Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein Page A

Goldwater was a good choice for the Republican half of their scheme. Then Manion joined his friends in imploring Barry to run—or at least let them form Goldwater Clubs to drum up support for him. They wanted to know if Goldwater would, even if he chose not to actively cooperate with them, at least stay out of their way—and whether he would yield gracefully to a draft if the boom they expected took shape. Goldwater gave a response he would echo many more times in the years to follow as supplicants paraded before him with arguments much the same: He was a loyal Republican, he said, and he would do nothing to harm the party. He supported Nixon. But it was his duty not to stand in the way of the wishes of the party’s rank and file, were they made sufficiently clear. Though it seemed to him that someone with a Jewish name couldn’t be an effective candidate.

    Manion left for Indiana in a mood of cautious optimism. And Goldwater left for a speaking engagement in Greenville, South Carolina.
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    Goldwater traveled some ten thousand miles a month that year for the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, always giving the same speech to any local audience that would have him: “Balance our budgets ... stop this utterly ridiculous agriculture program... get the federal government out of business—every business”; sell the Tennessee Valley Authority “if we can only get a dollar for it”; stop “the unbridled power of union bosses.” He spoke in a dehydrated, movie-cowboy tenor, slipping his heavy black spectacles on and off to match his awkward rhythms, now and again raising his voice in anger, sometimes stammering awkwardly. And to the right audience he could barely get his words out for the applause.
    The question was whether this was that audience. Goldwater didn’t often visit the states of the Old Confederacy, since there were practically no Republican Senate candidates below the Mason-Dixon line. In the land where Faulkner said the past isn’t even past, the word “Republican” still signified the political wing of the marauding Union Army. By the time Republican carpetbaggers were routed in the 1870s, the South was codifying a system of racial segregation to cow the potentially insurrectionary black population in its midst. And the ruling Bourbons had indoctrinated the people that if a second party were to grow up in the South, it would only have to court Negroes as its allies in order to take over—evoking visions of Negro domination and rape on the order of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
    State Republican organizations survived as shells, “post office parties” that existed only to deliver their “black-and-tan” delegations at Republican conventions in exchange for federal patronage if the GOP won the White House. They had a vested interest in remaining as meager and insular as possible—“rotten boroughs,” in political parlance. Since convention delegations were apportioned by voting population, not by Republican population, the black-and-tans were unaccountable to any grass roots. The delegates were tractable black citizens proud to represent the Party of Lincoln even if only as puppets of Democratic bosses. In the South, went the joke, Republicans were all rank and damned little file. Mississippi’s black Republican chair for thirty-six years didn’t even live in Mississippi. In South Carolina it could be impossible to vote for a Republican even if you wanted to, lest the local sheriff come knocking on your door; the secret ballot had only been instituted there in 1950.
    But the South, like Arizona, was changing. During and after World War II the South had also filled up with fortune-seeking outsiders unschooled in the curious political folkways of their new home. The newcomers formed a potential
Republican base. And to the rest of the South’s (white) citizenry, the Democratic Party was looking worse all