1964 Ad

Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Taylor Branch

Only hindsight suggested that Johnson had glimpsed a more dramatic, permanent change. 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. 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. Historic affiliations were too well fixed, with Republicans more united behind Negro rights than Democrats. 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. 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. For generations, none but the occasional eccentric Republican had bothered to contest elections for Southern state houses, legislatures, or courthouse jobs. Of 41 U.S. representatives from the core Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, Republicans in 1964 numbered zero.

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. One of them, James D. Martin of Alabama, met alone with Senator Goldwater on the roof of the Mark Hopkins Hotel to propose George Wallace's hastily conceived terms for a campaign alliance. 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. Goldwater declined, knowing he had more to lose than to gain, saying Wallace after all was still a Democrat. 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 heavy-handedness, which he called "Bobby Kennedy tearing around like a predator at the constitution of Mississippi and the registration laws of Alabama." 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. "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. "... 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. 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. Martin Luther King and others denounced the Republican ticket on its first official day and nearly every day thereafter. 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.