Epilogue
The first order of business tackled by the delegates at the thirty-first Republican National Convention, held in Kansas City, Missouri on August 16, 1976, was expanding the party’s base. After attendees listened to a reading of Johnny Cash’s “Ragged Old Flag” and participated in other introductory activities, they heard updates on the party’s initiatives to diversify its ranks. Once speakers discussed outreach to young people and the descendants of European immigrants who had previously voted for Democrats, Dr. Henry Lucas Jr. took the dais. Lucas, chairman of the National Black Republican Council, an organization begun by the Republican National Committee after the 1972 nominating convention, shared the GOP’s efforts to attract Black voters.1 In a speech that made no mention of the party’s identity as the Party of Lincoln or its early association with African Americans because of its opposition to slavery, Lucas explained that the organization was building on the GOP’s growing appeal to Black voters that had grown since 1968. “Historically these Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage,” he explained, “have been Democratic voters,” but in 1976, “more Black voters no longer consider themselves in the Democratic pocket.”
His analysis of current political trends could be written off as conveniently optimistic or willfully myopic—Lucas made no mention of the mass exodus of Black voters that occurred after the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964—but his omission of any party history before 1960 meant he could ignore the party’s new orientation. The 1960s marked a historic shift for the Republican Party that had resulted in it breaking its traditional association with African Americans that dated back to its founding in the 1850s. Although Lucas did say the GOP was not doing enough to attract Black voters and that affirmative rhetoric in support of diversity was insufficient, by ignoring the party’s disengagement from the African American freedom struggle as it pushed a reluctant nation to embrace federal protections of civil and voting rights meant he had let the GOP off the hook. His calls for the Republican Party to “provide leadership in seeing that every individual has an equal and fair opportunity to achieve independence, respect” and the “ability to get a job, irrespective of race” rang hollow as it rejected legal protections in those areas. The Republican Party embraced men like George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and Ronald Reagan, who appealed to white voters with grievance politics and an anti-government posture at the same time the government, after generations of delay, had helped African Americans win more than second-class citizenship.2 Meanwhile, Black delegates were unable to get Ford to utter a statement in favor of civil rights or engage in a discussion about racial issues. The president feared that responding to African American delegates’ demands would alienate white delegates.3
While Lucas’s erasure of the GOP’s history as the Party of Lincoln meant he did not have to engage with the party’s disengagement from the goals of the Black freedom struggle, it also meant he did not have to hold himself up to the example of the Black Republicans who came before him. Generations of African American leaders had long sought to be the conscience of the party on racial matters. His revised history of the Republican Party left no room for the likes of George W. Lee of Memphis, who had fought to retain the party’s commitment to African American freedom in the twentieth century, or the party’s most famous African American and fellow convention speaker, Frederick Douglass. One hundred years before Lucas took to the rostrum in Kansas City, Douglass addressed fellow Republicans in Cincinnati, Ohio at the 1876 Republican National Convention. Before the Republican Party convened in June that year, it had already chosen as its standard-bearer, the Union veteran and three-time Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes because of his scandal-free reputation, general appeal among Republicans, and willingness to take a less forceful position on the “Southern question.” With the impending ascent of Hayes and the party’s approval of a platform that promised little defense of Reconstruction policies, it looked like the Republican Party would choose electoral strength and a desire to downplay regional divisions over protections for African Americans who faced escalating racial terror in the South. Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave, abolitionist, and pastor, addressed the convention on its first day to warn Republicans not to let fiscal policies and other issues outweigh a commitment to protecting the right of every man to exercise the right to vote “without being murdered by the pistol.”4
Douglass, who had been campaigning on behalf of the Republican Party since the fall of 1875, had already made it clear that he believed African Americans in the South faced “utter extinction” if the Republican Party failed to protect the rights of Blacks. The steadfast Republican questioned the party’s oft-mentioned commitment to Black men’s emancipation and enfranchisement if the party was unwilling to protect those gains. Douglass asked the audience, “What does it all amount to, if the Black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shot-gun?” He observed that Republicans professed a commitment to African American liberty but had provided neither financial aid nor the means of self-support in the form of land to freed people and eleven years later made no guarantee to protect them, with force, if necessary, to ensure they could exercise the right to vote. While Douglass expressed a hope that Republicans would assure African Americans’ safe passage to the ballot box, he noted speculation among some Republicans that they no longer needed the Black vote to retain power. Douglass expressed doubt that Republicans could be victorious without southern Black voters. He argued instead that if Republicans recommitted themselves to protecting African Americans, they could potentially win a significant stronghold in the South. Although the Republican Party did not commit itself to African American freedom, Douglass remained dedicated to the Republican Party and campaigned tirelessly for Hayes after the convention. Historian and Douglass biographer David W. Blight asks, “What choice did he have?” The alternative was a Democratic victory that would return unrepentant white supremacy back to the federal government. The Compromise of 1877 would ultimately keep Republicans in power, but it made even more poignant Douglass’s statement at the convention: “I sometimes wonder that we [African Americans] still exist as a people in this country; that we have not all been swept out of existence, with nothing left to show that we ever existed.”5
Despite Douglass’s hope that Republicans would recommit themselves to African American liberty, they instead chose power. There would be numerous instances after 1876 when the Republican Party failed to live up to its traditional commitment to African Americans, but its abdication during the modern civil rights era would be more consequential for partisan politics because the Democratic Party stepped into the void. Black voters finally had the choice that Douglass lacked. By 1976, the GOP had already forfeited its identity as the Party of Lincoln, but its ascendancy to majority-party status after 1980 would result in it being perennially at odds with the vast majority of African Americans. The party’s resistance—and sometimes outright opposition—to federal civil rights protections paired with its pro–law and order policies and anti-welfare state agenda alienated Black voters who had fewer viable options without racially liberal Republicans on the ballot. With Republicans in the majority, the nation’s political center continued to race rightward inflicting disproportionate harm on the most vulnerable Americans.
FIGURE 10.1. Rockefeller grew angry at protesters who condemned his actions at Attica Correctional Facility during a one-day campaign tour of New York alongside vice presidential nominee Senator Bob Dole of Kansas on September 16, 1976. In response to students from Harpur College chanting, “Attica killer. Any way you figure, Rocky pulled the trigger,” the press captured the former governor giving them the middle finger. Rockefeller Family Office, NAR. Used by permission of the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Remembering Rockefeller
After stepping down as vice president in January 1977, Rockefeller returned to life as a private citizen. In the spring of 1978, he told the press he had left politics permanently and now devoted his time to his private art collection.6 Shortly after publishing the first of a planned five-volume series of books featuring his collection, Rockefeller died of a heart attack on January 26, 1979. On February 2, the family and the public paid their respects to Rockefeller in Riverside Church during a service presided over by senior minister William Sloane Coffin Jr., the former chaplain of Yale University best known as a prominent civil rights activist and Vietnam War opponent. During the memorial service attended by presidents and dignitaries, two of Rockefeller’s adult children, Anne Rockefeller Roberts and Rodman C. Rockefeller, praised their father’s exuberance for life, his love of ideas, and commitment to “the possibility of progress through rational study.” His youngest brother, David Rockefeller, identified the establishment of the New York State Council on the Arts, the creation of Adirondack State Park, and the expansion of the SUNY system as a few of the governor’s greatest accomplishments. In an emotional tribute, Henry Kissinger, who recounted his twenty-five-year relationship with Rockefeller, said his failure to become president was a “tragedy for the nation.” The service ended with a prayer from Martin Luther King Sr. and a recessional led by Lionel Hampton’s quintet. The musicians played “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which had served as Rockefeller’s campaign theme, and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” While unorthodox, Coffin told the assemblage, “That’s what Rocky would have wanted.”7 The memorial service honored a singular life by enumerating Rockefeller’s myriad accomplishments, touting his highest ideals, and hinting at what might have been.
A seemingly healthy Rockefeller died from a heart attack late on a Friday night. As journalists scrambled to give a full accounting of Rockefeller’s life, they relied on his failed ambition to become president as the organizing principle for their reports. Editorials from newspapers such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times published commentary that remembered Rockefeller as an unchanging figure in public life. The Washington Post wrote that a “constant theme of his political career” was his effort to “enlarge his colleagues’ sensibilities where matters of social and racial justice were concerned.” While the newspapers took note of “tragic blunders”—typically, they referenced Attica—the New York Times published an editorial that shared a view held by longtime Rockefeller admirers that failed to reassess the former governor through the lens of his late-career welfare reforms and drug policies. The New York Times concluded, “He tried periodically to play the hard-hearted scourge of criminals and other easy targets, but he lacked the hypocrisy he would have needed to pay his party’s price for nomination.”8 Tributes that failed to address the entirety of his public life launched the mythmaking around Rockefeller that fused him to the Rockefeller Republicanism that he had abandoned.
Alongside the laudatory editorials, however, newspapers also published articles by reporters who had covered Rockefeller during his almost two-decade-long career in electoral politics and noted changes in his governing style, rhetoric, and policies. New York Times journalists looked more closely at Rockefeller’s policies to explain his impact. Francis X. Clines highlighted the dynamism of Rockefeller’s early career when he observed, “Even the most experienced politicians never realized the power of state government until he took over and reinvented parts of it.”9 A prime example was the Urban Development Corporation, which he noted had faced recent criticism. A meticulous and nuanced accounting of his life and career by Linda Greenhouse noted that liberals denounced Rockefeller in his later years as governor for his “crack down on welfare recipients,” refusal to go to Attica, and the 1973 drug laws. The obituary observed that 1973 was also the year that Rockefeller reversed his position on the Urban Development Corporation and allowed the legislature to strip the agency of its ability to override zoning laws, a power Rockefeller had insisted on in 1968 to aid the agency’s mission to build low-income housing. The latter example implied what many observances of his life did not: Rockefeller’s active government, particularly its emphasis on aiding the poor, was not only out of step with the national GOP, but it fell out of favor with suburban New Yorkers. Greenhouse also noted that the drug laws had faced court challenges, “but the harshest sentences called for—up to life in prison for heroin sales—have not been widely imposed.”10
Warren Weaver Jr., who had long reported on Rockefeller’s career, concluded that the Republican Party would have never nominated Rockefeller for president because he “symbolized all the things that heartland Republicans disliked and distrusted: the East, the Ivy League, internationalism, big government, social consciousness. No matter how many contortions Mr. Rockefeller performed.”11 The judgment was a classic assessment of the divide between Rockefeller and the GOP, but it overlooked the additional fissures that alienated him from the party including the growing influence of southern white Republicans and the opposition he had always faced from conservatives at home. In 1979, Attica loomed large as what most commentators considered the greatest failure of Rockefeller’s career. It was a single devastating decision that Rockefeller alone had set in motion. The tragedy of Attica cannot be understated, but in time, Rockefeller’s drug laws would wreak more indelible harm on society. The damage they caused would not be fully realized until the public and state officials embraced the apparatus that Rockefeller set in place.
One year after Rockefeller’s death and several years after the height of the spike in heroin use in New York, two of Rockefeller’s aides marveled at their boss’s ability to get support for legislation that had drawn criticism from liberals and conservatives. Morrow and Spagnoli agreed in 1980 that the legislation went overboard, but Morrow believed that Rockefeller justified the harsh penalties because he had tried “medical treatment and milder penalties” with little effect, and he believed that he could scare kids from getting involved in the drug trade as a user or dealer. The administration of the NACC, which was neither equipped to treat nor punish, did not align with this claim, but Rockefeller, like his advisers, insisted he had done everything possible before resorting to life sentences for drug convictions. In the twenty-first century, the Rockefeller drug laws gained the reputation for being ineffective at curbing drug sales but incredibly successful at filling jails with Black and Latino low-level drug dealers who were convicted of nonviolent crimes. In 1980, however, Rockefeller’s longtime aides considered the laws a failure, not because of a continued drug epidemic per se but because people were unwilling to administer harsh penalties. In their opinion, the laws had already failed because they were not enforced, similar to the increased sentences Rockefeller had supported and signed into law in 1966. “What happened, I guess, in the practical working of it, was that nobody down the chain of enforcement had the guts to really enforce the thing. It was just too much.”12 Another former Rockefeller aide, Sol Corbin, blamed the laws’ failure on members of law enforcement who were determined to see them fail because “even the most sympathetic cases” could end up in prison for many years because of a “minor amount of marijuana.” He believed that despite losing their discretionary power, members of the judicial system found new ways to circumvent the harsh penalties.13 A 1978 evaluation of New York’s laws supported his conclusions; it found that drug felony arrests, indictment rates, and conviction rates all declined after the laws took effect and that the same percentage of people (11 percent) who were arrested for a drug felony before the laws were enacted went to prison afterward as well.14
The drug laws, despite ambiguous initial results, did help usher in a new era of tough sentencing, however. By 1983, forty-nine states had implemented similar mandatory minimum sentences for offenses other than murder and drunk driving, and state leaders such as New York governor Hugh Carey (1975–1983) and New York City mayor Ed Koch (1978–1989) supported initiatives that helped realize the potential of the drug laws for increasing incarceration rates.15 Rockefeller’s aides were correct in 1980: little had changed because of the laws, but that would soon change precipitously. Between 1973 and 1993, the New York prison population swelled from eighteen thousand to sixty-five thousand. In 1973, 10 percent of the population—around two thousand people—was incarcerated for possession and sale of narcotics; twenty years later, that percentage exceeded one-third.16 When Morrow and Spagnoli lamented the failure to enforce the drug laws in 1980, 38 percent of people imprisoned for drug offenses that year were African American, 32 percent white, and 29 percent Latino as opposed to their proportions of the population, which were 13 percent, 79 percent, and 9 percent, respectively. Twelve years later in 1992, when the state reported its highest number of commitments for drug offenses, 50 percent were African American, 44 percent Latino, and 5 percent white. This is despite data such as a study published in 1997 by the US Department of Health and Human Services that found that 72 percent of the 1.8 million adults in New York who had consumed illicit drugs in the preceding year were white. Additionally, a 2001 survey of drug users in New York conducted by the National Institute of Justice and the Office of National Drug Policy found that whites were “the principal purveyors of drugs in the state.”17 New York’s 1973 drug laws became a forerunner for the widespread adoption of long sentences for drug offenses and minimum sentencing guidelines that contributed greatly to what scholars in the twenty-first century call mass incarceration. The nation’s prison population with its disproportionate number of Black, Latino, poor, and urban constituents would not explode, however, until numerous parties adopted the logic behind the drug laws at the state and federal levels. In 2023, the Sentencing Project observed that the US prison population experienced an “unprecedented surge” from 360,000 in the early 1970s to nearly 2 million in 2022.18
As decades passed and the Rockefeller drug laws took their toll on Black and Latino communities, many observers would conclude that the governor’s anti-Black policies had worked as intended, but Rockefeller did not interpret his actions in that way—at least, he and his staff did not refer to them as such. To the contrary, Rockefeller made the case that he was protecting decent people of all races who sought opportunity and safe environments for their families—his previous support of civil rights was grounded in a similar universal appeal. Rather than address addiction and its disproportionate affect in a thoughtful and measured way, however, Rockefeller chose political expediency. He also advocated for the drug laws despite knowing that their enforcement would cause further harm to African Americans who were already impacted disproportionately by systemic racism in the criminal justice system. Upon learning of Rockefeller’s drug proposals, the New York Times editorial board lamented that Rockefeller “remain[ed] a prisoner of politicians’ passions.” Rockefeller refused to expand politically unpopular rehabilitation programs or advocate for reforms to the current criminal justice system, concluded the paper, because such decisions could be perceived as a “confession of past failure.”19 The appeal of reinforcing his law and order credentials overrode any interest in addressing the needs of Black communities that had long been overpoliced and underprotected by law enforcement.
Even before Rockefeller muted his advocacy for civil rights in the mid-1960s, he prioritized law and order issues as a means to disassociate himself from the liberal reputation that had long alienated him from a majority of Republicans. If pushed, Rockefeller admitted that the criminal justice system was flawed and unduly punished the poor, unconnected, and nonwhite, but he made no effort to fix those problems; at most, he made high-handed and empty promises that he would address bias. Rather than commit himself to attending to the inequality in the criminal justice system as a civil rights issue, Rockefeller weakened the few safety mechanisms available to primarily Black and Latino defendants who would eventually, as a matter of course, be swept up in the web of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Meanwhile, Rockefeller continued to offer rhetorical support for equal access to housing and education but increasingly avoided the redistributive and equal access policies that would make those goals achievable. His retreat from sweeping reform matched the opposition expressed by New Yorkers, and Americans more broadly, who had enjoyed the fruits of postwar prosperity, often with government assistance, but did not want to share those gains with racial and ethnic minorities.
The New Punitive State
Twenty years after the passage of Rockefeller’s drug laws, the get-tough legislation proved to be most successful at filling New York’s prisons with nonviolent drug offenders, who often had no previous criminal records, and changing the way the drug trade was conducted on the streets. Major drug dealers did not leave the state as Rockefeller predicted; instead, they avoided conspicuous drug sales and used low-level couriers—even sometimes unsuspecting women who did not know what they were transporting—to handle the drugs for them. As the twentieth anniversary of the Rockefeller drug laws approached, Joseph R. Lentol, chairman of the assembly committee on codes, held hearings to examine their efficacy. When the legislature had passed the laws in 1973 during Lentol’s first year in office, the Democrat had voted against the bill; in 1993, he hoped that holding hearings on the laws’ failure to incarcerate drug kingpins or reduce drug addiction would begin the process of reform, although there was little interest in such an effort among his legislative colleagues. Punitive approaches were just as, if not more, politically enticing in 1993 as they had been twenty years earlier. While Lentol hoped the state would seek alternatives to the failed drug program, Republican New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani called for the arrest of more low-level drug dealers, saying that the city’s decision to shift its focus from the lowest levels of the drug trade to concentrate on major drug dealers sent the wrong message.20
In 1973, Rockefeller argued that his previous emphasis on rehabilitation had failed, and as a result, he would focus on removing drug dealers from the streets, but the 1993 hearings revealed that his law was best suited to send people with illegal narcotics addiction, rather than dealers, to prison. Thomas Coughlin, commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, testified on June 8, 1993 that on average, addicted inmates spent twenty-four months in prison treatment centers, which cost $100,000 to build the cell/prison bed and $25,000 a year to maintain, while treatment in a community rehabilitation center cost $5,000 to $10,000 a year. The day that Coughlin testified that 1,750 people were waiting to enter the New York State prison system, 45 percent were nonviolent drug offenders.21 Other critics noted that the Rockefeller drug laws had not reduced drug-related crimes. Joe Hynes, district attorney of Kings County, testified that in 1971, 15 percent of crimes processed were drug related, and in 1975, the percentage had already begun to rise. In 1990, drug-related crimes reached 80 percent. Even worse, according to Hynes, murders in New York City regularly exceeded two thousand and were often drug related. When Lentol asked Hynes whether the drug laws were successful, his response was resolute: “The answer for me is quite simple: [Have] the Rockefeller Drug Laws worked? Absolutely not. Surely it did not work the way Governor Rockefeller intended.”22
In an era when the unemployment rates for teenagers soared and when many of the unemployed sought illegal means of generating income—sometimes to support their drug habits—the Rockefeller drug laws sent them to jail to rid the community of their criminal activity. The laws were found to target poor and minority offenders while exempting the wealthy, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of those imprisoned for drug offenses were Black and Latino. Rockefeller’s demand for mandatory sentences had grown in popularity as states sought ways to limit judicial discretion when many believed liberal judges had begun to put criminals’ interests before victims. This was also the period when states reestablished the use of capital punishment by imposing mandatory sentences to meet the standard ordered by the Supreme Court. As of 2004, Blacks and Latinos constituted on average 85 percent of the people indicted for drug felonies and 94 percent of those sent to prison.23 In 2004 and 2005, Republican governor George E. Pataki signed two bills into law that began the process of chipping away at the mandatory sentencing demanded by the Rockefeller drug laws. The first reform gave prisoners convicted of Class A-2 felonies the opportunity to petition for resentencing and early release. The second made it possible for those convicted of Class A-1 felonies to petition for a reduction in their mandatory sentences. At the time Pataki signed the bills, 986 inmates were eligible for reduced sentences.24 Some leniency would be shown to those who faced the harshest of sentencing in comparison to their crimes, but Rockefeller’s laws still prevented judges from having the discretion to send drug-addicted dealers to treatment rather than to prison.
It took thirty-six years for the mandatory sentencing component of the drug laws to be repealed. Opposition to the laws persisted throughout that period, but critics were up against what had become a national trend of mandatory sentencing for drug crimes and the creation of what is now known as the carceral state that is disproportionately populated by African Americans and Latinos. In that time, the laws had gained the reputation for being ineffective as the number of those convicted for drug-related crimes soared as the crime and murder rates rose and fell irrespective of the drug laws. Whereas district attorneys opposed the laws before they were passed, by the 2000s, prosecutors and district attorneys were among some of the most vocal opponents of reform. Bills aimed at reforming the drug laws routinely passed the Democratic-led assembly in New York but died in the senate, which remained in Republican control until 2009, the year the laws were finally reformed. Democratic governor David A. Paterson and the state legislature came to an agreement in March 2009, just over thirty years after Rockefeller’s death and a month shy of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws. The new law repealed mandatory minimum prison sentences for lower-level drug felons with no previous records, expanded drug treatment programs, widened the reach of drug courts, and allowed people already in jail to apply to have their sentences commuted. Paterson, however, limited the number of people who could apply for commuted sentences and did not request that the legislation be made retroactive, a change that would have made two thousand prisoners eligible for resentencing. These measures were intended to help the law pass the senate, which was split 32 to 30 between Democrats and Republicans. Although Republicans did receive some concessions, they were angered by Paterson’s decision to reduce the amount of notice communities received when a prison was set to be closed from one year to ninety days. Prison closures were expected due to the reforms, and Republicans, who represented the rural upstate communities that housed prisons, had blocked such closures for decades.25 Ultimately, the drug laws, and the quick-fix method to crime control that they represent, remained as controversial in 2009—and politically appealing—as they had been when Rockefeller first proposed them.
Rockefeller set out to meet the challenge of the civil rights movement and foster an open society for racial and ethnic minorities. Reviving the party’s heritage as a defender of African American freedom, however, required Rockefeller and most of his voters to dismantle a status quo that had served them well. Contemporary observers expressed shock when they first learned of Rockefeller’s latest drug proposals, but they were in line with a philosophy he had developed for years that stigmatized so-called bad actors to consolidate his base and obscure the systemic inequality that favored some to the detriment of others. Without a Party of Lincoln to aspire to, Rockefeller’s policies geared toward the urban poor became antithetical to his original objective of providing responsive government attuned to the challenges of modern society. Rockefeller’s failure narrowed future pathways for the Republican Party, but it also hindered the nation’s ability to, in the words of Rockefeller, “respect[] the dignity and equality of all men of all races.”26 The factors that contributed to Rockefeller’s decline may be unusual, but the resilience of his punitive politics demonstrate that moderation from a defensive posture can produce extreme outcomes and that retaliatory politics too often masquerade as moderation.