The Year the GOP Went South

...Of the region’s 375 convention delegates, all were white and at least 366 supported Goldwater...

...At the Cow Palace, the rolling invective that startled television viewers fell personally upon this tiny remnant...

...In his speech to the convention on Tuesday night, TAYLOR BRANCH, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is the author of PILLAR OF FIRE, from which this article was adapted...

...The New York Times called it a “disaster” for both the United States and the Republicans, saying the Goldwater nomination could “reduce a once great party to the status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction...

...Editor John H. Sengstacke eulogized the lost tradition reaching back to the armies of Grant and Sherman: “The Grand Old Party, which fought against slavery, which kept the flame of hope burning on the altar of freedom...

...Hostilities erupted on the convention floor...

...Now Negro leaders of both parties recoiled from the concerted hostility of the Cow Palace Republicans, which they could only hope was an aberrational coup traceable to Goldwater, disconnected from both old tradition and new racial progress...

...All three television networks covered the four-day national pageant more or less continuously, anticipating an abrupt regional and ideological shift of power toward Sen...

...There was little suspense beyond a slight possibility that Dwight Eisenhower, the only Republican president of the past 30 years, might throw his transcendent influence publicly against Goldwater...

...One of them, James D. Martin of Alabama, met alone with Senator Goldwater on the roof of the Mark Hophns Hotel to propose George Wallace’s hastily conceived terms for a campaign alliance...

...Newmeek pronounced the San Francisco convention “stunningly total - and unconditional...

...Hell, I don’t want to talk to that son-of-a-bitch,” Goldwater growled when Rockefeller called him to concede the nomination...

...This time the delegates responded with standing cheers, many shakmg angry fists at the reporters’ booths around the Cow Palace...

...COPYRIGHT 1998 by Taylor Branch...

...Goldwater stammered through several unsuccessful replies before trying a D-Day analogy...

...Still, this close call within the Republican bosom shook the new presidential candidate, who resolved never to repeat his signature phrase during the campaign...

...George Young, labor secretary of Pennsylvania, complained that Goldwater delegates harassed him to the point of setting his suit jacket on fire with a cigarette...

...Martin returned to circulate on the Cow Palace floor with his message that Republicans should rise above crude racial appeals to larger issues such as federal heavyhandedness, which he called “Bobby Kennedy tearing around like a predator at the constitution of Mississippi and the registration laws of Alabama...

...Campaign historian Theodore White described the release of pent-up anger as a turning point for the convention, if not for the role and reputation of the American press...

...By golly, that makes real sense,” he said with a smile of relief that nearly matched Goldwater’s...

...Echoing a widespread public outcry, Eisenhower demanded to know how Goldwater could see “extremism” as good politics when it smacked of kooks...

...Atlanta Daily World owner C. A. Scott first denied the Cow Palace revolution (“Scranton on the Move”), then mitigated its effect (“stands to reason . . . that the party as a whole will not be carried too far from traditional Republican principles”), then pretended it was good...

...The Cleveland Call and Post reported that George Fleming of New Jersey ran from the hall in tears, saying Negro delegates “had been shoved, pushed, spat on, and cursed with a liberal sprinkling of racial epithets...

...In Congress, fully 80 percent of House Republicans and 82 percent of GOP senators had just voted for the civil rights bill, with Democrats lagging behind because of their entrenched segregationist wing...

...an authentic party revolution, born of deep-seated frustration with the existing order, executed by a new breed of pros with a ruthless skill...

...Only hindsight suggested that Johnson had glimpsed a more dramatic, permanent change...

...He could not bring himself to split his party in support of Scranton, a sure loser to Goldwater, and he had never been comfortable speaking about racial harmony, anyway...

...GOPIWhite Man’s Party,” the Califrnia Eagle of Los Angeles protested a seldom-mentioned fact about Goldwater’s victory over Rockefeller in the decisive June 2 primary: It gained convention seats and control of party machinery for a slate of 86 California delegates that “by deliberate choice” was exclusively white...

...What he meant was that patriotism required sacrifice, said Goldwater, and that General Eisenhower had been the ultimate “extremist” for liberty when he sent the Allied troops across the English Channel against Hider...

...In precincts and state conventions, Republicans everywhere were organized in part around the glorious memory of Emancipation, which was precisely what had reduced them to near extinction among Southerners...

...S. representatives from the core Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Republicans in 1964 numbered zero...

...Today we hear more states’ rights talk than we have heard in the last quarter century . . .,” he told “Face the Nation” interviewers on July 19...

...With a peculiar mix of vehemence and care, King took pains to stop short of partisan endorsement, saying he was more against Goldwater than for ‘Johnson, hoping that a sound enough defeat for Goldwater might restrain both parties from political white flight...

...There was precedent for white Southern Democrats voting Republican on presidential ballots - Eisenhower and Nixon had cracked through to win a few Southern states - but it was daunting for any Democrat to contemplate the terrible math of running against rather than with the full weight of the traditional “solid South...

...In “Cal...

...Wallace wanted a public reward - veto power over Supreme Court nominees, or, shockingly, a place on the Republican ticket as Goldwater’s running mate - in exchange for his agreement not to run as an independent presidential candidate, which likely would doom Goldwater in Southern states...

...More personally, he told Goldwater that the slogan reminded him of right-wing zealots who had called Eisenhower himself “a conscious agent of the communists” in the White House, which was “utter tommyrot...

...Wallace himself formally withdrew from the presidential race three days after the Republican convention, leaving behind a tacit endorsement of Goldwater and a claim that he had changed the language of political debate...

...Minority observers mourned the loss of Republican stalwarts far beyond the sinecures and patronage posts of the South...

...is gasping its last breath in the Cow Palace...

...The Cow Palace came alive with roars of approval...

...Bill Moyers recalled Johnson saying that he had delivered the South to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine,” which would turn the whole structure of politics on a fulcrum of color...

...Permission by Simon & Schuster, Inc...

...Goldwater delegates and the spectator galleries showered New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller with catcalls and boos when he tried to speak against extremism...

...Others thought Johnson was hoping he could win even if he lost the entire South...

...Eisenhower evoked still greater emotion when he attacked the press, urging his audience to “particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation-seeking columnists and commentators, because...

...On the morning after his acceptance speech, Senator Goldwater sought an audience with General Eisenhower, who was straying again toward rebellion over Goldwater’s chief applause line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...

...Before then, White contrasted the “well-dressed and well-mannered Goldwater delegates” favorably with “civil rightsers” marching and picketing outside the Cow Palace, but the Eisenhower speech opened the convention itself to confrontation...

...He praised the Negro delegates for deciding not to walk out of the Cow Palace in abject resignation...

...They had endured only a “graphic demonstration” of what Democrats - “the party of Bilbo, Eastland, Thurmond, Barnett, Wallace” - inflicted regularly through the past half century, wrote Scott, concluding solemnly that it was “useless for a Negro today to think he solves the race issue in politics by jumping from one major party to the other...

...Let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal . . . roaming the streets with switchblade knife,” he declared...

...Goldwater declined, knowing he had more to lose than to gain, saying Wallace after all was still a Democrat...

...Other mainstream outlets speculated about Eisenhower, the rejection of Wall Street Republicans, or Goldwater’s poor prospects against Lyndon Johnson, but their excitements were mild beside the acute distress of Negro publications...

...For generations, none but the occasional eccentric Republican had bothered to contest elections for Southern state houses, legislatures, or courthouse jobs...

...This interpretation transformed Eisenhower’s mood...

...Of 41‘U...

...The San Francisco convention, sweeping aside Lee’s credentials claim that he and 200 “regular” Negro Republicans had been railroaded out of the Shelby County caucus, seated ”lily-white” delegations in Tennessee and every other Southern state “for the first time since Reconstruction Days,” reported the Pinsburgh Courier, noting that the caucus of Southern Republicans, “to add insult to injury,” named its hotel headquarters Fort Sumter...

...these are people who couldn’t care less about the good of our party...

...GOP Convention Spurns Negroes,” cried the Cleveland Call and Post...

...Martin Luther King and others denounced the Republican ticket on its first official day and nearly every day thereafter...

...Nationwide, by slating no Negro candidates and defeating most opposing tickets, Goldwater strategists whittled the number of Negro delegates to a minuscule 14 of 1,308, roughly one per hundred, in what newspapers called the fewest “ever to be certified to a Republican convention...

...which sustained the faith of Negro people...

...Eisenhower himself stirred the passions for which he blamed Goldwater...

...In the South, where Negro Republicans could imagine no substitute haven among Democrats, editors and owners of the few Negro newspapers writhed under the assault to their Republican identity...

...One alarmist feared that Johnson could lose the election solely on the race issue...

...The phrase ‘switchblade knife’ means ‘Negro’ to the average white American,” explained a dismayed Roy Wilkins in a newspaper column entitled “Ike Struck Lowest Blow.,’ Wilkins could only hope that a speech writer had inserted the sentence without Eisenhower’s knowledge...

...Their focus was less on the Goldwater nomination itself than on the institutional rejection of cherished Republican futures such as George W Lee of Memphis, delegate to every GOP convention since 1940, who had “seconded the nomination of Robert A. Taft” in 1952...

...The Chicago Defender raised the Nazi analogy to a blaring headline: “GOP Convention, 1964 Recalls Germany, 1933...

...Eisenhower was known to resent Goldwater for calling his administration a “dime store New Deal,” and privately he had threatened to renounce the Goldwater forces for reckless exploitation on civil rights, saying that if Republicans “begin to count on the ‘white backlash,’ we will have a big civil war.,’ Rumors of a decisive Eisenhower statement quickened when his brother Milton delivered a passionate nominating address on behalf of William Scranton, the surviving alternative to Goldwater, but Eisenhower remained neutral to the end...

...The Great Purge of Negroes,” announced 3et...

...Aides debated his words in strictest confidence...

...I think we just gave the South to the Republicans,” President Johnson told his staff on the way to his Texas ranch after signing the civil rights bill...

...Afterward, neither the triumphant Goldwater conservatives nor the defeated Rockefeller-Scranton liberals smoothed their raging antagonism in the interest of party unity...

...may have a stimulating effect on the development of a real two-party system in the South”), and finally called upon the scalded, soul-torn Old Guard to “hold the fort’’ no matter what...

...Negro Delegates to GOP Convention Suffer Week of Humiliation,” headlined the Associated Negro Press newswire...

...White voters could jump, too, in numbers of far greater impact...

...L$e magazine bemoaned the “ugly tone” of the entire convention...

...GOP Negroes Washed Away by the Goldwater Ocean,” said the Chicago Defender...

...In their direst visions, after the Goldwater convention followed hard upon the civil rights bill, neither established experts nor shell-shocked Negro Republicans anticipated a wholesale switch of party identification down to the roots of congressional and local offices...

...Southern Republicans re-formed as a homogeneous group...

...The American people are sick and tired of columnists and TV dudes who . . . try to slant and distort and malign and brainwash this country.’’ Only four years earlier, when advocates of civil rights had received a congenial welcome at the Republican convention in Chicago, Negro delegates had walked out of the Democratic convention in protest of Kennedy concessions-to Southern segregationists...

...Baseball legend Jackie Robinson summarized his “unbelievable hours” as an observer on the convention floor: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany...

...The century’s first handful of promising Deep South Republican candidates arrived at the San Francisco convention hopeful of novel success in the fall elections...

...The Year the GOP Went South How the 1964 Republican convention changed the face of the GOP BY TAYLOR BRANCH REPUBLICANS OPENED THEIR NATIONal convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace on Monday, July 13...

...Barry Goldwater’s Western conservatives from the longdominant Eastern business interests...

...Historic affiliations were too well fixed, with Republicans more united behind Negro rights than Democrats...