The Republican National Convention is underway in Milwaukee. It comes on the 60th anniversary of the 1964 convention — a raucous affair at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. There, the GOP nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, revealing that the conservative wing of the party was ascendent. Sixteen years later, the right scored a crowning victory when Ronald Reagan captured the presidency.
The 1964 convention shocked observers. Goldwater’s supporters heaped abuse on the media and moderate Republicans who refused to endorse the nominee. It was a stark digression from the typical convention, in which a newly crowned nominee and his allies extended olive branches to all wings of the party. In 1960, for example, Goldwater had scolded conservatives who didn’t want to endorse Vice President Richard Nixon, exhorting them to get on board.
But the vitriolic display, full of conspiracy theories and extremism, embodied the brand of conservatism on the rise in the GOP — one that now dominates the party.
Conservatives grew increasingly disgruntled during the 1950s as they watched the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower accept the welfare state and display a willingness to coexist with the Soviet Union. This spurred the mobilization of a grassroots movement determined to reassert its values, with the help of conservative media outlets like National Review and the radio program the Manion Forum of Opinion, as well as hard-right groups like the John Birch Society.
By the early 1960s, the conservative movement saw the GOP as their vehicle for pushing the country to the right and Goldwater as their standard-bearer. Fury over national Democrats’ embrace of the Civil Rights movement gave them new allies: Southern white arch-conservative Democrats who had aligned with the racist legacies of the former Confederacy. Lyndon Johnson did not exaggerate when after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he conceded to aide Bill Moyers, “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime — and mine.”
That year, savvy grassroots strategy helped the right dominate the process for selecting Republican convention delegates, which set the stage for what happened in San Francisco.