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1964 Republican National Convention

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1964 Republican National Convention

July 13–16, 1964, Cow Palace, Daly City (San Francisco), California; the convention that nominated Barry Goldwater for President; the first national-political event in which the conservative movement captured the Republican Party; the temperamental and rhetorical template the GOP has reproduced — at varying intensities — through 2024 and beyond.

Why It Matters Here

The 1964 RNC is the wiki’s first decisive political-realignment event. The earlier intellectual scaffolding — Kirk’s Conservative Mind (1953), Buckley’s NR (1955), Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom (1962), Bozell-ghostwritten Conscience of a Conservative (1960) — was given its political incarnation here. After 1964 the GOP could no longer return to its mid-century moderate-Republican consensus; the party’s center of gravity had moved permanently to the right.

The convention is also the first visible occurrence of a temperament — rage at media, refusal to disavow extremists, conspiracism about elite betrayal, embrace of confrontation — that the wiki argues is the through-line from Goldwater to January 6 2021. See Holden’s *TIME* synthesis.

What Happened

The Field Going In

Going in, the candidates were Barry Goldwater (Arizona conservative), Nelson Rockefeller (New York moderate, defeated by Goldwater in California primary), William Scranton (Pennsylvania moderate, entered last-minute as a noblesse-oblige draft), Henry Cabot Lodge (write-in winner of New Hampshire), Margaret Chase Smith, and George Romney.

Per a Harris Poll in late June 1964, 62% of rank-and-file Republicans preferred Scranton to Goldwater — but the moderate establishment was in disarray. Lodge, paging through the delegate list in his hotel: “What in God’s name has happened to the Republican Party! I hardly know any of these people!” The conservative grassroots had captured delegate selection.

The Schlafly Pamphlet

In summer 1964, Phyllis Schlafly self-published A Choice Not an Echo and distributed several hundred thousand copies — some delegates received more than 60 in the mail. The book’s central thesis: previous Republican nominations had been stolen by “a few secret kingmakers in New York” who installed Wall Street moderates. The structural form of Schlafly’s argument — an unaccountable elite conspiracy has captured the party against its grassroots base — is the prototype of Curtis Yarvin’s “The Cathedral” half a century later.

The Convention Floor

  • Goldwater operatives traveled in pairs along pre-timed routes, used radio-equipped cars, treated walkie-talkies as backup because they could be tapped (the campaign had tapped Scranton’s). Bill Middendorf (Goldwater finance chair) memoir later titled A Glorious Disaster — the conservatives knew they would lose the general and considered it generative.
  • Daniel Schorr’s CBS report alleged a Goldwater-German-right link based only on a planned Bavaria vacation; the smear consolidated rather than dissolved delegate loyalty. The convention is one of the wiki’s clearest cases of establishment counter-effort backfire.
  • Rockefeller booed. Speaking from the rostrum, Rockefeller advocated a platform plank denouncing extremism. Theodore White: a “den of hungry lions… hating and screaming and reveling in their own frenzy.” Rockefeller documented the Goldwater campaign’s “anonymous midnight and early morning telephone calls, unsigned threatening letters, smear and hate literature, strong-arm and goon tactics, bomb threats and bombings.” His amendment lost.
  • Hugh Scott’s anti-extremism amendment (Pennsylvania senator, separate from Rockefeller’s): “thunderous ‘no.’” Failed.
  • Eisenhower’s media attack. The former President “wound up the convention-goers by attacking the media for being biased against conservatives.” Delegates “stood in their chairs, shouting, raving, shaking their fists and cursing the reporters in the press section.” This is the cleanest single moment in postwar Republican politics where the party’s own most established figure rallied the base against the press.
  • The Civil Rights Act platform vote. Nearly 70% of delegates, on the Goldwater campaign’s instructions, voted down a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, which had been signed into law two weeks earlier (July 2, 1964). Goldwater himself had voted no on June 19, advised by Robert Bork (75-page concurrence) and William Rehnquist (then Phoenix attorney; “unconstitutional”).

Goldwater’s Acceptance Speech

Delivered at the Cow Palace on the evening of July 16, 1964. The speech’s drafting reflects the wiki’s two-headed reading of Goldwater himself: Harry V. Jaffa drafted the famous “ordered liberty” passage (the constitutional theology of mainstream Republican fusionism); the other now-canonical pair of lines were Goldwater’s own and were kept against the protests of half his staff:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Goldwater underlined them twice in his copy of the speech. They are now read as the foundational sentence of the postwar conservative movement’s confrontational temperament.

Black Delegates

Delmont (citing Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican):

  • William Young (Pennsylvania delegate): suit set on fire; told to “keep in your own place.”
  • George Fleming (New Jersey delegate): “They call you ‘nigger,’ push you and step on your feet… I had to leave to keep my self-respect.”

Jackie Robinson — lifelong Republican, Nixon 1960 supporter — described the convention as “the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known.” “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” Founded Republicans and Independents for Lyndon Johnson after.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Goldwater’s nomination is “both unfortunate and disastrous… While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to racists. His candidacy and philosophy will serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes will stand.”

The Result and the Realignment

  • Johnson won 61% of the popular vote, 486–52 in the Electoral College, 44 states. Still the largest popular-vote share of any presidential election in American history.
  • Goldwater carried Arizona (by under one percentage point) plus Mississippi (87%), Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Four of those five Deep South states had gone to Adlai Stevenson in 1956.
  • The Black-Republican cliff. Eisenhower 39% (1956), Nixon 32% (1960), Goldwater 6% (1964). No Republican candidate has reached 15% since.
  • Theodore H. White and James Reston both predicted the Republican Party would not recover for a generation. They were wrong by exactly five years: Nixon won in 1968 with Kevin Phillips’s Emerging Republican Majority paradigm — Goldwater’s electoral coalition rebranded for general-election viability.

After: The 1965 Coda

The wiki tracks the convention’s temperamental legacy directly into the year that followed (per Holden):

  • October 1965 Fifth Avenue march. 25,000 marchers including William F. Buckley Jr.; “Bomb Hanoi” floats; “Burly longshoremen and veterans left the line of march to attack those who voiced antiwar viewpoints.” Murray Rothfield: the “Buckley goons… Brown Shirts.” Armand Storace beaten to the ground by ILA members shouting “kill him” and “string him up.”
  • October 1965 ADL report. Sharp rise in KKK membership outside the South.
  • November 1965 NYT. John Birch Society membership “flourishing.” JBS adds Selma sheriff James G. Clark to its lecture circuit weeks after the Edmund Pettus Bridge attack.

The 1964 convention’s permission structure — embrace extremism in defense of “liberty,” refuse to disavow the conspiracist base, attack the media as the real enemy — extended directly into paramilitary street politics within twelve months.

The Reagan Coda

Ronald Reagan delivered “A Time for Choosing” on the Tuesday before the November election, on national television, on Goldwater’s behalf. “It may not have won Goldwater many votes, but it put Reagan on the map” (Menand). Reagan attacked New Deal big government in the rhetorical register of a Roosevelt fireside chat, even using FDR’s phrase “rendezvous with destiny.” Two years later he was governor of California; sixteen years later, President.

The wiki’s structural reading: Reagan made Goldwater’s program human-faced. The personality difference — actor vs. blunt fighter pilot — bridged the 1964 debacle to the 1980 landslide. The political program was substantially the same.

Goldwaterism Without Goldwater

Jackie Robinson, post-election: “If Goldwater has been defeated, but Goldwaterism remains triumphant in GOP councils, America faces a difficult future.”

Robinson’s framing is — six decades early — the wiki’s Counterrevolution thesis: the figure loses, the politics metastasize. Tait makes the same argument structurally. Dallek makes it about the JBS specifically. Holden makes it temperamentally.

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