt, ch. 5. 24. Columbus Giragi to W. P. Stuart, August 28, 1935, box 1, folder 5, Stuart Family Papers, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Arizona State University (Tempe); Ruth B. Fitzgerald to Howard V. Pyle, October 9, 1950, box

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19, folder 1a, 1,Pyle; Unsigned letter to Howard Pyle, June 20, 1950, box 19, folder 1a, 1, Pyle. 25. Rhodes interview by Smith, 11–12; Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 3 and 6. 26. Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 3 and 6. 27. Ibid. 28. Ross R. Rice, “ The 1958 Election in Arizona,” Western Political Quarterly 12 (March 1959), 266–75; Howard Pyle, “Making History: Good, Bad, and Indifferent,” March 6, 1985, typescript, box 12, folder 6, 7, ASU Oral Histories. 29. Pyle, “Making History,” 8–9; Guber, “Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona,” 33–34, 53–55; Shadegg, Arizona Politics, 107–46. 30. Guber, “Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona,” 33–34, 53– 55; Pyle, “Making History,” 8–9; Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” chs. 6–7. 31. “Nonpolitical Politician,” Time, March 26, 1951, 26; Shadegg, Arizona Politics, 32, 65–71. 32. Shadegg, Arizona Politics, 32, 65–71; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 32, 84– 86, 94; Guber, “Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona,” 75–100; Howard Pyle, “Address by Governor Howard Pyle,” October 30, 1952, typescript, box 34, folder 1, 7–8, Pyle; Pyle, untitled legislative address January 23, 1951, box 33, folder 5, 4, Pyle. 33. Ernest McFarland [campaign speech], undated, series 8, subgroup II, box 186, folder 19, 2, 4, Public and Personal Papers of Ernest McFarland, McFarland Historic State Park, Florence, AZ; James McMillan, Ernest W. McFarland: Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Governor, and Chief Justice of the State of Arizona (Prescott, AZ: Sharlot Hall Museum Press, 2004), 288–89; N. D. Houghton, “The 1954 Elections in Arizona,” Western Political Quarterly 7 (December 1954), 594–96. 34. James Johnson, Arizona Politicians: The Notable and the Notorious (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 101–10, 158–67; Shadegg, Arizona Politics, 197–99; See also Micaela Anne Larkin’s chapter in this book. 35. Quoted in Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy,” 690–692. 36. Ibid., 694; Guber, “Development of Two-Party Competition in Arizona,” 67–68, 108–23; Roy Elson, “Orchestrating Senator Carl Hayden’s Last Campaign,” Journal of Arizona History 41 (December 2000), 413–24, esp. 413. 37. Quoted in Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy,” 696. 38. Quoted in ibid., 698. 39. Ibid., 698–703. 40. Quoted in ibid., 701–2. 41. Ibid., 704–10. 42. Quoted in ibid., 706. 43. Rice, “1958 Election in Arizona,” 267; Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt,” ch. 6.

3 Southwestern Strategy Mexican Americans and Republican Politics in the Arizona Borderlands micaela anne larkin

contemporaries of and scholars of Barry Goldwater have often reXected on his western image and individualism. He has been described as both “the John the Baptist of the New Right” and a “synthesis of the Modern West.” But oft-told narratives of his and other Anglo southwesterners’ conservatism and movement building within state Republican parties have tended to isolate these conservatives from the dynamic, multicultural Southwest. Mexicans and Mexican Americans, for example, have been largely absent from accounts detailing the rise of modern conservatism. Yet Arizona’s Mexican American population and Mexico’s proximity played a critical role in shaping the anti-unionism at the core of the state GOP that Goldwater helped refound.1 Arizona conservatives recognized themselves as participants in a multilayered western environment and often described their transborder circumstances with more nuance than historians have. During the 1970 governor’s race, for example, Republican governor Jack Williams mentioned to Goldwater that he “came upon the world in Los Angeles” during his mother’s vacation. He joked that he “moved 66

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to Mexico to purge” himself. He claimed to have been “conceived when Arizona was a territory on the porch of the Old Adams Hotel (How’s that for having exact information?)” and that he returned to the state just after statehood in 1913. “You can say my ‘roots’ go deep in Arizona,” the governor continued, “but actually I’m a wetback.” His attempt at humor disguised tension and anxiety. Williams, an establishment Republican, faced a tight race from Raúl Castro, a naturalized Mexican American Democrat who was born in the Northern Sonoran copper-mining town of Cananea and moved to Southern Arizona as a child.2 Arizonans’ 1970 choice between two gubernatorial candidates who had both spent some early years in Mexico underscored the importance of both place and race to the conservative movement and Goldwater’s personal politics. The complex social relations of the Southwest and the long-standing reliance on Mexican labor shaped this generation of Republicans just as much as the natural environment. These men, who opposed the New Deal and organized labor, successfully engineered capital migration to the West and renewed Republican politics in Phoenix. While inXuenced by postwar corporate eVorts to promote free-enterprise, desert conservatives drew on their lived experiences within the political economy and society of the US–Mexico borderlands to shape their free-enterprise ideology. Goldwater and his allies, for example, honed a racially moderate, “color-blind” language of opportunity to court ethnic Mexican voters as they sought to rebuild the state GOP and to maintain a conservative business environment that prized free enterprise and individualism. Arizona businessmen worked out this rhetoric years before the South’s racial moderates. These white businessmen, civic activists, and parents, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Lassiter, and others within the new suburban synthesis scholarship have contended, frustrated liberals and white reactionaries with a “new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedom, and individualism.” Their ideology was born in a racially charged context peculiar to the industrializing Jim Crow South. During the process of desegregation and suburbanization, “suburban strategies developed in the Sunbelt South,” Lassiter maintained, “not a Southern strategy inspired by the Deep South and orchestrated from the White House, provided the blueprint for the transformation of regional politics and the parallel reconWguration of national

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politics.” Yet the rise of a rights-based, “color-blind,” meritocratic southern conservatism is remarkably similar to the earlier formation of southwestern inclusionary conservatism. While opposition to regulatory liberalism, commitment to nurturing industrial growth, and promotion of suburban life shaped the political development of both regions, inclusionary southwestern conservatism manifested the distinctive cultural and economic mores of the US–Mexico borderlands.3

Goldwater’s Generation and the Arizona Borderlands Goldwater and his conservative allies promoted a free-enterprise conservatism rooted in the political economy of the Southwest and utilized an ethnic Mexican population as an important segment of their labor pool. Together, Mexicans and Native Americans were the majority of Arizona’s minority population. Between 1926 and 1940, people of Mexican ethnicity represented 28 percent of the population (as compared to around 3 percent African American, and 11 percent Native American in 1940). Even as an inXux of whites from the South, Midwest, and California expanded the state’s total population, Hispanics still accounted for at least 17 percent of the population by 1970 (a low estimate given intermarriage and the era’s sampling methods and tendency to undercount).4 Anglo Republicans’ formative years in a racialized borderland, which depended on cheap, unorganized Mexican, Native American, and African American labor, shaped their antilabor politics. The presence of Mexican labor, for example, had profoundly inXuenced Arizona’s constitution and early state politics. Born out of Progressive Era eVorts to retain democracy as the privilege and duty of elite Anglos (and a select group of Mexican Americans), Republican leaders like Dwight Heard prized rigid divisions between Mexican workers and Anglo society. The parents of Goldwater conservatives employed Native Americans as domestics and Mexican Americans as manual laborers in agribusiness and mining endeavors. The business elite also detested unions, an antilabor sentiment reXected in their successful eVorts to limit organizing eVorts, and their preference to employ ethnic Mexican workers as a means to lower costs and prevent organization.

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Like other owners and operators during this pinnacle of western progressivism, Goldwater’s Republican forebears’ anti-unionism was steeped in the language of order, progress, and good government. This rhetoric remained potent during the Great Depression and World War II, and the control and submission of organized labor and ethnic Mexican laborers remained an essential feature of Arizona’s political economy.5 Arizona’s postwar entrepreneurs continued to count on Mexican Americans and nationals as an abundant source of cheap labor in the postwar period. Mexicans, along with Native Americans and a few African Americans, dominated Arizona’s agricultural labor pool. During the early postwar period, Mexican Americans remained a sizable presence in the Welds. But they also found work in other industries. In 1951, Mexican Americans were 50 to 80 percent of the state’s miners, a large portion of semiskilled construction workers, 26 percent of the hotel and restaurant union members, a majority in the packinghouse industry, a sizable presence in the CIO steelworkers union, and 30 percent of urban Arizona’s postal workers.6 Union advances dictated that the reborn postwar Arizona Republican Party needed to court the very Mexican American voters who had helped foster a New Deal for Arizona. Goldwater and his fellow travelers would employ their long-standing “good government” and antilabor rhetoric, but they infused it with a language of inclusionary opportunity to Wt the dynamics of postwar Arizona society, which included both urban cities committed to growth and rural communities devoted to agriculture and mining. Goldwater and his associates thus needed to court a heterogeneous and diverse populace. Ethnic Mexicans, for example, occupied diVerent roles and identities in the communities of the state. For working-class Mexicans, Phoenix had the social characteristics of a contested space, whereas other communities’ social and political mores reXected the long-standing cultural inXuence of Mexican Americans. Moreover, from the perspective of Goldwater and other Anglo Republicans, ethnic Mexicans did not always embody a cohesive group. Certain individuals would be Arizonans or pioneers, and others would be foreigners. Ethnic Mexicans themselves deWned their identity to meet their own needs in a state that employed both the racial hierarchies of the United States and Latin America. A family that described itself as Spanish might be

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Basque or a product of a union between an immigrant from Spain and a Mexican, or have roots in the Hispanic culture of New Mexico or the ranching culture of Southern Arizona, or be Mexicans with enough money to live in the right part of town. Hence, class, locale, and skin color structured Phoenix and the greater Southwest, even though Mexican Americans were deWned as white at this time.7 Intermarriage between Anglos and Mexicans had also been a persistent feature of Arizona’s ever-changing life, culture, and politics. The rate increased slowly during the twentieth century, which, in turn, extended social ties and bonds between diVerent groups. These familial-social relationships and the changing ethnic makeup of different areas also made segregation and discrimination issues complex; the sociopolitical order was not rooted in an ethic of antimiscegenation. Intermarriage also socially tied Mexican Americans, as a group, to the Anglo order. Thus, the Republican Party tended to deal with issues and policies involving Mexican Americans in a piecemeal fashion, as evidenced by their episodic appearances in party communications and leaders’ notes. In contrast, southern white businessmen, like those in Joseph Crespino’s chapter, often lumped racial strife and concern within an overriding “Negro problem.”8

Republican Boosters in the Southwest When the Goldwater generation set out to construct Phoenix’s business-friendly environment, they faced a particular quandary. Conservatives clearly wanted to challenge empowered liberals and laborers, but they had to employ tactics and language to positively recognize the pluralistic conditions of the American Southwest to gain the needed votes from the ethnic Mexican population. Booster Republicans thus waged their campaign to transform Phoenix city hall, expand the Arizona GOP, or challenge the seemingly monolithic Democratic Party with knowledge of the Southwest’s multiethnic nature and the forces that made assimilation and integration a shared goal of the business and Mexican American community. Goldwater and his generation hence crafted an inclusionary, free-enterprise conservatism to court working-class voters, both Anglo and minority, and win support for policies that limited trade unionism, a critical component of

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their industrial recruitment eVorts. Arizona conservatives treated racial minorities, especially Mexican Americans, as an important voting bloc in the postwar period, while they simultaneously, as their predecessors had done, campaigned against unions as a threat to industrial peace, economic prosperity, and individual opportunity. Instead of rallying against foreigners or decrying Mexican American voluntary associations, postwar anti-union advocates of “good government,” like Goldwater, asked workers to depose discriminatory labor bosses, corrupt Democratic oYcials, and dangerous communists, a label thrown about when politics reached a fever pitch.9 This Southwestern Strategy was rooted in Arizona conservatives’ response to the New Deal. They demanded racial equality and social progress within their support for free-enterprise principles. During the November 1945 State Central Committee meeting, for example, delegates declared themselves “the Conservative Party of this state” in order to “re-establish . . . a two-party system of government representative of all the people” by providing “militant opposition to the Democratic or Radical Party which by word, plan, or action is striving to fasten communistic theories and practices upon this state and upon this nation.” Leaders supported “republican government with its guarantees of equal opportunity for all” but also “opposed . . . unbridled radicalism.” The GOP would thus protect civil and property rights, because the party “does not believe in government by minorities, in class or race prejudice, or in favoring one section of our population above any other section but it does believe in protecting all the citizens in all the rights by requiring all citizens, all classes, and all groups to work for the common good.” These Republicans had thus undertaken a critical rhetorical revolution in their party’s commitment to restoring the common good, combating radicalism, and promoting good government. These Progressive Era principles were now enveloped in a color-blind language of individual opportunity and social progress, similar to the politics that would transform the suburban South in the 1960s.10 Action accompanied these words. Indeed, Goldwater Republicans’ inclusionary conservatism relied on courting minority voters. Party leaders placed ads in Spanish-language newspapers and corresponded with Mexican American Republicans. Anglo party stalwarts oVered

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these voters a philosophy that promoted education, equal opportunity, and individual initiative as pathways for upward mobility, while they decried Democratic “do-gooders” who mistakenly beieved that legislation could save “poor people” and ameliorate inequality.11 Some stalwarts, such as Goldwater campaign manager Stephen Shadegg, disliked this approach, because, as he said, the strategy was “perpetuating and accentuating the diVerence, and I think it is the diVerence which should be denied.” Yet, in practice, Shadegg proved himself ready and adept at targeting voting blocs. In the end, Goldwater Republicans pragmatically embraced diVerence within their colorblind rhetoric, while they maintained their opposition to privileging groups and using “federal compulsion” to promote social change.12 This commitment to color-blind free-enterprise principles shaped how conservatives reached out to Mexican American voters during the 1946 right-to-work referendum. They charged union leaders with discrimination, which Mexican Americans faced from organizers and managers in union hiring halls, agricultural Welds, and mining towns. An ad placed in a Spanish-language newspaper, for example, suggested that unions took dues from Mexicans while giving the best jobs to others. Supporting the initiative would hence end Mexican workers’ exploitation at the hands of their union “bosses,” not their employers.13 Arizona Republicans continued to court Mexican American voters after the right-to-work law was passed, in order to expand support for and membership in the GOP. For example, Anglo lawyers such as Orme Lewis contributed to the eVorts of Sal Balderas, Adam Díaz, Arturo Moreno, and other members of Arizona’s chapter of “Latinos con Eisenhower,” which endeavored to mobilize the Spanish-speaking vote in 1952. That same election cycle, Republican transplant John Rhodes campaigned for Congress by walking through the barrios of South Phoenix in the middle of Arizona’s hot summer. Goldwater, for his part, was a member of Lodge 129 of Alianza Hispanic Americans and American Legion Post #41, which Mexican Americans founded in 1945 and then transformed into a vehicle for social justice. Goldwater’s allegiances paid oV: Alianza Hispanic Americans featured the newly elected senator as brother of the month in their April 1953 magazine. Goldwater also endeared himself to voters because he proved himself amenable to his Mexican American constituents’ needs.

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In July 1958 Goldwater publicly supported the federal purchase of excess copper in the name of national defense, which, he noted, would also be a lifeline for struggling Arizona mining corporations and their predominantly Mexican American workforce.14 Yet this rhetorical and organizational evolution had less of an impact on Anglo Republican views toward Mexican nationals, be they documented or not. Party leaders, for example, did not oppose the massive deportation of the undocumented during “Operation Wetback” in 1954. Yet their support did not necessarily harm their eVorts to rebuild the GOP, because some Mexican Americans shared with the Republican Party a commitment to reducing illegal immigration. Anglo Republican approval for removing illegal immigrants from Welds, orchards, and pastures was partly rooted in their support for the federal Bracero Program, which, as other historians have noted, lessened the agricultural strikes and labor unrest that characterized the New Deal period but also provided sprawling Phoenix with a ready supply of Mexican American workers to build homes, schools, and production facilities. Shadegg, for example, considered “the Bracero Program . . . beneWcial” for growers, consumers, and nationals. This reasoning partly explained Arizona agriculture’s increasing reliance on Mexican nationals after 1954, when they accounted for approximately one-third to one-half of the total seasonal workers in Arizona Welds during peak months.15 Postwar opportunities in mushrooming Phoenix reshaped Mexican Americans’ opportunities, expectations, and allegiances. Many found work in the state’s capital city, where they had access to diverse types of work. Economic stability from jobs, veterans beneWts, and education increased the number of Mexican Americans integrating into the state’s economic and political life. Regardless whether they aligned with the Republican Party, Mexican Americans, like Phoenix judge Val Cordova, would look back at their struggles and triumphs and describe their individual success in the language of inclusionary conservatism, which had continued to emphasize equal opportunity, personal discipline, and commitment to community that had been a part of the GOP’s refounding and the postwar eVorts to court Mexican American voters. This “bootstraps” rhetoric of inclusionary conservatism thus remained viable in establishment Arizona politics.16

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Here Come the Chicanos! Arizona Republicans like Goldwater nonetheless found it necessary to modify the inclusionary conservatism that melded with assimilatory attitudes in the Mexican American community when they faced new electoral conditions and renewed interest in ethnic pride and activism by those of Mexican descent. Demands for social and economic justice, well outside the scope of Republicans’ inclusionary freeenterprise conservatism, had existed before this tumultuous decade. In Arizona, Mexican American civil rights emerged over time through small, often private, battles: groups fought for their rights, politicians tried to woo the Mexican American vote, and individual ethnic Mexicans achieved political, social, and economic success. These struggles for economic and educational opportunity were also intertwined with intermarriage, which resulted in a postwar Mexican American civil rights lacking the public, substantial, and sometimes violent memories associated with this moment in southern race relations.17 In contrast to the metropolitan South that Lassiter and others have researched, neighborhood-based racially and ethnically motivated activism was not a driving force in local politics, nor did a private schools movement reshape the educational landscape. In fact, desegregation and integration of Mexican Americans did not provoke massive or sustained resistance from white Arizonans. A populist-based segregation pamphlet, for example, failed to attract mass support in the 1940s, as did an attempt to segregate Mexican American veteran housing and block it from a particular neighborhood in 1946 and 1947. Post #41’s Mexican American Legionnaires were able to desegregate public housing and limit discrimination in new housing developments. The Arizona Supreme Court even desegregated schools in 1953, a decision that eventually had a dramatic impact on the agricultural communities surrounding Phoenix.18 Yet even though Arizona Republicans did not face overwhelming pressures from militant white homeowners or minority civil rights activists, they still adapted their politics to a national political climate oriented around civil rights issues. In 1967, Senator Paul Fannin, a conservative Republican and member of the local Phoenix political establishment, supported a bilingual education bill (as did Ronald Reagan when he governed California). Goldwater pressed President

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Richard Nixon to hold a conference on Mexican American issues in 1969, the same year Goldwater and Fannin advocated for a Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking Peoples. In 1970, a leader in an Arizona chapter of the John Birch Society, a descendant of a prominent pioneer family no less, suggested that the organization promote membership among Mexican Americans to counter growing support for Cesar Chavez’s boycotts and organizing drives in California Welds.19 Insurgent Arizona Chicana/os also forced Republicans to intensify their eVorts to win over Mexican American voters. A small group of Chicana/o civil rights activists, inspired by student radicals transforming southern civil rights and union organizers such as Arizona-born Chavez, challenged the traditional labor and political practices of the Arizona conservatives, who had by then transformed the GOP into a large, powerful party. Arizona activists organized in schools, Welds, and barrios, where illegal immigration, less than a decade after the Bracero Program had ended, proved an increasingly divisive issue. Laborites, for their part, suggested in handouts that the rising tide of illegal labor hindered the eVorts of native workers (especially Mexican Americans) to earn a decent living and thus increased urban crime. Yet Goldwater and other Anglo, business-focused Republicans also needed the working-class vote that unionists were courting. The senator and other Phoenix-based Republicans subsequently pursued a legislative agenda that adapted their Progressive Era and early postwar emphasis on equal opportunity to beWt increased politicization of minority communities and the postindustrial economy. They also wanted to woo Mexican Americans who scorned the rhetoric of Chicano youth culture.20 Yet Anglo Republicans’ own labor practices betrayed their contorted southwestern version of free-enterprise ideology. Many, as their parents had done, continued to employ illegal immigrants, a managerial and elite household strategy endemic to the borderlands but also at odds with their postwar rhetorical emphasis on free labor and inclusion. They proved themselves unapologetic when reporters learned of these strategies to cut production or personal costs. Criticism, for example, emerged when citizens learned that Goldwater’s brother Bob employed illegal immigrants. The senator dismissed his critics: “My brother is over twenty-one and can make his own decisions. If you

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people would get oV your butts, and go to work, we wouldn’t have to hire nationals.” Such retorts would not serve Goldwater or his political heirs well. They betrayed how old racial and economic practices buttressed their inclusive conservatism, and the blindness among the GOP’s elite stratum of entrepreneurs to the long-term consequences of not abandoning their reliance on Mexican nationals to keep cheap labor.21 Goldwater Republicans also found new challenges when they appealed to the assimilated Mexican American population that they had courted since the mid-1940s. By the late 1960s, educated and accomplished Mexican Americans like Raúl Castro were politicians in their own right. Castro had lived his Wrst ten years in an American-run copper-mining town in Northern Mexico called Cananea. In 1926, Castro’s family moved to Pirtleville, a predominantly Mexican suburb of Douglas, Arizona. Raised in poverty, he attended college and, eventually, law school in Arizona. Castro had then been active in southern Arizona Democratic party politics and legal circles, work that led to his appointment as the American ambassador to El Salvador and Bolivia under President Lyndon Johnson. In 1968 Goldwater wanted newly elected President Richard Nixon to renew Castro’s Bolivian appointment: “We have many Republicans in Arizona—what I call ‘fat cats’ in the weaving business—who told me not to let Nixon recall Castro. They got along with him.” Yet Goldwater’s request bespoke Castro’s acceptability to conservative Republicans and Democrats, then Arizona’s political establishment, but also the senator’s conviction that Castro represented a threat to the GOP. Goldwater clearly recognized the appeal of Castro to those in the Mexican American establishment, too.22 The former ambassador was a political hazard. Castro returned to Arizona and ran for governor in 1970. He beat his Democratic primary opponents two to one, even though he lacked a war chest and the state Democratic Party’s organizational support. Analysts concluded that his primary election success reXected widespread support by Arizona’s minority populations. These voters were a critical part of the electorate: in 1970, Mexican Americans accounted for over 15 percent of the population, Native Americans for 6 percent, and African Americans for 3 percent. This backing mattered in the general election, when Castro ran as a “law and order” candidate who also

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reiterated the kind of equal opportunity language that Anglo Republicans had perfected. Castro, for example, claimed that no one was denied opportunities in the United States. This assertion frustrated Chicana/o student activists, one of whom criticized him as a “white sleeper.” Yet this same insurgent asserted that Castro lost the race because of the “racist white people in Maricopa.” Castro had in fact done well. He lost by just one percentage point, a reXection of his appeal to many minority and white voters.23 Castro’s narrow defeat was indicative of the ongoing conXicts between assimilated Mexican Americans, Chicana/o “militant integrationist” activists, and established business-oriented conservatives. Tensions came to a head during Williams’s Wrst term when the Arizona Farm Bureau undertook a concerted eVort to stymie the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) eVorts to organize Arizona Weld hands. Williams supported agribusiness heads, signing a 1972 law that outlawed secondary boycotts and limited the ability of farm workers to strike. He considered the measure an extension of the labor policy at the center of his generation’s borderlands inclusionary conservatism, because the bill “will help all of Arizona just as the right to work law did. That law has made Arizona one of the most successful states in terms of economic growth in the nation and the same attacks were made upon it.” Yet Williams, at this moment when his contemporaries were struggling to deal with labor policy after the Bracero Program’s end, also abandoned the desert Republicans’ tradition of reaching out to Mexican Americans. He refused to meet with Chavez, who had returned to his home state to Wght the bill. The head of the UFW was disgusted. He rallied the Mexican American community against the governor by initiating a recall movement with help from local Chicana/o and white liberal activists. The eVort juxtaposed Williams, characterized as an old racist governor who had mandated a John Birch Day, against Chavez, the saintly organizer whose fast had inspired a pantheon of civil rights activists. The recall inspired liberal youth, because the drive represented the most signiWcant liberal protest in the state in decades. Republicans and other conservatives responded by claiming that Chavez was a communist, whose unionism provoked violent confrontations between farm workers, owners, and citizens. Yet this default anti-union strategy failed to gain signiWcant traction. Chavez’s supporters turned in more than 160,000 signatures to place the issue

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before voters, well over the 103,000 needed. Yet Arizonans never considered the issue on election day: state oYcials ended up tossing out many of the signatures over technicalities, which resulted in the threshold not being met.24 The unsuccessful attempt to oust Williams did not limit Castro’s political career. He had not participated in the recall movement but would run for governor less than two years later. He won the 1974 election against Russell Williams, who had no relation to Jack. Pundits disagreed over why Castro had upset the Anglo Republican establishment, attributing his victory to his “story,” frustration over crime and pollution, and the Watergate scandal. Regardless of the reason, Castro’s election represented a watershed moment in Arizona politics and its inclusionary conservatism. The governor represented an early version of the western Democrats that emerged in the 1970s, those emphasizing traditionalist values and centrist policies. Further, he had clear ties to the state’s more conservative Democrats. These “pinto,” or JeVersonian, Democrats shared the Anglo Republicans’ anti-union politics and spoke in the language of color-blind, freeenterprise conservatism that Phoenix boosters had worked out a generation before Castro’s election in order to include Mexican Americans into their base.25 Indeed, Castro’s political ascendancy oVered proof to some Arizonans that the state had moved beyond the discrimination that limited meritocratic individual advancement. For the Anglo population, Castro’s 1974 election conWrmed the color-blindness of the American political system. Born in Mexico, Castro had prospered in conservative Arizona through hard work and dedication. One Arizonan told the newspaper, “I don’t think of him as a man of Mexican descent. . . . I think of him as a smart, astute man. He’s come a long damn hard way to get where he is.” Castro conWrmed the American way for Arizona conservatives, as did the other Mexican Americans from humble beginnings that entered into Arizona’s judiciary and public oYces during the 1970s.26 The Anglo explanations of Castro’s triumph shared the language of the inclusionary conservatism that Goldwater and the other Republicans had developed to retool the state Republican Party years before race-neutral politics transformed the suburban South. Desert boosters had made individual opportunity and advancement central to their

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eVorts to challenge New Deal liberalism and build an institution capable of ending the Democratic Party’s hold over Arizona. Their ideas were fundamentally rooted in the Arizona borderland, a politicized and racialized space that they transformed in their eVorts to lure industry. The ongoing interaction between an assimilating Mexican American population and Arizona’s Republican leadership represented a process through which Anglo-Americans came to describe and understand the integration of minorities into full citizenship and a competitive labor market that lacked the trade unionism and federal regulation of migrant labor to stabilize wages and working conditions. Goldwater Republicans’ “Southwestern Strategy” of inclusionary conservatism had also shaped how they understood civil rights issues. While their borderlands experience with Mexican Americans contributed to their notions of a color-blind conservatism and meritocracy, it also made them predisposed not to question the extent to which Arizona depended on labor from Mexico, which set the stage for Arizona’s current political divisions.

Notes 1. Michael E. McGerr, “Is There a Twentieth-Century West?,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 251; Peter Iverson, Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 152–56; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 2. Jack Williams to Barry Goldwater, October 6, 1970, Series I-Personal: Alpha Files—Jack Williams, 1969–1970, Folder 2, Box 24, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater [hereinafter cited as BMG Papers], Arizona Historical Foundation [hereinafter cited as AHF] (Tempe); Raúl H. Castro and Jack L. August Jr., Adversity Is My Angel: The Life and Career of Raúl H. Castro (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 2009). 3. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6; Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6, 11–14; Kevin M. Kruse, “ The Politics of Race and Public Space: Desegregation, Privatization, and the Tax Revolt in America,” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 5 (July 2005): 633; Matthew D. Lassiter and Kevin Kruse, “ The

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Bulldozer Revolution: Suburbs and Southern History since World War II,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 691–706; Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Tami J. Friedman, “Exploiting the North–South DiVerential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 323–48; James C. Cobb, Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 4. Due to the census numbers, Arizona’s Hispanic population is hard to ascertain. The Hispanic percentage in 1970 is probably a low estimate, given intermarriage and the number being generated by census workers using a set list of Hispanic names to estimate the population. Mary Melcher, “ ‘This Is Not Right’: Rural Arizona Women Challenge Segregation and Ethnic Division,” Frontiers 20, no. 2 (1999): 190; Table 17. Arizona—Race and Hispanic Origin: 1860 to 1990, US Census Bureau, Sept. 2002, http://www.census.gov/population/www/ documentation/twps0056/tab17.pdf. 5. Pete R. Dimas, Progress and a Mexican American Community’s Struggle for Existence (New York: Lang, 1999); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 121–47; Oral Histories: Pedro Guererro, Box 7, Folder 7, AHF Oral History Collection; Oral Histories: Margaret Hance (part of the Arizona Way and Arizona Way Revisited), Box 7, Folder 6, AHF Oral History Collection; William Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Robert Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Abraham HoVman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974); Micaela Larkin, “Labor’s Desert: Mexican Workers, Unions and Entrepreneurial Conservatism in Arizona, 1917–1972,” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2009). 6. Raymond Johnson Flores, “ The Socio-Economic Status Trends of the Mexican People Residing in Arizona” (bachelor’s thesis, Arizona State University, 1951), 19–33. 7. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt: Right to Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943–1958,” PaciWc Historical Review 78, no. 1 (February 2009): 81–118; for inclusive Democratic Party politics, see Luis H. Cordova Papers, 1936–1990 (MSS 125), Chicano Research Collection, Arizona State University Library (Tempe); Larkin, “Labor’s Desert,” 117– 65; Oral Histories: Pedro Guererro, AHF; Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans, 148–76; Dimas, Progress and a Mexican American Community’s Struggle for Existence; Mario T. Garcia, Católicos: Resistance and AYrmation in Chicano Catholic

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History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 183; Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992); Julian Samora and Patricia Vandel Simon, A History of the Mexican-American People (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 244. 8. While work remains to be done on Arizona as a whole, research suggests that it would be similar to Los Angeles, where George Sanchez found a rate of 15.6 percent marriages of Mexican immigrant men to Anglo women, and 33.3 percent of Mexican immigrant women to Anglo men in records relating to naturalization applications in 1940. Literature suggests that an exogamous marriage rate of 10 to 15 percent prior to 1950 would be a fair estimate, see George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 195. For more on estimating the rates, see Constantino Panunzio, “Intermarriage in Los Angeles, 1924–1933,” American Journal of Sociology 47, no. 5 (March 1942): 690–701; Gary A. Crester and Joseph Leon, Intermarriage in the United States, vol. 5 (New York: Routledge, 1982), 95. For discussion of Tucson data, see Salvador Acosta, “Crossing Borders, Erasing Boundaries: Interethnic Marriages in Tucson: 1854– 1930” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2010); John W. Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr., eds., Pure Goldwater (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), 69; Western Union Telegram to Orme Lewis, September 2, 1952, Box 7, Folder 9, Orme Lewis Papers, AHF; Philip Scranton, ed., The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). 9. For a discussion of the multiethnic dimensions of the Southwest, see Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 4–6; Larkin, “Labor’s Desert,” 117–65. 10. “Minutes of Meeting of Republican State Central Committee,” November 1945, Box 7, Folder 15, 1, 9, Orme Lewis Papers, AHF. 11. “Latin American Papers,” Box 1, Folder 2, Luis H. Cordova Papers, 1936– 1990 (MSS 125), Chicano Research Collection, Arizona State University Library (Tempe). 12. Stephen C. Shadegg to Mr. Robert B. Campbell, February 1, 1963, loose in Box 99 in the unprocessed Stephen Shadegg Collection, AHF. 13. “Latin America Papers,” Luis H. Cordova Papers, 1936–1990; William Collins, The Emerging Metropolis: Phoenix, 1944–1973 (Phoenix: Arizona State Parks Board, 2005); Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor–Management Relations in America, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 36; “Importante” advertisement, El Sol, November 1946, 6. 14. John A. Flores to Orme Lewis, July 25, 1952, Box 7, Folder 9, Orme Lewis Collection, AHF; John Rhodes, I Was There (Salt Lake City: Northwest Press, 1995); Charles H. Sanderson, The Faces of Post 41: South Phoenix Latinos Fight for the Country Abroad and Their Civil Rights at Home (Phoenix: Latino Perspectives

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Media/Raúl Castro Institute, 2008), 1–20; Alianza, April 1953, Folder Goldwater, Personal: Boards, Memberships, Alianza, BMG Papers; Barry Goldwater, “Statement re Stabilization and Production of Copper, Lead, Zinc and Other Materials from Domestic Mines,” Section VI, Box 1, Folder 29, BMG Papers. 15. Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Craig Kaplowitz, LULAC: Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station: Texas A&M, 2005), 56; Stephen Shadegg to William C. Davis, AZ Farm Bureau, August 3, 1969, loose in Box 100, Stephen Shadegg Papers; Lisbeth Haas, The Bracero in Orange County: A Work Force for Economic Transition, Working Papers in U.S. Mexican-Studies 29 (San Diego: University of California, Program in Mexican American Studies, 1981), 1–3, 45; Arizona State Employment Service, Agricultural Employment in Arizona, 1950–1962 (Phoenix: Arizona State Employment Service, 1963), 10–16; Harland PadWeld and William E. Martin, Technological and Social Change in Farm Industries of Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965), 266–67. 16. Val Cordova, oral history interview, 16, Phoenix History Project, Arizona Historical Society–Central Arizona division, Tempe. 17. Nick Tapia, “Cactus in the Desert: The Chicana/o Movement in Maricopa County, 1968–1978” (master’s thesis, Arizona State University, 1999), 2, 15, 19, 20; F. Arturo Rosales, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the MexicanAmerican Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000), 331–32, 377–82; Christine Marin, “Go Home, Chicana/os: A Study of the Brown Berets in California and Arizona,” in An Awakened Minority: The Mexican Americans, ed. Manuel Servin (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1974), 226–46; F. Arturo Rosales, Chicana/o! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Publico, 1997). 18. Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A ProWle of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 50–51, 171; Collins, Emerging Metropolis, 266–67; Lillian Stough, Sidney P. Osborn: World War II Governor of Arizona, 1941–1948 (Phoenix: Sage Press, 1996), 16; Christine Marin, “LULAC and Veterans Organize for Civil Rights in Tempe and Phoenix, 1940–1947,” Mexican American Studies and Research Center Working Paper Series (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2001); Sanderson, Faces of Post 41, 26–31; Matthew C. Whitaker, Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 122. 19. John David Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1; Frank Cullen Brophy, Reds Stir Mexican Americans (Belmont, MA: Review of News, 1968); Frank Cullen Brophy, “Chavez Nonsense Must Cease,” Arizona Republic, August 2, 1972, 7; Mary Melcher, “Planning for Survival: Civil Defense and Anti-Communism in Arizona, 1950–1975,” Journal of Arizona History 45, no. 2 (2004): 184. 20. “Arizona, Agriculture, and Farmworkers,” memo, May 20, 1972, Box 3, Folder 6, UFW–Arizona State Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State

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University (Detroit); Sean P. Cunningham, Cowboy Conservatism: Texas and the Rise of the Modern Right (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 112– 14. 21. Paul Damon to Senator Stevenson, June 12, 1972, Box 4, Folder 14, UFW–Arizona State Papers, Walter Reuther Library; Michael Cooper, “McCain Makes Appeal to Hispanics,” July 9, 2008, New York Times, http://www.nytimes .com/2008/07/09/us/politics/08cnd-mccain.html. 22. Donnie RadcliVe, “Republicans, Democrats, Cervantes, and Shakespeare,” Washington Post, October 18, 1977, B4; Castro and August, Adversity Is My Angel. 23. Ross R. Rice and Dickinson L. McGaw, “ The 1970 Elections in Arizona,” Western Political Quarterly 24, no. 2 (June 1971): 243–51; Roberto Pastor, untitled article, La Disensión 1, no. 2 (1970), Box 2, Folder 11, MASO/MEChA Records, Chicana/o Collection, Arizona State University (Tempe); Castro and August, Adversity Is My Angel. 24. “New Labor Law Expected to Set OV Arizona Clash,” New York Times, June 11, 1972, 46; “Recall Bid Faces Delay in Arizona,” New York Times, January 21, 1973, 30; James W. Johnson, Arizona Politicians: The Notable and the Notorious (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). 25. Castro and August, Adversity Is My Angel. 26. Kenneth Reich, “Chicana/o Governor Advances Slowly,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1975, A3.

4 Getting to Goldwater Robert A. Taft, William F. Knowland, and the Rightward Drift of the Republican Party michael bowen

barry goldwater did not just ride out of the Arizona desert in 1960 to challenge Richard Nixon for the Republican presidential nomination. He had already spent eight years bedeviling liberal Democrats and trade unionists from his Senate seat. But his Wrst foray into national politics was also a part of a high-level conservative takeover of the national GOP Wfteen years in the making. In July 1945 Thomas E. Dewey had received a nearly impossible, but seemingly necessary, task that would challenge even his ostentatious drive. Dewey had unsuccessfully run for president in 1944 and still had visions of leading a triumphant resurgence of the GOP. As a Wrst step he had commissioned pollster Claude Robinson to assess the party’s chances and lay out a strategy for victory in 1948. The detailed summary of Robinson’s Wndings, titled “ Truman, the Republican, and 1948,” contended that the Republicans would not win another presidential election until they developed a completely new political identity. “ The Republicans have been the minority party for twelve years,” Robinson wrote. “ They have,” among other things, “lost their appeal to youth. They 87

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must Wnd fresh, vigorous, righteous appeals to recruit youth or their long term outlook is bearish.” Robinson argued that the GOP was regarded as too probusiness and too conservative. He made a forceful claim that Democratic constituencies like labor unions and minority groups had to be brought into the party with promises of further progress and economic security. To continue with the same narrowly focused platform, the report concluded, would keep the GOP out of the White House for the foreseeable future.1 Dewey and his associates approved of Robinson’s plan and adopted it as their strategic vision for the next three election cycles. In doing so, they sparked an intense factional conXict that dominated the postwar Republican Party and made the GOP the vehicle for the conservative movement. In a conXict that preWgured the storied 1964 California showdown between Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, Dewey and Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft challenged each other for control of the Republican organization and the inside track for the 1948 presidential nomination immediately following the 1944 election. Though both men governed in similar fashions and endorsed many of the same policy ideas, they disagreed on the way the GOP should position itself to the electorate, with Taft calling for a more oppositional, anti–New Deal stance, very much akin to the hostility that Goldwater had expressed in the pages of the Phoenix Gazette a decade before. Initially, mundane questions over patronage and fundraising had the most direct bearing on the power struggle. Following the 1948 election, where candidate Dewey squandered a staggering lead in the closing weeks of the campaign, the question of party control became meshed with questions of ideology. Both sides adopted identities at diVerent ends of the political spectrum to attract voters, distinguish themselves from their rivals, and portray their quests for the party’s nomination as more than simple self-interest. The factions still jockeyed behind the scenes for supporters and resources, but their philosophical diVerences became more pronounced and determinative. After Dewey-backed Dwight D. Eisenhower won the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1952, the question was temporarily settled, a fact Taft’s death in 1953 further compounded.2 During the Eisenhower administration, the question of liberalism versus conservatism soon overshadowed the power politics behind the scenes, just as it would dominate the conservative literature supporting

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Goldwater in 1964. The Dewey faction used control of patronage appointments to purge most of the Taftites from the Republican organization. While this was a fairly straightforward matter of establishing and maintaining control of the party apparatus, observers in the press and at the grassroots level attributed these maneuvers to ideology. Self-identiWed conservatives conXated the removal of the old guard with Eisenhower’s pronouncements of a moderate “Modern Republicanism” and searched for a candidate to challenge the incumbent. Though California senator William F. Knowland had no chance against Eisenhower, he Xirted with the nomination and aligned support along the right wing of the GOP. Thus, the 1964 nomination of Barry Goldwater was not a sudden emergence of political conservatism, as some scholars have claimed, but rather a product of this long-standing antagonism. In 1945 disaVection with the New Deal existed but was not articulated in a uniWed or systematic way. By 1960 the conservative intellectual and grassroots anticommunist movements had mobilized the Republican Right, many of whom viewed the anti-Taft eVorts as part of a broader leftward shift from their party leadership. But the Wfteen-year feud between the Taftites and the Deweyites was as important as grassroots and lettered insurgencies. The Dewey wing’s concerted eVorts to marginalize conservatives, to protect parts of the New Deal order, and to expand the federal government’s authority provided conservatives with the rhetorical Wrepower to publicly damn moderate Republicans in the 1960s for echoing liberals, limiting state authority, and acting as demagogic kingmakers. Internal GOP squabbling in the 1950s hence opened the door to a far-west insurgent like Goldwater, who took his seat the same year Taft’s death left conservatives without a senatorial standard-bearer.

Taft versus Dewey—1944–52 The GOP at the national level was as conXict-ridden and embattled as the Arizona Republican Party had been in the 1930s and 1940s. From 1944 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, the Taft and Dewey factions challenged each other for control of the party organization and essentially split the GOP into two camps.

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This divide can be traced to a speciWc date, December 21, 1944, when members of the congressional leadership met with Dewey and his associates to hammer out a new statement of policy. Taft and Dewey had exchanged platform ideas in advance and had reached a tentative agreement, though Taft expressed concern over creating a statement of policy so soon after the presidential election. Dewey persisted and those legislative leaders who assembled at the governor’s suite at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York agreed in principle to support the planks listed, including new federal housing and medical care programs. The meeting broke down, however, when the Capitol Hill Republicans asked for Dewey’s hand-picked Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Herbert Brownell, to step aside and allow a legislator to run the party organization during the 1946 midterm election cycle. Both sides were playing for a larger prize. Dewey hoped to maintain his grip on the chairmanship and build the party in anticipation of a second presidential run, though he told Taft and his associates he did not plan to seek the nomination in 1948. Taft did not for a minute believe that Dewey would stay out of the 1948 Wght and sternly refused to move forward in the name of party unity if Dewey intended to run the Republican organization. The question was not about liberalism versus conservatism, as it would be in the contest between Goldwater and Rockefeller, but rather about which individual would be the next nominee. During the Wrst four years of the rivalry, political identity was a very minor part of the story and was by no means the central point of contention.3 Following the 1944 meeting through the election of 1948, power was the overarching concern, with campaign strategy and ideology key secondary issues. Columnist Stewart Alsop noted in 1950 that Taft and a group of self-identiWed liberal senators who challenged his leadership voted together on most major pieces of legislation. Taft and Dewey in fact agreed on most key policy areas, with the notable exception of foreign relations, and neither came down consistently on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Taft, for example, sponsored legislation that expanded the federal government’s role in public education and public housing, measures that many would label as “liberal,” while Dewey supported a measure in New York that would Wre striking public employees, a fairly draconian antilabor position.

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Through the late 1940s diVerences would emerge on topics such as organized labor and civil rights, but these were matters of degree.4 While neither group was truly liberal or conservative, the appearance of ideological diVerences became crucial and deWnitive following the election of 1948. Both sides had divergent reads on the American electorate and recent history. As such, they created their campaign rhetoric and platform planks based on what they believed the voters would endorse. Though he referred to himself as a “liberal,” Dewey promoted what could best be described as “anticonservatism.” He believed that the New Deal had permanently expanded the government and that the people would never back any reduction in services or weakening of the role of the state. He did not advocate a version of modern liberalism, though he did call himself a “New Deal Republican” at various times, but he held that to remain viable the GOP would have to tack leftward and embrace an activist government. He also believed that the lingering stigma of the Hoover administration and blame for the Great Depression remained an obstacle to the party’s success. Dewey hoped to create a new political identity based on a set of “forward-looking” principles to demonstrate that the party had progressed, even though what exactly those tenets included at a given moment was open to negotiation. He read the results of the 1948 election, a contest that most pundits and prognosticators believed he would win easily, as a rejection the recent history of the party and of the Taft-led 80th Congress, not of his candidacy or his platform. From 1948 through 1952, he called for a break from the past character of the GOP and forcefully advocated a new direction for the party. In a series of lectures in Princeton in 1950, for example, he claimed, “Each of [the last four campaigns] was based upon a liberal platform and led by a candidate who assured the people that he did not intend to repeal the Twentieth Century,” and lambasted the Taftites for their policy views. He glossed over the many similarities between the factions and instead painted his rivals as lost in the past and out of touch with the American people, while claiming his own organization could recapture the White House.5 While he was recasting himself as a liberal, Dewey continually referred to Taft and his allies as conservatives, a label they readily accepted, just like Phoenix’s free-enterprise-focused booster set. Though he was by no means an ideologue, Taft personally held a political

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worldview based heavily on individual liberty, federalism, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. From his chairmanships of the Republican Senate Policy Committee and the Senate Labor Committee, Taft steered a conservative course, though he remained amenable to working with liberals on key issues. He blamed Dewey’s parroting of Democratic policies on the campaign trail and his weak overall performance, not the legislative record of the 80th Congress, for the 1948 Wasco. He won reelection to the Senate in 1950 on a fairly conservative platform notable for a positive portrayal of the Taft-Hartley Act, a 1948 measure that curtailed the power of organized labor. He asserted that the law protected trade unionists from tyrannical union bosses, which helped him carry the union stronghold of Cleveland, one of only two Republican Senate candidates to do so in the twentieth century. He had won, moreover, by 400,000 votes. Taft’s overwhelming victory in Ohio convinced many Republicans that he could actually win a presidential election on the basis of his traditionalist Republican principles. Though some members of the emerging right-wing press eventually embraced Goldwater and exerted their editorial authority to expand the conservative movement in the 1960s, these kingpins doubted whether the Taftites were legitimate conservatives in the early 1950s. Taft nevertheless drew the support of those most opposed to the New Deal and modern liberalism. It was unlikely that his faction could actually carry a presidential election, but Taft certainly had a high level of support.6 Going into the 1952 electoral cycle, the Taft and Dewey wings continued with their divergent campaign strategies. Dewey’s 1948 organization reformed to manage Eisenhower’s candidacy and based their rhetoric on his war record, his near-universal popularity, and his anticipated bipartisan support. Taft campaigned on his legislative record and his pledge to check the expansion of centralized authority, a guarantee not unlike the one Goldwater made this same year when he unseated liberal Democrat Ernest McFarland. Both presidential candidates polled well on the major issues of the cycle, and the nomination came down to a procedural move to block the seating of pro-Taft contested delegates from four southern states. The Eisenhower forces outXanked Taft’s Xoor managers and gave Eisenhower the nomination, a process that afterward became a part of conservative Republican mythology and fueled the idea, most forcefully propagated by Phyllis

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SchlaXy in her 1964 campaign paperback A Choice Not an Echo, that a group of eastern liberals had hijacked the GOP away from its conservative base. The 1952 campaign did little to dispel this idea as Dewey and his associates set up Citizens for Eisenhower (CFE), an ostensibly nonpartisan organization to mobilize Democrats and independents. Operating under the assumption that the Republican brand carried a stigma and was unelectable, the group achieved so much success early on that only a last-ditch proposal from national Republican chairman Arthur SummerWeld kept them from supplanting the RNC in the campaign hierarchy. Taft, bitter over the convention results, stumped for Eisenhower only after a highly publicized meeting between the two and a Wrm commitment that the new administration would not replicate the New Deal. Though they brieXy uniWed for the election cycle, both wings treated the other with suspicion.7

The Purge of the Taftites—1953–60 Eisenhower’s victory failed to instill party unity but instead heralded a campaign for purity. Insurgent antiliberal Republicans like Goldwater and Taft had seats in the Senate, but the Dewey forces had Wrm control of the party machinery. They launched a concerted eVort to run the Taftites out of the national party. This straightforward political maneuver ensured control of the organization but soon became wrapped up more in ideas and policy proposals that increasingly deWned both factions. Herbert Brownell, a Dewey adviser who vetted most of the cabinet appointments, ignored Taft’s closest associates and famously turned down Taft’s two choices for secretary of labor, noted anti-union conservative Clarence Manion and former Connecticut senator John Danaher, in favor of Martin Durkin, the head of the American Federation of Labor’s plumbers union, and an avowed Democrat. The Eisenhower administration and the RNC also moved to block Taftites from distributing patronage positions in their home states, a maneuver that would greatly diminish their local power bases and allow the national organization to Wnd new, more amenable, state leaders. By July, Taft was well aware of what was taking place but was succumbing to cancer and was too weak to protest. He noted to a supporter that “the question of patronage is still a troublesome

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one” and rightly believed that the White House was withholding appointments to punish his friends and associates.8 After Taft’s death in 1953, the purge continued. The eVects were most pronounced in the South, where it took place under the pretext of revitalizing the two-party system in the region. Southern Republican leaders were notorious for keeping their organizations small and controllable and becoming active only during presidential elections. They also composed one of Taft’s strongest bases of support on the RNC, and, in 1948 and 1952, Brownell had cultivated a group of young, dynamic leaders to both organize at the grassroots and supplant the Taftites. In 1953, RNC staVer Jim McKillips and White House congressional liaison Charles Willis managed the political situation in Dixie. Late that year they established a Southern Advisory Group, chaired by legendary golfer and Eisenhower conWdant Bobby Jones and composed primarily of individuals who had backed Dewey and Eisenhower in 1948 and 1952 respectively. Its membership included Elbert Tuttle of Georgia, John Minor Wisdom of Louisiana, Claude Vardaman of Alabama, and William Kimbel of South Carolina, four individuals who would be responsible for a small but noticeable growth of southern Republicanism in the 1950s. At their Wrst meeting, held November 15, 1953, at the Atlanta Athletic Club, the group developed a plan to hold special referendums to elect new party leaders in each state during the early months of 1954. Wisdom was tasked with surveying the various state electoral laws to ensure its feasibility in as many southern states as possible. Though this speciWc initiative never came to fruition, the proposal shows that the Taftites were no longer welcome in the party organization. As White House chief of staV Sherman Adams told a supporter from Texas, “Southern Republican recognition and appointments shall hereafter be for the friends and leaders of the Southern people and not for exploiters or scalawags . . . you are entirely right that it is ‘time for a change.’ ”9 From 1953 through 1960, the RNC and the Eisenhower administration continually moved against Taft’s former associates, with mixed results. In Tennessee, former RNC chairman and Taft conWdant B. Carroll Reece drew considerable Wre. Reece, a longtime congressman from Tennessee’s First District, and Knoxville News publisher Guy Smith dominated all aspects of the Tennessee party from their base in the northeastern portion of the state and steered most federal jobs to

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their supporters. In 1953 the national Republican leadership encouraged the state CFE chapter to recruit candidates for congressional seats in middle and west Tennessee and challenge Reece for control of patronage west of Knoxville. The head of the CFE negotiated a compromise with McKillips and Willis to set up a six-member commission to make patronage recommendations, with three members coming from the Reece group and three from the Eisenhower faction. In June 1953 Willis noted that Reece did not want any “Eisenhower people” involved in state aVairs, but he was “as happy as possible” with these arrangements. As the White House applied pressure, Reece found relief when arch-conservative New York Republican Daniel Reed used his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee to stymie an extension of the excise proWts tax, a key aspect of Eisenhower’s Wscal program. Reed contended that the bill was too intrusive in private enterprise and would hamper business growth, and he planned to hold it in committee. Eisenhower was one vote short on the House Rules Committee of getting a discharge petition to move the legislation to the House Xoor, prompting him to call Reece and ask that he change his vote. Reece did so in exchange for full control of the patronage setup and the Tennessee Republican Party. Willis, exasperated that Reece stayed in power, Wred oV an angry letter to Adams saying, “It is completely incomprehensible to me that Carroll Reece’s vote on any particular bill is more important than building a party for ’54 and victory in ’56.” Reece had saved his Wefdom, but due only to a stroke of good fortune.10 Most Taftites did not survive. In Mississippi, Perry Howard, one of two African Americans on the RNC, was an obvious target for removal. From his law oYce in Washington, Howard had led the “Black and Tan” wing of the Mississippi GOP since the Hoover administration. In 1952 Brownell aligned with the rival “Lily-White” faction to recruit a pro-Eisenhower delegation for the Republican National Convention. Howard barely retained his seat on the RNC but expected to continue as state patronage distributor going forward. The state CFE group and the Lily-Whites, however, leveraged their support for Ike to work out a compromise solution in which E. O. Spencer, head of both the Mississippi CFE and the Lily-Whites, chaired an ad hoc committee to determine federal appointments. This new entity was rife with turmoil, and in August, with the administration’s backing,

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Spencer sued to remove Howard and assume full control of the Mississippi GOP. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Spencer’s organization, which became the oYcially recognized Mississippi GOP, Howard retained his RNC seat but had virtually no inXuence.11 The racial and political dimensions of the controversy converged as the Eisenhower administration, nominally moderate on civil rights, worked with Southern segregationists to ostracize one of the highestranking African Americans in the GOP. Power, not ideology or any sort of policy preference, determined Howard’s fate. Removing him had virtually nothing to do with Howard’s race or the racial views of Spencer and his associates, as both factions were essentially conservative on all issues beyond civil rights, which was especially evident in 1956 when both Howard and the Lily-Whites once again brought contested delegate slates to the Republican National Convention. The White House dispatched John Minor Wisdom, a widely respected racial progressive, who brokered a deal where Howard and Spencer agreed to split the delegation 8–7 favoring Howard, in exchange for Howard dropping any future claims as the recognized Republican leader in Mississippi. Why Howard would accept such a trade was unclear, but he was seated as a delegate and was once again reelected to the RNC, though Spencer now controlled the day-to-day operations of the state party. In the months that followed, he claimed racial discrimination and lobbied the White House to reinstate his patronage powers after the Lily-Whites repeatedly expressed displeasure with Eisenhower’s stance on civil rights legislation. Throughout 1957 Howard sent RNC headquarters newspaper clipping after newspaper clipping of Mississippi Republican oYcials disavowing the president’s civil rights program.12 Finally, in September 1957 after Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to oversee the integration of Little Rock Central High School, Spencer formally renounced his Republican aYliation. Howard immediately dispatched a letter to the White House asking for recognition as state party leader, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. In a letter to a concerned citizen, White House oYcial Howard Pyle (Arizona’s former governor) noted that state chairman Wirt Yeager, who had also criticized the Little Rock situation, had been given “more responsibilities,” meaning he would be the sole arbiter

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of patronage in the state. This marked the end of Perry Howard’s importance in Mississippi Republican circles.13 Howard and Reece were two of the more prominent Taftites to face the wrath of the White House, but they were by no means alone. In 1956, nine individuals either resigned or were voted oV of the RNC by their state delegations. Of those nine, at least eight were connected with the Taft faction, including leaders from Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Utah. Aside from Reece, a handful of Taftites managed to hold on to their inXuence. In the South, only Reece and Wallace Townsend of Arkansas retained their RNC seats after the 1956 election cycle. Ironically, Townsend, a prominent Taft supporter in 1952, lost his membership on the RNC in 1958 due to his defense of Eisenhower’s actions in the Little Rock crisis. In a statement issued by the Arkansas Federation of Republican Women and signed by Townsend, the authors blamed Orval Faubus and the Democrats for the controversy and praised Eisenhower’s willingness to preserve law against mob rule. The state party voted him out at the next opportunity over his pro–civil rights views, a move the White House endorsed. Only Reece, Ohio RNC members Clarence Brown and Kathleen Kennedy Brown, and Walter Hallanan of West Virginia held on to their seats on the RNC through the end of the Eisenhower administration.14

The Fusion of Ideology and Power Even though the major goal of the purge was to replace members of the rival factions with friendly partisans, both sides emphasized the ideological characteristics of the maneuver. Internal White House memos argued that realigning the party around Eisenhower’s centrist views and removing the stigma of conservatives would ensure the future of the GOP, the kind of rumored kingmaking that 1964 Goldwater supporters cited when justifying their support. In 1956 the president’s brother Milton pointed out, “ The Republican party is being rebuilt (thirty-nine new State Chairmen have been elected during [the Eisenhower] administration) and this reform will be more meaningful and dependable four years hence.” Internal White House memos argued that realigning the party around Eisenhower’s centrist views and removing the stigma of conservatism would ensure

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the future of the GOP. Conservatives believed that they were being targeted for removal primarily because of their political beliefs. Vice President Richard Nixon, who had never aligned with the Taft faction even though it shared conservative leanings, believed that the ouster hurt the integrity of the GOP. During the 1954 congressional election campaign, he argued that “kicking Republican organization people in the face” had weakened morale to the point that many state and local organizations were putting in few hours on the campaign trail. When the Democrats recaptured majorities in both houses, conservatives who had no direct ties to the Taftites emphasized the ideological dimensions of their ejection. The factionalism had moved beyond power and was now a question of conservatism versus liberalism. Since 1948 the Dewey faction had argued in earnest that they represented a progressive, liberal Republicanism, so it was only natural for Taftites and other self-identiWed conservatives to view the events as punishment for their political ideology.15 Through the Eisenhower administration the worst fears of conservatives were conWrmed, and their frustrations grew. The ideological dimension was central to the high-proWle spat between Harold Stassen and Richard Nixon over the 1956 vice-presidential nomination, another internal squabble that preWgured the open conXict between Rockefeller and Goldwater. Nixon, ostensibly placed on the ticket in 1952 to provide geographic and ideological balance and anticommunist credibility, had not meshed well with his colleagues in the executive branch and was seen as a stand-in for the conservative wing of the party. Liberal Republicans expressed concern that, if Nixon continued as vice president, he would likely become front-runner for the 1960 nomination and undo the progress they had made since 1952 in reshaping the party as a “forward-looking” entity. In July 1956, just a few weeks before the Republican National Convention, White House oYcial Harold Stassen called for Republican insiders to replace Nixon on the ticket with Massachusetts governor Christian Herter. Herter had a long association with moderate Republicanism and seemed a plausible choice as Eisenhower’s successor. In early August, Stassen sent a mass mailing to party leaders contending that Nixon’s reputation as a conservative would cost votes in the general election and, more importantly, that he could not be trusted to continue the programs of the Eisenhower administration. Stassen’s missive was in line

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with the long-term Deweyite strategy to move the party to the center in order to capture the most moderate elements of the New Deal coalition, as he claimed that union leaders and other interest groups would vote Democratic if Nixon remained on board. Stassen closed his divisive letter with a call for party unity, saying, “I sincerely believe our Republican Party, in its duty and responsibility to its great President and to our country, can do nothing less than name the best available candidate, and the best available potential occupant of the Vice Presidency in 1956.” Herter, in Stassen’s opinion, was the logical choice.16 Stassen’s opposition to conservatism had prompted this abortive campaign, a fact not lost in press analysis of the controversy. The conservative magazine National Review contended that Stassen and his supporters “dislike Nixon because he is not a certiWed Liberal. They don’t want a free convention, they want a convention that will turn down Nixon. They will welcome any eVort by political bosses to tyrannize the delegations—in the way Dewey tyrannized the New York delegation four years ago—if such eVorts prove necessary to impose their will upon it.” New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, writing privately to Dewey, expressed dismay that Stassen was the only liberal to challenge Nixon, leading him to think that “the conservative wing of the party is not displeased with him.” Ideology was now the central point of contention. Sulzberger went on to tell Dewey, “Some people dislike the devil—that’s the way I feel about the conservative Republicans.” For their part, conservatives rallied around Nixon. Senate minority leader William F. Knowland issued numerous statements backing the vice president, and twenty Republican House members called for Stassen’s resignation over his public grandstanding. The Eisenhower administration and the RNC were caught in the middle and in the end ostracized Stassen and endorsed Nixon. Herter, sensing the political tide turning, issued his own press release announcing his intention to defer to the will of Eisenhower and making it clear that he would not accept the nomination without the president’s consent regardless of the will of the convention. Stassen’s promise for a Xoor Wght over the matter at the 1956 national convention never materialized, but the situation further illustrated to conservative Republicans the precarious situation they faced as Eisenhower and the Dewey faction led the GOP.17

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As ideology became the focus of the party split, conservatism was also changing, taking on a harder edge in the 1950s as its adherents were becoming more and more frustrated with the Eisenhower administration. Three major episodes show exactly how important the labels “conservative” and “liberal” had become in American politics. First, questions over the proper foreign policy continued to be a wedge issue between the factions and took on new ideological dimensions. In late 1951 Ohio Senator John Bricker, a close political ally of Taft, had called for a constitutional amendment to ensure that foreign treaties would not trump federal and state laws. The so-called Bricker Amendment, which developed over the next three years with assistance from the American Bar Association and a number of right-wing and isolationist organizations, was a direct response to the United Nations Charter and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bricker and others feared that these two provisions could overrule existing local and state laws and infringe on the separation of powers between the federal government and the states, further eroding American federalism.18 Though the Bricker Amendment was introduced during the Truman administration, it remained an open question in the Wrst years of the Eisenhower presidency. During the 1952 campaign, John Foster Dulles had endorsed the limiting of treaty powers but, once in oYce as Eisenhower’s secretary of state, rejected it as a detriment to conducting foreign policy. Eisenhower agreed and though the initial amendment had sixty-four sponsors, more than enough for the two-thirds majority necessary for passage in the Senate, he worked publicly and privately for its defeat, earning scorn from conservatives. A number of organizations formed to support the Bricker Amendment, including Clarence Manion’s Foundation for the Study of Treaty Law and the Committee for Constitutional Government, a group funded by newspaper publisher Frank Gannett. Manion and Gannett were both conservative ideologues and Taftites. Their support for the Bricker Amendment stemmed from the oft-repeated claims that the Roosevelt and Truman State Departments had betrayed American principles at the World War II peace conferences, and they advanced what was becoming a standard conservative critique of an internationalist foreign policy.19 Regardless of the consequences at stake, the issue had little resonance with the general public. Though an October 1953 Gallup poll

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revealed that 81 percent of those surveyed had not heard of the Bricker Amendment, Eisenhower’s objection to it raised the ire of grassroots anticommunists and others tapped into the emerging conservative movement. Letters opposing the White House’s position came in great frequency from avowed former Taft supporters. An engineer from West Virginia encouraged RNC chairman Leonard Hall to tell the president to “take his Middle of the Road policy out and bury it,” citing the Bricker Amendment as one of the major diVerences between Eisenhower and the conservatives. By summer 1954 the Bricker Amendment was dead, and the Right blamed Ike for its early end.20 Eisenhower’s nomination of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court was the second issue to anger conservatives. The longtime governor of California and 1948 vice-presidential candidate was a moderate who sided reliably with Dewey. Eisenhower’s decision garnered favorable press coverage but received overwhelmingly negative reactions from self-identiWed conservatives. One correspondent thought that “President Eisenhower has a wonderful opportunity to increase the strength of this Court and get away from the damn fool social and fantastic neo-political thinking of the Supreme Court.” Appointing Warren would, he argued, keep the Court moving to the left. Other writers linked Warren with socialism, bad government, and, perhaps worst of all, the Deweyites. Human Events claimed that Warren’s nomination was little more than a repayment for California’s support at the 1952 convention, tying Warren to the heavy-handed tactics of Dewey and Brownell. Even some Republican legislators thought Warren moved the Court to the left. In a meeting during Warren’s Wrst year, House majority leader Charles Halleck expressed amazement at a number of decisions and told Eisenhower that he never thought Congress would continue to “correct” judicial rulings, after the Republicans had made an appointment. Warren’s ties with Dewey and his political and judicial views were intertwined in the mind of conservatives, who opposed him for both.21 Throughout his tenure, Warren’s decisions generated outrage from conservatives. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision drew the most vitriol. The ruling struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine, in place since the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, rendered segregated public schools unconstitutional, and energized both African Americans and segregationists. The RNC embraced the Brown

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decision, calling it indicative of the “healthy climate-of-equality” in the Eisenhower administration. Brownell’s Justice Department, under Eisenhower’s orders, had contributed a brief in favor of overturning the “separate but equal” clause, and despite some personal misgivings on Eisenhower’s part, the Republican administration endorsed the ruling of the Warren Court.22 Brown helped shape the contours of the ideological conXict within the GOP and brought out the most repugnant traits of some conservative Republicans. After Brown, the questions of states’ rights and separation of powers, issues that went beyond civil rights, became strictly racial matters and added to the growing indictment of the Eisenhower administration and also primed federal overreach to be a rallying cry for conservatives, and a major theme in Conscience of a Conservative (1960). A correspondent from rural West Virginia claimed, “States rights are being encrouched [sic] upon! Until the Supreme Court reaches its senses—States rights are in danger, and the only hope is a good third party with a good Southerner as President!” In the next paragraph, the writer criticized the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles and expressed his undying admiration for Douglas MacArthur, ticking oV two other conservative talking points before signing oV. The minister of the First Methodist Church of Thomasville, Georgia, pledged never to vote for the Republicans again, as he had in 1952, and declared that integration would not work because African Americans were unfamiliar with the “rules of sanitation and cleanliness.” Though these sentiments were echoed by numerous letter writers from across the South, defections from the region’s GOP insiders were surprisingly few, while the conservatives added another point to their list of grievances with the administration.23 Finally, under the Eisenhower administration, Joseph McCarthy’s crusade came to an end. Since his February 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy had terrorized federal oYcials with threats, intimidation, and outright humiliation before his Senate committee. Goldwater was among those Republicans who refused to censure his colleague, but many Taftite Republicans had actually initially distanced themselves from McCarthy and his methods. McCarthy in fact had had no ties to their formal organization. Yet as the ideological dimensions of the conXict became dominant, many outside the party grouped McCarthy with the old guard. Eisenhower saw the link between

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McCarthy and the Taftites as a “marriage of convenience” between what were, to him, the more disreputable elements of the GOP. During his Wrst few months in the White House, Eisenhower had jousted with McCarthy in press conferences but did not castigate him. In private, the president tried to control McCarthy through surrogates and encouraged Republican legislators to make every eVort to keep him in check, tactics that failed.24 Eisenhower reached his breaking point in October 1953 when McCarthy accused the United States Army of being soft on communism. The Army initially removed security risks from the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, but a Wght broke out between McCarthy and the White House over who would supervise further investigations into the military’s loyalty program. To add to the absurdity, on November 3 McCarthy staV member David Schine was drafted into the army. His alleged lover, McCarthy staVer Roy Cohn, was livid over what he termed a politically motivated act and began harassing the secretary of the Army and other oYcials, demanding special favors for Schine. After Cohn threatened army general counsel John Adams with further investigations, the White House began tracking McCarthy’s activities. Adams made it crystal clear that McCarthy and his staV had sought special favors for Schine and that a rather bombastic set of hearings on the promotion and honorable discharge of an Army dentist had been politically motivated. Eisenhower and his advisers lined up a group of legislators to investigate McCarthy, and the ensuing Army–McCarthy hearings were his undoing. McCarthy tried to dictate the proceedings, and at one point, when he publicly questioned the loyalty of a civilian attorney retained by the army, he came across as a playground bully. After he launched into a tirade, Joseph Welch, another civilian attorney for the army, asked, “At long last, Senator, have you left no sense of decency?” Citizens were left to answer that question on their own.25 Yet conservatives continued to praise McCarthy. In late 1954 William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell published Joseph McCarthy and His Enemies in defense of the anticommunist crusade. Many rank-andWle Republicans agreed with Buckley and Bozell, and McCarthy’s censure, from a Republican-controlled Senate no less, was seen as a sort of martyrdom by some on the Right. Grassroots anticommunists regarded McCarthy as a hero. In 1955 a housewife from Chicago wrote

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to Senate Republican leader William F. Knowland, “I am not satisWed with the way things are going—I voted for Senator Taft knowing he was a wonderful man. . . . I voted Republican because of Senator McCarthy—but what they did to a Wne patriotic American they silenced him, insulted and pushed him in the background.”26 The “they” she referred to was the Democratic Party, the moderates in the Senate, and the Eisenhower administration, whom the Right collectively viewed as an anti-American alliance. Barry Goldwater understood that McCarthy was playing with Wre and had no hard evidence, but Goldwater continued to support him because his eVorts had brought the issue of anticommunism to the fore, another indication that McCarthy’s crusade helped focus the eVorts of the Right against the Eisenhower administration.27 These criticisms of Eisenhower’s policies illustrate how important ideology and policy, not strategy and personal conXicts, had become to the deepening divisions within the GOP. In January 1954 Eisenhower’s brother Edgar, one of his most conservative critics, sent him an article that claimed the president was getting “bad advice, both political and otherwise” from a select and isolated group of Deweyites. Eisenhower refuted the charges, but the article reXected the common perception of strong conservatives and former Taft supporters that the GOP had been captured and made liberal by the Eastern Establishment.28

The Right Searches for a Leader By 1956, with the Taftites reeling from political pressure and conservatives growing increasingly frustrated with the policies of the White House, some on the Right began looking for new standard-bearers. Taft’s death and the purge of his allies had left a leadership vacuum, and Knowland emerged as the most viable successor. He had earned the Right’s admiration as a leading proponent of the Asia First movement, a loose group of pundits and legislators that blamed the Democratic Party for the loss of China and lobbied aggressively for a more interventionist policy in the region. As Senate majority leader he had advanced Eisenhower’s moderate agenda but did not work well with the administration. Eisenhower

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often criticized Knowland, telling one associate, “It is a pity that [Knowland’s] wisdom, his judgment, his tact, and his sense of humor lag so far behind his ambition, and—to give him credit—his obvious integrity and persistence.” Intellectuals and the political groups associated with the right wing, however, coalesced around Knowland and convinced him to pursue the 1956 Republican nomination as a conservative, much as they would turn to Goldwater four years later. Knowland, aware of the implications of challenging a sitting president from within his own party, made it known that he planned to run for the nomination if, and only if, Eisenhower refused to stand for reelection. This enabled him to test the waters and attract support without jeopardizing his leadership position in the Senate. His advisers warned him that he could be branded as disloyal and open himself up to retribution, but Knowland pressed on. Writing to one of his longtime campaign contributors, Knowland stated, “You may rest assured that I am fully cognizant of the calculated risks involved. However, if the President is not to be a candidate I believe that the year, 1956, is a year of decision as far as I am concerned. If nobody is willing to stand up as a rallying point to prevent the selection of a handpicked candidate the nomination would go by default.” In his public appearances, Knowland hysterically claimed that the Dewey wing planned to remake the GOP in Eisenhower’s image, helping to position himself on the right.29 In late 1955, Knowland and his associates actively recruited slates of delegates for the Republican National Convention. These individuals joined on primarily due to Knowland’s conservatism and a desire to protest the moderate Republican administration. His campaign team, made up of close advisers and associates from California, received a signiWcant number of delegate commitments from minor state and local oYcials, individuals who would have faced an uphill battle within the Republican organization. Only one, Wallace Townsend from Arkansas, served on the RNC. While the situation could have changed if Eisenhower had opted not to run, Knowland’s committed support came from the fringes of the GOP, a testament to the weakness of conservative elements within the party organization following Taft’s death and the ensuing purge.30 Perhaps more importantly, Knowland received the endorsement of a number of strong conservative groups that utilized political methods

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but existed outside the Republican apparatus. The most notable of these was the organization known simply as For America, a group composed of current and former Republican convention delegates and oYce holders primarily from the South and Midwest. They were essentially a precursor to the John Birch Society, but, in the period before the extreme and moderate right wings split, it provided a vehicle for political action for many opposed to the moderate liberalism of the Eisenhower administration. The membership of its National Policy Committee combined former Taftites with the conservative intellectual movement. Its letterhead included William F. Buckley, Frank Chodorov, Taft’s former Wnance manager Ben Tate, and Taftites E. F. Hutton and former US senator Albert Hawkes. In late 1952 Taft had suggested one of For America’s two cochairmen, Clarence Manion, as a possible choice for secretary of labor. Both Manion and his fellow cochair, former FBI agent and notorious conspiracy theorist Dan Smoot, reached thousands of conservatives every week through Manion’s radio show and Smoot’s Dan Smoot Report newsletter. The organization’s message illustrated the merging of numerous single issues into one uniWed conservative message. A fund-raising appeal indicated that “FOR AMERICA stands FOR STATES RIGHTS, competitive enterprise, private property, and individual liberty. We oppose all moves toward internationalism, Fascism, Socialism, Atheism, or Communism.” Knowland did not have the organization’s backing but did receive encouragement from For America members.31 For America, and a number of unaYliated but like-minded supporters, deemed Knowland a worthy successor to the Taft legacy. R. B. Snowden of Hughes, Arkansas, who had written letters of encouragement to Taft in 1948, informed Knowland, “It is now time to get all the right-wingers on one side, and all the left wingers on the other, and you are the man the right-wingers want, and I hope and pray for your success.” This support included a number of southerners who opposed the Warren Court and the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Thomas Gibson, a Mississippian who Wve years earlier had begged Taft to endorse the Mississippi Lily-Whites and repudiate Perry Howard, was on For America’s National Policy Committee. Knowland, like Taft, ignored the racial aspects of these letters and instead focused on communist subversion and foreign policy in his responses. The alliance of these extremist groups with more mainstream

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conservatives, some eight years before Buckley would repudiate the John Birch Society in the pages of the National Review, shows that the self-identiWed conservatives were still searching to Wnd their political legs in the 1950s and saw Knowland as a possible successor to Taft’s conservative legacy.32 Knowland dropped his dark-horse candidacy in early 1956, but he publicly criticized the campaign strategy and the reorganized CFE throughout the cycle. Continuing the 1944–48 Taftite argument, he publicly called for the RNC to wage a vigorous campaign based on what he regarded as true Republican principles. Speaking at a meeting of the Ohio Republican Party, Knowland proclaimed, “It is this type of hard-hitting campaign that the late Sen. Robert A. Taft . . . would have joined . . . in making for the preservation of our way of life and in behalf of the Republican Party of which he was so justly proud to be a part.” Likewise, Goldwater, already a darling of the Right, warned Republicans not to be complacent, as the early indications were that the “victory balloon is not oV the ground yet.” At times their warnings strayed to the apocalyptic side, much as they did in the pages of Conscience of a Conservative and in the famous 1964 campaign literature, but the line of criticism remained consistent throughout the election cycle. Their pronouncements dovetailed with the sentiments of the right-wing press, who attacked Eisenhower and his administration for their moderation. During the election of 1956, National Review argued, “The greatest diVerence between the two parties lies in the fact that they back diVerent people, not diVerent ideas, for oYce.” On the following page, a shadow box tucked away at the end of the second column listed the “Republican Platform: Short Version.” Point one read, “Dwight Eisenhower is our leader,” while points two and three were blank.33 Eisenhower’s second term set the stage for more conXicts within the party. In his 1956 victory address, Eisenhower came out forcefully for centrism when he exclaimed, “I think that modern Republicanism has now proved itself. And America has approved modern Republicanism.” This remark, likely an oV-the-cuV statement, became the identifying phrase for Ike’s anticonservative positioning and, from that point forward, the rallying cry for those pledged to remake the GOP into the forward-looking party Thomas Dewey had been advocating since the mid-1940s.34

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Conservative Republicans and their compatriots in the press were not impressed. Bozell claimed, as he and other right-wing pundits would in their 1960s indictments of kingmakers, that Eisenhower’s goal had not been to win reelection in 1956 but to defeat conservatives, saying “the mandate the right wing had helped him win was a mandate to exterminate the right wing, and he left little doubt that he regarded the completion of this chore as his chief domestic obligation in the months ahead.” Bozell’s assessment was a good indicator of conservative thought in 1957. Writing from the other side of the political spectrum, Nation correspondent Dan WakeWeld surmised, “Of the many questions left unanswered by the recent Presidential campaign, one of the most perplexing is how to distinguish between the two parties.” Though he was not as venomous as Bozell, WakeWeld did contend that Eisenhower had linked the two parties not through bipartisanship, but “by platitudes.”35 A week after the election, Eisenhower clariWed his position and gave reporters a more complete deWnition of Modern Republicanism. The government, as he saw it, had two major duties. The Wrst was to ensure that the federal government had enough strength and resources to “take the lead in making certain that the productivity of our great economic machine is distributed so that no one will suVer disaster, privation through no fault of his own.” Washington would hence lead in areas such as education and health, a critical acceptance of certain elements of the New Deal system of government and an aYrmation of the postwar liberal consensus. The second duty was the protection of the free-enterprise system, and Eisenhower promised to limit the regulatory powers of the federal government. In Eisenhower’s estimation, a centralized government would act as a drag on productivity, and, aside from currency stabilization and a balanced budget, the federal government should not interfere with the economy unless an emergency demanded extraordinary measures. These remarks, though broad and lacking any speciWc policy examples, set the tone for the next four years and Wrmly wedded Ike to a middleof-the-road agenda. Conservatives, expectedly, were less than thrilled. Throughout his second term, the alienation continued to the point where many were reluctant to endorse Nixon’s candidacy in 1960.36 By the end of the Eisenhower administration, conservatives inside the Republican Party had been thoroughly marginalized. Taft’s death,

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the ensuing purge of the RNC, and a larger generational change within the party structure had reduced the Right’s inXuence within the organization. But Deweyite success was built on an unstable foundation, namely, the personal popularity of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1961, with Nixon’s defeat and the Dewey wing giving way to a younger generation of politicos, the party leadership was once again up for grabs. Conservatives at the grassroots level had grown frustrated with the party’s direction, because of concrete policies and ideological differences. By then, conservative journals such as the National Review, grassroots anticommunist groups, and the rest of the emerging Right had grouped a number of disparate issues under the umbrella of modern conservatism. Buckley and his associates in the conservative press used Eisenhower’s actions to rally grassroots anticommunists and other right-leaning citizens and helped tie political agendas to ideology. Conservatives believed that the Dewey faction, through Eisenhower, had moved the Republican Party away from its traditional principles. Terms such as the “Eastern Establishment” and “kingmaker” were now engrained in conservative discourse. The events of the Eisenhower years generated a great deal of discontent that fueled and shaped the “Draft Goldwater” movement and allowed for a conservative resurgence that has deWned mainstream politics in the decades since. Notes 1. Claude Robinson, “ Truman, the Republicans, and 1948,” July 5, 1945, Box 46, Folder 9, series 2, Thomas E. Dewey Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York [hereinafter cited as Dewey Papers]. 2. For more on the Wrst wave of scholarship on conservatism, see Alan Brinkley, “ The Problem of American Conservatism,” Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994): 409–29; Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Gregory Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (New York: NYU Press, 1999); John A. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Neils Bjerre-Poulsen, Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945–65 (Copenghaen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002); Dan T. Carter, Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for

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Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945–1966 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2001). 3. Michael Bowen, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 15–34. 4. Stewart Alsop, “Sen. Taft Is as ‘Liberal’ as the Liberal Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1949. 5. Speech, Thomas E. Dewey, Princeton University, 8 February 1950, Copy in Box 126, Folder Politics—Speeches 1950 (1), Herbert Brownell Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas [hereinafter cited as Brownell Papers]; Speech, Thomas E. Dewey, Princeton University, 9 February 1950, Copy in Box 126, Folder Politics–1950 Speeches 2), Brownell Papers; Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 345–51. 6. Michael Bowen, “Addition through Division: Robert A. Taft, the Labor Vote, and the Ohio Senatorial Election of 1950,” Ohio Valley History 5, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 21–42. 7. Bowen, Roots of Modern Conservatism, 130–52. 8. Robert A. Taft quoted in James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican (New York: Houghton MiZin, 1972), 608; Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “Eisenhower, Taft Distrust Is Over,” Washington Post, 23 February, 1953; Jerry Kluttz, “Extent of Job Data to be Given Senate Stirs DiVerences,” Washington Post, 10 February 1953. 9. Edward Bermingham, Letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 10 November 1952, Copy in Box 689, Folder OF 138–Alabama, OYcial File, Papers of the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas [hereinafter cited as OYcial File]; Jim McKillips, “Report on the Southern Committee Meeting,” undated, Copy in Folder Southern Situation 1953 (1), Papers of the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas [hereinafter cited as Hall Papers]; Sherman Adams, Letter to William Burrow, 19 December 1952, Copy in Box 708, Folder OF-138-C 1), OYcial File. 10. Charles Willis, Letter to Sherman Adams, 25 June 1953, Copy in Box 529, Folder GF-109-A-2 Tennessee 1952–1953 (2), General File, Papers of the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas [hereinafter cited as General File]; the new blood of the RNC apparently believed that Reece was standing in the way of progress in the Volunteer State. Charles Willis, Letter to Sherman Adams, 20 May 1954, Copy in Box 529, Folder GF-109-A-2 Tennessee 1952–1953 (2), General File. 11. Leonard Hall, Press release, 29 May 1953, Copy in Box 173, Folder Mississippi Situation, Hall Papers; Jim McKillips, Memo to Leonard Hall, Undated, Copy in Box 166, Folder Southern Situation 1953 (1), Hall Papers; Louise McCorkle, Letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 10 August 1953, Copy in Folder OF 109-A-2 Mississippi, OYcial File; Newspaper Clipping, 9 February 1954, Copy

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in Box 180, Folder Mississippi Situation 1954, ConWdential File, Papers of the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas [hereinafter cited as ConWdential File]. 12. Perry Howard, Letter to Howard Pyle, 12 March 1957, Copy in Box 511, Folder GF-109-A-2 Mississippi, General File; News clipping, Jackson Daily News, 28 June 1957, Copy in Box 511, Folder GF-19-A-2 Mississippi, General File; News clipping, Jackson Daily News, 25 September 1957. 13. Howard Pyle, Letter to W. N. Ethridge, 25 October 1957, Copy in Box 511, General File. 14. In August 1953, Hallanan openly challenged Hall’s interference in West Virginia, attributing it to “one purpose and that is to keep alive the bitterness of the Eisenhower–Taft Wght in Chicago.” Hall responded that he was more concerned with building the party organization than with who was in charge of patronage. Hallanan tried to gather support to oust Hall at the Wrst RNC meeting of 1954 but obviously could not gather the votes and opted not to make public calls for Hall’s removal. Despite repeated attempts at ousting him, Hallanan remained on the RNC until his death in 1962. Walter Hallanan, Letter to Leonard Hall, 27 August 1953, Copy in Box 176, Folder West Virginia Situation 1953 (1), Hall Papers; Leonard Hall, Draft Letter to Walter Hallanan, undated, Copy in Box 176, Folder West Virginia Situation 1953 (1), Hall Papers; Val Washington, Memo to Sherman Adams, 24 November 1953, Copy in Box 466, Folder 109-A-1 (Oct-Nov-Dec 1953), General File; Statement, Arkansas Federation of Women, 7 October 1957, Copy in Box 490, Folder 109-A-2 Arkansas, General File; Press release, Republican National Committee, 22 August 1956, Copy in Box 3307, Folder 1956 Republican National Convention, John Minor Wisdom Papers, Tulane University School of Law, New Orleans. 15. Milton Eisenhower, Letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 January 1956, Copy in Box 12, Folder Jan. ’56 Miscellaneous (4), Ann Whitman DDE Diary Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas; Charles Willis, Memo to Sherman Adams, 28 May 1953, Copy in Box 543, Folder 109-A-7 (3), General File; Charles Willis, Memo to Sherman Adams, 11 August 1954, Copy in Box 543, Folder 109A-7 (3), General File; Memorandum, “An Analysis of the 1934 Congressional Elections,” undated, Copy in Box 6, Folder Campaign 1954 (2), Hall Papers. 16. Dwight D. Eisenhower, letter to Richard Nixon, 28 June 1954, in The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, ed. Lewis Galambos and Daun Van Ee, vol. 15, doc. 951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1155; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 394–97; Harold Stassen, Letter to William F. Knowland, 10 August 1956, Copy in Box 96, Folder Campaign 56, William F. Knowland Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley [hereinafter cited as Knowland Papers]. 17. National Review, 18 August 1956, 5; Press release, undated, Copy in Box 95, Folder Miscellaneous Campaign ’56 (3), Knowland Papers; “‘Quit’ Stassen Advised by 20 Congressmen,” Chicago Tribune, 24 July 1956; Russell Baker, “President Backs Nixon Once More as Running Mate,” New York Times, 13 July 1956. 18. Though the conservative intellectuals did not speak with one voice on the

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matter, a signiWcant number of correspondents believed that Eisenhower was squandering valuable resources and, in many cases, giving aid that would later beneWt Communist nations; see George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998), 110–14. 19. Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 20. Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics, 1945–1955 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970); Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Joel Belknap, Letter to Leonard Hall, 5 November 1953, Copy in Box 18, Folder Comments 1953 (1), Hall Papers. 21. A. O. Burmeister, Letter to Herbert Brownell, 28 September 1953, Copy in Box 4, Hall Papers; James G. Blake, Letter to Leonard Hall, 23 June 1953, Copy in Box 4, Hall Papers; Ernest Anthony Jr., Letter to Leonard Hall, 28 November 1953, Copy in Box 4, Hall Papers; Human Events 10, no. 39, 30 September 1953; Charles Halleck, interview, transcript in Eisenhower Oral History Collection. 22. L. Brent Bozell, The Warren Revolution: ReXections on a Consensus Society (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966); Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 239–81; Peter F. Lau, ed., From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); James C. Cobb, The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Austin Sarat, ed., Race, Law, and Culture: ReXections on Brown v. Board of Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Press release, RNC Research Division, 21 May 1954, Copy in Box 102, Folder Floyd McCaVree 1954 (3), Hall Papers; Eisenhower and Brown, see Michael S. Mayer, “With Much Deliberation and Some Speed: Eisenhower and the Brown Decision,” in Journal of Southern History 52, no. 1 (May 1986): 43–76; David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 51–110. 23. E. R. Arvidson, Letter to Leonard Hall, 3 October 1954, Copy in Box 9, Folder Civil Rights 1953, Hall Papers; A. Stout, Letter to Earl Warren, 14 October 1954, Copy in Box 9, Folder Civil Rights 1954, Hall Papers; Olin C. Cooper, Letter to Leonard Hall, 21 September 1954, Copy in Box 9, Folder Civil Rights 1954, Hall Papers. 24. JeV Broadwater, Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 136–37; Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000) 242–43; Ambrose, Eisenhower, 346–51; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to William Robinson, 23 March 1954, in Galambos and Van Ee, eds., Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 15, doc. 794, 975–77.

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25. Herman, Joseph McCarthy, 243–47. Herman’s account directly contradicts the story told in Ambrose, Eisenhower, 349–53, which said that Eisenhower stayed out of the Army–McCarthy matter initially. 26. Mrs. Gene Russ, Letter to William F. Knowland, 22 December 1955, Copy in Box 96, Folder Illinois 1956 Campaign, Knowland Papers. 27. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 106. 28. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Edgar Eisenhower, 27 January 1954, in Galambos and Van Ee, eds., Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 15, doc. 694, 857–59. 29. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to William Robinson, 12 March 1954, in Galambos and Van Ee, eds., Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 15, doc. 773, 949–52; William F. Knowland, Letter to Frank Doherty, 1 February 1956, Copy in Box 95, Folder California (3), Knowland Papers; Wire Copy, 23 January 1956, Copy in Box 95, Folder (Miscellaneous Campaign ’56 (3), Knowland Papers. 30. Unsigned and undated memo, Copy in Box 95, Folder Arkansas, Knowland Papers. 31. Political Xier, “For America,” undated, Copy in Box 95, Folder California WFK answer by form (1), Knowland Papers; Mrs. Ralph Myers, Letter to William F. Knowland, 16 February 1956, Copy in Box 95, Folder California WFK answer by form (1), Knowland Papers; see also six more copies of the “For America” pamphlet in this folder alone; for Manion’s support of Werdel, see Clarence Manion, “ Transcript of Weekly Broadcast No. 102,” 9 September 1956, Copy in Box 96, Folder Campaign ’56, Knowland Papers. 32. R. B. Snowden, Letter to William F. Knowland, 15 February 1956; Letter, Thomas Gibson to Robert A Taft, 8 November 1951, Copy in Box 1032, Folder Politics-General-1951-G, Robert A. Taft Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. 33. Wire Copy, 12 September 1956, Copy in Box 96, Folder Campaign 56, Knowland Papers; Barry Goldwater, Press Release, 12 September 1956, Copy in Box 96, Folder Campaign 56, Knowland Papers; “ The Week,” National Review, 1 September 1956, 3–4. 34. Unsigned and undated memo, Folder OF-138-C-12 Modern Republicanism, Box 717, OYcial File. 35. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Letter to Barry Goldwater, 15 November 1956, Copy in Folder OF 138-C-12 Modern Republicanism, Box 717, OYcial File; Russell Baker, “Eisenhower Vows to Toil for Peace,” New York Times, 7 November 1956; L. Brent Bozell, “National Trends,” National Review, 24 November 1956, 10; Dan WakeWeld, “ The Night the Roof Fell In,” Nation, 17 November 1956, 429–31. 36. Memo, unsigned and undated, Copy in Box 717, Folder OF-138-C-12 Modern Republicanism, OYcial File. The memorandum is signed by Eisenhower and, at the bottom, includes the phrase “Above deWnition given by the President, extemporaneously, on November 14, 1956 to a group of reporters.”

5 The Dealers and the Darling Conservative Media and the Candidacy of Barry Goldwater nicole hemmer

in february 1963 the United Auto Workers (UAW) put together an in-depth report on what they called “That Other Subversive Network,” the conservative movement. In a series of articles in the UAW newspaper Solidarity, the union blasted three conservative men who had emerged as political threats. The Wrst, Roger Milliken, funneled millions of dollars into conservative organizations. The second, Clarence Manion, hosted a weekly national radio program to promote conservative ideas. And the third, Barry Goldwater, had become the most recognizable conservative politician in the United States. Together they were the faces of “that other subversive network”: “the Donor, the Dealer, and the Darling.”1 The dealers and the darling played critical roles in the rise and trajectory of modern conservatism. Barry Goldwater’s ascendance to the political head of the conservative movement was not mere happenstance but the result of concerted eVorts by those within conservative media to promote Goldwater as the face of American conservatism. Those media Wgures, who had built networks and institutions throughout the 1950s, leapt at the chance to inXuence national politics through 114

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Goldwater, despite the senator’s occasional reluctance. In turn, Goldwater’s candidacy and electoral loss reshaped conservative media. Thus, the dealers and the darling were deeply intertwined. Conservative media helped catapult Goldwater to the forefront of the movement, and the Goldwater candidacy transformed the nature of postwar conservative media from a refuge for the committed base into a recruitment tool for a broader movement and, in time, a winning political majority.

The Dealers Make a Darling In the late 1950s, conservative media housed leaders in search of both followers and a standard-bearer. It was here, in the radio studios, editorial oYces, and publishing houses, that the men and women leading postwar conservatism concentrated their eVorts. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, they established media outlets dedicated to the propagation of the conservative worldview. In an age of “Liberal orthodoxy,” William F. Buckley Jr. declared in the inaugural issue of National Review, “[a] vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is—dare we say it?—as necessary to better living as Chemistry.” Manion branded his guests “100 per cent Right Wing,” damning those who deemed themselves middle-of-the-road. At Regnery Publishing, Henry Regnery announced that the company valued propagation over proWt (a good thing, since he rarely made it into the black on right-wing books). Over the course of the 1950s, these media outlets expanded and established themselves as authorities on American conservatism. And they weren’t alone in their endeavors.2 Throughout the 1950s, new right-wing media emerged across the country. Human Events, a small foreign policy newsletter established in 1944, took oV ten years later when James Wick came on board and refashioned it into a current events newsweekly that would have signiWcant inXuence within the conservative movement. Dan Smoot, a former CIA agent, launched a popular radio program out of Dallas. Husband-and-wife team Kent and Phoebe Courtney printed The Independent American, a publication to the right of Human Events with fewer resources and less style than its better-known counterparts. Straight Talk, the column penned by earthy southerner Thomas J.

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Anderson (who would later run for president on the American Party ticket), gained popularity in the 1950s, eventually evolving into a radio program dedicated to cutting out the “cancer of collectivism.” These were only a few of the writers, broadcasters, pamphleteers, and publishers promoting conservatism in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, it was possible to talk about “conservative media” in a meaningful way.3 Having established audiences and reputations in the 1950s, those in conservative media next sought to secure political power. To take over one of the two major parties, conservatives needed a politician to represent them, someone who could break through what the Right saw as a liberal stranglehold on national politics. A few conservative congressmen had already made their way into oYce in 1946, but they represented a tiny minority in each party. In the Democratic Party, conservatives were freighted with the problems of sectionalism. Rightwing Democrats were almost exclusively southern and felt shut out to the extent that some were considering a third party. As Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat candidacy showed, however, they were unlikely to draw support from outside the South. The Republican Party, as Michael Bowen explains in his chapter, belonged to the Eisenhower wing: modern, liberal, centrist. Thus, Clarence Manion, the conservative radio broadcaster the UAW tagged as the movement’s dealer, had diYculty Wnding a standard-bearer in the late 1950s. He Wrst eyed Orval Faubus, the governor at the heart of Arkansan resistance to school integration at Little Rock. Yet while Faubus could carry the South, he held no appeal for the Taft Republicans of the North.4 After considering several conservative Republicans, Manion lit upon Barry Goldwater, who in 1958 won reelection as a US senator from Arizona. Manion and Goldwater had established a relationship in 1957, when Goldwater made his national radio debut on the Manion Forum. The senator would return to the Forum’s microphone nine times before the 1964 election. By his third appearance in 1959, Goldwater had become Manion’s choice to become not only the Republican presidential nominee, but the face of conservatism.5 Goldwater took longer to make his mark in conservative publications, appearing only occasionally in the pages of National Review and Human Events. National Review seemed particularly cool toward the senator. Launched in late 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., the magazine promoted itself as the journal of thinking conservatives, oVering

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philosophical musings, witty satire, and regular insights from its erudite founder. National Review referenced the senator a handful of times in the 1950s, and only one article crowned him a conservative leader. That article, which examined Goldwater’s leadership role among conservative Republicans, was penned by L. Brent Bozell, Goldwater’s speechwriter and the ghostwriter of Conscience of a Conservative. After Bozell’s piece, Goldwater received no signiWcant coverage in the magazine until the release of his best-selling book Wfteen months later.6 More favorable coverage came from Human Events, which positioned itself as a newsier periodical willing to entertain a broader swath of right-wing thought than National Review. Human Events embraced Goldwater for his opposition to Modern Republicanism (an Eisenhower-style acceptance of New Deal programs). In 1958, publisher Wick placed Goldwater on the Senate “Roll of Honor” based on his conservative voting record. And by 1959 the newsweekly occasionally ran articles by Goldwater about the state of the Republican Party and his support of Nixon’s presidential candidacy.7 Goldwater’s growing proWle among conservatives encouraged Manion to meet with him in May 1959 to discuss a presidential bid. In that meeting, Goldwater made two things clear: Wrst, no third-party run was in the oYng. Goldwater was a Republican through and through, and should the party choose Vice President Richard Nixon as its nominee, Goldwater would support him. Second, Goldwater agreed with Manion that only a conservative could generate enough enthusiasm for a Republican win in 1960.8 Organizing for Goldwater consumed Manion’s oV-air time. Since January 1959 he had been attempting to put together a Goldwater Committee with one hundred big-name endorsers. But while many within Manion’s conservative network supported the idea of Goldwater as the nominee, they balked at putting their names and reputations behind the drive. Some demurred for practical reasons. Sears-Roebuck chairman Robert Wood expressed “great admiration” for the senator but thought Nixon had the nomination sewn up. Newspaper publisher Eugene Pulliam, who owned papers in the Midwest and Arizona, voiced the same doubts—“I don’t believe there’s a Chinaman’s chance to get him nominated in 1960”—though he signed on once Manion explained Goldwater had assented to the eVorts. Pulliam’s resistance highlighted

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the pragmatism of resistance to Goldwater. While a principal supporter of Goldwater in Arizona politics, Pulliam understood that what played well to the arid West’s Republican parties was a far cry from what appealed to the party at the national level. Another faction worried that Goldwater’s political career would be ruined by an ill-fated quest for the presidency at a time when conservatism was still so far out of the mainstream. “I am not willing to be a party to having him sacriWced on the altar of protest,” a Goldwater supporter explained when turning down the committee invitation. Goldwater himself got cold feet about the organizing going on around him, requiring Manion and Brent Bozell to Xy to Washington and assure the senator that they would not go public until he said the word.9 Others wanted assurances that Goldwater was a real conservative, as deWned by their pet issues. Where did he stand on the income tax? On diplomatic recognition of the USSR? On court-ordered desegregation? In this vein, Buckley asked Manion for advice on whom the magazine should support in the upcoming primaries. The problem, Buckley explained, was Goldwater’s vocal support for Nixon. Given National Review’s anti-Nixon stance (Nixon was tied too closely to Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism), Buckley was loath to back Goldwater, who he believed was “irrevocably entangled in the Nixon operations.” In supporting Goldwater, Buckley believed, “we have contributed to the ascendancy of Nixon. And this I am not in the mood temperamentally to do.” Even less temperamentally inclined to support Nixon was right-wing radio commentator Dan Smoot, who not only felt Goldwater was too closely allied with Nixon to do much good, but also suspected that Goldwater “fails to comprehend the governmental principles that we are Wghting for.”10 Part of Manion’s project, then, was not only to rally support for Goldwater but to convince others on the right of Goldwater’s conservatism. He aimed his persuasive eVorts not at Buckley or Smoot or the Goldwater committee, but at a much larger audience. To sell the right on a Goldwater candidacy, his supporters needed to make Goldwater synonymous with conservatism nationally. And who better, Manion thought, to spell out the senator’s conservative principles than Goldwater himself? The idea of a statement of belief, a Goldwater manifesto, appealed to Manion on several levels. First, it would marry a prominent politician

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with conservative ideals, advancing both together. Second, a Goldwater tract would popularize the senator nationally, getting his name in the news, on bookshelves, and on the lips of conservatives across the country. Finally, it would lay the groundwork for a Goldwater campaign without forcing the hesitant senator into a declaration of candidacy. The book could do the campaigning for Goldwater until he was ready to take up the call.11 The book, which would become The Conscience of a Conservative, came together through Manion’s single-minded determination. When it became clear Goldwater would not have the time to devote to the book, Manion brought aboard Buckley’s brother-in-law Brent Bozell of National Review to do the writing—a natural Wt, since Bozell also worked as a speechwriter for the senator and had already been involved in the GOP faction Wghts that would give rise to the main critiques of modern liberalism and Republicanism. When a publishing company could not be found prior to manuscript production, Manion used Victor Publishing, a press he had created to issue pamphlets of his own. And when Bozell traipsed oV to Spain for three weeks and then threw all his energies into protesting Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States, Manion hounded him about the manuscript until it was Wnished. Manion arranged for distribution as well, focusing on corporations who could use the purchase and dissemination of the book as a form of campaign contribution.12 Successful as Manion’s eVorts were, they carried no guarantee Conscience of a Conservative would Wnd a sizable audience, or even generate enough sales to recoup the senator’s $1,000 advance. Buckley, in addition to being unenthusiastic about a Goldwater candidacy, saw little possibility for mass book sales. After all, Taft had not gotten very far with his A Foreign Policy for Americans, timed to boost his celebrity during the 1952 nomination drive. Nor would businessmen get behind Goldwater or his book, Buckley reasoned, because Nixon could easily win their favor with “a little old-time rhetoric about free enterprise.” Without corporate bulk purchases or mass sales, the Goldwater manifesto would languish as Taft’s had.13 A lot had changed since 1952, however. Where Taft had appeared to be the dying gasp of a Republican old guard, Goldwater stood at the base of a groundswell. He was already familiar to conservative audiences through his appearances on the Manion Forum and his favorable

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coverage in Human Events. And Buckley’s doubts notwithstanding, Goldwater had credentials with conservative businessmen. During his Wrst term, he had tried organized labor, particularly the progressive, politically active UAW, in the court of public opinion and before the Senate in hearings on corruption and racketeering in the trade union movement. By 1960 many knew Barry Goldwater as the senator who dared to call UAW president Walter Reuther “more dangerous to our country than Sputnik” and declared publicly that he would “rather have [Jimmy] HoVa stealing my money than Reuther stealing my freedom.”14 As such, when the book launched in April 1960, it followed a trajectory quite diVerent from Taft’s lackluster sales. Within a few weeks, Manion’s company had burned through over thirty thousand copies and had ordered Wfty thousand more to meet demand. Well-reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and Barron’s, chattered about on the Forum and other radio shows, covered in National Review and Human Events, the book generated buzz. In the Wall Street Journal, John Chamberlain (a contributing editor to National Review) heaped praise on the conservatism espoused in the book, calling it “the creed of a Wghter who has both a warm heart and a good mind.” “There is more harsh fact and hard sense in this slight book,” the Tribune declared supportively, than in all the “vapidities” of Congress, electoral campaigns, and the associated commentary. Goldwater himself, the Chicago paper lauded, “has the clarity of courage and the courage of clarity.” At the National Review, Frank S. Meyer concluded the book placed Goldwater “in the Wrst rank of American statesmen,” because of his willingness to stand on principle in “the present atmosphere of don’t-rock-theboat contentment with aggrandizing bureaucracy at home and complacent faith in coexistence abroad.” Human Events’ endorsement came in a four-page abridgment of Goldwater’s book, complete with an order form and a plea to distribute as many copies as possible.15 All these accolades translated into sales. Through mail orders, instore purchases, and, increasingly, campus bookstores, Conscience of a Conservative became a legitimate best seller, with 100,000 hardbacks and 400,000 paperbacks sold within six months of its release, just as its author, Goldwater, became the face of conservatism.16 The book did better than the 1960 Americans for Goldwater campaign. Goldwater’s position on the Senate Republican Campaign

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Committee made him a well-recognized Wgure; Conscience of a Conservative made him a nationally recognized conservative Wgure. While he failed to secure a spot on the ticket in 1960—the Republicans ran Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge—the combination of Conscience and Americans for Goldwater ensured the Arizonan would remain the movement’s best hope for the 1964 race.17 That race was a deWning moment not only for Goldwater but for conservative media. When the senator ran for the presidency in 1964, the movement tied its fate to his political fortunes. Conservative media outlets hammered that connection, arguing that a Goldwater nomination gave the electorate its Wrst chance to vote for a conservative president. Manion, Wrmly Wxed on Goldwater and the 1964 election, launched a new campaign in October 1963. “On radio and television, through newspapers, direct mail and billboards we will appeal for a Conservative versus a liberal candidate for President in 1964,” Manion declared. “We want a chance for a choice.”18 Manion seemed likely to get his wish. Goldwater’s star had risen dramatically since 1960. He won a 1962 Associated Press poll of delegates from the 1960 convention, beating out Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and George Romney. In a Texas poll that same year, Goldwater trounced Rockefeller twelve to one. Though the Arizonan was still disinclined to mount a presidential run, his supporters were determined to mount one for him.19 The Draft Goldwater movement was not the only one gaining traction going into 1964. By the time Goldwater announced his openness to a presidential run in the spring of 1963, the conservative movement was thriving. Not only had the ranks of organizations like the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom swelled, but the movement had become a popular topic of conversation outside conservative circles. True, much of what had been written about the movement was scathing—it was a gathering house for “the most paranoid suspicions,” a politics of resentment and status-anxiety—but at least conservatives were no longer languishing in obscurity. By 1963 they were more organized, motivated, and enthusiastic than they had ever been. The time was ripe to transform an ideological movement into an electoral one. And with sales of Conscience of a Conservative approaching a million copies, one candidate stood out above the rest.20

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The Goldwater drive proved a boon for conservative media. The senator’s candidacy roused conservatives across the country, who suddenly wanted as much material about Goldwater as possible to help them sell the candidate and his message. Reprints of Forum broadcasts and copies of Human Events passed from neighbor to neighbor. Suburban kaVeeklatsches in support of Goldwater took place at kitchen tables strewn with the latest issue of National Review and dog-eared copies of None Dare Call It Treason. The products of conservative media were the bibles of the Goldwater nomination drive. Readers burned through conservative paperbacks, all of which covered the movement’s case in 1964: liberal policies, put in place not by the people but a few shady and corrupt elites, were destroying America at home and abroad. None Dare Call It Treason spun a tale of “America’s retreat from victory” in the cold war. Author John Stormer, a Missouri Republican devoted to proselytizing conservative anticommunism, argued the United States was losing the cold war through weak-willed foreign policy and internal subversion. Thirty years of liberal governance (Stormer included Eisenhower in this) had allowed communist and leftist ideologies to inXuence national policy and prevent America from winning the cold war. In A Choice Not an Echo, Phyllis SchlaXy accused “a few secret kingmakers” of denying conservatives opportunities in the Republican Party for the past three decades. With her book she intended to rally grassroots Republicans to keep these kingmakers from blocking the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the GOP’s “one obvious, logical, deserving, winning candidate.” After the convention, Texas rancher J. Evetts Haley joined them with A Texan Looks at Lyndon. Conservatives needed to look no further than the subtitle—A Study in Illegitimate Power—to get Haley’s point, but those willing to delve further found page after page of suggested scandal and implied illegality. Without showing Johnson dipping into the public coVers, for instance, Haley pointed to Johnson’s wealth and told readers, “He has been on the public payroll his entire adult life . . . always close at hand as his political friends ladled out the government gravy.” These three books all reached the same conclusion: only a true conservative—that is, Goldwater—could stop the country’s self-destructive slide.21 The books were instant successes. Self-published under the imprimatur Liberty Bell Press, None Dare Call It Treason sold its Wrst printing

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of 100,000 books in a few months, then another 100,000 in the Wrst half of April. Another 100,000 sold two weeks later. By the time of the Republican National Convention in June, the book was on its eighth printing. Before election day, Stormer had printed 6.8 million copies, the number of sales limited only by how many he could produce. The key to this tremendous volume of sales was bulk distribution. The 75¢ paperback had been designed for mass propagation. The back page of the Wfteenth edition (one of three August runs) urged readers to “help awaken others!” by passing the book along to “friends, relatives, neighbors, clergymen, school teachers, libraries” and included an order form. As Manion had done with his broadcast reprints, Stormer oVered bulk pricing to encourage multiple sales, oVering a discount for as few as three copies (for $2.00 rather than $2.25) or as many as a thousand (at twenty cents apiece). Conservative groups, not bookstores, were responsible for getting these books into the hands of readers. Constructive Action, a California-based group chartered to distribute conservative books and Wlms, bought 500,000 copies of the book during election season and distributed over two million by the end of 1965.22 As with Manion’s reprints, bulk distribution allowed conservative authors to bypass the publishers, bookstores, and reviewers that shaped the national book market. This sales strategy made use of a network of conservative media sources and organizations established before 1964 to promote and distribute their books. Henry Regnery, who ran the largest of the three main conservative publishing houses, constantly railed against the diYculty of getting conservative books placed in bookstores or reviewed in prominent publications. While a Xurry of conservative bookstores opened in the early 1960s, many under the auspices of local John Birch Society branches, nabbing shelf space in regular bookstores remained diYcult. Indeed, even getting the bestselling None Dare Call It Treason placed often required red-baiting reluctant booksellers.23 SchlaXy’s A Choice Not an Echo and Haley’s A Texan Looks at Lyndon followed similar trajectories. SchlaXy revealed her book to a group gathered in her home in March, announcing that it would win the nomination for Goldwater. Manion, present at the meeting, confessed he was “hopeful merely” that the book could have such an impact. But when the book sold 600,000 copies in its Wrst printing, he was

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cheered. Nearly a million copies were distributed by a single supporter in California before the election. In a letter to Fred SchlaXy, Phyllis’s husband, Manion divulged, “Everybody in California tells me that if Barry wins tomorrow, Phyllis’[s] book will be largely responsible.” When Goldwater eked out a two-point victory over chief rival Nelson Rockefeller the next day, Manion became convinced that SchlaXy’s book had put Goldwater over the top. He was not alone in his perception of the book’s power. One Orange County activist credited the book with dispelling the mystery and misinformation surrounding Goldwater. A Choice, the activist explained, “made us familiar with this person and what he was about. . . . Then we identiWed with him.”24 These best sellers (A Texan Looks at Lyndon passed seven million copies in September) were treated like campaign paraphernalia: handed out at conventions and rallies, and mailed to delegates and state party headquarters for free, thanks to wealthy donors. As such, in Dade County, Florida, campaign workers could canvass neighborhoods and in place of Xyers and leaXets give out nearly 200,000 copies of Stormer’s book. All told, well over Wfteen million copies of these three books were distributed before election day, doing far more to spread the conservative message during the campaign season than did Goldwater himself, who turned out to be a lackluster, unenthusiastic candidate.25 Sales were not the only aspect of these books that stood out. Though three conservative publishing houses were Xourishing by 1964, each of these paperbacks was self-published. Stormer published under Liberty Bell Press, SchlaXy under Pere Marquette, and Haley under Palo Duro. SchlaXy chose to self-publish after the success of Conscience of a Conservative and None Dare Call It Treason convinced her that it was possible. So why, when successful publishing companies had been a mainstay of conservative writing for ten or Wfteen years, were the most successful conservative books of the era—perhaps the most successful since modern conservatism emerged in the postwar era—self-published? The likely suspects were costs, proWts, and eYciency.26 The beneWts conservative publishers oVered were connections and funds. Conservative publishing houses were willing to take risks on ideological manuscripts, even those without potential for large sales,

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because they used the network of conservative mailing lists, sponsors, and organizations to help them identify and develop a market for conservative literature. Sometimes they were willing to take a loss on books they deemed important, as when Regnery published Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, but in other cases they required authors to Wnd the initial capital for publishing. For instance, when Manion wanted to publish The Conservative American as a paperback with Regnery, the publisher asked him to Wrst line up pre-orders for 50,000 copies. If the book caught on, Regnery would order a second printing using his own distribution networks. To help stabilize their business models, conservative publishers relied on backlists and nonpolitical books, as Regnery had with the Great Books series and as Devin Garrity of Devin-Adair (the second-most-popular conservative publisher of the era) had with the Irish literature and poetry list upon which the company was founded in the early twentieth century.27 As Manion showed with Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, and as the campaign books of 1964 conWrmed, when authors had networks and funds of their own, conservative publishing houses had less of a role to play. Certainly, Pere Marquette or Palo Duro failed to carry the same cachet as Regnery, the house that had published Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale (the book that launched Buckley onto the national stage in the early 1950s). But the conservative movement was growing quickly, with new adherents joining the ranks every day. Whatever authority Regnery or Devin-Adair may have had in more established conservative circles, there was little reason to think recent converts cared that much about the imprimatur. There were other ways of legitimizing the conservative credentials of a book and its authors, using other parts of the conservative media network. What was Human Events or National Review reporting? What did Dan Smoot or Clarence Manion have to say? Who introduced the book to the reader mattered as well. When the copy came from the local Republican Party or a fellow Bircher, authority was conveyed as the book changed hands.28 The three self-published authors were able to use their own connections within the conservative movement, as well as their own resources, to capitalize the Wrst printing. Subsequent success funneled funds back into the operations, allowing the authors to continue

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production. The lack of an outside publisher carried certain beneWts as well. Complete control resided with the author: control of content, of publication schedule, of distribution. Since printing and shipping happened elsewhere, authors did not have to worry about storing and organizing a half million paperbacks in their living rooms. Suddenly, conservative publishing did not seem to be too diYcult an endeavor. November did not bring a Goldwater victory, but it cemented conservative media at the center of the movement. From Conscience to Manion’s “chance for a choice” campaign to the explosively popular campaign paperbacks, the Goldwater campaign demonstrated the dealers would remain as central to conservatism in the world of electoral politics as they had in the world of ideas and organizations. But the loss also exposed a weakness of conservative media. Dealers could activate a loyal and responsive base, but that base, enthusiastic as it was, simply was not large enough to win a national election. How those in conservative media responded to that shortcoming would dramatically change their work.

The Darling Remakes the Dealers Conservative media Wgures had found they could successfully sell a candidate to conservatives, that they could even help a conservative secure a presidential nomination. But the November landslide that swept Johnson back into oYce proved they had a long way to go if they were to secure political power for their movement and their ideas. While most analysts read into the election results the collapse of the American Right, in conservative media circles Goldwater’s defeat was greeted not with despair but with determination. The trouble, it appeared, was that they were not reaching a wide enough audience. Twenty-seven million people had cast their votes for Goldwater. Even if these ballots represented, as Manion claimed, “unreconstructed ‘die hards’ ” and “hard core Conservatives,” their numbers were clearly insuYcient to win a national election.29 The time had come to move beyond using media as a way to bring together disparate conservatives scattered around the nation. For ten years, those in conservative media had worked to communicate with

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and coordinate people who passionately disagreed with liberalism. As one right-wing radio preacher remarked, “ The fault of the conservative movement is that we have talked to ourselves instead of to the uninformed.” That might have worked when the movement was just getting under way, but to compete in national politics, conservatives had to reach beyond their base into the amorphous middle of American politics.30 And so, counting twenty-seven million in hand and believing millions more could be won over to conservative principles, media magnates targeted the uncommitted. The Manion Forum embraced its new mission. “We’re not interested in Conservatives,” a 1965 pamphlet for the Forum declared, “because the millions of Conservatives in America are already concerned about the facts we present on our radio and television programs.” These listeners, the Forum acknowledged, would continue to Wght for the cause even without tuning into conservative media programs. National Review publisher William Rusher concurred, concluding that “it is pretty clear that we have done all we can do in selling National Review to hard-line conservatives.”31 The post-Goldwater years, then, required winning over what Manion called “the vast majority of Americans”: not conservatives, liberals, or communists, but people who “couldn’t care less.” It was this group the Forum wanted to bring into its audience, to introduce to the conservative creed. “We know from eleven years’ experience,” Manion professed, “that, once Mr. Average American gets a chance to Wnd out what is happening to his country, he becomes a dedicated Conservative.”32 Manion’s language was telling. According to his formulation, all it took to transform the uncommitted into conservative foot soldiers was exposure to the conservative argument. But hadn’t the Goldwater campaign been a referendum on liberalism and conservatism? Surely the campaign had thoroughly exposed the nation to the American Right. Not so, those in conservative media contended. They argued that the conservative message failed to penetrate, that voters never knew what Goldwater stood for. To make their case, both Manion and National Review pointed to a blind poll conducted by Louis Harris. The survey asked not about candidates but about issues. On several issues—some of them central to conservative beliefs—the majority of

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respondents agreed with Goldwater: on restoring school prayer, on curtailing federal power, on tightening security in government. Yet voters either did not connect Goldwater to these ideas or had more pressing concerns.33 The poll pointed to an underlying problem: a failure to communicate and control the image of the movement and its spokespeople. Goldwater had allowed his opponents and the press to deWne him, to paint him as a hard-hearted extremist and warmonger. All conservatives, in fact, had been presented in the press as fringe radicals far outside the American mainstream. To win over people not committed to the cause, conservatives would Wrst have to Wnd a way to deWne themselves to the American people. This was the major lesson of the Goldwater campaign. Conservative media waged a three-pronged attack. First, they attempted to expand the reach of conservative media, to enter new markets and build new audiences. Second, they sought to shed their extremist image by downplaying or denouncing the more eccentric parts of the movement. Third, they worked to discredit established media’s claims of objectivity in order to make conservative media a viable alternative. Attempts to expand the reach of conservative media immediately ran up against roadblocks. Expansion required money, and the campaign had exhausted the conservative base, leaving them thin on energy and resources. Compounding the problem were innovations in direct mail, which pooled the names of active Goldwater supporters and sold access to the address lists. These rosters seemed like an easy way to raise funds from conservatives to pour into the expansion eVorts. But because almost all conservative media institutions and organizations were attempting to expand after the election, direct mail instead tended to exacerbate the frustration of movement conservatives. National Review’s William Rusher fretted over the development, telling Buckley that “it is almost certainly going to end by emptying the conservative purse and perhaps disillusioning the contributors as well.” Right he was. An irate supporter of the Forum shot oV a letter to Manion after receiving seventeen solicitations from various conservative groups in ten days. “Each professed the urgent need of my sending money in order that they might remain solvent,” he thundered. “None was interested in whether or not I remained solvent!”34

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As a result, conservative media outlets, which had seen burgeoning coVers in the buildup to the Goldwater campaign, watched as funds dipped in the post-Goldwater years. The Manion Forum’s income shrank 16 percent in the 1964–65 Wscal year as it began losing stations and donors. And Manion was not alone—National Review’s circulation dwindled, conservative publisher Henry Regnery found himself sitting on piles of unsold paperbacks.35 As revenue streams dried up, those in conservative media turned their attention to distribution, itself a form of expansion. New patterns of distribution could get the conservative message to new audiences without signiWcant outlays of money. By creating new contacts outside established conservative circles, distribution changes helped enlarge the movement. It took a few years, but Manion started up a short broadcast called the Manion Forum Footnotes, three-to-Wveminute pieces perfect for radio audiences increasingly more likely to listen in the car than in the living room. The brief time period forced Manion to be more colloquial and provocative—a welcome change from the occasionally stultifying weekly radio addresses. He relished pithy indictments of liberal issues, taking on feminism (“Neither Gloria Steinem nor anybody else can come up with a logical argument to support the Woman’s Liberation movement”), regulations (“Tell your congressman to get rid of this OSHA incubus or get ready for the safety of universal unemployment”), and taxation (“Washington, DC, turns out to be the last rampart of the big tax-eating spendocracy”).36 Television presented new opportunities as well. Post-election schemes to buy a major network went nowhere, but conservative media Wgures began popping up on new television programs. Manion had been on television for a few years and believed it drew a diVerent audience than his radio show. Not only did television widen his audience, it improved his guest list. Television exposure proved a powerful enticement for big names to come on the program. “It has helped us immeasurably,” he explained to a top advertiser, “in getting important top-Xight talent for both television and radio.” William Buckley’s Firing Line went live in 1966, giving the quick-witted editor a chance to spar with liberal guests while propagating a conservative position on television, which he called “an indispensible part of evangelization.”37 For the print-bound, innovations in distribution resulted in a similar variety of outcomes. Henry Regnery worked tirelessly to get

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mass-circulation paperbacks onto newsstands and into bookstores, but failed to produce a best seller on par with the campaign paperbacks. The group Constructive Action, led by Ted LoeZer, found more success, likely because it focused solely on distribution. After the Goldwater campaign, Constructive Action aimed to “split the atom of apathy!” by getting conservative reading materials into the hands of the uncommitted. To facilitate book distribution, Constructive Action set up an essay contest for college and high school students. In 1965 the contest centered on None Dare Call It Treason, putting 480,000 copies of the book into the hands of students over the course of a few months.38 Constructive Action also developed a reception-room program aimed at professionals looking for reading material for their waiting areas. Citing lobbies as “an ideal location to bring our citizens into contact with publications giving basic truths and clear explanations of the positive values of Freedom and the Private Enterprise System,” Constructive Action oVered plans including Human Events, Manion Forum and Dan Smoot transcripts, Reader’s Digest, National Review, and America’s Future pamphlets. In addition, clients would receive a selection of conservative books, almost all of which were published or republished by conservative publishing companies.39 These expansion eVorts put conservatives before a larger audience, but they did not grant them an automatic hearing. During the election, opponents had successfully painted Goldwater as a dangerous madman leading a band of fanatics. Even if conservative media could reach a larger audience, such eVorts would be worth little if that audience believed conservatives were nothing more than extremists—or worse, a punch line. At the heart of this problem was the John Birch Society. Conservative media leaders all acknowledged that the group played a critical role in conservative organizing. Founded in 1958, its membership numbers neared 100,000 just three years later. But the easily lampooned leader, Robert Welch, had turned the society into a target with his claims that Eisenhower was a communist. This accusation, which Welch made in his widely circulated book-length letter The Politician, came to deWne the Birch Society, despite its exclusion from the published version of the letter and most members’ disavowal of the charge. Time magazine called The Politician “Welch’s Mein Kampf.”

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Time asserted that such a cloak-and-dagger group, seeing communist conspiracy everywhere, would normally be dismissed “as a tiresome, comic-opera joke.” After censuring the society from the Senate Xoor, North Dakota senator Milton Young inserted the Time article into the Congressional Record as evidence of his claims against the Birchers.40 Because of the negative national coverage of the group, the struggle to determine what to do about the Birch Society weighed heavily on the minds of those in conservative media as well as on rank-andWle conservatives after Goldwater’s loss. Manion stuck with the society, declaring to a listener that, although he had been publicly denounced and slurred for his aYliation with the Birch Society, he “refused to run out on the selXess thousands who have found it a rallying point for ‘right’ thought and action when both are so badly needed.”41 But not running out was not the same as wholly supporting. Manion revealed an increasing discomfort with the society in the months after the 1964 election. In March 1965 he made clear that he would not appear at talks sponsored by the Impeach Earl Warren Committee, a group dedicated to one of the Birch Society’s pet projects, the expulsion of the Supreme Court Chief Justice. Manion acknowledged his philosophical support for Warren’s censure but insisted it could not be achieved politically. Political practicality, however, was seldom a yardstick for Manion’s schemes. His insistence on it in this instance indicated a discomfort with the political cost of being associated with one of the society’s more visible endeavors.42 A few months later Manion expanded his sponsorship ban to include groups identifying as “ ‘Local Chapters of the John Birch Society’ or variations thereof.” The explanation? As a memo to sponsors put it, “at the local level he wishes to make his appeal to Conservatives as broadly based as possible.” The remark about “broadly based” appeal was telling. Manion clearly felt that appearing under the banner of the Birch Society limited his ability to reach a wider audience. Though still a member, Manion was beginning to detach himself from the society in order to reach out to the uncommitted.43 Manion was not the only one distancing himself from the Birch Society in 1965. National Review had made its case against Welch in a 1962 editorial but had exempted society members from its rebuke, insisting that among their numbers were “some of the most morally

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energetic, self-sacriWcing, and dedicated anti-Communists in America.” After the Goldwater campaign, however, many of the magazine’s editors, particularly Buckley, felt Birch members no longer warranted exclusion from censure. The Birch Society had become far too damaging to the conservative cause for these men and women to be excused for supporting the society. In 1965 the magazine wrote the Birch Society out of the conservative movement.44 This move away from extremism, though not shared by everyone on the right, marked a turning point for conservative media. They were attenuating their appearance to appeal to a larger audience. Even scrubbed clean of the taint of extremism, however, they still faced a major obstacle revealed by the Goldwater campaign. Those in conservative media did not control their image. The established media did. Mainstream commentators, newspapers, radio programs, and television shows would feel both the darling’s and the dealers’ wrath. During his presidential run, the press bedeviled Goldwater, who grumbled about media unfairness, criticizing the press for its focus on extremism and for asking questions of him they would not ask of Democrats. Stung by the coverage of his “extremism” line at the convention and subsequent depictions of him as a trigger-happy warmonger, Goldwater began striking a more moderate note, but he also sought to limit press inXuence in shaping the campaign narrative. In calling for televised debates (to which Johnson never agreed), Goldwater told reporters at a press conference that he would ask for one deviation from the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debate: reporters would not be asking the questions. “You fellows are looking for news, but not necessarily for education,” he lectured. “We are trying to educate.” In a lighter but still pointed moment, Goldwater’s press secretary handed out gold pins to the reporters on the campaign plane that read “Eastern Liberal Press.”45 His supporters took an even stronger stance against media coverage of their candidate. Manion denounced the “slanderous propaganda being showered upon” voters. To a friend, he wrote resignedly about a recent Saturday Evening Post article, “It is only one of the many evidences that the establishment is determined to give Goldwater the ‘works.’ ” “ This has been the most disgusting campaign,” a longtime supporter conWrmed to Manion, “not only by the [D]emocrats, but by columnists, radio and TV commentators, and managers of companies

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[who] have pulled out all the stops in trying to handicap Goldwater in every way. I do not see how some of them sleep nights.” In these exchanges, conservatives built on an argument they developed in the 1950s: that established media were tilted in favor of liberals and that conservatives faced an uphill battle getting their message across. With an avowed conservative positioned to win the nation’s highest oYce, they believed the press had jettisoned any pretense of objectivity and would stop at nothing to bring Goldwater down.46 As evidence of such obstacles, conservatives pointed to the petty vandalisms they claimed stemmed from the slanted coverage of Goldwater’s campaign. Billboards for Goldwater proclaiming, “In your heart you know he’s right,” were defaced with the graYto, “In your guts you know he’s nuts.” Manion reported an invoice from an order of pamphlets that, next to the pamphlet title “Must Barry Goldwater Be Destroyed?” a mail clerk scrawled “Yes!” The incidents were the stuV of political campaigns, expressions of supporter enthusiasm, but for conservatives who felt they had been shut out for so long and already chary of press coverage, these acts were part of a larger campaign to smear Goldwater.47 In making their anti-objectivity arguments, conservative media Wgures built on their long-standing conviction that established media were tilted in favor of liberals. Their goal in the post-Goldwater years was to dismantle the perception that established media were objective. They believed that if they could convince the public that all media were biased—and that established media were intractably liberal— they would have an easier time countering negative portrayals of the Right. As a bonus, they would legitimate conservative media in the process: if all media were biased, then conservative media were not a font of propaganda but a source of balance. Liberal-bias arguments had been a centerpiece of conservative media from the beginning, the raison d’être for enterprises like the Manion Forum and Human Events. Such arguments took on new importance for conservative movement building after 1964. In the days after the election, conservative media outlets made this analysis a key component of their explanation of Goldwater’s loss. Writing for National Review, editor Frank Meyer stated the election proved “[t]he masscommunications network, solidly in Liberal hands, is even more formidable an opponent than conservatives had thought.” A few weeks

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after the election, a Manion Forum Newsletter bitterly concluded, “There was no ‘chance for a choice.’ The great issues were blacked out in a dense fog of vituperation and misrepresentation by columnists, radio and TV commentators, a left-wing press, and Liberal candidates who played upon popular fears, unfounded in fact, unjustiWed and unwarranted even in fancy.” The Forum argued that press coverage had amounted to smears and measures of personalities rather than any substantive look at the issues. Manion’s audience echoed this interpretation in their letters written just after the campaign, excoriating “managed news” and “controlled press” for anti-Goldwater bias.48 Sister Mary Roger, a frequent correspondent with Manion, anguished over how the press had “slandered, cruciWed” the candidate during the campaign. She named the perpetrators exhaustively: “the press, TV, Radio; Lippmann, Ralph McGill, Roscoe Drummond, Alsop, the low down Democratic Party . . . Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, Ramparts, America, and weekly, diocesan papers such as The Michigan Catholic, LaCrosee [sic] Times-Review, Kansas Advanced Register and the horrible Commonweal . . . CBS—NBC—ABC—Cronkite, Svereid [sic], McGee, Huntley, Brinkley, Morgan, Howard K. Smith and the rest of them.” . . . “ To think,” she fumed, “that people fell for their lies.” Sister Mary Roger created more than just a list of oVenders. She made an argument to which conservatives anchored their charges of liberal bias: the established media did not just slant the news—they fabricated it. As another letter-writer raged, “They never told a straight truth. It was always wrong side out, lies for truth and truth for lies.”49 Those in conservative media hammered liberal bias throughout the post-Goldwater years. Their charges trickled up, breaking through in 1969 when Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked the press as “a closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Forty million Americans tuned into the nightly news expecting objectivity, and instead, Agnew argued, this closed fraternity drenched the news in biases derived from a New York–Washington echo chamber. The ferocity of his attack and his status as vice president ensured the question of liberal bias would be a subject of national debate.50 Conservative media Wgures were ready for that debate, having reWned their arguments over Wfteen years. They did not just laud Agnew: they turned him into a touchstone, proof that theirs was a legitimate grievance. Within six weeks of the speech, Manion hosted James J.

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Finnegan, chief editor for the right-wing newspaper Manchester UnionLeader, to provide evidence supporting Agnew’s claims. Finnegan used the opportunity to cast conservative media as “the only force standing between the liberal news media and the total monopolization of all news information available to the American people.” A few months later, Parade magazine publisher Red Motley joined Manion and praised Agnew’s indictment as “timely, and proper.” When it came time to send out the Forum’s 1970 fund-raising letters, the vice president took a prominent place, justifying the call to balance out the liberal tilt of established media.51 Other conservative media also hopped on the Agnew bandwagon. His speeches provided regular content for Human Events, and his portrait graced the newsweekly’s advertisements under the banner “How Much News Is Being Withheld From You?” So popular was the vice president in their oYces that Human Events released Wve of his recordings as part of their Audio-Forum. Audio-Forum recordings were classed by topic: conservative classics, politics, communism, foreign policy, economics—and Spiro Agnew, who rated his own category as a conservative article of faith. And less than a year after Agnew caught conservatives’ attention with the Iowa speech, conservative publisher Arlington House released The Enemies He Has Made: The Media vs. Spiro Agnew (a book destined to reside on conservative bookshelves next to a Human Events promotional oVering, Agnew: ProWle in ConXict).52 Agnew’s speech was heavy on accusations but light on evidence, and conservatives rushed to provide support. At Wrst veriWcations were largely anecdotal, like the eleven-item list of liberal media infractions James Finnegan oVered on the Manion Forum (among them: suppressing atrocities by the Viet Cong, ABC’s coverage of Nixon’s 1962 loss in the California governor’s race, the CBS documentary Hunger in America (1968), and the number of liberal and left-wing guests on the Today and Tonight shows). But soon conservatives began to take a more systematic approach, employing techniques to give the claim of media bias the veneer of science. One of the earliest of these was carried out by the Committee to Combat Bias in Broadcasting, an oVshoot of the American Conservative Union. Inspired by Agnew, the Committee planned to monitor television broadcasts for liberal bias and wanted to bring grassroots conservatives into its eVorts. The

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committee sent out letters from Human Events publisher Thomas Winter along with Media Watch Monitoring Cards, a way for individuals to help “document prejudice in TV news reporting”—and a method to keep the base involved in the project. Listed on the card were the names of several news commentators, to be ranked one of three ways: “presents news accurately and objectively,” “tends to be liberal in his presentation,” or “goes all out to distort facts and to discredit conservatives.” Clearly, the committee was not worried about Wnding a conservative bias in the nightly news broadcasts.53 The committee’s eVorts were soon overshadowed by the work of a writer for TV Guide. Edith Efron, who had Wrst caught Manion’s eye with a 1964 article criticizing the Fairness Doctrine, joined the media bias Wght soon after Agnew’s speech with the article, “ There Is a Network News Bias,” which ran Wrst in TV Guide (a magazine that reached far beyond the pre-1964 conservative base) and was reprinted two weeks later in Human Events. The article was based on an interview with Howard K. Smith, the self-proclaimed “left-of-center” anchor for ABC who believed journalists approached the news from a liberal perspective that prevented them from seeing improvements in the South, military successes in Vietnam, and the positive attributes of conservatives, middle America, and the presidency. Efron followed up that anecdotal piece with a book-length work, released in 1971, called The News Twisters. The book purported to be a scientiWc study of liberal bias. Efron’s method consisted of watching news coverage of the 1968 election and marking down whether Nixon’s coverage was favorable (comments on his upbeat mood) or unfavorable (coverage of hecklers at campaign events). Her conclusion: network news followed “the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies,” with 1,620 words spoken in Nixon’s favor, and 17,027 against him. The solution she proposed was prescient. Networks, she argued, should aim for fairness—that is, equal coverage—rather than objectivity.54 Efron pushed the book in conservative media outlets, where it found an eager reception. Buckley (who had been the projects chairman for the foundation that funded Efron’s research), planned “a special splash” in National Review, in his newspaper column, and on his television show Firing Line. Efron prodded William Rusher, National Review’s publisher, to cover it on his television program, The Advocates, and pressed the Conservative Book Club to make it a selection.

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John Chamberlain, who wrote the cover article on Efron for National Review, promoted the book as science in his syndicated column, arguing that her charges of liberal bias were more than just “Mrs. Efron’s say-so”—her quantitative tabulation proved her point. Splashed across right-wing media, News Twisters became popular with conservatives, but it became a best seller thanks to Nixon. The president ordered special counsel Charles Colson to get the book on the New York Times best-seller list, which Colson did by buying up all the copies from stores used to determine the list.55 So there were beneWts to being close to power. And they extended beyond book buying. In the wake of Agnew’s speech, Manion and his cohort sensed a climate change in American media. Manion pointed to the 1971 television debut of Spectrum, a sort of op-ed page for the CBS morning news. Beginning Wrst on radio, the show brought on a number of commentators, many of them conservative, to oVer analysis of the news. The regular airing of conservative opinion on national television led Manion to call Spectrum “the greatest boon to our cause that has ever happened on ‘air.’ ” Conservative opinion found its way into other CBS shows in 1971; that year, the segment “Point/Counterpoint,” which pitted conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick against liberal Nicholas von HoVman, became a regular feature on 60 Minutes. Kilpatrick traced these developments back to Agnew, saying that in the wake of the vice president’s speech, “a sea change came over my friends in New York. . . . All of the sudden they began to think, my gracious, there is another point of view in this country after all.” Even the publisher of Human Events, in the midst of selling his paper as an alternative to the liberal dominance of media, had to admit that after Agnew’s speech, conservatives were popping up all over established media outlets (including the editorial pages of “that holy house organ of Liberalism—the New York Times”). Though it would take a few decades to fully Xower, by the early 1970s conservatives had begun making inroads into what would be one of their greatest victories: substituting ideological balance for objectivity as the primary value governing broadcast journalism.56 The dealers were breaking through. Still, these changes to conservative media in the wake of the Goldwater campaign developed unevenly, and even the most successful took time to mature. The experience of the campaign and national

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politics had left an indelible impression on conservative media, however. It transformed conservative media from an inwardly focused enterprise to a proselytizing one. That change led to new distribution techniques, a refutation of extremism, and renewed attempts to discredit established media. A bumpy road lay ahead for the dealers. Their eVorts were seldom as successful as they wished, and the movement languished and splintered as new iterations of conservatism emerged in response to developing social issues. When conservatives captured political power in the 1980s and 1990s, they removed the regulatory limits on ideological broadcasting. This, along with their early work selling liberal bias, helped transform American media values from objectivity to balance. This transformation elevated conservative media in importance, moving it from the sidelines to the center of American media. From that new position, conservative media leaders have become even more inXuential in the electoral process, helping sell candidates like Sarah Palin to conservatives and mobilize the movement in their support. In that way, the connection between the dealers and the darlings remains strong.

Notes 1. “ That Other Subversive Network,” Solidarity, January and February 1963, in Box 8, Folder 2, Clarence E. Manion Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago [hereinafter cited as Manion Papers, CHM]. 2. “Publisher’s Statement,” National Review, Nov. 19, 1955, 5. Letter to contributors, Sept. 21, 1956, Box 97, Folder 42, Manion Papers, CHM. 3. Nicole Hemmer, “Messengers of the Right: Media and the Modern Conservative Movement” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010), ch. 2. 4. Manion to Howard BuVett, Mar. 27, 1959, Box 69, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. Manion and Hub Russell dined with Faubus in early 1959 and scratched out a plan, but Manion abandoned his work for Faubus when he began working closely with Goldwater. See correspondences in Box 69, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. For a brief discussion of the changing party system, see Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 37–40. On the changing role of southern politicians, see Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. chs. 2 and 3.

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5. Manion claimed that Goldwater’s appearance on the Forum on May 12, 1957, was the senator’s Wrst appearance on a national radio program. Manion to Russell Bennitt, July 10, 1963, Box 10, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 6. Bozell, “Death Throes of a Proud Party,” National Review, Jan. 31, 1959, 487. 7. “ The Big Fight,” Human Events, Dec. 28, 1957; Wick, “Rating Your Members of Congress,” Human Events, Oct. 20, 1958; Goldwater, “ The Future of Republicanism,” Human Events, Jan. 28, 1959; Goldwater, “ The Epithets of Wayne Morse: A Challenge to Senatorial Dignity,” Human Events, July 22, 1959; Goldwater, “Wanted: A More Conservative GOP,” Feb. 18, 1960. 8. Notes from meeting of Goldwater, Manion, and Hubbard Russell, May 15, 1959, Box 69, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. 9. Wood to Manion, Apr. 22, 1959, Box 69, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM; Pulliam to Manion, June 1, 1959, Box 69, Folder 5, Manion Papers, CHM; William B. Wright to Manion, July 16, 1959, Box 69, Folder 7, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Frank Brophy, July 28, 1959, Box 70, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 10. Buckley to Manion, Sept. 24, 1959, Box 70, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; Smoot to Hubbard Russell, Oct. 13, 1959, Box 70, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM. 11. Frank Brophy laid out these reasons in a letter to Bozell when proposing the project on Manion’s behalf. Brophy to Bozell, June 18, 1959, Box 69, Folder 5, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Milliken, June 18, 1959, Box 69, Folder 5, Manion Papers, CHM. 12. Manion to CliVord Ward, May 5, 1960, Box 70, Folder 5, Manion Papers, CHM; “Goldwater Book Reaps Financial, Political Hay,” New York WorldTelegram, Apr. 26, 1960, Box 72, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; Bozell to Manion, Aug. 17, 1959, Box 68, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Frank Brophy, Sept. 1, 1959, Box 68, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Milliken, Jan. 29, 1964, Box 68, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. 13. Manion to Buckley, Sept. 28, 1959; Buckley to Manion, Oct. 2, 1959; Box 68, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. 14. Quoted in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor,” Journal of American History 95, no. 3 (2008): 678–709. 15. Initial sales numbers from “Goldwater Book Reaps Financial, Political Hay,” New York World-Telegram, Apr. 26, 1960, Box 72, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; John Chamberlain, “ The Humane Base of Conservatism,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1960, 10; George Morgenstern, “Harsh Facts, Hard Sense on the Perils to Liberty,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 17, 1960, B3; Frank S. Meyer, “A Man of Principle,” National Review, Apr. 23, 1960, 269–70; Barry Goldwater, “Platform for a Free America,” Human Events, Apr. 14, 1960. 16. Sales numbers from Wall Street Journal, as mentioned in Bozell to Manion, Oct. 12, 1960, Box 72, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 17. On Goldwater and the 1960 election, see Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press), 142–48.

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18. Broadcast #48, “A Second Political Party Is in Order,” Aug. 28, 1955; “At Last—A Chance for a Choice,” Manion Forum Ephemera, Folder 2, Wilcox Collection, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS [hereinafter cited as Wilcox Collection, UK]. 19. This discussion of the 1964 Draft Goldwater drive and Suite 3505 is drawn from Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), ch. 10. Clif White chronicled the committee’s activities in Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1967). The publisher Arlington House was created by Conservative Book Club founder Neil McCaVrey, promotions consultant for National Review, in the weeks prior to the election based on the rousing success of conservative books during the Goldwater campaign. 20. See, for example, the collection of essays in Daniel Bell’s The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1963). 21. Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell, 1964); SchlaXy, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette, 1964); Haley, A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power (Canyon, TX: Palo Duro, 1964). 22. Stormer, None Dare, back page. Perlstein makes the same comparison to Manion’s reprints in Before the Storm, 478. On Constructive Action, see Constructive Action, Inc. Ephemera, Wilcox Collection, UK. (Constructive Action should not be confused with Citizens for Constructive Action, a Walter Knott– led group that worked to organize and promote candidacies, most notably Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial run in California.) 23. On Regnery and book reviews, see, for instance, Regnery to Dan Smoot, May 7, 1953, Box 70, Folder 1 “Dan Smoot,” Henry Regnery Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA [hereinafter cited as Regnery Papers, HI]; Regnery to Mrs. Seth Milliken, Mar. 1, 1957, Box 51, Folder 13 “Roger Milliken,” Regnery Papers, HI; Regnery to Frank J. Johnson, Jan. 10, 1961, Box 36, Folder 17 “Frank J. Johnson,” Regnery Papers, HI; Henry Regnery, “ReXections of a Chicago Publisher,” Feb. 1964, Box 24, Folder 7, William A. Rusher Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [hereinafter cited as Rusher Papers, LOC]. On the diYculty of bookstore placement, see, for instance, Regnery to Felix Morrow, Mar. 28, 1951, Box 54, Folder 2 “Felix Morrow,” Regnery Papers, HI. On conservative bookstores, see, for instance, Regnery to Victor Milione, Dec. 14, 1962, Box 34, Folder 9 “ISI (2 of 3),” Regnery Papers, HI; Regnery to James Wick, Dec. 19, 1961, Box 32, Folder 1 “Human Events (1 of 2, 1961–64),” Regnery Papers, HI. The red-baiting anecdote comes from Perlstein, Before the Storm, 477. 24. On California numbers, see Jameson Campaigne to Otto Von Habsburg, Aug. 17, 1964, Box 11, Folder “11: August 1 to August 31, 1966,” Jameson G. Campaigne Papers, HI. On the book’s inXuence on Goldwater’s primary campaign, see Manion to Bonner Fellers, June 15, 1964, Box 81, Folder 7, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Fred SchlaXy, June 1, 1964, Box 79, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. Orange County activist Cathy Sullivan, quoted in McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 136.

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25. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 479. 26. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis SchlaXy and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 123–24. 27. Regnery to Manion, June 2, 1965, Box 48, Folder 27, Regnery Papers, HI; Regnery to Manion, June 29, 1965, Box 48, Folder 27, Regnery Papers, HI. The Great Books series worked well for Regnery for a few years, until he was dropped as a publisher because, he believed, he published controversial works. 28. Henry Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (New York: Harcourt, 1979), 146–61, 167–73; John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 88–98, 113. 29. Manion to Norman L. Cotten, Nov. 30, 1964, Box 17, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 30. Billy James Hargis to Manion, Apr. 2, 1964, Box 14, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM. 31. Rusher concluded that in order to reach out to undecideds, National Review should not change its content. Rather, it should emphasize its relationship to Buckley, who had become widely popular after his mayoral run and the launch of his television program Firing Line. Rusher to Buckley, Feb. 6, 1967, microWlm reel 33, Rusher Papers, LOC. 32. Manion Forum pamphlet, [1965], Box 109, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 33. Manion Forum letter to subscribers, Nov. 17, 1964, Box 16, Folder 7, Manion Papers, CHM. National Review, after commenting on the poll, wryly added, “Now if the American voter can only be brought to the point of agreeing to annihilate little girls who play with daisies, this country can have a conservative Administration.” In National Review, Dec. 15, 1964, 1089. 34. Rusher to Buckley, Mar. 3, 1965, microWlm reel 31, Rusher Papers, LOC; Ralph E. Gray to Manion, July 24, 1966, Box 26, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. 35. Manion Forum Audits, Box 106, Folder 3, Manion Papers, CHM; Audit Bureau of Circulations, Box 110, Folder 4, Rusher Papers, LOC; Regnery to John L. Ryan, May 19, 1965, Box 56, Folder 5, Regnery Papers, HI; Regnery to M. Stanton Evans, Aug. 5, 1965, Box 21, Folder 16, Regnery Papers, HI. 36. On Footnotes, see, for instance, Broadcast #936, “ The Future of Freedom: Self-Government Cannot Be Maintained by Those Who Are Ignorant of Its Principles,” Sept. 17, 1972. Examples taken from Footnotes 72, 163, and 1632. 37. Quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power (New York: Union Square, 1986; repr. 2008), 25. On television audience, see Manion to Lester Varn Jr., Oct. 29, 1969, Box 102, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Lewis, Aug. 9, 1965, Box 20, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM 38. Ted LoeZer, Constructive Action Special Report, ConWdential, April 1966, Constructive Action, Inc. Ephemera, Folder 1, Letters, Wilcox Collection, UK. 39. “Serving the Nation’s Business & Professional Men,” Constructive Action Brochure, Constructive Action, Inc. Ephemera, Folder 2, Brochures, Wilcox Collection, UK.

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40. “ The Americanists,” Time, Mar. 10, 1961; “Senator Scores Group Calling Eisenhower a Red,” New York Times, 9 Mar. 1961, 12. 41. Manion to Francis S. Spence, Nov. 27, 1964, Box 17, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 42. Douglas C. Morse to Manion, Mar. 24, 1965, Box 18, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Morse, Mar. 26, 1965, Box 18, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM. 43. Memo to sponsors of Dean Manion’s events, May 18, 1965, Box 19, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM. 44. “ The Question of Robert Welch,” National Review, Feb. 13, 1962, 87. 45. Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2001), 154; E. W. Kenworthy, “Goldwater Gains in Drive for Unity,” New York Times, Jul. 30, 1964, 1. 46. Manion Forum Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 21, Box 85, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM; Manion to Frank DeGanahl, Sept. 24, 1964, Box 16, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; J. G. Bell to Manion, Oct. 29, 1964, Box 16, Folder 5, Manion Papers, CHM. 47. Correspondences regarding the clerk Wring are located in Box 63, Folder 3, Manion Papers, CHM. 48. David Greenberg, in an excellent article on media and the civil rights movement, argues that the charge of “liberal bias” in the press originated with the white southern opposition to the civil rights movement and sympathetic coverage of the movement outside the South. While I agree that the southern roots of “liberal bias” merge with the national conservative movement by the mid1960s, I Wnd stronger continuity with these early conservative media Wgures, who had to justify their existence by arguing conservative voices were excluded from established outlets. Greenberg, “ The Idea of ‘the Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 1 (December 2008): 167–86; Frank S. Meyer, “What Next for Conservatism?,” National Review, Dec. 1, 1964, 1057; Manion Forum Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 22, Box 85, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM. 49. Sister Mary Roger to Manion, Nov. 14, 1964, Box 16, Folder 7, Manion Papers, CHM; Bessie Ridge Long to Manion, Nov. 12, 1964, Box 16, Folder 6, Manion Papers, CHM. 50. E. W. Kenworthy, “Agnew Says TV Networks Are Distorting the News,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1969, 1, 24. 51. Forum, Broadcast #795, “Hanky-Panky: Liberal News Manipulators Are Caught with Their Scripts Down,” Guest: James J. Finnegan, Jan. 4, 1970; Manion to Clayton Kirkpatrick, Jan. 1, 1970, Box 55, Folder 3, Manion Papers, CHM; Forum, Broadcast #805, “We Shall Overcome: Free Flow of News and Good Sense of a Free People Will Insure Nation’s Survival,” Guest: Arthur H. “Red” Motley, Mar. 15, 1970; Draft of suggested letter for Vig. List, n.d., Box 107, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM.

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52. Human Events insert card, “How Much News Is Being Withheld from You?,” attached to Robert D. Kephart to Manion, Mar. 22, 1971, Box 107, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM; Stephen J. Ganslen to Rusher, Nov. 6, 1972, Box 41, Folder 9, Rusher Papers, LOC; Arlington House catalogue, Fall 1970, Arlington House Publishers Ephemera, Wilcox Collection, UK. 53. Thomas L. Winter to “Dear Fellow American,” Committee to Combat Bias in Broadcasting Ephemera, Wilcox Collection, UK. 54. Edith Efron, “Why Speech on Television Is Not Really Free,” TV Guide, Apr. 11, 1964, clipping in Box 67, Folder 1, Manion Papers, CHM; Edith Efron, “ There Is a Network News Bias,” TV Guide, Feb. 28, 1970, 6–11, reprinted in Human Events, Mar. 14, 1970, 8; Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971). 55. Buckley memo, June 17, 1971, Box 121, Folder 2, Rusher Papers, LOC; Efron to Buckley, June 4, 1971, Box 121, Folder 2, Rusher Papers, LOC; “The News Twisters,” Firing Line, Sept. 1, 1971, program #S0026; John Chamberlain, “ TV Reporting on ’72 Campaign Should Be DiVerent,” Human Events, Sept. 18, 1971, 11. The Nixon administration’s involvement in Efron’s book is detailed in David Brock’s The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (New York: Crown, 2004), 26–33. 56. Manion to Rusher, May 21, 1974, Box 61, Folder 4, Manion Papers, CHM; Behind the Lines transcript, show #127, Box 212, Folder 8, Rusher Papers, LOC; Kephart to Manion, Mar. 22, 1971, Box 107, Folder 2, Manion Papers, CHM.

6 Goldwater in Dixie Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right joseph crespino

on september 17, 1964, the Boeing 727 carrying Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater landed in brilliant sunlight at the airport in Greenville, South Carolina. Standing at the bottom of the steps as Goldwater exited the plane was Strom Thurmond, the Democratic senator from South Carolina and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate. The day before, Thurmond had issued a scalding denunciation of the Democratic Party, ending with his surprise announcement of his new status as a “Goldwater Republican.” On his right lapel Thurmond had pinned a Goldwater button. On his left was a tiny golden elephant sporting a pair of Goldwater’s distinctive hornrimmed glasses.1 A frenzied crowd of twenty thousand South Carolinians joined in the welcome for Goldwater. TraYc along Interstate 85 backed up for three miles. Marching bands blared patriotic music. Goldwater girls, dressed in blue skirts, white blouses, and crimson sashes, bounced and waved. By the time Goldwater stepped onto the tarmac, the entire law enforcement details of two counties could not hold back the boisterous crowd that broke police lines and engulfed the candidate. Embarrassed policemen threw punches and shoved teenagers, trying to reestablish a protective cordon. The industrialist Roger Milliken, 144

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identiWed at the Republican National Convention as one of Goldwater’s most important Wnancial backers, could not get close enough to shake Goldwater’s hand. On the red-carpeted podium, Goldwater and Thurmond held their hands aloft while the crowd screamed itself hoarse. By day’s end, forty-Wve people would require emergency Wrst aid. Thirty-Wve of them had fainted. Two had suVered heart attacks. One child had broken out in hives.2 Scenes like this one followed Goldwater across the South. Goldwater would go on to win Wve Deep South states. In the two “deepest”—Alabama and Mississippi—he won 69 and 87 percent of the vote respectively. These victories came the same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most signiWcant single piece of civil rights legislation that Congress had passed since Reconstruction—legislation that Senator Barry Goldwater had voted against. After signing the bill, President Johnson famously remarked to presidential aide Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”3 Goldwater’s southern success now stands as the middle marker in a three-point plot line covering thirty-two years of America’s postwar history, each event neatly divided by sixteen years: Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat presidential run that showed that white southerners were no longer “in the bag” for the Democratic Party; Goldwater’s 1964 campaign that marked the Wrst time that white southerners had voted in signiWcant numbers for the party of Lincoln; and 1980, when Ronald Reagan narrowly beat a native son of the Democratic South and sealed the GOP’s dominance in the region up to the present day. It is a tidy narrative of political transformation in the American South, but one that obscures as much as it reveals about the South and modern conservatism. Lyndon Johnson’s bit of folk wisdom about the impact of the civil rights bill makes it easy to forget how millions of white Americans outside of the South chafed at the advances and continued protests of the civil rights movement. The notion also ignored the wholesale transformation of the southern political economy from a one-crop agricultural backwater to the modern industrialized and urbanized Sunbelt. The process remade class politics in the South, privileging the same kind of antilabor, free-enterprise discourse that deWned postwar Arizona politics. This rhetoric was at the center of the conservative movement coming together in the GOP.

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Yet hidden in the narrative of Republican domination in Dixie is how eVectively the Democratic Party used the politics of class to stave oV GOP inroads and continue to dominate local and state politics in the South well into the 1980s. The success of a Democratic politician like South Carolina’s Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, Thurmond’s longtime South Carolina colleague in the Senate, shows how well Democrats were able to hang on.4 In recent years a wave of new scholarship on grassroots conservatism has provided depth, rigor, and complexity to our understanding of the rise of modern conservative politics. The best of this work has not jettisoned racial reaction as a category of analysis but has placed it alongside a number of other important interpretive lenses: class and suburbanization, gender, and religion. Yet in sketching the social, cultural, and spatial worlds that informed conservative political action, it is important not to skip formal, organized political action itself— not coVee klatches, antibusing marches, or evangelical rallies, though those were important, but precinct political meetings, state conventions, and campaign speeches.5 Particularly important is the relationship between national conservative leaders such as Goldwater and the burgeoning southern Republican organizations. Among the latter, none was more prominent, or more important to Goldwater’s fortunes, than the South Carolina Republican Party. It was at the South Carolina state convention in March 1960 that Roger Milliken arranged to have the South Carolina delegation go to the national convention in Chicago that year pledged to Goldwater. It was the initial public event—carefully coordinated with the release of Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative— that kicked oV his 1960 presidential boomlet. And, of course, South Carolina was home to Strom Thurmond, if not the Wrst, then certainly the most prominent and powerful southern Democratic convert. Goldwater and Thurmond’s evolving relationship over the course of the 1960s shed important light on the regional and racial dynamics of conservative politics. An examination of Barry Goldwater and the South Carolina GOP sheds light on two issues in the historiography of the South and modern conservatism. First, it helps to historicize a debate among scholars about the relative weight of race versus class as an explanatory factor in the rise of the southern GOP. Some recent scholarship has argued

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that race has been overstated as a factor in the Republican rise in the South.6 The history of GOP growth in South Carolina helps to historicize this debate. It is not one that scholars can approach from an objective remove. Republicans themselves were debating which factors were responsible in building the southern wing of the party exactly at the moment that it was happening. The question as to the sources of modern southern Republicanism has always been implicated in Wrst facilitating and later justifying one of the most remarkable realignments in American political history. Second, this history complicates a facile distinction sometimes made between “national” conservatives—Wgured either as “northern” or “Sunbelt” conservatives—and southern conservatives. “Northern conservatives ignored the civil rights question,” one scholar has written. A study of California has argued that for Sunbelt suburbanites, opposition to civil rights “was only one of a host of issues in a broader conservative package.” Racial issues “did not occupy the same prominence in the life, ideas, and politics of Southern California as they did in the former confederate states.”7 The account of regional and national conservative politics reXected in this chapter, however, suggests something diVerent. While Republican conservatives in South Carolina guarded closely the priorities of Jim Crow, they did so as the most important local issue in a range of priorities under assault by modern liberalism. On the other side, “national” conservatives such as Barry Goldwater based in a state like Arizona with a relatively small African American population may not have felt the political pinch of racial concerns as severely as their southern counterparts, but they certainly did not “ignore” civil rights, either at the local level, as Micaela Larkin shows in her contribution, or when they became national Wgures. They knew that attracting conservative white southern support would be critical in the conservative takeover of the GOP, and they carefully calculated their views on civil rights to meet white southerners’ approval. The most important Wnancial Wgure in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was also the major moneyman behind the Republican resurgence in South Carolina. Palmetto State Democrats nicknamed him the GOP’s “Daddy Warbucks.” A report from the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco called him “the single most inXuential delegate.” Roger Milliken—New York–born,

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educated at Groton and Yale—was the scion of one of the South’s great textile families. A father of Wve who took over the reins of the family business in 1947, Milliken lived a relatively modest life in Spartanburg, South Carolina. His passions were for modern industrial management, tough-minded business practices, and conservative politics.8 Milliken was one of the most reliable and deep-pocketed patrons of a variety of conservative causes over the second half of the twentieth century. He was indispensable in providing Wnancial support for the National Review in its early years. “What would American conservatism do without the Millikens! Horrible thought!” wrote magazine founder William F. Buckley Jr. Conservative activists and politicians alike went out of their way to court Milliken. In June 1960, for example, conservative radio host Clarence Manion—the man chieXy responsible for organizing the 1960 Draft Goldwater movement—urged Goldwater not to strike John Birch Society founder Robert Welch from a list of supporters to appear in an upcoming Goldwater advertisement. “One of Welch’s strongest supporters is Roger Milliken of South Carolina,” Manion wrote, noting that Milliken had contributed ten thousand dollars to Welch’s campaign of full-page ads protesting Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States.9 In July 1959 Milliken wrote to Manion with the idea of kick-starting a Goldwater drive by arranging for the South Carolina delegation to go to the convention committed to Goldwater. South Carolina’s Republican national committeeman W. W. Wannamaker elaborated on the plan at a meeting of Goldwater backers that Manion chaired at the Union League Club in Chicago in January 1960. The only concern for Wannamaker, the lone southerner in attendance, was having the movement begin in the South; he worried that it might tie Goldwater too closely to regional reaction. None of the others in attendance shared the concern. The South Carolina GOP convention would dovetail with the planned publication in early March 1960 of Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Constitutional Conservative, which would outline the Senator’s position on a range of domestic and foreign issues, and, ideally, pressure Richard Nixon, the presumptive Republican nominee, into taking conservative Republicans seriously. The meeting ended with instructions to Wannamaker to move ahead with South Carolina’s nomination plan.10

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Goldwater’s book—with its shortened Wnal title, The Conscience of a Conservative—became a literary and political phenomenon. The initial print run was only Wfty thousand copies; in Chicago, Manion had implored the attendees to spread word about the book and line up reviews. Roger Milliken had already pledged to buy large quantities and distribute them widely, and Manion urged other businesses to do likewise. By June the book had debuted on Time magazine’s bestseller list at number ten; by election time there were a half million copies in print. The 127-page hardback became the political Bible for a rising generation of conservative activists. Ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley and an attendee of the Chicago meeting, and divided into brief, easily digestible chapters—“ The Welfare State,” “ The Soviet Menace,” “ Taxes and Spending”—the book explained in straightforward, commonsense language the central issues in the rising conservative revolt.11 The third chapter was titled “States’ Rights”; the fourth, “And Civil Rights.” They could have been mistaken as the only ones, based on the encomium written by William Workman, a South Carolina syndicated political columnist. His review, published the same day that Goldwater keynoted the 1960 South Carolina Republican state convention, called Conscience a “handbook for survival.” Workman lauded Goldwater’s critique of the term “civil rights,” which he said was not a synonym of “human rights” or “natural rights” but merely a description of rights given by a legislature, not prescribed by “politicians, or sociologists—or the courts.” The “clear and unmistakable terms” in which Goldwater discussed the thorny matter of school segregation thrilled Workman. He quoted favorite passages at length, such as, “Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am Wrmly convinced—not only that integrated schools are not required—but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the Weld of education.”12 Some four hundred delegates, two dozen of whom were African American, turned out to hear Goldwater speak in Columbia before the largest South Carolina Republican convention in history. Goldwater played up his high school years at the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia (he had had the South in his heart ever since, he told the delegates), but he also touted the Republican Party as the “only place a conservative can go,” predicting that “thousands of conservative

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Southerners” would vote the GOP ticket that year. Praising southerners for their “steadfast devotion to what they believe” led him to digress into a moment of calculated bipartisanship: “I know this isn’t customary for a Republican and particularly for me as chairman of the [National Republican Senatorial Elections] committee—but I just wish to God we could Wnd some more Strom Thurmonds in this country.” South Carolina reporters noted what close friends the two men were, how Thurmond was Goldwater’s counterpart in the Democratic Party. The feelings were mutual. The following month Thurmond predicted that if either party nominated Goldwater for president, “he would sweep the South.”13 During the Wve-hour convention Richard Nixon’s name was not mentioned once. After Goldwater’s keynote, Roger Milliken took the Xoor and moved that South Carolina go to the convention pledged to Barry Goldwater. Delegates responded with “rebel yells of agreement.” A parade of county delegations ensued behind both Confederate and US Xags. Roger Milliken called a delighted Clarence Manion the next day with a play-by-play account of the convention. Republican national committeeman W. W. Wannamaker reported back as well, but as in Chicago he worried about “having the project branded sectional or reactionary.” “We need encouragement from other regions,” he wrote, “especially the Middle West.”14 They would not get it. In July, Goldwater went to the national convention in Chicago with two states lined up, South Carolina and his home state of Arizona. The LaSalle Hotel, headquarters for the South Carolina delegation, was ground zero for the fervid band of conservatives who tried to nominate Goldwater. Fueling the campaign were reports of the “Compact of Fifth Avenue,” Richard Nixon’s fourteen-point agreement with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the liberal Republicans. Goldwater called it the “Munich of the Republican Party.” For conservatives the document included numerous heresies on domestic and foreign issues, but foremost among them for the southerners was point 9, which assured “aggressive action” on civil rights and voiced support for sit-in demonstrators. Conservatives picketed all along Michigan Avenue, with the southern delegations in the plurality.15 In the end, however, Barry Goldwater counted the votes and sided with his professional political advisers. The night before the

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nominating vote, he went to the Arizona and South Carolina delegations to tell them not to place his name in nomination, but by that point Goldwater had become a cause, not merely a candidate. When he met the South Carolinians, Roger Milliken stood up and addressed Goldwater in the third person: “We were instructed by our state convention to vote this delegation for Senator Goldwater and that’s what we intend to do.” The next day Goldwater withdrew his name. He implored conservatives to “grow up,” to fall in line behind Richard Nixon while still continuing the Wght to take back the Republican Party, but not before supporters celebrated his nomination in the most impassioned demonstration of the convention. It was a mixed bag of old-line Taft supporters, college-aged devotees who faked credentials to slip past security guards, and cold war hawks like Phyllis SchlaXy, who on the spur of the moment led the Illinois delegation into the Goldwater parade. Yet prominent among them all were the Dixie Republicans. In Columbia, the Goldwaterites had carried Confederate Xags alongside the national banner; as they marched around the hall in Chicago, strains of Dixie played by the convention orchestra could be heard over the din.16 Months earlier, the imminent release of Conscience of a Conservative buoyed Goldwater’s most steadfast supporters. In early March, Clarence Manion predicted it would be a well-timed “sensation” in a letter to Goldwater. He was “sure that the Civil Rights disturbance [would] increase its popularity throughout the Southland.”17 For over a month, the South had witnessed an unprecedented string of direct action protests by African Americans. It began on February 1 in Greensboro, North Carolina, where four students from North Carolina A&T, a historically African American college, were the Wrst to “sit in” at the lunch counter of the Woolworth’s Department store. The Greensboro students inspired copycat protests in Nashville and Virginia. Added to the new sit-in sensation was a wave of marches and other protests. In early March in Columbia, some Wfty African Americans armed with bricks and clubs battered cars parked at a white drive-in restaurant.18 For many white South Carolinians, the direct-action protest strained race relations nearly to the breaking point. “Whites in the South are beginning to despise the negro,” noted a Columbia man who sent Strom Thurmond a newspaper clipping of the violence at a Columbia

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restaurant. A former aide in the governor’s oYce, David H. Kennedy, saw “signs of dangerous unrest in the racial situation in the South.” A white couple who had moved from West Virginia to near Myrtle Beach wrote Harry Dent, Thurmond’s chief aide, requesting “Wrst hand opinions” of what Thurmond planned to do “to see that the ‘niggers’ don’t do to us what they are doing elsewhere.” Dent passed along the name of the executive director of the South Carolina Citizens’ Council and suggested that the couple get in touch.19 The furor over the sit-ins dovetailed with equally dramatic showdowns in Washington. On February 15, the Senate began discussion of civil rights proposals that would last until April 8; it was the longest deliberation since the Smoot-Hawley tariV debate of 1929–30. Senate liberals were determined to strengthen voting rights provisions from the 1957 legislation that had proven ineVective. It was an electric topic, given the jockeying of presidential candidates in an election year. Majority leader Lyndon Johnson was determined to get a civil rights bill through Congress, one that would show him to be the only Democratic presidential candidate able to negotiate between the warring liberal and conservative wings of the party. In late February the Capitol became the site of a legislative siege. In hopes of wearing down southern opposition, a majority of the Senate voted in favor of around-the-clock sessions. The idea was Lyndon Johnson’s, but he forced a majority vote of support lest he be held personally responsible for the collapse of a senior southern colleague. The sergeant-at-arms borrowed several dozen cots from the army, moving them into the old Supreme Court chamber and empty committee rooms. The Senate restaurant made preparations to serve rations at all hours. The novelty of the scene added to the excitement. Photographers competed to capture senators in escalating states of undress, and a late-night stop by the Senate gallery became the fashionable nightcap for Washington socialites.20 South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond spoke for dozens of hours during the 1960 Wlibuster. He relied heavily on a recently published book by the South Carolina political columnist William Workman called The Case for the South. Thurmond sent a copy to each of his Senate colleagues, including Vice President Nixon. Workman’s book was a compendium of segregationist arguments that hit all the high points of regional apologia. He defended the “much-maligned Citizens’

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Council of the South,” as well as southern ministers and church leaders who challenged anti–Jim Crow pronouncements by national church bodies; he decried the “paper curtain”—a term coined by Montgomery Advertiser editor Grover C. Hall to describe the alleged tendency of northern newspapers to cover southern racial conXict to the exclusion of incidents in the North; he discussed resettlement of African Americans to diVerent regions of the country as a solution to the civil rights crisis; and, most of all, he denounced the Brown decision as based not on legal precedent but on political and sociological reasoning, a charge that led Workman to a broader critique of Warren Court liberalism that he believed imperiled every segment of national life.21 Yet Workman was a signiWcant Wgure in Thurmond’s career not merely as a source of segregationist argument. Their relationship went back some Wfteen years. As a young reporter Workman covered Thurmond both in the governor’s mansion and on the presidential campaign in 1948. A World War II veteran, Workman served in a military reserve unit that Thurmond organized in Columbia, where they had regular opportunities for extended political discussions. When Thurmond won his write-in campaign in 1954, he asked Workman to come to Washington to serve as press secretary in his Washington oYce, but Workman declined, citing family obligations. Workman remained in South Carolina, where he joined the editorial staV of the Columbia State and wrote a syndicated political column that appeared in thirty southern newspapers. His columns mixed states rights advocacy, anti-unionism, and hard-line anticommunism in an intoxicating brew drunk down by both Thurmond’s old Dixiecrat supporters and the Goldwater insurgents who were taking over the South Carolina GOP and helping shift the national party rightward.22 Workman was among those southerners who preceded Thurmond in switching from the States Rights Democrats to the Goldwater Republican Party. As late as 1960 Workman had no oYcial political aYliation, yet his conservative opinions were clear enough thanks to his decade’s worth of columns. In the fall of 1961 a group of Republicans in Columbia, including J. Drake Edens, who would chair Workman’s campaign and eventually become the state party chairman, recruited Workman to join the Republicans and challenge Olin Johnston in the upcoming Senate race. South Carolina Republicans had

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been emboldened by the election in 1961 of Charles E. Boineau Jr. to the South Carolina House of Representatives, a victory that made him the Wrst Republican elected in the state since 1901. Yet the party was still in its infant stages. Republicans generally lacked candidates with signiWcant enough name recognition to run statewide. As Boineau himself told Republican leaders when asked about the prospect of running a statewide campaign, Republicans had only “a bunch of dedicated little old ladies in tennis shoes, and me, that didn’t know what the hell we were doing.” In Bill Workman, however, they had an articulate conservative candidate who was so well known to South Carolinians that the byline of his syndicated column was simply his initials—WDW.23 Workman not only embraced the South Carolina GOP but ran for oYce under its mantle. In 1962 he challenged Olin Johnston for a US Senate seat in what would be the most signiWcant statewide Republican campaign in South Carolina since Reconstruction. Workman ran with the backing of the same impassioned conservatives who had helped spur the Goldwater insurgency at the 1960 Republican National Convention, as well as scores of high school and college students across South Carolina who had caught Goldwater fever. Goldwater’s popularity across the South had only grown since the Chicago convention. In November 1961 Goldwater delivered a highproWle speech in Atlanta in which he pledged to “bend every muscle I have to see that the South has a voice [in the next Republican platform] on everything that aVects the life of the South.” He repeated his opposition to the federal government forcing integration in southern public schools and said that he would support a constitutional amendment to return the control of schools to the states. It was odd, Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution wrote, to hear “a rebel yell rise from a desegregated group of Republicans,” all the more so because it came from a Republican who told them how the Democrats had “ ‘abused’ the South.”24 In March 1962 Goldwater was back in South Carolina to address the largest South Carolina Republican convention in state history. Over 2,500 people attended, with about seven hundred delegates and alternates—all white—from thirty-four of the state’s forty-eight counties. The Charleston News and Courier juxtaposed photographs from the 1956 and 1962 Republican state conventions, both shot from the

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same vantage point inside Columbia’s Township Auditorium. The Wrst showed an unadorned hall with rows of empty seats—no one had even put out an American Xag. Plain folding chairs and a table sat on the stage. A female Wgure behind a small wooden lectern addressed a desolate hall. In the second photograph, every seat was Wlled. The auditorium was decorated with fresh Xowers and red, white, and blue bunting, as well as state, national, and Confederate battle Xags. A cutout image of South Carolina sat in the corner of the stage and a huge banner showing the Republican elephant hung behind the podium.25 “I think its time you sent somebody up there [to Washington] to help Strom Thurmond represent the conservatives,” Goldwater told the convention goers. Goldwater systematically attacked the Kennedy administration and said that Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles had been reassigned because he had been “right once too often.” In a gibe that showed that Goldwater knew his Bible Belt audience, he added, “ The only thing worse than being right in Washington is being Protestant.”26 South Carolina Republicans were encouraged by the Texas senate race the previous year, where the Republican John Tower won election to Wll the remainder of Lyndon Johnson’s term. Republicans also held great hope for the election to Congress of Floyd Spence, a threeterm Democratic state representative who had recently switched parties and was vying for the district that included Columbia. Spence said that he had changed parties because his “basic convictions are being compromised by remaining in the Democratic Party.” Across the South, Republicans ran seven Senate and sixty-two House candidates. The average age for Republican Senate contenders was forty-six; for the House it was forty-two. Noting the attractive, young Republican candidates, the conservative national syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander characterized the Workman–Johnston race as a forty-six-year old “columnist, author and combat soldier” versus “one of the latterday Claghorns.”27 On the campaign trail Workman was less explicit about racial matters than in his book. In fact, as a candidate, Workman seemed Xat, too analytical by some Republicans’ estimation. He generally lacked the Wre that South Carolina audiences had come to expect from their political candidates. At Wrst South Carolina Democrats were the more explicit race-baiters in the campaign. They published a faux newspaper

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called the “Dixie News” that alleged Richard Nixon’s close association with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and ran the headline “Remember Little Rock” over a picture of federal troops escorting African American schoolchildren into Central High School. In late September, however, Workman’s campaign got a major boost when President Kennedy used federal troops to enforce the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. Now the Democrats had their own Little Rock. The site of federal marshals using tear gas and bayonets to repel protestors appalled not just white southerners but an assortment of right-wing groups across the country, who began referring to Oxford, Mississippi, as “Kennedy’s Hungary.”28 “Mississippi is helping us,” a Workman aide admitted to a reporter. Events in Oxford, Workman said, had “the earmark of a cold-blooded, premeditated eVort to crush the state of Mississippi to submission.” He praised Ross Barnett’s deWance of federal authority. “When South Carolina’s turn comes, she’ll defend her rights,” Workman told a crowd in North Augusta. In Walterboro, he said that Ole Miss was “part of a grand pattern, a pattern which destroys the Constitution, a pattern which utterly wipes out the states which would make of us simply administrative provinces of an all powerful central government.” Workman drew a straight line connecting the States Rights revolt of 1948 to Republican politics in 1962. “I saw strong men from Mississippi and Alabama walk out of that convention with sorrow in their hearts and tears in their eyes,” he said, “being driven from the house of their fathers by persons who did not believe in what we of the South believed in as the heritage of the Democratic Party and of the American people.” After Oxford, Republican campaign workers at the Anderson County Fair noticed a considerable increase in visitors at the party booth. Fairgoers vowed that this was the last straw for the Kennedy administration.29 Workman inspired great hope among Republicans, yet even with events in Oxford, Olin Johnston had forged a comfortable lead by late October. Late in the campaign, Workman implored supporters to turn out “with axe handles” if necessary to get an honest count, an inXammatory comment that one Republican would later recall as his biggest mistake of the campaign. More importantly, Olin Johnston let Xy a Xurry of announcements of federal beneWcence, all of which

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Xowed through his oYce—new post oYces, small business loans, aid for farmers. The signal achievement was a White House announcement that Donaldson Air Force Base near Greenville had been struck from the Pentagon’s list of base closings (it was put back on less than two months after the election). Election night proved uneventful. Workman called Johnston to concede by shortly after eight o’clock.30 Even so, Workman won 42 percent of the vote in a statewide election, which amounted to a historic achievement for the South Carolina GOP. Years later Harry Dent would downplay the role of the Workman campaign in spurring Strom Thurmond’s party switch two years later. He called it “a pretty good poll” but suggested that before 1964 the GOP in South Carolina was a mere “paper party.” Yet notes that Workman took on a long-distance telephone conversation with Strom Thurmond and Harry Dent the month following the campaign suggest a diVerent story.31 On December 17, in a call from Washington to Columbia, the three men discussed the “Democratic-Republican-Independent situation” in South Carolina. “Strom concurs that if the sound people don’t vote in Demo primaries,” Workman wrote, “those primaries will come to reXect the will only of trashy element. Feels that he may have to run by petition in 1966 if this trend continues.” Thurmond still believed that conservatives could maintain control of the Democratic Party in South Carolina as an entity separate from the national Democratic Party, but he worried about a law under consideration by the state assembly that would require registration by party. “If registration is required by party, many will not register as Democrats and will forsake the Democratic primary,” Workman wrote. “ That will leave Strom out on limb, for he fears he cannot win nomination if only trashy Democrats vote.”32 Who were the “trashy Democrats”? Neither Thurmond nor Workman explained. But given some of Workman’s other comments during the campaign, it is not hard to discern. They were Democrats who traYcked in what Workman called the “controlled vote,” or what segregationists had derisively referred to as the “bloc vote.” In a televised campaign appearance, Workman had pledged that, unlike his opponent Olin Johnston, he would make no secret deals “with Negro leaders here—or in Washington or elsewhere—regarding their support, or regarding my position.” But trashy Democrats were also black

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Democrats, and in this, Thurmond and Workman revealed racist notions about black political participation that stretched back to the very moment of African American enfranchisement. During Reconstruction, many white southerners never accepted the legitimacy of the Fifteenth Amendment; it was imposed by unscrupulous Republicans, they believed, as a way of exploiting freedmen to help prop up illegitimate Republican regimes in the postwar South. The image of the ignorant African American whose vote was for sale was a common trope of turn-of-the-century southern disfranchisement campaigns, and it persisted well into the twentieth century, in both the North and South. As late as 1948, the NAACP’s Henry Lee Moon decried the tendency, even among white liberals, “to isolate and stigmatize the vote of the Negro as a corrupt and venal factor in American politics.” With their obsession with the “bloc vote,” the racial politics of South Carolina’s new GOP followed seamlessly from the segregationist Democrats that preceded them.33 Even before Workman’s campaign, Thurmond had considered how the new Republican organizations in the state would impact Democratic Party primary voting. Thurmond had long conversations on the matter with Walter Brown, a former press agent for Jimmy Byrnes and Thurmond’s closest adviser during his Dixiecrat campaign. “ These new found Republican Boy Scouts need to be told what the score is,” Brown wrote Thurmond in November 1961, “for the good of our state Democratic Party and the State of South Carolina.” No Republican candidate could win a statewide vote, Brown argued, yet the more conservative Democrats the GOP attracted, the easier it was for liberal Democrats to win party primary races. “Unless someone knocks in the head this eVort of the Republicans to put a state ticket in the Weld,” wrote Brown, “ . . . then we are going to be put in the position where we will lose control of the Democratic Party to the liberals and scalawags, and we cannot stay in it.”34 It was a moment of enormous volatility in a state that had known only political stasis for the past eighty-six years. An articulate young Republican—a white man and a native South Carolinian, no less— had run for the US Senate talking about states rights and constitutionalism. He had the backing of an energetic and well-heeled party apparatus with aspirations for transforming not only state but national party politics. Given these dynamics—not to mention the Democratic

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gang in Washington: liberals, intellectuals, would-be socialists, and bloc vote appeasers—the votes that William Workman won were more than merely a “pretty good poll” for Strom Thurmond. It was a Xash frame of future party politics in South Carolina. Strom Thurmond would never run in a Democratic Party primary again. Republicans split over these Southern defections. Many moderate and liberal Republicans were upset over the campaigns that GOP candidates had run in several southern states, South Carolina in particular. They believed that their party could still win African American voters if they stood strongly for civil rights, as President Dwight Eisenhower had done in 1957 with the Civil Rights Act and with his actions in Little Rock. Nixon had taken this position in his 1960 presidential campaign. Barry Goldwater’s emergence and his conspicuous support for states’ rights had alarmed these Republicans. They criticized the eVort of “certain far-right Republicans” to “appeal to the South based on dogmatic conservatism and equivocation or abdication on civil rights.” The issue, as one liberal Republican magazine put it, was whether or not Republicans should “trade Lincoln for Strom Thurmond.”35 Such turmoil existed even among younger Republicans, often treated as a uniWed bloc in the conservative upsurge within the GOP. The magazine Advance was Wrst published in 1961 by self-styled “progressive” Republicans at Harvard. After graduation, the group moved the publication to Washington, and throughout 1961 and 1962 they were the most consistent critics of Operation Dixie and of Goldwater’s leadership of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. “States’ rights do not include the right to deprive minority groups of their constitutional liberties,” the magazine argued. It dismissed Goldwater’s argument about “hunting where the ducks are” as “immoral” and “foolish.” After the 1962 elections, Advance joined New York Senator Jacob Javits in denouncing eVorts by conservatives to “outsegregate the segregationists.” Both cited in particular the Senate campaigns of William Workman in South Carolina and James Martin in Alabama.36 The 1962 midterm campaigns revived a decade-old debate among Republicans over how to balance the party’s historic commitment to African American civil rights with appeals to conservative white southerners. Goldwater and his fellow conservatives countered the criticisms by liberal Republicans by arguing that it was economics, not

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race, driving party growth in the South. They advanced an image of an economically dynamic, increasingly middle-class South that naturally identiWed with the small-government conservatism of the Republican Party. It was the image of the region that only a few years later pundits would begin to refer to as the “Sunbelt South.” “The kind of leadership that’s putting the steam into the GOP drive is the leadership of business and professional men,” wrote Anthony Harrigan, in a proWle of South Carolina Republicans in Human Events. Goldwater himself traced Republican gains back through the previous three presidential elections, when Eisenhower and Nixon had won almost half of all presidential votes in the region. “A new and diVerent kind of conservatism is rising to displace the old, rural traditional—almost hereditary—conservatism of the Democrats,” he wrote. “It is primarily an economic conservatism stemming from the growth in business activity, the increase in per capita income and the rising conWdence of the South in its own ability to expand industrially and commercially.” He denounced as “absurd on its face” charges that Republicans had gained based on appeals to “extreme segregationists.” The emphasis on free-enterprise conservatism had been a mainstay of Workman’s columns before he entered politics.37 The dispute between liberal and conservative Republicans over Operation Dixie was part of a larger power struggle within the GOP. Goldwaterites needed white southerners badly if they were to take over the party from liberal Republicans. They were not going to convert many moderates, and whatever African Americans came into the party via its support for civil rights were unlikely to be conservatives. The key growth segment was white southerners, who already believed more or less what conservative Republicans believed anyway. Goldwater and conservatives used the Sunbelt image to argue that it was not segregationists by and large who were driving party growth in the region. Yet Goldwater knew as well how important segregation was to the southern Republican. He had seen the Confederate Xags that they waved. He had keynoted the state conventions and had carefully crafted his speeches to say that while he himself did not favor segregation, some of his best political friends were segregationists— Strom Thurmond, for example. Liberal Republicans framed the problem of the GOP as what to do with the southern segregationists. As far as Goldwater and

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conservative leaders were concerned, however, the problem children in the conservative coalition were not southern segregationists but the John Birch Society and other hard-line anticommunists prone to outlandish and politically damaging outbursts. In his private correspondence with fellow conservative leaders, those were the allies that Barry Goldwater worried about. In comparison to Robert Welch, Strom Thurmond was a Boy Scout.38 Conservative Republicans had no patience with liberal Republican hand wringing over the issue of segregation. As a Goldwater aide put it in a memo to his boss, Advance’s concern about southern racism was “one of the reasons the South remains solidly Democrat.” Voting rights, for some conservatives, was a diVerent concern—Goldwater himself was always steadfast in supporting black voting rights. But integration in schools? For Raymond Moley the issue seemed trivial when compared with runaway federal spending. Goldwater’s writings on states’ rights suggested something similar; civil rights was certainly not the vital moral issue that Advance made it out to be.39 For southern Republicans like Bill Workman who worried about Democrat opponents making political hay out of Goldwater’s old ties to the NAACP, the Arizonan could not be clearer in his support for white southerners. Goldwater explained to Workman that he had been a member of the NAACP “back in 1948 or 1950” to “help stop segregation in the high schools in my hometown,” but he added, “I have not been a member since that time and in the interim my most bitter political enemies have been the NAACP.” The NAACP was “not primarily concerned with the situation involving the Negro,” said Goldwater, “but are beholden to every socialistic cause in America.” Far from distancing himself from the segregationist ideas of Workman, a national conservative leader such as Clarence Manion wrote an admiring letter to Workman during the campaign, telling him how much he had enjoyed The Case for the South. “I am sure that if you are as persuasive in your campaign as you are between those covers you will win the election,” wrote Manion.40 To be sure, Barry Goldwater did not share Strom Thurmond’s racial politics exactly, yet for Goldwater as well as for most nonsouthern conservatives, civil rights was simply not an issue of great moral or political concern. What the two men did share was a grave skepticism about the lengths that civil rights forces were willing to go to,

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to ensure equal rights. In August 1961, for example, Goldwater sent Thurmond a copy of civil rights legislation that had been passed by the legislature of the Virgin Islands, a US protectorate. “If this kind of legislation spreads any further, the present Civil Rights legislation will seem to be a God-send,” Goldwater wrote. He had underlined sections of the bill that he found particularly egregious, including provisions prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and private clubs and establishing periodic inspections by a commissioner of public safety. “I agree with you one hundred percent,” Thurmond responded. “Isn’t this preposterous?”41 The decision by Goldwater and other conservative Republicans to embrace Strom Thurmond, or to recruit segregationist apologists like Bill Workman, or to go hunt any of the other ducks who could help them take back the Republican Party from the Rockefellers, Javits, and other liberal Republicans was not a diYcult one. It was part of the conservative movement’s eVort to restore some sanity to domestic politics and the operation of the federal government, to strengthen national security, stave oV the communist menace and, in the process, possibly save the free world. For most conservatives, given all that hung in the balance, white southerners’ desire to preserve a range of segregated practices—to have the races attend separate schools, to allow restaurant owners to decide whom they wanted to serve, to have business owners free from the federal government telling them which employees to hire—none of these things seemed terribly unreasonable or even controversial propositions. In 1964, thanks in large part to the tireless eVorts of Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater won South Carolina and four other southern states but lost the general election in what at the time was the worst drubbing in history. Afterward, Goldwater returned to Arizona where he spent the next four years. When he returned to Washington in January 1969, after winning the Senate seat of retiring Carl Hayden, the dynamic between Goldwater and Strom Thurmond differed from the heady days of the early 1960s. Back then, anti-unionism and anticommunism had been the basis of their political friendship, but the frisson came in the political value that each oVered the other. Goldwater was the star ascendant of the Republican Right who helped to promote Thurmond in national right-wing circles. Thurmond was Goldwater’s ambassador to the dissident southern Democrats essential to a

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conservative Republican trying to win the White House. Goldwater used to tell his southern audiences, “ There is not enough difference between a conservative South Carolina Democrat like Sen. Thurmond and a conservative Republican to put a piece of paper between.”42 By 1968 Goldwater was eager to put considerably more distance between the two. An exchange of letters during Goldwater’s 1968 Senate campaign shows how carefully he backed away from the man who had become the avatar of his 1964 campaign’s dubious southern strategy. Thurmond sent Goldwater a copy of a book that he was about to publish, The Faith We Have Not Kept, and asked him to write a foreword. Goldwater begged oV, saying that while the book represented a great many of his positions, there were “enough minor disagreements” that would prevent him from doing so. Thurmond picked up on the delicate politics involved. “I am interested in seeing you come back to the Senate,” he wrote, “and don’t want you to take any step or do anything that would in any way jeopardize your election.” But he politely asked what the disagreements were. If there were misstatements or errors, he wanted to change them before publication.43 Goldwater stammered. “ The word minor disagreement, probably, shouldn’t have been used, and I wouldn’t suggest you change anything in your book,” he answered in a follow-up letter. If he had read more closely, Goldwater could have objected to a muddled passage in which Thurmond implied support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott, an 1857 decision that upheld the property rights of slave owners and helped precipitate the Civil War. Instead, Goldwater said that the problem came down to Thurmond’s gloss on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. “While I totally disagreed with the way the Brown case was settled,” he explained, “I did agree with its principle but in reading your book you reXect, as I know you honestly believe, a continuing disagreement with it.”44 Thurmond might have pointed out that in attacking Brown his book did not defend segregation itself but dealt with constitutional principles that he believed the Court had sacriWced in reaching its conclusion. Or he could have asked whether Goldwater’s explanation meant that he himself did not have a “continuing disagreement” with “the way the Brown case was settled.” In fact, Thurmond could have asked how his book’s denunciation of Brown diVered substantively from the one Goldwater oVered in Conscience of a Conservative. Both books were

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penned by well-connected conservative ghostwriters: in Goldwater’s case, Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law; for Thurmond, Lee Edwards, who held a PhD in world politics from Catholic University and would become one of the premier historian advocates of modern conservatism. Thurmond denounced Brown as the lead case in a wave of decisions inXuenced by the liberal theory of the Constitution as a “living document.” Goldwater’s book cited the history of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that its authors neither intended it to apply to schools nor authorized federal intervention in the Weld of education. He was unconvinced that Brown was the law of the land. “ The Constitution, and the laws ‘made in pursuance thereof,’ are the ‘supreme law of the land,’ ” Conscience read. “ The Constitution is what its authors intended it to be and said it was—not what the Supreme Court says it is.”45 Yet Strom Thurmond said none of these things. “I can certainly understand why, during election year, you have to be particularly careful in all your actions,” he wrote. Thurmond did not push Goldwater to explain how he had been in favor of the Brown decision before he had been against it. He understood. Goldwater had needed Thurmond when he was running for national oYce in 1964, but in 1968, in a Senate reelection campaign in Arizona, Thurmond was a liability. Goldwater’s Democratic opponent was sure to attack him for being an extremist, as the Democrats always had. It did not pay for him to be too closely identiWed with the former Dixiecrat presidential candidate and the face of racist resistance in the South.46 It was a long way from that brilliant day in Greenville, when Strom Thurmond put his career on the line for Goldwater in what was the boldest party switch ever seen in southern politics. Yet the exchange of letters showed the sort of political dance in which Goldwater led Thurmond, the pushing away after pulling in close. Over the next few decades, for other party leaders—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan most notable among them—it would become a standard step. Notes 1. Robert McHugh, “Goldwater Appeal to State: A Two-Party System— Now,” State, Sept. 18, 1964; Charles Mohr, “ Thurmond Joins Goldwater Drive,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1964.

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2. McHugh, “Goldwater Appeal to State.” 3. Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118. 4. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ernest F. Hollings with Kirk Victor, Making Government Work (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). 5. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Darren Dochuck, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Daniel HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Michelle Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 6. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 7. Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 66; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14–15. 8. William Jennings Bryan Dorn, Dorn: Of the People, a Political Way of Life (Columbia, SC: Bruccoli, Clark Layman/Sandlapper, 1988), 169; “South Carolinian in Barry’s Inner Circle,” Charleston News and Courier, July 15, 1964. 9. Buckley, quoted in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009), 80–81; Manion to Goldwater, June 29, 1960, box 1, folder Victory Publishing Company, “The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, Arizona Historical Foundation [hereinafter cited as Goldwater Papers, AHF]. 10. Clarence Manion to Barry Goldwater, July 21, 1959, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (1 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, AHF; “Abstract of Minutes Taken at Goldwater Meeting,” Jan. 23, 1960, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, AHF. 11. “Abstract of Minutes Taken at Goldwater Meeting,” Jan. 23, 1960, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, AHF; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 62–63.

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12. “Senator Goldwater on States Rights,” Greenville News, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers. 13. “13 Votes to Goldwater: South Carolina Republicans Pledge Delegation,” New York Times, Mar. 27, 1960; “Goldwater Backed: Thurmond Is Lauded at GOP Convention,” Charlotte Observer, Mar. 27, 1960; “Goldwater Lauded by Thurmond,” Charleston News and Courier, Apr. 29, 1960. 14. “ Thurmond Is Lauded at GOP Convention,” Anderson Independent, Mar. 27, 1960; Joseph Alsop, “Nixon and the Rightwingers,” Washington Post, Apr. 6, 1960; Clarence Manion to Barry Goldwater, Mar. 31, 1960, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I. Personal, Goldwater Papers; W. W. Wannamaker to Clarence Manion, Mar. 28, 1960, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), sub-series Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers. 15. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 85. 16. Ibid., 92–93. 17. Clarence Manion to Barry Goldwater, Mar. 9, 1960, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (2 of 4), subseries Writings, Personal, Goldwater Papers. 18. Emanuel Perlmutter, “Sit-ins Backed by Rallies Here: Negro Students From South Tell of Demonstrations at Lunch Counters,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1960; “Negroes Batter Cars at Drive-In: Pre-Dawn Violence Flares at Columbia, S.C.—Police Ban Alabama Protest,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1960. 19. Jim Hanahan to Strom Thurmond, Mar. 5, 1960, box 4, folder Civil Rights 3 (Race Relations), Subject Correspondence 1960, Strom Thurmond Institute [hereinafter cited as STI]; David H. Kennedy to Strom Thurmond, Feb. 25, 1960, box 4, folder Civil Rights 3 (Race Relations), Subject Correspondence 1960, STI; Harry S. Dent to Mr. and Mrs. Amos C. Johnson Jr., Feb. 17, 1960, box 4, folder Civil Rights 3 (Race Relations), STI. 20. “Senate Siege,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1960; “ The Congress: The Filibuster,” Time, Mar. 14, 1960; “Major Issues in the 1960 Civil Rights Debate,” Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1960, 193–95. 21. “Strom Thurmond Selects His Book For ‘Talkathon’,” Greenville News, Mar. 6, 1960; “ Thurmond Gives Each Member of the U.S. Senate a Copy of W. D. Workman’s Book, The Case for the South,” Mar. 5, 1960, box 9, folder 100, Speeches Series, Original Sub-Series B, 1947–1983, Thurmond Papers, STI; Wiliam D. Workman, The Case for the South (New York: Devin-Adair, 1960), 19, 26, 75–87, 108–10, 144–45, 198. 22. W. D. Workman Jr. to Sen. Strom Thurmond, Apr. 18, 1955, box 39, folder Persons, Thurmond, J. Strom (1 of 4), William D. Workman Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, University of South Carolina; Monroe W. Karmin, “Ole Miss & Politics: Dixie GOP May BeneWt from Anger at Kennedy Actions in Mississippi—South Carolina Republicans See Hope for Senate Win:

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Texas, Alabama Impact—A Blow to President in 1964?” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 1, 1962. 23. William D. Workman Jr., interviewed by Jack Bass, Feb. 5, 1974, A-0281, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina; Boineau oral history, USC, 24; Russell Merritt, “ The Senatorial Election of 1962 and the Rise of Two-Party Politics in South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 98, no. 3 (July 1997): 284. 24. Margaret Shannon, “Goldwater Hits Racial Force: GOP Solon, Here for Speech, Gives Views on Integration,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 19, 1961; Eugene Patterson, “The South Meets Sen. Goldwater,” Atlanta Constitution, Nov. 21, 1961. 25. “GOP Adopts Platform, Passes Four Resolutions,” News and Courier, Mar. 18, 1962; Claude Sitton, “Senate Race Is On in South Carolina: Staunch Conservative Picked by G.O.P. Convention,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1962. 26. Sitton, “Senate Race Is On in South Carolina”; Anthony Harrigan, “South Carolina Going Republican?” Human Events, May 12, 1962, 343–44. 27. “South Carolina GOP of Age,” Washington Evening Star, Mar. 22, 1962; Alan L. Otten, “GOP’s Dixie Drive: Republicans Expect to Make New Inroads in Democratic Stronghold,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 1962; Holmes Alexander, “Republicans Rising in the South with Young and Eager Candidates,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1962. 28. Martha Edens, interviewed by Herbert J. Hartsook, Nov. 30, 2000, South Carolina Political Collections Oral History Project, USC, 9–10; Russell Merritt, “ The Senatorial Election of 1962 and the Rise of Two-Party Politics in South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 98, no. 3 (July 1997): 283, 288; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 80. 29. Wall Street Journal, Oct. 1, 1962; James E. DuVy, “In G.O.P. We Trust,” unpublished manuscript, folders 171–175, James E. DuVy Papers, Special Collections, Clemson, 49–50; New York Times, Oct. 23, 1962; W. D. Workman Jr., “Speech at Walterboro, First Congressional District, Rally,” Oct. 2, 1962, box 5, folder Johnston v. Workman, Speeches, General, William D. Workman, Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, USC. 30. James E. DuVy, “In G.O.P. We Trust,” unpublished manuscript, folders 171–175, James E. DuVy Papers, Special Collections, Clemson, 49–50; Claude Sitton, “G.O.P. Seeks South Carolina Inroad in Senate Race,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 1962; Karmin, “Ole Miss & Politics; “Carolina Base Closed in ’62 Thrives as Plant Site,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 1964; “Democrats Gain in Senate Races,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 1962. 31. Cohodas, Strom Thurmond, 358; Merritt, “Senatorial Election of 1962,” 289. 32. “Long Distance Conversation with Harry Dent and Sen. Strom Thurmond,” Dec. 17, 1962, box 39, folder Persons, Thurmond, J. Strom (1 of 4), William D. Workman, Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, USC. 33. “ Text of Speech by W. D. Workman, Jr.,” Sept. 11, 1962, box 5, folder Johnston v. Workman, Speeches, Television, William D. Workman, Jr., South

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Carolina Political Collections, USC; Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948), 40. 34. Walter Brown to Strom Thurmond, September 29, 1961, box 26, folder Political AVairs 2–2 (1962 Senate Election), Subject Correspondence 1961, STI. 35. “Ideology and the Party Split—Myth and Reality,” Advance, March 1962, 23–26. 36. “Civil Rights: A Republican Imperative,” Advance, July 1961, 6–9; “ The Charge up Capitol Hill,” Advance, March 1962, 4–6, 29–30; Robert C. Albright, “Javits Urges GOP to Use Progressive Leadership,” Washington Post, Nov. 21, 1962; Hedrick Smith, “G.O.P. Is Attacked for Its Aid to Segregationists in the South,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 1962; “Washington Report,” CBS News, Dec. 2, 1962, box 5, folder Johnston v. Workman Critiques and Evaluations of Election Results, William D. Workman, Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, USC. 37. Harrigan, “South Carolina Going Republican?”; Barry Goldwater, “ The GOP Invades the South,” box 2, folder The GOP Invades the South, subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers. 38. See, for example, Barry Goldwater to Clarence Manion, Aug. 11, 1961, box 1, folder Victor Publishing Company, “ The Conscience of a Conservative” (3 of 4), subseries Writings, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers; see also Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, pp. 129–41. 39. Stephen Shadegg to Barry Goldwater, Nov. 27, 1962, box S–Y, folder Shadegg, subseries Correspondence, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers; Raymond Moley, The Republican Opportunity (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1962), 236. 40. Barry Goldwater to W. D. Workman, Jr., May 3, 1962, box 5, folder Johnston v. Workman, General (4 of 4), William D. Workman, Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, USC; Clarence Manion to W. D. Workman, Jr., Aug. 20, 1962, box 5, folder Johnston v. Workman, Manion Forum, William D. Workman, Jr. Papers, South Carolina Political Collections, USC. 41. Barry Goldwater to Strom Thurmond, Aug. 2, 1961, box 3, folder Civil Rights I, Subject Correspondence 1961, STI; Strom Thurmond to Barry Goldwater, Aug. 7, 1961, box 3, folder Civil Rights I, Subject Correspondence 1961, STI. 42. Quoted in Robert McHugh and William B. Williams, “Sen. Thurmond to Bolt Democrats, Back Barry: May AVect ’66 Senate Race Here,” State, Sept. 16, 1964. 43. Barry Goldwater to Strom Thurmond, April 18, 1968, folder Thurmond, Strom, Box Alpha Files T–W, sub-series Alpha Files, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation; Strom Thurmond to Barry Goldwater, April 24, 1968, folder Thurmond, Strom, Box Alpha Files T–W, subseries Alpha Files, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation. 44. Strom Thurmond, The Faith We Have Not Kept (San Diego: Viewpoint Books, 1968), 15; Barry Goldwater to Strom Thurmond, Apr. 29, 1968, folder Thurmond, Strom, Box Alpha Files T–W, subseries Alpha Files, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, AHF.

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45. Thurmond, Faith We Have Not Kept, 14–17; Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York: Hillman, 1960), 37. 46. Strom Thurmond to Barry Goldwater, Apr. 24, 1968, folder Thurmond, Strom, Box Alpha Files T–W, subseries Alpha Files, Series I, Personal, Goldwater Papers, AHF.

7 Goldwater’s “Moral Mothers” Miscalculations of Gender in the 1964 Republican Presidential Campaign michelle nickerson

the goldwater presidential campaign galloped out of the Republican National Convention of 1964 triumphant, facing the November elections with the full force of a conservative movement at its back. The celebration was short-lived, however. By early September, poll numbers placed the GOP nominee woefully behind Goldwater’s opponent, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Despite the Republican’s tremendous popularity on the right, Goldwater was struggling to win approval from the rest of America. Johnson put him at a tactical disadvantage early in the race by vowing to fulWll the Kennedy legacy, which he had already initiated with the Civil Rights Act, passed in July of 1964, and establishment of antipoverty programs. Goldwater’s hard-line foreign policy rhetoric, moreover, opened opportunities for critics to characterize the conservative as a warmonger. The famous “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” remark at the GOP national convention buttressed charges that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuclear annihilation. The senator’s attacks on 170

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welfare, Medicare, and Social Security further hardened him in the eyes of many voters. Goldwater’s campaign staV also exacerbated the problem of disenchantment with their candidate by heaping one blunder upon another.1 Citizens for Goldwater–Miller commenced a last-minute strategy to turn the presidential race around—another faulty maneuver that contributed to the campaign’s historic reputation for lapses in judgment. The committee, which started out as the “Draft Goldwater” movement, represented an organization within the larger oYcial campaign that focused on mobilizing conservative activists. Its director, F. Clifton White, declared that Goldwater needed a “missile gap,” referring to Democrat John F. Kennedy’s attack against Vice President Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, in which he charged the Eisenhower administration with allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviets in nuclear weapons technology. Goldwater’s strategists worked to develop a similarly eVective Hail Mary pass—a new tactic crafted so brilliantly that it could reverse the campaign’s failing course. They wanted, like the Kennedy campaign had, to jolt the American electorate into recognition of national vulnerabilities from which Goldwater could steer America away to safety. In short, the Citizens for Goldwater–Miller team wanted a successful scare tactic.2 It created Choice, a campaign advertisement for television that ran about twenty-seven minutes. Choice typically appears as a footnote in historical accounts of the 1964 presidential campaign. The lack of treatment partly reXects the attitude of Goldwater himself, who paid scant attention to the Wlm. Choice, moreover, barely reached the public. After initial release to the press, reports of its graphic content convinced Goldwater to pull Choice altogether. Panned as lewd and racist, the Wlm threatened to damage the candidate, who moved swiftly to remove the advertisement from sight before it became an albatross. Choice thus disappeared into the dustbin of history, joining a long list of tactical miscalculations by presidential campaigns that escape sustained analysis because they led seemingly nowhere. Choice demands further scrutiny, however, as an artifact of the conservative movement that signaled an important ideological trend developing on the right that eventually bore fruit. Goldwater staVers made Choice so lewd that it would not have passed twenty-Wrst-century

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standards of the Federal Communications Commission. Urban violence, rebellious youths, and sexual promiscuity appear as related aZictions of an unraveling society that needed conservative leadership to rectify. The Wlm’s prevailing messages about the disintegrating social fabric and dangers to public safety failed in the short term but ultimately yielded the New Right’s “pro-family” agenda. Choice also calls for attention to the role that women did not play in its creation. Goldwater’s promoters relied on the growing authority exercised by women in grassroots politics to bolster their candidate’s credentials as a moral standard-bearer. “Housewife,” over the 1950s, became more than a familial role; it became a form of citizenship status and political identity. Married women engaged vigorously in Republican, Democratic, anticommunist, peace, labor, and environmental politics over the 1950s and 1960s. They claimed authority as representatives of their families, their communities, and taxpayers. The Citizens for Goldwater–Miller committee sought to harness the moral authority of housewives by creating a so-called grassroots women’s organization to release Choice, which it named Mothers for Moral America (MMA). MMA acted as if it were independent, though it always operated as part of the Goldwater campaign. The Mothers claimed to represent American women banding together to halt the spread of urban violence, juvenile delinquency, pornography, and other moral outrages threatening to undo the social fabric. It also falsely represented Choice as its own creation. Examining the emergence of Choice within a longer history of the postwar Right reveals that Goldwater’s team did not simply invent social peace and morality as campaign gimmicks to lure voters. The Citizens committee seized upon patterns already developing at the grassroots, mainly among women. Housewife activists had been taking provocative stances in confrontations with school board, city, county, and state oYcials to counter a perceived liberal threat to their children’s minds. They developed political subjectivities around their positions in the family, speaking out as aggrieved parents. The Citizens committee thus sought to incorporate protective mothers into the campaign to boost Goldwater’s popularity among women voters, portraying him as the president who would restore decency to American life.

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Law and Order . . . and Morality We Republicans seek a government that attends to its inherent responsibilities of maintaining a stable monetary and Wscal climate, encouraging a free and a competitive economy, and enforcing law and order. —Barry Goldwater, Republican Presidential Nomination Speech, 1964

Barry Goldwater joined a growing contingent of conservative oYce seekers promising to restore “law and order” to America’s streets. The expression addressed growing frustration with rising crime rates, campus demonstrations, urban riots, political assassinations, illicit drug use, and sexual promiscuity. The San Francisco convention became the setting for the conservative tough-on-communism agenda to begin its transformation into the conservative tough-on-lawlessness agenda. “ Tonight,” Goldwater declared, “there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest oYces, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elderly . . .” “[N]othing prepares the way for tyranny,” he emphasized, “more than the failure of public oYcials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.” Goldwater blamed liberalism for these problems. Government paternalism fostered a sense of entitlement among a growing class of undeserving poor that, used to taking what they did not earn, spiked the crime rate. Arrogant youths, meanwhile, blamed everyone but themselves for their problems, destroying property, much like children, to express rage over not being able to get their way. Marxist professors enabled them.3 Placing blame on “bullies,” which collapsed students, rioters, and criminals into one category of perpetrators, Goldwater reached out to voters who wanted no part of the liberal root-cause approach to combating crime. Lyndon Johnson, in his January State of the Union Address, announced that he would attack America’s problems by addressing the social ills at their source, especially housing, unemployment, and education. During John F. Kennedy’s abbreviated term as president, his domestic policy staV, comprised heavily of social scientists, worked to develop policy solutions to social, race, and juvenile problems. His advisers relied on the work of community activist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America (1962), to guide their thinking. Harrington’s best seller popularized the “culture of poverty” concept, which relied on the latest social scientiWc work by

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anthropologist Oscar Lewis to show how social, political, and economic factors—not laziness—created the circumstances of the poor. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” campaign speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964 tied education reform to the alleviation of poverty: “[W]e must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must oVer an escape from poverty.” The “culture of poverty” gained further traction over the 1960s as a catalyst for leftist mobilization, but so did its repudiation in the “law and order” critique.4 Goldwater’s tough stance against the so-called bullies, however, damaged his image, especially among women. In September, Citizens for Goldwater–Miller’s chief strategists discussed options for how to broaden his appeal. Public relations director Rus Walton suggested to the rest of the Committee leaders that Goldwater needed to show some “compassion.” He was developing a reputation for “standoYshness” with the press and public by showing reluctance to smile, engage with crowds, and inquire about “the crops.” He needed to chat with people “in heart-warming situations,” and appear in photos with the Goldwater family “in natural, homey warm situations.” In short, Goldwater needed to make an emotional connection with voters. Goldwater’s tough cowboy charm had worked so well to communicate his willingness to assert power that he faced an uphill battle demonstrating to America the positive social agenda he aimed to fulWll.5 Morality became that agenda. But the candidate described God and country far diVerently than he had in his journals from his 1940 Colorado trip. In mid-October, for example, Goldwater declared in a televised speech at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City that the nation’s “moral Wber” was decaying and called on America to notice the lack of any reference to God in the Democrats’ campaign platform. He invoked the evils of “mental health” to explain why liberalism had weakened the moral fortitude of the nation. Rebuking the quintessential liberal who “frowns on the policeman and fawns on the social psychologist,” Goldwater equated disrespect for the law with misplaced faith in mental health experts and social welfare programs. Championing law and order, school prayer, and the free-enterprise system, he vowed to redeem the nation from “thirty years of an unhealthy social climate.” In another speech, he attacked Johnson for failing to provide the nation with “lights of moral leadership.” The

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campaign released newspaper, handbill, and television advertisements to accompany the speeches: “Americans everywhere are indignant about moral decay.” The text attacked corruption in high oYce, street crime, and youthful rebellion as related problems caused by liberalism.6 F. Clifton White believed that the campaign could make a much bigger impact, however, by developing a lengthier campaign Wlm for television. Clif White, who masterminded the successful campaign to draft Goldwater, imagined a production that the major networks would air by October 15. After the broadcast, Citizens for Goldwater– Miller would ship one hundred copies of the reels by air to its grassroots committees all over the country, for them to show in their communities. White also recommended that the documentary especially target women. “ The Wlm,” he declared in a September 18 memo, “will be charged with emotion, calculated to point the Wnger on the issue of immorality.” Women would turn hostility to action.7

Moral Mothers The 1964 presidential election arrived in the midst of monumental political transformations. The civil rights movement had already set these forces in motion, but Students for a Democratic Society, the free speech movement, anti–Vietnam War protestors, feminists, and hippies were building upon that momentum. The outrageous styles of this politicized generation overshadowed the activist work of a more demure demographic category that shaped American political culture in this period: American housewives. By the mid-1960s, the term housewife had acquired meaning over the course of centuries since it had appeared in English, with recent decades of the twentieth century leaving strong political and cultural imprints. Social protest by working-class women during the Great Depression imbued housewife with populist connotations and communal signiWcance. Wives and mothers who organized food boycotts, rent strikes, and city services together demanded that landlords, grocers, and government oYcials take them seriously because of their position in the family. They also drew solidarity from their anonymity as housewives—an anti-elitist selfperception of their political purpose that counterpoised their interests with those of bankers, real estate moguls, and Wall Street traders.8

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The prosperity of the 1950s raised the American housewife to iconic status. At the end of World War II, Americans weary of economic depression and war turned their attention to family life. Marriage and birth rates rose dramatically, and metropolitan regions grew as builders developed acres of suburban tract housing to accommodate the proliferation of households. Although the rate of married women entering the workforce rose in this period, homemaking came to represent the ideal, normal, and natural role for women over the 1950s. Television sit-coms along with advertisements for home appliances and consumer goods portrayed the duties of housewifery as deeply satisfying—the most important tasks a woman could assume to fulWll her needs and those of society.9 The 1950s housewife has since grown mythic, especially due to the impact of The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Betty Friedan’s book became a best seller because millions of American women recognized their own unhappiness in her description of the profound and widespread disillusionment with middle-class domesticity. As one woman quoted in the book reXected: “My secret scream as I stir the oatmeal, iron the blue jeans, and sell pop at the Little League baseball games is ‘Stop the World, I want to get on, before it’s too late!’ I love my family dearly and wouldn’t trade them, or my life with them, for anything. But as they go out each day to meet and get involved in this great big wonderful world, I yearn to tag along!” The popularity of the Feminine Mystique not only exposed pervasive discontentment among women but stimulated feminist activism. Betty Friedan established the National Organization of Women (NOW), which quickly grew into a vigorous civil rights organization for women. As youthful leftists infused the feminist movement with their radical ideology and countercultural styles, the American housewife became a symbol of tradition. In American collective memory, she came to represent the provincial enclaves of suburban overconsumption ultimately rejected by the political and cultural trailblazers of the 1960s.10 These memories, bracketed too neatly along generational lines and the easy “1950s” and “1960s” periodizations, deXect attention from a duty widely practiced among housewives: political activism. Many women believed that responsibilities to their families translated into citizenship roles in the larger community, nation, and world. To be a housewife required them to get out of the house—often. Women

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organized together mainly out of necessity. Since their daily schedules and responsibilities coincided, they performed political work while husbands were at the oYce and children were at school. In the process of organizing without men, they developed their own, uniquely feminine grassroots styles of politics. Like the food boycotters and rent strikers of the 1930s, housewife activists insisted that public oYcials listen to them as the citizens most in touch with the needs of the community. They also took advantage of their middle-class lifestyles to devote signiWcant hours to research and study that helped them develop expertise in areas of policy for their lobbying eVorts. The political movements engaged by housewife activists varied widely. While some harnessed maternal outrage in campaigns against subversive textbooks, others fought for a nuclear test ban treaty, while others lobbied state oYcials to designate wildlife preserves.11 In 1961 an organization called Women Strike for Peace organized a national movement that, armed with placards, strollers, and babies, marched against nuclear proliferation. The strikers’ maternal, protectionist stance not only underscored the harmful implications of America’s hawkish foreign policy for future generations but also protected them from red-baiting opponents. The presence of their children at demonstrations caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy and made the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings appear farcical. That same year, a group of well-known Los Angeles civic leaders formed Operation Moral Upgrade to unite women in a Wght against “sick entertainment.” “We have sat through downgrade plays, read oVbeat books, wallowed in sex-swamped Wlms and listened to pessimistic politicians long enough,” said founder Marion Newkirk. A few years later, the New Yorker Hazel Henderson launched the group Citizens for Clean Air, by passing out leaXets to other mothers while walking in the park with her daughter. After the group reached twenty thousand members, she wrote an article for Parents magazine describing the satisfaction environmental activism gave her as a young mother. Historian Adam Rome writes that housewives became environmental activists partly because of “gendered expectations.” They entered politics to protect their homes in metropolitan regions suVering the environmental pressures of suburbanization. Operation Moral Upgrade, Women Strike for Peace, and

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Citizens for Clean Air did not, by any means, work as allies, but the groups did share a common aim to protect their families.12 Clif White believed the Citizens committee could turn this female vote toward Goldwater by provoking their maternal defense sensors. His observations of women volunteers in the Goldwater campaign had impressed him. “No other single group,” he wrote in a political memoir of the campaign, “was as dedicated and hardworking as the women of this country.” By 1964, female activists on the right had developed a reputation for their zeal and eVectiveness as grassroots organizers. Working from their living rooms, church basements, and school board meetings, housewife activists on the right fought against progressive teaching, internationalist curricula, and desegregation in schools. They published newsletters, organized study groups, formed chapters of the conservative John Birch Society, and opened conservative bookstores. Though they often worked with men and never aimed to form a separate movement, the female Right nevertheless developed into its own subculture over the 1950s and 1960s. By the time the campaign to draft Barry Goldwater unfolded, women had developed vital components of the movement’s political culture from the bottom up.13 White shared the belief among many conservatives that women were naturally conservative. Quoting the French Romantic writer Victor Hugo, he declared in his memoir, “Men have sight, women insight.” He believed that the senator “touched the consciences of the nation’s mothers and grandmothers, and co-eds, the stenographers, the girls working behind counters in shops and department stores. These women saw in Goldwater a man who would preserve the civilization and society they felt slipping out from under them.” White’s perception of Goldwater’s female supporters resonated with gendered discourse on the right that had been developing over the cold war. Conservatives came to see women as naturally more protective and watchful of threats to their family by virtue of their daily proximity to children and the community. National Review writer Russell Kirk described women in 1957 as the “conservative sex,” explaining, “Women’s attachment to hard realities has something to do with their social principles, and their realization of the need for genuine security has something to do with it; and so has their practical understanding of the worth of the family and community; and so has their

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instinctive knowledge that society is not a ‘machine for living,’ but rather a spiritual thing, founded upon love.”14 Women contributed to beliefs about natural conservative instincts, especially in their post–World War II red-hunting endeavors. The fervor for anticommunism that stimulated housewives to action took many of them out of the home, away from housework for signiWcant hours out of the week. Marjorie Jensen, editor of an anticommunist newsletter in Pasadena, California, described her political work as a “career.” Marie Koenig, another anticommunist activist in Pasadena, gladly escaped daily chores. “I hated to cook. I hated housework, so I had to get out of the house.” The hours spent away from husband, children, and chores might have caused some concern, but female activists recognized these absences as small sacriWces for a larger duty that would beneWt their families with the much greater reward of their freedom. In 1963 a West Los Angeles mother published a memoir documenting her years as a volunteer spy for the FBI. In I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife, Marion Miller describes herself as “selWsh” for wanting to devote her time to her family. Her husband oVers to help her make what she perceives as the harder but more righteous choice: “I can look after the children,” he responded. “You have a duty to civilization, too. I’m not impugning your patriotism. I just know what I know.”15 Conservative women also came to see themselves as well suited for investigative work by virtue of the Xexibility of their daily schedules, and their perceived natural instincts of patience and intuition. Amateur anticommunists often adopted red-hunting with the belief that subversion was too big a threat for the FBI to handle on its own. As J. Edgar Hoover wrote in his popular 1958 book Masters of Deceit, “[T]here are fewer than 6,200 agents of the FBI. Hence, all of these agents are not available for the investigation of subversive activities.” Other women saw men as too preoccupied with work to give antisubversive activity the proper attention it needed. Marie Koenig’s husband, Walter, also became involved in the conservative movement but did not commit as many hours as his wife. “[M]en don’t have the time to be running around doing the things that we women do,” she remembered in a 2000 interview. “ They don’t have time to go and sit and write letters and go to meetings and sit there for a boring lunch and then a long two-hour talk or panel of speakers or whatever. . . .

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when they get home at night they don’t want to run around to meetings again.” Koenig characterized herself as better suited for political work than Walter because she had more time. In 1956 a Washington, DC, housewife told a US Senate Subcommittee that it should listen to her observations of a bill under consideration that she deemed subversive, because she and the other women in her organization, the Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense, had more time to study legislation than they did: “[W]e feel that we are experts in this . . . you as Senators with all the many commitments and the many requirements, are not able to go into all these things.” Over the 1950s women thus contributed to notions of female powers of “insight” and intuition to identify subversive threats. They insisted that they had the time and patience to comb legislation, sit through “boring” meetings, and assume any mundane task necessary to spot the elusive enemy within.16 Clif White admired the diligence of conservative women, which he observed at the 1963 Republican Women’s Conference. He claimed he never saw “enthusiasm and spontaneity” like he did at the event, where the excitement for Goldwater seemed infectious. The Draft Goldwater Committee sent invitations to chairwomen of all the state delegations to the conference, inviting them to visit their hospitality suite at the conference hotel. White fondly remembers the committee staVers’ late-night preparations—the staying up until Wve on the morning to hang decorations; displaying campaign brochures, buttons, and bumper stickers; and procuring coVee, china, and silver from the hotel kitchen. Even before the reception oYcially started at nine o’clock, women had lined up, knocking to beat the onslaught. “For the next three days,” White recalled, “there was a constant human traYc jam in the suite, often overXowing into the corridor outside.”17 Citizens for Goldwater–Miller sought to direct the political fervor of housewives toward the campaign by inventing a women’s organization called Mothers for Moral America. White thought such a group could make Goldwater look more spiritual, emotional, and connected to the grassroots. He proposed the MMA as part of the larger morality campaign but never talked much about actual women in the details of his plan. Mothers for Moral America did come into existence as an oYcial organization with real living, breathing members but disappeared almost as quickly as it formed. The evidence left behind by

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Goldwater’s strategists demonstrates, moreover, that the inner circle that formed the MMA used the group in those Wnal hours of the campaign for its symbolic value. The Citizens for Goldwater–Miller committee aimed to frighten Americans into creating moral mothers of their own imagination—to visualize a pack of indignant women Xanking Goldwater, ready to stand down criminals, drug dealers, porn stars, and inXuence peddlers in Washington.

Choice This should not be done by you, but it must be done—and immediately by a team of rough, tough hatchet men.18 —F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater, September 16, 1964

The main function of Mothers for Moral America was sponsorship of the campaign Wlm Choice. As the morality campaign unfolded over October, the Citizens team worked diligently on the project. The title Choice underscored an important theme of the campaign—that Goldwater represented a bona Wde alternative to politics as usual. The conservative movement rallied around the senator because he stood for the small government, anticommunist, probusiness agenda it aimed to bring to the Republican Party. The emerging Right rejected the moderate “modern” Republicanism of President Dwight Eisenhower, who maintained most New Deal programs and expanded governmentprovided services during his two terms. Goldwater Wnally oVered, in other words, a “choice” in national politics. Phyllis SchlaXy’s recently published A Choice Not an Echo had popularized the term and imbued it with regional signiWcance as well. The gifted Catholic housewife activist in Alton, Illinois, with degrees from Washington University and Harvard University, wrote the slim paperback polemic championing Goldwater as the antiestablishment candidate who would break the corrupt “kingmakers” of the GOP based on the East Coast. Ronald Reagan further underscored the theme of choice in his legendary Goldwater stump speech, “A Time for Choosing,” made famous in sponsored television broadcasts.19 The Citizens Committee planned for Choice to appear toward the end of a carefully timed crescendo in its morality campaign. When Clif White outlined plans for the strategy in a mid-September memo,

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he stressed the importance of waging a dual attack, one dirty and one clean. The committee, acting the part of “hatchet man” behind the scenes, would assault the public with sex, corruption, and violence. They would take responsibility for making associations for viewers between these developments and President Johnson. “The candidates [Goldwater and his running mate, Congressman William Miller] cannot, at the outset, be directly connected with this manipulation. Toward the end of the campaign—as everything ‘comes together’—they will no doubt become involved.” Goldwater, instead, should revive spiritual and “humanistic” themes that characterized his early speeches, while continually hammering on the need for moral leadership in Washington, “touching on it, building on it, as the campaign progresses.” The speech at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City represented the Wrst maneuver in the execution of this strategy.20 An October memo indicated that the committee was already building its so-called women’s group, organized at the state, county, and local levels. Strategists hoped that the ad hoc mothers organization would spark a groundswell of support, “a spontaneous, public movement—carefully coordinated with and through the Citizens committee.” After Goldwater approved the plan, the committee moved ahead by enlisting prominent Republican women, including Nancy Reagan and William F. Buckley’s mother, Aloise, to sit on MMA’s national committee. Writing from the group’s headquarters in Michigan, national coordinator Carol Arth Waters sent a letter and brochure to community leaders across the country in October, urging them to join the mothers’ “moral crusade.” The name Goldwater appeared nowhere in this letter, which represented the MMA as an independent organization summoning women interested in restoring “respect for law and order so that our children may be reared in a proper environment.” White planned for the organization to lead a march after the Wlm aired, a “Porchlight Parade for Morality” all over the country that would emphasize their demand for community safety.21 Rus Walton, the Citizens committee’s director of public relations, oversaw the production of Choice. The former corporate publicist and conservative grassroots organizer worked closely with Raymond Morgan, best known for the hit television show Queen for a Day, to produce the twenty-eight-minute montage of newsreel clips meant to shock and disturb viewers. Walton held an initial meeting at the Beverly

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Carlton Hotel on September 22 with the production staV to plan the documentary. He echoed White’s recommendations for Choice but spoke with yet more candor in his description of the violence and sex necessary to provoke viewers. The meeting transcript reveals how the producers aimed to manipulate racial fears even while convincing themselves that their intent was not racist. “Yes, raw naked emotions arouse them,” said Walton, referring to the public. He had been underscoring the reasons why they had to track down images of racial violence or juvenile delinquency that angered Americans. “We want to make them mad, we want to turn their stomachs.” He wanted the staV to sort through “canned” footage of the recent Harlem race riots and the Berkeley student sit-ins at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. “I want to see the sight of Harlem on August 15th and 16th.” Walton noted, however, that even though “what they call civil rights is a part of it,” the twenty-eight-minute attack advertisement did not actually involve race. He articulated the wider conservative movement’s insistence that antidiscrimination protest had nothing to do with actual racial injustice—its insistence that civil rights activists provoked illegitimate discontent. Walton aimed for Choice to expose the so-called enablers by projecting all of society’s illnesses together, ignoring the racial identities of perpetrators. “[I]t is just a sinus [sic] sickness of society itself.” When someone asked if he wanted to show the causes of the violence, he responded, “You just show me the solution.”22 Choice combined the elements discussed that afternoon in September and more. To the sound of brass instruments screeching in the background, the Wlm cut between footage of black city-dwellers breaking windows to college-age white men collecting a crowd as their hands release a park bench into an empty street. Were the fair-skinned troublemakers campus demonstrators or frat-house revelers? The distinctions were unclear: that was the point. The producers even dared to be especially provocative by Xashing the naked breasts of a go-go dancer in a dizzying scene that evoked out-of-control sex, drugs, and debauchery. A male Mardi Gras reveler Xashed full-frontal nudity. The producers aimed to represent a horriWc and disintegrating social order, which they portrayed jarringly as the fruits of American liberalism. Lyndon Johnson never appeared in Choice, but a Lincoln Continental similar to the one at his Texas ranch stood in for the president,

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swerving menacingly on a dirt road between scenes. Johnson loved to race around the open landscape of his hill country property, drink in hand, as journalist passengers nervously glanced at the speedometer. Choice implied that the Texan’s wild side made him dark, corrupt, and dangerous. Joining the Wlm’s array of repeated images was Johnson aide Bobby Baker, who stank of scandal. Baker parlayed money and favor between lobbyists, Democratic senators, and himself. In January, a Senate subcommittee had investigated “Little Lyndon,” as he was known, for laundering kickbacks to the president through the television station owned by the First Lady in Austin. Though the case led nowhere, Goldwater’s team used Bobby Baker to represent the corrupt, dirty, machine-style Democratic politics they promised to sweep out of Washington. Unleashing Mothers for Moral America would seem especially appropriate, since Baker also had a reputation for arranging liaisons of a less political nature between senators and women. Pure motherly indignation would appear to Xow upward, out of the hearts of women across America toward the crooked world of Democratic insider politicians. The nation needed leadership, order, patriotism, and morality, asserted the popular actor Raymond Massey, who narrated Choice. Visual representations of these values eventually fade into view, mixing images of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, marching soldiers, a waving US Xag, and rosy-cheeked white schoolchildren.23 Mothers for Moral America issued a press release announcing the Wlm’s airing in late October, claiming that Choice was “conceived by” MMA. The entire project, explained national project director Mrs. Hiram Houghton of Iowa City, “was made possible by the contributions of mothers throughout the nation who are concerned with the moral decay infesting all parts of our land and our society.” The name Goldwater appeared nowhere, which, reported the Los Angeles Times, represented a deliberate omission. The Times exposed a memo from the campaign advising all Mothers groups to avoid mentioning their formal ties to Citizens for Goldwater–Miller.24 Choice made its debut with a thud. An early release to the press oVered journalists the opportunity to report every titillating detail to the public, and the Democratic National Committee described it as sick. The criticism rained down even before the Mothers launched the Wlm. The committee responded by instructing all Goldwater groups

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to stop showing the document and send the prints back to headquarters. Those close to Goldwater also made it known that the candidate judged Choice to be racist. Not only had the “missile gap” strategy failed, but it had also actually oVended some women who saw through the campaign’s attempts to manipulate them. Mrs. Richard Coveney of New York wrote to the Moral Mothers that she had been following the Goldwater campaign, “hoping to Wnd in it, for myself, some respect for his platform and adherents.” While she “deplored corruption in our government,” she expressed disgust with the fear mongering she saw in Choice: “A dirty Wlm disqualiWes its distributors from ‘moral leadership.’ ”25

Aftermath Although Choice deserves its reputation as a colossal lapse of judgment on the part of the Citizens committee, the strategy nevertheless deserves attention for its foresight with respect to Mothers for Moral America. The biggest problem with the MMA is that it remained a front for the Citizens committee. The MMA foreshadowed a future in which women would come to lead the conservative movement through single-issue campaigns, gradually assuming more power in the conservative movement and in national politics. Morality could not work with law and order to save the Goldwater campaign overnight, but White had indeed identiWed a theme that would galvanize a female activism for the emerging Right, and in a sustained way. By promising to restore spirituality, decency, and patriotism even without introducing concrete policies for how to do so, Goldwater established a pattern for rallying conservative women into the twenty-Wrst century. Social issues, mainly relating to feminism, started politicizing housewives in the early 1970s. Debate over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), revived by the National Organization of Women in 1972, lit the match. Eight years after she published A Choice Not an Echo in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run, Phyllis SchlaXy formed STOP ERA, which stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges ERA. The organization rallied conservative women who believed that the amendment would interfere with their right to the privileges they

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enjoyed as housewives, especially male breadwinning and male protection. Opponents also wanted to communicate the message that they did not feel liberated by the feminist movement. Ninety-eight percent of STOP ERA members belonged to churches, mostly Christian evangelical churches. Historian Donald Critchlow identiWes SchlaXy as the Wrst leader of the Christian Right to make churches into bases of conservative grassroots mobilization. Within a year the organization had established chapters in twenty-six states, putting pressure on their lawmakers not to ratify the amendment, which stalled in 1977.26 That same year, the orange-juice lady Anita Bryant started a campaign against homosexuality in the state of Florida. The Southern Baptist mother of four children, familiar to the public as a pop singer and former beauty queen, had developed a second career as spokesperson for the Florida Citrus Commission and writer of Christian spiritual literature. Bryant focused her campaign against homosexual teachers, whom she denounced as bad role models and child molesters. Using the Bible to deWne homosexuality as unnatural, she started a group in Dade County called Save Our Children to challenge an amendment that prohibited discrimination against homosexuals “in housing, public accommodation, and employment.” By June of 1977, the ordinance had been repealed, and Bryant made herself into a national spokesperson in the campaign against gay rights.27 The mother of all single-issue campaigns has been the Right to Life movement. The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which ruled all laws in the United States banning abortion to be unconstitutional, fueled the grassroots mobilization of women in Christian churches, started by Phyllis SchlaXy the previous year. Although the movement has failed to reverse the decision in its forty-year history, the persistence and militancy of anti-abortion activists helps to sustain the life of the religious Right. As sociologist Kristin Luker points out, abortion opponents also tend to be “bullet” voters in that they choose their candidates based on where they stand on the abortion issue. They can also be counted on to turn out consistently on election day.28 The Citizens for Goldwater–Miller Committee could not make a Moral Mothers organization to meet the needs of its candidate in 1964, but women were on the brink of using single-issue campaigns to develop their own organizational niche on the right. By the mid-1980s,

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these women probably would not have picked Barry Goldwater as their president, since he voted against an amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade and openly disdained the religious Right, famously declaring in 1981, “Every good Christian should kick [Jerry] Falwell in the ass.” Choice fell well short of its planners’ “missile gap” hopes, and Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election, but the conservative movement abounds with Christian women prayerfully seeking to perform their duties as moral mothers.29 Notes 1. F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater, memo, Sept. 18, 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University, 1; Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),110, 114–15; Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 206–07, 226; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 429–31, 455–59. 2. Anna Kasten Nelson, “President Kennedy’s National Security Policy: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 19, no. 1 (March 1991): 4–5. 3. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 121, 210; Gregory Schneider, American Conservatism since 1930: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 238–46. 4. Lyndon Baines Johnson, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 8, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/col lections/selected-speeches/november-1963–1964/01–08–1964.html; Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 275; President Lyndon Baines Johnson, “Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, http:// www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/640522.asp. 5. Rus Walton to Ed McCabe, n.d., ca. Sept. 1964, memo, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University. 6. J. William Middendorf II, A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 201; Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 33, 42; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and

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Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965; repr. 1979), 117. Citations are to the 1979 edition. 7. Rus Walton to Senator Barry Goldwater, Sept. 18, 1964, memo, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University, 5. 8. See Annelise Orleck, “We Are That Mythical Thing,” in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History (New York: Routledge, 1990), 376; and Michelle Nickerson, introduction to her Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 9. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 146, 168. 10. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1983). 11. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism, 37–38. 12. Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,” Journal of Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1982): 493, 496–97; Jean Ward, “Women Join to Fight for ‘Moral Upgrade,’ ” Los Angeles Examiner, July 30, 1961; Adam Rome, “Give Earth a Chance: The Environmental Movement and the 1960s,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (September 2003): 537–38. A robust and growing literature on women who developed common perceptions of their citizenship duties from shared concerns as wives and mothers suggests that housewife activism represented a signiWcant political trend in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than an aberration. See Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Sylvie Murray, The Progressive Housewife: Community Activism in Suburban Queens, 1945–1964 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminist Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Dorothy Sue Cobble’s history of labor feminism in midcentury America documents women who identiWed as workers rather than housewives, but her subjects similarly developed a political agenda for themselves around interests of family. Labor feminists championed shorter days, maternity leave, and paid child care from employers and the government. Dorothy Sue Cobble, ch. 5, “ The Politics of the ‘Double Day,’ ” The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 13. F. Clifton White with William J. Gill, Suite 3505: The Story of the Draft Goldwater Movement (New Rochelle, NY: 1967), 136. 14. Ibid.; Russell Kirk, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 8.

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15. Marie Koenig, interview by author, tape recording, Pasadena, Calif., April 5, 2001, 16; Marion Miller, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 56. 16. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 310; Koenig interview, 16; Senate Subcommittee on Territories and Insular AVairs, Committee on Interior and Insular AVairs, An Act to Provide for the Hospitalization and Care of the Mentally Ill of Alaska, and for Other Purposes: Hearings on H.R. 6376, S. 2518, S. 2973, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., 1956, 164. 17. White, Suite 3505, 137. 18. F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater, memo, Sept. 18, 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University, 2. 19. See Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Donald Critchlow, Phyllis SchlaXy and the Grassroots Right: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 19–23, 119–20; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 503–04. 20. F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater, memo, Sept. 18, 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University, 4. 21. Carol Arth Waters to “Community Leader,” n.d., ca. Oct. 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University; F. Clifton White to Barry Goldwater, memo, October 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University, 4; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 494–95. 22. “ Transcript of Informal Conference Held at the Beverly Carlton Hotel,” Noon and Pratt CertiWed Shorthand Reporters, Sept. 22, 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater Folder, Box 325, DNC Series I, LBJ-PL, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas, 2–4; Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, The Free Speech Movement: ReXections on Berkeley in the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 91. 23. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 308; “Choice,” The Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, FM MSS 1, Series VI, Media—DVD #16, “Choice: The Citizens Committee for Goldwater & Miller,” Arizona Historical Foundation. 24. In his own recollections of the Choice production, outlined in the political memoir A Glorious Disaster: Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign and the Origins of the Conservative Movement, campaign insider William Middendorf makes no mention of Mothers for Moral America except in his description of the press release, which named the MMA as its sponsor. Middendorf ’s account conWrms the Moral Mothers to be what one observer described as a “front group.” See Samuel G. Freedman, “ The First Days of the Loaded Political Image,” New York

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Times, Sept. 1, 1996, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/01/arts/the-Wrst-days-of -the-loaded-political-image.html. 25. Mrs. Richard J. Coveney to Carol Arth Waters, Nov. 6, 1964, Goldwater 1964 Campaign Collection, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public AVairs Archival Collections, Ashland University. 26. Critchlow, Phyllis SchlaXy, 216–21. 27. Frederick S. Lane, The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 109. 28. Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 138, 224. 29. Andrew E. Busch, “ The Goldwater Myth,” Claremont Review of Books (Winter 2006), http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1237/article_detail .asp.

8 Phoenix’s Cowboy Conservatives in Washington elizabeth tandy shermer

after the 1964 election, Barry Goldwater remained the fairhaired boy of many a conservative media mogul, and a hero to business-focused conservatives and voters wary of, if not outright hostile to, organized labor, federal oversight, and business taxation. His renown among these free-enterprise devotees served him and other Arizona Republicans well both before and after his presidential bid. His ever-increasing fame and inXuence bolstered the already wellregarded state GOP’s reputation with the amorphous American Right. Such prestige increased Arizonans’ power within the national GOP and granted desert Republicans access to the business and political circles that would direct the movement from above and transform federal policies. As senators, Supreme Court justices, and leaders of major business associations, these erstwhile boosters did much to further roll back the liberal regulatory state and provide the broad conservative movement with its most tangible, long-term victories.

The Business of National Movement Building The industrial recruitment intertwined with the Arizona GOP’s postwar rebirth and Phoenix’s development into a mecca for light 193

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electronics and aerospace technologies played an outsized role in catapulting boosters into regional and national business organizations, political networks, and government oYces. By 1962 Phoenix had become one of the centers for electronics in the West, just behind Los Angeles and San Francisco, and essentially tied with defense-dependent San Diego. The outside investment responsible for this economic transformation connected boosters to those leading executives on the move. These CEOs, especially those who had orchestrated and bankrolled Goldwater’s presidential run, tended to share the Phoenix businessmen’s antipathy toward working within the conWnes of the liberal regulatory state and were the “invisible hands,” as historian Kim Phillips-Fein called them, of the modern conservative movement. The relationship between Phoenix Chamber of Commerce members, who increasingly came out of leadership positions in the area’s branch plants, and prominent CEOs, who managed these outposts from afar, was reciprocal. Phoenix’s Chamber men wanted to attract high-tech, proWtable Wrms, which, by the very nature of their desirability, were able to elicit impressive deals from many communities eager to attract large, revenue-generating businesses. Executives also needed, both from an ideological and a material standpoint, to shift operations to areas where they would be able to increase their proWt margins and also do business as they saw Wt.1 This relationship proved vital to the booster and corporate business conservatives’ local and national political agendas. General Electric’s (GE) vice president for employee and public relations, Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, was the chamber men’s most important ally in the East and within the ranks of American CEOs. Boulware, who hired Ronald Reagan as a spokesman for GE’s brand of antigovernment, anti-union free enterprise, was a strong supporter of Phoenix-style modernization. Boulware orchestrated visits from GE executives to Arizona, where these corporate oYcials reminded voters that the state could attract good manufacturing jobs only if its probusiness agenda were maintained.2 The Phoenix Chamber was also vital to Boulware’s burgeoning career as a conservative spokesman and strategist. In May 1958 Boulware delivered one of the most important addresses of both his political and business career before the Phoenix Chamber. He urged members to continue to build and protect the “business climate” that

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led GE to select Phoenix for its computer branch plant. Boulware feared that business leaders had failed “to have business and our economic system understood,” which meant, “We businessmen have become the whipping boys for opponents.” “We businessmen cannot look elsewhere for citizens to blame,” Boulware admitted. “We have long had the opportunity and responsibility to do our considerable part . . . in restoring the balance needed in this situation.” “Not only money—and lots of it—but lots of volunteer leg-work and mental sweat [sic] is needed to restore the balance,” he concluded. Boulware’s speech, “Politics . . . The Businessman’s Biggest Job in 1958,” received much attention both in and outside Phoenix. The Arizona Republic excerpted large portions of the address under the heading, “Politics Called ‘Business of All.’ ” Boulware’s call to arms reached politically minded business owners across the country. GE printed over 200,000 copies of the address. The editors of American Business reprinted the piece in its entirety. The bimonthly publication Vital Speeches of the Day also included Boulware’s words alongside talks given on the education gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, and foreign aid to the Philippines. A board member of the National Association of Manufacturers even cribbed Boulware’s text for his own speaking engagements. Businessmen also asked for copies to distribute among their peers.3 Boulware’s relationship with the Phoenix Chamber also made the institution a staging ground for Ronald Reagan’s political career. The veteran Hollywood actor, former Screen Actors Guild president, and self-described New Deal Democrat found work hosting General Electric Theater in the mid-1950s. He also toured GE facilities to deliver the anti-union messages at the core of Boulware’s management philosophy. Phoenix thus served as one backdrop in Reagan’s GE-sponsored political odyssey. In these years, he vacationed at his in-laws’ Valley vacation house, near the Goldwaters, who were friendly with the Davises (the parents of Reagan’s second wife, Nancy). Reagan found the senator “a very pleasing fellow to be with.” “I was on the mashed potato circuit,” he remembered, “doing my own speeches and my own research and everything. I was getting further and further away from the Democratic philosophy until I became a Republican, but ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’ was a very great factor in all of that in helping me make up my mind.”4

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Reagan’s 1961 speech before the Phoenix Chamber highlighted this reconsideration. Liberals, he cautioned, “appeal[ed] not to the worst, but the best in our nature, they have used our sense of fair play . . . and have perfected a technique of ‘foot in the door’ legislation . . ., always aiming at the ultimate goal—a government that will someday be a big brother to us all.” Reagan demanded businessmen lead the Wght against Wfth-column socialism: “Wars end in victory or defeat . . . by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.” Yet Reagan, not Goldwater, would emerge as the conservative lodestar in 1964, when the retired actor explained to Americans that Goldwater’s candidacy marked a “ Time for Choosing,” a televised appeal critical to establishing his electability in and outside California.5 Reagan’s and Goldwater’s intertwined political careers reinforced the deep, friendly alliance between Boulware and Goldwater. Boulware’s retirement from GE enabled him to spend time and money on Goldwater’s presidential campaign and his later senatorial runs. Goldwater, in turn, bent Boulware’s ear about up-and-coming Republicans elsewhere and beseeched him to work on their behalf. Each considered the other vital to the conservative movement. “I can remember very well the great inspiration that you provided for me as you so stubbornly, rightly, and forcefully fought with the union that was trying to take over your company [in the 1950s],” Goldwater reXected in the early years of the Reagan administration. “I wish we had more like you around. The woods are full of softies today, not many tough ones left.” “It is to you we all owe the bringing of sensible conservatism out into the open,” Boulware responded, “raising it to recognized importance and respectability, and seeing that it became such compelling ‘news’ that the biased media, educators, clergy and politicians of both parties could no longer dare ignore it.” “You may have lost the one battle along the way,” Boulware celebrated, “But you are now winning the war.”6 Goldwater’s friends in the Phoenix Chamber and Arizona GOP had also been a part of this political trench warfare, Wghting that would make them as prominent as their national allies. Two of the most powerful were Walter and Carl Bimson, brothers who saved the struggling Valley National Bank (VNB) in the 1930s and remade it into the largest bank in the Rocky Mountain West and one of the most formidable in the nation after World War II. Both brothers had broad political inXuence. Walter directed the Los Angeles branch of the Federal

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Reserve Bank of San Francisco, served on the American Bankers Association’s Small Business Commission, and also joined the Department of Commerce’s Business Advisory Committee. In all of these roles, he vigorously protested state regulation of the Wnancial sector. While his chamber contemporaries launched the campaign to transform the Phoenix city government and Arizona GOP, Walter was lambasting liberal economic policies before fellow business owners and promoting an alternative path to economic prosperity in his writings and political work. When speaking on America’s rapid conversion from a war to consumer economy, Bimson dismissed the eVorts of liberal policymakers and congratulated “the American businessman,” who “constructed new plants, re-equipped his factories with new machines, built millions of new homes, poured out an endless stream of cars, radios, [and] refrigerators.” Bimson championed the “system of democratic capitalism and individual freedom” and thus found it “diYcult to have any patience whatsoever with those who would discard a proven and successful system and attempt to make America over along lines that have failed again and again.”7 Bimson’s brother Carl also became a major Wgure in American banking. In Arizona, he continued to work for VNB but also had leadership positions in Phoenix’s Chamber, Credit Bureau, and Better Business Bureau, as well as the Arizona Bankers Association. On the national level, he spoke before business groups and advocated for political engagement to challenge liberal-regulatory economic policy. In 1960, for example, he appeared before the Ohio Bankers Association to advocate that Wnanciers take a greater role in politics. Echoing Goldwater’s Depression era remonstrations against apathetic business owners, Bimson called the assembled, and their peers across the country, “probably the best hope for stopping the present political drift toward a government-controlled economy.” When traveling, he also advocated bankers’ active involvement in making communities hospitable to industry. He argued that the Wnancier “should muster the economic power of his business behind causes, activities, and organizations designed to improve the eYciency of government and the climate of business.”8 Carl was also an active member in several national business groups. He directed the National Retail Credit Men’s Association in the mid1940s, held leadership positions in the Financial Public Relations

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Association throughout the 1950s, and also served on the US Chamber of Commerce’s Finance Committee (and chaired its Sub-committee on Credit Unions) in the late 1950s. He also took on a prominent role in the American Bankers Association (ABA), heading its Installment Credit Commission, which placed him on the Executive Council and Credit Policy Committee. In 1960 the ten thousand delegates at the ABA’s yearly convention elected him president.9 Top managers represented the Bimsons in person and in print when travel and membership obligations prevented them from appearing before interested audiences. Employees went west to California and east to the South, Northeast, and Midwest. Vice President James Patrick traveled, in the late 1960s alone, to San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, and Shelbyville, Indiana, where he urged his hometown’s boosters to emulate the Phoenix Chamber’s industrial and political initiatives. VNB’s Research Department head, Herbert Leggett, a self-styled “refugee from Wall Street,” wrote and edited most of the widely circulated Arizona Progress during its Wrst sixteen years of publication. The monthly reached thirty thousand recipients, two-thirds of whom resided outside Arizona. The bulletin was Leggett’s pulpit. “New industries create new jobs, new taxable wealth and new sources of local income,” he championed in celebration of Phoenix’s business climate. Charts depicting rising taxes appeared alongside endorsements of reduced manufacturing levies and warnings that “voters (as well as non-voters) have only themselves to blame” for higher duties. Leggett also kept tabs on GOP aVairs, celebrated the steady rise in Republican registration, and criticized liberal Democrats.10 Local and national prominence generated journalistic interest in VNB and Walter Bimson. Interviews enabled him to craft an image of himself as a bold rule breaker and to establish VNB’s reputation as an agent for free-enterprise politics. In interviews, Bimson styled himself as a kind of metropolitan cowboy very much a part of a tamed, modern frontier. The Saturday Evening Post’s Neil M. Clark, for example, let Bimson speak for himself in a 1954 proWle that oVered readers a populist banker dedicated to individual opportunity, not corporate investment. “People must always have the chance to go freely into business for themselves, to succeed or fail, and if they fail, to try again,” the Wnancier explained. “I like to see mobs of people around tellers’

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cages and oYcers’ desks, not just depositing dribbles so we can send gobs to millionaires, but making use, themselves, of every banking service.” The increasingly famous Wnancier described himself and his 1933 move to Phoenix as “brash,” a word well within the Phoenix Chamber’s lexicon to describe itself, its industrialization initiatives, and its political campaigns to lure conglomerates to the Valley and win over Arizona voters.11

Washington’s Arizonans Goldwater also embraced this cowboy ethos, an image replicated in the Time and Saturday Evening Post features published after his 1958 reelection. The Arizona boosters who followed him to Washington also deWned themselves and their policies as examples of the western free-enterprise Republicanism. Orme Lewis, for example, also went to Washington in 1953, after Eisenhower administration oYcials tapped him to be the assistant secretary of the interior. Lewis oversaw Public Lands Management until 1955, when he resigned to resume his lucrative Phoenix law practice. The Saturday Evening Post published his impressions of the job, the federal bureaucracy, and state power that same year. Lewis described himself as “the caretaker for all our human and all our national resources,” “a kind of Lord High Executioner . . . for the conservationists, duck hunters, Wshermen, miners, oil drillers and the private concessionaires in all our national parks,” and “the Great White Father to a total of nearly 4,000,000 Polynesians, Micronesians, Guamanians, Hawaiians, Eskimos, Indians, Virgin Islanders and Puerto Ricans.” Lewis listed a litany of “comic, incredible, exotic and exasperating incidents,” which left him terriWed of sprawling, entrenched federal bureaucracies, a clarion call similar to Goldwater’s denunciations of the national government. Readers, especially those in business and distrustful of the liberal state, praised Lewis for his fearless account. “We have too much government, too much land and resources in Federal ownership, and too much dependence on Washington,” a forest economist with the National Lumber Manufacturers Association complained.12 Not all of these Arizona Republicans were so well received. Goldwater was widely attacked as a dangerous relic, both before and during

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the 1964 campaign. He shocked liberal journalists, for example, when he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” in his acceptance speech. Republican apparatchiks also found themselves at loggerheads with his handlers, namely, University of Arizona alumnus Dean Burch; Winslow, Arizona, native Richard Kleindienst; Phoenix transplant Denison Kitchel; and Goldwater’s longtime manager Stephen Shadegg. They formed a tight-knit group of self-described cowboys, who showed little interest in following party precedent. Outsiders deemed them the Arizona MaWa and looked askance at the money (over $500,000) that jeweler and Arizona GOP rebuilder Harry Rosenzweig had insisted on raising from his Phoenix oYces, not the GOP’s Washington headquarters.13 Yet Goldwater’s 1964 defeat did not end his political career or turn Arizona conservatives out of the movement or national party apparatus. He captured roughly 40 percent of the vote, essentially the conservative movement’s electoral base. Though his defeat was considered outsized at the time, his notoriety in fact helped the senator Wnd a political home in the post-1964 political landscape. His hyper-growth, anti-union, low-tax, deregulation philosophy became orthodoxy as the stagXation crisis eroded faith in liberal prescriptions for recovery, stability, and growth. Ultimately, the Phoenix-based GOP’s, and Goldwater’s, real legacy was their growth politics. The senator, now an elder statesman and veteran of the early conservative clash with New Deal liberalism, had the political clout to bring Phoenicians as well as young Goldwater loyalists from outside Arizona into prominent positions within the GOP. Richard Nixon, for example, gave many of them important positions within his administration, including Dean Burch, who chaired the Federal Communications Commission; and Richard Kleindienst, William Rehnquist, and Richard Burke all served in the Department of Justice.14

High-Court Arizonans Goldwater himself was perhaps proudest of Phoenicians William Hubbs Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he helped name to the Supreme Court. Upon O’Connor’s conWrmation, Goldwater

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stated, “I think of all the things I have done in my life, this one topped them all because she is not only a complete woman, but a dear friend and an Arizonan of whom I will always be proud.” Both jurists did much to install in mainstream politics and federal policymaking the free-enterprise conservatism espoused by corporate CEOs and honed by boosters in Sunbelt states such as South Carolina and Arizona. Most research has detailed these justices’ votes on social issues, which has distorted both jurists’ overall record and judicial philosophy. Such scholarship has often cast the pair as near opposites. Only recently have scholars begun to probe their record on questions of economic policy and governance. These new assessments of the Rehnquist era have noted that the Court did not fundamentally advance the conservative movement’s social agenda but did enshrine its economic and governmental philosophy. O’Connor, Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and, until the mid1990s, David Souter voted consistently to devolve more power onto the states except in cases where these governments attempted to regulate business. On these issues, Rehnquist and O’Connor had almost identical voting records.15 Neither was native to central Arizona. They instead came from families and areas with a strong aversion to midcentury liberalism. As such, their jurisprudence and politics were certainly not rooted in Phoenix. Still, it is signiWcant that both chose to relocate to Phoenix, where they joined native and transplanted Republicans eager to be a part of a vanguard state GOP, do business in the Valley, or take part in Chamber industrial recruitment. Rehnquist grew up far from the desert, in Shorewood, Wisconsin, where the mansions along Lake Michigan dwarfed his small brick home in this aZuent suburb. His father, the child of Swedish immigrants, never attended college and sold paper wholesale. His mother, in contrast, was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, spoke Wve languages, and freelanced as a translator, which left her plenty of time for civic aVairs. Rehnquist’s parents discussed politics openly and imbued in their two children a political philosophy that borrowed from Wendell Willkie, Herbert Hoover, and Robert Taft. During World War II, Rehnquist, then a high school student, volunteered to be the neighborhood civil defense oYcer. When he graduated, he spent just one year at Kenyon College before joining the Army Air Corps in 1943.

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Although he spent much time in North Africa, hostilities had ended when he arrived. But this stint left him with a desire “to Wnd someplace like North Africa to go to school.” With the GI Bill, he enrolled in Stanford from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in political science in 1948. He went on to earn master’s degrees at both Stanford and Harvard before returning to the Bay Area to obtain his law degree. At Stanford he graduated Wrst in his class and went on to clerk with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.16 After his clerkship, Rehnquist moved to Phoenix. In some accounts, he reported that he was most concerned with living in a warm climate. Famously, he Xipped a coin to decide between Albuquerque and Phoenix. In later writings and interviews, he cited a deep attraction to the city’s politics. He celebrated Phoenix as “the lost frontier here in America . . . and by that I mean not just free enterprise in the sense of a right to make a buck but the right to manage your own aVairs as free as possible from the interference of government.” He did more than just practice law. He became active in the state’s Republican Party and blended these two interests when he opposed a local public accommodations law and an integration plan for the city’s public school system. His stance separated him from Goldwater and other boosters involved in city governance. They had always attempted to present at least the illusion of diversity and equal opportunity or walked the line between their perceptions of the diVerences between de facto and de jure segregation.17 Rehnquist’s involvement with GOP eVorts to keep African Americans from voting dogged his later career. The Arizona NAACP charged that Rehnquist, as early as 1958, was involved with a group of Anglo lawyers who challenged African American voters at the polls. According to the head of the Maricopa County Democratic Headquarters, “voters were being challenged in several precincts in South Phoenix. . . . I was told it was William ‘Bill’ Rehnquist . . . he was asking people standing in a long line waiting to vote, to read printing on a white card[.] People were leaving the lines and were not voting.” “I also had calls from . . . a precinct committeeman[,] a black woman[,] who said her people were frightened and afraid to vote,” the witness added. The Democratic activist was convinced the move was political. “We had a big Registration drive that year, and a lot of the People were voting for the Wrst time. [A]fter the challenging started we no

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longer had people waiting in line[,] the voting was real slow,” she explained. “I tried to get the precinct people to go door to door to get out the vote but word was out they were afraid to vote.”18 Despite this controversy, Rehnquist became enmeshed in the business elite as well as the state’s inXuential Republican Party. He served eagerly and willingly in Goldwater’s presidential bid. He wrote speeches, counseled the senator on his famous vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and provided Goldwater with the legal, constitutional argument against the bill that the senator used. Rehnquist also worked with political scientist Harry JaVa to draft Goldwater’s subsequent speeches on the matter. Though Goldwater had supported the Phoenix ordinance and had long disdained those defenders of de jure segregation, he embraced Rehnquist’s arguments in his eVorts to win over the South.19 Rehnquist’s involvement served him well. Upon Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, Kleindienst, whom the president appointed the deputy attorney general, hired Rehnquist as the head of the OYce of Legal Counsel. Rehnquist, now one of the president’s lawyers, was instrumental in Nixon’s eVorts to “unpack” the Court, an eVort to appoint, in John Dean’s words, “strict constructionist” judges, who would “interpret the Constitution rather than amend it by judicial Wat,” in order to overturn liberal, activist jurisprudence. Rehnquist identiWed potential nominees by studying their records and writings, made recommendations to Attorney General John Mitchell, and conducted subsequent interviews. In an internal memo, Rehnquist deWned a desirable candidate: “A judge who is a ‘strict constructionist’ in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiVs—the latter two groups having been the principal beneWciaries of the Supreme Court’s ‘broad constructionist’ reading of the Constitution.”20 Rehnquist’s appointment was serendipitous. In the fall of 1971, Justices Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan’s resignations surprised the Nixon administration. At Wrst neither Rehnquist nor Lewis Powell was on the shortlist. During the vetting process, Rehnquist dismissed the idea that he would be a nominee, because, he said, “I’m not from the South, I’m not a woman, and I’m not mediocre.” Nixon Wrst championed Richmond lawyer and Virginia congressman Richard PoV, Californian William French Smith, or Philadelphia prosecutor Arlen

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Specter, but only because Nixon’s aides reminded him that he had not appointed a Jew. In discussions with Attorney General John Mitchell, the two men had named dozens of potential jurists. In a memoir, John Dean took credit for Wrst mentioning Rehnquist as a possibility. Reportedly, he told a Nixon adviser, “ The president has a perfect candidate right under his nose. . . . Bill Rehnquist makes Barry Goldwater look like a liberal.” Goldwater told Nixon, “He’s probably the greatest authority on the Constitution in the country today.” Nixon still equivocated until after the American Bar Association rejected his list of other nominees and he learned of Rehnquist’s experience as a clerk.21 Rehnquist’s conWrmation to the Court and to the position of Chief Justice, though sometimes labeled quick, generated tremendous controversy. Judiciary Committee Democrats feared Rehnquist’s and PoV’s ascension. Senators Birch Bayh, Gary Hart, Sam Ervin, and Edward Kennedy spent the Wrst day grilling Rehnquist about overturning past precedent and limiting congressional powers. Bayh admitted that Democrats feared that “the President has thought that the whole purpose for these nominations is to turn around the Court and thus turn around the series of interpretations that have been put on the laws over the past 20 years.”22 Rehnquist also faced tough questions in regard to his antidesegregationist views and political activities in 1971 and 1986. Committee members discussed his public opposition to the Phoenix accommodations act, the integration of Phoenix public high schools, and involvement with voter intimidation eVorts. The nominee relied on denial and backtracking. In 1971 Rehnquist stipulated that he no longer opposed the accommodations act, continued to consider busing “artiWcial,” and asserted that his polling “responsibilities, as I recall them, were never those of challenger, but as one of a group of lawyers working for the Republican Party in Maricopa County who attempted to supply legal advice to persons who were challengers.” They did not target minority voters, he testiWed, but focused on “areas in which heavy Democratic pluralities were voting together, with some reason to believe that tombstones were being voted at the same time.” Controversy increased after a short memo with Rehnquist’s initials surfaced from Justice Jackson’s old Wles. “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases” maintained that “it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by liberal colleagues, but

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I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaYrmed.” Disagreement ensued, and continues, over whether the missive represented Rehnquist’s opinion and an attempt to sway the justice or a position Jackson asked his clerk to draft in preparation for a vote. Rehnquist Wrst disavowed the one-and-a-half-page, single-spaced piece and only reluctantly identiWed it as a “bald, simplistic conclusion, which was not an accurate statement of my views at the time.”23 During the 1971 hearings Rehnquist received support from Phoenicians, including O’Connor. The state senator had been long active in Arizona party politics and was committed to using her media connections to counter public attacks on Rehnquist. O’Connor’s background diVered sharply from Rehnquist’s midwestern roots. Born in El Paso on March 26, 1930, O’Connor grew up on a remote ranch on the Arizona–New Mexico border. Her father, Henry Day, endeavored to build his farm into one of the largest in the West. The Depression ravaged his outWt. He opposed the New Deal and the government programs liberals oversaw but accepted federal subsidies when farm prices crashed. His daughter lived with her grandparents in El Paso during the school year but returned to the Lazy B ranch every summer. She was a gifted student and fulWlled her father’s wish that she attend Stanford in his native California. She entered as an undergraduate in 1946, completed her economics degree in 1949, and Wnished her law degree just two years later. Rehnquist, whom O’Connor had dated brieXy, Wnished Wrst, and O’Connor third. Yet the only job oVers she received were for legal-secretary positions. She followed her husband, John Jay O’Connor, to Frankfurt, Germany, where he worked for the Judge Advocate General Corps, and then to Phoenix when he landed a job at a leading law Wrm. “John and I felt that by living in Phoenix,” she later explained, “we would have an opportunity to be more actively involved with our community than might be the case if we were to return to California.” Though her grades had been better than his, she once again could not Wnd a position and resigned herself to working out of a shopping center with litigator Tom Tobin. “Other people who had oYces in the same shopping mall repaired TVs, cleaned clothes, or loaned money,” she remembered. “It was not a high-rent district. I got walk-in business. People came in to see me about grocery bills they couldn’t collect, landlord– tenant problems, family members and other everyday things.”24

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O’Connor, like other housewives, threw herself into Phoenix civic and political life. She served, for example, on many boards and committees, including the board of trustees of the Heard Museum and the board of visitors for the Arizona State University Law School (later renamed in her honor). The O’Connors spent much time with some of the most formidable Arizona Republicans, including Goldwater, Rosenzweig, and Rehnquist. Her relationship with the senator was especially important. She was a Wxture in his 1958 and 1964 campaigns. Eventually, he became her political mentor.25 In 1965, still unable to break into Phoenix’s law Wrms, she began work in the attorney general’s oYce. “I persisted,” she remembered, “and got a temporary job and quickly rose all the way to the bottom of the totem pole in that oYce.” Her hard work paid oV: she was appointed to a vacant seat in the state senate in 1969, won reelection twice, and served as the majority leader in the legislature. She was the Wrst woman to serve in such a capacity in the United States. She exhibited a more pragmatic interpretation of post-1964 conservative politics. For example, she fought government spending but also supported a state Medicaid program, the repeal of a law barring women from working more than eight hours a day (which had kept many out of high-paying professional jobs), and a measure to make public meetings accessible to citizens. Her popularity helped her win a spot on the Maricopa County Superior Court in 1974. Five years later, governor Bruce Babbitt appointed her to the court of appeals.26 In 1981 Ronald Reagan nominated her for the Supreme Court. The president had promised to name a woman during the campaign, in part to assuage women voters’ fears about his aggressive foreign policy positions. Reagan met with her for just forty-Wve minutes in July 1981. Reportedly, the president was conWdent that his staV had vetted her appropriately and thus kept their conversation to their mutual acquaintances, fondness for horses, and love of the West.27 O’Connor’s nomination polarized the GOP. To many, she embodied a dedication to states’ rights and local control. Strom Thurmond praised O’Connor’s appointment as a new chapter in American federalism, a laudation heaped with meaning, given the South Carolinian’s role in formulating southern Sunbelt conservatism. Her work in the Arizona government, Thurmond emphasized, “gives us hope that she will bring to the Court, if conWrmed, a greater appreciation of

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the division of powers between the Federal Government and the governments of the representative States.” But O’Connor refused to answer questions about her personal political beliefs and opinions on past Court decisions, especially Roe v. Wade (1973). Her reticence enraged the religious Right, an increasingly powerful force in the expanding conservative movement. Jerry Falwell denounced her openly, and several anti-abortion advocates spoke against her in the Senate. Goldwater was quick to come to her defense. “Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass,” he declared. “I don’t like getting kicked around by people who call themselves conservatives on a non-conservative matter. It is a question of who is best for the Court. If there is going to be a Wght in the Senate, you are going to Wnd ‘Old Goldy’ Wghting like hell.”28 The senators also questioned O’Connor, although with less publicity, about her understanding of federal power and liberal judicial activism. In answer to these inquiries, she was matter-of-fact on her views regarding the balance between states’ rights and the central government’s power, issues vital to the early years of the conservative movement, as well as legislating from the bench. For example, in her opening statement, she stated plainly that she had a great “appreciation of the disparate and distinct roles of the three branches of government at both the State and the Federal levels” and considered “the proper role of the judiciary” as “one of interpreting and applying the law, not making it.” The senators present probed her views on improper judicial activism and federalism in landmark cases, most notably Brown. O’Connor declared the ruling “an accepted holding of the Court” and an agreement between jurists “that the previous understanding of the 14th amendment was a Xawed understanding.” Yet she refused to issue a judgment on the nature of the decision. “I do not know that the Court believed it was engaged in judicial activism,” she stated. “I did not participate in the debate, and the hearings, and the arguments; and I cannot tell you all that went into the making of that decision.”29 Both O’Connor and Rehnquist proved themselves dependable voters for the Arizona GOP’s and national conservative movement’s postwar economic and political agenda. They constituted the core of a future bloc that, in the words of legal scholar Mark Tushnet, transformed the meaning of the First Amendment from protecting “Eugene

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V. Debs and Martin Luther King, Jr., rebels and rabble rousers” to shielding “Lorillard Tobacco and Ted Turner: money and marketing.” Rehnquist brought to the bench a fundamental interest in stopping and then undoing over thirty years of liberal, activist jurisprudence and an intention to protect free enterprise. During his early years on the bench, the others called him the “lone dissenter.” “I came to the court sensing,” Rehnquist explained in a rare interview, “without really having followed it terribly closely, that there were some excesses in terms of constitutional adjudication during the era of the so-called Warren Court.” “So I felt,” he continued, “the boat was kind of keeling over in one direction. Interpreting my oath as I saw it, I felt that my job was, where those sort of situations arose, to kind of lean the other way.”30 Rehnquist became the driving force behind a landmark decision that sent a warning signal to liberals that the Court was beginning to undergo a metamorphosis. In 1975 justices ruled that state and local governments had to follow the federal minimum wage law, a precedent set almost forty years earlier when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1935 Wagner Act. Rehnquist authored and signed the only dissent, which argued that the 1975 ruling violated the protections the tenth amendment provided the states. A year later, the Court reversed itself in a 5–4 decision. During deliberations for National League of Cities v. Usery (1976), Rehnquist persuaded four other jurists to change their opinions. His argument boiled down to his assertion that Congress had violated the states’ rights clause in the Bill of Rights. In the majority opinion, Rehnquist rejected the legislature’s ability to force state and local governments to follow federal minimum wage and maximum hours laws. He contended that although Congress had the right to “exercis[e] its express powers to tax and regulate commerce,” these laws threatened the “separate and independent existence” of the states. The Court had not invoked the Tenth Amendment since the 1937 “switch in time to save nine,” a decision that upheld key components of the Wagner Act, which Goldwater and other business conservatives had deplored, but also stopped Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Court with justices predisposed to uphold liberal policies. Thus, scholars came to see Usery as a signal that the Court would begin to dismantle the governmental framework that not only had underpinned the New Deal but had enabled the enactment of other midcentury regulatory reforms.31

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When O’Connor joined the Court Wve years later, she provided an important vote for Rehnquist’s drive to repeal the federal government’s power, particularly in regard to regulation, redistribution, and unionization, issues at the heart of top Phoenix Republicans’ politics, business activism, and policymaking both in Arizona and in Washington. Her vote proved dependable and vital to shifting the tenor of the court even before Reagan and George H. W. Bush were able to appoint more conservative jurists to the bench. In total she sided with conservatives on more than 80 percent of cases involving states’ rights and the regulation of industry. For example, when the Court once again reversed its opinion on federal authority over wages and hours in state governments in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985), only Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor dissented. Although they each authored their own dissents, all three expressed concern that the majority had ignored the protections the Bill of Rights aVorded the states.32 But a new cohort of analysts have asserted that the Rehnquist Court did the most to repeal midcentury state limitations on business and reorient the state toward antiliberal measures. The restrictions the Rehnquist Court initially placed on federal power had an unintended consequence: state governments began to regulate business. Hence, when these cases appeared before the Court, these jurists did not side with the states and protect their power to police the market. Instead, the new majority found in favor of corporations that opposed these regulations. To many scholars, this shift signaled that initial assessments of the Rehnquist Court’s allegiance to federalism had in fact masked its overarching concern for protecting commerce.33 This jurisprudence highlights the power, reach, and impact of Arizona industry-focused conservatism. Indeed, even when religious conservatives began to frustrate and eclipse the movement’s founders in power and prestige, the Phoenix Chamber men and state party refounders considered their actions to have reaped impressive political dividends. Upon Walter Bimson’s retirement in 1970, Goldwater expressed his thanks to “you with your forward looking, modern banking technique [that] opened up funds for the young businessmen.” Goldwater’s peers were equally proud of their senator’s eVorts to bring Phoenix’s brand of Republican politics to Washington. “I have treasured your friendship through the many years,” Bimson wrote to

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Goldwater, “and have felt a feeling of conWdence in the future of our State and our Nation because you were in a position to inXuence public opinion in a direction that I have always supported.” “You have made a great contribution towards saving this country,” another Chamber man wrote in the late 1970s. “I regard you as one of the group comprising Senators Taft, McCarthy, Jenner, McCarran; Generals McArthur, Chenualt and Patton; Robert Welch, Westbrook Pegler, Whitaker Chambers and numerous other who have been uncompromising in their loyalty to God and country.”34 Notes Author’s Note: Portions of this chapter are also in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 1. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), ch. 8; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). 2. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 87–114. 3. L. R. Boulware, “Politics . . . The Businessman’s Biggest Job in 1958,” in Vital Speeches of the Day, 14, no. 19, 588–93; “Politics Called ‘Business of All,’” Arizona Republic, May 25, 1958, 6; Boulware, “Politics Held Industry’s Job,” Arizona Republic, May 22, 1958, 6; “ The Only Alternative,” Arizona Republic, May 23, 1958, p. 6; Lemuel R. Boulware to J. Harvie Wilkinson Jr., July 17, 1958, folder 453, box 18, Lemuel Ricketts Boulware Papers, Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) [hereinafter cited as Boulware]; Charles R. Sligh Jr. to Lemuel R. Boulware, May 29, 1958, box 17, folder 429, Boulware; Charles Johnson to Lemuel Rickets Boulware, July 30, 1958, box 17, folder 429, Boulware; John D. Hoblitzel Jr. to L. R. Boulware, June 17, 1958, box 17, folder 429, Boulware; Carroll Reynolds to L. R. Boulware, June 26, 1958, box 17, folder 429, Boulware. 4. Ronald Reagan, interviewed by Robert Goldberg, August 7, 1991, transcript, 1, Robert Goldberg Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation (Tempe); Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 5. Ronald Reagan, “Encroaching Control,” March 30, 1961, box 21, folder 13, pp. 5, 11, 12, 17, Paul Fannin Papers, Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records (Phoenix). 6. Goldwater to Boulware, December 10, 1971, box 38, folder 1040, Boulware; Goldwater to Boulware, September 22, 1980, box 38, folder 1040, Boulware;

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Goldwater to Boulware, April 27, 1978, box 38, folder 1040, Boulware; Goldwater to Boulware, June 13, 1983, box 38, folder 1040, Boulware; Boulware to Goldwater, June 20, 1983, box 38, folder 1040, Boulware. 7. Ernest Jerome Hopkins, Financing the Frontier: A Fifty Year History of the Valley National Bank (Phoenix: Valley National Bank, 1950), 200–204, 268–70; Walter R. Bimson, “ Talk before Convention of General Insurance Agents of Arizona,” October 15, 1948, box 29, folder 238, 1, Valley National Bank Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Tempe [hereinafter cited as VNB]. 8. “Meet President Bimson,” Banking: Journals of the American Bankers Association (October 1960), 1–7, folder 6, box 1, ibid.; “Surtax or Chaos: Valley Bank OYcial,” Arizona Republic, April 7, 1968, 1-F and 6-F; Carl Bimson, “Handling Loans to Small Business,” Burroughs Clearing House, January 1945,box 68, folder 934, 18–20, 37–39, VNB; Carl Bimson, “A Banker’s Participation in Public AVairs,” February 12, 1960, “Paying Our Way,” May 17, 1960, and “Westward Ho!,” May 20, 1960, all in Carl Bimson, Addresses of Carl A. Bimson, vol. 9 (Self published, 1960), n.p., Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe. 9. “Meet President Bimson,” 1–7; “Surtax or Chaos,” 1-F, 6-F. 10. James Patrick, “ The Certainty of Failure,” February 14, 1968, typescript, folder 622, box 5, VNB; “Current Developments,” Arizona Progress, October 1947 1–2; “Both Federal and Local Taxes Continue to Set New Records,” Arizona Progress, October 1948, 2 “Current Developments,” Arizona Progress, April 1950, 1; “Happy Returns,” Arizona Progress, October 1951, 1; “As the Nation Goes, So Goes Arizona, in Presidential Voting,” Arizona Progress, July 1952, 2; “Liberalism,” Arizona Progress, October 1952, 1; “Bon Voyage,” Arizona Progress, November 1963, 1. 11. Keith Monroe, “Bank Knight in Arizona,” American Magazine, November 1945, 24–25+, esp. 24, 25, 122; Neil Clark, “Brash Banker of Arizona,” Saturday Evening Post, April 10, 1954, 22–23, 75–78. 12. Orme Lewis and Paul Healy, “I Was the Great White Father,” Saturday Evening Post, December 17, 1955, 36–37+, esp. 37; Orme Lewis to Mr. James G. McNary, December 29, 1955, box 4, folder 4, Orme Lewis Collection, Arizona Historical Foundation (Tempe) [hereinafter Lewis]; [Illegible signature] to Mr. Secretary, January 10, 1956, box 4, folder 4, Lewis; A. Z. Nelson to Mr. Lewis, January 3, 1956, box 4, folder 4, Lewis. 13. Harry Rosenzweig, interviewed by Minister, side 1, tape 13; Robert Novak, The Agony of the GOP 1964 (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Stephen Shadegg, What Happened to Goldwater? The Inside Story of the 1964 Republican Campaign (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965); Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 149– 240; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 99–488. 14. Shermer, Creating the Sunbelt, ch. 9. 15. Barry Goldwater, untitled note: “ This is for the Alpha File,” n.d., box 14, folder O’Connor, Sandra Day 1972–1994, Alpha Files, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, Arizona Historical Foundation (Tempe) [hereinafter cited as Goldwater Papers]; Mark A. Tushnet, A Court Divided: The

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Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 1–22, 249–318; Linda Greenhouse, “ The Supreme Court: Federalism; States Are Given New Legal Shield by Supreme Court,” New York Times, June 24, 1999; Richard A. Epstein, “ The Federalism Decisions of Justices Rehnquist and O’Connor: Is Half a Loaf Enough?” Stanford Law Review 58 (April 2006), 1793–1827; Charles RothWeld, “Federalism in a Conservative Supreme Court,” Publius 22 (Summer 1992), 21–31; Sue Davis, “Rehnquist and State Courts: Federalism Revisited,” Western Political Quarterly 45 (September 1992), 773–82; Herman Schwartz, “ The States’ Rights Assault on Federal Authority,” in The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right, ed. Herman Schwartz (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 155–68. 16. Donald E. Boles, Mr. Justice Rehnquist, Judicial Activist (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1987), 12–16, esp. 13. 17. Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism, ch. 9; US Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Nominations of William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., November 3, 4, 8, 9, and 10, 1971, esp. 305. 18. US Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, 99th Cong., 2nd sess., July 29, 30, 31 and August 1, 1986, 1152; Boles, Mr. Justice Rehnquist, 16–17. 19. Tushnet, Court Divided, 10–24. 20. John W. Dean, The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That RedeWned the Supreme Court (New York: Free Press, 2001), 15–27, esp. 15–16. 21. Ibid., 34, 113, 129, 132; Boles, Mr. Justice Rehnquist, 5. 22. Committee on the Judiciary, Nominations of William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., 16–52, esp. 180, esp. 19. 23. Ibid., esp. 53, 69–72; Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist, esp. 1152–60, 324–325; Boles, Mr. Justice Rehnquist, 75– 100, esp. 98–99. 24. Joan Biskupic, Sandra Day O’Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most InXuential Justice (New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 2005), 7–48, quoted on 28–29 and 47; Ann Carey McFeatters, Sandra Day O’Connor: Justice in the Balance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 22– 46, esp. 46; Robert W. Van Sickel, Not a Particularly DiVerent Voice: The Jurisprudence of Sandra Day O’Connor (New York: Peter Land, 1998), 22–32; Sandra Day O’Connor, interview by Harriet Haskell, January 31, 1980, transcript, Phoenix History Project, Arizona Historical Society (Tempe). 25. McFeatters, Sandra Day O’Connor, 52–53; Biskupic, Sandra Day O’Connor, 22–69; Sandra D. O’Connor to Barry Goldwater, April 6, 1978, folder: “O’Connor, Sandra Day 1972–1994,” box 14, Alpha Files, Goldwater Papers. 26. McFeatters, Sandra Day O’Connor, 47–52, esp. 47; Van Sickel, Not a Particularly DiVerent Voice, 29–32; Biskupic, Sandra Day O’Connor, 22–69.

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27. McFeatters, Sandra Day O’Connor, 1–18. 28. US Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, The Nomination of Judge Sandra Day O’Connor of Arizona to Serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., September 9, 10, 11, 1981, 2; McFeatters, Sandra Day O’Connor, 11–18; Van Sickel, Not a Particularly DiVerent Voice, 33–41. 29. Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Judge Sandra Day O’Connor of Arizona to Serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, esp. 57, 66, 102. 30. Tushnet, Court Divided, 302; quoted in John A. Jenkins, “ The Partisan: A Talk with Justice Rehnquist,” New York Times, March 3, 1985, 32. 31. Van Sickel, Not a Particularly DiVerent Voice, 82–92, quoted in 82–83; William W. Van Alstyne, “The Second Death of Federalism,” Michigan Law Review 83 (June 1985): 1709–33; Jesse H. Choper, “ The Scope of National Power vis-àvis the States: The Dispensability of Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal 86 (1977): 1552–1621; Archibald Cox, “Federalism and Individual Rights under the Burger Court,” Northwestern University Law Review 73 (March/April 1978): 22–25. 32. Tushnet, Court Divided, 249–58; Van Sickel, Not a Particularly DiVerent Voice, 82–92; Van Alstyne, “Second Death of Federalism”; RothWeld, “Federalism in a Conservative Supreme Court,” 21–31; Ruth Colker and Kevin M. Scott, “Dissing States? Invalidation of State Action during the Rehnquist Era,” Virginia Law Review 88 (2002): 1301–86; Greenhouse, “Supreme Court”; Erwin Chemerinsky, “Justice O’Connor and Federalism,” McGeorge Law Review 32 (2001): 877–954. 33. RothWeld, “Federalism in a Conservative Supreme Court,” 21–31; Colker and Scott, “Dissing States?,” 1301–86; Greenhouse, “Supreme Court”; Chemerinsky, “Justice O’Connor and Federalism,” 877–954; Tushnet, Court Divided, 302–18; Richard H. Fallon Jr., “The ‘Conservative’ Paths of the Rehnquist Court’s Federalism Decisions,” The University of Chicago Law Review 69 (2002): 429–94; Davis, “Rehnquist and State Courts,” 773–82; Schwartz, “States’ Rights Assault on Federal Authority,” 155–68; Bradley W. Joondeph, “ The Deregulatory Value of Justice O’Connor’s Federalism,” Houston Law Review 44 (2007): 507–51. 34. Frank Snell, interviewed by Kristina Minister, side 1, tape 10; Barry Goldwater to Walter Bimson, December 21, 1970, Alpha Files, box 2, folder Bimson, Walter 1967–1971, Goldwater Papers; Walter Bimson to Barry Goldwater, January 11, 1971, Alpha Files, box 2, folder Bimson, Walter 1967–1971,Goldwater Papers; Frank Brophy to Barry Goldwater, April 14, 1977, Alpha Files, box 2, folder Brophy, Frank Cullen 1974–1980, Goldwater Papers.

9 Green Goldwater Barry Goldwater, Federal Environmentalism, and the Transformation of Modern Conservatism brian allen drake

by april 22, 1970, the Wrst Earth Day, the nation’s ecological problems were no longer the domain of resource managers, small conservation groups, and local activists—going green had gone mainstream. Even the penultimate chapter of Barry Goldwater’s third book, The Conscience of a Majority, published just after his return to the Senate in January 1969, gave a nod to the new status quo. Much of the book was classic Goldwater, replete with indictments of liberals, unionists, and reporters, but the section entitled “Saving the Earth” was a clear departure. It is “our job,” the senator declared, to “prevent that lush orb known as Earth . . . from turning into a bleak and barren, dirty brown planet.” “We are in trouble on the Earth in our continuing eVorts to survive,” he warned, and “it is diYcult to visualize what will be left of the Earth if our present rates of population and pollution expansion are maintained.” No longer was there “any reason to question whether the threat is real.”1 Such sentiments were hardly unusual in the years after 1964, but they rarely came from conservatives. Moreover, Goldwater’s warnings 214

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seemed to put him at odds with the conservative movement that he had helped build. “I happen to be one,” he wrote, “who has spent much of his public life defending the business community, the free enterprise system, and local governments from harassment and encroachment from an outsized Federal bureaucracy.” But when it came to environmental problems, he was willing to explore federal solutions, much as with his requests for government help in putting the Colorado River to use. “I feel very deWnitely that the [Nixon] administration is absolutely correct in cracking down on companies and corporations and municipalities that continue to pollute the nation’s air and water,” he explained. “While I am a great believer in the free competitive enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment . . . when pollution is found, it should be halted at the source, even if this requires stringent government action against important segments of our national economy.” Even in the context of the time it was a rather startling admission. “Mr. Conservative,” the champion of states’ rights and small government, had embraced federal environmental regulation.2 Conventional wisdom tends not to associate conservatives with environmentalism, and for good reason, because environmental protection and “big government”—a favorite Goldwater term and target— have been closely linked since colonial times. As far back as the early 1800s, as John Cumbler, Richard Judd, and others have argued, state power was a key weapon for those who would save New England’s riparian meadows and Wsh runs from the threat of textile-factory milldams. Later that century, Progressive conservationists brandished the power of state-centered scientiWc and technical expertise in their crusade for better management of the nation’s forests, rangelands, and rivers, and for the protection of its more scenic parts as well. Indeed, government’s role in environmental aVairs, at both the state and federal levels, grew steadily beyond the Progressive Era. After World War II, the “environmental management state” (in Adam Rome’s words) had joined the welfare state and the military-industrial complex as a prominent expression of federal power. With their allergy to government and their tight embrace of industrial capitalism, many postwar conservatives were unsurprisingly hesitant to identify with environmentalism or environmentalists; in 1980 the Reagan administration

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practically declared war on them, aiming to roll back federal environmental management right along with the Soviets as a part of the Reagan Revolution.3 Not all conservatives were so hostile, however. Even if he acted out of political expedience, Richard Nixon helped to fashion some of the most important regulatory tools of the postwar era in the National Environmental Protection Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Clean Air Act of 1970. Republican John Saylor, a Nixon contemporary, was a furious opponent of dam building in the Grand Canyon in the 1960s, and arguably the greatest congressional champion of federal wilderness preservation from the 1950s through the 1970s. Indeed, the Republican Party, conservatism’s partisan home after World War II, had a tradition of supporting federal environmental protection, best embodied by men like Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and Herbert Hoover. Its modern members can, historian William Cronon asserted, “claim with considerable justiWcation that [the GOP’s] environmental record” before 1980 “was no less distinguished than that of the Democrats,” reinforcing scholar Samuel Hays’s observation that postwar environmentalism’s “values and ideals tended not to Wt into traditional political ideologies, but to cut across them.” The environmental movement circa 1970 was not just a reform eVort but a sea change in social values, as powerful and potent as the divisive culture wars, and so widespread that it could sometimes Wnd support even among the most unlikely of champions.4 In 1970, and indeed for much of his adult life, Barry Goldwater was one of those unexpected champions. Given his intense aversion to a powerful central government, as well as his roots in the famously libertarian West, pundits and scholars would expect him to staunchly oppose federal environmental regulation. Yet he also had a legendary independent streak when it came to issues like abortion and gay rights—and environmentalism. Nature was important to Barry Goldwater, and, like so many Americans in the postwar period, he was concerned about its fate, to the point that he was willing—at times—to invoke federal power not only for nature’s use, as in the case of the Colorado River Commission, but also for its protection. The pragmatism that Andrew Needham describes in his chapter was never permanent, though, because whatever Goldwater’s hopes about government’s ability to save the planet, he remained an antistatist

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conservative to the end, and those two impulses clashed. “Green Goldwater” was thus a sporadic phenomenon, closely related to historical and personal circumstances in the 1970s, when political fault lines shifted from the aftershocks of stagXation, social upheaval, and a far more expansive and entrenched federal bureaucracy. Goldwater was never quite able to square the tensions among his environmental concerns, his faith in capitalism, and his mistrust of government. Nevertheless, his complex personal relationship to the natural world tells us a lot about the power of postwar environmentalism and its inXuence on both him and the larger culture.

Damming Arizona Goldwater came to know nature long before he got into politics, growing up surrounded by the Sonoran desert and camping and hiking around Camelback Mountain, not yet encircled by Phoenix’s urban sprawl. His mother, Josephine (“Jo”) Williams Goldwater, introduced him more fully to natural Arizona. She loved to take car-camping trips (a common activity in the consumer-oriented 1920s) into the Sonoran, where she would read and lecture to Barry and his siblings about the state’s natural history. On some of these trips Barry took a camera along, which began a hobby that he pursued for the rest of his life: photography, particularly landscape shots and portraits of local Native peoples. He was never a world-class artist, but he had much talent, and one of his Wrst brushes with fame came in 1940 with the publication of a book of his photography entitled Arizona Portraits (a second edition with similar content followed in 1946). That same year Goldwater took his trip down the Colorado River and emerged with hundreds of photographs and some three thousand feet of motionpicture footage. In autumn he began showing the Wlm to audiences all over Arizona, sometimes arriving in more remote locales via his airplane, which lent him an air of tech-savvy individualism to accompany his burgeoning reputation as a rugged outdoorsman. The Wlm “gave me access to so damn many Arizonans,” he noted later, that “it was just a natural step for me to go into politics.”5 Goldwater’s political ascent began with his election to the Senate in 1952. This Republican victory in traditionally Democratic Arizona

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was an early sign of the political transformation of the arid Southwest from the home of radical, hardscrabble miners into the conservative, dynamic, metropolitan Sunbelt. Environmental protection was not much of an issue for him at that time; he did introduce legislation in 1957 to increase the size of Grand Canyon National Park, a project that would later become dear to him, but he was not yet what most Americans would recognize as an “environmentalist.” He voted against the era’s most signiWcant piece of federal environmental legislation, the Wilderness Act of 1964, and also devoted considerable energy to enlisting the federal government’s help in damming the West’s rivers.6 This particular crusade put him squarely within mainstream twentieth-century western politics. Almost all the region’s politicians shared an unshakable belief in the virtues of federal reclamation: dams, canals, aqueducts, pumping stations, and so forth, built at public expense for the beneWt of the western economy. Liberals liked reclamation for the jobs and cheap electricity it provided to the common man, and its mission (at least in theory) to support the idealized small farmer; dam building was a major component of the New Deal, for example, and had strong Democratic backing after World War II. Many western Republicans also supported reclamation. Their desire for economic growth, dependent in the arid West on federally subsidized water, molliWed their fears of a strong national state (in contrast, eastern Republicans tended to be far more resistant to reclamation’s siren call). Dams were not pork or a government handout, western boosters asserted, but a helping hand for honest, hardworking folks in a severely arid environment who would use such projects to build the West up to glorious heights of free enterprise.7 For all his complaints about the New Deal’s legacy and continued expansion of federal power under Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, Goldwater avidly embraced reclamation. Along with his Democratic senatorial partner Carl Hayden, he stumped enthusiastically for the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a proposal to move water some three hundred miles from Lake Havasu to the agricultural areas around Phoenix and Tucson, and which became, when it was built, one of the most expensive reclamation projects in the West. “We desperately need [CAP] water for continuing development,” Goldwater declared on the Xoor of Congress in 1963, where his arguments troubled southern congressmen who viewed the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley

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Authority (TVA) as sacrosanct. Goldwater had long decried the TVA as a rogue bureaucracy “conceived in the minds of socialistic planners, born in a period of economic distress and nurtured and expanded in deceit,” but his defense of reclamation for Arizona ignored its similarity to TVA projects, and critics charged hypocrisy. Goldwater answered that the Constitution implied a federal role in reclamation but did not provide for TVA’s production and sale of electricity. Moreover, he asserted, western reclamation projects always paid for themselves.8 Goldwater was an ardent supporter of the biggest federal reclamation plan of the 1950s, the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), which aimed to bring the famous river and its tributaries under strict hydrological control with a slew of dams and related accoutrements. CRSP boosters argued that it would deliver to the region the kind of prosperity the heavily irrigated California enjoyed; indeed, fairness demanded that Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado proWt from a watershed whose use California essentially monopolized. The heart of the CRSP was to be Echo Park Dam, named after its proposed site on the Green River in Colorado. But Echo Park lay inside Dinosaur National Monument, and many in the Sierra Club and other conservation groups saw in the plan a replay of the Hetch Hetchy controversy some four and a half decades earlier, when the city of San Francisco built a dam in the eponymous valley inside Yosemite National Park. Club founder John Muir and his allies fought the dam, arguing that not only a place of natural beauty but the entire “national park principle” was at stake; if a dam could be built inside Yosemite, the very idea of national parks as places where nature enjoyed protection from such development was destroyed. They lost in 1914, but in 1956 their descendants won the Wght, evidence of an increasing national concern for environmental issues (Goldwater was, in fact, a Sierra Club member). In return for the removal of Echo Park Dam from the CRSP, the victors agreed to a replacement in Glen Canyon on the Colorado River itself, upstream from the Grand Canyon.9 His club membership notwithstanding, Goldwater sided with dam builders. One of his Wrst acts as senator was to cosponsor legislation authorizing the CRSP, and on the Senate Xoor he rejected any argument that the Echo Park Dam would harm either the region’s beauty or the park principle. On the contrary, he argued, by allowing boat traYc on the dam’s reservoir, “millions of Americans will be able to

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visit this beautiful section of the country each year.” Enough of Echo Park would still remain after the dam’s construction to satisfy the critics, who ought to be happy, he concluded, that the common man would now be able to experience the beauty that they were so hellbent on protecting.10 Even the Grand Canyon itself was not oV Goldwater’s list of potential reclamation sites. In moving water some three hundred miles southeast from Lake Havasu, the CAP would require a massive amount of electrical power for pumping stations. The proposed Bridge Canyon Dam, to be located just downstream of Grand Canyon National Park, was to supply it. The resulting reservoir, dozens of miles long and hundreds of feet deep in places, would back up several miles into the park itself. As with the Echo Park Dam, wilderness activists in the Sierra Club and elsewhere went ashen at the thought and launched a desperate opposition campaign. Once again they were victorious, helping—along with considerable assistance from interstate political rivalries and compromises—to eliminate the dam from the CAP proposal in the mid-1960s in exchange for the coal-Wred Navajo Generation Plant. But Goldwater, despite his deep reverence for the canyon, felt that reclamation trumped all arguments against the dam. Most of the canyon’s beauty would remain, he argued, and what was lost was a fair exchange for the economic growth the project would stimulate. He was even willing to trade on his reputation as a canyoneer to buttress his defenses. “I have traveled every foot of the river through the Canyon,” he told a correspondent, “and I believe that no one exceeds my own zeal for the Grand Canyon, and I honestly feel that in this case, the dam at Bridge would prove advantageous.” So intense was Goldwater’s support that years afterward he was still grumbling about the Sierra Club’s opposition, as if it had been a personal aVront.11 Even one of the greatest pieces of federal environmental legislation in American history could not win Goldwater’s support. The 1964 Wilderness Act was the fruit of decades’ worth of eVort to secure federal protection for “untouched” public lands of outstanding aesthetic, spiritual, and ecological character—lands where, in the act’s famous words, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” While some human activities would be allowed, public lands designated as “wilderness” under the act would ultimately be protected from most

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forms of economic exploitation, such as mining, drilling, timbering, and associated road construction. The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club led the charge that secured the legislation, which eventually had widespread support in Congress when Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in September 1964. Johnson himself seemed to embrace arguments about pristine lands—“it is a place where man can renew contact with nature,” he had said about his Great Society in May of that year, perhaps thinking of the proposed bill. “It is a place which honors creation for its own sake.”12 Goldwater was one of only twelve Senators to vote against the Wilderness Act. He fretted about federal wilderness protection “locking up” resources and denying tax revenue to the states, and raised procedural questions about the act’s enforcement. But his main complaint challenged the bill’s workability. Goldwater asserted that the protection it oVered to “wilderness” would touch oV an avalanche of visitors whose combined impact would destroy the very wilderness qualities that they Xocked to see. With increased tourism would come pressure for more roads, hotels, and restaurants from “dudes” (as he termed them) who did not really appreciate wilderness and were unwilling to immerse themselves in it as he had done in 1940—to hike or pack into it, sleep in a tent, or clean up after themselves. Soon the government would capitulate to their demands and “start putting sewer lines, gaslines, waterlines, and paved roads” into places like his beloved wild Arizona desert. Federal wilderness areas, in other words, would die from the law of unintended consequences. His support for the Echo Park Dam notwithstanding, his fears were not wholly disingenuous; the spectacular popularity of wilderness areas after World War II would indeed make crowd management an increasingly thorny issue for wilderness preservationists, a situation scholar Roderick Nash termed “the irony of victory.”13

Goldwater’s Fierce Green Fire This particular criticism of the Wilderness Act revealed Goldwater’s growing inner ambivalence about the necessity of federal intervention to protect the nation’s environment. He remained “Mr. Conservative” after 1964, but new challenges to personal liberty and national

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resources transformed political debates and forced him (and other conservatives) to modify their opposition to an ever-growing, more entrenched federal government. Part of this adaptation, for Goldwater, was a new concern about environmental problems and a new willingness—albeit grudging—to employ federal power to solve them, an adaptability that he shared with the movement conservatives whom Goldwater disliked for their eagerness to invoke state power to restrict access to abortions and to limit civil protections for gays and lesbians. Like many Americans, Goldwater’s environmental awakening emerged to a large degree from his personal experiences with the consequences of metropolitan growth. After his loss to Johnson, for example, he spent much of his free time raising money and lobbying for the preservation of Camelback Mountain from the city’s relentless suburban sprawl, which eventually required an infusion of federal money. His concerns only increased in the late 1960s. Flying into Luke Air Force Base in late 1969, for example, he lost visibility as he attempted to land. The culprit was smoke from nearby Phoenix mixed with desert dust. “You won’t believe this,” he wrote his friend Charles Orme afterward, “but [even] at forty thousand feet I could see the white smoke coming out of the smelter in town and then I could see every smelter north plus the one in Mexico.” Such a vivid encounter with the environmental costs of Arizona’s rapid growth—growth that he championed—Wlled him with unease. “The destruction of our clean air,” he told Orme, “has me really concerned.” He confessed to Orme in 1971 that, along with air pollution, he was “terribly worried about our State . . . because as I Xy around it and over it after prolonged absences, I see more and more gouging and cutting” from Phoenix’s and Tucson’s inexorable spread. Progress had now become a problem, and “there should be some way to control it.”14 Many turned to the federal government. Environmentally concerned Americans of the era, especially white, middle-class urbanites and suburbanites interested in nature as an element of their consumer lifestyle, demanded and received government help in protecting it, and the years between 1969 and 1973 saw some of the most important pieces of federal environmental legislation in the nation’s history. As a white suburban American consumer, with all the desires and fears that accompanied that status, Goldwater was similarly amenable to a federal role in environmental protection. But his amenability was

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political as well as personal. Like other Republicans in the early 1970s, Goldwater was searching for new ways of thinking and legislating amid the era’s changing politics of protection and privacy. In particular, his return to the Senate coincided with the peak of the environmental management state, whose popularity was high on both sides of the political aisle. For the GOP, accommodation to such liberal bureaucracy and, hopefully, the consequent ability to control its excesses seemed a wiser path than outright resistance. Thus, Goldwater now spoke clearly, if reluctantly, in favor of controlling sprawl and other environmental threats through federal intervention for both individual and partisan reasons. He was not alone. Fellow Republican Richard Nixon was no environmentalist, yet he served as the main architect of the environmental management state. Nixon considered most green activists to be little better than the hippies and war protestors who shouted over his silent majority. Yet he was also a master politician and strategist, and historian Bruce Schulman asserts that Nixon’s acceptance of federal environmental regulation in the 1970s was essentially an attempt to Wght big-government liberalism from the inside. His aim, Schulman contends, was to appear to appease liberal demands for vigorous environmental protection while structuring environmental bureaucracies in such a way as to weaken them in practice. Motivated by the belief that he could best deXect the push for federal environmental regulation by co-opting it, and also feeling the inXuence of certain green-minded advisers, Nixon raised the federal government’s environmental regulatory activities to a new level. The result was major legislation like the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the National Environmental Protection Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), followed up by the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and others. Nixon, of course, distanced himself from these landmark bills when he considered them outside the bounds of his “New Federalism,” which sought to balance the need for federal resources with conservative allegiance to local control. He vetoed the Clean Water Act in 1972, for example, because he considered it too burdensome on business; Congress overrode his objection.15 Goldwater supported Nixon’s antipollution initiatives wholeheartedly in the early 1970s. He cosponsored the CAA in the Senate and even trumpeted that support in letters to constituents. His preference

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was for local and state action, he wrote to one, but if those failed “the Federal government may have to Wll the gap to protect the atmosphere.” Goldwater also stood behind Nixon’s creation of the EPA, uncharacteristically throwing his weight to the creation of a regulatory bureaucracy. Such support was not merely pandering for green votes; in numerous private letters Goldwater reiterated his belief that the time was ripe for government action on the pollution problem (“ The whole question of what’s happening to our environment,” he told a constituent in 1969, “gives me the most concern of any issue before the Congress.”) He laid into the mining and utility industries for failing to clean up their emissions voluntarily and warned them that they could “expect the federal government to move in.” Unlike in his 1958 denunciation of the Detroit executives who bargained with UAW president Walter Reuther, Goldwater now excoriated the auto industry for a lack of interest in cleaner, more eYcient engines. “I can tell you I am getting tired of Detroit shirking its responsibilities,” he fumed, “and this doesn’t come from a left-wing liberal, this comes from a right-wing conservative,” who left the possibility of federal regulation hanging. To agriculture secretary CliVord Hardin, he expressed concern about the health risks of herbicides. He even told one correspondent that he would be willing to stop underground nuclear testing if “there is any danger to the ecology or the people of the United States.” He considered threat of pollution especially serious; “while I do not like to see government interference,” Goldwater told a friend, “it is obvious that something has to be done.”16 Goldwater’s emergent environmentalism coexisted comfortably with his allegiance to economic growth. He championed renewable energy and cosponsored bills for federally funded solar and geothermal projects, because this sort of green government was especially easy for him to get behind. Energy independence from the Middle East was of vital interest to this cold warrior, brought home in 1973 by the oil crisis and the visions of permanent scarcity it inspired. Of further attraction was the pork; as a perennially sunny state, Goldwater’s native Arizona was sure to be a major recipient of any federal funding for solar research. “We are the home of everything solar,” Goldwater told the Senate in September 1974, only half-jokingly.17 But Goldwater’s environmental conscience also led him to reverse positions on issues of land preservation, protection, and stewardship.

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For example, he rethought his opposition to federal wilderness. A 1972 letter to a voter supporting the proposed Saguaro Wilderness— only eight years after his vote against the Wilderness Act—suggested the depth of that change. “I truly feel,” the senator explained, “with the rapid reduction of wilderness areas it is becoming more and more a fact that we must set aside enough acres of the remaining unspoiled country so that the following generations of Americans will have the opportunity of enjoying the sights that we have taken for granted all these years.” In that vein, Goldwater threw his support behind Senator Henry Jackson’s proposal for three wilderness areas—Mount Baldy, Sycamore Canyon, and Pine Mountain—in the Arizona Strip, and likewise behind Senator Robert Packwood’s proposal to designate the Snake River a federally protected “Wild and Scenic” river. It was a signiWcant reversal for Goldwater, who Wfteen years earlier had been a vigorous supporter of three proposed privately owned dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake. In 1974 he vehemently opposed condominium developments on Hart Prairie in Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks and even oVered his assistance to antidevelopment activists.18 His most notable about-face was on the Glen Canyon Dam. Since his 1940 trip, Goldwater had held a keen interest in the Grand Canyon’s ecological health, and with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam (the Echo Park Dam’s replacement in the CRSP) in 1963, the Colorado River had sickened steadily. Deprived of beach-building silt and spring Xoods, the Colorado ran ice-cold, and heavy boat traYc, with its noise and garbage, made things even worse. Thanks to Glen Canyon Dam and too many tourists, Goldwater lamented in 1970 to the park’s superintendent Robert Lovgren, “We are destroying one of the most delightful places in the world.”19 Goldwater’s regrets colored his votes for environmental protection and suggested a new ambivalence toward reclamation. When the Senate debated amendments to the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and their eVects on a proposed dam on Virginia’s New River in 1976, Goldwater favored nature over growth. “I rise to announce my opposition to this [New River] dam,” he began, acknowledging that it “may sound funny coming from a man who was born and raised in the arid west.” “Of all the votes I have cast in the 20-odd years I have been in this body,” he explained, “if there is one that stands out above all the others that I would change if I had the chance, it was a vote I cast to construct

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Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado. Today we can build nuclear power plants. We do not need to destroy running water.” “I think of that river as it was when I was a boy,” he concluded, “and that is the way I would like to see it again.” He followed up with a “yea” vote on a proposal to designate a twenty-six-mile stretch of the New River as wild and scenic and revoke any hydroelectric licenses on it. Later, Goldwater would again describe his vote for Glen Canyon Dam as the single worst he ever cast—quite an admission, given his regrets over rejecting the Civil Rights Act in 1964—and it is diYcult to overestimate how signiWcant such a turnabout was. At the time, opposing Glen Canyon Dam was the domain of Wrebrand writers like Edward Abbey and the indefatigable former Sierra Club executive director David Brower. Goldwater would never repudiate reclamation per se— far from it—but on this one topic, at least, he had become a strange bedfellow to the most radical environmental activists of the era.20

Green Fire Fading By the early 1970s, then, “Mr. Conservative” was clearly still a man of his times, working to Wnd a place for himself amid the era’s environmental concerns. But other conservatives were beginning to construct an approach to environmentalism that more closely echoed the antistatist, business-friendly conservatism of the early postwar movement. As conXict between and within the two political parties redrew the decade’s political landscape, Goldwater followed the Republican Party’s lead and retreated from many of his Earth Day era sentiments. By the mid-1970s, he mixed praise for the environmental management state with criticisms that revealed both the limits of his own environmentalism and the power of conservatives who championed local control, wise use, and market solutions. A nasty spat with the Sierra Club over the fate of Grand Canyon National Park symbolized the beginning of Goldwater’s environmental retreat. Expanding and solidifying park boundaries had long been a mission of his; as early as 1957 he (unsuccessfully) introduced legislation to that eVect, despite his opposition to other preservationist measures, such as the Wilderness Act. In late 1969 he tried again, teaming up with Democratic congressman Morris Udall, who simultaneously

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introduced the bill in the House (for “the best show of strength,” as Udall told him). The bill died and they tried again in 1973, this time successfully. Like many such boundary bills, Goldwater’s was a complex mix of acreage additions and deletions designed to accommodate a variety of competing interests. It added thousands of acres to the park (and absorbed two previously protected national monuments), while also severing thousands of acres elsewhere. Most of the deleted acreage was to pass into the hands of the Hualapai, a Native American group then living on a tiny reservation inside the canyon and, in Goldwater’s opinion, in desperate need of more land. While formulating the bill, with its myriad concessions and compromises, Goldwater had consulted many parties; despite his reputation as an arch-conservative, in practice he recognized politics as the art of compromise and was willing to solicit advice from all sides of an issue to Wnd a middleground solution. Thus, he was very proud of the consensus behind the Wnal product, and equally conWdent in its prospects.21 When the Sierra Club and its allies objected to the bill and threw their support to a rival one sponsored by fellow Republican senator CliVord Case, Goldwater was stung deeply. The club had two main objections to Goldwater’s bill. The Wrst was that its acreage additions were too few. The second involved the deletions for the Hualapai. However pressed the tribe might be for land, the club argued, carving out chunks of a national park for a private interest set a very dangerous precedent. Like dams, such deletions seemed to violate the park principle, and the club, having already won a major victory in defeating Bridge Canyon Dam, felt little need to back down in this case. Goldwater was furious. He took to the Xoor of the Senate to denounce the club, which he deemed “a closed society, a self-centered, selWsh group, who care for nothing but ideas which they themselves originate and which Wt only their personal conceptions of the way of life everyone else should be compelled to live.” “While I know the Sierra Club would like about one-third of Arizona and a little bit of Utah and Nevada in the Grand Canyon National Park,” he sniVed to club president Raymond Sherwin in his resignation letter, “it is not going to be that way.”22 The club’s opposition to the SST, a proposed supersonic passenger jetliner, did little to improve Goldwater’s sinking opinion of the group. As an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, a high-ranking

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oYcer in the Air Force Reserve, and an inveterate technophile, Goldwater loved complicated, cutting-edge aerospace projects, and in the case of the SST he seemed to take opposition to it as an insult. So he had little patience when environmentalists cried out against the aircraft because of the potential eVects a Xeet of them might have on the Earth’s atmosphere and climate (not to mention noise pollution from sonic booms). Goldwater sneered at such concerns—despite the recent incident over Luke Air Force Base—and dismissed the “scare stories, myths, guesses, speculation, half-truths and downright lies,” as he termed them in a 1970 New York Times editorial, coming from “an unusual combination of left-wing scientists, politicians, economists, and conservationists” in “a desperate attempt to channel ever more funds into social welfare programs.” As he had with the Bridge Canyon Dam, Goldwater also invoked his own environmentalism in response to critics. “Long before the words ‘ecology’ and ‘pollution’ became prominent,” he huVed in 1971, “I was known in my State of Arizona as a nature lover . . . and I yield to no one . . . in my concern as a conservationist.” Yet, he declared, “I [will] vote for [the SST] with not a single qualm as to its possible eVect on the earth’s atmosphere. If there were even a question of a doubt I would be opposed to this program.” Well into the 1970s, long after the SST went down to defeat as a victim of its inordinate costs, Goldwater would Wre the occasional volley at the recalcitrant environmentalists who had, in his mind, selWshly deprived America of its own Concorde.23 The personal may have turned Goldwater a shade of green, but the political largely shaped his second thoughts about environmentalism. His misgivings were anchored in his long-standing warnings against bureaucracy, central government, and federal control that had made him the conservative standard-bearer in 1964. Goldwater, like Nixon, never hesitated to withdraw his support for the environmental management state when he considered Congress or the EPA on the verge of expanding federal power too much or disregarding freeenterprise principles. Goldwater criticized the EPA’s policies throughout the mid- and late 1970s on these grounds. On the Senate Xoor, he accused the bureaucracy of “impeding the progress of people and aVecting the lives of people and the livelihood of people.” He had originally supported organizations like the EPA. “I thought they were good,” he explained. “I think they are being badly misused by . . .

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people who really do not understand what they are supposed to do, nor what we intended them to do.” In letters from the late 1970s he was even blunter, declaring the EPA “out of control,” insisting that it “must be brought into line,” and declaring that “if I had my way, we’d just get rid of the EPA entirely.”24 Goldwater’s leadership in the emerging Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s and early 1980s illustrated just how strongly he felt about the need for a more conservative environmental platform. The rebellion’s locus was in the legislatures of a number of intermountain western states, where proponents advocated the return of federal land within their borders to state control, which could then decide how to best manage it, environmentally or otherwise. Rhetorically, the rebels draped themselves in rugged-pioneer trappings and preached the gospel of states’ rights, free enterprise, and deregulation, the pillars of Goldwater’s conservatism and political career. Critics scoVed, seeing the “rebellion” as simple greed swaddled in an antifederalist mantle, dedicated to short-circuiting federal land management in the name of private gain. Goldwater, for his part, embraced the rebellion enthusiastically, as well as its best-known federal ally, Secretary of the Interior James Watt. President Ronald Reagan appointed Watt—a lawyer and former president of the intensely anti-environmental Mountain States Legal Foundation—to assist his campaign to restrain federal environmental regulation, and Watt was almost universally despised by American environmentalists in the early 1980s because of the commitment he brought to the task during his short tenure. Goldwater deemed him “an exceedingly Wne Secretary” and defended him vigorously, much to the consternation of a number of constituents.25 More evidence of Goldwater’s opposition came with the debate over the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, known informally as the Alaska wilderness bill. It was a monumental proposal, calling for wilderness designation for over 100 million acres of federal land in the state and “wild and scenic” status for over two dozen rivers. Goldwater, deep in the middle of the Sagebrush Rebellion, refused to support the bill and, indeed, voted against it and also in favor of every amendment intended to weaken it. The bill would lock up land that Alaskans badly wanted and needed for economic growth, he argued, but its supporters had only their self-interest, and the votes of environmentalists, in mind. The end result was, Goldwater

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told an Arizona state senator, “probably the worst legislative foul up that I’ve seen in all my years in the Senate,” intended to make “one gigantic . . . national park out of the State of Alaska.” Undaunted, Congress passed the bill and President Jimmy Carter signed it into law in December 1980.26

New Green Shoots Despite its appearances, however, Goldwater’s Reagan era remonstration did not signify an end to his concern for the environment. On the contrary, his commitment would make something of a comeback in the last two decades of his life. His continuing devotion to environmental protection mirrored his activism for abortion and gay rights, which is usually considered at odds with the Republican Right. But it also reXected the extent to which post-1980 conservatism, and not just the senator’s own politics, remained complex, conXicting, and in Xux. James Morton Turner has argued that the Sagebrush Rebellion “played an important role in the consolidation of modern conservatism,” because it channeled long-standing western resentment over federal land management into the emergent New Right. Goldwater’s support for it indicated that, although conservatism had much evolved since 1964, and his own inXuence on the movement had waned, he was still largely in sync with its development. But not entirely; in 1982, with the ashes of the rebellion still warm, Goldwater introduced legislation designating Arizona’s Aravaipa Canyon as a federal wilderness. He waxed eloquent on the Senate Xoor about its “beautiful multicolored cliVs [that] rise as high as 1,000 feet,” its lush vegetation, wildlife populations, and recreational opportunities. But the more far-reaching 1984 Arizona National Forest Wilderness Act best represented his continuing ambivalence about federal environmentalism. As he had with his Grand Canyon expansion plan, Goldwater sponsored this bipartisan bill with Morris Udall, and when it became law on August 28, 1984, it designated nearly thirty parcels of Arizona public lands as wilderness, under the auspices of the very Wilderness Act that Goldwater had rejected two decades before.27 Later, near the end of his life, Goldwater accepted an honorary membership in the group Republicans for Environmental Protection

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(REP). As the name implied, REP was (and remains) an organization of Republicans that took pride in the GOP’s legacy of federal environmental protection, regretted that the party seemed to have abandoned the issue to liberals, and in general was not at all comfortable with the anti-environmentalism that dominated in the wake of the Reagan years. Given the widening distance between the GOP and its ideological godfather in the 1990s over issues like gays in the military, abortion, and the inXuence of the religious Right, Goldwater’s relationship with REP suggested that, as with these other issues, he no longer felt that the Republican Party’s environmental stances matched his own. It also suggested that Goldwater continued to search, as he had since Earth Day, for a proper governmental response to environmental challenges, one that recognized the need for federal action while retaining faith in free markets, property rights, and small government. Here he shared the mission of conservative and libertarianleaning “free-market environmentalists” of the 1970s and 1980s, a small and diverse group of activists and thinkers who united a traditionally liberal concern for environmental protection with a preference for individual actions and market-based solutions and a distinct lack of faith in regulation.28 Goldwater’s Wnal allegiances, and indeed his entire time in oYce, speak to the character, complexity, and depth of postwar environmentalism, a movement broad enough in its concerns and constituencies to accommodate the ideological breadth of the era’s politics. Clearly, environmentalism attracted liberals and the Left, but it also spoke to conservatives and played an important role in how the Right grew, transformed, and succeeded in the 1970s and 1980s. After 1964 conservatives struggled to Wnd a suitable response to all kinds of social and cultural changes, chief among them escalating environmental degradation and the demand for a federal role in preventing it. Goldwater made his way through this political thicket, his responses shaped by both his personal desires and larger political developments. In the process he exempliWed how the Right tied itself to older traditions, modern politics, and new initiatives. “Green Goldwater,” then, was not just an interesting quirk but also a symbolic bridge between the Republican Party’s more environmentally friendly past and its post-1980 anti-environmental future, a transitional Wgure suspended somewhere amid Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush.

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Notes Author’s Note: This chapter Wrst appeared in a slightly diVerent form as “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Senator Barry Goldwater and the Environmental Management State,” Environmental History 15 (October 2010): 587–611, published by Oxford University Press. 1. Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Majority (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 212, 217. On the rise of postwar environmentalism, see Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (San Francisco: Island Press, 1994); and Hal P. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Forth Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998). 2. Goldwater, Conscience of a Majority, 222. For examples of the era’s solemn environmental warnings, see Paul R. Ehlrich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and Technology (New York: Random House, 1971); and Donella Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (New York: Signet, 1972). 3. John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Richard W. Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of EYciency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); Elmo R. Richardson, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History,” Environmental History 7 (April 2002): 303–18; Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence, 491–526. For a broad history of government involvement in environmental protection, see Richard N. L. Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 4. J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000); Thomas G. Smith, Green Republican: John Saylor and the Preservation of America’s Wilderness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); Char Miller, GiVord Pinchot and the Making of American Environmentalism (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001); Kendrick Clements, Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); William Cronon, “When the G.O.P. Was Green,” New York Times, January 8, 2001; Samuel P. Hays, “From Conservation to Environment: Environmental Politics in the United

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States since World War II,” in Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental History, ed. Char Miller and Hal Rothman (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 124. 5. “Josephine Goldwater Biography,” Box 2, Folder 10, Goldwater Family Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe [hereinafter cited as GFP-AHF]. See also Peter Iverson, Barry Goldwater, Native Arizonan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 3–19; Barry M. Goldwater, Arizona Portraits, 1st ed. (Phoenix: privately printed, 7 October 1940). On Goldwater’s photography, see Iverson, Native Arizonan, 20–46; Barry Goldwater, Delightful Journey down the Green & Colorado Rivers (Tempe: Arizona Historical Foundation, 1970), 118. A good account of the Goldwaters’ trip may be found in Iverson, Native Arizonan, 27– 39, and “Barry and Peggy Goldwater—scrapbook 1939–41,” Box 24OV, GFPAHF; Barry Goldwater quoted in Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 57. See also Iverson, Native Arizonan, 40; “Grand Canyon Park and Nature (monument revised boundaries),” Box 175, Folder 8, Legislative Fragments, 85th Congress, Barry M. Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe [hereinafter cited as BMG-AHF]. 6. “Grand Canyon Park and Nature (monument revised boundaries).” 7. On reclamation in the West, see Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin, 1986); and Norris Hundley Jr., Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 8. A concise summary of the Central Arizona Project is Jack L. August Jr., “Water, Politics and the Arizona Dream: Carl Hayden and the Modern Origins of the Central Arizona Project, 1922–63,” Journal of Arizona History 40 (Winter 1999): 391–414. See also Robert Dean, “ ‘Dam Building Still Had Some Magic Then’: Stewart Udall, the Central Arizona Project, and the Evolution of the PaciWc Southwest Water Plan, 1963–1968,” PaciWc Historical Review 66 (February 1997): 81–98. For Goldwater’s anti-TVA sentiments, see Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1 April 1963, Vol. 109, pt. 4:5267; and Congressional Record, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 13 July 1954, Vol. 103, pt. 11:14187. On southern congressmen’s concerns, see Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 29 October 1963, Vol. 109, pt. 15:20437–38; and Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 11 September 1963, Vol. 109, appendix 5287–6583. 9. Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 161–81; Mark W. T. Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); Smith, Green Republican, 57–94. 10. Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 2 April 1953, Vol. 99, pt. 13:703; Congressional Record, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 28 March 1955, Vol. 101, pt. 3:3819.

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11. On the battle over the Grand Canyon dams, see Byron Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002). See also Dean, “‘Dam Building Still Had Some Magic Then,’ ” 83–84, 92–98; and Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 227–37; Barry Goldwater to Robert Michael, 7 January 1964, Box 5, Folder 12, 84–88th Congs. Files, BMG-AHF. 12. The text of the Wilderness Act of 1964 may be found at http://www .wilderness.net/NWPS/documents/publiclaws/88–577.pdf. Johnson’s “Great Society” speech may be found at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives .hom/speeches.hom/640522.asp. 13. Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 8 April 1963, Vol. 109, pt. 5:5895; Barry Goldwater to K. W. Macdonald, 16 May 1963, Box 15, Folder 1, 84–88th Congs. Files, BMG-AHF; Congressional Record, 87th Cong., 1st sess., 5 September 1961, Vol. 107, pt. 13:18087–88; Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 316–41. 14. Peter Iverson, “ ‘This Old Mountain Is Worth the Fight’: Barry Goldwater and the Campaign to Save Camelback Mountain,” Journal of Arizona History 38 (Spring 1997): 41–56. See also Iverson, Native Arizonan, 201–11; Barry Goldwater to Charles H. Orme Jr., 20 January 1970, 91st Cong. Files, Box 33, Folder 5, BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to Charles H. Orme Jr., 22 November 1971, Constituent Service, 92nd Congress (1971–1972), Box 12, “EPA (1 of 2),” BMG-AHF. 15. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: the Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 23–52. On Nixon, see also Flippen, Nixon and the Environment. On other conservative attempts to politically manage environmental concerns, see Meg Jacobs, “ The Conservative Struggle and the Energy Crisis,” Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 193–209. 16. On Goldwater’s support for the Clean Air Act, see Congressional Record, 91st Cong., 2nd sess., 18 February 1970, Vol. 116, pt. 3:3731; Barry Goldwater to Sergeant George J. Zay Jr., 15 October 1970, 91st Cong. Files, Box 46, Folder 5, BMG-AHF; and Barry Goldwater to James W. Pullaro, 7 December 1970, “BS” Series, Box 1, Folder 49, BMG-AHF. On his support for the EPA, see Barry Goldwater to Danny Ellenberger, 7 December 1972, 92nd Cong. Files, Box 41, Folder 3, BMG-AHF; and Barry Goldwater to Michele Moots, 2 February 1971, “BS” Series, Box 1, Folder 49, BMG-AHF. The quote about “protect[ing] the atmosphere” is in Barry Goldwater to David Sterzing, 12 December 1969, 91st Cong. Files, Box 7, Folder 1, BMG-AHF. The quote about “what’s happening to our environment” is from Barry Goldwater to Robert A. Erkins, 11 December 1969, Legislative Series, 91st Cong., Public Works Committee, Box 15, “Air and Water Pollution (1 of 5),” BMG-AHF. The quote about the federal government “mov[ing] in” is in Barry Goldwater to William P. Reilly, 30 July 1971, Constituent Service, 92nd Cong., Issue Mail, Box 7, “Pollution (letters from students),” BMG-AHF. The quote about Detroit is in Barry Goldwater to Keith Anderson, 13 March 1975, Constituent Service, 94th Cong., Issue Mail, “Auto Emissions” [no box or folder], BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to CliVord Hardin, 15 July 1970,

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Constituent Service, 92nd Cong., Projects and Programs “Forest Service,” Box 4, Folder 1, BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to C. M. Overton, 5 August 1971, Constituent Service, 92nd Cong., Issue Mail, Box 10, “Underground Nuclear Tests—Amchitka, Alaska,” BMG-AHF. The quote claiming that “something has to be done” is in Barry Goldwater to Charles W. Dryden, 26 April 1972, Constituent Service, 92nd Cong., Box 8, “Pollution (3 of 3),” BMG-AHF. 17. Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., 17 September 1974, Vol. 120, pt. 23:31433. On Goldwater’s support for solar and other renewable energy sources, see Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 24 September 1973, Vol. 119, pt. 24:31033; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 119, pt. 30 (5 December 1973), p. 39757; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., 19 February 1974, Vol. 120, pt. 3:3339; Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 26 March 1975, Vol. 121, pt. 7:8753; Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 11 September 1975, Vol. 121, pt. 22:28642–44; and Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 13 November 1975, Vol. 121, pt. 27:36424. See also Barry Goldwater to Edward F. Medley, July 17, 1975, 94th Cong. Files, Box 26, Folder 4, BMG-AHF. 18. Barry Goldwater to Ollie O. Barney, 27 April 1972, Legislative Series, 92nd Cong., Box 21, BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to Mary Caldwell, 24 July 1969, Cong. 91, Box 42, Folder 10, “Wilderness Dept. of Agriculture Legislative General Correspondence 1969–1970,” BMG-AHF; “BS” Series, Box 3, Folder 17, “Co-sponsor S. 717 to establish Hells Canyon-Snake River,” BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to Mr. and Mrs. Daryl R. Schwichtenberg, 7 May 1974, Constituent Service, 93rd Cong., “Issue Mail (Feb.–June 1974),” BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to JeV Boyer, 1 May 1974, Constituent Service, 93rd Cong., “Issue Mail (Feb.– June 1974),” BMG-AHF. 19. Barry Goldwater to Robert Lovgren, 20 March 1970, Constituent Service, 92nd Cong., Box 4, “Colorado River Trips,” BMG-AHF. 20. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 2nd sess., 30 August 1976, Vol. 122, pt. 22 28408–09; Congressional Quarterly Roll Call 1976: A Chronology and Analysis of Votes in the House and Senate, 94th Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1977), p. 74-S; for an example of his “worst vote” sentiments, see Barry Goldwater to John D. Leshy, 10 September 1982, “E” series, Box 2, Folder 10, BMG-AHF. Abbey and Brower’s anti-dam sentiments are well known. Abbey’s most famous expression of his dislike is his Wctional book The Monkeywrench Gang (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975), which told the story of a group of “ecotage” saboteurs who dreamed of blowing it up. Brower’s growing doubts about the dam may be seen in The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1963). On Abbey, see James M. Cahalan, Edward Abbey: A Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001). On Brower, see David Brower with Steve Chapple, Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). 21. Morris K. Udall to Barry Goldwater, 17 April 1969, Legislative Series, 91st Cong., Interior and Insular AVairs, Box 11, “Enlarge Boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park (1 of 6),” BMG-AHF; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 1st

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sess., 20 March 1973, Vol. 119, pt. 7:8690–94; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 24 September 1973, pt. 24:31014–15; Barry Goldwater to Sam Steiger, 7 December 1972, Legislative Series, 91st Cong., Interior and Insular AVairs, Box 11, “Enlarge Boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park (5 of 6),” BMG-AHF. On Goldwater’s support for Native Americans, see Iverson, Native Arizonan, 151–88, and on his 1973 plan, see 211–15. See Legislative Series, 83rd Cong., Box 10, BMG-AHF, for details on Goldwater’s 1957 proposal. 22. On Club objections, see John A. McComb to Barry Goldwater, 12 June 1970, Legislative Series, 91st Cong., Interior and Insular AVairs, Box 11, “Enlarge Boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park (4 of 6),” BMG-AHF, and John A. McComb to Barry Goldwater, 31 March 1972, Legislative Series, 91st Cong., Interior and Insular AVairs, Box 11, “Enlarge Boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park (5 of 6),” BMG-AHF; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., 20 May 1974, Vol. 120, pt. 12:15357; Barry Goldwater to Raymond Sherwin, 12 July 1973, Boards and Memberships, Box 10, BMG-AHF. 23. Barry M. Goldwater, “ The Big Lie and the SST,” New York Times, 16 December 1970, 47; Congressional Record, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 24 March 1971, Vol. 117, pt. 6:7795. On the SST, see Mel Horwitch, Clipped Wings: The American SST ConXict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). See also Joshua Rosenbloom, “ The Politics of the American SST Programme: Origin, Opposition and Termination,” Social Studies of Science 11 (November 1981): 403–23. 24. Congressional Record, 95th Cong., 2nd sess., 8 August 1978, Vol. 124, pt. 18:24851; Barry Goldwater to Angelo Mercine, 3 February 1977, Constituent Service, 95th Cong., Issue Mail, “EPA” [no box or folder], BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to G. Paul Carden, 28 February 1977, Constituent Service, 95th Cong., Issue Mail, “Clean Air Act” [no box or folder], BMG-AHF; Barry Goldwater to Henry G. Metzger, 1 March 1979, Constituent Service, 96th Cong., Issue Mail, “Clean Air Act” [no box or folder], BMG-AHF. 25. Congressional Record, 98th Cong., 1st sess., 29 September 1983, Vol. 129, pt. 19:26398. 26. Congressional Roll Call 1980: A Chronology and Analysis of Votes in the House and Senate, 96th Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1981), 48-S–51-S; Barry Goldwater to Stan Turley, 14 August 1980, Constituent Service, 96th Cong., Issue Mail [no box or folder], BMG-AHF. On the Alaska Wilderness Bill, and the larger context of natural resource development in the state, see Stephen Haycox, Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2002). See also Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 272–315. 27. James Morton Turner, “ ‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History 96 (June 2009): 123–48; Congressional Record, 98th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 129, pt. 3 (1 March 1983), p. 3300; Congressional Record, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 1 February 1984, Vol. 130, pt. 1:1316–21; Congressional Record, 98th Cong.,

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2nd sess., 9 August 1984, Vol. 130, pt. 17:23353–56 and 23434–40; Stewart Udall to Barry Goldwater and Morris Udall, 29 June 1983, “Unprocessed,” BMG-AHF. 28. William Rentschler, Goldwater: A Tribute to a Twentieth-Century Political Icon (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2000), 186. On “free market environmentalism,” see Terry L. Anderson and Donald Leal, Free Market Environmentalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001); John R. E. Bliese, The Greening of Conservative America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); and Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

10 Time Is an Elusive Companion Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, and the Dynamic of Modern Conservatism william a. link

in the 1970s, Americans witnessed an important political transformation—what historians describe as a rightward turn in national life— and this is a subject that historians in recent years have begun to explore in considerable detail. Much of the new literature on modern conservatism has stressed the grassroots nature of a wider social and political shift occurring during the 1960s and 1970s, and scholars have emphasized the convergence of issues that united conservatives around the country. Still, little of this literature has fully accounted for the signiWcance of national-level leaders of the American Right, how a national network was forged in dedication to upending the liberal state. For many modern conservatives Barry Goldwater’s run at the White House in 1964 was an epochal event. Although trounced by Lyndon Johnson’s landslide majority, Goldwater articulated a political vision that included antistatism and hostility to the vestiges of the New Deal, unqualiWed opposition to the Soviet Union in foreign policy, and a spectrum of resistance to the civil rights revolution. These were all 238

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issues familiar to conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s, and they had already appeared prominently in congressional and presidential politics. The mid-1960s proved crucial in deWning the political coalition leading up to the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, but the subsequent ascent of modern conservatism disguised signiWcant divergence within the movement. Jesse Helms charted his political career from the election of 1964. Switching from Democratic registration to Republican in 1970, he subsequently was elected as North Carolina’s Wrst Republican senator since the nineteenth century. Both longtime members of the Senate, Helms and Goldwater served as heroes to conservative activists from the 1960s to the 1990s. At the same time, the two men represented the diversity existing in modern conservatism, and their careers suggested strands that characterized the modern American Right. Goldwater and Helms shared core political values, but Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy assembled only one part of the modern conservative coalition. Although Helms remained an admirer of Goldwater, their differences by the early 1980s help to illustrate signiWcant tensions. For although Goldwater provided a deWning moment in 1964, by the time that the conservative ascendancy took hold—from the late 1970s to the turn of the twenty-Wrst century—the American Right had reimagined itself. Goldwater enjoyed a deep reservoir of aVection among conservatives; in this regard, Helms was no exception. By the time that Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Goldwater had become what the New York Times called an “old-school elder statesman” of the conservative cause.1 “ There wouldn’t even be a conservative movement,” Helms liked to tell people, “if it hadn’t been for Barry Goldwater.” Had it not been for Goldwater’s “terriWc Wght” for the conservative cause, he wrote, “I’d be in Raleigh running a television company.” Without Goldwater, said Helms, “it never would have crossed my mind to run for the Senate.2 Nonetheless, there were signiWcant ideological diVerences dividing Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater. In policy, and especially in domestic policy, they sometimes diverged. Barry Goldwater served as an icon for Jesse Helms and other movement conservatives; his politics, seemingly representing principles rather than politics, deWned the

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ideological purity of the American Right. Goldwater’s anticommunism, his unstinting opposition to a big federal government, and his dedication to individual freedom provided an umbrella beneath which diVerent elements of modern conservatism could reside. In the 1960s, when Helms worked in North Carolina as a television broadcaster and editorialist, he often used Goldwater to represent a wider conservative coalition. Helms’s admiration for Goldwater and what he stood for thus makes their relationship all the more illuminating in explaining the complicated, shifting dynamics of modern conservatism.3 Growing up in the small North Carolina town of Monroe during the 1920s and 1930s, Helms spent two years in college and then dove into a career as a newspaper journalist, radio announcer, and, beginning in 1960, full-time TV conservative. Between November 1960 and February 1972, Helms broadcast more than 2,700 television editorials. These “Viewpoint” editorials provided Helms the chance to shape a political message that was rooted in opposition to the civil rights movement, hostility to liberal elites and student protesters, and suspicion of changes accompanying the 1960s counterculture. Although Helms would later seem a southern hayseed to his critics, he was a skilled manipulator of media and a keen student of language, with a knack for identifying the political emotions of ordinary people. Moreover, deeply connected to national conservatives, he maintained a large correspondence that sustained a far-Xung network, north and south, east and west. Helms understood the power of modern media, and as a television broadcaster came to understand the importance of media to modern political culture. In the “Viewpoint” editorials, Helms gained his sea legs in the rough-and-tumble of rhetorical warfare. For him, the 1960s were a true testing ground that shaped his subsequent political career.4 Even before Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run, Helms admired the Arizona senator from afar. He enthusiastically endorsed Goldwater’s brand of conservatism, as espoused in his 1960 manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, and praised his ideas on television broadcasts. A nominal Democrat who never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, Helms became a dedicated conservative. He believed that Goldwater represented a new wave of ideological change. Conservatism, Helms predicted in 1960, was “potentially more popular than we realize.” Goldwater’s defense of freedom, according to Helms, was

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essential. Freedom was like a “handful of sand,” Helms informed viewers on December 7, 1960, and the “moment you relax any of your Wngers, it starts slipping away from you.” Helms, like Goldwater, considered himself a man who placed principle above party politics. Goldwater might never rise to party leadership, he explained, but “he strikes us as a man who couldn’t care less,” both “doing and saying what he thinks is right.” Goldwater was a person, Helms said in December 1961, who spoke “without timidity and without hesitation” and who expressed the “very same things that a great many other Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, have been thinking for a great while but not saying because they feared the political consequences.” His liberal critics might jeer at him, but his consistent application of principle would eventually bear fruit. “Sooner or later,” Helms said, “the truths which he has borrowed from JeVerson, Jackson, Franklin and others will set us free.”5 Helms’s views about Goldwater were self-referential: he saw himself as similarly ideological, similarly standing above the corruption of political compromise. And, like Goldwater, he believed that his conservatism represented the views of most Americans, whose information and understanding of public life had been Wltered through a liberal media. In 1962 Helms noted how television reporters casually referred to Goldwater as “rightwing” and “extremist.” The media’s marginalization of Goldwater—and implicitly Helms’s marginalization— illustrated the “hazards of presuming to speak out in opposition to the so-called ‘liberal’ trend in America.” This provided an example of “a matter of words, and the eVective use of them by the political liberals of our society.” “What Peter says about Paul,” Helms chided, “tells more about Peter than it does about Paul.”6 Helms realized that Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy could pave the way for a larger conservative revolution. Criticizing the liberal media for distorting Goldwater’s message, Helms asserted that Goldwater, after his victory in the June 1964 California primary, represented “the last stand of conservatism in the United States.” He was a polarizing Wgure, “an attractive Wgure to some, and the opposite to others,” but his campaign was premised on oVering genuine choice and upsetting the post-1945 political consensus that was stiXing true political dialogue.” When all was said and done, this was “what the country has been needing for some time.” Although it was likely that voters would

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overwhelmingly choose “more of the same,” Jesse believed that “freedom’s best hope of survival lies in the people’s having a clear-cut choice.” In July 1964 he noted that Goldwater would have “served his country well for, between now and November, all Americans will be exposed to an inescapable study of the nation’s principles and fundamentals.” Goldwater was depicted in the press as a “trigger-happy warmonger, as a cruel man who would cast his nation into starvation and despair; as, in short, a monster,” he complained in September. It was hardly necessary to assert that such an image was “monstrously false.”7 Helms, like dedicated housewives and determined publishing magnates, was not discouraged by Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in the presidential election of 1964. Goldwater’s defeat reXected a lack of support among those lacking “the courage to try to oVset the tempting and beguiling lures that captivate the dreams of massive numbers of voters.” Goldwater’s message of “self-reliance and personal responsibility” was not easy to communicate to unresponsive voters. But Goldwater also ran into an “emotional phalanx” when he explained that government was unable to provide anything “that it has not Wrst taken from the people, or borrowed from future generations.” When Goldwater distinguished between “the needy and the lazy,” he was labeled as heartless. “When he called for a strengthening of the original concept of Social Security,” Helms said, “he was charged with proposing to destroy it. For advocating for his nation a posture of strength in the world, he was labeled a warmonger.” Johnson, in contrast, ran a basically dishonest campaign in which he promised “continued peace and security, without ever quite revealing the nature of the peace we now have, nor the kind of security for which we might hope.” What Goldwater endured in 1964, Helms concluded three years later, “does not diVer, except perhaps in degree, from what all conservatives—in oYce and out—have learned to expect as their lot.”8 After election to the Senate in 1972, Helms looked to Goldwater as a prominent member of the small conservative Republican element in Congress. “It means a very great deal to me to be able to serve in the Senate with you,” Helms wrote early in his Wrst term, in November 1973. A close friend of Jesse’s commented to Goldwater that he never saw the North Carolina senator “without your name coming up in the conversation,” adding that he considered it a “high honor to be able to serve in the Senate with you.”9

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But Helms’s admiring comments masked substantive diVerences. During his early years in the Senate, he looked to fellow southern senators such as Strom Thurmond, Harry F. Byrd, and James Allen, rather than to Goldwater, for tutelage, instruction, and support. Helms quickly became known for his ability to master the Senate rules and to publicize conservative causes by tying up debate and deliberation. Skillfully exploiting the amendment process and Wlibuster to his advantage, in the 1970s Helms—who was emerging as a leading member of movement conservatives—rarely won such battles. “We lost,” as Helms described the outcome of one such Wght, “but the odds were such that it would have been miraculous if we had won.”10 Unlike in many areas of domestic policy, Helms and Goldwater continued to agree on the foreign policy issues at the heart of postwar conservatism: both strongly opposed détente and believed the military should combat Soviet expansionism. Goldwater was, perhaps, an even more uncompromising anticommunist than Helms—which is saying something. As staunch anticommunists, Helms and Goldwater agreed in their support of white minority regimes in Africa, disapproval of better relations with “Red” China, and opposition to ratiWcation of the Panama Canal treaties in 1978. When Jesse sponsored a resolution making Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn an honorary US citizen in 1974, Goldwater refused to support it. “I just can’t bring myself to giving honorary citizenship to anyone from that country,” he wrote, though Solzhenitsyn “would come as close to getting it as anyone I have ever known.”11 Goldwater and Helms were personally cordial; despite his hardnosed public image, Helms was one of the better-liked members of the Senate. When Helms experienced a stiV challenge from incumbent North Carolina governor Jim Hunt for his Senate seat in 1984, Goldwater visited the state and campaigned for him. Throughout their years in the Senate, the two men enjoyed good relations, though it cannot be said that they were personally close. Nor were the two men true political allies. Goldwater agreed with Helms that one of his favorite tactics—forcing votes on hopeless causes in order to put his opponents on record—was sometimes beneWcial. There were, Goldwater wrote Helms in May 1976, “some who talk one way at home, and vote another way here.” But obstructionism was usually not Goldwater’s style, despite his willingness to lend Helms occasional

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assistance. Goldwater did not participate in the conservative mobilization that Helms led during the 1970s and 1980s. Goldwater did not approve of the aggressive tactics that Helms and his allies so often employed. In 1975, when Helms’s political organization Wrst began direct-mail fund-raising, Goldwater refused to permit his name to be used. His name, he wrote, had been “used so much over the last few years that I am afraid it won’t have any meaning and I don’t want to see it go down any further.”12 The divergence between Goldwater and Helms, over time, grew most apparent on issues of race and culture, issues that became deWning for modern conservatism as it evolved after the 1960s. Certainly, Goldwater was no friend of the civil rights movement, and his presidential campaign made a strong and successful appeal to whites unhappy with the end of segregation. Both men pitched their opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act in constitutional terms; both opposed the measure because of the expansion of federal power. But Helms’s views about the federalization of civil rights—unlike Goldwater’s— remained remarkably unchanged throughout his life. He was personally oVended by any suggestion that he was racist, and he was convinced that he had many black friends and had their best interests in mind. He considered any insinuations about his racial attitudes profoundly insulting, any suggestions of hostility toward black people oVensive. When interviewers pressed too hard about his racial attitudes, he bristled. Once, during a long biographical interview with North Carolina public television that aired in several taped segments, he stormed oV the set when the interviewer pressed too hard about his positions on civil rights. Helms was, however, tone deaf about matters of race. He unquestionably shared the prejudices common to southern whites of his time and, like many small-town whites, ignored the basic injustice of Jim Crow and mounting black discontent with it. The conclusion of the Raleigh News and Observer in 1972 that Helms was “the most notable antagonist of Negro rights in the last 10 years in North Carolina” could easily deWne the rest of his career.13 When the Supreme Court ordered the end of segregated public schools in 1954, Helms became a vocal opponent. After Arkansas governor Orval Faubus blocked court-ordered integration and President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched paratroopers to provide for the integration of Central High School

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in Little Rock in September 1957, Helms was appalled. Federal intervention in the South, he wrote, was “exactly in tune” with Karl Marx’s predictions: government-required integration amounted to socialism. “ The cackles” you heard, Jesse wrote tellingly in a Tarheel Banker editorial, had “a Russian accent.”14 Helms saw political potential in framing an ideological message that avoided overt racial appeals but appealed to white fears. Crude racial appeals, he advised in December 1957, remained ineVective with those possessing a “sincere misunderstanding of the South’s problem”—suburban whites who mostly preferred issues of race to be coded. To reach white audiences, Helms argued for the more skillful use of media. Whites should communicate more eVectively, he advised, to a national conservative constituency who, armed with the truth, would oppose governmental intrusion and meddling in southern aVairs. To overcome northern white “misunderstanding,” Helms emphasized anticommunism and opposition to federal intervention; he also suggested that racial mores would change only through slow, voluntary action by whites and self-help by blacks, who, he claimed, were not yet ready for leadership. Federal intervention in civil rights meant socialism, Helms argued, and greater and greater governmental encroachment. He worried less about integration, he wrote in December 1958, than about “the destruction of the fundamentals that made this government unique in all history.”15 Increasingly, Helms crafted a conservative message that melded racial anxieties with antigovernment sentiment. Unreconciled to federal intervention in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964–65, like Goldwater, he opposed the revolution in civil rights that occurred as a result of federal intervention. Yet he went further than Goldwater in developing a new politics of race. After the end of segregation, many of his WRAL “Viewpoint” editorials dealt with how social deterioration and decline of the 1960s had resulted from the civil rights revolution. Detesting the black civil rights leadership, Helms viewed direct-action protest as an illegal Xouting of the law that had encouraged crime and social order. Helms’s “Viewpoint” editorials suggested a link between crime and white anxieties about an urban black population. Civil rights protest, he believed, had spun out of control in the black urban uprisings that erupted for four summers after 1964. Urban violence seemed to conWrm Helms’s general assertions about

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the civil rights movement’s disrespect for law and order and its abdication of “responsible” racial leadership. Too many African American leaders wanted “open and violent conXict with their white neighbors,” he told viewers in April 1964. Black people deserved a “right to pursue progress, and to strive for opportunity,” but their leaders wrongly encouraged them to “misbehave and violate the law in demanding what they vaguely call ‘freedom.’ ”16 Helms in the 1960s made an important leap in the repackaging of the race issue to a national audience. Like conservative publishing kingpins, Helms suggested that the civil rights revolution’s main legacy was social disorder. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience campaign had created a climate that encouraged “riots and anarchy in the streets in recent years.” King, Helms charged, was joined by white liberals, a “gaggle of preachers and professors” who joined in Xouting the law, and these liberals had created a “condition in which the vicious and the irresponsible have gone to war with all society.” In Helms’s world, legal and social order were disintegrating. The nation raced toward anarchy, he warned in June 1964: in their disrespect for the law, civil rights protesters enjoyed the tacit support of federal authorities. When they took the law into their own hands, suddenly legal wrongs became civil rights, and the law was violated “deliberately and repeatedly.” Helms sensed an atmospheric transformation that was gripping white America in the 1960s, and he took full advantage of mounting white frustration and anxiety with the civil rights revolution.17 When he joined the Senate in 1972, Helms remained an inveterate opponent of the legacy of the civil rights revolution. Throughout the 1970s Helms remained the Senate’s strongest opponent of federally mandated school busing, and, based on the widespread unpopularity of busing, he succeeded in turning that issue into a cause with national appeal. He fought a lonely and largely futile battle to block the extension and expansion of the Voting Rights Act in 1982. But nothing better illustrates his continuing hostility to the civil rights legacy than his Wlibuster of the bill, in October 1983, to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. Although there is no evidence of “subversion” on King’s part—despite extensive eVorts by J. Edgar Hoover to prove it—Helms revived the old connection between anticommunism and hostility to the civil rights movement. King’s views, Helms told fellow senators on October 3, 1983, were “those of a radical

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political minority that had little to do with racial minorities.” King took few measures to dissociate himself from the “most extreme political elements in the United States,” and he exhibited an “actionoriented Marxism” that was “not compatible with the concepts of this country.” These charges were ludicrous, and they persuaded few senators, but they laid out Helms’s interpretation of the legacy of the civil rights movement.18 There were important diVerences between Helms and Goldwater about race, civil rights, and federal intervention. Where Helms became a conservative ideologue out of the taut environment of the highly racialized political world of North Carolina, Goldwater had no such political roots, no such context. His conservatism was primarily anticommunist and antistatist, and his core belief was in the sanctity of individual freedom. While Helms was busy organizing opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in North Carolina, in the 1950s Goldwater endorsed voting rights for African Americans, even criticizing the Kennedy administration in the 1960s for lax federal enforcement. Goldwater also favored a constitutional amendment banning the poll tax. Still, it is undeniable that Goldwater beneWted politically from white reaction to the civil rights revolution. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater opposed federalized school desegregation and asserted that the matter should remain an issue of state jurisdiction. He vocally led Senate opposition to the Civil Rights Act in June 1964, and during the campaign he backtracked from earlier principled support for black voting rights. Without question, his campaign exploited white backlash during the presidential election of 1964; all of the states he carried, aside from Arizona, were Deep South. Goldwater walked what one scholar calls a “tightrope” between personal abhorrence of discrimination and a political need for southern votes. Like most other opponents of the Civil Rights Act, he subsequently became reconciled to its necessity and, unlike Helms, accepted federal civil rights protections. When Helms opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, Goldwater remained uninvolved. Nor did he support Helms’s Wlibuster of the King holiday, though in actual fact very few senators supported Helms’s eVorts.19 In some respects Goldwater’s 1964 campaign represented a highwater mark of an older form of conservatism that emphasized libertarianism, anticommunism, and antistatism. In the aftermath of the

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tumult of the 1960s, new issues bubbled to the surface that, during the next decades, became increasingly important in the modern conservative agenda. In the new culture wars that raged in the late twentiethcentury United States, these two paragons of post-1964 conservatives diverged sharply over core issues. As a TV editorialist, Helms attacked the student revolt and the 1960s counterculture as evidence of a wider moral decline. Goldwater often reached the same conclusion, yet he recoiled at religious conservatives’ politicization. In contrast, Helms sponsored and championed the mobilization of Christian evangelicals in the 1970s. The cultural issues of the 1970s drew from an expanded reaction against the main features of the 1960s—youth rebellion, sexual permissiveness, and expanded rights for women. Helms aimed his Wre on abortion and school prayer and, later during the 1980s, sexuality. A newly mobilized, well-organized, and highly politicized movement of conservative evangelicals provided additional energy and leadership. Some of these elements were present in Goldwater’s presidential campaign of 1964, still more in Reagan’s unsuccessful presidential campaign of 1976, but they expanded and solidiWed during the late 1970s and 1980s. Raised in a small-town culture that imbued him with a Southern Baptist ethos, Helms never wavered from religious fundamentalism. With his support and participation, Jerry Falwell, an evangelist from Lynchburg, Virginia, organized the Moral Majority in the spring of 1979. In North Carolina and nationally, Helms helped to incorporate the Christian Right into the conservative mainstream. Organizations such as the Churches of Life and Liberty and the North Carolina chapter of the Moral Majority used the resources of his political organization, the North Carolina Congressional Club, to organize and to establish themselves as viable entities. By the 1980s Helms had become Christian evangelicals’ advocate in the Senate.20 Among the most important issues arousing evangelicals during the 1970s were abortion and school prayer. In both instances the Supreme Court altered the status quo, by prohibiting the states’ requirement of prayer in public schools (in 1962) and states’ criminalization of abortion (in 1973). For conservatives, the federal courts’ intervention on school prayer and abortion indicated moral decay. Helms presented a simplistic view of social change that evangelicals embraced: secularization had diminished the moral Wber of the country. The

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elimination of prayer marked the dominance of a “totally secularist philosophy” in public schools, Helms wrote in his autobiographical Where Free Men Shall Stand (1976), which had led to permissiveness, the drug culture, pornography, and crime. The school prayer ban meant “freedom from religion.” He became the Senate’s leading advocate of restoring prayer to the schools, and, though unsuccessful, he attracted attention to his cause—and made school prayer high in the conservative agenda.21 Helms also became the Senate’s leading opponent of legal abortion, an issue that became vital to the wives and mothers who would prove the religious Right’s shock troops. Abortion, he said, could never be a “moral way to solve a problem of immorality—or, for that matter, a population problem,” and it was “a few steps away from the reasoning that Hitler used to exterminate people.” In the September 1975 issue of Human Events, Jesse declared that it was “terribly wrong . . . to kill these children in order to serve the convenience of those who may not want them around.” Abortion, Helms thought, was “murder—and no other face can be put upon it.” Only Wve months after the Supreme Court issued its decision, in June 1973, Helms proposed a right-to-life, anti-abortion constitutional amendment. Although the amendment made little progress, as with school prayer, Helms sought to force his fellow senators to put themselves on record.22 Joining with the Christian Right, Helms opposed the same cluster of values that they found outrageous. In early 1977, when Dade County, Florida, which included Miami, enacted a local ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, a popular movement began. Former Miss America Anita Bryant formed a grassroots organization, Save Our Children, Inc., in a successful eVort to repeal the law. Bryant’s campaign became the Wrst manifestation of an anti-gay movement attracting support from around the country and rapidly becoming a notable feature of late-twentieth-century conservatism. Helms endorsed Bryant’s campaign in March 1977 and described her as a “Wne and decent lady, a dedicated Christian, who had dared to speak out.” In June 1977, when Bryant’s movement succeeded in repealing the ordinance by a two-to-one margin, Helms wanted to expand nationally Bryant’s anti-gay-rights movement. Meeting with Bryant in Washington, Helms helped to discuss a national strategy to defeat other local antidiscrimination ordinances. He also suggested that he

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might seek an anti-homosexual-rights bill in Congress. Consistently opposed to gay rights in all forms, Helms established an unequivocal record about homosexuality in the 1970s.23 Opposition to feminism became another issue binding the Religious Right to a conservative movement in Xux. “We must reverse the trend,” Helms declared, “that says that women must be liberated from the dignity of motherhood and from femininity of her natural development.” In 1972 Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the measure was submitted to the states. But after twenty-two states quickly ratiWed, an anti-ERA movement emerged, and in 1977 Indiana became the thirty-Wfth—and last—state to ratify. As an opponent of manifestations of feminism, not surprisingly Helms opposed the ERA and became allied with Phyllis SchlaXy, perhaps the best-known antifeminist of the 1970s. Both opposed Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972, which equalized gender diVerences in intercollegiate athletics, and in 1975 Helms introduced the Equal Educational Opportunity Amendments Bill of 1975, which proposed to reverse Title IX. Anti-ERA activists feared that the amendment would transform the family and women’s role in it.24 Helms’s emphasis on cultural issues became even more pronounced after Goldwater left the Senate in 1987. Goldwater’s retirement marked the passing of an older-style conservatism, and the rise of a new, hardhitting cultural conservativism. The transition from Goldwater to Helms embodied this larger transformation. Jesse was the gay rights movement’s most determined opponent in the Senate. Outspoken in his views, he energized anti-gay political sentiment, while he became a hated political symbol to gay political organizers. In some respects, Helms’s positions on gay rights resembled his views on civil rights for blacks: in both instances, he condemned special treatment for a political minority. But in other respects his treatment of gay people went well beyond his posture toward African Americans. He instinctively recoiled at the very notion of civil rights for gay people, he told an interviewer in February 2000, and he objected primarily to any eVorts to legitimize homosexual lifestyles. Like many people of his generation, he did not object to closeted gay people; he had “no problem” with their private behavior, but he objected to homosexuals “parading around” and demanding that they be regarded as “normal.” Why, he asked, did gays “feel compelled to announce that they are gay?”

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Helms also opposed AIDS education that legitimized homosexuality. AIDS, he suggested, was primarily a disease of homosexuals, whose behavior had hastened the epidemic. Providing special treatment for gay people, as one aide put it, was “fundamentally unfair.” Public-health measures focusing on safe sex were less eVective than attempts to limit or eliminate homosexual behavior. The truth, he declared, was that “sodomy, adultery, and fornication are not now, nor have they ever been, safe.” Current AIDS education eVorts, which focused on safe sex, revealed that public-health oYcials had “their heads in the sand.” AIDS threatened the majority of the heterosexual population; strict public-health measures should isolate the homosexual minority and protect the heterosexual population. Despite public discussion of the disease, Helms said in a Senate speech in June 1987, there had been few steps to “protect from this dreaded disease those who do not now have it”; the “real discrimination” was that the law left the uninfected unprotected. AIDS had become the Wrst “politically protected” disease in history, and “powerful homosexual rights groups” had silenced the opposition. Gay rights groups protested “any public initiatives to protect the general public beyond research and education” because they believed that public welfare was less important than “their civil rights to engage in unnatural and immoral sexual behavior.” Into the 1990s, Helms continued to resist any concessions on gay rights. He had “no respect for homosexuals—for perverts,” he told the Charlotte Observer in 1992, adding that if that statement was considered shocking, it remained “exactly the way I feel about it.”25 About these cultural wars Goldwater and Helms diverged most starkly. In a curious irony, Helms’s campaign for cultural purity abandoned conservatives’ historical and Goldwater’s steadfast antipathy to governmental restrictions on individual liberty: in all of these areas, government would assert a supervisory, regulatory role. In this sense, Goldwater was more consistent. After his retirement from the Senate in 1987, Goldwater’s disaVection with the new conservatism grew. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Goldwater became a supporter of gay rights. In June 1992 he endorsed a civil rights ordinance under consideration by the Phoenix city council, and in 1993, he supported homosexuals serving in the armed forces. “You don’t have to be ‘straight’ to Wght and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight,” he declared in a letter to the Washington Post in June 1993.

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Goldwater served as honorary cochair of Americans Against Discrimination, which sought federal protections against anti-gay job discrimination. “ The big thing is to make this country, along with every other country in the world with a few exceptions,” Goldwater told a reporter in 1994, “quit discriminating against people just because they’re gay.” “You don’t have to agree with it, but they have a constitutional right to be gay. And that’s what brings me into it.”26 In October 1985 television producer and liberal activist Norman Lear circulated a piece entitled: “ Thank you, Barry Goldwater.” Although he disagreed with Goldwater on many issues, Lear said, he admired his “unswerving and courageous dedication to protecting the American system of government.” In the 1980s, Goldwater opposed Jesse Helms’s attempt to strip federal courts of their ability to prohibit school prayer in the public schools. “Did you really write this bill?” Goldwater once asked Helms. “If I wrote it, I would be ashamed,” he added, describing the bill as equivalent to “outlawing the Supreme Court.” Twenty years after the 1964 campaign, Lear said, Goldwater adhered to a political philosophy that was “conservative in the best sense of the word.” Although Helms denounced the “Norman Lear crowd” and claimed that Goldwater was “being used” by “leftwingers” and the liberal press, there was a ring of truth to Lear’s assertions.27 By the time Barry Goldwater retired from the Senate, there were marked diVerences in the evolution of modern conservatism. Some of these diVerences perhaps reXected Goldwater’s quirky political personality and his propensity to speak his mind, and over time he would become more and more estranged from the Republican mainstream. But the divergence from Helms-style Republicanism also reXected real issues. The foot soldiers of the Reagan Revolution, many of them Christian evangelicals, had been mobilized by Helms and his allies. They brought a cluster of cultural and racial issues, and a political style, removed from Goldwater’s conservatism.28 In July 1981 these tensions erupted over the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor for the Supreme Court. Religious Right groups initially opposed her because of suspect views on abortion; Helms led the opposition. Exasperated, Goldwater, who sponsored O’Connor’s nomination, declared that the Moral Majority’s Jerry Falwell deserved a “kick in his ass.” He also told a Washington Post reporter in July 1981 that he did not like the “central issues, such as abortion, that Jesse

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Helms and his Moral Majority followers are pushing.” Helms, Goldwater added, was not a true conservative. “If Jesse and his followers continue to operate this way,” he warned, “we’re going to see conservatism right back in the same Wx we were in when I ran for president.”29 Matters boiled over in mid-September 1981, when Goldwater oVered a broader indictment. As the vote on O’Connor’s nomination drew near—and as it appeared certain she would be conWrmed—Goldwater spoke up. At a breakfast with reporters on September 15, 1981, he complained about groups using “religion as a basis for being for or against a political issue.” There was a “danger in becoming oriented around a religious concept and then backing a political objective.” Goldwater speciWcally criticized Helms, who, he said, represented “the New Right and not new conservatism.” Goldwater had little interest in Helms’s “social” issues—school busing, ERA, and abortion—and he thought that “more important things” were inXation, high interest rates, and having a strong military.30 Goldwater took his criticism to the Senate Xoor. It was, he said, “a wonderful feeling to be a conservative these days.” When he ran for president in 1964, he was told that he was behind the times. Now, in contrast, “everybody tells me I was ahead of my time.” Americans wanted a new, conservative course in public policy, and the “ideological pendulum” had swung widely, and the nature of politics and policymaking to some extent had passed Goldwater by. Time, he reXected, was “certainly . . . an elusive companion.” But the Reagan Revolution—and the coming to power of conservatives—had raised basic issues. True conservatism, he believed, lay in the principle of freedom, which was based on a “deep, abiding respect for the Constitution.” Those freedoms were now threatened by the “specter of single-issue religious groups,” political activists with whom there could be “little or no compromise.” Like any other weapon, God’s name should be used rarely, Goldwater believed. The religious Right was not using its power wisely; conservative evangelicals required total assent rather than political compromise, and if you disagreed with them, “they cajole, they complain, they threaten you with loss of money or votes or both.” Personally, Goldwater was “angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate.” The religious Right’s unwillingness to compromise was a “divisive

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element that could tear apart the very spirit of our representative system, if they gain suYcient strength.” “I don’t like the New Right,” he declared. “What they’re talking about is not conservatism.” Troubles abroad, in Iran, Northern Ireland, and Lebanon, all resulted from “injecting religious issues into the aVairs of state.” “By maintaining the separation of church and state,” Goldwater said, “the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars.” Goldwater promised to Wght the religious Right “every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’ ”31 The following spring and summer, Goldwater’s struggle with the New Right continued, as he opposed eVorts to limit courts’ jurisdiction in issues of busing, school prayer, and abortion. “How long before someone says that the courts can’t hand down decisions on drunk driving, or rape or murder?” During an eight-month Wlibuster against eVorts to limit the federal courts’ jurisdiction, Goldwater supported the Wlibusters, saying that he had had a “stomachful” of the so-called social issues. In August he voted with liberals in opposing Helms’s eVorts to enact legislation permitting school prayer. “If they don’t like it,” Goldwater said about the religious Right in 1982, “to hell with them.”32 Helms and other movement conservatives were reluctant to criticize Goldwater, who enjoyed an iconic status something like that of Reagan. Although Helms opposed much of the Reagan administration’s policies as pragmatic backsliding, he never found fault with Reagan himself. Notably, despite Goldwater’s sharp criticisms of movement conservatives in the early 1980s, Helms never responded in kind. He perhaps realized that Goldwater had become somewhat marginalized in his last term in the Senate, out of the mainstream, but he also had a residue of aVection for the old conservative warrior. Barry Goldwater and Jesse Helms represented two ends of the spectrum of modern conservatism, and their example reminds us that the rightward turn was a political and cultural phenomenon that was fraught with tension. In The Death of Conservatism (2009), Sam Tanenhaus charts the self-destruction of the modern American Right that culminated with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Although Tanenhaus does not explore them, internal tensions have always been present in modern conservatism. Movement conservatives who looked

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to Jesse Helms for leadership, and who embraced matters of race and culture as deWning issues, were at odds with the traditionally libertarian conservatism of Barry Goldwater. As a spokesman, advocate, and organizer of conservative evangelicals’ political mobilization, Helms led the way in the turn toward cultural politics after the 1970s. The conXuence of issues of race and culture made possible Reagan’s election in 1980 and have remained driving forces in modern conservatism. It is possible to underestimate the importance of these phenomena, and of Jesse Helms speciWcally, but that is done at the peril of misunderstanding central tendencies in the political and cultural transformation of the past four decades.33

Notes 1. Peter Ross Range, “ Thunder from the Right,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 1981. The literature on modern conservatism is rapidly growing. See Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. Jesse Helms to Barry M. Goldwater, June 10, 1975, December 21, 1979, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater, Series I, Personal Alpha Files, Box 8, Folder 12 [hereinafter cited as BMG]. 3. On the 1964 campaign, see Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), chs. 7–9; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 4. William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008). 5. Helms to Barry Goldwater, October 19, 1960, December 9, Jesse Helms Papers, Jesse Helms Center, Wingate, NC [hereinafter cited as JH]; “Viewpoint” #12, December 7, 1960 [hereinafter cited as VP]; VP #262, December 12, 1961. Goldwater responded that he appreciated “the editorializing that your station is now doing [in] getting across to the people the importance of the conservative philosophy.” Goldwater to Helms, December 9, 1960, JH. 6. VP 294, January 30, 1962.

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7. VP #877, June 10, 1964; VP #895, July 20, 1964; VP #941, September 22, 1964. 8. VP #972 and #1542, November 4, 1964, February 14, 1967, respectively. Goldwater seemed to have appreciated the attention. See Goldwater to Helms, August 5, 1966, JH. 9. Helms to Goldwater, November 21, 1973; Thomas F. Ellis to Goldwater, November 28, 1973, BMG. 10. Helms to Goldwater, February 4, 1974, BMG. 11. Goldwater to Helms, April 15, 1974, BMG. 12. Helms to Goldwater, July 16, 1984; Goldwater to Helms, May 12, 1976; Charlie Black to Helms, March 6, 1975; Goldwater to Helms, March 10, 1975, BMG. 13. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4–5, 83; quotation from “Jesse Helms and ‘the Whispers,’ ” editorial, Charlotte Observer, August 13, 1972. 14. “ There Is Another Way,” Tarheel Banker 34, no. 3 (September 1955): 24; “We Aren’t Solving Anything,” Tarheel Banker 36, no. 5 (November 1957): 32. See also Bryan Hardin Thrift, “Jesse Helms, the New Right, and American Freedom” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2005), 42–44, and “Jesse Helms’s Politics of Pious Incitement: Race, Conservatism, and Southern Realignment in the 1950s,” Journal of Southern History 84 (November 2008): 887–926. 15. Helms to Mrs. E. H. Whinham, December 6, 1957, JH; Helms to Frank J. Mackey, December 30, 1957, JH; excerpt from addresses to Western North Carolina Conference, National Association of Bank Auditors and Comptrollers, November 21, 1957; “Banker Asks Million for ‘Truth Campaign,’ ” Knoxville NewsSentinel, November 22, 1957; “Bank OYcial Suggests ‘Truth Drive’ by South,” unidentiWed clipping; Jesse Helms to Wriston A. Helms, November 26, 1957; Helms to Mrs. Holmes Van Mater, March 30, 1956; Helms to Thomas D. Collins, December 17, 1958, all in JH. See also Helms to Frank J. Mackey, December 30, 1957, JH. 16. VP #833, April 9, 1964; VP #829, April 3, 1964. 17. VP #1674, August 30, 1967; VP #883, June 18, 1964; VP #801, February 25, 1964. 18. Congressional Record, October 3, 1983, Xoor speeches, JH; Helen Dewar, “Helms Stalls King’s Day in Senate,” Washington Post, October 4, 1983; Paul Houston, “Helms Launches Filibuster against Holiday for King,” Greensboro Record, October 4, 1983; Dave Doubrava, “Helms Moves to Head OV Vote on Bill Creating King Holiday,” Washington Times, October 4, 1983; Steven V. Roberts, “King Holiday Bill Faces a Filibuster,” New York Times, October 4, 1983. 19. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 140; Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New York: Yale University Press, 2008), 66.

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20. A. L. May, “Fundamentalists’ EVect on Politics Questioned,” Raleigh News and Observer, August 31, 1980. 21. Jesse Helms, Where Free Men Shall Stand (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1976), 108. 22. Helms to H. Fleming Fuller, January 19, 1974, JH; Jesse Helms, “Abortion a Sign of Moral Decay,” Human Events, September 13, 1975; “Senate Kills Move to Ban Abortions,” Washington Star, April 29, 1976; Paul Scott, “Senate Abortion Showdown,” Independent American, April 14, 1976; speech to the March for Life meeting, Washington, DC, January 22, 1975, JH. See also Helms on abortion in Congressional Record, June 29, October 1, December 5, 1973, January 17, March 3, 1975, March 15, April 28, June 28, 1976, in abortion notebook, JH. Helms, in 1964, told a correspondent that he favored criminal penalties for the parents of children born out of wedlock. “No one, in my judgment, has the ‘right’ or the ‘freedom’ to bring children into the world as a discard, as an unwanted creature, and as a burden on society.” JH to George Stevens III, August 12, 1964, JH. 23. Jesse Helms, “Jesse Helms Reports,” Monroe Enquirer-Journal, March 16, 1977; “Bryant Vows Battle Will Widen on Gays,” Raleigh News and Observer, June 9, 1977. 24. Paul Clancy, “Helms Would Create Conservative Party,” Charlotte Observer, May 16, 1974; JH, speech, Congressional Record, October 1, 1974, JH; Marty Gunther, “Women Will Be the Real Losers If Our Gov’t. Continues to Give in to Libbers,” National Tattler, October 26, 1975; Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis SchlaXy and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 244–48. For background, see Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from SuVrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 25. Willkie interview, April 21, 2006; Congressional Record, June 10, 1987; Bill Krueger, “Helms Submits Bill for Broader AIDS Testing,” Raleigh News and Observer, June 11, 1987; John Monk, “Helms Might Fight Clinton on Allowing Gays in Military,” Charlotte Observer, November 15, 1992; John Monk, “Helms Denies He Made Deal on Gays in Military,” Charlotte Observer, January 24, 1993. 26. Lloyd Grove, “Barry Goldwater’s Left Turn,” Washington Post, July 28, 1994; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 331–32. 27. Grove, “Goldwater’s Left Turn”; Norman Lear, “ Thank You, Barry Goldwater,” October 1985, BMG. 28. Grove, “Goldwater’s Left Turn.” 29. Fred Barbash, “Conservatives Feud in Wake of O’Connor Choice,” Washington Post, July 9, 1981; Albert R. Hunt and James M. Perry, “ The Machine That Helms Built,” Washington Post, July 26, 1981. 30. Godfrey Sperling Jr., “Goldwater Takes Issue with New Right Politics,” Christian Science Monitor, September 16, 1981; Judith Miller, “Goldwater Vows to Fight Tactics of ‘New Right,’ ” New York Times, September 16, 1981; US Congress, Congressional Record, Senate, 127th Cong., September 15, 1981; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 315–16.

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31. US Congress, Congressional Record, Senate, 127th Cong., September 15, 1981. 32. David S. Broder, “Goldwater Lashes Religious Pressure,” Washington Post, September 16, 1981; Steven V. Roberts, “‘Conscience’ of Conservatives Goes on the Attack,” New York Times, March 11, 1982. 33. Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009).

Afterword Barry Goldwater in History and Memory robert alan goldberg

tombstone, arizona, deputy sheriff Wyatt Earp allegedly observed, “Fast is Wne, but accuracy is everything.”1 For a long time, historians took their cue from Earp and prided themselves on their accuracy and hesitancy to quick-draw conclusions. More recently, however, historians have questioned not only their ability to be accurate about the past but even their own objectivity. To their research, historians bring race, class, and gender identities and political leanings that act as screens Wltering and sifting historical information. As physicist Werner Heisenberg has argued, the observer cannot be separated from the observed. To get the past, or to get past biases, professional historians must oVer interpretations tested by logic and the weight of evidence. Further complicating our understanding of history is the matter of memory. If trained historians observe and measure, men and women store and remember with memories tinged with emotion and changing over time. Thus, we create our own histories, giving salience to the moments when we were personally raised to a national and international consciousness. Scholars take such memories, even imagination, seriously, studying them as they are reXected in public rituals and monuments. They also record them in oral histories of the rich, famous, 259

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ordinary, and invisible. For historians best to represent the past—its events, decisions, rhythms, and nuances—they must be able to merge the written with the spoken, the recorded with the remembered. With this as context, let us consider the intersection of scholarship and memory with regard to Barry Goldwater and the 1964 election. This combination promises to reveal a complex picture of the past. Still, scholars must be alert, for memories are fragile and self-serving, and often deny dissonance. Authors meanwhile must self-consciously protect their subjects from the assumptions that they bring to their research. They, too, cannot escape the magic of memory. An alert must also be sounded, when memory and scholarship are reinforcing. The conventional wisdom may disguise critical patterns and deXect understanding. Historians, political scientists, and biographers are obligated to listen closely to the players, hear their words, and tease from the past the critical choices that sounded then, and echo now. Professional scholarship and public memory converge in regard to 1964. This was a signiWcant year, a critical election, both personally and historically. There are few events that compare in the conservative imagination to this moment. Listen to those who were there at the creation. Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan wrote: “Like a Wrst love, the Goldwater campaign was, for thousands of men and women now into middle age, an experience that will never recede from memory, one on which we look back with pride and fond remembrance. We were there on St. Crispin’s Day.”2 New Right activist Paul Weyrich spoke similarly for a younger generation: “Even if we did nothing but wear a Goldwater button, or attend a rally—and some of the New Right are so young [that] is all they did—it made a mark, and had an impact.”3 For Senator John Tower, “ The ’64 campaign was the Alamo before San Jacinto, to put it in Texas terms.”4 Those who fought the odds that year, Wrst in the primaries and state conventions and then against the Democrats, wear special badges of identity and honor. Check the résumés of conservative leaders, and you will Wnd that many proudly recall that they were Wrst roused to politics in 1964 for Barry Goldwater. Consider attorney Theodore Olson, who successfully argued Bush v. Gore (2000) before the US Supreme Court and who has Wled a federal lawsuit in favor of the legalization of same-sex marriage. In 1964, while attending the University of California Berkeley Law School, he worked in the Goldwater

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eVort. Campaign worker Richard Viguerie, shortly after the election, gathered lists of Goldwater contributors and developed a national direct-mail network to provide information and raise funds for conservative causes. The 1964 campaign was an incubator that accelerated the maturation of a generation of conservatives. Michael Deaver, Jake Garn, Jesse Helms, Phyllis SchlaXy, David Stockton, and George Will began their political lives in the Goldwater campaign or honed critical skills there. Not the least among them was Ronald Reagan.5 Even liberals have Goldwater credentials. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remembers her experience as a Goldwater Girl decked out in straw hat and short skirt. “When I was Wfteen years old, I distributed leaXets for the Arizonan in New York City, hardly Goldwater country. I even pulled the lever for Barry Goldwater, having talked my Democratic mother into letting me join her in the voting booth. Her threat still rings in my ears: if he wins by one vote, don’t come home. I still have my convention tally sheet detailing the delegate count for Barry at the Cow Palace.”6 A record 3.9 million Americans worked actively for Goldwater. If twenty-two thousand men and women donated money to John Kennedy’s campaign in 1960, more than a million gave to Barry in 1964. These Americans were as dedicated to their cause as those who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Arguably, the conservative campaign was the most successful social movement of the sixties.7 Even today, conservatives assess allegiance according to a personal carbon dating that makes 1964 the touchstone of commitment. Perhaps it was, as Buchanan suggests, a Wrst love, an initial call to service at a time when many Americans looked beyond themselves for meaning. SacriWce in a lost cause is also empowering, especially when the future is read as a validation of the past. Maybe 1964 casts a long memory because of the bitterness of the race, stirred by the vitriol of a negative campaigning not seen before in the twentieth century. Similarly, never to that time were the battle lines seemingly drawn so clearly between liberalism and conservatism. In a recent article, “ The Western Hero in Politics: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” I suggest that conservatism touched Americans profoundly because it evoked the symbolism of the American West, past and present, real and imagined. That is, Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan cloaked themselves

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in its mythical power. Their styles, words, and deeds conjured up the classic western hero of popular culture. This strategy was especially potent in the 1950s and 1960s, when television and motion pictures saturated the air with a western story value-laden with images of progress, patriotism, virility, law and order, and individualism. And, as we know, appeasement was a word seldom heard in the western lands. Whatever the reasons, 1964 was personal for many, a critical election, a beginning rather than an end.8 Beyond the conservative consensus and more recently, liberals have revised their memories of Barry Goldwater. In the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s fall from grace and having drunk from the bitter well of Vietnam, they remember Goldwater as a virtuous citizen-politician, even a prophet, who spoke his mind without hesitation or hedging. Like their counterparts on the right, they see him as a conservative who moved to the dictates of his conscience and damned pragmatism and the politics of expedience. If late coming to the reality of Watergate, Barry’s visit to Richard Nixon to press resignation convinced them that he was on the side of light. Liberals also embraced him in the 1990s, after his retirement from public life, when his libertarian tendencies and personal history led him to amenable positions on choice and gay rights. While on a trip to Phoenix, President Bill Clinton acknowledged his stature with a special visit. Now forgotten were 1964 allegations of right-wing extremism, racism, and nuclear hotheadedness. Now embarrassing were the hecklers who taunted him during the campaign with cries of “In your guts, you know he’s nuts,” a play on his campaign slogan.9 The American people did more than reject Alf Landon, Thomas Dewey, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. They forgot them. That was not Barry Goldwater’s fate.10 Scholars have validated the public memory of Barry Goldwater and the election of 1964. In The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (2007), historian Donald Critchlow characterizes the nomination of Barry Goldwater as “the deWning moment” of the conservative movement.11 Jonathan Schoenwald portentously titled his 2002 book A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. Political scientist Lee Edwards casts Goldwater as “ The Man Who Made a Revolution.” In Rick Perlstein’s 2001 Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, the Goldwater campaign is heralded as an opening thunderclap

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that would unmake the American consensus. I support this judgment. I describe Goldwater’s primary campaign and the subsequent nominating convention as “the Woodstock of American Conservatism,” a “crucible for birthing a better world.”12 What historians see when they turn to 1964 is the beginning of a signiWcant change in the American electoral calculus. With Barry Goldwater, conservative activists moved to complete their capture of the Republican Party. Their eVort secured Goldwater the nomination, but even more telling were victories at the grass roots. Particularly signiWcant were the eVorts of Goldwater activists in the South in what was called Operation Dixie, launched in the 1950s. First at the presidential level and later in gubernatorial and senatorial races, conservatives transformed a solid Democratic South into a Republican bastion. Following Goldwater’s contention, “We ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” activists built a coalition that aimed to unite white workingand middle-class Americans in the South and West with ethnic voters in the nation’s major cities.13 On these “forgotten” and “silent” Americans, as Goldwater called them, conservatives would eventually found an alliance and fulcrum to win the White House.14 African Americans could read the handwriting on the wall. With the courting of southern whites and in response to Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they abandoned the Republican Party, which had won a third of their vote in 1960. Democrats since 1964 have gathered upward of 90 percent of their support. In fact, Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic candidate to win the presidency with a majority of the white vote.15 Barry Goldwater and other conservatives also pioneered in American presidential politics an agenda that commentators labeled “the social issue.” Goldwater preached law and order, condemning courts that coddled criminals and made city streets into jungles. He decried the “bullies and marauders” who caused Americans to be fearful even in their own homes.16 Championing the Republican Party platform, he Xayed the Supreme Court for denying school prayer and permitting pornographers to operate. His jeremiads against moral decline and a breakdown in law and order became campaign staples and echoed in Republican races for thirty years. This polarizing strategy hammered cracks in a New Deal consensus founded in class, a quest for social justice, and a belief that a rising economic tide lifted all boats.

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After 1964, identities and issues based in religion, race, and ethnicity would reemerge to shape political decision making. It certainly prepared the ground for the next generation of conservatives who mobilized in single-issue movements against choice, gay rights, evolution, and the Equal Rights Amendment. If Goldwater was always uncomfortable talking about religion in politics, evangelicals would Wnd comfort in his cause and make it their own.17 In fact, though, the race was never close. Some observers have focused on Barry Goldwater’s miscalculations and the inexperience of his campaign team. Others labeled his eVort quixotic and ahead of its time. Stones are also cast at a factionalized Republican Party. Clearly, he ran uphill and against the wind. John Kennedy’s death, peace and prosperity, and the coming Great Society focused Democratic strength. Lyndon Johnson, determined to outpoll his mentor Franklin Roosevelt, wasted no resource in the eVort. Barry Goldwater watched the returns on television brieXy and then headed for bed. He had won Wve southern states and barely Arizona.18 Perhaps Barry Goldwater’s most immediate legacy was to ensure heavy Democratic majorities in Congress that accelerated the passage of liberal social and economic legislation. More long-range, Barry Goldwater and his 1964 campaign set a geopolitical strategy for victory and established the social issue as a script in presidential politics. Events would create a more amenable time for conservative mobilization, and activists would rise to the opportunity. It was Ronald Reagan who took the conservatives to the political promised land. He had the talent to make the conservative message receptive beyond the faithful core. He was, as the old and insightful joke goes, Goldwater in sheep’s clothing. Step back from these important changes and judgments for a moment. There is still more to learn about history, memory, and 1964. Let us focus on Barry Goldwater at that moment. The lightning rod from Arizona attracted deep animus and devout adoration. Few remained neutral. Discarding the blinders of his partisans and most vehement critics, what did he advocate to right-wing America? How eVective was he as a spokesman for conservatism? What were the implications of his words and deeds? The point of this discussion is to see Barry Goldwater more clearly, beyond his blurring in memory and even by historical consensus.

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In The Conscience of a Conservative, the Arizona senator went on record with an antistatist, anticommunist, and free-market agenda. This translated into positions against a progressive income tax, federal grants to education, urban renewal, public housing, and foreign aid. Goldwater championed brinksmanship and rollback and promised support to anticommunist guerillas in China and Eastern Europe. In fact, Goldwater declared, the United States must be prepared to intervene militarily against “vulnerable” communist regimes. Such positions sharpened ideological diVerences between liberals and conservatives and, with the help of Democratic activists, fanned the fear of radical change from the right.19 Such positions endeared him to fellow conservatives. Yet, if politically astute in securing his base, Goldwater lacked the politician’s touch to reach beyond it. He was politically deaf in the moment, running a campaign oblivious to the facts on the ground. For example, even in the wake of President John Kennedy’s assassination, the Arizona senator could not be coaxed from his defense of extremism. While in part ideological, his stand was Wxed by a political calculation to use the shock troops of the John Birch Society while rejecting its leadership. In distancing himself from the society’s authorities, Goldwater avoided press censure while enabling legions of Birchers to ring doorbells, distribute literature, and ferry voters to the polls for Goldwater. It also tagged the Arizonan as a man in league with right-wing radicals and clearly out of the mainstream of American politics.20 Barry Goldwater’s defense of states rights aligned him with southern racists at a time when the civil rights movement had moved a nation and had the feel of history in the making. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater argued that the Constitution aVorded blacks protection only in voting, contractual relations, and property holding. He rejected the Supreme Court’s conclusions in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision; “I am . . . not impressed,” he declared, “by the claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration is the law of the land.”21 He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although a foe of segregation, he placed property over human rights and predicted the “creation of a Federal police force of massive proportions” to ensure its enforcement.22 Thirty years later, in an interview with me, he remained, despite the scale of racial progress, adamantly opposed to the legislation on constitutional grounds.23

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For Americans at the time and for historians since, this raises the question of race for American conservatism. While activists were eager to pursue moral and military crusades abroad against communist dictators, they maintained their distance from the civil rights movement at home. They were silent before the reality of southern discrimination. Neither, except in a few cases, did they pursue racial justice in their local communities on their own initiative. If hunting required going where the ducks were, victory was impossible without the votes of white southerners bent upon maintaining the racial status quo. For many conservatives, principle gave ground to pragmatism. If Goldwater had the conscience of a conservative to condemn the Tennessee Valley Authority in Tennessee and Medicare to the elderly of St. Petersburg, Florida, why did he not remind white southerners of his membership in the NAACP and his eVorts to integrate Phoenix? Why did he not call them to actions that would defer federal intervention? Here, the conservative’s conscience was undermined by the politician’s calculus. In 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. In its aftermath came the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as Americans and Russians caught their breath after the scare of annihilation. Barry Goldwater could not grasp the experience that gripped his fellow Americans. In The Conscience of a Conservative, he dismissed the fantasy of coexistence. Goldwater called for a reexamination of diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union and rejected arms talks. He voted against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and demanded that Americans be open to exercising nuclear options. He speculated on the use of lowyield atomic weapons in Vietnam and seemed unfazed that it might incite Chinese and Russian intervention in that conXict. Goldwater’s sense of mission blinded him. It made him insensitive to a public rubbed raw by television and radio emergency tests, air raid warnings, school drills, programs to build fallout shelters, and media images of thermonuclear holocaust. It also opened him to the slander that little girls picking daisies would be at the mercy of a man with an “itchy Wnger” eager to press the button.24 In history and memory, a key event of the 1964 campaign has been largely overlooked. At Senator Goldwater’s insistence, he and President Lyndon Johnson met privately in the Oval OYce of the White

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House on July 24 to talk about the coming race. During the sixteenminute meeting, Goldwater raised two concerns. He suggested that the candidates mute the civil rights issue for fear of exacerbating racial tensions. Also, to maintain a united front before the communist enemy, he promised to hold his Wre on Vietnam. He pledged to desist from raising the issue to attack the president. This surprised Johnson, who was surely pleased that his opponent had just volunteered to relieve him of his two biggest campaign liabilities.25 If Goldwater had acted from a sense of patriotism, had he done the nation a disservice? Civil rights proved too immediate to ignore, but did the candidates’ agreement allow the issue to mutate into new political images and code words of racial antipathy? Cries of law and order, depictions of city streets as a jungle, and the equation of riots with civil rights demonstrations reminded whites that a vote for Goldwater oVered a means of resistance to racial change. Such innuendos would become more explicit in subsequent presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, Democrats, reluctant to threaten their own bases of support, rarely confronted the Republicans on the “switchblade” issue. In regard to Vietnam, Goldwater helped forestall a national debate on the war before the beginning of the large-scale military buildup. There would be no public examination of the emerging policy. Johnson faced no serious test, no need to justify his course, and his aides continued to develop their scenarios without hesitation. Even when the candidates allowed Vietnam to surface, their treatment belied its importance and deferred scrutiny. Gentle reassurances from one candidate and, from the other, nonspeciWc demands to pursue victory could not awaken Americans to the involvement that both men privately predicted. Such occasional comments and jabs became Xares for historians but did not catch media attention. Americans were not so much deceived about Vietnam during the 1964 election as they were lulled into sleepwalking toward their future. History and memory have been kind to Barry Goldwater. His only enemy now is amnesia. As the World War II and baby boom generations pass, his name will conjure up less emotion and substance. This is a shame. Patriot and politician, conservative and pragmatist, he left a mark on his nation and his fellow citizens. In their hearts, they know that his concerns for personal freedom, ordered liberty, and community responsibility are at the core of our republic. At the same time,

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Barry Goldwater’s role in history demands scrutiny, for his choices had eVect beyond a single election and beyond his own life. Notes 1. The site QuotationsBook (www.quotationsbook.com/quote/33310), among other sites, attributes this quotation to Wyatt Earp. None, however, cites a primary source for place or date. 2. Patrick J. Buchanan, “ The Voice of the Desert,” Introduction to The Conscience of a Conservative (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), x. 3. Paul Weyrich, “Blue Collar or Blue Blood? The New Right Compared with the Old Right,” in The New Right Papers, ed. Robert W. Whitaker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 51. 4. Interview with John Tower, September 14, 1990. 5. New York Times, August 19, 2009, 1A, 14A; Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 236. 6. Hillary Rodham Clinton, interview with Katie Couric, Today Show, June 5, 2003 (transcript available at http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/3079098). 7. Jack Bass and William Devries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequences since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 256; author interview with Jake Garn, November 26, 1990, Salt Lake City, Utah; Richard Viguerie, The New Right: We’re Ready to Lead (Falls Church, VA: Viguerie, 1980), 26–27; William A. Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 161; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 473, 475. 8. Robert A. Goldberg, “ The Western Hero in Politics: Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Rise of the American Conservative Movement,” in The Political Culture of the New West, ed. JeV Roche (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 13–50. 9. Goldberg, Goldwater, 229. 10. Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1996, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/ 1996–09–12; Goldberg, Goldwater, 330–34. 11. Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 285. 12. Lee Edwards, The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995); Jon Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Goldberg, Goldwater, 181. 13. Quoted in George Tindall, The Disruption of the Solid South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 60. 14. Goldberg, Goldwater, 150. 15. Bass and Devries, Transformation of Southern Politics, 350; Goldberg, Goldwater, 233, 235. 16. “ The ‘Something’s Wrong’ Theme,” Time, August 28, 1964, 24.

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17. Goldberg, Goldwater, 217–19, 221–22, 229–31, 300–301. 18. Ibid., 233–34; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 513–14. 19. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, KY: Victor, 1960), 5, 9, 10, 13, 20, 22–23, 30, 32, 42, 69, 70, 87, 89–90, 95–99, 121–22. 20. Goldberg, Goldwater, 144, 158–60, 190. 21. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 36. 22. US Senate, Congressional Record, 88th Congress, 2nd sess., June 18, 1964, Vol. 110: 14319. 23. Interview with Barry Goldwater, September 24, 1992. 24. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 100–101, 105–11, 114, 118–20; Issues and Answers, ABC, May 24, 1964. 25. Goldberg, Goldwater, 215–16.

About the Contributors

Michael Bowen is a visiting assistant professor of history at Westminster College. He received his PhD in American History in 2006 from the University of Florida. The University of North Carolina Press published his Wrst book, The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party (2011). It looks at factional disputes in the Republican Party and the rise of popular conservatism from 1944 through 1964. Joseph Crespino is a professor of history at Emory University and the author of Strom Thurmond’s America (Hill and Wang, 2012) and In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is also coeditor, with Matthew Lassiter, of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009). Brian Allen Drake is a lecturer in the University of Georgia’s History Department, where he teaches US and environmental history. He received his PhD from the University of Kansas. His book, The Unnatural State: Loving Nature and Fearing Government in Postwar America, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press Weyerhauser Environmental Series. His work examines the interplay between environmentalism and antistatism and reveals that postwar conservatives, libertarians, and environmentalists inXuenced one another in important ways. For his work, Drake received the Eddie Jacobson Scholarship to support his research. 271

272

About the Contributors

Robert Alan Goldberg is Professor of History at the University of Utah. Goldberg penned the Wrst exhaustive biography of Barry Goldwater, titled simply Barry Goldwater (Yale University Press, 1995). He was the Wrst academic to take seriously the man, his surroundings, his followers, and his ideas. For this work, Goldberg received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. The book won the Evans Biography Prize, and the New York Times named it a notable book for 1995. In the Times book review, the Brookings Institute’s Jonathan Rauch called it “an admirable and refreshingly brisk biography.” Goldberg has continued to publish. His latest work explores the culture of conspiracy in America. Nicole Hemmer received her PhD from Columbia University. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Her dissertation argues that understanding the rise of modern American conservatism requires an analysis of how conservative media functioned within the movement. She shows that the institution of conservative media developed along three related tracks: message, movement, and technology. Hemmer’s study explores the motivations fueling conservative media outlets, as well as the struggle to articulate and control the meaning of conservatism and the direction of the movement. She additionally studies the relationship of the media to electoral politics, to other parts of the conservative movement, and the personal relationships upon which all others rested. Micaela Anne Larkin was the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale and now lectures at Oklahoma State University. She attended the University of Notre Dame and returned there for her doctoral studies in American history. In the summer of 2008, she completed her dissertation, “Labor’s Desert: Workers, Unions and Entrepreneurial Conservatism in Arizona, 1917–2008.” She is currently revising her dissertation for publication by further studying the intersection of conservatism in the Southwest with the rise of Latino civil rights activism. William A. Link is the Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. Link has published Wve major books: A Hard

About the Contributors

273

Country and a Lonely Place (UNC Press, 1986); The Paradox of Southern Progressivism (UNC Press, 1993); a biography of William Friday (UNC Press, 1995); Roots of Secessions (UNC Press, 2003); and Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern American Conservatism (St. Martin’s, 2008). The latter provides a reconsideration of one of the dominant Wgures in the modern South and postwar conservatism. This project has received praise from numerous historians, who called the book a “masterful,” “fascinating,” “incisive biography [of] the complexity of Jesse Helms.” Link is the recipient of several fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Andrew Needham received his PhD from the University of Michigan. He is an assistant professor in New York University’s History Department. His book Power Lines is under contract with Princeton University Press. His project explores the far-reaching environmental and social eVects of metropolitan development in the modern United States. SpeciWcally, he traces how increasing demand for electricity in the metropolitan Southwest (primarily Phoenix and Los Angeles) led to the construction of a series of coal mines and power plants on the Navajo Nation, thus making Navajo energy resources central to the daily lives of suburban residents throughout the Southwest. His research has been published in the Journal of Urban History and several edited collections. Michelle Nickerson is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Chicago. She received her PhD in American Studies from Yale. She studies the history of the American conservative movement through the eyes of women. Her research has documented the rise of the cold war Right through the grassroots eVorts of women activists, without which, she says, the movement would never have been as strong. She is the author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press, 2011), and coeditor of a volume of essays, Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space and Region in the American South and Southwest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). She also has written on postwar gender roles, women in the Republican Party, and right-wing political activism and its impact on American history.

274

About the Contributors

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and was the Paul Mellon Fellow of American History at the University of Cambridge. She received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she worked as the assistant director for the Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy. Her research explores the linkages between midcentury capital mobility and the rise of modern conservatism in the Sunbelt. Her work has appeared in the Journal of American History, PaciWc Historical Review, and New Politics. Her Wrst book, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in January 2013.

Index

abortion access, 186; Goldwater’s support for, 1, 6, 222, 230, 231, 252–53; as issue for Christian Right, 186, 207, 248, 249, 252–53 Adams, Sherman, 94 Advance, 159, 161 Africa, 243 Agnew, Spiro, 134–35, 136, 137 agriculture, 224; in Arizona, 31, 33–34, 35, 48, 69, 73, 77–78 AIDS, 251 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980), 229–30 Albright, Madeleine, 13 Alexander, Holmes, 155 Alianza Hispanic Americans, 72 Allen, James, 243 Alsop, Stewart, 90 American Conservative Union, 135 American Legion Post #41, 72, 74 Anderson, Thomas J., 115–16 anti-unionism, 34, 53, 68–69, 72, 77–78, 195; Goldwater and, 3–4, 34, 37, 60– 61, 69, 162 Aravaipa Canyon, 230 Arizona Democratic Party, 53–55, 56, 58, 76–77, 78 Arizona Highways, 29 Arizona National Forest Wilderness Act, 230 Arizona Progress, 198 Arizona Republic, 195

Arizona Republican Party, 9–10, 45, 52–59, 193; Goldwater and, 9, 52, 55, 57, 71–72, 193; and Mexican American voters, 9–10, 66–67, 69, 70–75, 79; and New Deal, 52, 53, 55 Arlington House, 135, 140n19 Army-McCarthy hearings, 103 Asia First movement, 104 Baker, Bobby, 184 Balderas, Sal, 72 Barnett, Ross, 156 Bell, Daniel, 4 bilingual education, 74 Bimson, Carl, 196, 197–98 Bimson, Walter, 196–97, 198–99 Boineau, Charles E., Jr., 154 Boulder Canyon Act, 32, 33 Boulder (Hoover) Dam, 19, 30, 32, 33 Boulware, Lemuel Ricketts, 194–95, 196 Bozell, L. Brent, 103, 108, 117, 118, 119; and Conscience of a Conservative, 4, 119, 149, 164 Bracero Program, 73, 75, 77 Bricker, John, 100 Bricker Amendment, 100–101 Brophy, Frank, 54 Brown, Walter, 158 Brownell, Herbert, 90, 93, 94, 95, 101, 102

275

276

Index

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 153, 207, 244; Goldwater and, 149, 163–64, 265 Buchanan, Pat, 260, 261 Buckley, Aloise, 182 Buckley, William F., Jr., 106, 109, 125, 182; and Firing Line, 11, 129, 136, 141n31; and Goldwater, 10, 118, 119; and John Birch Society, 107, 132; and L. Brent Bozell, 4, 103, 119, 149, 164; and National Review, 115, 116, 132, 136, 141n31, 148 Burch, Dean, 200 Burke, Richard, 200 Bush, George H. W., 209 Bush, George W., 231 busing, 204, 246, 253, 254 Byrd, Harry F., 243 Camelback Mountain, 217, 222 Carter, Jimmy, 230 Castro, Raúl, 67, 76–77, 78 Central Arizona Project (CAP), 31, 33–37, 39, 57, 218–20; Goldwater and, 33–36, 37–38, 44, 218–20 Chamberlain, John, 120, 137 chambers of commerce, 44. See also Phoenix Chamber of Commerce Charter Government Committee, 51–52 Chavez, Cesar, 75, 77–78 Chicago Tribune, 120 Chodorov, Frank, 106 Choice (Wlm), 12, 171–72, 180–85, 187 Choice, Not an Echo, A (SchlaXy), 10, 92–93, 122, 123–24, 181, 185 Christian Right, 8, 186–87, 248–50, 253–54; and abortion issue, 186, 207, 249, 252; Goldwater’s hostility to, 187, 207, 251–54 Citizens for Clean Air, 177–78 Citizens for Eisenhower (CFE), 93, 95, 107 Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, 171–72, 174, 175, 178, 180–85, 186 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 159 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 145, 170, 244, 245, 265; Goldwater and, 145, 203, 226, 244, 247, 263, 265

civil rights movement, 145, 150, 151–53, 245–47. See also National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Clean Air Act of 1970 (CAA), 216, 223–24 Clean Water Act (1972), 223 Clinton, Bill, 6, 262 Clinton, Hillary, 13, 261 Colorado River Commission, 20, 31, 33, 35, 41n44; Goldwater as member of, 9, 20, 21, 31, 33–34, 35–36, 216 Colorado River Compact, 32, 33 Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), 219–20, 225. See also Echo Park Dam Colson, Charles, 137 Committee to Combat Bias in Broadcasting, 135 Conscience of a Conservative (Goldwater), 4, 107, 195, 240, 265, 266; impact of, on Goldwater’s standing among conservatives, 4, 120–21, 265; L. Brent Bozell as ghostwriter of, 4, 119, 149, 164; and 1960 presidential boomlet, 146, 148, 149–50, 151; origins of, 119–20, 125; on racial issues, 102, 163–64, 247, 265; retrospective views of, 6, 7, 20; strong sales of, 120, 121, 124 Conscience of a Majority, The (Goldwater), 214 Constructive Action, 123, 130, 140n22 Cordova, Val, 73 Courtney, Kent, 115 Courtney, Phoebe, 115 cowboy image, 2, 8, 44, 174, 199, 200 Critchlow, Donald, 186, 262 Cronon, William, 216 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 266 Danaher, John, 93 Davis Dam, 33 Day, Henry, 205 Dean, John, 203, 204 Deaver, Michael, 261 Dent, Harry, 152, 157 Devin-Adair, 125

Index Dewey, Thomas E., 87–88, 107, 262; and 1948 election, 87, 88, 94; Republican Party faction associated with, 89, 93, 98–99, 101, 105, 107, 109; schism between, and Robert Taft, 10, 88, 89–93 Díaz, Adam, 72 Dinosaur National Monument, 219. See also Echo Park Dam direct-mail fund-raising, 128, 244, 261 “Draft Goldwater” movement (1960), 62, 109, 148, 171, 180 Dulles, John Foster, 100, 102 Durkin, Martin, 93 Echo Park Dam, 219–20, 221, 225 Edens, J. Drake, 153 Edwards, Lee, 164, 262 Efron, Edith, 136–37 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 55, 95, 104–5, 130; conservative frustration with, 4, 10, 89, 98, 99–104, 108, 109, 111– 12n18, 122, 181; Goldwater as critic of, 3, 4, 60; and “Modern Republicanism,” 89, 107, 108, 181; and 1952 election, 88, 92–93, 95; and racial issues, 96, 97, 102, 159, 244–45 Eisenhower, Milton, 97 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 216, 223, 224, 228–29 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 12, 185–86, 250, 253, 264 Falwell, Jerry, 187, 207, 248, 252 Fannin, Paul, 51, 58, 61, 74, 75 Faubus, Orval, 97, 116, 138n4, 244 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 176 Finnegan, James J., 134–35 Firing Line, 11, 129, 136 First Amendment, 207–8 For America, 106 Ford, George O., 47 Friedan, Betty, 176 Friedman, Tami, 44 Frohmiller, Ana, 57 Gannett, Frank, 100 Garn, Jake, 261

277

Garrity, Devin, 125 gay rights: Goldwater’s support for, 6, 216, 222, 230, 251–52, 262; religious Right’s opposition to, 186, 249–51 General Electric (GE), 194, 195. See also Boulware, Lemuel Ricketts Gibson, Thomas, 106 Glen Canyon Dam, 23, 38–39, 219, 225–26 Goldwater, Barry: Colorado River boat trip of, 2, 9, 19–20, 22–29, 30–31; family of, 2, 7, 22, 26, 75–76, 217; as photographer, 22, 25–26, 217 ———in Arizona: and Arizona Republican Party, 9, 52, 55, 57, 71–72, 193; and Central Arizona Project, 33–36, 37–38, 44, 218–20; on Colorado River Commission, 9, 20, 21, 31, 33–34, 35–36, 216; as Phoenix activist, 3, 20, 28–29, 45, 46–49, 51, 209–10, 251; Senate campaigns of, 4, 6, 20, 36, 58–59, 61, 206 ———emergence of, as face of conservatism, 4–5, 60–62, 114–15, 116–22, 148–51, 154–55 (see also Conscience of a Conservative); anti-unionism of, 62, 74–75, 76, 118, 262; and conservative media, 10–11, 114–15, 116–26; 1960 presidential boomlet for, 116, 117–21, 148–51 ———and environmental and resource issues, 13, 21–22, 37–39, 214–15, 216– 17, 221–24, 226–29, 230–31; and Grand Canyon, 27–28, 37–38, 218, 220, 226–27; and water projects, 33–36, 37–38, 44, 218–21, 225–26; on wilderness protection, 218, 220–21, 225–26, 229–30 ———1964 presidential campaign of, 4–5, 10–12, 35, 121–26, 132–34, 170–75, 178–87, 199–200, 241–42, 260–67; and gender, 172, 174–75, 180–85; long-term impact of, 1, 5, 8, 10–11, 14, 200, 238–39, 260–64, 267; in the South, 11, 144–45, 247, 263, 265–66

278

Index

Goldwater, Barry (continued) ———and racial issues: on Brown v. Board of Education, 149, 163–64, 265; and Mexican Americans, 67, 69, 70– 73, 74–76; on 1964 Civil Rights Act, 145, 203, 226, 244, 247, 263, 265; and southern segregationists, 11, 145–51, 154–55, 159–64, 203, 244, 247, 265–66 ———and social issues: on abortion access, 1, 6, 222, 230, 231, 252–53; on gay rights, 6, 216, 222, 230, 251–52, 262 Goldwater, Barry, Jr., 7 Goldwater, Bob, 2, 75–76 Goldwater, CC, 7 Goldwater, Josephine (“Jo”) Williams, 26, 217 Goldwater, Peggy, 22 Grand Canyon: and dam proposals, 37– 38, 39, 216, 220; Goldwater’s boat trip in, 2, 9, 20–29; national park in, 218, 220, 226–27 Haley, J. Evetts, 122, 123, 124 Hall, Grover C., 153 Hall, Leonard, 101, 111n14 Hallanan, Walter, 97, 111n14 Halleck, Charles, 101 Harrington, Michael, 173–74 Hawkes, Albert, 106 Hayden, Carl, 31, 36, 54, 56–57, 162, 218 Hays, Samuel, 216 Heard, Dwight, 68 Helms, Jesse, 239–40; and cultural issues, 248–53, 257n22; and Goldwater, 13, 239–44, 247–48, 251–55; and racial issues, 244–47 Henderson, Hazel, 177 Herter, Christian, 98–99 Hofstadter, Richard, 4 Hollings, Ernest “Fritz,” 146 Hoover, Herbert, 201, 216 Hoover, J. Edgar, 179, 246 Houghton, Mrs. Hiram, 184 housewives, 172, 175–78 Howard, Perry, 95–97 Human Events, 101, 115, 122, 130, 135, 160, 249; and allegations of mainstream

media bias, 133, 135–36, 137; and Goldwater, 10, 116, 117, 119–20 Hunt, Jim, 243 Hutton, E. F., 106 immigrants, 73, 75–76, 81n8 Independent American, The, 115 industrial recruitment, 48–49, 50–51, 193–94 intermarriage, 68, 70, 74, 81n8 Interstate Stream Commission. See Colorado River Commission irrigation, 31, 34 Iverson, Peter, 27 JaVa, Harry, 203 Javits, Jacob, 159, 162 Jensen, Marjorie, 179 John Birch Society, 106, 121, 123, 130–31, 178; in Arizona, 54, 75; Clarence Manion and, 131, 148; Goldwater and, 148, 161, 265; National Review conservatives and, 107, 131–32 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 58, 76, 173–74, 221, 262; campaign by, in 1964, 132, 170, 174, 242, 264, 266–67; and civil rights, 145, 152; conservative attacks on, 122, 182, 183–84 (see also Texan Looks at Lyndon, A); landslide victory of, 8, 126, 242, 263 Johnston, Olin, 153, 154, 156–57 Jones, Bobby, 94 Kennedy, John F., 156, 171, 173, 177, 265 Kennedy, Robert, Jr., 6–7 Khrushchev, Nikita, 119, 148 Kilpatrick, James J., 137 Kimbel, William, 94 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 208, 246–47 Kirk, Russell, 125, 178 Kitchel, Denison, 200 Kleindienst, Richard, 200, 203 Knowland, William F., 89, 99, 104–7 Koenig, Marie, 179–80 Kruse, Kevin, 67 Lake Powell, 38, 39 Lassiter, Matthew, 67–68, 74

Index Latinos. See Mexican Americans “law and order,” 76, 173, 174, 182, 263 Lear, Norman, 252 Leggett, Herbert, 198 Lewis, Orme, 72, 199 Lewis, Oscar, 174 Little Rock crisis (1957), 96–97, 116, 156, 159, 244–45 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 121 LoeZer, Ted, 130 Los Angeles Times, 33, 184 Luker, Kristin, 186 Manion, Clarence, 10, 100, 125, 127, 129, 130; on alleged media bias, 133, 134– 37; and John Birch Society, 131, 148; as a leading conservative voice, 106, 114, 115; and 1960 Goldwater boomlet, 116, 117–20, 148–49, 150, 151; and 1964 Goldwater candidacy, 121, 123– 24, 126, 132–34; and Robert Taft, 93, 106; and southern segregationists, 116, 138n41, 161 Martin, James, 159 Massey, Raymond, 184 McCarthy, Joseph, 102–4 McFarland, Ernest, 36, 58–59, 61, 92 McKillips, Jim, 94, 95 Mexican Americans, 46, 68–70, 75–78; Arizona Republicans’ courtship of, 9–10, 66–67, 69, 70–75, 79 Meyer, Frank S., 120, 133 Mickle, George, 47 Miller, Marion, 179 Miller, William, 182 Milliken, Roger, 11, 114, 146, 147–48, 149, 150, 151 Mitchell, John, 203, 204 “Modern Republicanism,” 3, 4, 117, 118; Eisenhower and, 89, 107, 108, 181 Moley, Raymond, 34, 161 Moon, Henry Lee, 158 Moral Majority, 248, 252–53 Moreno, Arturo, 72 Morgan, Raymond, 182 Mormons, 26–27, 58 Mothers for Moral America, 12, 172, 180–81, 182, 184, 185, 189n24

279

Motley, Red, 135 Mouer, Benjamin, 33 Muir, John, 219 Nash, Roderick, 221 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 156, 158, 202 National Environmental Protection Act, 216, 233 National League of Cities v. Usery (1976), 208 National Organization for Women (NOW), 176 National Review, 109, 116–17, 178–79; on Eisenhower administration, 107, 109, 118; and Goldwater, 10, 116–17, 118, 120, 122; and John Birch Society, 107, 131–32; after 1964 election, 127, 129, 130, 132, 136–37, 141n31; Roger Milliken and, 11, 148; William F. Buckley, Jr. and, 115, 116, 132, 136, 141n31, 148 Native Americans, 68, 69, 76, 227 Nevills, Norman, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31 New Deal, 44, 45, 46, 54; Arizona Republican Party and, 52, 53, 55; Goldwater’s hostility to, 2–3, 20, 34, 37, 46–47, 48, 62; ”Modern Republicans” and, 4, 60, 89, 91, 99, 108, 117, 181; and public works projects, 34, 218 Newkirk, Marion, 177 New York Times, 99, 137, 228, 239 Nixon, Richard, 98–99, 121, 200, 203– 4; conservative distrust of, in 1960, 108, 117, 148, 150; and environmentalism, 13, 215, 216, 223–24, 228; and Goldwater, 62, 74–75, 76, 118, 262; and the media, 136, 137; as Republican nominee in 1960, 117–18, 121, 148, 150–51, 159, 171; and white southerners, 11, 155–56 None Dare Call It Treason (Stormer), 11, 122–23, 124, 130 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 266 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 12–13, 200–201, 205–8, 209, 252–53

280

Index

Olson, Theodore, 260–61 Operation Moral Upgrade, 177–78 “Operation Wetback,” 73 Orme, Charles, 222 Panama Canal treaties (1978), 243 Parker Dam, 33, 39 Patrick, James, 198 Perlstein, Rick, 262–63 Phillips-Fein, Kim, 194 Phoenix, Ariz., 29, 44, 201, 204; city government in, 9, 49, 51–52; economic transformation of, 9, 12, 48– 49, 50–51, 62, 193–94; Goldwater’s activism in, 3, 20, 28–29, 45, 46–49, 51, 209–10, 251; Mexican Americans in, 69–70, 72, 73; national inXuence of, 12–13, 193, 194–99, 200, 209–10; race relations in, 69–70, 72, 73, 202–3, 204 Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, 45–52, 194–99; Goldwater and, 3, 28–29, 46–49, 51, 209–10; and industrial recruitment, 48–49, 50–51, 194 Phoenix Gazette, 20, 47, 59, 88 Pinchot, GiVord, 216 Plessy v. Ferguson, 101, 205 Powell, John Wesley, 2, 21, 23, 31 Powell, Lewis, 203, 209 Pulliam, Eugene, 117–18 Pyle, Howard, 52, 54–55, 57–58, 96 Reagan, Nancy, 18, 182, 195 Reagan, Ronald, 44, 74, 194, 248, 254, 261–62; electoral success of, 5, 145, 239, 255, 264; and environmental issues, 215–16, 229, 231; and Goldwater, 181, 195–96, 261; and Supreme Court, 206–9; and white southerners, 11, 145, 164 Reece, B. Carroll, 94–95, 97 Reed, Daniel, 95 Regnery, Henry, 115, 125, 129, 141n27. See also Regnery Publishing Regnery Publishing, 115, 123, 125 Rehnquist, William Hubbs, 12–13, 200–205, 206, 207–9 religious Right. See Christian Right

Republican National Committee (RNC), 90, 93–97, 99, 101–2, 105, 111n14 Republican national conventions: (1952), 92–93, 101; (1956), 98–99; (1960), 150–51, 154; (1964), 4–5, 132, 170, 173, 263 Republican Senate Campaign Committee, 59, 62, 159 Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP), 230–31 Reuther, Walter, 3–4, 60–61, 120, 124 Rhodes, John J., 51, 53–54, 55, 56, 59, 61, 72 right-to-work law (in Arizona), 53, 72; Goldwater and, 34, 37 Robinson, Claude, 87–88 Rockefeller, Nelson, 121, 150; and 1964 Republican contest, 5, 10, 88, 90, 98, 124 Roe v. Wade (1973), 186, 187, 207 Rome, Adam, 177, 215 Romney, George, 121 Roosevelt, Franklin, 20, 47, 54, 59, 208 Roosevelt, Theodore, 19, 28, 37, 216, 231 Rosenzweig, Harry, 52, 55, 206 Rusher, William, 127, 128, 136, 141n31 Sagebrush Rebellion, 229, 230 Saguaro Wilderness, 225 Saturday Evening Post, 62, 132, 198–99 SchlaXy, Phyllis, 122, 123–24, 181, 186; as ERA opponent, 185, 186, 250; support of, for Goldwater, 122, 123–24, 151, 181, 261. See also Choice, Not an Echo, A Schoenwald, Jonathan, 262 Schulman, Bruce, 223 Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (McClellan Committee), 60–61, 120 Shadegg, Stephen, 72, 73 Short Creek, Ariz., 58 Sierra Club, 37–38, 219–20, 221, 226–27 Smith, Howard K., 136 Smoot, Dan, 106, 115, 118, 125 Snell, Frank, 49

Index Social Security, 1, 171, 242 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 243 Spence, Floyd, 155 Spencer, E. O., 95–96 SST debate, 227–28 Stassen, Harold, 98–99 Stockton, David, 261 STOP ERA, 185–86 Stormer, John, 122–23, 124. See also None Dare Call It Treason Sulzberger, Arthur Hays, 99 SummerWeld, Arthur, 93 Taft, Robert A., 3, 90–92, 93, 119, 201, 210; death of (1953), 88, 104, 108–9; Republican faction associated with, 89–98, 102–3, 106, 107; schism between, and Thomas E. Dewey, 10, 88, 89–93 Taft-Hartley Act (1947), 53, 60, 92 Tanenhaus, Sam, 254 Tate, Ben, 106 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 218–19 Tenth Amendment, 208 Texan Looks at Lyndon, A (Haley), 122, 123, 124 Thurmond, Strom, 144, 151–52; and Goldwater, 11, 144–45, 146, 150, 155, 160, 161–64; party switch of, 11, 144, 157–59; and William Workman, 152, 153, 157–58 Time magazine, 62, 130–31, 149, 199 Tower, John, 155, 260 Townsend, Wallace, 97, 105 Turner, James Morton, 230 Tushnet, Mark, 207–8 TV Guide, 136 Udall, Morris, 226–27, 230 unions, 45–46, 69, 77–78, 114. See also anti-unionism United Auto Workers (UAW), 60–61, 114. See also Reuther, Walter United Farm Workers (UFW), 77–78. See also Chavez, Cesar University of Mississippi riots (1962), 156 US Supreme Court, 96, 101–2, 153, 163,

281 252; and abortion rights, 186, 249 (see also Roe v. Wade); Arizonans on, 12–13, 200–210, 252–53; and racial issues, 163 (see also Brown v. Board of Education; Plessy v. Ferguson); and school prayer, 248–49, 263. See also Warren, Earl

Valley National Bank (VNB), 196–99, 209–10 Vietnam War, 5, 266, 267 Viguerie, Richard, 261 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 245, 246, 247 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act), 208 Walton, Rus, 174, 182–83 Wannamaker, W. W., 148, 150 Warren, Earl, 101–2, 131 Washington Post, 120, 251, 252–53 Watergate scandal, 78, 262 Waters, Carol Arth, 182 Watt, James, 229 Welch, Joseph, 103 Welch, Robert, 130, 131, 148, 210 western-hero image, 261–62 Weyrich, Paul, 260 White, F. Clifton, 171, 175, 178, 180, 181–82, 183, 185 Wick, James, 115, 117 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, 225–26 Wilderness Act of 1964, 218, 220–21, 225, 226, 230 Wilderness Society, 221 Will, George, 6, 14, 20, 21, 261 Williams, Jack, 57, 66–67, 77–78 Williams, Russell, 78 Willis, Charles, 94, 95 Winter, Thomas, 136 Wisdom, John Minor, 94, 96 women activists, 11–12, 172, 176–80 Women Strike for Peace, 177–78 Wood, Robert, 117 Workman, William, 11, 152–54, 155–59, 160; and Goldwater, 149, 161, 162 World War II, 50, 57, 100p Young Americans for Freedom, 121