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on september 17, 1964, the Boeing 727 carrying Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater landed in brilliant sunlight at the airport in Greenville, South Carolina. Standing at the bottom of the steps as Goldwater exited the plane was Strom Thurmond, the Democratic senator from South Carolina and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate. The day before, Thurmond had issued a scalding denunciation of the Democratic Party, ending with his surprise announcement of his new status as a “Goldwater Republican.” On his right lapel Thurmond had pinned a Goldwater button. On his left was a tiny golden elephant sporting a pair of Goldwater’s distinctive hornrimmed glasses.1 A frenzied crowd of twenty thousand South Carolinians joined in the welcome for Goldwater. TraYc along Interstate 85 backed up for three miles. Marching bands blared patriotic music. Goldwater girls, dressed in blue skirts, white blouses, and crimson sashes, bounced and waved. By the time Goldwater stepped onto the tarmac, the entire law enforcement details of two counties could not hold back the boisterous crowd that broke police lines and engulfed the candidate. Embarrassed policemen threw punches and shoved teenagers, trying to reestablish a protective cordon. The industrialist Roger Milliken, 144 6 Goldwater in Dixie Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right joseph crespino identiWed at the Republican National Convention as one of Goldwater ’s most important Wnancial backers, could not get close enough to shake Goldwater’s hand. On the red-carpeted podium, Goldwater and Thurmond held their hands aloft while the crowd screamed itself hoarse. By day’s end, forty-Wve people would require emergency Wrst aid. Thirty-Wve of them had fainted. Two had suVered heart attacks. One child had broken out in hives.2 Scenes like this one followed Goldwater across the South. Goldwater would go on to win Wve Deep South states. In the two “deepest ”—Alabama and Mississippi—he won 69 and 87 percent of the vote respectively. These victories came the same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most signiWcant single piece of civil rights legislation that Congress had passed since Reconstruction —legislation that Senator Barry Goldwater had voted against. After signing the bill, President Johnson famously remarked to presidential aide Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”3 Goldwater’s southern success now stands as the middle marker in a three-point plot line covering thirty-two years of America’s postwar history, each event neatly divided by sixteen years: Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat presidential run that showed that white southerners were no longer “in the bag” for the Democratic Party; Goldwater’s 1964 campaign that marked the Wrst time that white southerners had voted in signiWcant numbers for the party of Lincoln; and 1980, when Ronald Reagan narrowly beat a native son of the Democratic South and sealed the GOP’s dominance in the region up to the present day. It is a tidy narrative of political transformation in the American South, but one that obscures as much as it reveals about the South and modern conservatism. Lyndon Johnson’s bit of folk wisdom about the impact of the civil rights bill makes it easy to forget how millions of white Americans outside of the South chafed at the advances and continued protests of the civil rights movement. The notion also ignored the wholesale transformation of the southern political economy from a one-crop agricultural backwater to the modern industrialized and urbanized Sunbelt. The process remade class politics in the South, privileging the same kind of antilabor, free-enterprise discourse that deWned postwar Arizona politics. This rhetoric was at the center of the conservative movement coming together in the GOP. Goldwater in Dixie 145 Yet hidden in the narrative of Republican domination in Dixie is how eVectively the Democratic Party used the politics of class to stave oV GOP inroads and continue to dominate local and state politics in the South well into the 1980s. The success of a Democratic politician like South Carolina’s Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, Thurmond’s longtime South Carolina colleague in the Senate, shows how well Democrats were able to hang on.4 In recent years a wave of new scholarship on grassroots conservatism has provided depth, rigor, and complexity to our understanding of the rise of modern conservative politics. The best of this work has not jettisoned racial reaction as a category of analysis but has placed it alongside a number of other important...

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