Neo Conservatism Linked to Barry Goldwater in 1964
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater announced his presidential bid in 1964 saying, “I will offer a choice, not an echo.” A Choice, Not an Echo became the title of Phyllis Schlafly’s 1964 book. Goldwater’s presidential campaign set him against the moderate Republicans of the Northeast, led by New York’s Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania’s William Scranton. Defeating his rivals in the primaries, Goldwater arrived for the National Convention in San Francisco confident and determined. But many voters mistrusted Goldwater and viewed his most ardent supporters as, in the words of Vermont Senator George Aiken, “weird and vulgar.”
Barry Goldwater’s Conservatism
Unlike other Republicans willing to accept FDR’s New Deal, Goldwater wanted to dismantle it. He was fiercely anti-Union and stated, during the New Hampshire primary, that Social Security should not be mandatory. According to Goldwater, big government was creating a welfare state. During a campaign TV ad, he referred to this as the “cult of individual and government irresponsibility.”
Barry Goldwater rejected negotiating with the Soviet Union and believed that the United Nations was incompatible with American beliefs and the Constitution. He opposed federal funding for education and voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, calling it, “a threat to the very essence of our basic system.” The future conservative senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, stated that Goldwater was, “the last hope of the capitalistic, free enterprise system.”
Goldwater’s Attack on Communism
Barry Goldwater never criticized Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch hunts” of the early 1950s. He believed that every American child needed to be taught the evils of Communism. Ironically, the detonation of China’s first atomic bomb as well as the Kremlin’s removal of Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev in October, 1964 may have helped Johnson more than Goldwater. Goldwater was perceived by many voters as someone willing to launch a nuclear war.
The Lyndon Johnson campaign reinforced this view with the famous “Daisy” ad, featuring a young girl plucking a daisy as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background. As the commercial ends, Johnson tells the viewers, “These are the stakes.” Goldwater, however, told Americans that the country was, “not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other nations and people.” Writing about the 1964 election, Jon Margolis commented that Goldwater’s “real enemy was neither communism nor liberalism but the modern world.”
The Seeds of an Ultra-Conservative Republican Wing
Goldwater’s nomination was raucous and impolite. Goldwater’s faction controlled the convention’s Platform Committee and beat back any attempts by moderate Republicans to amend it. Moderate Republicans were shouted down. It helped Goldwater that the convention was in California where the party leadership had fallen to the ultra-conservatives who were led by former Senator William Knowland.
Moderates saw the rising conservative wing as upstart devotees of Ayn Rand and supporters of the John Birch Society. In his acceptance speech, Goldwater told the delegates that, “Our people have followed false prophets…” He spoke of freedom and how it applied to the conservative agenda and elaborated the failures of the Kennedy-Johnson years. He ended with the party’s new marching orders: “The Republican cause demands that we brand Communism as the principal disturber of peace in the world today…Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”
The November Election
Goldwater’s stupendous defeat in November 1964 brought the moderate Republicans back into party control. Goldwater was, in the words of Walter Lippmann, “a radical reactionary who would…dismantle the modern state.” In 1968 Richard Nixon would be elected. Reelected in 1972, Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace after being implicated in the Watergate scandal cover up. By 1980, however, Ronald Reagan was elected after the Republican Party embraced New Conservatism.
Traced back to the days of Barry Goldwater, Republican New Conservatism triumphed in 1994 when the party gained control of Congress after forty years of Democratic leadership. Today, in many ways, the emerging Tea Party Movement led by such conservatives as former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin owes much to the days of Barry Goldwater and the party’s attempt to silence the moderates.
References:
- Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, 2004)
- Jon Margolis, The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999)
- Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step From the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (University of California Press, 1998)
- Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (NY: Atheneum Publishers, 1965)
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