Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle Between Liberalism and Conservatism by Nancy Beck Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle Between Liberalism and Conservatism by Nancy Beck Young Kevin Jon Fernlund Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle Between Liberalism and Conservatism. By Nancy Beck Young. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. Pp. 289. Photographs, notes, bibliographic essay, index.) Nancy Beck Young began the research for this book in 2013. Since then, Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, and Young observes in her [End Page 98] preface that there were “intriguing” similarities between the elections of 1964 and 2016. In both, the Democratic candidates—Lyndon Johnson and Hillary Rodham Clinton—represented safe, status quo choices while Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump were both portrayed by Democrats and Republican centrists (Rockefeller Republicans in 1964 and Never Trump Republicans in 2016) as extremists. In the end, Goldwater was trounced, except in his home state of Arizona and in the five southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. He lost both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Trump also lost the popular vote but prevailed in the Electoral College. For all of the inviting similarities, this book is not about two different elections, but one election and two different campaigns, those of Texas’s Lyndon Johnson and Arizona’s Barry Goldwater. Young argues that the election of 1964 “was more than anything else a competition about two different views of the Sunbelt, Goldwater’s backward-looking conservatism and Johnson’s forward-looking liberalism” (7), and that it turned on the issues of race and the role of the federal government. Young calls these men two suns of the Southwest. Her coverage of the 1964 election is comprehensive and well-researched. She has a sharp eye for detail, such as that available in direct mailing, advertising, speeches, fundraising, and campaign literature, and she also has a good grasp of Johnson’s politics. In addition, she understands how central the civil rights movement had become to liberalism and the Democratic Party, once the bastion of white supremacy and segregation. Her treatment of Goldwater, however, is less sure. While Johnson and Goldwater both may have come from the Southwest, there is a big difference between the history of Johnson’s Texas, which was part of the South, and Goldwater’s Arizona, which was in the West, where the Civil War and Jim Crow cast far lighter shadows. What did loom large for Goldwater was the Cold War, not civil rights (he supported integrated schools but, as a strict constructionist, believed education was a local, not a federal, matter). For “Mr. Conservative,” the spread of Communism abroad and the expansion of the liberal state at home were two inextricably related problems that posed a grave threat to American liberty. In The Conscience of a Conservative (Victor Publishing, 1960), with the clarity and force of a Thomas Paine pamphlet, Goldwater laid out his political vision, which galvanized a new generation of Republicans, and in 1964 won over the Deep South’s voters, who, in retrospect, proved to be way ahead of their time. Young downplays the strong appeal of Goldwater’s political message in the South and offers instead a traditional explanation for his electoral success, suggesting that he used dog whistles and coded speech to lure racist and resentful white voters from the Democratic Party—a charge that he vehemently denied. If Goldwater had a “southern strategy,” it was to [End Page 99] attract voters by taking unequivocal and principled positions on the “Soviet menace,” the size and reach of government, states’ and civil rights, taxes and spending, welfare, farming, labor, and education. And it worked, first in Arizona and the South, and then almost everywhere else, if not right away. It took twenty years, or five more presidential elections, for the sun of the old liberalism to set and for the sun of the new conservatism to rise. In 1984, the latter finally reached its zenith: after running for a second presidential term on what was essentially a Goldwater platform, Ronald Reagan carried forty-nine states out of fifty to win 525 electoral votes out of 538. The United States...