In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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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 departure from his prepared text, warned of the danger posed by crime. “Let us not be guilty,” he said, “of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearms seeking a helpless prey, suddenly becomes upon apprehension a poor, underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society and the laxness or weaknesses of too many courts to forgive his offense.” As the journalist Theodore White observed, the former president was “lifting to national discourse a matter of intimate concern to the delegates, creating there before them an issue which touched all fears, North and South. The convention howled.”40
Two nights later, on July 16, Goldwater again brought the convention to a fever pitch. In no mood to offer conciliatory words to the moderates who had called him an extremist and sought to block his nomination even after he had secured a majority of the delegates, he made it clear that conservatives were now in charge. “Those who do not care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case,” he declared. And then he offered the aphorism for which he is best remembered. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he stated. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
FIGURE 1. Senator Barry Goldwater addresses the Republican Convention on July 16 and accepts the presidential nomination. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
A reporter in the auditorium was stunned: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater.”41
But while journalists and historians subsequently focused on that phrase and moment, the part of the speech that ignited and united the delegates was the nominee’s invocation of law and order. Demanding in loaded language with racial overtones that public security “not become the license of the mob and of the jungle,” Goldwater blamed the Democrats for allowing crime to flourish as the more than thirteen hundred delegates, only fifteen of whom were black (none of them from the South), roared their approval.42
“The growing menace in our country tonight, to personal safety, to life, to limb and property, in homes, in churches, on the playgrounds and places of business, particularly in our great cities, is the mounting concern—or should be—of every thoughtful citizen in the United States,” he growled as the crowd hooted and hollered. “History shows us, demonstrates that nothing, nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.”43
In the final draft of his nomination speech, Goldwater had scrawled in the margins even stronger and more personal language, which he opted not to deliver. “Our wives dare not leave their homes after dark,” he wrote. “Lawlessness grows. Contempt for law and order is more the