Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller

Author:Edward H. Miller [Miller, Edward H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226205410
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Politics of Law and Order

The politics of law and order had been brewing since at least the summer of 1963. In a memo that June, one Goldwater advisor wrote, “The hostility to the new Negro militancy has seemingly spread like wildfire from the South to the entire country.” The president had failed to grasp “the political implications of such a change.” “So long as the “tide of rebellion” continued and Goldwater invoked states’ rights and argued that “private property must remain inviolate,” he had a “serious chance” to beat John Kennedy. The memo suggested that any given category of crime be treated “as a prong of a single fork—a fork labeled ‘moral crisis.’” Goldwater, the memo argued, must jab the fork “relentlessly from now until election day.”67

Goldwater rolled out the discourse of “law and order” in March 1964 in New Hampshire, where he faced a closely contested primary against Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge. The president, Goldwater declared, ought to “turn on the lights of moral leadership” and the “lights of moral order.”68 His “light-switch” reference identified morality with lightness, whiteness, and civic order (and, by extension, depravity with darkness and the civil rights struggle), connections he made even more explicit that June in Dallas. There, Goldwater specifically identified as criminal behavior the nonviolent resistance campaigns of the civil rights activists. Before a crowd of eleven thousand at the Dallas Memorial Auditorium, Goldwater declared his allegiance to “the principles that look upon violence in the streets, anywhere in this land, regardless of who does it, as the wrong way to resolve great moral questions—the way that will destroy the liberties of all the people.”69

Goldwater employed the language of law and order to appeal to fears of crime and black militancy while simultaneously blaming social ills on liberalism. He often spoke in terms calculated to evoke fears of black-on-white crime and sexuality, as in the statement “Our women are no longer safe in their homes.”70 In describing Washington, DC, with its high crime rate, as “a place of shame and dishonor,” he called into play public awareness of the city’s sizable African-American population.71 Goldwater placed the blame for threats to order squarely with the civil rights movement and the Great Society, President Johnson’s set of social and economic reforms. Civil rights, he averred, engendered permissiveness and moral laxity. American liberalism, reaching its crescendo with the Great Society, had banished God from schools and rewarded indolence with social programs. “Government seeks to be parent, teacher, doctor, and even minister,” Goldwater lamented. “Rising crime rates” evidenced the “failure” of the liberal strategy of social change.72

This strident, racist rhetoric, which originated with the Right, influenced moderates as well. Even temperate public figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted the rhetoric of “law and order,” as in this remark at the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco: “Let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal . . . roaming the streets with switchblade knife.”73 Roy Wilkins, president of the National Association

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.