At the outset, Rockefeller appeared to embody moderate Republicanism. Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma defines this as centered on “pro-growth government intervention in the economy, a powerful federal presence … abroad [i.e., hawkish Cold War internationalism], a comprehensive social safety net,” and “racial liberalism,” which meant governmental action to erase segregation and promote “access and equality” in employment. Rockefeller’s chief legacies to many New Yorkers, Barrett acknowledges, were dramatic expansions of the state university system (more than quintupling enrollment), pioneering environmental protections, the nation’s first state arts council, and pharaonic public infrastructure investments, from the Metropolitan Transit Authority to Albany’s Empire State Plaza to the short-lived Urban Development Corporation.
Yet the New York governor, near the end of his time in office, also crafted the unprecedentedly draconian 1973 Rockefeller drug laws. These established mandatory sentencing for possession of a wide range of narcotics (the governor had originally pushed for life sentences for dealers and users), became “the nation’s toughest drug laws,” and helped forge a punitive criminal justice system that has disproportionately affected Black communities (an outcome, Barrett charges, Rockefeller himself knew was likely).
The 1973 drug laws emerged in the aftermath of Rockefeller’s catastrophic mismanagement of the 1971 Attica prison riot. In the wake of a decade of field-defining legal and historical scholarship about America’s War on Drugs and its carceral state, Rockefeller’s role in shaping punitive narcotics policies is probably better-known today than his support for public investment in social programs and economic development. But his narcotics policy shift from rehabilitation to incarceration, Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma reveals, mirrored a broader tendency in the later years of Rockefeller’s gubernatorial tenure towards social policy retrenchment. This shift encompassed paring back medical assistance for the poor, introducing work requirements into state welfare programs, and decontrolling New York City rents. (Barrett relays a disturbing, emblematic 1969 episode in which Rockefeller publicly mocked the weight of an African American woman in Nassau County who questioned proposed cuts to the state welfare budget).
Barrett sets out to solve the seeming paradox of Rockefeller’s defining policies. While another contemporaneous attempt to ideologically define moderate GOP politics, President Eisenhower’s “Modern Republicanism,” was centered around a distinctly Republican vision of the postwar social market economy (something Rockefeller also embraced), Rockefeller, at the outset of his career, identified his brand of moderate Republicanism with support for civil rights.
How, then, did he become an architect of a carceral state that has wrought many destructive effects on modern American race relations?