Introduction
Nelson Rockefeller and the Reorientation of Twentieth-Century US Politics
There is an unspoken consensus about the rise and fall of moderate Republicanism that does not take Nelson Rockefeller’s full career into account. For the nostalgic, Rockefeller is the representation of a saner time when politics was not overcome by rancor and disagreement did not preclude consensus. Rockefeller’s expression of moderate Republicanism included a commitment to an activist government, a social safety net that included medical care for the poor, an interventionist US presence abroad, and the promotion of an open society at home. A core tenet of Rockefeller’s politics was the belief that the government must play a leading role in fostering racial equality, and as a result, he was a supporter of federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s. According to this perspective, the notion of a moderate Republican wing is proof of better times and inspiration for a path forward. This thinking, however, ignores how embattled moderates were within the Grand Old Party (GOP) and that Rockefeller responded to that pressure by adopting policies that disproportionately harmed racial minorities to appeal to an increasingly conservative nation.
The problem with this nostalgia is that it is ahistorical and prevents a full engagement with a singular, yet emblematic, figure in US politics. Rockefeller envisioned leading a Party of Lincoln that would meet the demands of the modern civil rights movement like its nineteenth-century predecessor committed itself to free labor and an end to slavery. The Republican Party rejected that future almost as soon as he proposed it, but his goal was also at odds with the activist movement that he sought to assist. The civil rights movement of the 1960s rendered his affinity for the African American freedom struggle—which was guided by noblesse oblige—anachronistic. The successes of the civil rights movement therefore set Rockefeller on a collision course with the GOP and African Americans.1 Rockefeller should not be reduced to his opposition to Barry Goldwater’s supporters in 1964 nor the violent end of the Attica prison rebellion in 1971. Instead, to understand these moments, one must account for the entirety of Rockefeller’s political vision and career as he failed to remain relevant in a reordered political environment. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” did not apply to Rockefeller when he penned it in 1963, but his words would soon be apt. King’s identification of the white moderate as the true impediment to racial freedom and equity demands a reassessment of the politics of moderation that extends to Rockefeller, the twentieth-century liberal consensus, and the possibility of an equitable multiracial democracy.2
As this book shows, the careers of Rockefeller and of the twentieth-century Republican Party are entwined when it comes to assessing the history of party politics in the United States. For despite the wealth of scholarly attention to the ascendancy of conservativism within the Republican Party, the frameworks we have for understanding Rockefeller Republicanism remain too narrow to capture the complexity of Rockefeller’s rise and fall between 1958 and 1976. Historians have produced a wide range of studies on the diversity of modern conservativism in the past thirty years that examine its local, regional, and national development among a range of adherents.3 As a result, Republicans who were not associated with the party’s rightward turn have been understudied in comparison to members of the conservative wing of the GOP that was on the rise between the 1960s and 1980s. Although the history of conservatism remains a critical area of inquiry, it is important to look at other elements of the Republican Party. The intense focus on modern conservatives’ critiques of the GOP and their efforts to transform it can result in an overemphasis on their perspective on the party and their view of figures like Rockefeller. As a result, the historiographical interest in modern conservatism and the transformation of the Republican Party can simultaneously obscure the ideological continuities within the party that conservatives built upon after 1960 and deflect attention from seemingly oppositional figures like Rockefeller. By reexamining the Republican Party of the mid-twentieth century and the influential elements of the party that were not the vanguard of the conservative turn, this book makes it possible to gain a more complete picture of the GOP ideologically and regionally.4
Rockefeller’s career trajectory is by no means representative of all moderate Republicans, which is of course a broad term, but his experiences allow for an examination of the political pressures faced by all Republicans, but moderates in particular, who were not active members of the movement conservatism that would eventually dominate the Republican Party by 1980. For example, fellow prominent moderate Republicans in New York did not respond to the pressure in the same way as Rockefeller. New York City mayor John Lindsay became a Democrat in 1971, rather than remain on the periphery of the Republican Party. The US senator from New York, Jacob Javits, who was first elected to the US Senate in 1956, remained in office until 1981, when he lost the Republican primary to Alfonse D’Amato, a more conservative challenger, who subsequently defeated Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman. Unlike Rockefeller, neither leader embraced conservative policies later in their political careers.5 Rockefeller’s rightward shift, in comparison to these Republican peers, only further highlights the need to present a more nuanced account of his career. Rockefeller’s failed attempts to win the Republican presidential nomination from 1959 to 1973 provide insight into the conservative turn from the perspective of a Republican who did not lead this effort. Rockefeller serves as an important lens through which to study this evolution because his adoption of conservative policies and rhetoric over time shows how moderates from both parties who took a similar path assured the general rightward shift of US policies, weakened the welfare state, and codified a two-tier racialized criminal justice system.
Rockefeller’s prominence in national politics, fifteen-year tenure as governor of New York, and reputation as a racially liberal moderate Republican makes him an ideal lens in which to examine the decline of the liberal consensus and the rightward turn of US politics after the civil rights movement spurred an expansion of the body politic in the 1960s. Whereas histories of the Republican Party in this era tend to focus on the Sun Belt to the exclusion of the Northeast, examining Rockefeller’s career facilitates a reassessment of a region that has received too little attention, particularly in the areas of Republican politics and conservatism more broadly. Similar to the work of historians who have shown the weaknesses of the liberal consensus or liberal establishment, especially the liberal racial consensus, in the postwar era, this work suggests that Rockefeller Republicanism was not as dominant as Rockefeller believed or portrayed to the nation, even when it was influential in presidential party politics. The Republican Party and conservatism, more generally, in the Northeast need to be reevaluated in the same way that historians have reassessed the nature of liberalism and the Democratic Party in the urban North in the postwar era.6 By examining policy debates among New York Republicans, this book reconsiders the political commitments and dominance of Rockefeller Republicanism.
Early in his career, Rockefeller’s consistent calls for Republicans to advocate for federal civil rights legislation and direct-action civil rights activism positioned him to the left of most of his party. His financial support for Black causes and advocacy for antidiscrimination laws in New York won him support among civil rights leaders like King and further established him as a racial liberal.7 This aspect of Rockefeller’s politics, particularly regarding national politics, has been noted by historians of conservatism and the Republican Party and explored in more depth by Rockefeller biographers.8 More recently, historians of the carceral state and policy in the 1970s, have renewed interest in Rockefeller’s attitudes on race and policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that were associated with African Americans toward the end of his career. For this group of scholars, Rockefeller is also significant because of his advocacy for the Rockefeller drug laws and the role he played in the deadly retaking of the Attica Correctional Facility, which are identified as a prototype of the punitive policies that facilitated mass incarceration.9 Although these works examine Rockefeller’s participation in the weakening of the social safety net, they do not examine the governor’s gradual adoption of these ideas within the context of his traditionally contentious relationship with conservative Republicans in New York and nationally. Looking at the entirety of Rockefeller’s career—with an emphasis on policies that affected African Americans in particular—allows for a fuller accounting of Rockefeller’s racial liberalism and how the positions he adopted over time affected his status within the New York Republican Party. It also helps to bridge the divide between scholars who emphasize his early career in national politics and those who focus on the twilight of his career in New York.
Defining Rockefeller Republicanism
Rockefeller was a Republican who advocated for pro-growth government intervention in the economy, a powerful federal presence at home and abroad, a comprehensive social safety net, and concerted efforts to promote access and equality in the United States. He was also a consummate Cold Warrior who supported large federal expenditures for armaments and foreign aid in addition to domestic spending to defeat the Soviet Union—commonly held positions among the era’s liberals. In the early twentieth century, Rockefeller would have been associated with Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive Republican tradition that embraced an empowered government that could regulate big business. However, in the mid-twentieth century, Republicans like Rockefeller were known for accepting the goals of the New Deal and the robust government it represented. Sometimes referred to as moderate, liberal, progressive, or Eastern Establishment Republicans, these Republicans gained outsized national prominence when they became likely presidential nominees for a defensive Republican Party in search of credible challengers to Franklin Roosevelt’s popularity and governing style.10 As a newcomer to electoral politics, Rockefeller was in the mold of the state’s former governor (1943–1954) and two-time Republican presidential nominee (1944, 1948) Thomas E. Dewey, who described himself as a “New Deal Republican.”11 As the standard-bearer for the Republican Party, President Dwight Eisenhower, who was to the right of Rockefeller, tried to popularize a version of this Republicanism as well by rebranding it “modern Republicanism.”12 Although all of these terms are helpful for understanding the thinking of Republicans who were not small government conservatives in the mid-twentieth century, moderate Republican is a broad label that is well suited to Rockefeller because he eschewed the label of liberal Republican—in part to ward off accusations that he was too liberal to be a Republican—and saw himself as being committed to a range of ideas across the political spectrum.13 Even though Rockefeller is not a stand-in for all moderate Republicans—the term applies to numerous politicians who did not fit neatly into the modern conservative movement that came to dominate the GOP—he was his era’s most recognizable moderate Republican.
Thanks to his name recognition, wealth, and national press coverage as a presidential hopeful, references to Rockefeller Republicanism first appeared in the popular media as early as 1960. The conservative editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, for example, defined “Rockefeller Republicanism” as advancing “internationalist rather than nationalist” foreign policy and domestic policy that was indistinguishable from the New Deal and equated it with “eastern Republicanism” and “New York Republicanism” in the spring of 1960. Such portrayals gave the false impression that the entire New York Republican Party resembled Rockefeller’s politics, but it correctly identified him as embracing more liberal ideas than most mainstream Republicans.14 However, New York’s GOP—like the national party—was divided. Conservatives dominated rural upstate communities and advocated for laissez-faire government, low taxes, and a pro-business anti-regulation ethos, whereas moderates or liberals who were concentrated in New York City and its suburbs supported an active government, tended to be more socially liberal, and did not shun regulation while encouraging a pro-business environment, including public-private partnerships.15 As soon as the term “Rockefeller Republicanism” appeared in the press, it earned an adversarial reputation when Rockefeller challenged Richard Nixon’s leadership. In the months leading up to and during the 1960 Republican National Convention, Rockefeller claimed that the vice president had not distinguished himself as a leader and launched his own bid for the nomination in all but name.16
Rockefeller Republicanism advocated for racial equality, support for the civil rights movement, especially in the segregated South, and government action to ensure an open society that allowed the full participation of racial minorities. Rockefeller’s desire to create a society that allowed people of all races and backgrounds to contribute to the economy and society was sharpened by Cold War imperatives. As a result, federal intervention in the field of civil rights had the dual goal of protecting the freedoms of African Americans at home, while advancing the United States in its contest against the Soviet Union in the era of decolonization and the struggle to gain influence over the third world.17 His commitment to racial liberalism resulted in him supporting efforts to end Jim Crow in the South and strengthen antidiscrimination laws in the North. Through Rockefeller’s support of the civil rights movement and strategic disengagement from aspects that he deemed to be too controversial, it is possible to gauge the priorities and strength of racial liberalism in the North.18 Unlike efforts to welcome pro-segregation white southerners into the Republican fold in the early 1960s, Rockefeller and his staff envisioned a path forward for the Republican Party that embraced and protected newly enfranchised southern African Americans. This vision for the GOP was grounded in Rockefeller’s commitment to racial progress and his views on civil rights–era politics, which was inextricably linked to the Republican Party’s founding ideals.
The Republican Party, also known as the Party of Lincoln, was founded between 1854 and 1856 to oppose the pro-slavery Democratic Party and advance its commitment to free labor, land, and men. Rockefeller Republicanism’s support for the aims of the modern civil rights movement made it an inheritor of the Republican Party’s original opposition to slavery. Although many early Republicans set out to contain rather than terminate slavery, free and enslaved African Americans could better align their interests with this new party than those before it. Rockefeller Republicanism was a successor of this older strain of Republicanism and its often-complicated position on the rights of African Americans. Radical Republicans, who argued for abolition, equality under the law, and racial justice for African Americans, were a minority in the party far outnumbered by those who accepted abolition and the conferral of some rights to Blacks in principle but firmly believed African Americans were inferior. The Republican Party at its founding comprised a mix of ideological, moral, sectional, and economic opposition to enslaved labor in addition to what historian Eric Foner calls “the distaste of the majority of northerners for the Negro and the widespread hostility toward abolitionists.”19 After the contested election of 1876, the Party of Lincoln, under the leadership of Rutherford B. Hayes, assured the end of Reconstruction by promising the South federal subsidies, the appointment of a southerner as postmaster general, and the removal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina in exchange for southern Democrats accepting Hayes as president. The Compromise of 1877 permitted Redeemers to institutionalize violations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which allowed for the denial of African Americans’ rights of citizenship, and reasserted white social control through disfranchisement and unprosecuted violence in the South.20 Due to political necessity and the flagrant racism within the southern Democratic Party, the vast majority of African Americans remained loyal to the Republican Party until the 1930s. Early in Rockefeller’s career, he often described his affiliation with the GOP as a moral and political bond to the legacy of a party founded in a commitment to equal opportunity for African Americans, but in doing so, he papered over the reality that the Republican Party had been an unreliable and too often silent ally of the African American freedom struggle. Rockefeller’s veneration of the Republican Party’s founding was not unusual, but his desire to revive that abolitionist fervor for the twentieth century did set him apart from most in the GOP.
Despite numerous examples of the Republican Party failing to protect the rights of African Americans, the party often remained, at least rhetorically, committed to recognizing the rights of the Black community in the United States. As the civil rights movement’s fight for the rights of African Americans gained national awareness, Rockefeller believed it was only natural for the Republican Party to aid in the effort by empowering the federal government to dismantle Jim Crow. Rockefeller’s position on civil rights and racial liberalism was common among moderate Republicans of his era who were more likely to support civil rights legislation at the state and federal levels. Moderates were not alone; however, some conservatives such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, who lost a bitter primary fight to Dewey, also supported such measures.21 Rockefeller felt an affinity for the work of civil rights organizations such as King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, the National Urban League, an organization with deep ties to the Rockefeller family, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and sought out ways to support their initiatives privately and publicly. Although the civil rights movement is not at the center of this work, its challenge to the status quo of the nation’s racial politics and policy debates is critical for contextualizing Rockefeller’s desire to revive the Party of Lincoln for the civil rights era.
Rockefeller’s early interactions with the national Republican Party earned him the ire of conservatives and a reputation as an upstart who was eager to upend the status quo, but his actions on the national stage provide an incomplete picture of his approach to politics. Rockefeller must be examined within the context of New York Republican politics to appreciate that he often took a more cautious and nuanced approach at home. New Yorkers tend to remember Rockefeller for grand government initiatives such as the expansion of the state’s university system, investments in infrastructure ranging from highway construction to the staggeringly expensive and equally disruptive Empire State Plaza, and the implementation of Medicaid and environmental protections, but that is only part of his record.22 As a result of his uneasy fit within the state and national GOP, Rockefeller Republicanism was always concerned with seeking opportunities to maintain a position of moderation by adopting conservative policies opposed by liberals. During his first inaugural address, which was tailored to a national audience, Rockefeller encouraged the public to not attach a label to his brand of politics. Instead, Rockefeller said he embraced conservative, liberal, and progressive measures.23 Following Rockefeller’s directive, particularly in areas related to race, allows this book to highlight critical moments when he modified his positions and initiatives to seek common ground with a state party that questioned or disagreed with many of his goals. Rockefeller sought to demonstrate his alignment with conservatives or conservatism more generally as early as his first term in office by attenuating his racially liberal positions. His efforts only increased over time. These moments of modulation animate this history that asks readers to reassess popular understandings of Rockefeller, the party he remained loyal to, and his eponymous form of Republicanism.
Racial Equality Meets Political Pragmatism
Advocacy for civil rights was central to Rockefeller’s political principles and national reputation early in his political career, but he was aware that his position could impede his path to the presidency. In May 1960, Rockefeller expressed his commitment to civil rights while delivering the convocation speech to dedicate a new law school center at the University of Chicago. He told the audience in Rockefeller Memorial Hall—a major gift from John D. Rockefeller Sr. helped found the university—that the struggle to achieve equality for people of all races in the United States was the nation’s greatest challenge of the twentieth century. After praising the nation’s progress in the field of civil rights—he cited Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 as examples—he said no region of the country could claim to be perfect in terms of “respecting the dignity and equality of all men of all races.” Although Rockefeller did not mention the city’s history of racism and segregation, there was perhaps no more fitting example of exclusionary policies and segregation in the North than Chicago in the mid-twentieth century.24 Although an aide to Rockefeller warned him against giving a speech that would draw attention to America’s flawed domestic racial record, Rockefeller chose to address race relations head-on. “If as individuals and as a people,” warned Rockefeller, “we tolerate false divisions of man against man whether by ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ or by laws enforcing racial segregation; if we tolerate pretensions of superiority by any people, including ourselves; if we tolerate arbitrary barriers against progress by any people, in our own nation or in the world … we shall have broken faith with our fathers, and we shall deserve the disrespect we shall invite.”25 Rockefeller’s statement on Law Day, a Cold War creation of the American Bar Association and Dwight Eisenhower, was more notable because he criticized the nation on a day designated to celebrate freedom and the rule of law in the United States juxtaposed to Soviet despotism. For Rockefeller, advocating for civil rights protections was integral to his Republicanism and vision for the role of government.
Concern about taking too strong a stance on civil rights arose again a year and a half later in 1961. Rockefeller believed that advocating for racial progress could provide the platform he needed to reach his goal of capturing the White House, but he feared that such a tactic could alienate Republicans, Party of Lincoln or not. The fifty-four-year-old New York governor and grandson of one of the nation’s wealthiest Americans aspired to be president. Although a first-term governor, he had served in the administrations of three presidents and as New York’s head of state became an instant contender for the presidency. Rockefeller and his staff pondered the viability of his plan at a consequential moment for the GOP. “The Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln and was born out of the issue of human equality and dignity and has had a magnificent—though little touted—record on this issue all through its history.” In a December 1961 memo to Rockefeller, his political adviser George L. Hinman expressed his concern that the “very heart” of the party’s philosophy was in jeopardy because of an effort among some Republicans to revitalize the party in the South by adopting a retrograde position on race relations. “The theory,” explained Hinman, “is that by becoming more reactionary than even the Southern Democratic Party, the Republican Party can attract Southern conservatives who have been Democrats, and by consolidating them with the conservative strength in the Middle West and Far West, the Republicans can offset the liberalism of the Northeast and finally prevail.” According to Hinman, who was a member of the Republican National Committee and would remain in Rockefeller’s employ until 1977, it was essential that Republicans reject this strategy, which he dismissed as unsound politically and morally. Rockefeller, he counseled, was the man to lead the fight against this historic challenge to the Republican Party devised by “ultra-conservative leadership” because the governor believed in it deeply but also because he thought it would “stir the American public.” Drawing attention to a Republican plan to appeal to white southern segregationists would be a sound political strategy because Rockefeller could simultaneously challenge the Republican Party and the Kennedy administration’s weak civil rights record. Hinman concluded, “We’ve got a great thing here. The American people will never go with the ultras on this.”26
While Rockefeller contemplated the right time and place to implement Hinman’s proposal, he aided a campaign to desegregate a town in Georgia. About a week after Rockefeller received the memo, on December 16, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Albany, Georgia, alongside hundreds of African American protesters on charges related to parading without a permit and obstructing the sidewalk. Despite pledging to remain in jail indefinitely to draw attention to the Albany movement, King posted bond and was released two days later after negotiations between activists and city officials resulted in a vague agreement to deescalate tensions in the community. While King was in jail, Rockefeller called Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver on the civil rights leader’s behalf. According to King’s assistant Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, Rockefeller’s assistance began when the governor called the Albany command center out of the blue and asked how he could help. In addition to contacting Kennedy and Vandiver, he provided a substantial amount of money, Walker estimated it was about $10,000, to get people out of Albany.27 Although he had only been an elected official for three years, by 1961, Rockefeller had established a national reputation as a presidential hopeful and supporter of the civil rights movement. The year before, he challenged the Republican Party to take a stronger stance in support of federal civil rights legislation and direct-action activism like what took place in Albany. Rockefeller’s confrontation with his party had resulted in Republicans adopting a civil rights platform plank on par with the Democratic Party at the 1960 Republican National Convention.
Rockefeller agreed with Hinman’s plan to make a public statement about the efforts to diminish the Republican Party’s commitment to racial equality. Another Rockefeller adviser, Hugh Morrow, described Rockefeller as “raring to go.” Although Rockefeller’s staff supported his commitment to civil rights, there was some disagreement about how to do so without weakening his prospects as a presidential hopeful. Amid King’s arrest in Albany, for example, Rockefeller considered an invitation to be a featured speaker at a rally to honor King that was planned for the next February in Chicago. A week and a half after Hinman penned his memo to Rockefeller, Robert Douglas, another adviser to the governor, said there were “many drawbacks” to an appearance at the rally despite Rockefeller’s enthusiasm. Douglas explained that Rockefeller’s “identification with the Negro people is probably as strongly established as that of any single figure in public life.” For that reason, he did not need to do any more work to improve his relationship with African Americans, who he thought would welcome an opportunity to vote for Rockefeller in a presidential election.28 Rockefeller’s staff was concerned because being associated with an African American cause, no matter how righteous or rooted in the party’s principles, could alienate him from Republicans. Despite their claims that opposition to the civil rights movement and defense of Jim Crow were fringe positions, their fear that Rockefeller could be too closely associated with an activist movement that threatened the nation’s racial hierarchy indicated that African Americans’ fight for equality was highly controversial and not only in the South.
As Rockefeller and his staff weighed the costs and benefits of further associating Rockefeller with King, Douglas offered a warning that challenged the feasibility of Rockefeller’s plan to get elected by condemning Republican efforts to align with southern white Democrats. He warned Rockefeller that the February 1962 rally appearance would not “endear [Rockefeller] to the hearts of the Midwestern Republicans, especially with a visit to Chicago which had traditionally inharmonious race relations.” Douglas offered a frank assessment: “Dr. King is a great leader of his people. However, he is greatly misunderstood in the North, and deeply hated in the South.… Until the perspective of history has its opportunity to set in, any closer public identification we have with Dr. King may only give more ammunition to those who refer to Rockefeller as erratic, unstable, etc.” “In the meantime,” Douglas recommended, “we have a lot of fence-mending right within the Party and can afford to rest on our laurels in this area for a while.” In the end, Rockefeller did not cancel previously scheduled trips to discuss civil rights and race relations, but he determined that an additional speaking engagement in the Midwest was inadvisable. Hinman, who argued that it was a moral and political imperative for Rockefeller to make race relations the centerpiece of his political agenda, agreed with Douglas.29 Rockefeller and his advisers insisted that only fringe “ultras” would ever consider it possible for the Republican Party to relinquish its identity as the Party of Lincoln, but they also recognized that taking a strong stand on civil rights put Rockefeller in a precarious position with midwestern Republicans.30 Rockefeller and his staffers did not acknowledge this, but northern opposition to King’s politics paired with their fear of midwestern Republicans being alienated by Rockefeller’s civil rights message suggested that the plan to unite southern defenders of Jim Crow and Republicans from the Middle and Far West was viable after all.
On February 15, 1962, Rockefeller spoke at the Lincoln Day Dinner where Hinman advised him to call attention to the effort to advance the Republican Party in the South by embracing the priorities of southern racists. The fundraiser sponsored by the Niagara County Republican organization—where the Republican national chairman William E. Miller introduced Rockefeller—received nationwide press coverage. The headlines focused on Rockefeller’s “sharp” criticisms of John F. Kennedy who he said failed to advance civil rights as president, despite campaigning for African American votes with promises of federal legislation and executive orders to end discrimination.31 Rockefeller praised Eisenhower’s civil rights record in comparison, which he said instituted unprecedented desegregation in schools and the armed forces. Although Rockefeller’s speech had the markings of a typical election year speech, it did hint at the issues raised by Hinman. “The suggestion is occasionally made,” stated Rockefeller, “that the party warp or abandon its heritage and, to put it bluntly, speak softly on civil rights to whisper an appeal for Southern votes.” He continued, “The party of Lincoln cannot try to strike so cheap a bargain without dishonoring its own heritage and betraying American people.” The Associated Press reported that Rockefeller did not elaborate but noted that the Republican Party had been accused of conducting a divided campaign in 1960 where Nixon pledged support for civil rights in the North and US senator from Arizona Barry Goldwater deemphasized similar positions in the South. Rockefeller then posed a challenge to fellow Republicans that implicitly rejected any racist electoral strategy paired with an overture to Black voters. “[African Americans] must see—we must help them see—not on the basis of words, but on the irrefutable basis of performance, that the party of Lincoln, which was their party then, remains their party now.”32
Rockefeller was not the only Republican politician to voice dismay about the future of the Republican Party. Fellow New York moderate Republican, Senator Javits, expressed the same concern but in a more direct manner. Days before Rockefeller’s statement, Javits accused some in his party of “paying too much attention to the thunder on the right and not enough attention to the thunder in the cities.” The senator who had recently made public statements opposing the John Birch Society and other extremist organizations said he was troubled by those who thought “the Republican party should swing toward the right, even toward ultra-conservatism.” He warned that if the Republican Party did not make itself competitive in cities, it would become an “impotent fringe party.”33 Republicans like Rockefeller and Javits feared a change in their party that would end the GOP’s traditional commitment to defending the rights of African Americans, but they believed it was preventable. Ultimately, Rockefeller’s vision for the GOP—a national party with appeal to African Americans, the urban North, supporters of a robust social safety net, staunch anti-communists, and traditional small government conservatives—would not win out. Whether inevitable or not, Rockefeller’s loss reveals much about the making of the modern Republican Party, the eclipse of moderate Republicanism, racial inequity that went untouched by federal civil rights legislation, and the twentieth-century struggle to determine the role of government in the United States. Centering Rockefeller and his advocacy for civil rights provides new insight into the conservative turn of the Republican Party. It also allows for an examination of the importance of questions around race and federal intervention in the field of civil rights to racial politics in the North.
Rockefeller as Bellwether of Republican Party Politics
The benefit of tracing a single politician’s career to examine Republican politics, policy generation, and the broad impact of the civil rights movement is that it generates opportunities to connect local and national histories and cross common periodization and topical boundaries. Putting Rockefeller, a descendant of the first Republicans, at the center of this study also facilitates an exploration of civil rights–era racial politics within a broader context that dates to the earliest days of the GOP. It also provides singular insight into the revolutionary nature of the conservative turn of the 1960s and 1970s, despite conservatives’ insistence that they were the true inheritors of the Republican legacy. Although this study follows the contours of Rockefeller’s career, it is not a biography and only introduces elements of his personal life such as his divorce at junctures where it seemed to impact public discourse. Similarly, this work does not seek to determine whether Rockefeller changed his core beliefs. His rhetoric and policy outcomes are the focus of the work because they are more tangible than Rockefeller’s internal reasoning, which can be difficult to assess. As a result, Rockefeller is intended to serve as an indicator of changing political winds based on his interactions with his peers and the public’s response to his campaigns and policies. Rockefeller set out to revive the Party of Lincoln for the modern civil rights era, to make the GOP the premier protector of African American rights; he failed in spectacular fashion. The nature of that failure, no matter how far-fetched his plan may seem decades later, reveals the depths of the US’s resistance to becoming a multiracial democracy and demonstrates how a commitment to moderation—a desire to improve, rather than overturn, the racial status quo—can result in extreme outcomes and enduring harm to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
This book reassesses Rockefeller Republicanism and Rockefeller’s efforts to build a multiracial, cross-class constituency that would revitalize the Party of Lincoln in three stages. Part 1 examines Rockefeller at his most optimistic when he, rightfully or not, believed he could take the helm of the national Republican Party. It introduces Rockefeller’s background, lays out the political landscape of postwar New York, and demonstrates that despite an impressive entrance into electoral politics, there were early signs that Rockefeller’s politics were a mismatch for the New York GOP. It also explores the ways in which Rockefeller undermined his own commitment to antidiscrimination efforts in New York, particularly in relation to housing policy, for the sake of party unity. Part 2 analyzes Rockefeller’s iconic challenge to the rise of Barry Goldwater in 1963 and 1964, which culminated in Rockefeller facing one of the most memorable rejections of a politician at a twentieth-century political convention. Rather than look at Rockefeller as the lone defender of racial liberalism in the Republican Party, it explores the capitulation of fellow prominent moderates at the moment when the nation finally appeared ready to harness the federal government to end southern Jim Crow. This is the period in which not only the Republican Party turned away from its traditional commitment to African American rights, but Rockefeller also rejected a northern-oriented civil rights movement for the sake of maintaining power in New York. Part 3 examines Rockefeller’s final years in public office from his failed 1968 presidential campaign to his introduction of punitive reforms in the areas of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, commonly referred to as welfare, and criminal justice after he lost faith in his ambition to revitalize the Party of Lincoln. It traces the decline of Rockefeller’s political career alongside the demise of the racially liberal moderate Republicanism that he had aspired to during his early years as governor. In the face of conservative pushback, Rockefeller tacked right in ways that disproportionately harmed poor, urban African American communities. Rockefeller’s opportunistic adoption of negative racial stereotypes to prop up his own career not only ended his previous attempts to create a diverse constituency but made a mockery of them. The book ends by surveying the life span of the Rockefeller drug laws and the punitive turn they helped facilitate, in part thanks to Rockefeller’s thwarted ambition to revive the Party of Lincoln and the subsequent absence of a Republicanism committed to racial liberalism.
This is a history of the pivotal moment in the Republican Party when it would, in the words of Hinman, “side with the ultras” and the ramifications of that change for Rockefeller Republicanism specifically but also moderate Republicanism, the New Deal consensus, and modern US politics. Historians often refer to the 1960s as the beginning of the conservative turn, but unlike works that examine the leaders of that transformation, this book traces the conservative turn from the perspective of a Republican who struggled to keep up. Nelson Rockefeller, the standard-bearer of the once prominent, although minority, moderate faction of the Republican Party and perennial presidential hopeful, would end up settling for an appointment to the vice presidency under Gerald Ford in 1974. Rockefeller’s successes and failures serve as guideposts to examine the transformation of the Republican Party and the process in which it forfeited its identity as the Party of Lincoln. At the start of his electoral career in 1959, Rockefeller’s policies demonstrated his commitment to racial liberalism and a government that guaranteed social services that matched the challenges of modern life. As the years passed, Rockefeller said his politics remained the same, but his policy reversals in the fields of illegal narcotics and welfare made his claims irrelevant. This book examines the transformation of Rockefeller Republicanism during the conservative turn, but more broadly, it demonstrates the process in which a moderate and pragmatic politician, in the name of electoral viability, legitimized the dismantling of the welfare state and helped codify racial inequality for the post–civil rights era.