Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy more

Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Barry Goldwater’s Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor Elizabeth Tandy Shermer In the spring of 1960, a slim 123-page pamphlet grabbed the attention of audiences across the nation with a powerful restatement of the conservative world view: “the radical, or Liberal, approach has not worked and is not working.” With this declaration, Senator Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative climbed to the top of best-seller lists across the country. Inside were ideas drawn from a decade’s worth of the senator’s speeches and writings and the research of the Arizonan’s ghostwriter, Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law. Goldwater and Bozell condemned New Dealers and Fair Dealers as well as moderate Republicans, such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, because they were allowing “socialism” to subordinate “all other considerations to man’s material well-being.”1 Conscience of a Conservative was an outcry against the New Deal order for Goldwater and American conservatives who followed his lead. The chapters touched on issues dividing the nation: the balance between state’s rights and civil rights, the increase in taxes and farm subsidies, as well as the expansion of the labor movement and the welfare state. But the villains were not Soviet commissars or domestic Communists. Instead, Goldwater and Bozell trained their fire on liberals, including those who called themselves moderate Republicans. Targeting liberal wolves in gop sheep’s clothing was a shift in the strategy of the Right as it directed political focus away from the McCarthyite witch-hunts and toward a political rhetoric that sought to exploit fissures in the postwar liberal consensus. In recent years, Goldwater and Conscience of a Conservative have received renewed attention. In the academy and in politics, Goldwater’s legacy seems to be in flux with libertarians and even some liberals who hail the senator’s latter-day hostility to the religious Right and his tolerant attitude toward homosexuality and abortion. In an interview for the 2006 documentary film Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater (made by Goldwater’s granddaughter CC), Madeline Albright, President Bill Clinton’s former secretary of state, captures the film’s central argument: “Today, he looks liberal to me.” In the 2007 Princeton University Press edition of Conscience of a Conservative, the conservative columElizabeth Tandy Shermer is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This project would not have been possible without funding from the University of California’s Labor and Employment Research Fund or support from Linda Whitaker, the Arizona Historical Foundation’s archivist, who opened up Barry Goldwater’s Senate files for me and gave me total access to his papers and other collections, which they were, and continue to be, reorganizing. I also benefited from the comments and criticisms of Eileen C. Boris, Mary O. Furner, Robert Goldberg, Laura Kalman, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Paul Spickard, and David Witwer. Special thanks to Nelson Lichtenstein. Readers may contact Shermer at ellie@umail.ucsb.edu. 1 Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (New York, 1960), 3; Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, 1995), 138–39; Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 10. December 2008 The Journal of American History 1 2_Shermer.indd 1 9/30/08 2:41:49 PM 2 The Journal of American History December 2008 nist George F. Will maintains that Goldwater would be disgusted with “social conservatives” and their “strong government conservatism,” which has “an active agenda to defend morals and promote virtue, lest freedom be lost.” That kind of Republican, Will asserts, is not Goldwater’s heir apparent. In the book’s new afterword, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims the senator was not “a mere shill for Wall Street or the wealthy elite” and would actually side with those calling for more regulation and restraint.2 Those new assessments of Arizona’s most famous senator offer more insight into contemporary political debates than into Goldwater’s politics. Indeed, the very libertarianism that makes Goldwater intriguing today is chief among the characteristics that led the historian Richard Hofstadter and the sociologist Daniel Bell to denounce the movement Goldwater led more than forty years ago as one of alienated “pseudo-conservatives” on the fringe of American politics. This historiographical about-face cannot be divorced from the seemingly dramatic erosion of the New Deal liberal-regulatory order and the meteoric rise of a religiously inflected Right, whose narrative has become a staple of recent scholarship. Yet recent work has, for the most part, focused on the racial and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s to explain that dramatic political transformation. Efforts to understand the Right prior to that era have emphasized Cold War anticommunism or the cultural and political impact of postwar affluence to fathom the fracturing of the New Deal coalition and the waning of support for an activist, liberal state. Most of the narratives in this literature that have intersected with labor history have focused on the emergence of an assertive social conservatism within the working class, which was graphically symbolized by the violent 1970 New York City clash between unionized construction workers and anti–Vietnam War protestors. This “hard hat” phenomenon and the emergence of the culturally conservative Ronald Reagan Democrats—who proved so important in the 1980 election—seemed to demonstrate the degree to which the “culture wars” of the 1970s and 1980s subverted the New Deal order.3 But these narratives offer little insight into how Americans grew to distrust the economic pillars of the New Deal. In many recent works, historians have shown that, unlike today, economic rights were explicitly high on the national political agenda in the early postwar period. Labor and business historians, in particular, have asked why so many Americans, on both the left and the right, ceased to see a well-organized and secure trade union movement as crucial to economic prosperity and political democracy. Those historians have begun to reshape the story of the death of the New Deal, demonstrating in 2 Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, dir. Julie Anderson (Sweet Pea Films, 2006); Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960; Princeton, 2007), xv, 123, 134–35; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made similar remarks on the television program, “Conservatism and Liberalism in the 1960s,” prod. New York Public Library, Book tv (c-span2, May 26, 2007). Participants on the program included John Patrick Diggins, Hendrik Hertzberg, Kennedy, Jeff Madrick, Sam Tanenhaus, and Sean Wilentz. 3 Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right, Expanded and Updated (Garden City, 1964). On race and anticommunism in the Right, see Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York, 2004); Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1992), Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston, 1998); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003); and Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996). On social conservatism in the American working class, see Jefferson Cowie, “Nixon’s Class Struggle: Romancing the New Right Worker, 1969–1973,” Labor History, 43 (Aug. 2002), 257–83; Jefferson Cowie, “Vigorously Left, Right, and Center: The Crosscurrents of Working-Class America in the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, 2004), 75–106; Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the WorkingClass Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002); and Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. 2_Shermer.indd 2 9/30/08 2:41:49 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 3 remarkable detail that the literature on American conservatism has slighted the salience of the labor issue in the crystallization of a right-wing counterattack against liberalism that occurred long before the hard hats became a symbol of the white working class’s new support for Republican stances on social and cultural matters.4 Goldwater’s politics, both in Arizona and in the Senate, are central to an understanding of the slow collapse of liberalism’s popular appeal. In the 1950s, the senator helped reclaim for American conservatism a language of freedom, individualism, and family security that Progressives, New Dealers, and trade unionists had monopolized for almost two generations. Scholars of the American Right have long identified radical individualism as a strand of modern conservatism. Much of their work focuses on how right-wing intellectuals, from Ayn Rand to Friedrich von Hayek, championed individualism as a way to denounce the welfare state and defend laissez-faire capitalism. Such intellectuals struck a resonant chord with American voters, including segments of the working class, because, as the historian Michael Kazin has argued, protecting individuals from the powerful—whether it be corporations or the liberal state—is one of the most important political tropes in the American populist tradition. However, according to Kazin, the conservative movement only appropriated this David-and-Goliath rhetoric successfully in the mid-1960s, when working-class whites turned against “wheeler-dealer” liberals and embraced the gop “as the champion of any citizen harassed by arrogant but inept bureaucrats, slovenly and unpatriotic protestors, and criminal minorities.” But Barry Goldwater proved the pioneer. Even before this much-studied white working-class backlash, the Arizona senator had deployed that populist language to fight New Dealers, Fair Dealers, and Square Dealers, not to mention union organizers. During the 1950s, the senator became one of the leading spokesmen for conservatives eager to make Americans distrust the large, modern trade union movement, not big business. While Goldwater and Bozell did not dedicate a single page to left-wing subversives in Conscience of a Conservative, they spent an entire chapter on “Freedom for Labor,” a title that underscored the authors’ central message: the trade union movement was trampling on the working class. Goldwater and Bozell charged that “graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it. The cause is the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of union leaders.” They posited, “The evil to be eliminated is the power of unions to enforce industry-wide bargaining.”5 4 On the salience of economics in the postwar period, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004); Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005); Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2003); James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (Oxford, 1997); and Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore, 2002). On conservative attacks on unions, see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: rca’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, 1999); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana, 1994); Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, 1997); Andrew Kersten, Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II (New York, 2006); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003); Lichtenstein, State of the Union; William Millikan and Peter Rachleff, A Union against Unions: The Minneapolis Citizens Alliance and Its Fight against Organized Labor, 1903–1947 (St. Paul, 2001); Kimberley Phillips-Fein, “Top-Down Revolution: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Politicians against the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005); and David Witwer, “Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement,” Journal of American History, 92 (Sept. 2005), 527–52. 5 John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, 1997); Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the gop (Chapel Hill, 1995); Jennifer Burns, “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement,” in American Capitalism: Social Though and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Phila- 2_Shermer.indd 3 9/30/08 2:41:49 PM 4 The Journal of American History December 2008 Goldwater used his first term in the Senate to win a large following, not as an anticommunist, which was commonplace enough in the 1950s, but as the spokesman for the anti-union Right within the Republican party. His political activities made him the biggest enemy of the trade union movement, touching off a war in 1958 between conservatives eager to reelect the senator and labor leaders desperate to defeat him. According to Goldwater, “crooked bosses” and high wages generated an inflationary spiral that weakened the economy and penalized ordinary workers, trade unionists, and middle-class consumers alike. Goldwater alleged that these “racketeers” used the New Deal state to gain a stranglehold over rank-and-file unionists and the nation’s economy. Despite a spirited, labor-driven campaign against him, he not only won reelection but also garnered a large national following composed of Americans hostile to New Deal programs, skeptical of liberal promises, and eager to uphold his definition of individual freedom. His political victory had a greater importance than just laying the foundation for his 1964 presidential campaign. While Goldwater was not the mastermind behind postwar anti-unionism, he was a pioneering spokesman for the anti-union Right who used his considerable fame to bring disgruntled unionists into the national spotlight. Goldwater helped introduce into mainstream political discourse the conservative argument that many routine, heretofore legal trade union activities were, in fact, corrupt, dangerous, and un-American because they impinged on American individualism. Solidarity, then, became an abridgement of the rights of the individual. As a public crusader against the specter of organized labor, Goldwater not only won a national following but also helped conservatives gain important footholds in their push against postwar liberalism. The Liberal West Goldwater’s ascendancy in the Southwest had its roots in the region’s spectacular midcentury growth. The Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War helped transform the West from a supplier of the raw materials eastern businesses needed into a formidable manufacturing power and a cornerstone of the Cold War military-industrial complex. The West had always enjoyed and depended on federal dollars, and New Deal programs poured even more wealth into the region. New Dealers favored decentralizing industry and promoting agrarian efficiency, which made the arid and sparsely populated Southwest a prime location for government projects. Depression-era infrastructure development and wartime necessity ensured a steady demand that provided not only jobs but also the government contracts that would transform western businesses, such as W. A. Bechtel Company, Bank of America, and Kaiser Industries into powerful, national corporations. Henry Kaiser built a unionized empire by accommodating his business practices to the 1935 Wagner Act when building the Grand Coulee Dam. Kaiser and his son also invested in medical care for their workers, which led to the creation of Kaiser Permanente in 1945, a revolutionary health care plan for its time. Kaiser and other delphia, 2006), 271–90; Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (Boston, 1996); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (1976; Wilmington, 1998); Leo P. Ribuffo, “Conservatism and American Politics,” Journal of the Historical Society, 3 (March 2003), 163–75; Jonathon M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (Oxford, 2001); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, 1998), 222, 224. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative (2007), 40, 51. 2_Shermer.indd 4 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 5 federal contractors set a new standard for western development that was predicated on a powerful, intrusive state and a vibrant trade union movement.6 Labor movements in the West flourished in the 1940s. During World War II, the National War Labor Board (nwlb) strengthened labor’s role as a partner in an emerging system of tripartite corporatism, which balanced the power of business with the strength of an empowered labor movement and an activist liberal state. Giving “maintenance of membership” contract clauses to unions that pledged not to strike proved to be the most crucial policy decision the government made to strengthen the power of unions. Those clauses gave newly organized employees, or those employed under an older contract, fifteen days to withdraw from the union voluntarily. After that inaugural period, workers had to remain union members in good standing; failure to pay dues or to abide by union rules meant expulsion from the union and termination of employment. Such agreements signaled the union’s legitimacy and strength, especially because these clauses facilitated almost effortless growth. “As factories and mills expanded,” the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein explains, “new workers were automatically enrolled, increasing the steady flow of dues. With a rising wartime income large industrial unions had the financial resources to organize the new defense plants being built in Texas, Southern California, and other areas far removed from the traditional centers of union strength.”7 Simultaneously, changes in the proto–sun belt’s economy transformed the shape of the western labor movement. After the war, growth in the tourism, retail, service, and manufacturing industries, plus an increase in federal jobs, marginalized mining and agriculture, the old mainstays of the western economy. Federally built roads brought tourists eager to stay in the new hotels and motels and to eat in the many restaurants opening across the region. In Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, state coffers depended increasingly on tourism, which, along with defense, became a pillar of the postwar western economy.8 Labor adapted well to those changes. The growth in union membership in the Southwest was tremendous. Between 1939 and 1953, the number of Arizona unionists increased from 16,600 to 57,400, while union density (the percentage of union workers out of the total work force) grew from 17.4 percent to 27.2 percent. This growth brought spectacular displays of western labor’s new strength. The Teamsters Union made impressive gains in the region and replicated tactics they used in the Midwest to organize Denver, the area’s largest transportation hub. With a foothold in Colorado, the Teamsters spread into New Mexico and Wyoming. Beachheads were also established in the service sector. The Reno Culinary Workers local struck in 1949 during contract negotiations for better wages and benefits, timing the work stoppage with the all-important Fourth of July celebrations. Unions were also active politically. In Nevada, unionists began serious attempts in 1945 to unify the state’s numerous labor organizations for political campaigns and legislative action. The mining districts were also not quiescent. Local 890 of the In6 Gerald D. Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (Albuquerque, 1977); Gerald D. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West (Tucson, 1999); Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York, 2005), 126; Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill, 1997), 8; Klein, For All These Rights, 193. 7 Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The cio in World War II: With a New Introduction by the Author (Philadelphia, 2003), 71–81, esp. 81. 8 William S. Collins, The New Deal in Arizona (Phoenix, 1999), 20–25; Mary Ellen Glass, Nevada’s Turbulent ’50s: Decade of Political and Economic Change (Reno, 1981). 2_Shermer.indd 5 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM 6 The Journal of American History December 2008 ternational Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (iummsw or Mine-Mill) called against the Empire Zinc Corporation what ended up being the most dramatic western strike of the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1952, Anglo and Mexican American miners and their families held out against employers in Hanover, New Mexico, a social movement lionized in the left-wing film Salt of the Earth (1954).9 Labor was on the move in Arizona as well. In Phoenix, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (afscme) and the United Public Workers had great success organizing city employees, including police officers and fire fighters (both of these locals won big wage increases after the war). afscme members from various locals formed the City Employees Unity Council, which served as a political arm for these public sector locals. In the building trades, Phoenix locals had negotiated closed shop clauses in their contracts, which ensured that only unionized workers would handle all immediate postwar construction. Laborites had also organized portions of the city’s service sector, including the famous Westward Ho Hotel, a favorite watering hole for Goldwater and his friends. After a 1946 referendum, which outlawed union membership as a condition of employment, the ongoing negotiations between management and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union Local 611 over raises became a struggle about enforcing the new law. In November 1946, unionists walked out thirty-six hours after voters approved the ballot proposition. The strike was bitter: owners declared publicly that they would replace all striking workers permanently, unionized vendors refused to make deliveries to the hotel, and newspapers reported intimidation, violence, and vandalism aimed at replacement workers crossing the picket lines.10 On the surface, the political landscape seemed suited to a growing trade union movement. During the depression and World War II, the number of registered Democrats in Arizona had steadily increased, so much so that by 1950 they outnumbered Republicans by a margin of more than four to one. Arizona’s senators were New Deal Democrats and among labor’s main allies. These liberals believed that state and federal governments should fund the dams, jobs, roads, and schools necessary to modernize the West. Senator Carl Hayden was an old-line Progressive who first represented Arizona in 1912 when the territory became a state. He had cordial relations with organized labor and made his life’s work the passage of the Central Arizona Project, which delivered Colorado River water 9 On the highly contested subject of union density, see Leo Troy and Neil Sheflin, U.S. Union Sourcebook: Membership, Finances, Structure, Directory (West Orange, 1985), 7-3, 7-4. The tables on these pages show union growth for every state, 1897–1984. Donald Garnel, The Rise of Teamster Power in the West (Berkeley, 1972), 277–92; Glass, Nevada’s Turbulent ’50s, 12–13. Members United Labor Legislative Committee to All Locals and Central Bodies [1945], Right to Work boxes, American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio), Nevada Collection (Nevada Historical Society, Reno). This collection is unprocessed and the materials are loose in one of two boxes labeled “Right to Work boxes.” Glass, Nevada’s Turbulent ’50s, 82; Jack Cargill, “Empire and Opposition: The ‘Salt of the Earth’ Strike,” in Labor in New Mexico: Unions, Strikes, and Social History since 1881, ed. Robert Kern (Albuquerque, 1983), 183; James J. Lorence, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (Albuquerque, 1999). Salt of the Earth, dir. Herbert J. Biberman (ipc, 1954). 10 Charles A. Esser, “Pay Hike Request Renewed,” clipping, p. 145, Nov. 25, 1946, City of Phoenix Scrapbook: October 10–November 28, 1946, Scrapbook cd 2, Personal and Political Papers of Senator Barry M. Goldwater (Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe). “Cops Encounter Union ‘Trouble,’” clipping, p. 122, n.d., ibid.; “Phoenix Firemen Get Wage Boost,” clipping, p. 110, n.d., ibid.; “City Firemen Get Salary Hike,” Arizona Labor Journal, n.d., p. 113, clipping, ibid.; Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, 1997), 107; Michael S. Wade, The Bitter Issue: The Right to Work Law in Arizona (Tucson, 1976), 36–41; “Strike-Bound Hotel Finds New Trouble,” clipping, p. 142, City of Phoenix Scrapbook: October 10–November 28, 1946, Scrapbook cd 2, Goldwater Papers; “Mauling by Pickets Reported as Hotel Gets Non-union Help,” clipping, p. 122, n.d., ibid.; “Call Police to Westward Ho Strike,” clipping, p. 121, n.d., ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 6 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 7 to central and southern Arizona. Hayden’s colleague, the Democrat Ernest McFarland, won a Senate seat in 1941 and became the majority leader in 1951. He was commonly called the “father of the G.I. Bill” for his role in drafting and passing that legislation. The popular support for Hayden and McFarland as well as Arizona’s economic recovery and organized labor’s success indicated that New Deal liberalism not only had a transformative effect on the state but that it was firmly and securely in place at midcentury.11 Reorganizing the Western Right The threat of a labor and liberal ascendancy spurred conservatives to political action. Although they benefited from federal dollars, many business leaders in the Southwest had no intention of supporting corporatist arrangements. The specter of the growing labor movement and the expanding federal government united corporate titans with local business owners in the region. Opposing them were employers in retail, service, agricultural, and extractive enterprises, which were either labor intensive or structured in a way that gave workers power at the work site. Throughout the 1940s, southwestern state legislatures were key arenas in the fight against the New Deal. As one tactic, business leaders supported laws designed to remake the region into an oasis for heavily taxed and unionized firms fleeing the Northeast. In 1949, the members of the Reno Chamber of Commerce pushed a “free-port” bill through the Nevada legislature, which permitted manufacturers to avoid property taxes on goods officially “in transit.” The state assembly relaxed those rules throughout the 1950s, attracting warehousing and manufacturing companies to Nevada. Curbing labor’s growth was also a key strategy for conservatives. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, state governments across the South and Southwest introduced right-to-work legislation, similar to the 1946 Arizona law.12 Barry Goldwater’s rise exemplified the politics of this emergent counteroffensive. The Arizonan was well known even before he ran for the Senate because of his family’s stylish department store, Goldwater’s, and his daring exploration of the Grand Canyon in 1940, which he captured on film and presented to audiences during the 1940s across the state. He cultivated the image of a compassionate capitalist. His firm was renowned for its positive employee relations as well as its medical and pension plans. Like the benefits offered by other welfare capitalists, the perks at Goldwater’s were an important argument against charges of business malfeasance and employer indifference to workers’ welfare. Local papers lauded Goldwater’s, cementing the Phoenician’s reputation as a model employer. A Prescott newspaper reported that upon the opening of a store in that city in the early 1940s, Goldwater treated fourteen of his new employees to a fancy dinner. “Perhaps it’s pretzels and beer for run-of-the-counter sales ladies,” the editors noted, “but it’s champagne and chicken if they’re on Goldwater’s payroll . . . and a chance to ‘dine out’ with the dashing bon vivant, Mr. Barry Goldwater.” “Pity the poor working girls? Not if they work for Goldwater’s.”13 11 Jack L. August Jr., Vision in the Desert: Carl Hayden and Hydropolitics in the American Southwest (Fort Worth, 1999); James E. McMillan, Ernest W. McFarland: Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Governor, and Chief Justice of the State of Arizona (Prescott, 2004), 73–95. 12 Glass, Nevada’s Turbulent ’50s, 41; Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 156; Fones-Wolff, Selling Free Enterprise, 261. 13 On welfare capitalism, see Jacoby, Modern Manors. On the benefits at Goldwater’s, see “Employee Handbook 1954,” p. 7, folder 1, series 5, subseries I, subgroup 2, William Saufley Collection (Arizona Historical Foundation). Since my initial research trip in December 2004, the archivists at the Arizona Historical Foundation have taken 2_Shermer.indd 7 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM 8 The Journal of American History December 2008 The merchant’s fame grew during the depression when he wrote as a guest columnist for the Phoenix Gazette. The newspaper’s editor, Wes Knorpp, offered a daily guest column for famous Arizonans, giving them free rein in their subject matter and editorial point of view. Goldwater used his editorials to attack the New Deal as politically dangerous and ethically corrupt and to chide business owners for being complacent in the face of this challenge. Goldwater had not always been hostile toward the New Deal, however. Until 1934, Goldwater’s put the “blue eagle,” the symbol of the Deal’s National Recovery Administration, in its windows and on its advertising. The businessman especially supported programs that provided money for modernizing Phoenix and its struggling financial institutions. But Goldwater became an opponent of New Deal reforms after 1935, when he became concerned that the New Dealers’ emergency measures would become permanent. That opposition led him to mobilize a vigorous and active group of business elites, who would wrest control of city politics from the coalition of small businessmen, unionists, and longtime politicians that ran it.14 His 1938 editorial, “A Fireside Chat with Mr. Roosevelt,” was an open letter to the president and a powerful statement of a world view openly hostile to all New Deal policies, initiatives, and programs. “I would like to know,” Goldwater demanded, “just where you are leading us. Are you going further into the morass that you have led us into or are you going to go back to the good old American way of doing things where business is trusted, where labor earns more, where we take care of our unemployed, and where a man is elected to public office because he is a good man for the job and not because he commands your good will and a few dollars of the taxpayers’ money?” “Your plans,” Goldwater declared, “called for economy in government and a reduction in taxes.” “In five years my taxes have increased over 250 per cent and I fear greatly that ‘I ain’t seen nothin’ yet’!,” he exclaimed. Goldwater asserted that the American businessman “distrusts you and fears your every utterance.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s worst move, from Goldwater’s standpoint, was “turn[ing] over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capitol and then decide for yourself if that plan worked.” In a later editorial, “Scaredee-Cat” (1939), the merchant lashed out at politically timid businessmen for not challenging the “minority groups who are causing the tax increases.” The “American businessman” was “the biggest man in this country . . . afraid of his own shadow.” “He is the man who condemns, and sometimes justly so,” Goldwater charged, “the politician over his luncheon tables and his desks and in his other very private conversations, but never in the open where his thoughts and arguments would do some good toward correcting the evils to which he refers in private.”15 Those columns earned Goldwater acclaim from Phoenix business owners also weary of New Deal policies. George W. Mickle of the Phoenix Title and Trust Company wrote to Goldwater personally to commend him for taking a public stand. The Phoenix lender George O. Ford praised Goldwater’s writing as “logical, fearless, and as far as it goes, apart much of the William Saufley Collection and put the materials in other collections, including the Barry M. Goldwater Papers and the Stephen Shadegg Collection. “Champagne Corks Pop as Business Expands,” Arizona fax, n.d., p. 4, clipping, p. 87, Barry and Peggy Goldwater Scrapbook, 1939–41, Scrapbook cd 1, Goldwater Papers. 14 [W.] Wesley [Knorpp] to Barry Goldwater, May 23, 1940, folder 1, box 1, Writings sub series, Goldwater Papers; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 47–48. 15 Barry M. Goldwater, “A Fireside Chat with Mr. Roosevelt,” June 23, 1938, n.p., p. 94, Scrapbook cd 1, Goldwater Papers. Barry M. Goldwater, “Scaredee-Cat,” Phoenix Gazette, June 23, 1939, n.p., clipping, p. 79, ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 8 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 9 truthful.” “Compared with the average citizen, as your writing shows, you are a goliath,” Ford gushed, “and I say to you openly and fearlessly and would publish it now if possible, I hold the masses in contempt and their leaders and masters.” Henry A. Morgan of the Pacific branch of the Springfield Fire and Marine Insurance Company also praised Goldwater: “If business men, over the United States would follow your example and publish articles of the kind, it would in my opinion have a very beneficial effect.”16 Goldwater’s reputation among local businessmen helped create a network of antiregulatory, antilabor Phoenicians who embraced not the New Deal but classical, Smithian liberalism during the depression and World War II. These retailers, bankers, lawyers, and newsmen began a concerted effort to transform Phoenix into a modern metropolis, but they also started building a state Republican party that offered distinct, powerful opposition to Arizona’s liberal Democrats. These activists first came together to draft and lobby for the 1946 right-to-work proposition. Though Goldwater was one of the spokesmen for those in favor of the law, his personal political career did not start until 1949 when he ran for city council with other like-minded Phoenicians on a reform ticket known as the Charter Government Committee (cgc). After defeating a coalition of small-business owners, laborites, and liberals, the Chamber of Commerce–controlled cgc dominated city politics until the 1970s. Like an earlier generation of Progressives, these conservatives wanted to remove partisan politics from local government, but they would do so through the creation of a business-friendly environment. Being a right-to-work state helped, but cgc activists also sought fiscal incentives, including lobbying the city electorate to support a 1949 tax break for manufacturers who relocated to Phoenix and pressuring state legislators to pass a 1955 sales tax repeal on goods sold to the federal government, which cgc officials often celebrated as the lynchpin in the deal between the Chamber of Commerce and a major defense contractor to open a branch plant in Phoenix. Though cgc members preached nonpartisanship, a major part of their industrialization initiative was creating a strong, far-right Republican party. As such, Goldwater and his colleagues also concerned themselves with party politics. In 1948, he began drafting like-minded Republicans to run for office on the theory that Arizonans would support the gop at the polls if they could vote a straight ticket. This strategy worked in 1950, when Goldwater managed Howard Pyle’s gubernatorial campaign, helping Pyle become Arizona’s the first Republican governor in twenty years.17 Goldwater was a key leader of the Arizona Right, but he differed in important ways from other Arizona conservatives. At midcentury, Arizona was a racially heterogeneous society: many Native Americans lived in reservations in the north, most African Americans lived in the poorest neighborhoods in the state’s cities, and large numbers of Mexican Americans lived in poverty both in the countryside and in urban barrios. An unreflective racism was commonplace among Anglo residents. In a celebrated 1964 incident that became a major controversy upon his appointment to the Supreme Court, William H. Rehnquist, then a young lawyer practicing in Phoenix, sought to coerce election volun16 Geo. W. Mickle to Barry Goldwater, June 24, 1938, p. 88, ibid.; George O. Ford to Barry Goldwater, June 24, 1938, p. 90, ibid.; Henry A. Morgan to Barry Goldwater, June 24, 1938, p. 89, ibid. 17 John J. Rhodes interview by Dean Smith, May 1, 1991, transcript, pp. 11–12, Oral History Collection (Department of Archives and Special Collections, Arizona State University, Tempe); Barry Goldwater to Jack Williams, June 5, 1968, pp. 1–2, “Williams, Jack, 1 of 7, 1955–1968” folder, box 3, Alpha Files, Personal, Goldwater Papers; on the history of the growth of Phoenix, the Charter Government Committee, and the Arizona Republican party, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, “Creating the Sunbelt: The Political and Economic Transformation of Phoenix, Arizona” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009). 2_Shermer.indd 9 9/30/08 2:41:50 PM 10 The Journal of American History December 2008 There was one registered Republican for every four Democrats in Arizona in 1952, forcing Barry Goldwater to bring his U.S. Senate campaign to areas far removed from his home in Phoenix’s wealthy, Anglo north side. Goldwater, shown here campaigning in 1952, reached out to Native American, Mexican American, and African American voters by making speeches in both English and Spanish, and hiring translators to deliver his denunciations of New Dealers to Navajos living on reservations. Courtesy Barry M. Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation. teers into making African Americans read portions of the Constitution before they could cast their ballots. Though Rehnquist supported Goldwater, the merchant never advocated that kind of overt discrimination. He defined himself against those who were openly racist or anti-Semitic. Goldwater, a dues-paying member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), was one of the first businessmen in Phoenix to hire African Americans. Goldwater also advertised his support for a 1951 lawsuit to end school segregation in Phoenix.18 Early in his political career, he avoided the race card but campaigned openly for support from Arizona minorities. Many of his ads were in English and Spanish. Once in office, Goldwater paid particular attention to his Spanish-speaking constituents. The senator wrote to his friend Adolfo Quezada for help with “research work that I would like to 18 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, vol. II: Characteristics of the Population, part 3: Arizona (Washington, 1952), 31–47. For other descriptions of Arizona’s population, see Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Arizona, comps., Arizona: A State Guide (New York, 1940); Clarence Mitchell to Barry Goldwater, Dec. 8, 1971, “Rehnquist, William H., 1969–1989” folder, box 3, Alpha Files, Personal, Goldwater Papers. 2_Shermer.indd 10 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 11 accomplish this summer that relates to the problems of the Mexican-American.” He also reached out to Carlos Montaño, who ran a Phoenix advertising agency, for help finding a secretary, “one who writes and speaks Spanish and is of Mexican descent.” Native Americans were also important to Goldwater. During the 1952 election, he privately expressed outrage about “this new deal government which has NEVER done anything for the Indian, comes thru our reservations as great white fathers.” “I want to make a strong statement,” he told his campaign manager, “at the right time re the indian situation in Arizona and how after twenty years of a benevolent government interested in all the peoples welfare, or so they say, these indians are no better off than they were 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago.” Goldwater the candidate worked hard to mobilize Native Americans living on reservations. In planning to register and woo voters in those areas, Goldwater focused on finding campaign partisans “of those counties to create thirty new precincts whose precinct committeemen will be Indian Traders who are basically and violently anti–New Deal.” He theorized that reaching out to Native Americans “might well be the margin of victory in this state.”19 Despite Goldwater’s efforts to win Native American and Mexican American votes, he hardly espoused an advanced sense of racial equality. As his biographer, Robert Goldberg, points out, “there were limits to his activism . . . because he believed that issues of discrimination and prejudice were inconsequential in Phoenix.” This blindness even extended to anti-Semitism. He frequented the same restrictive clubs and businesses that barred his Jewish relatives as well as numerous Jewish friends, political allies, and supporters. It was this balance between despising de jure racism but accepting its de facto form, as well as his libertarian view of the relationship between the state and the individual, that would influence his public opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and his private coolness to the gop’s “southern strategy” a half decade later.20 The future senator also crafted a more nuanced opposition to the labor movement than did many of his conservative supporters. One of Goldwater’s most important compatriots was the newspaperman Eugene Pulliam, who bought the two major Phoenix newspapers, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette, in 1946. He was a major ally for the Republican Right in Arizona because he drove rival, liberal newspapers out of business, used the Arizona Republic to support his cgc allies in their electoral campaigns and legislative initiatives, and published editorials from extreme, right-wing conservative commentators who weighed in on national issues. An almost daily feature in the newspaper was Victor Riesel’s “Inside Labor,” an influential, nationally syndicated column on the trade union movement. Riesel characterized unionists and their leaders as a red menace that threatened political, social, and economic security. Headlines from local and syndicated columns, including “Red Union Forces Decision on U.S,” “Waterfront Mobs Devise New Racket,” “Union Members Own Vast Country Club,” and “Reds Encouraged by U.S. Strikes,” gave the Arizona Republic a distinctive antilabor flavor that unabashedly connected unionization with Soviet expansion, financial largesse, and economic turmoil. To drive this message home and push potential votes away from the Democratic ticket, 19 Barry Goldwater to Adolfo Quezada, June 12, 1953, Microdex 1: Applications for Employment, Filmfile 2.24, Microfilm, Media Files, Goldwater Papers; Carlos Montaño to Barry Goldwater, Feb. 23, 1953, ibid.; Barry Goldwater to Montaño, March 7, 1953, ibid.; [Barry Goldwater] to Steve [Shadegg][1952], Microdex 2: 1952 Campaign, ibid.; Barry Goldwater to Everett Dirksen, May 28, 1952, “Dirksen, Everett McKinley, 1952–1969,” Alpha Files, Personal, ibid. 20 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 89; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001), 363–65, 188–89. 2_Shermer.indd 11 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM 12 The Journal of American History December 2008 other daily columns proclaimed the “New Deal Smeared Lady Industrialist” and “Price War Reveals New Deal Errors.”21 Goldwater’s approach to the labor issue was akin to that of the famed conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, whose column also ran in the Pulliam press. Pegler’s work was enormously popular in the 1940s, when he made himself a household name and won the Pulitzer Prize for an exposé, not of Communist infiltration of the labor movement, but of corruption and malfeasance within two American Federation of Labor (afl) unions. “I could name a hundred thieves and gangsters, embezzlers and terrorists who hold office in unions of the American Federation of Labor,” Pegler asserted, “They infest the A.F. of L. to such a degree that the organization has negligently lost its right to public respect as a labor movement and has become the front for a privileged terror obviously comparable to the Mafia of Sicily.” Pegler made the case that since labor could not reform itself, the government had to right the situation, an argument that he and his conservative employer, the newspaper publisher Roy Howard, used to question the soundness of the Wagner Act’s protections and to attack the New Deal.22 Waging War on the “Powercrats” Following his success in city politics, Goldwater ran for the U.S. Senate in 1952. Goldwater’s challenger was the incumbent Ernest McFarland, but the merchant really campaigned against fdr’s legacy and Harry S. Truman’s record. Relying on the Arizona political insider Stephen Shadegg to manage the campaign, Goldwater again used his influence to get a Republican to run in each state race to give voters a sense that a vote for Goldwater and the Arizona gop could really bring dramatic change.23 New Dealers and Fair Dealers were Goldwater’s favorite targets. To sully the reputation of liberal programs, the Senate hopeful returned to the themes of his depression-era editorials. He attacked “Powercrats,” whom he identified as a “small group of willful men who have recklessly exalted their personal power and seek to increase and perpetuate their selfish control over the free men and free women of America.” The term was as loaded as Pegler’s charges of graft because both hinted at the seemingly expansive and illegitimate strength of the liberal Democrats in power. Goldwater claimed there was only one reason for the power of “Harry S. (for Spendthrift) Truman”: corruption. Goldwater contended that liberals had introduced the “P’s and Q’s in federal government . . . Big Personal Profit Quietly and Quickly.” He promised that Republicans would “put an end to waste. . . . overhaul and revise the existing machinery of government. . . . [and] put men in office who will regard that office as a public trust, and not as a personal possession for private looting.”24 He also told Arizonans that New Dealers and Fair Dealers were the real threats 21 Fenwick Anderson, “Bricks without Straw: The Mirage of Competition in the Desert of Phoenix Daily Journalism since 1947” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1980), 29–66; Russell Pulliam, Publisher Gene Pulliam: Last of the Newspaper Titans (Ottawa, Ill., 1984); Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor: Red Union Forces Decision on U.S.,” Arizona Republic, June 6, 1951, p. 6; Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor: Waterfront Mobs Devise New Racket,” ibid., June 7, 1951, p. 6; Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor: Union Members Own Vast Country Club,” ibid., June 9, 1951, p. 6; Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor: Reds Encouraged by U.S. Strikes,” ibid., June 18, 1951, p. 6; Westbrook Pegler, “Westbrook Pegler Says: New Deal Smeared Lady Industrialist,” ibid., June 22, 1951, p. 6; Columbus Girage, “Our Amazing Arizona: Price War Reveals New Deal Errors,” ibid., June 5, 1951, p. 6. 22 Witwer, “Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement,” 540. 23 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 24–25. 24 Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 10, Aug. 25, 1952, transcript, koy broadcast, p. 7, “Barry Speeches” folder, box 145, Stephen Shadegg Collection (Arizona Historical Foundation). The Stephen Shadegg Collection is 2_Shermer.indd 12 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 13 to economic prosperity. He asked voters how they felt about inflation, telling them, “the major cause of our difficulty today is the reckless spending of the New Deal Bureaucrats and the reckless taxation by those men who have supported the New Deal.” Goldwater portrayed the New Dealers as slowly strangling the American people: “[e]very working man and working woman in the United States today must work at least one day out of every four to pay his taxes. . . . you must try and buy food which has doubled and doubled again in price. You must try and pay rent which has gone up and up. You must buy clothes which cost twice as much today as they did before the period of the great national planners.” He told votes in the town of Casa Grande that “the issues of this campaign are rather simple. . . . ‘Has the New Deal been an outstanding success? Are we satisfied with out situation today? Is the future secure?’” He pushed Arizonans to stop “big government” because “waste and wild experiments, and give aways in government . . . creats deficits and deficits create inflation and that in the end the . . . consumer pays the total [cost] of government.”25 Goldwater softened his anti-statist positions with promises to maintain elements of the New Deal state. He emphasized his opposition “to the super-state, gigantic bureaucratic centralized authority, whether it be administered by Democrats or Republicans,” but assured Arizonans that if elected he would not “immediately turn back the clock to 1932.” Echoing Eisenhower’s moderate brand of Republicanism, Goldwater promised voters that he would not end the federal programs that had helped build affluent America, “No responsible Republican has any intention or desire to abolish any one of them.” Goldwater specified his support for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, Social Security, unemployment insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and benefits for the blind.26 With so many registered Democrats in Arizona, Goldwater needed to reach beyond his own party, and the fractious nature of the state’s Democratic party helped him. While Arizona was solidly Democratic, it was not soundly liberal; it was deeply divided between an older, self-proclaimed “small-d” or “Jeffersonian” democratic tradition and the New Deal wing of the party. In his famous 1947 guide to America, Inside U.S.A, the journalist John Gunther wrote, “The two great forces pulling Arizona are California and Texas.” Although Texans settled in northern Arizona and laid the groundwork for the cattle industry, many Arizonans looked to California as an economic model, hoping to replicate the high wages and good manufacturing jobs found there. Gunther explained, “Arizona is overwhelmingly Democratic from a local point of view,” noting that there was but one Republican in the legislature. The schism in the Democratic party was reflected in the state’s politics. Senators Hayden and McFarland were New Dealers, but many Democrats in state and local government held more “Jeffersonian” principles than Rooseveltian ones. Arizona unionists had trouble finding candidates for state and local positions who were open to, let alone supportive of, their interests or the New Deal. Indeed, many unionists expressed concern that the state’s mining and agricultural interests, who proclaimed essentially unprocessed, and the citations to it represent how the materials were organized in December 2004, when I conducted my initial research. The archivists expect to begin processing this collection in January 2009 and finish in 2001; Barry Goldwater, untitled speech,” Prescott, Ariz., typescript, Sept. 18, 1952, pp. 4–7, ibid. 25 Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 15, typescript [Aug.] 1952, p. 1, ibid.; Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 3, typescript [Aug.] 1952, p. 4, ibid.; Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 6, typescript, Aug. 27, 1952, p. 3, ibid.; Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 1, typescript [Aug.] 1952, p. 1, ibid. 26 Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 2, typescript [Aug.] 1952, p. 1, ibid.; Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 6, typescript, Aug. 27, 1952, p. 3, ibid.; Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 2, typescript [Aug.] 1952, pp. 5–6, ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 13 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM 14 The Journal of American History December 2008 themselves Democrats, controlled politics. “There are two types of Democrats here,” a Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) representative lamented in the run-up to the 1950 gubernatorial election, “Already the Copper boys have announced their candidate, one Joe Haldiman who is an insurance executive. There would be no difference between [the gop candidate Howard] Pyle and Haldiman. Both are controlled by the same interests, only difference is Haldiman is a democrat.”27 To win over Democrats, Goldwater fashioned himself as the heir apparent to the Jeffersonian-Democrats. During this campaign, he never referred to himself or his politics as “conservative,” which is not surprising. The American Right had not yet united traditionalists, anticommunists, and classical, Smithian liberals under the general rubric of conservatism. Like others on the Right at the time, Goldwater struggled with a designation for his particular opposition to New Deal liberalism. As such, in 1952, he trained his fire on those in charge of the new corporatist order, the “Powercrats.” It was those distasteful byproducts of tripartite governance who imperiled the country, he charged. Before a crowd on the campaign trail, he wondered, “what has happened to the great Democratic party, the party which historically and traditionally has always stood as the protector of the individual’s freedom and the individual’s liberty?” “I would suggest to you tonight,” he continued, “that the Great Democratic party is captive, controlled and subservient to the wishes of wilful, power hungry men who lust for dictatorship, but not for freedom, men who have stated in their private letters that you and I are too damned dumb to make the right decisions.”28 Goldwater took his plea directly to the state’s unionists. Like others of his generation of postwar conservatives, Goldwater could not ignore the class issues that twenty years of New Deal statecraft had legitimized. Although he denounced “class” politics, he recognized that electoral polarization along income and occupation lines was an unavoidable fruit of the Roosevelt/Truman era. The key to bridging the class divide, he believed, was challenging the Democratic claim that Republicans and business leaders were the enemy. Instead, he proposed that those who raised class issues were nefarious individuals bent on causing problems. To a radio audience, he explained, “one of the magic wonders of America has been that here we have had a classless society, entirely free of those old world dividing lines.” “Much of the magic progress of America,” he claimed, “has been due to the fact that the tenant of today is very apt to be the landlord of tomorrow, that the laboring man today will be the employer of tomorrow, that today’s carpenter is tomorrow’s contractor, and that opportunity beckons to every individual possessing the initiative and the drive to take advantage of this new concept of man’s equality.”29 For Goldwater, class warfare was also counterproductive. Arizonans needed a senator bent on discussing the problems of “government, of labor, and of management” because “they must be solved if this Republic is to endure as the stronghold of freedom in our world.” He contended that management and labor were in a fifty-fifty partnership because 27 John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York, 1947), 901–4, esp. 901, 903; Nicholas C. Dragon to Mary Goddard, Sept. 16, 1952, folder 1, box 22, Committee on Political Education. Research Division Files, 1944–1979 (George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, Md.). 28 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945; Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 4, typescript [Aug.] 1952, p. 4, “Barry Speeches” folder, box 145, Shadegg Collection. 29 Editors of the Arizona Daily Star, “The Gentlemen Shows Courage,” Arizona Daily Star, July 31, 1952, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 9: Political Activities August–October 1952, Goldwater Scrapbooks—Newspaper Clippings, Goldwater Papers; Barry Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 14, typescript, Sept. 7, 1952, koy broadcast, p. 3, “Barry Speeches” folder, box 145, Shadegg Collection. 2_Shermer.indd 14 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 15 both sides had the same objective. Problems only arose when people exploited disagreements. “Big business has long been the whipping boy for those who seek to promote their own ends by arousing passion and prejudice. But you and I know that in many instances big business has deserved everything which has been said against it,” he countered, “And I would like to add that much of the credit for the correction of these abuses belongs to organized labor.” He portrayed his family’s business as one that had found the perfect balance, without government or union interference, contending that Goldwater’s provided excellent benefits for workers because “our employees earned those things for themselves.”30 Goldwater was confident he could appeal to even the most militant unionists. He made a point of speaking in Bisbee, a town made famous in 1917 for the deportation of over a thousand hard-rock miners and their families, many of whom were affiliated with the radical Industrial Workers of the World. Thirty-five years later, the town lay in primarily Democratic Cochise County. The largest industry in the town was mining, which employed about one-third of the Bisbee work force, and the miners were organized under the radical Mine-Mill union. Although the local’s president had announced that members would endorse the Democrat McFarland in 1952, Goldwater still went to Cochise County in hopes of splitting the rank-and-file from their leadership. To appeal to the workers, Goldwater went straight to their paychecks. Arizona mining had been in decline for years, and Mine-Mill unionists had been particularly beleaguered since 1950 when the cio expelled their organization. Communist influence and the loyalty oaths required by the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) continued to divide the Bisbee workers. Local leaders had worried for months about declining turnouts at their membership meetings as well as rank-and-file interest in reorganizing under the afl.31 Goldwater sought to capitalize on these troubles to win union votes. To turn miners against the New Deal, the businessman explained to the workers that the copper, silver, and gold mines had not closed because they had run dry. Rather, he blamed liberal-regulatory policies, not managerial decisions, for shutting down the shafts, arguing that when Truman approved a reduction in the tariff for those metals in 1947, it was “the perfect example of the super state, of the all powerful government planner dictating to the lives of its citizens.” He lambasted Truman for agreeing to pay more for foreign copper rather than promoting the consumption of domestic ore. With this indictment of liberal economic and foreign policy, Goldwater preyed on fears of lost jobs and smaller paychecks. He warned that only a return to less government regulation would pull miners out of the quagmire Truman and fdr had created. Only a vote for Goldwater would protect the working class of Bisbee.32 By wooing the Democratic base and attacking the Fair Deal, Goldwater put McFarland and his union partisans on the defensive. A major weapon for organized labor was the Arizona State Federation of Labor’s Arizona Labor Journal, which published antiGoldwater ads and pro-McFarland notices during the 1952 campaign. The editors battled 30 Goldwater, untitled speech, no. 1, typescript [Aug.] 1952, pp. 1, 3–4, 6, “Barry Speeches” folder, box 145, Shadegg Collection. 31 Carlos A. Schwantes, ed., Bisbee: Urban Outpost on the Frontier (Tucson, 1992). Bureau of the Census, Census of Population, II, pt. 3, pp. 45–49; Barry Goldwater, “Speech in Cochise County before the International Mine Mill and Smelter Workers Union,” typescript, Oct. 27, 1952, p. 7, “Barry Speeches” folder, box 145, Shadegg Collection. On the background of Bisbee, Arizona’s Local 551, see their minute books, Western Federation of Miners Collection, Western History Collection (University of Colorado, Boulder). For descriptions of the difficulties the local faced, see books 2 and 3, box 852, ibid. 32 Goldwater, “Speech in Cochise County before the International Mine Mill and Smelter Workers Union,” 2–4, 7. 2_Shermer.indd 15 9/30/08 2:41:51 PM 16 The Journal of American History December 2008 Barry Goldwater (left) and his colleagues in the newly reorganized and reoriented Arizona Republican party, including Governor Howard Pyle (right), hoped the 1952 inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican president in twenty years, would mark the end of the ascendancy of modern liberalism and begin the dismantling of the New Deal state. They were soon disappointed, however, with Eisenhower and his policies designed to fit within the framework of the New Deal regulatory state. Courtesy Barry M. Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe, Arizona. Republicans and cast the election as a crucial fight not only to keep a Democrat in the Senate, but also to curb anti-union sentiment in Arizona. But at this point in his political career, Goldwater was not the embodiment of anti-unionism he would become by 1958. Laborites agreed to print a pro-Goldwater ad in their newspaper, even though the editors had the right to refuse to sell advertising space to anyone. Besides relying on the Arizona Labor Journal, unionists also distributed leaflets and other campaign literature. The Arizona wing of the cio’s Political Action Committee (cio-pac) circulated 10,000 copies of its endorsed slate of candidates, along with postcards and leaflets. The cio-pac also sought to organize Mexican Americans for the election and held voter registration drives in all cio locals. Although the cio, afl, and the railroad brotherhoods all endorsed candidates in past elections, they often supported politicians based on their electability— often without regard for their support of organized labor. In 1952, only the cio regional director for Arizona and New Mexico made a point not to “select ‘sure things’ just to pile up a good record.”33 33 “‘Anti-Picket’ Law is Poison for Merchants,” Arizona Labor Journal, Oct. 16, 1952, pp. 2, 4, clipping, folder 2_Shermer.indd 16 9/30/08 2:41:52 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 17 The 1952 election was a victory for Eisenhower, Goldwater, and other Arizona Republicans. Although the Senator-elect edged his opponent by only 7,000 votes, the win was impressive given the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans in the state. Goldwater won over men and women voters, the young and elderly, as well as white-collar workers and professionals. He won fewer counties than McFarland but was victorious in the more populous areas of the state, carrying Maricopa and Pima counties, which encompassed Phoenix and Tucson, respectively. Even with his success in Tucson, however, Goldwater was unable to carry predominantly Mexican American precincts in Pima County: in the Second Precinct Goldwater received only 469 votes to McFarland’s 553 and in the Fourth and Fifth precincts McFarland fared even better. Still, the Phoenician won Pima County by 4,455 ballots. The other four counties that the Senator-elect captured (Apache, Coconino, Navajo, and Yavapai) primarily depended on agricultural, extractive, and manufacturing industries in the early 1950s. The Republican candidate eked out 52 percent of the votes in Apache and 54 percent in Coconino even though most of the workers in those counties were employed in unskilled jobs in farming and lumber manufacturing trades.34 Goldwater’s losses in the remaining eight counties (Pinal, Graham, Yuma, Gila, Greenlee, Cochise, Santa Cruz, and Mohave) were less surprising. In 1952 the majority of workers in those areas labored in some combination of agricultural, mining, manufacturing, or construction trades. The narrowest margins of victory in those counties came in Pinal and Graham, where he lost by less than 10 percent of the vote. Pinal County was primarily an agricultural and mining region whereas Graham depended mostly on farming. Goldwater received just 39 percent of the vote in Yuma County, where most inhabitants worked in construction or agriculture. Few of the many miners and metal workers in Gila and Greenlee counties supported the Phoenician. He won only 3,033 votes in Gila (35 percent) and 1,152 in Greenlee (25 percent). Goldwater’s efforts to reach out to Bisbee miners proved fruitless; he lost Cochise County by 1,634 votes.35 Even though the margin of victory was slim for Goldwater, his election signaled major changes in Arizona politics. Besides defeating the incumbent Democratic senator, the Arizona gop, with the aid of numerous registered Democrats, made other substantial gains. Arizona Republicans finally sent a member to the House of Representatives. The gop also now controlled thirty of the eighty seats in the state’s lower house, instead of just eleven. In the state senate, the number of Republicans increased from zero to four. Only at the county level did Democrats hold out against the Republican onslaught. The gop successes meant that the Republican party was now a viable alternative to the Arizona Democratic party. Goldwater’s win was also an important ideological victory. His stumping against Truman, big government, and organized labor made some inroads among Arizona’s rank 1, box 22, Committee on Political Education. Research Division Files. ibid.; Congress of Industrial OrganizationsPolitical Action Committee (cio-pac) Research Department, “Arizona Senator and Governor,” typescript, Oct. 9, 1951, p. 1, ibid.; Dragon to Kroll, Sept. 16, 1952, ibid. 34 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 97; “Pyle Carries 3 Counties Usually Considered as Cinch for Demos,” Arizona Daily Sun, Nov. 6, 1952, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 11: Political Activities November–February 1952–1953, Goldwater Papers; Arizona Daily Star, Nov. 17, 1952, n.p., clipping, ibid.; “Pima Backs Barry, but Not Fannin,” Tucson Citizen, Nov. 5, 1958, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 60: Political Activities October–November 1958, ibid.; box 10, Election Returns, Secretary of State Records (Arizona History and Archives Division, Arizona State Library, Phoenix); Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, II, pt. 3, pp. 45–49. 35 Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, II, pt. 3, pp. 45–49; “Pyle, Goldwater Score Win; City Goes All Democratic,” Tombstone Epitah, Nov. 6, 1952, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 11: Political Activities November–February 1952–1953, Goldwater Papers. 2_Shermer.indd 17 9/30/08 2:41:52 PM 18 The Journal of American History December 2008 and file. One unionist from Higley proclaimed in a letter to the editor of the Phoenix Gazette, “As a life long union member, I won’t vote to cover up Truman’s crooked deal. I will vote for clean government, sound prosperity, with an X for Eisenhower, Pyle and Goldwater on Nov. 4.” He questioned how “the common people will vote for more corruption in high places, tighter domination by union bosses and tax collectors.”36 Growing a Conscience in the Senate Once in the Senate, Goldwater became a more outspoken conservative who often defined himself against Eisenhower’s politics and policies. The president’s vision of what the historian Robert Griffith called a “corporate commonwealth,” enraged the Arizonan because Eisenhower seemed to be forcing the gop to accommodate the New Deal state. Eisenhower’s goal was to foster a nation that depended on voluntarism, in which business and labor cooperated with each other because, as the Republican president put it, “In our tight knit economy, all professions and callings—no matter how widely separated they may be in purpose and technique—all have points of contact and areas of common interest.” On New Deal liberalism, Eisenhower described his goal as, “flattening of the curve of this particular trend,” but argued that a complete reversal was undesirable: “government has to be the principal coordinator and, in many cases, the actual operator for the many things that the approach of depression would demand.” To restore balance, the president, a self-described “modern Republican,” focused on privatizing development and the nation’s infrastructure to create a strong economy and prosperous nation.37 Eisenhower’s modern Republicanism was the perfect foil for Goldwater’s politics. Goldwater spent much of the first portion of his term traveling the country, delivering speeches for the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. During those engagements, he advanced a far-right, rather than an Eisenhower, Republicanism. Goldwater’s attacks crossed party lines; he defamed anyone promoting the expansion, no matter how limited, of the welfare state. His first public attack on Eisenhower came in July 1953 during floor debate over raising the federal debt limit. Before the Senate, Goldwater charged, “Our problem is not in Europe. It is not on the shores of Asia. It is wrapped up in the Treasury of the United States and the budget of the United States.” Goldwater was exasperated that the first Republican president in two decades seemed to be embracing the New Deal state. To his friends, he wrote, “It’s obvious that the Administration has succumbed to the principle that we owe some sort of living, including all types of care to the citizens of this country, and I am beginning to wonder if we haven’t gone a lot farther than many of us think on this road we happily call socialism.”38 Initially, to help avoid that slippery slope, Goldwater followed the lead of other conservatives by capitalizing on fears of Soviet subversion, even if the Arizonan believed the liberals in power were far more dangerous than domestic Communists. In the Senate, Goldwater proved a conservative anticommunist and a staunch supporter of Wisconsin senator 36 Paul Kelso, “The 1952 Elections in Arizona,” Western Political Quarterly, 6 (March 1953), 100; Peter Victor, “Union Member,” letter to the editor, Phoenix Gazette, Nov. 3, 1952, n.p., Scrapbook 10: Political Activities August–October 1952, Goldwater Papers. 37 Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review, 87 (Feb. 1982), 87–122, esp. 90, 92, 101. 38 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 100–104; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 26–27; Barry Goldwater to Robert Goldwater and William E. Saufley, Jan. 30, 1954, “Saufley, William E. (Goldwater Store Manager), 1939–1958 (1 of 3)” folder, unnumbered Personal Correspondence box, Goldwater Papers. 2_Shermer.indd 18 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 19 Joseph McCarthy. Goldwater had known McCarthy since the 1940s and had benefited from McCarthy’s support during the 1952 campaign. He also endorsed the McCarthy’s high-profile investigations of private institutions and government agencies thought to harbor security risks or outright Communists. In November 1954, Goldwater was one of twenty-two Republicans to vote against the Senate’s censure of McCarthy. But Goldwater was a libertarian, not a McCarthyite. The image of Goldwater as a trigger-happy cold warrior is more a product of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 presidential campaign against Goldwater than the Arizonan’s actual politics. Unlike such well-known, staunch anticommunists as Democratic senator Patrick McCarran, Republican senator William Jenner, or even J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who sought to purge from public life anyone who had ever been associated with Popular Front politics and culture, Goldwater used counter-subversive discourse to contain and roll back the New Deal and all the institutions, trade unions chief among them, that sustained that brand of social democratic statecraft. In his Arizona department stores, on the floor of the Senate, and in the pages of Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater targeted Keynesian fiscal policy, intrusive government planning, and a politically active labor movement as the main threats to the American body politic. It was within that context that Goldwater voted to avoid McCarthy’s censure; he feared a voter backlash against the Wisconsin Senator’s anticommunism would return the Democrats to power in 1954.39 McCarthy’s public downfall and Republican losses in the 1954 election catapulted Goldwater and his brand of antilabor, anti–New Deal conservative politics to the fore. Upon arriving on Capitol Hill he had hoped to serve on the Armed Services Committee and the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee but wound up on the Banking and Currency and the Labor and Public Welfare committees. Although a seat on the latter committee was usually considered a minor posting, the Arizonan was not disappointed with his Labor and Public Welfare Committee assignment, as Goldberg suggests in his biography. In a personal note to friends back home, Goldwater disclosed, “on the other committee, Labor[,] I feel that I can contribute. I may get Health as my subcommittee and everything concerning that sort of vital question would come our way so added to the other problems of labor that will be a marry old job. . . . I intend to be come rather unpopular by voting the economy all the way down the line come what mayish.” Indeed, in his time on that committee during the remainder of the 1950s, Goldwater staked out his most distinctively conservative and politically consequential positions when he challenged both Eisenhower moderates and Democratic Party liberals on issues that touched on the radical reform of federal labor policy.40 Many historians of American labor have characterized the 1950s as an era in which a postwar “labor-management accord” reached its apogee. Although the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the Wagner Act had constrained labor’s power, many thought the legitimacy of mass industrial unions was now beyond question. President Eisenhower seemed to confirm such a consensus when he appointed James Mitchell, a former labor relations executive at unionized Bloomingdale’s, as his secretary of labor. Mitchell favored a boost 39 Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia, 1988); Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, 2004); Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 105–9; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 247–470. On the famous daisy commercial in which an innocent little girl counting the petals she is pulling off a flower coincides with a countdown to an atomic blast, see ibid., 412–15). 40 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 99; Barry Goldwater to Bob [Goldwater], Will [Shaufley] et al., n.d., pp. 1–2, no file or box numbers on photocopy, Goldwater Papers. 2_Shermer.indd 19 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM 20 The Journal of American History December 2008 in the minimum wage and a repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which enabled individual states to enact right-to-work laws. This restriction on union security, Mitchell told a 1954 cio convention, did “more harm than good.” With such an olive branch, one cio leader proclaimed, “We used to organize by saying, ‘Roosevelt wants you to join a union.’ Now we can revise that to say, ‘Ike wants you to join a union.’”41 Goldwater rejected any such accommodationist statecraft, and his rise to national prominence provides further evidence against claims of a midcentury consensus on the so-called labor question. Throughout his Senate tenure, Goldwater was the Republican Right’s most outspoken and effective critic of what he called, “compulsory” unionism. In the process, he clashed publicly with Mitchell and other supporters of the Eisenhower administration’s labor policy. Goldwater first challenged gop moderates in the summer of 1954 when he sponsored an amendment to the Taft-Hartley Act that would give much of the federal government’s power over industrial relations to the states. Goldwater argued that this would give control “back to the people,” a sales pitch that implied the federal government and the trade union movement threatened, not protected, citizens. During the heated debate over the bill, he argued that with the proposed revisions states could conceivably pass laws that would require 95 percent, not just a majority, of the work force to support a union before certification. Democratic senator Hubert H. Humphrey stated that Goldwater’s proposals “are determined . . . to drive a blow at organized labor that will send it rolling and rocking for weeks and months and years to come.”42 Union political activities were of particular interest to Goldwater. While on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, his first target was cio-pac. Labor leaders had formed the committee in 1943 as a mechanism to mobilize the union vote and defend labor’s political influence, activities that outraged Goldwater and other conservative Republicans, especially because the million dollars that cio-pac spent in the 1954 elections seemed to be the reason Democrats retook the House and Senate. In gearing up for the 1956 elections, Goldwater warned that union leaders planned a “massive use of political slush funds—on a nation-wide scale.” “The use of violence and coercion by union leaders,” he charged, “has now been transferred from the area of industrial disputes and brought boldly into purely political arenas.” Union political activities were, according to the Senator, “increasingly ruthless and successful efforts of certain elements in the leadership of the labor unions to take over and control the Democratic party.” cio-pac, then, was an un-American organization poised to subvert the democratic process, leaving voters poorly represented in state and federal governments. Without these nefarious labor leaders, Goldwater was convinced that labor would deliver a Republican victory, citing independent studies that concluded that 40 percent of unionists voted for Republicans. Mitchell responded to Goldwater’s forewarnings: “I don’t agree with Senator Goldwater. I don’t think he’s speaking for the Republican party. He’s speaking for Senator Goldwater.”43 41 On why historians now question the idea of a labor-management accord, see Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 98–99. A. H. Raskin, “Labor Secretary Bids States End Union Shop Curb,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1954, pp. 1, 27. 42 “Union Leadership Assailed by G.O.P.,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1955, p. 25; Joseph A. Loftus, “Mitchell Urges Amity to Labor,” ibid., Nov. 22, 1955, p. 27; Joseph A. Loftus, “Broad State Rule over Labor Urged in Senate Debate,” ibid.; Damon Stetson, “Taft Act Proposal Labeled Tyranny,” ibid., May 4, 1954, p. 27. 43 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 110; Loftus, “Broad State Rule over Labor Urged in Senate Debate”; Stetson, “Taft Act Proposal Labeled Tyranny,”; “Union Leadership Assailed by G.O.P.”; Loftus, “Mitchell Urges Amity to Labor.” 2_Shermer.indd 20 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 21 Goldwater did indeed carve out his own distinctive perspective, which exploited the fissures in the house of labor even at the high noon of its post–World War II stability and prosperity. By 1955, when the afl and cio merged, American labor really was “big,” and bureaucratic. Million-member unions, such as the United Automobile Workers (uaw), the United Steelworkers of America, and the Teamsters, sought industry-wide bargaining, a unified political front, and institutional stability. Most union leaders saw internal opposition, from either the Left or the Right, as disruptive and potentially subversive, and so too did many executives of the largest U.S. corporations, who sought a constrained and predictable industrial relations routine. Shop floor militants on the left, who had built the great industrial unions a generation before, found themselves without a national spokesperson, certainly not among the Democratic party’s leading figures. But for the minority of unionists on the right, who chafed at the social liberalism of the autoworkers’ Walter Reuther or the highly centralized leadership of David J. MacDonald’s Steelworkers, Goldwater proved a vigorous and vocal champion.44 Goldwater maintained an active correspondence with rank-and-filers who supported his cause, and, in 1955, he gave such dissidents a public forum in the nation’s capital to discredit efforts by trade union leaders to speak for the entire working class during the next election round. At a 1955 press conference sponsored by Goldwater and Republican senator Carl T. Curtis, Michigan union members from uaw and Steelworker locals took aim at their own leaders who used dues money to campaign in favor of liberal Democrats, whom these dissidents opposed. Goldwater took pains to assert that these unionists were “true union men who believe in unionism, and who practice unionism.” Harry F. Brothers, who had belonged to uaw Local 735 for fifteen years, explained, “I’m for unions as a force to achieve collective bargaining, seniority rights and improved working conditions. But I don’t favor the unions being used by the union bosses to further their personal political objectives. I bitterly oppose being compelled to make involuntary contributions through the use of my dues to finance the party which I vote against at the polls. And there are millions of rank and file men in this country who are as bitter about it as I am.” These outspoken laborites highlighted the findings of a recent University of Michigan study that found that 41 percent of union members were Republicans. Another concerned union member argued that the leadership’s manipulation of internal union politics compelled workers “to make a choice between economic security and the right to political convictions.” Another rank-and-filer asserted, “You will find at least one, and sometimes three and four letters to the editor protesting that the actions of the union leaders in politics do not reflect their views. Unfortunately many are afraid to have their names printed for fear of reprisals.” Arguments that politically active unionism abridged American freedom and individual choice were the kind Goldwater sought to project and legitimize. “Union bosses,” one of the assembled laborites accused, were building “a dictatorship that will be stronger than government itself.” Although these dissidents admitted they were “proud to join the union because unionism is essential to the economy of the nation,” they charged, “union bosses are now taking advantage of this faith and confidence, built up in a few short years, and are turning the power given to them, and con44 Paul Jacobs, The State of the Unions (New York, 1963); Lichtenstein, State of the Union; Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana, 1995); Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York, 1952); David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (Oxford, 1996); Harvey Swados, “The uaw—Over the Top or over the Hill,” Dissent (Fall 1963), 321–43. 2_Shermer.indd 21 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM 22 The Journal of American History December 2008 fidence bestowed upon them, into a political purpose. I consider this to be a betrayal of the rank-and-file membership.”45 Goldwater’s counter-organizing became an important part of an ongoing war against labor’s strength and legitimacy. The generals leading that offensive were politicians, businessmen and captains of industry who had never made peace with trade unionism, whatever its political coloration. In the mid-1950s, the former Notre Dame law professor Clarence Manion became the champion for small and midsized business owners who remained resolutely hostile to any accommodation with even a highly constrained and bureaucratized unionism. Manion had a weekly radio show that urged listeners to turn against the liberals in power. Behind the scenes, Manion raised funds for his group For America, which included mostly small business owners who agreed with Manion and Goldwater’s claims that liberalism was the road to socialism and who championed policies to repeal liberal regulations, constrain labor’s power, and end deficit spending. These petit capitalists, the Goldwater biographer Rick Perlstein contends, were the shock troops of the Goldwater insurgency.46 Big business also led a counteroffensive. To stop unionization efforts, many big firms either built private welfare systems or fled the industrial North for right-to-work states in the developing sun belt. Lemuel Ricketts Boulware of General Electric (ge) crafted an effective program designed to constrain, subvert, and eliminate union influence at the bargaining table and on the shop floor. Boulware, who hired Ronald Reagan in 1964 as a spokesman for ge’s brand of antigovernment, anti-union free enterprise, also became an important financial supporter of Goldwater’s political ambitions. With ge invested in developing a computer division in Phoenix, Boulware became deeply invested in protecting the city’s right-wing cadre of business leaders. Throughout the late 1950s and even into the early 1960s, Boulware orchestrated visits from ge executives to Arizona, where they reminded voters that the state could attract good manufacturing jobs only by maintaining its low-tax, probusiness agenda. In later years, both Goldwater and Reagan would salute Boulware as a founder of modern conservatism. In 1971, Goldwater lauded Boulware for “the great inspiration that you provided for me as you so stubbornly, rightly and forcefully fought with the union that was trying to take over your company.” In a similar exchange in 1983, Boulware, in turn, thanked the senator, “It is to you that we all owe the bringing of sensible conservatism out into the open. . . . You may have lost one battle along the way [the 1964 presidential election]. But you are now winning the war.”47 The growing public concern about labor’s power and practices gave Goldwater a chance to make himself a household name and spread the antilabor message. In 1957, the U.S. Senate created a Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (also known as the McClellan or Rackets Committee) after headline-grabbing scandals, especially stories of racketeering and violence involving the Teamsters, seemed to tie 45 Republican State Central Committee of Michigan, The Rank and File Union Members Speak Out on Political Action, as Told to U.S. Senator Carl T. Curtis and U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (Lansing [1956]), pp. cover page, 4, 5, 7, “Rank and File Speak Out” file, box 3H495, Stephen Shadegg/Barry Goldwater Collection (Center for American History, Austin, Tex.). 46 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 11–13. 47 Jacoby, Modern Manors; Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: rca’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York, 2001); Quoted in Kimberley Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and General Electric, 1950–1960,” in American Capitalism, ed. Lichtenstein, 264. Barry Goldwater to Lemuel R. Boulware, Dec. 10, 1971, Sept. 22, 1980, April 27, 1978, June 13, 1983, folder 1040, box 38, Lemuel R. Boulware Papers (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia); Boulware to Barry Goldwater, June 20, 1983, ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 22 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 23 the labor movement to a vast network of organized crime interests. With the conservative southern Democrat John McClellan at the helm, the Rackets Committee hearings became a signal event in the moral history of American trade unionism. The liberals on the committee, including Senator John F. Kennedy, saw their main target as Teamster corruption, especially once investigations uncovered that vast sums of money were pouring into the union’s poorly administered regional pension funds. Under the committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy’s relentless, televised questioning, the longtime Teamster president, Dave Beck, revealed himself as a greedy, complacent autocrat. He soon resigned, opening the door for an even more powerful Teamster president, Jimmy Hoffa, to assume control. The combative and self-assured Hoffa also came before McClellan’s committee, and his rhetorical sparring matches with the younger Kennedy inaugurated a decade-long legal political feud that did not end even after Hoffa’s 1967 imprisonment for jury tampering.48 Goldwater and other Republicans on the committee were critical of Hoffa and the Teamsters, but they found their main target elsewhere: chiefly in Walter Reuther, the ambitious and visionary president of the uaw, whose economic and political influence was peaking. Reuther had once been a Socialist and had been close to the Communists for a time in the 1930s, but neither Goldwater nor Karl Mundt, a fellow Republican committee member and a former member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, expended much energy exposing the radical political affiliations of Reuther’s youth. Instead, they grilled him about uaw contributions to and influence on state and national Democratic party leaders; the aggressive and sometimes violent nature of uaw organizing efforts; and Reuther’s ideological and political ambitions. This line of question was remarkable, not only because of Mundt’s earlier involvement in the investigations into Alger Hiss but also because McCarthy had been slated for a key slot on the Rackets Committee. His death, just before the commission convened, gave Goldwater the opportunity to fill McCarthy’s spot. The entire investigation into Reuther and the auw, then, highlighted the Right’s abandonment of anticommunism as a tool to wage war on liberals and laborites. “My conflict with Mr. Reuther,” Goldwater explained to a reporter who asked about the Arizonan’s dogged pursuit, “is philosophical.” Indeed, much of Goldwater’s unease about the uaw president lay in the Arizonan’s distrust of the growing power and influence of labor. Though he had always feared the potency of the trade union movement, his time in Congress heightened those concerns. When writing to colleagues during congressional debate on controlling union funds he put it this way: “I never realized the extent to which the labor movement has gained control over Congress.” He lamented, “Union lobbyists are everywhere, including the very offices of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, and they have only to suggest their wishes and their will is done.” “If we have gone so far as to allow one organization to control the Senate and the House,” he argued, “it is later than we think, and it is probably past the time of being able to do anything 48 Anthony V. Baltakis, “Agendas of Investigation: The McClellan Committee, 1957–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Akron, 1997), 7–28; David Witwer, Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (Urbana, 2003), 157– 211; U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field, Investigation of Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, 85 and 86 Cong., Feb. 26, 1957–Sept. 9, 1959, parts 1–58; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 121–25; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 27–39. 2_Shermer.indd 23 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM 24 The Journal of American History December 2008 about it. This doesn’t mean any lessening on my part to try to do something about it, but my efforts are going to be more and more like a small boy’s whistle in a tornado.”49 For Goldwater, Reuther seemed to embody labor’s increasing power and influence on both the shop floor and on Capitol Hill. This influence, Goldwater maintained, was un-American, and he beseeched members of the gop to watch the uaw president, even to devise a “kind of a disertation” on his activities. Reuther became a core concern for the Arizona senator for several reasons: Reuther’s position as second-in-command of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio); the labor leader’s supposed “political black list of Republican Senators”; Ruether’s threats to Democrats in office, which Goldwater described as “in effect, la[ying] down the law to the Democrat Party regarding how they should behave ‘or else,’”; and his “bold statements on matters of domestic, foreign, and political policy which have only a most obscure bearing on the interests and welfare of labor union members.” This last concern was Goldwater’s greatest, and he pushed Republicans to ask, “Do these statements of Walter Reuther constitute a proper function of his responsibility to the members of these unions? Indeed, what is Walter Reuther’s job?”50 In January 1958, Goldwater flew to Detroit, where he chastised an Economic Club audience, well marbled with executives from the Big Three automakers, for their unwillingness to curb uaw economic and political ambitions. In a critique reminiscent of those he lodged against timid businessmen in his depression-era editorials, Goldwater declared Reuther “more dangerous to our country than Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do.” A week later, Goldwater told the press, “This man cannot meet the charges that I, as well as others have made about him and his obsessive drive for political power.” The antagonism between the two men reached its zenith during a well-noted exchange in 1958 during Reuther’s three-day interrogation in the Senate. Goldwater told the uaw president that he would “rather have Hoffa stealing my money than Reuther stealing my freedom.”51 The Rackets Committee spent much time and energy investigating the uaw’s epic, violence-plagued effort to organize the Kohler Company, a medium-sized plumbing fixture manufacturer in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Like Goldwater’s, Kohler was a paternalistic family-owned and -operated company, whose executives played an outsized role in state Republican politics. For two generations, Kohler, and the company town in which it was situated, had resisted “outside” union efforts to organize its four thousand workers. The most recent confrontation with organized labor began in the early 1950s, when workers contacted the uaw.The union won a National Labor Relations Board election among Kohler workers in 1952, but management refused to meet the workers’ demands for seniority, arbitration, and security guarantees when the first contract expired in 1954, leaving unionists with little recourse to but strike. To the Kohlers, as well as Goldwater, the uaw demand for recognition seemed tantamount to an invasion. Before the Senate, three years into a nine-year struggle, the company president Herbert Kohler explained that his stand against the uaw “served the public interest and specifically the interest 49 Joseph A. Loftus, “Kohler Hearings Hit Three Ways,” New York Times, March 16, 1958, p. E9; Barry Goldwater to Jay Gordon Hall, June 16, 1958, “Hall, J. Gordon, 1958–1959, folder 1 of 4,” box 5, Personal Correspondence, Goldwater Papers. 50 Barry Goldwater to Lloyd Jones, May 3, 1956, “Republican Policy Committee, 1952–1956” folder, box 7, ibid. 51 Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within (1960; Westport, 1982), 266; Quoted in “Reuther Warns of Tough Bargaining,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 23, 1958, p. 9; Congressional Record, 85 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 7–Aug. 24, 1958, p. 2887. 2_Shermer.indd 24 9/30/08 2:41:53 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 25 During his 1958 Senate campaign, Barry Goldwater again faced an impressive majority of registered Democrats. Reaching across party lines to recruit Jeffersonian Democrats uncomfortable with modern liberalism became a crucial electoral strategy for Goldwater. Many of these Democrats, such as the members of “Democrats for Goldwater,” from Douglas, Arizona, campaigned for the senator because they believed he better embodied their political philosophy than the self-proclaimed “Mr. Democrat,” Ernest McFarland. Courtesy Barry M. Goldwater Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Tempe, Arizona. of people employed in American industry.” The most egregious threat to his company, Kohler employees, and the nation, according to Kohler, was “compulsory unionism.” “To my mind,” he explained,” the right to work . . . is self-evident.” He blamed union leaders for forcing workers to strike, asserting, “those voting for this strike were not only a minority of the company’s employees, but a minority of the union’s claimed membership.” Hence, his company’s fight against the uaw was “not merely as a matter of law, but as a matter of morals and of sound American principle.” Kohler claimed that many workers “terrorized by the abuse and threats, the home picketing, the assaults and night-riding vandalism, were staying away, although they wanted to work.” Goldwater’s questioning of Kohler in front of the committee was not an interrogation but a chance for the senator to reinforce arguments he had been making since the depression. In a leading question, he asked Kohler to confirm that the uaw had “been . . . derelict to the members of their own union” for refusing to end the strike.52 52 U.S. Congress, Senate, Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor Management Field, Investigation of Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, 85 Cong., 2 sess., March 26, 27, 28, and 29, 1958, pp. 2_Shermer.indd 25 9/30/08 2:41:54 PM 26 The Journal of American History December 2008 The Most Dangerous Man in Arizona The 1958 elections proved a national test for Goldwater’s labor politics. In six states, including California and Ohio, emboldened conservatives put right-to-work referenda on the ballot. For his part, Goldwater, who had earlier traveled the country delivering speeches at the behest of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, sought to energize business leaders around his attack on labor’s political influence and economic clout. Echoing the 1938 complaints he had directed at the feckless merchants of Phoenix, the senator now complained that businessmen had shown “weakness, even cowardice” in dealing with trade union leaders. “If you continue to sit on your hands in the 1958 Congressional elections,” he told members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “the labor leaders can again get done what they want done . . . [and] in 1960 the President of the United States will be picked by the labor leaders.”53 Labor and its liberal allies were equally determined to marginalize the gop Right in the 1958 elections. The 1957–1958 recession had revived labor-liberal hopes that state political initiatives designed to strengthen the welfare state could once again enjoy the kind of traction they had before the 1937–1938 recession undermined the more expansive policies of the New Deal. The merger between the afl and cio in late 1955 helped unify labor’s fractious political operation; in Arizona, the new state affiliate of the afl-cio built a united labor movement capable of filling parks and ball fields with capacity crowds on Labor Day and for important campaign events. Arizona labor had mobilized well during the 1956 presidential election, and, in 1958, it planned to unseat the state’s most famous senator. In a report on labor’s 1956 electoral efforts, Arizona’s afl-cio secretary-treasurer lamented that unionists had failed to unseat a Republican member of the House John J. Rhodes, but “plan[ned] on killing two birds with one stone in 1958—pray for us!”54 Goldwater also had other reasons to worry about his chances for reelection. His 1952 opponent, Ernest McFarland, seemed poised to win back his seat in the Senate; there were still more registered Democrats than Republicans in Arizona; and two years earlier the New York Times had reported, “Senator Goldwater’s ultraconservative views on labor union activities are believed to have reduced his original popularity with voters.” McFarland won the governor’s seat in 1954, defeating Howard Pyle. The Democratic governor then charged Goldwater with spending too much time away from Capitol Hill, pointing out that Goldwater had not helped Senator Carl Hayden in his efforts to secure water rights for Arizona.55 In 1958 labor was McFarland’s greatest ally, and the afl-cio poured money into his campaign. The federation’s political arm, the Committee on Political Education (cope), sent the organizer Al Green into the Arizona trenches to ensure the rank and file delivered a McFarland victory. Defeating Goldwater became a goal for unionists across the nation. The Houston Labor Journal published an ad declaring the senator, 9934–52; Sylvester Petro, The Kohler Strike: Union Violence and Administrative Law (Boston, 1965); Walter Uphoff, Kohler on Strike: Thirty Years of Conflict (Boston, 1966); Kennedy, Enemy Within, 266–95; Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther, 346–48, Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 121–25; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 27–39; Congressional Record, 85 Cong., 2 sess., Feb. 26–March 29, 1958, pp. 8329–10256. 53 Gilbert J. Gall, The Politics of Right to Work: The Labor Federation as Special Interests, 1943–1979 (New York, 1988), 93–128. “Goldwater Hits Business, Labor,” New York Times, April 30, 1958, p. 22. 54 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 125–26; “Capacity Crowd Attends Rally at Encino Park,” Arizona Labor Journal, Sept. 6, 1956, p. 8, clipping, folder 1, box 25, Committee on Political Education. Research Division Files; K. S. Brown to Sirs and Brothers, June 15, 1956, pp. 1–2, ibid. 55 Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 125–26; “President Ahead in Arizona Drive,” New York Times, Oct. 24, 1956, n.p., clipping, folder 1, box 25, Committee on Political Education. Research Division Files. 2_Shermer.indd 26 9/30/08 2:41:54 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 27 “Wanted for stabbing organized labor in the back.” “Anyone who would like to drop a 50-cent piece or a dollar in the ‘reward kitty’ for the skin of Goldwater,” the editors promised, “we will guarantee that it will be sent to the State Democratic Committee in Arizona to help beat this vicious foe of organized labor.”56 Until labor declared war on him, Goldwater and his chief handler, Stephen Shadegg, struggled for a campaign issue to rally voters. Arizona already had a right-to-work law, and the recession had not hit the state hard enough to make unemployment a key issue. When the uaw named Goldwater the sworn enemy of the trade union movement, the senator’s campaign strategists had the hook they needed. cope’s efforts generated an antiunion counteroffensive in Arizona. In contrast to 1952, when Goldwater had muted his antilabor, anti–New Deal rhetoric, Arizona Republicans in 1958 deployed the populist rhetoric of freedom and individualism to attack openly the alliance between labor and the Democratic party and the power of the trade union movement. Goldwater’s message in 1958 was that labor-management conflict in Arizona resulted directly from what he considered to be the growing labor movement’s increasing power, which the New Deal had made possible. Conservative strategists made normal union political activities, such as contributing to political campaigns and negotiating for security clauses in contracts, sound criminal. They connected Green to the laborites Goldwater had interrogated before the Rackets Committee, portraying the cope official as the most dangerous man in Arizona. Goldwater framed himself as a David to the labor organizer Goliath, “living in the best hotels in Arizona most of the time since February.” “He smokes big cigars and rides in big cars, and has a pretty soft living,” the senator charged, “and your money is paying for it.” “He’s here,” Goldwater asserted, “because the big shot union bosses who are afraid that Barry Goldwater in the United States Senate might someday get something done which would limit their power, want to beat Barry Goldwater, so they employ Al Green to come out here and spend your money to defeat me.” Goldwater’s attacks on the afl-cio’s campaign activities was not limited to Green. He argued that cope really stood for “Cancel out people’s equality” and was “the creation of power-hungry union dictators who seek to weld a band of steel around the freedoms of America.” Goldwater also warned voters against the “teams of neighborhood callers, some paid, some volunteer, all with a single purpose, to repeat distortion of the truth and outright lie, and thus prey upon the sympathies or the emotions of men and women who have not been exposed to the truth.”57 Again the Republican underscored that his complaint was with powerful labor “racketeers,” not hard-working Arizona workers. Goldwater was running, then, to protect those at the mercy of the “bosses.” To appeal to unionists, his campaign focused on his support for trade unions and workers’ rights to “bargain for better wages and working conditions.” In one ad, for example, he separated his advocacy for fair pay and voluntary unionism from his fight against compulsory unionism. Goldwater explained to voters, “Americans cannot be forced to join a particular church, lodge, social organization, or political party. No law in our country should compel a man to join a union to hold or get a job—nor deny him the right to join one if he wishes. Union membership should be voluntary. 56 “cope Agent ‘Muscles In,’” Arizona Republic, Oct. 18, 1958, n.p., clipping, folder 1, box 26, Committee on Political Education. Research Division Files. 57 Barry Goldwater, “Whose Union, Whose Money, Who Is Boss,” typescript of simulcast, originating station— kpho Phoenix, p. 13, box 145, Shadegg Collection. “Film #4—‘cope’—Senator Barry Goldwater,” typescript, pp. 1, 4, box 105 ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 27 9/30/08 2:41:54 PM 28 The Journal of American History December 2008 Freedom is lost when citizens are denied the free right of association.” To prove the large, bureaucratic, and powerful trade union movement malevolent and his crusade virtuous, Goldwater’s campaign literature combined rhetoric on a worker’s right to bargain and join a trade union with discussions of the abuses of power unearthed by the Rackets Committee. He pledged his support for a unionist’s right “to refuse to pay excessive or unfair initiation fees,” “to be honestly represented in collective bargaining,” “to vote in secret and in SAFETY for whomever he pleases,” “to have open, democratic discussions of union problems,” “to know how his union spends his initiation fees and dues,” “to enjoy full employment without arbitrary lockouts or strikes,” and “to get rid of union dictators, racketeers, and crooks.”58 To further separate the rank and file from their “bosses,” Goldwater tackled the trade union movement’s opposition to right-to-work laws. Union leaders had long argued that those laws hurt working Americans, but the senator claimed that the laws helped Arizonans since the state’s copper miners, manufacturers, and construction workers made more money on average than most Americans. He reminded Arizonans, “in 1956, Mr. [Ralph] Cordiner [the chairman of ge], speaking directly to the issue of right-to-work, said that General Electric would not go into any state that did not have a right-to-work law because they wanted their employees to have the protection of being free to join a union without the use of force and compulsion.”59 The candidate underscored that his conservative, anti–New Deal, anti–organized labor political-economic philosophy was in the best interest of working-class Arizonans. Goldwater’s attacks on organized labor highlighted the differences between his 1952 and 1958 campaign messages. With this outright assault on the principles undergirding the Wagner Act, Goldwater and Shadegg now believed they had the political clout to sever any connection to Eisenhower’s moderate Republicanism. Goldwater also depended on Mine-Mill unionists to help get the labor vote in 1958. He arranged for disaffected miners to appear with him on camera to show how much the rank and file supported him. In one of the candidate’s five-minute campaign films, he visited “the fine union that they run down here” in Bisbee. With carefully staged questions about the Arizona mining industry, the senator crafted his message: only Barry Goldwater and his conservative comrades looked out for American workers.60 The senator won a resounding victory, carrying nine of Arizona’s fourteen counties (in 1952 he won only six). The Phoenician won more votes than any other candidate running for statewide election, while McFarland received the least. Goldwater garnered 56 percent of ballots cast, beating the governor by almost 36,000 votes and far outshining his narrow 1952 upset. He won almost two-thirds of Phoenix voters and a third of the state’s Democrats. In Coconino and Apache, two primarily agricultural counties that sided with the senator in both elections, Goldwater increased his margin of victory. In Coconino, each of the three precincts in the town of Williams sided with Goldwater by nearly 65 percent. Goldwater also stole three counties away from McFarland’s 1952 win column, Santa Cruz, Mohave, and Graham. Only residents of Greenlee, Pinal, Gila, Yuma, and Cochise counties approved sending “Mac” back, but even in those areas, Goldwater decreased his margin of defeat. In Cochise, McFarland won by only 231 votes (out of 13,413) in 58 Barry Goldwater, I Have Absolutely No Quarrel with Rank and File Labor (Tucson [1958]), box 105, Shadegg Collection. 59 Goldwater, “Whose Union, Whose Money, Who Is Boss.” 60 “Film #2—Bisbee—Senator Barry Goldwater,” typescript, pp. 1, 3, box 105, ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 28 9/30/08 2:41:54 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 29 Figure 1: Map of Arizona showing the percentage of voters by county who voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1952 and 1958 U.S. Senate elections. Although his reelection seemed in jeopardy in 1958, Goldwater’s campaign rhetoric against Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, more so than the Senator’s efforts against his two-time opponent Ernest McFarland, gave him a resounding win. 1958, as opposed to 1,634 in 1952. This narrow defeat surprised local officials as there were only 2,371 registered Republicans in the area. The most important shift in Cochise occurred in Bisbee, described by the local paper as “a mining camp without question in the pocket of any Democratic candidate.” McFarland won all six districts in 1952 but lost the city in 1958. Goldwater’s victory was slight, less than one hundred votes, but it 2_Shermer.indd 29 9/30/08 2:42:10 PM 30 The Journal of American History December 2008 still shocked journalists covering the election. In only one county did the percentage of Goldwater voters decrease. The senator won Pima County in both elections, but his popularity slipped from 56 percent to 53 percent. The area grew rapidly during the 1950s as Tucson, the county seat and Arizona’s second-largest city, attracted manufacturing and wholesaling establishments, and military bases. The number of residents voting increasing by almost 14,000. McFarland increased his number of votes in the county by over 7,000 votes, while Goldwater added a little over 6,000. Still, McFarland’s new supporters were not enough to give the Democratic candidate the win.61 Standing victorious amid a slew of Republican defeats in 1958, Goldwater became the new conservative champion for a badly beaten gop. His victory over McFarland, and by extension Reuther, raised his standing among many Republicans. Senator Everett Dirksen praised Goldwater openly for his leadership. “It is small wonder that in every corner of the country they hold you in high esteem,” Dirksen opined, “It is simply a tribute to your courage, your singleness of purpose and your determination to get a job done in a field of endeavor which has frightened so many in public life because they were afraid of reprisal. . . . I salute you as a great American and a great soldier in my book.” Vice-President Richard M. Nixon reached out to the reelected senator, hoping Goldwater could help brainstorm ways to revitalize the Republican party. Goldwater became the chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. Upon his unanimous election, he announced, “those who have started out to discredit conservatism have done a good job.” But he was “proud of being a conservative” and demanded that “the party quit copying the New Deal, seeking only for votes, and remember that a two-party system needs two philosophies and not just one.” Moreover, he pushed the gop to “declare against centralized government, and then act as if it means it.” Even before Arizonans voted, major news outlets, including Time and the Saturday Evening Post, took notice of the rugged westerner taking a stand against organized labor in the desert and described him as a brawny cowboy rising within the Republican party’s ranks. Right-wing Republicans immediately began an intense campaign to “draft” the Arizonan for a presidential run.62 Goldwater’s victory and his nationwide popularity resulted from his success in tapping into long-standing fears of the Arizona and national electorate of concentrations of power. Voters had begun to worry about labor organizers, not business leaders. That populist sentiment was radically opposed to politically active trade union leaders, not to organized labor itself; it was hostile to Eisenhower-era corporatism, not to working-class organization per se. One Bullhead City, Arizona, resident explained that he sided with Goldwater because “He’s one of the best friends the working man and organized labor ever had but 61 There is some disagreement over what counties Goldwater won. Robert Goldberg states that he won ten counties, but the sources he cited were newspaper articles published on November 5, 1958, which gave Goldwater the win in Cochise County by just 85 votes, 6,591 votes for Goldwater and 6,822 for Ernest McFarland. Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 131–32. The election statistics given here were compiled from: “Cochise Just Barely Democratic,” Bisbee Daily Review, Nov. 6, 1958, p. 1, clipping, Scrapbook 61: November 1958, box 61, Political Activities, Goldwater Papers; “County by County Vote Tabulations,” Tucson Citizen, Nov. 6, 1958, n.p., clipping, ibid.; “Goldwater Vote Total Sets Record,” Phoenix Gazette, Nov. 6, 1958, n.p., clipping, ibid.; “Coconino County, Williams Help Put Goldwater, Fannin In,” Williams Daily News, Nov. 6, 1958, n.p., clipping, ibid.; box 10, Election Returns, Secretary of State Records; Bradford Luckingham, The Urban Southwest: A Profile History of Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson (El Paso, 1982), 79–88. 62 Everett McKinley Dirksen to Barry Goldwater, Sept. 11, 1959, “Dirksen, Everett McKinley, 1952–1969” folder, box M, Alpha Files, Personal, Goldwater Papers; Goldwater quoted in Robert S. Ball, “Goldwater in Fray as gop’s New Taft,” Detroit News, Jan. 25, 1959, p. 20-A; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 132–34; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 41–45; “Personality Contest,” Time, Sept. 29, 1958, p. 15; “The Glittering Mr. Goldwater,” Saturday Evening Post, June 7, 1958, pp. 39, 116. 2_Shermer.indd 30 9/30/08 2:42:10 PM Origins of Conservative Ascendancy 31 a deadly foe of unionism as of today and if you voting workers don’t know the difference between organized labor and unionism, you better get busy and look into the matter.” A self-described Arizona Democrat refused to vote a straight ticket because he was a “Jeffersonian Democrat and not a Walter Reuther, Harry Truman Democrat.” He voted for Goldwater and other conservatives running in 1958 because “I can not stomach what some of our Democratic candidates are trying to do with the Democratic voters of my state.” An Arizona Teamster contacted the Republican candidate because “I was interested in knowing what a rank and file member like me could do in removing some of our unwanted officers at the head of the Teamsters Union.” The truck driver echoed Goldwater’s campaign messages, explaining to the politician, “I am definitely in favor of organized labor . . . I know that if it were not for the union I would not be able to have the standard of living I now enjoy, and I am grateful to the union for this. By supporting you I feel that the best interests of the working union member are being served.”63 As Goldwater gained prominence, Americans associated him with the radical individualism within modern conservatism that challenged New Deal liberalism. Though nationally his support came mostly from college-aged conservatives, members of the lowermiddle class, small-business owners, and a smattering of corporate executives, Goldwater made inroads among the working class. Trade unionists outside of Arizona who supported him believed Goldwater to be the champion of the American worker. One unionist wrote to the Arizona Republic to urge Arizonans to “Keep Barry Goldwater to be sure of it.” The concerned Californian argued, “We of organized labor’s rank and file should show to him our thanks and appreciation for his exposure of the use, theft and private control of our dues money by our own leaders.” A machinist from Kansas looked to Goldwater to “do something about the union shop, before a ‘REAL MEAN MAN’ like Hitler, Hoffa, Stalin or Beck comes to power.” A California member of uaw Local 719 supported the senator because the disaffected unionist “hope[d] and pray[ed] that your investigation will some day force Mr. Reuther to represent the workers that pay for representation, and stop using them as pawns in his unholy fight for power.” A forty-five-year member of the afl from Philadelphia applauded Goldwater’s efforts because “in order to draw the fire of ‘Ruthless’ Reuther . . . you must be a pretty square shooter.” The conservative had won this rank-and-filer over because, “Labor Unions should be made subject to the anti-trust laws. As they are operated today, they certainly constitute a combination in restrain of trade and commerce.”64 The foundation of Goldwater’s appeal was a carefully crafted message that the country would soon read about in Conscience of a Conservative. His free-market, small-government, antilabor populist conservatism not only tapped into fears of union bureaucracy and power but also bridged differences between those in the working and managerial classes. His promise to curb inflation and corruption as well as protect freedom and indi63 Harry J. Walden, letter to the editor, Mohave Miner, Oct. 30, 1958, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 60: Political Activities October–November 1958, Goldwater Papers; B. M. Stradley, “Democrat for gop,” Arizona Republic, Nov. 2, 1958, n.p., clipping, ibid.; Roy A. Jesperson and Bernice R Jesperson to Barry Goldwater, Oct. 24, 1958, Union—Members Letters Favoring Investigation folder, box 3H497, Shadegg/Goldwater Collection. 64 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 1–16; Andrew, Other Side of the Sixties, 1–8; Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary”; M. G. Burnside, “Thanks from Labor,” letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, Nov. 3, 1958, n.p., clipping, Scrapbook 60: Political Activities October–November 1958, Goldwater Papers; Hugh B. McCullough to Barry Goldwater, Dec. 1, 1957, p. 2, Union—Members Letters Favoring Investigation folder, box 3H497, Shadegg/ Goldwater Collection; Merrill P. Forcier to Barry Goldwater, Jan. 25, 1958, typescript, ibid.; Herman A. Dyke to Barry Goldwater, Jan. 30, 1958, typescript, ibid. 2_Shermer.indd 31 9/30/08 2:42:10 PM 32 The Journal of American History December 2008 vidualism by breaking the large, modern labor movement depended on an argument that the Republican Right and big business could better protect the citizenry and the economy than the tripartite corporatism Reuther and the heirs of New Deal/Fair Deal regulation espoused. This alternative vision for creating prosperity helped Goldwater and other right-wing Republicans exploit libertarian fissures in the New Deal coalition. His success in 1958 also demonstrated that Republicans would not have to follow Eisenhower’s plan to institutionalize aspects of the New Deal to placate liberals and laborites. Goldwater defeated McFarland and, at the same time, made clear to the most energetic and conservative elements of the Republican party that attacking the ideological framework sustaining the Wagner Act and union solidarity could be, under the right conditions, a winning electoral strategy. Goldwater had discovered that while anticommunism alone could not roll back the New Deal, an assault on politically active trade union leaders as corrupt, unrepresentative of their rank and file, and un-American might well prove a successful plan. Years before construction workers in hard hats reinvented how Americans saw the working class, Goldwater created a rhetorically imagined, but political potent, division between unionists and their leaders that delegitimized key pillars of the New Deal order. 2_Shermer.indd 32 9/30/08 2:42:10 PM