Barry Goldwater was once an icon for the Conservative movement. But as the movement changed in the last two decades he has become almost persona non-grata. Progressives have smeared him has a racist and today’s Conservatives collaborate through their silence. Libertarian-Conservatives still admire Goldwater and through the personage of Rand Paul there is a growing Neo-Goldwater wing on the right. It may not be force in 2014 or 2016 but after this version of the Republican Party has run its course this wing will be ascendant and most likely will lead a new version of the GOP to victory in 2020.

One of the hidden historical facts about Barry Goldwater was that he was against Segregation. As a Department store owner he desegregated his business. Another hidden gem was that Goldwater was a member of the NAACP. Back then, before the organization went Afro-Marxist, the NAACP welcomed Republicans. Goldwater put his money where his mouth was and helped fund anti-segregation legal challenges.

Here, Barry Goldwater enters the story. Goldwater was a department-store proprietor and a member of the Phoenix city council. He was a very conservative Republican, something that was not at all at odds with his membership in the NAACP, which was, in the 1950s, an organization in which Republicans and conservatives still were very much welcome. The civil-rights community in Phoenix, such as it was, did not quite know what to make of Goldwater. It was already clear by then that he was to be a conservative’s conservative and a man skeptical of federal overreach; while he described himself as being unprejudiced on what was at the time referred to as “the race question,” the fact was that he did not talk much about it, at least in public. His family department stores were desegregated under his watch, though he was not known to hire blacks to work there. But when the Arizona legislature was considering making segregation voluntary in the public schools, Goldwater was lobbying for it behind the scenes. And, perhaps more important, he organized a group of well-known white conservative leaders to do so as well. He did so on the advice of his friend Lincoln Ragsdale.

[….]

When Lincoln was working to raise money for the NAACP for a lawsuit to integrate the schools, he turned to every possible source he could think of, including the conservative city councilman Barry Goldwater. To his surprise, Goldwater responded with a large check. What surprised him further was that Goldwater became a personal friend and political colleague of the couple, a “great inspiration,” in Lincoln’s words.

[….]

But funding the lawsuit may have been the most important thing Goldwater did in his civil-rights career. As the historian Quintard Taylor of the University of Washington puts it: “Most historians characterize the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education as the death knell for de jure public school segregation. Yet a little-known legal victory by . . . the Arizona NAACP before the Arizona State Supreme Court in 1953 provided an important precedent for the ruling by the highest court in the land.” The NAACP had not been getting very far suing on behalf of black students, but it had made some progress with suits on behalf of Mexican-American students: A 1951 decision had outlawed segregating Hispanic students in the Tolleson School District, and Phoenix refused to comply with the new legal standard, so it was targeted for a lawsuit, too: one that would have ended racial discrimination against any student.

[….]

Barry Goldwater was not the most important opponent of racial segregation in Arizona, nor was he the most important champion of desegregating the public schools. What he was was on the right side: He put his money, his political clout, his business connections, and his reputation at the service of a cause that was right and just.

[….]

The problem for Republicans is that reclaiming their reputation as the party of civil rights requires a party leadership that wants to do so, because it cherishes that tradition and the values that it represents. It is not obvious that the Republican party has such leaders at the moment. The Party of Lincoln seems perfectly happy to be little more than the Party of the Chamber of Commerce. We should not turn our noses up at commerce — though Napoleon meant it as an insult, it was Britain’s glory to be “a nation of shopkeepers” — but it was not commerce alone that freed the slaves or built the nation.

Barry Goldwater stood up to any tyranny. Whether it was Nazism, Communism or segregation, he stood for individual liberty. Just like Calvin Coolidge is being rediscovered by many Libertarian-Conservatives, hopefully Barry Goldwater continues to be rediscovered. His message of individual liberty is timeless and if the Republican Party ever wants to be competitive in a Presidential election they should embrace this philosophy.

Another article on the GOP and civil rights that you should find interesting. Teh author states that the South was starting to trend Republican before the 1960’s.

by Sean Trende

I by-and-large agree with the thrust of Jamelle Bouie’s recent American Prospect article, which argues that Republicans badly misapprehend the reason(s) African-Americans generally vote for Democratic candidates. Too many conservatives assert that African-Americans have developed a “false consciousness” and simply need to be shown the error of their ways before they’ll start supporting Republicans. Asking “What’s the matter with black people?” simply isn’t going to get the GOP very far in its minority outreach efforts.

But in the course of this argument, Bouie makes the following statement: “White Southerners jumped ship from Democratic presidential candidates in the 1960s, and this was followed by a similar shift on the congressional level, and eventually, the state legislative level. That the [last] two took time doesn’t discount the first.”

If you polled pundits, you’d probably get 90 percent agreement with this statement. And if you polled political scientists, you’d likely get a majority to sign off on it. That’s maddening, because it’s incorrect.

[……..]

In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections.

But the big breakthrough, to the extent that there was one, came in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won 48 percent of the vote there, compared to Adlai Stevenson’s 52 percent. He carried most of the “peripheral South” — Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida — and made inroads in the “Deep South,” almost carrying South Carolina and losing North Carolina and Louisiana by single digits.

Even in what we might call the “Deepest South” — Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — Eisenhower kept Stevenson under 70 percent, which might not seem like much until you realize that Tom Dewey got 18 percent in Georgia against FDR in 1944, and that this had been an improvement over Herbert Hoover’s 8 percent in 1932.

In 1956, Eisenhower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the vote in the South, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent. He once again carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53 percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama. This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the administration had opposed the school board.

[………]

Perhaps the biggest piece of evidence that something significant was afoot is Richard Nixon’s showing in 1960. He won 46.1 percent of the vote to John F. Kennedy’s 50.5 percent. One can write this off to JFK’s Catholicism, but writing off three elections in a row becomes problematic, especially given the other developments bubbling up at the local level. It’s even more problematic when you consider that JFK had the nation’s most prominent Southerner on the ticket with him.

But the biggest problem with the thesis comes when you consider what had been going on in the interim: Two civil rights bills pushed by the Eisenhower administration had cleared Congress, and the administration was pushing forward with the Brown decision, most famously by sending the 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to assist with the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

It’s impossible to separate race and economics completely anywhere in the country, perhaps least of all in the South. But the inescapable truth is that the GOP was making its greatest gains in the South while it was also pushing a pro-civil rights agenda nationally. What was really driving the GOP at this time was economic development. As Southern cities continued to develop and sprout suburbs, Southern exceptionalism was eroded; Southern whites simply became wealthy enough to start voting Republican.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater won 49 percent of the vote in the South to Lyndon Johnson’s 52 percent. This doesn’t represent a massive breakthrough; in fact, Goldwater ran somewhat behind Eisenhower’s 1956 showing. He lost Texas, Virginia, Florida, and Tennessee, all four of which were won twice by Eisenhower and the last three of which were won by Nixon. He also lost North Carolina and Arkansas.

Goldwater did win Louisiana and South Carolina, although as we saw above, those states became “swing states” in the 1950s, not the 1960s. The only real breakthroughs for Republicans came in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi (Goldwater won 87 percent of the vote in the latter). But the argument that white Southerners in those states began voting Republican in 1964 is quite a different animal than the much broader claim that white Southerners began voting Republican that year; even then, the groundwork in these largely rural states had been laid in the 1950s.

And of course, there were steps forward in addition to the steps back for Democrats afterward. Jimmy Carter won the South by 10 points in 1976; if you narrowed down to white Southerners, Gerald Ford’s showing probably looked a lot like the Eisenhower/Nixon showings in the South. Even as late as 1992, Bill Clinton ran only a point behind George H.W. Bush in the South, although his showing among white Southerners was clearly much weaker. (Every Southern state besides Arkansas was decided by single digits that year.)

Even at the congressional level, the 1964 elections don’t represent some sort of watershed. The GOP’s development in the South lags its development at the presidential level, as quality candidates continued to favor the Democratic Party well into the 1990s, and as the national Democrats continued to tolerate Southern Democrats operating as a de facto third party through the mid-1970s. [……]

But if you’re looking for an analogue to Ike’s 1952 showing in the South, but at the congressional level, it would probably be 1962, not 1964. The GOP went from winning 21 percent of the Southern vote for Congress in 1960 to winning 33 percent in 1962. It nearly unseated Alabama Sen. Lister Hill that year, leading political scientist Walter Dean Burnham to declare that two-party competition had finally arrived there. Of course, it also won LBJ’s Senate seat in a special election in 1961.

Republicans actually stepped backward in the House popular vote in 1964, to 32 percent, before winning 34 percent in 1966. Incidentally, all of these improved showings owe a lot to Eisenhower, who directed the NRCC to launch “Operation Dixie” in the late 1950s, developing local “farm teams” in states where no Republican organization existed and working to make sure more House races were contested.

Goldwater’s nomination may well have represented a watershed in the GOP’s ideological development (though I think there are some nuances there that are frequently missed as well), and there’s no doubt, at least in my mind, that GOP candidates used racialized appeals to try to win over Southern whites. None of those debates are impacted by the observations above.

But the assertion that white Southerners began voting Republican in 1964 is simply incorrect, whether for president, Congress, or statehouses. The development of the Southern GOP was a slow-moving, gradual process that lasted over a century, and is just being completed today.

Update by Speranza

Read the rest –  Southern  whites shift to the GOP predates the ’60’s.