Today Thomas Dewey is best remembered for a cameo in what is perhaps the most famous picture of Harry S. Truman’s presidency, “Dewey Defeats Truman” screamed the banner headline of the November 3rd, 1948 Chicago Tribune. Before he was an incorrect newspaper headline though, Thomas Dewey was one of the standard bearers of what was left of the Republican Party after Franklin Roosevelt got through with it. He was the governor of New York for more than a decade and was heavily involved with the effort to run Dwight Eisenhower as a Republican in 1952. He was a giant of what is now an almost extinct species, the socially liberal, fiscally conservative Northeastern Republican; the event that marked that sadly departed group for extermination was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign.
In “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” Rick Perlstein chronicles not only that campaign, but also the enormous amount of political work required to bring it about. Hovering over all that hullaballoo is a quote from Thomas Dewey that Perlstein uses to both open and close the narrative, one that may be very relevant in the age of Barack Obama and the rodeo show of his right wing opponents. Dewey said that if the two American political parties were ever realigned along their ideological axes, “The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.” That thought was on the mind of many professional political observers in the wake of Goldwater’s 1964 annihilation by Lyndon Johnson.
To the true believer conservatives in Perlstein’s book, however, that defeat was in an inconceivable future. They saw Eisenhower as a lukewarm conservative who had done nothing for their cause and they felt marginalized within their own party. After the 1960 election, which many believed John Kennedy had stolen (to be fair to them it wasn’t a clean election, and even if Kennedy would’ve won anyway it wasn’t a fringe position to think chicanery had made the difference), they were tired of playing second fiddle in their own party. After all, if they weren’t going to win by trotting out moderates like Dewey and Nixon, why on earth shouldn’t they be out front?
Who were these people and what was their cause? By and large they were businessmen who’d chafed under both the New Deal and the wartime restrictions on private enterprise. (They were also strong isolationists.) They wanted to roll back the government that had grown up around Roosevelt and Truman. That they were also violently anti-Communist and none too keen on civil rights (which they attacked as a further increase in federal government power) goes almost without saying.
Perlstein documents, blow by blow, how the true conservatives (just like today they were financed almost exclusively by a few wealthy individuals) took over party organ after party organ. From county and state level committees to auxiliary groups only loosely affiliated with the Republican Party they engaged in an old fashioned political war, door by door, ward by ward, dollar by dollar. They conquered the Party through enormous amounts of hard nosed political work the likes of which is rarely seen. The result was Barry Goldwater’s nomination, a landslide that buried the traditional poobahs of the party.
Much like “Nixonland”, its de facto sequel, “Before the Storm” is filled cover to cover with catnip for those interested in American politics. For example, when the 1964 nominating process got to the Oregon primary, Richard Nixon was not officially running. Though his name was on the ballot in Oregon he wasn’t openly campaigning, preferring instead to play the disinterested elder statesmen whom, should the party ask, would be a good soldier and step into the nomination. Nixon’s advisors told him to play his part and not make any effort in Oregon, victory was unlikely anyway. Instead:
Nixon decided to make a stealth campaign in Oregon whatever the risks. Nadasdy [a young PR man and Nixon backer] reflected with wonder that so careful and shrewd a politician could also relish harebrained cloak-and-dagger schemes that could easily blow up in his face.
In addition to wonderful little nuggets like that there are a number of incidents that eerily parallel our times. Once it got off the ground Goldwater’s campaign was sustained by small donations from people with more passion than money, “A thirteen-year-old sent $5 from his allowance, a twelve-year-old $15 earned cutting grass, a seven-year-old girl a card with three pennies taped on it and the message “I say a prayer for Senator Goldwater every night.” Two young steadies pledged to give up their Saturday night movie and donated the money they saved.” To have donations of such meager amounts make up an important part of the total would be almost unheard of in high level American politics until the rise of on-line fundraising the last few cycles.
But the parallels don’t stop with the money. Giving a right wing radio address before President Kennedy’s fateful trip to Dallas, the oil man H.L. Hunt, an outspoken conservative, warned that if strong, federal civil rights protections were enacted then the next step would certainly be the confiscation of firearms. One need only look at the sales figures for guns and ammunition since the last election to see the perennial nature of that unfounded fear.
The right wing paranoia doesn’t always take the form of “they’re coming for my guns” however. One 1960s rumor, given its first wide exposure in a newsletter sent out by Orange County Republican Representative James B. Utt, had it that the UN was secretly training 100,000 troops in Georgia (including 16,000 “African Negro troops, who are cannibals”) that, with the connivance of the lefty Democrats, would dissolve the Constitution and make the US part of a world government. (The troops were at an Army base receiving training before going home to friendly governments.) As insane as that was, it was believed by millions of Americans. Their gullible successors are the ones spouting off about Obama’s birth certificate, ACORN, and the socialist/fascist/communist plots of Barack Obama. It’s not too difficult to imagine FOX News circa 1964 running a chyron along the lines of “16,000 African Troops Train in Georgia, Officials Says ‘Everything Fine’, Local Residents Worry”.
After Goldwater went down in flames the doyens of the American political establishment moved in to declare conservatism dead. And if you were taking in the whole view that was indeed the way things looked in 1964. Vietnam was still barely on the political radar (though Johnson had already decided to escalate it once the election was over) and the racial issues that were to shred American political assumptions for decades to come were still largely confined to the South. The Watts Riots, with which Perlstein opens Nixonland, happened in 1965.
Massive defeat and all, the Goldwater campaign remains the seminal event from which modern conservatism is descended. Not only did Nixon do tireless work on Goldwater’s behalf (for which he was lambasted at the time but which did him a world of good four years later), but Ronald Reagan, then still merely an actor, made his national political debut giving what was known simply as “The Speech”. It’s a 30 minute harangue that is the perfect distillation of the mid-1960s conservative world view. (Goldwater, on whose behalf it was televised, isn’t even mentioned until halfway through.) As would be his custom through later campaigns and his presidency, Reagan’s facts were often flat out wrong or heavily distorted, but even with that knowledge and forty odd years of hindsight it’s difficult to watch that and not agree with the guy.
And, of course, from Reagan came Bush the Elder, and from Bush the Elder came Bush the Younger and the present sorry state of the Republican Party. The question today is whether or not the conclusion from 1964 holds true because the parties are now, for the first time since then, aligned along their ideological axes. The Republican Party has driven out all the heretics and consists of naught but hard core right wing conservatives. The Democratic Party consists of pretty much everyone else.
After 1964 the Republicans stormed back to power on racial resentment and foreign policy fiasco. Off and on they’ve been leaning on those two crutches for the last eleven presidential elections. But the ground has shifted underneath them, the foreign policy fiascos are now theirs and the racial resentments are a faint echo of what they once were. Can an ideologically pure Republican Party compete on the national level? We’ll find out in the next couple of elections, but Thomas Dewey didn’t think so and he was in a position to know.
