A Single Spark Can Touch Off a Prairie Fire

The conservative movement has become such an established part of American political life that only the ancient can recall when it was written off as dead, buried and soon to be forgotten. The year was 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson had just defeated Barry Goldwater, the “voice of conservatism,” whose followers had seized the Republican Party from the Eastern bankers, stock brokerage presidents, lawyers and industrialists in control since before World War II.

The word “defeat” does not adequately describe the immensity of Goldwater’s loss or the blow seemingly suffered by the conservative cause. Goldwater won only six states, and his loss gave Democrats huge majorities in the House and Senate, clearing the way for passage of Johnson’s Great Society legislation. The time had come, it seemed, to mark the demise of the conservative crusade, with its fierce anti-communism and unrelenting opposition to social programs dating to the New Deal.

Pundits and academics, analyzing the election results, did exactly that. Richard Rovere predicted at the time in The New Yorker that “the election has finished the Goldwater school of political reaction.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summed up a commonly held view that the two-party system was endangered. Citing the twice-beaten Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, Schlesinger wrote: “The election results of 1964 seemed to demonstrate [Dewey’s] prediction about what would happen if the parties were ever realigned on an ideological basis: ‘The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.’ ”

“At that,” writes scholar Rick Perlstein in an elegantly sarcastic phrase that concludes “Before the Storm,” his study of the era, “there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book.”

But, as history has proved, it was, in fact, time to keep the book open and fill the pages with the story of a movement that, though defeated, was not destroyed and within two years had captured the governorship of California with a candidate who would be elected president in 1980. The story of this remarkable fall and rise is told in two excellent books that delve into the roots of the conservative movement and explain its staying power and growth.

One is Perlstein’s “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.” The other is “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right” by Lisa McGirr. Perlstein, a scholar who has written for Lingua Franca, Slate and the Nation, and McGirr, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, have explained the transformation by tracing its growth among the suburbanites who have in the last 30 years become the dominant force in American politics. Perlstein views the movement from the standpoint of the Goldwater campaign, McGirr from the suburbs of Orange County.

With clarity and insight, both authors show how the nation’s journalistic and academic elite had underestimated conservative strength and misinterpreted the 1964 election. Goldwater’s words and style, reminding people of Dr. Strangelove, were too frightening for the electorate. The Goldwater persona and the lopsided results made the experts play down such events as George Wallace’s winning a quarter of the votes cast in the Wisconsin primary earlier in the year. “We won without winning,” Wallace exclaimed. Nor did they understand the historic importance of Goldwater’s success in the South in November. These results were evidence of a strong resentment among a substantial number of white voters, starting with traditional working-class Democrats and moving up the economic scale, against civil-rights legislation, welfare and other important parts of the liberal agenda. Despite the election of 1964, America was becoming more conservative. Volunteers were at the heart of the comeback, men and women in their 30s and 40s from Southern California suburbs.

Their preoccupation with extreme anti-communism and conspiracy theories, along with an affection for the secretive John Birch Society-the right wing’s counterpart to the Communist Party in the ‘50s and ‘60s-made them seem so marginal that it was difficult to understand how they would ever connect with a majority of Americans. It took Ronald Reagan and his political managers, Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts, to expand this narrowly based movement into a “prairie fire,” a phrase the candidate used in almost every speech to describe the tide sweeping across California in 1966. Reporters treated the phrase as a joke. When Reagan reached “prairie fire” in his speeches, everyone knew it was time to pack their gear and board the bus, for the speech was almost over.

But “prairie fire” meant much more than that. Soon, the press saw that certain themes-welfare, street crime and the student protests at Berkeley-resonated with his audiences. In the background were the Watts riot, hippies, Haight-Ashbury, rock ‘n’ roll, drugs and rebellious youth. Berkeley, in particular, roused a broad range of audiences; it seemed to sum up the voters’ gripes.

I understood the power of these issues. I wrote about them in my stories at the time and explored them in more depth in a biography of Reagan. But I had little idea I was witnessing a transformation of American politics.

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The right’s themes, while seeming out of step at the height of the civil rights movement and the Great Society, were actually very much in tune with the growing fears of white middle-class and upper-class America. “Blacks staged sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, rode through Dixie on buses alongside of whites in defiance of local laws and in accordance with the rulings of the United States Supreme Court marched through the streets of Southern cities in ever-escalating confrontation with the customs and codes of segregation,” Perlstein writes. “Millions thrilled to the moral transcendence of these heroic warriors for freedom. Millions more decided that rabble rousers-perhaps communist dupes-were spitting on law and order, overturning settled ways of life with reckless abandon and might not stop until they had forced their way into their own Northern white neighborhoods.” Millions, he writes, were stirred by Johnson’s War on Poverty, but millions more “wondered why these people couldn’t help themselves.”

Or, as McGirr writes, “Concerns over ‘law and order’ and ‘morality’ and attacks on ‘sophisticated intellectuals’ moved to center stage. As American liberalism began to unravel, the focus of the Right’s discourse shifted away from communism toward a more direct attack on ‘liberal humanism’ and the ‘open society.’ This shift in focus-which went hand in hand with the rise of the New Left, the student movement, the counterculture, the civil rights struggles in the North and the Vietnam War-represented not fundamentally new concerns but rather new terrains of struggle. These new conflicts gave conservative ideas a broader appeal among a wider constituency .... “

The Cold War provided fertile soil. America was watching a television show called “I Led Three Lives,” based on the life of Herbert A. Philbrick, about an FBI undercover agent fighting the international Communist conspiracy. Nowhere was the soil more nourishing than in Orange County, which was rapidly filling up with predominately white newcomers who tended to work in Cold War-related industries, usually aerospace.

It began in the 1950s with a narrow constituency, the newcomers to the suburbs of Orange County who were preoccupied by Cold War anti-communism. Although Sen. Joe McCarthy’s star had faded nationally, fundamentalist minister Fred Schwarz drew more than 7,000 young people to his School of Anti-Communism in Anaheim’s La Palma Stadium, sponsored by the highly conservative Walter Knott and other local businessmen. The school, wrote McGirr, “decisively shaped the future of right-wing politics in Orange County. It recruited new activists to the cause and linked them together in networks that remained active throughout the decade.”

The strength of McGirr’s book is her explanation of the growth of the conservative movement through the stories of women and men who moved to the Orange County suburbs. Typical was Bee Gathright. Born in the Depression to religious, socially conservative parents, she was one of nine children raised on an Iowa family farm. Her mother, she remembered, “wouldn’t take government aid on anything.” She registered Democratic when she moved to Orange County, but her upbringing left a strong imprint, and when a neighbor asked to use her patio for a meeting and she heard a man from Knott’s Berry Farm speak on liberalism and conservatism, she knew she was a conservative at heart.

Later, she arranged a meeting at a local public school so more people could hear the man. She participated in the conservative study groups, bridge clubs, barbecues and coffee klatches that became organizing tools of the right. From there, she moved into Republican volunteer organizations and finally became a Goldwater volunteer, turning her home into a campaign headquarters.

Many of them were aerospace executives or engineers-Gathright’s husband was a Douglass plant engineer-mentally and physically fighting the Cold War. When Joel Dvorman, a member of Orange County’s Magnolia school board, held a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in his backyard to build support for abolition of congressional and legislative committees on un-American activities, outraged residents crashed the meeting. One of them, James Wallace, a production supervisor at Autonetics, an aerospace firm, was roused to action. In a letter to the editor of the Register, he called Frank Wilkinson, who had spoken at the rally, a “traitor.” Sharing his anger, neighborhood activists asked at school board meetings whether Dvorman was a Communist; soon an organization was formed, with a petition-gathering “ladies auxiliary” that eventually succeeded in recalling Dvorman from the board.

While the nation was focused on its glamorous young president in 1961 and 1962, Orange County activists were hard at work building their network. “We’d get together in my living room, about 30 people, and we would recruit those people by telephone, one person would lead us to another-they’d lead us only to people who were conservative,” activist Nolan Frizzelle told McGirr. The Dvorman recall, the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, the John Birch Society and an unsuccessful statewide anti-pornography initiative drew wide support from the community and formed the backbone for the 1962 campaign for conservative Joe Shell, who won a surprising one-third of the vote against Richard Nixon in the gubernatorial primary.

The conservative networks grew, not only in Orange County but through the Sunbelt, into the Old Confederacy and in Midwestern suburbs. A political manager, Clif White, began to organize them on behalf of Goldwater, taking control of state Republican organizations, building the majority the senator needed to win the Republican nomination for president. The California conservative cadres were crucial in delivering the presidential primary to Goldwater, assisted by the timely birth of a son to the new (and recently divorced) second wife of the moderate candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, the senator’s primary election opponent.

Kennedy was fearful of a white backlash for his support of Southern integration. Warning signs had been appearing for some time. In 1962, voters in an otherwise liberal Berkeley had overturned an ordinance aimed at banning discrimination in housing, and the then-speaker of the state Assembly, Jesse Unruh, said that the goals of the Democratic Party might not be compatible with the electorate.

Kennedy’s assassination less than a year later changed the dynamics of the presidential election, which was fast approaching. A sorrowed nation supported Kennedy’s successor. Although the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War should have helped the isolationist Goldwater, the senator was too warlike. And from the Republican convention in San Francisco in July through the election in November, Goldwater and his team proved incapable of running a national campaign that would appeal to a broad variety of voters in the fall.The Goldwater forces blitzkrieged the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. They controlled the platform votes. They booed Rockefeller when he spoke in favor of a platform amendment denouncing extremist groups such as the Communists, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. The delegates hated the Commies and didn’t think much of the Klan. But the Birch Society was too close to their right-wing hearts for them to allow Rockefeller’s insult to pass without a boo. Sergeants-at-arms stopped NBC’s John Chancellor from interviewing moderate Alaska delegates and after police removed him from the floor, he issued one of broadcasting’s most famous signoffs: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”

When Goldwater accepted the nomination, his speech served notice that only the like-minded could play on his team: “Those who do not care for our cause we do not expect to enter our ranks in any case.” Then, in words that became the signature of his campaign, he said, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

The nation watched this debacle on live television and, within a few minutes, all of White’s careful efforts to control the campaign were destroyed. “It was one thing that Clif White hadn’t given a moment’s thought: what a blitzkrieg looked like broadcast live on TV,” writes Perlstein. “And when the dust lifted with the Goldwater side celebrating an overwhelming victory, ‘pyrrhic’ was hardly an adequate word to describe it.”

There was, Perlstein notes, one Goldwaterite who understood the power of television better than any of the year’s candidates-better, probably, than most of the era’s campaign managers. And so, on the Tuesday before the election, Ronald Reagan, then an actor, gave a televised speech in support of his candidate that did as much good for the conservative cause as Goldwater’s nomination acceptance did harm.

Reagan’s speech, in fact, was not too different from those he’d given to Orange County conservatives at the beginning of the ‘60s; he was, after all, a speaker at Fred Schwartz’s School of Anti-Communism in 1961. But Reagan was Goldwater without the hard edge, not frightening, preaching a message of inclusiveness. “He delivered his lines like punches,” Perlstein writes. “ [T]he stories went by faster than thought, like a seduction .... “ Near the end of his speech, Reagan said, “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

The speech, “A Time for Choosing,” was rebroadcast many times over the next few weeks. It was, Perlstein writes, what the Goldwater campaign should have been saying all along: “People called their crazy fascist Goldwaterite friends on the phone: ‘Now I get it,’ they said. Conservatives were no less stricken; they had never heard as gripping and pithy statement of what they believed.”

Two years later, Reagan easily won the Republican nomination for governor. Without his Goldwater-conservative base-without the troops that Perlstein and McGirr have so accurately described-Reagan would not have made it. But unlike Goldwater and his team, Reagan and his managers understood that the election extended beyond the primary to November. And to win that contest, Reagan needed the votes of Democrats and moderate Republicans. Reagan did it, first for governor and then for president, with a message that actually wasn’t much different from Goldwater’s.

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Like Goldwater, the Orange County right-the volunteers such as Gathright and Wallace-had grasped the issues that would touch the hopes and fears of America’s middle class, particularly the white segment of it. But the right-wingers were too extreme. They were kindling wood for Reagan’s prairie fire. Still, the ideas hatched in Orange County churches and backyards and spread by Goldwater have survived his defeat and Reagan’s departure from office. They have changed the terms of political debate. The American electorate, beginning with Reagan’s victory in 1980, has accepted the values the conservatives espoused. Bill Clinton, the New Democrat, steered his party away from liberalism, and now moderates and liberals are joining conservatives in calling for a tax cut.

Remember welfare? Whatever happened to it? Where did affirmative action go? These two fine books, which should be read together, explain their demise and that of many other ideas that seemed so permanent, so much a part of a national consensus, in 1964.