In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm

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СКАЧАТЬ for decades. And it would help make public support for punitive measures by the police and the courts an enduring foundation of the coming crusades against crime and drugs.

      Goldwater was not the inventor or originator of law and order. Since Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s southern whites had blamed black criminality on the end of slavery and the beginning of integration. By the 1920s, the Great Migration of African Americans had led to similar fears among northern whites. In the 1940s and 1950s, the rise of the modern civil rights movement led conservatives in Congress to warn repeatedly of the great threat racial integration supposedly posed to public safety. In the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1960, for example, Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina declared that it would lead to a “wave of terror, crime, and juvenile delinquency” in the South as earlier state laws had in the North. Democratic Senator James Eastland of Mississippi likewise asserted that “law enforcement is breaking down because of racial integration” and claimed that the unsafe streets of New York were clear evidence.³²

      But it was Goldwater who introduced law and order to presidential politics in March 1964, when he charged that crime and riots—which conservatives continually if inexactly conflated—ran rampant in America’s streets. He refused, however, to place the blame on racial integration, unlike Thurmond, Eastland, and Wallace, who made law and order the focus of his presidential campaign when he entered Democratic primaries later in the spring. Goldwater instead asserted that the fault lay with the widespread practice of nonviolent protest, which in turn had led to disrespect for authority. The Arizona senator also ascribed guilt to white liberals like President Johnson, who in a crass and cynical bid for black votes had condoned and even applauded demonstrators when they violated what they viewed as unjust and immoral laws.

      “Many of our citizens—citizens of all races—accept as normal the use of riots, demonstrations, boycotts, violence, pressures, civil disorder, and disobedience as an approach to serious national problems,” thundered Goldwater at the University of New Hampshire, where he promised to restore law and order. Passage of civil rights legislation, he predicted, would not lead to lower tensions and less crime—as white and black liberals had asserted for decades—but only to more bloodshed and fewer restraints on individual behavior. Like most conservatives, he saw black criminality as a result of immorality, not prejudice.³³

      Goldwater used law and order to blend concern over the rising number of traditional crimes—robberies and rapes, muggings and murders—with unease about civil rights, civil disobedience, and civil unrest. If the fear factor reached a critical level, conservative politicians, pundits, and propagandists could emphasize that opposition to crime and violence, not support for discrimination and segregation, was the reason for their resistance to the freedom struggle. Of course, liberals could with justification respond that the calls for law and order frequently rested on racial prejudice. Civil disobedience was often the only recourse left to black demonstrators denied basic freedoms and confronted by white officials who exploited the law or white extremists who defied it. But what made law and order such a potentially potent political weapon for conservatives was that they could turn it into a Rorschach test of public anxiety and project different concerns to different people at different moments.

      More fundamentally, Goldwater offered a cogent view of a complicated and threatening world by contending that the loss of security and order was merely the most visible symptom and symbol of the failure of liberalism. In his view, the welfare state had squandered the hard-earned taxes of the deserving middle class on wasteful programs for the undeserving poor. These programs had in turn aggravated rather than alleviated social problems by encouraging personal dependence and discouraging personal responsibility. They had also raised false hopes and expectations on the part of the disadvantaged. “Government seeks to be parent, teacher, leader, doctor, and even minister,” he argued at a New Hampshire high school. “And its failures are strewn about us in the rubble of rising crime rates, juvenile delinquency, [political] scandal.”³⁴

      It was a powerful, if premature, indictment of the War on Poverty that Johnson hoped to launch and Goldwater wanted to forestall. But for the moment law and order enabled the Arizona senator to focus on what he and other conservatives claimed were the negative consequences of civil rights without directly opposing what had become a moral imperative to most liberals and many moderates. In the primary campaign, the issue might also help him broaden his appeal in southern and western suburbs. And by enhancing Goldwater’s popularity with working-class and lower middle-class whites, especially ethnic Catholics in northern cities, law and order might facilitate a successful challenge in the general election, if he could first claim the Republican nomination.

      In April the campaign continued to stumble, but in May it gained momentum and delegates, including 271 of 278 from southern states. At a rally in Madison Square Garden before eighteen thousand enthusiastic supporters, Goldwater said he supported the right to vote but not the effort to legislate integration, calling it a “problem of the heart and of the mind.” He added that “until we have an Administration that will cool the fires and the tempers of violence, we simply cannot solve the rest of the problem in a lasting sense.” The comment met with scorn from Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP. He warned that the patience of blacks was wearing thin as the civil rights bill remained stalled in Congress. “If [our] pleas continue to be met with sophistry and antebellum oratory there will certainly be violence in the streets and elsewhere,” he predicted. “There is nothing left. There is no place to turn.”³⁵

      At a Memorial Day rally in Riverside, part of Goldwater’s all-out effort to defeat Rockefeller and win the critical California primary, he again rejected the liberal claim that passage of the civil rights bill would reduce black crime and promote racial harmony. “Some wobbly thinkers think that laws will stop you from hating, laws will make you generous,” he said with disdain. “But when I read about street crimes, about hatred covered with blood, I ask what’s happening to the land of the free.” Three days later, he attracted 51 percent of the vote and clinched the Republican nomination. Southern California had provided the vital votes. In morally traditional Orange County, Goldwater swamped Rockefeller, whose new wife had given birth the weekend before the election, by an almost two-to-one margin. Now it was on to the convention—but first the senator had to return to Washington, where the debate over the civil rights bill had reached a climax.³⁶

      Back in February the House of Representatives had overwhelmingly approved the measure. But in the Senate a core group of southern Democrats had blocked it. After a seventy-five-day filibuster, the longest in history, the Senate took a cloture vote on June 10. Supporters of the bill needed sixty-seven votes to halt debate; in the end, they received seventy-one, including the “aye” of Democratic Senator Clair Engle of California, who was in a wheelchair and had to point to his eye because he could not speak due to a brain tumor.³⁷

      On June 18, Goldwater was one of twenty-seven senators—only six of whom were Republicans—to vote against the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson signed into law on July 2. The racial question was “fundamentally a matter of the heart,” Goldwater declared on the floor of the Senate. “The problems of discrimination cannot be cured by laws alone.” He added that “if my vote is misconstrued, let it be, and let me suffer its consequences…. This is where I stand.”³⁸

      As anticipated, Goldwater’s vote attracted harsh criticism from liberals. But he received strong praise from conservatives like Ezra Taft Benson, former secretary of agriculture in the Eisenhower administration and later president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Like Goldwater he agreed that the bill would lead to more violence, but he blamed communists—not liberals. “The plans made some years ago for the use of the Negroes in stirring up strife and contention, if not civil war, is being carried out effectively,” warned Benson.³⁹

      At the Republican Convention in San Francisco, most of the delegates shared Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights and support for law and order. On July 14, the second night, Dwight Eisenhower arrived and, in a lastminute СКАЧАТЬ