Almost President (29 page)

Goldwater also averted the racist tag because he demonstrated no racism in his personal life. Some of his relations with minority groups smacked of paternalism, but at an individual level, Goldwater enjoyed positive personal relationships with African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. He did take some provocative stands on race during his career, such as when he argued in 1968 that apartheid should be given time to work in South Africa. Yet, a friend said, “nothing was more distressing to Goldwater” than to be accused of being a racist.

He admonished his children to never use the word “nigger”; his family's stores, called Goldwater's, were among the first in Arizona to hire black clerks (though they could only wait upon white customers during the Christmas rush); and when approached by black veterans of World War II, Goldwater, as a senior officer, personally desegregated the Arizona Air National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces. He even expressed empathy for the impatience felt by black civil rights protesters in the early 1960s. He simply argued that the federal government had no constitutional authority to do anything for their plight beyond guarantee their right to vote.

What seemed genuinely shocking about Goldwater's narrow view of the federal role in enforcing civil rights is that it was at odds with the more than one-hundred-year-old tradition of the Republican Party (although it must be acknowledged that from Reconstruction on, the GOP mostly paid lip service to civil rights for blacks, appearing enlightened only when matched against the Democrats; “The Party of Lincoln” was more slogan than a commitment to a set of policies that might elevate the status of African Americans).

Still, Republicans had maintained the allegiance of a significant number of African-American voters through the 1960 election. From Reconstruction until the New Deal, those relatively few African Americans who were allowed to vote overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. Most African Americans, however, still lived in the South, where more than 90 percent of eligible blacks were denied their right to vote by a host of state initiatives, including poll taxes and literacy tests, as well as outright intimidation.

Between 1915 and 1970, six million African Americans migrated out of the South and into the North, where they were slowly recruited into the urban Democratic political machines. They began switching party allegiance during the New Deal, which offered some hope for unemployed blacks as well as whites. Roosevelt captured an estimated 60 percent of the African-American vote in 1936. Black movement into the Democratic Party accelerated in 1948 when Truman desegregated the federal work force, including the Armed Forces, and Democrats finally adopted, at Hubert Humphrey's urging, a strong civil rights plank to their party platform—the act that led Thurmond to launch his independent candidacy.

But Republicans had maintained a commitment to civil rights, at least as stated in their party platforms, through 1960. So Eisenhower received 39 percent of the black vote in 1956 and Nixon received 32 percent in 1960. But African Americans took Goldwater's nomination as a sign that the Republicans had abandoned them. The break was decisive. Goldwater received but 6 percent of the African-American vote, and no Republican presidential candidate has been able to win even 15 percent of the black vote since.

It was extraordinary how rapidly Goldwater's candidacy changed perceptions of the two parties in regard to race and civil rights. In 1962, a survey conducted by National Election Studies found that the public saw virtually no difference between the two parties on the issue of civil rights. Asked which party would most likely ensure blacks received fair treatment in jobs and housing, 23 percent said Democrats, 21 percent said Republicans, and 56 percent felt there was no difference. Just two years later, the same survey found 60 percent of the respondents believed Democrats would do more to ensure fair treatment for African Americans, 33 percent felt there was no difference between the parties, and just 7 percent thought the Republican Party would do more to help blacks.

Since most other Republican leaders remained at least publicly committed to civil rights, it seems that the new perception of the Republican Party's position on the issue was due mostly to Goldwater's nomination and candidacy. Former New York congressman Jack Kemp, who was the party's 1996 vice presidential nominee, has called the GOP's “Southern strategy” a “disgrace,” adding, “The Democrats had a terrible history [on civil rights] and they overcame it. We had a great history, and we turned aside.”

Goldwater understood his views would cost the Republican Party the support of African Americans, but he had made the calculation the GOP could win far more white votes than it would lose black votes. In 1961, Goldwater told a group of Georgia Republicans that a GOP organized along conservative principles was “not going to get the Negro vote . . . so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”

Some, including Goldwater himself, have suggested that the Republican appeal below the Mason-Dixon Line was centered in the less racially restricted and more economically diverse states of the so-called New South. Yet, Goldwater failed to carry the New South states of Florida, Tennessee, and Texas that Eisenhower and Nixon had carried in their campaigns. Rather, all five states that Goldwater won in the South were in the Deep South, and no Republican presidential candidate had won Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina since Reconstruction. Yet Goldwater carried these states by overwhelming percentages, winning nearly 60 percent of the vote in South Carolina, 70 percent of the vote in Alabama, and 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi—which, not coincidentally, was the same percentage that Thurmond had won in 1948.

Goldwater won 55 percent of the total white vote in the South in 1964, but given the scope of his landslide loss, Johnson was able to win a majority of the white vote nationally. LBJ was, however, the last Democratic candidate for president to win the white vote. Ronald Reagan carried 61 percent of the Southern white vote in 1980 even while running against a Southerner; in 1984, Reagan won 71 percent of the Southern white vote.

The Goldwater campaign's seminal role in triggering this dramatic racial shift has been obscured by three subsequent events. First, George Wallace's independent campaign for president in 1968 carried the states of the Deep South that would otherwise likely have gone to the Republican Nixon. Second, Nixon's 1972 rout of George McGovern was so overwhelming that race was not an obviously identifiable factor in such a landslide.
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Third, the Democrats' nomination in 1976 of a Southerner, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, made it appear as if Democrats would again aggressively compete in the South at the presidential level. After Carter, however, no Democrat has been able to win more than four Southern states, and Democrats did not carry a single Southern state in the presidential elections of 1984, 1988, 2000 (even though their nominee that year was from Tennessee), or 2004.

Republican success in the South is not limited to presidential races. By the 1990s, Southern Republicans dominated the party's congressional leadership, and in 2010, Republicans swept away the last vestiges of Democratic power in the South by winning a majority of the region's state legislatures. A disheartened Democratic 2010 U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana said, “White male Democrats in the South are becoming extinct.” African Americans make up 20 percent of all voters in the South, but they represent a majority of Democrats in the region. In the South, the two parties are stratified along racial lines just as they were during Reconstruction—only the parties have switched roles.

Republicans and Goldwater admirers are understandably reluctant to acknowledge that this realignment, which has helped Republicans win seven of the eleven presidential elections between 1968 and 2008, was rooted in opposition to the struggle for black equality. In a 2010 interview, Mississippi Republican governor Haley Barbour insisted that those “who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican were a different generation from those who fought integration.” Goldwater had made the same claim in a 1971 letter to
Business Week
magazine, where he said that the growing Republican strength in the South “has nothing to do with busing, integration, or any other of the so-called closely held concepts of the Southerner. The South began to move into the Republican ranks because of the influx of new and younger businessmen from the North who were basically Republican. And they were aided by young Southern Democrats who were sick and tired of the Democratic stranglehold on the South and switched over to the Republican Party.”

This was certainly not the prevailing view then, and it does not seem supported by the facts now. Kevin Phillips, a campaign aide for Richard Nixon in 1968 who published the influential study
The Emerging Republican Majority
that promoted a “Southern strategy,” declared Goldwater's presidential campaign to be the South's “final battle against Negro voting rights.” Columnist Robert Novak, in a 1965 book on the Goldwater campaign,
The Agony of the GOP 1964,
said that Goldwater's strategy was clearly to “forget all the sentimental tradition of the party of Lincoln” and to “soft-pedal civil rights” without “actually endorsing racial segregation.”

Novak also said that Northeastern Republicans still committed to the GOP's civil rights tradition were shocked by the “unabashed hostility toward the Negro rights movement” expressed at a 1963 convention of Young Republicans dominated by pro-Goldwater conservatives. “For the Young Republicans . . . their party was now a White Man's Party,” Novak wrote. Nixon was equally blunt. He said flatly that Goldwater “ran as a racist candidate,” and Nixon, who had nonetheless stumped for Goldwater, resented insinuations that his campaigns in 1968 and 1972 were a continuation of Goldwater's “Southern strategy.” Nixon saw his own efforts as far subtler and less crude than Goldwater's.

Despite Goldwater's attempts to distance himself from overt racism, Southern segregationists were drawn to him. South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, even though still nominally a Democrat, had been one of the first persons to urge Goldwater to run for president as far back as 1959. When Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964, Thurmond not only endorsed him, he switched parties, becoming the first Republican senator from the Deep South since Reconstruction.
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Thurmond said he was “not under any false illusions that [Goldwater] is a segregationist,” but Johnson's choice of civil rights advocate Hubert Humphrey to be his vice presidential nominee was a clear signal that segregationists were no longer welcome in the Democratic Party. Thurmond's hometown newspaper, the
Charleston News and Courier,
saw that Goldwater had opened the way for “a realignment of political power in this country, with the South, Middle West, and Far West joined together in a new alliance.”

George Wallace even imagined an alliance that would make him Goldwater's running mate in 1964. Far more an economic populist than a conservative, the Alabama governor found common cause with Goldwater on the issue of race. Wallace told an aide it would be “apparent to a one-eyed nigguh who can't see good outa his other eye that me and Goldwater would be a winning ticket. We'd have the South locked up, then him and me could concentrate on the industrial states and win.” There was some basis for Wallace's bravado. He had run as a protest candidate against Johnson in the Democratic primaries and had won more than a third of the vote in the Wisconsin primary, 30 percent of the vote in the Indiana primary, and 43 percent in Maryland where, as Wallace put it, “If it hadn't been for the nigger bloc vote, we'd have won it all.”

Goldwater was uncomfortable embracing the overt racism practiced by Wallace. When an intermediary advised Goldwater of Wallace's desire to be his vice presidential running mate, an observer said Goldwater “looked as though someone had just reported a death in the family.” Goldwater rejected Wallace's gambit. He did not need Wallace to win the Deep South, while Wallace would drive away all hope of support from racial moderates. Besides, Wallace was a Democrat, not a Republican. But Goldwater did talk Wallace into abandoning an independent presidential campaign that would have ruined the GOP candidate's chances of taking the South.

Even without Wallace, Goldwater had difficulty keeping some of the most noisome racists in the country from jumping on his bandwagon. Robert Creel, Alabama Grand Dragon for the Ku Klux Klan, made headlines when he endorsed Goldwater, saying, “I like Barry Goldwater. I believe what he believes in. I think the same way he thinks.” Goldwater's vice presidential running mate, the conservative and irascible New York congressman William Miller, said, “Senator Goldwater and I will accept the support of any American citizen who believes in our posture, who believes in our principles, who believes in our platform.” Only after considerable public criticism did the Goldwater campaign rebuff Creel's endorsement.

Goldwater campaign advisor J. William Middendorf II, who would later serve in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, acknowledged, “It was not Barry's intention, but indeed was a fact, that racists thought he was their friend. While [the Goldwater campaign] tacitly accepted their support, to charge Barry with consciously appealing to racism was specious.”

Goldwater, however, had always seemed ambivalent about race. Back in Arizona, he had been a member of the Tucson chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also made significant contributions to the Phoenix chapter of the Urban League, but he funneled the contributions through a friend so that his involvement could remain anonymous. Later in life, Goldwater seemed embarrassed that he had not done more to further the cause of black equality in his community. In his 1988 autobiography, Goldwater takes credit for integrating Phoenix's lunch counters. In truth, the only action the Phoenix City Council took while Goldwater was a member in the early 1950s was to order the restaurant at the city-owned airport to serve black customers—and Goldwater was not present for either the deliberations or the vote on that issue.