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National Review and Barry Goldwater Shaped American Conservatism

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National Review and Barry Goldwater Shaped American Conservatism LOOKING WEST AND MOVING RIGHT: How the National Review and Barry Goldwater shaped American Conservatism Ciska Schippers 6339514 June 25, 2018 Thesis MA American Studies Dhr. dr. G.H. (George) Blaustein University of Amsterdam Inhoud Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2 Chapter 1: The vagueness of (pseudo-)conservatism ............................................................................. 8 Chapter 2: The conservative as underdog ............................................................................................ 25 Chapter 3: The Southern strategy, race and regionalism ..................................................................... 39 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 56 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 59 Literature .......................................................................................................................................... 59 Primary Sources ................................................................................................................................ 60 1 Introduction ‘Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers.’1 Barry Goldwater is the loser Rick Perlstein is referring to in his book Before the storm: Barry Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus. Conservative Republican nominee Barry Goldwater lost overwhelmingly during the 1964 election against the incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater is generally viewed by historians as the first conservative candidate after the Second World War, before which the United States did not have a conservative movement to speak of. But despite losing overwhelmingly, this election proved to be the starting point of the Republican Party as a conservative party, and the South and Southwest as Republican strongholds. What was the role of the conservative senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater in changing American politics until this day? To understand the significance of Goldwater is to understand the history of conservatism in the United States. In The making of the American conservative mind, Jeffrey Hart writes that before the New Deal era, there was no collective defense or articulation of a coherent stream of conservative thought. During the Depression and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘the defeat of conservative assumptions seemed complete, their spokesmen few, and universities captured by liberalism’.2 In his book The conservative intellectual movement in America, since 1945 historian George Nash observes: ‘In 1945 no articulate, coordinate, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States. There were, at best, scattered voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the future of the country.’3 As Nash’s title suggests, this changed after the war, and central to the shift in things is the magazine National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr. More on the discussion on the birth of the American conservative movement will be discussed in chapter one, but a short biographical passage on the life of Buckley is essential to the understanding of the National Review and the thought behind the magazine that was so monumental in unifying conservative thought in the United States. William F. Buckley Jr. was born on November 24, 1925 in New York City. His father William Frank Buckley Sr. practiced law and was a successful oil entrepreneur, a venture that took him around the world. William Sr., his wife and ten children lived abroad, in Mexico, Great Britain, France and in the United States both in the South (South Carolina) and the Northeast (New York State). 1 Rick Perlstein, Before the storm: Barry Goldwater and the unmaking of the American consensus (New York 2009) x. 2 Jeffrey Hart, The making of the American conservative mind (Wilmington 2005) 1. 3 George H. Nash, The conservative intellectual movement in America, since 1945 (New York 1976) xv. 2 Because of this diverse background the Buckley children were all multilingual, speaking Spanish, French as well as English. They were also practicing Catholics. Buckley thus did not have a mainstream American upbringing. After graduating from the private Millbrook School, Buckley joined the army for two years and after the war enrolled in Yale University in 1946. His time at Yale shaped Buckley, by the professors and fellow students he met, the journalism and debate experience he gained and by the reigning world view at Yale he constantly challenged. This world view is the topic of Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale. In the foreword, Buckley wrote that when he came to Yale, he brought with him firm beliefs in Christianity, free enterprise and limited government. According to Buckley, the most important duel at the time was between Christianity and atheism, and, on another level, between individualism and collectivism.4 He looked eagerly to Yale to find allies against secularism and collectivism, but was negatively surprised.5 According to Buckley he thought that it was the responsibility of the trustees of Yale to be committed to: ‘the desirability of fostering both a belief in God, and a recognition of the merits of our economic system.’6 But, he found, that many affiliated with Yale, including President-emeritus Charles Seymour, gave freedom to faculty members to teach what they saw fit, as they called it ‘academic freedom.’7 According to Buckley, the problem: ‘was not that all Yale professors, by any means, were hard-left atheists; it was that Yale refused to say that one set of opinions was better than another.’8 The book became a best seller, but was also widely criticized. Frank Ashburn even linked it to the Ku Klux Klan. He wrote in the Saturday Review: ‘The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.’9 After Yale, Buckley was recruited for the CIA by his Yale professor and future editor of the National Review Willmoore Kendall.10 Two years he worked for the Agency in Mexico City. But during this time God and Man at Yale took off and Buckley was offered a number of editorial positions at right-wing periodicals.11 Buckley and his wife moved from Mexico to New York City and Buckley took 4 William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale (Chicago 1951) xvi. 5 Buckley, God and Man at Yale, xiii. 6 Ibidem, xiv. 7 Ibidem. 8 Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne, Jr, Strictly right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American conservative movement (Hoboken 2007) 18. 9 Ibidem, 23. 10 Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, Right face: organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65 (Copenhagen 2002) 116. 11 Bridges and Coyne, Strictly right, 24. 3 a job at The American Mercury. 12 This right-wing radical libertarian publication eventually perished when it was financed by millionaire Russell Maguire, who steered the magazine towards ‘the swamps of anti-Semitism’.13 Buckley had left The American Mercury by 1953, to work on a book on Senator Joe McCarthy with his friend Brent Bozell. This book by Buckley and Bozell McCarthy and his enemies: the record and its meaning was actually a defense of McCarthy and his policies. According to the writers, McCarthy entered the national stage at a frightening and uncertain time, when nobody knew how to cope with the new threat in their midst, communism.14 Although they concluded that McCarthy’s method should not bring down innocent people, they did define McCarthyism as ‘a weapon in the American arsenal’.15 Americans who opposed to McCarthyism according to Buckley and Bozell were ‘confused, they have misread history (…) there is only one alternative to this explanation: that they are opposed to the decline of Communist influence at home.’16 Buckley kept defending McCarthy later on, and Barry Goldwater did as well. Meanwhile, former leftist turned fervent anti-leftist William S. Schlamm decided the time was ripe for a new right-wing magazine.17 William Buckley had caught his eye, and Schlamm asked him to spearhead the magazine. After Buckley had finished McCarthy and his enemies, they got together to outline the magazine, recruit editors as well as raise money for its launch. On November 19, 1955, 7500 copies of the first issue of the National Review appeared.18 The tone of the magazine wasn’t scholarly and academic like the magazines before it, like The Freeman, but rather sarcastic and witty. The magazine featured funny cartoons and other contributions regularly, like a fake advertisement for the ‘amusement park’ Liberal land, with the attractions ‘Spend a day down on the farm. Get paid for not growing anything’, and ‘Be a U.S. delegate at the United Nations. Vote to have the American people pick up the check.’19 But although this tone meant broadening the scope outside of the academic world, Buckley ‘held on to his unabashed elitism’, historian Niels Bjerre-Poulsen writes in Right face: organizing the American conservative movement 1945-65.20 Buckley stressed that the editorial line would ‘reject cultural 12 Ibidem, 29. 13 William A. Rusher, The rise of the right (New York 1984) 42. 14 William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and his enemies:
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