Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Manion brought in Frank Cullen Brophy, an Arizona banker on For America’s advisory board and a mover in the short-lived 1955 Campaign for the 48 States, a movement for constitutional amendments to cap the income tax and limit federal spending. Brophy, one of Phoenix’s biggest landowners, had sold Goldwater the magnificent hilltop lot where his dream house now stood. They shared a curious passion of Arizona’s elite: playing Indian. (On the heel of his left hand, Barry Goldwater wore a tattooed four-dot glyph signifying his initiation into the Smoki Clan, a Prescott “tribe” complete with its own creation myth—cobbled together from the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology—and an annual dance pageant; Brophy led a similar outfit called the St. John’s Mission Indian Dancers.) Manion was friends with Brophy. Brophy was friends with Goldwater. Maybe together they had a chance of convincing him.

  One Monday in May, Brophy wrote Goldwater: When they got together later in the month, did he mind meeting with “several people whose opinion both you and I respect” to discuss a political project? Brophy hinted that General Wedemeyer might show up.

  The audience was May 15, in Washington. First Manion met with Representative Dorn, who agreed that Goldwater was a good choice for the Republican half of their scheme. Then Manion joined his friends in imploring Barry to run—or at least let them form Goldwater Clubs to drum up support for him. They wanted to know if Goldwater would, even if he chose not to actively cooperate with them, at least stay out of their way—and whether he would yield gracefully to a draft if the boom they expected took shape. Goldwater gave a response he would echo many more times in the years to follow as supplicants paraded before him with arguments much the same: He was a loyal Republican, he said, and he would do nothing to harm the party. He supported Nixon. But it was his duty not to stand in the way of the wishes of the party’s rank and file, were they made sufficiently clear. Though it seemed to him that someone with a Jewish name couldn’t be an effective candidate.

  Manion left for Indiana in a mood of cautious optimism. And Goldwater left for a speaking engagement in Greenville, South Carolina.

  Goldwater traveled some ten thousand miles a month that year for the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, always giving the same speech to any local audience that would have him: “Balance our budgets ... stop this utterly ridiculous agriculture program... get the federal government out of business—every business”; sell the Tennessee Valley Authority “if we can only get a dollar for it”; stop “the unbridled power of union bosses.” He spoke in a dehydrated, movie-cowboy tenor, slipping his heavy black spectacles on and off to match his awkward rhythms, now and again raising his voice in anger, sometimes stammering awkwardly. And to the right audience he could barely get his words out for the applause.

  The question was whether this was that audience. Goldwater didn’t often visit the states of the Old Confederacy, since there were practically no Republican Senate candidates below the Mason-Dixon line. In the land where Faulkner said the past isn’t even past, the word “Republican” still signified the political wing of the marauding Union Army. By the time Republican carpetbaggers were routed in the 1870s, the South was codifying a system of racial segregation to cow the potentially insurrectionary black population in its midst. And the ruling Bourbons had indoctrinated the people that if a second party were to grow up in the South, it would only have to court Negroes as its allies in order to take over—evoking visions of Negro domination and rape on the order of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

  State Republican organizations survived as shells, “post office parties” that existed only to deliver their “black-and-tan” delegations at Republican conventions in exchange for federal patronage if the GOP won the White House. They had a vested interest in remaining as meager and insular as possible—“rotten boroughs,” in political parlance. Since convention delegations were apportioned by voting population, not by Republican population, the black-and-tans were unaccountable to any grass roots. The delegates were tractable black citizens proud to represent the Party of Lincoln even if only as puppets of Democratic bosses. In the South, went the joke, Republicans were all rank and damned little file. Mississippi’s black Republican chair for thirty-six years didn’t even live in Mississippi. In South Carolina it could be impossible to vote for a Republican even if you wanted to, lest the local sheriff come knocking on your door; the secret ballot had only been instituted there in 1950.

  But the South, like Arizona, was changing. During and after World War II the South had also filled up with fortune-seeking outsiders unschooled in the curious political folkways of their new home. The newcomers formed a potential Republican base. And to the rest of the South’s (white) citizenry, the Democratic Party was looking worse all the time. It started at the 1936 convention when the party first seated black delegates (a black minister gave the convocation; South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith walked out: “This mongrel meeting ain’t no place for a white man!”). That convention also suspended a rule that candidates needed two-thirds of the delegates to win the nomination—and with it the South’s veto power. In 1947 Truman tentatively welcomed the conclusions of his Committee on Civil Rights, whose report To Secure These Rights defined the legislative agenda for the modern civil rights movement. At the 1948 convention Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey declared it was “time for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk in the sunshine of human rights,” and he maneuvered a robust civil rights plank into the platform. South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond led a walkout to form a third party.

  Southern Democrats claimed the gestures toward civil rights were only demagogic and expedient attempts to hustle the votes of urban blacks in the North so the party could turn its back on the South. But where else could Southerners go? Until about 1958, Republicans were more liberal on race than the Democrats were (although it wasn’t hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn’t have any white Southerners to placate). Many chose to vote for General Eisenhower as their protest against the civil rightsters taking over the national Democratic Party, some for quite idealistic reasons: a second party would light a fire under lazy Democratic courthouse hacks. Ike won a majority of the region’s electoral votes in 1956. Those gains were lost after he federalized the National Guard at Little Rock Central High in 1957—reluctantly, to be sure; a frequent visitor to the South, Eisenhower was rather fond of its folkways, truth be told. But the GOP was not ready to give up the fight: also in 1957, Republican National Committee chair Meade Alcorn put one of his best men, the affable Virginian I. Lee Potter, to building a rank and file in the South in a project called “Operation Dixie.”

  Its biggest success had been in South Carolina. The first state to bolt the Union had always been the surliest in the Democratic coalition. Its senior senator, Olin Johnston, already chaired the Post Office and Civil Service Committees, so South Carolinians didn’t want for patronage. Strom Thurmond, now the junior senator, was hardly a Democratic loyalist after his 1948 Dixiecrat presidential run, and after threatening to bolt the party once again in 1956. Meanwhile, the state was eager to lure more right-to-work Republican industrialists. In 1956 Herb Kohler, in the heat of the strike, built a $12 million ceramics factory in South Carolina; in 1958 six new factories were built in the town of Spartanburg alone. In 1959, after Gerber chose to build a $3 million baby-food plant in a nearby town whose blue laws didn’t prevent the company from running shifts on Sundays, Spartanburg voted to repeal its blue laws altogether.

  Two men were instrumental in bringing the modern South Carolina Republican Party into the world. Gregory D. Shorey was a poster child for the latest New South. A Massachusetts native, he had settled in Greenville in 1950, founded a water-sports equipment company, and led the state’s Eisenhower campaign in 1952. But it is unlikely that the Republican Party in South Carolina would have got so far so fast through the 1950s without the cover given potential recruits
by Roger Milliken, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the state. Milliken came from a Northeastern textile family who had been Republican since the 186os, and who began building mills in South Carolina in 1884. Shy and brilliant, a virtuoso in industrial modernization (his company would register almost fifteen hundred patents), Milliken took over the family’s booming business in 1947 after graduating from Yale. He was a conservative’s conservative: in 1956, when workers at his Darlington factory organized to form a union, Milliken shut it down permanently rather than negotiate.

  Together, Shorey and Milliken had scared up enough genuine rank-and-file Republicans to hold a respectable convention in 1959, in Greenville. Goldwater’s speech, on May 16, was broadcast live on statewide television. For saying that Brown v. Board of Education should “not be enforced by arms” because it was “not based on law,” he became a sensation—the Republican Yankee who preached the states’ rights gospel.

  Shortly afterward, Manion received what should have been encouraging news from Arkansas—a letter, coded for security, from one of Faubus’s administrative assistants announcing that the governor was considering the conservative group’s offer. But by then the point was moot. When Dorn sent Manion the newspaper accounts of Goldwater’s hero’s welcome in Greenville, Manion realized that to go forward courting Faubus was entirely unnecessary. Goldwater would do for the South and the North. That was Wednesday. On Thursday Manion began sending out invitations and working the phones to assemble a Goldwater for President committee from among his most trusted friends and biggest donors. By the next week he had fired up the Robotype machine and had gone down his mailing list.

  And so on the first day of June 1959, a phalanx of proprietors of small, family-owned manufacturing companies—men born in the waning years of the nineteenth century, who had fought the U.S. entry into World War II; who had their hearts broken once, then twice, then three times, when Robert Alonzo Taft was spurned by their party; who feared Communism only slightly more than they feared Walter Reuther and an unsound dollar if they didn’t just believe they all amounted to the same thing—received a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” from Dean Clarence Manion of South Bend, Indiana.

  The subject of this personal and confidential message is conservative political action. In the past few months, a great volume of letters and continuing contacts with “live” audiences in all parts of the country have convinced me that there is tremendous popular sentiment for Senator Barry Goldwater. He has stood up manfully and successfully under every conservative test and I honestly believe that his nomination for President by the Republican Party is the one thing that will prevent the complete disintegration of that party once and for all in the 1960 election.

  By the same token, I believe that Goldwater, as the Republican candidate, can win the presidential election. It has been encouraging to find that politically experienced people agree with these conclusions and we are now in the process of assembling a National Committee of 100 prominent men and women to “draft” Goldwater for the Republican nomination. We hope that General Albert Wedemeyer will be Chairman of this Committee.... We hope that you will consent to serve....

  It is felt that the Goldwater Movement will definitely establish a firm position far to the right of the “middle of the road” around which conservative popular sentiment throughout the country can rally with real enthusiasm.

  And so he gathered the sons of Acme Steel of Chicago and of Wood River Oil & Refining Company of Wichita; of Uncle Johnny Mills of Houston and Lone Star Steel of Dallas; of Rockwell Manufacturing of Pittsburgh and Roberts Dairy of Omaha; of Kentucky Color and Chemical and Youngstown Sheet & Tube; of Lockport Felt and the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company; of United Specialties and Memphis Furniture Manufacturing and Avondale Mills and Henderson Mills and American Aggregates and Downing Coal and United Elastic, to go out to try to change the world.

  To most of the country—to Brent Bozell’s “vast uncommitted middle”—these maneuverings couldn’t have been more obscure. A new decade dawned, and the Establishment had spoken: it was a time of enormous possibility—if only the greatest nation in the world weren’t too much like a rich, portly old man to wake up and grab it. If it did, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote in a much discussed piece in the January 1960 issue of Esquire called “The New Mood in Politics,” from the vantage point of the 196os, the 195os would appear as “a listless interlude, quickly forgotten, in which the American people collected itself for greater exertions and higher splendors in the future”—and “the central problem will be increasingly that of fighting for individual dignity, identity and fulfillment in an affluent society.”

  Like sentiments crowded the magazines on the nation’s coffee tables. There had never been a decade rung in with such heady self-consciousness of high purpose. John F. Kennedy was the new mood’s self-proclaimed political prophet, kicking off his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination warning of a “trend in the direction of a slide downhill into dust, dullness, languor, and decay.” Such phrases—taunts, almost—would ring through his campaign speeches over the coming summer and fall: “If we stand still here at home, we stand still around the world.... If you are tired and don’t want to move, then stay with the Republicans.... I promise you no sure solutions, no easy life.” Under his administration there would be “new frontiers for America to conquer in education, in science, in national purpose—not frontiers on a map, but frontiers of the mind, the will, the spirit of man.”

  Kennedy was styled the very incarnation of action, of youth, of vigor, of everything conservatism was presumed not to be. “Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking,” Adlai Stevenson said, introducing the candidate in California, “the people said, ‘How well he spoke!,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, ‘Let us march’?” When Harris showed the “America is going soft” refrain as Kennedy’s highest-scoring campaign theme by far, Richard Nixon added to his own speeches an amen chorus: “So I say, yes, there are new frontiers, new frontiers here in America, new frontiers all over the universe in which we live.... The United States needs more roads, more schools, more hospitals. This is what our opponent says. But we can do it better—because they want to send the job to Washington and do it by massive spending.”

  The youth were stirring. The Student YMCA-YWCA drew thousands to a conference called “The Search for Authentic Experience”; the same year an editor of the student newspaper at Cornell led students in a rock-throwing riot against the doctrine of in loco parentis; at the University of California’s massive Berkeley campus a coalition of self-professed radicals overturned the Greek machine for leadership of student government. Everywhere on campuses paperbacks of a certain description were avidly passed from hand to hand: William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society; Sartre, Camus, Ayn Rand, Vance Packard,

  C. Wright Mills; George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—glorifications of stalwart, lone individuals who chose authenticity and autonomy and risk over conformity and prosperity and ease, a philosophy embodied by the four black college students who had almost on a whim done no more than order coffee at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter in February and sparked a movement in seventy cities that winter in which well-scrubbed young black men and women put their bodies on the line to challenge the social order of an entire region.

  The “new mood in politics” did not seem to bode well for Clarence Manion’s cadres—rich, portly old men, in the main. They would have been as shocked as anyone else to find out that the man who ended up spearheading their crusade would express the zeitgeist as well as the handsome young senator from Massachusetts.

  Recruitment had been slower than the dean had hoped through the summer of 1959. Some prospects were already committed to Nixon; others said Goldwater didn’t have “a Chinaman’s chance” (Gene Pulliam’s words); som
e insisted any candidate be vetted for his position on a pet nostrum like repeal of the income tax or withdrawal from the United Nations. Some Southerners Manion called still held onto the fantastic notion that one of their own might sweep the Democratic nomination. Many told him they were just too old.

  But by July, Manion had a hook. “We hope to publish a 100 page booklet on Americanism by Senator Goldwater,” he now wrote in his entreaties, “which can be purchased by corporations and distributed by the hundreds of thousands.”

  The idea for the booklet had come in the middle of June. Through the ministrations of Frank Brophy, Manion had negotiated the grudging noninterference of Goldwater in their efforts to publish something under his name. In exchange for Manion keeping the Goldwater for President committee secret until the pamphlet was released, and going no further without the prospective candidate’s permission, Goldwater promised to endorse no one for the 1960 nomination, thus keeping his own name open. He probably agreed to that much in the certain belief that nothing would come of it. “I doubt there’s much money to be made by mass sale of a Goldwater manifesto,” National Review editor Bill Buckley told Manion, citing “the difficulties Taft had in 1952 peddling his foreign policy book.”