The Polarizers by Sam Rosenfeld

Author:Sam Rosenfeld [Rosenfeld, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226407258
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Saga of Mary Crisp: Factional Struggle and the Partisan Polarization of Social Issues

By June 1980 RNC co-chairman Mary Dent Crisp had begun to suspect that her Washington, DC, office was bugged. For weeks she had wondered why sensitive information appeared to be leaking from her office to the press, and she noticed a beeping sound on the line during calls. Eventually she called in a private investigator to conduct a countersurveillance sweep of the office.156 The investigator found no direct evidence of bugging but noted “two suspicious situations”: a wire running from a neighboring office through Crisp’s room to an unknown destination, and an electromagnetic “energy/radio field” detectable at a window near her desk.157 Crisp reported this to fellow RNC officials, and three days later—an excessively long time, in her opinion—they called in another firm to investigate.158 Eventually the police themselves took over the investigation, finally concluding that no bugging had taken place.159

Though this case was deemed a false alarm, the idea that espionage might take place in a party committee’s headquarters would have hardly seemed farfetched just two presidential election cycles after the Watergate break-in. What was more notable was the fact that Crisp suspected the culprits to be fellow members of her own party.

The story of an RNC co-chairman whose gradual professional isolation brought her to the point of suspecting skullduggery by factional enemies captures in a vivid way a broader process that activists on the left and right helped to hasten during the 1970s: the partisan sorting of cultural and social issues. Positions on issues relating to gender, religion, identity, and ecology that had come to the fore thanks to 1960s movements did not, as of the early 1970s, have clear partisan valences. That had begun to change by decade’s end, and nowhere was the dynamic more evident than in the politics of women’s rights. The untenable position in which Mary Crisp found herself in June 1980 resulted from the parties’ polarization in the preceding years.

Crisp was a career-long GOP party worker and a feminist, and during her rise within party ranks, few perceived such a combination to be contradictory. Originally a precinct captain in Maricopa County, Arizona, Crisp served as a Republican national committeewoman during the Ford years and the national convention secretary in 1976.160 Despite her support for Ford in the nomination contest that year, she encountered little opposition from Reaganites when Bill Brock chose her as party co-chairman in January 1977 as part of a Sunbelt-heavy leadership team. Within months, however, Crisp’s penchant for candid press quotes drew their ire, beginning with her public criticism of Reagan’s “idea of purism” and her insistence that the GOP had to be able to encompass figures as ideologically disparate as Barry Goldwater and Jacob Javits.161 The main focus of conservatives’ opposition to Crisp was her outspoken feminism. Her patron, Mary Louise Smith, had managed to serve as the party’s first female chairman without controversy despite a reputation as, in one profiler’s words, an “ardent feminist.”162 But

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