As Republicans arrive in Milwaukee to nominate Donald Trump, the convention comes on the 60th anniversary of an important warning from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the party’s 1964 gathering in San Francisco: “There is no place in this Republican Party for those who would infiltrate its ranks, distort its aims, and convert it into a cloak of apparent respectability for a dangerous extremism.”
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Republican convention goers in 1964 — including many new activists on the right who had earned coveted delegate spots by working around the party’s moderate leadership and winning support at the grassroots — were there to nominate the conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. They responded to Rockefeller’s remark by booing, jeering, and hurling invective at the high-profile moderate Republican governor.
Meanwhile, moderates worried — with good cause, as it turned out — that it was not electorally prudent to nominate a conservative like Goldwater. Conservatism had been outside of the mainstream of presidential politics since Herbert Hoover’s failed presidency and they correctly foresaw an electoral disaster with Goldwater at the top of the ticket. But Rockefeller’s warning demonstrated more than mere electoral concerns. In the early 1960s, he had become alarmed by the gravitation of extreme groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society — who rejected efforts to make the U.S. a multiracial society — toward the GOP.
Rockefeller’s speech has been mythologized in an era where conventions have become little more than infomercials. It’s known as a dramatic display of party disunity, and as moderates’ prescient, but unheeded, warning to their party. That narrative, however, obscures a more complicated history of moderate and mainstream conservative silence and complicity in Republican Party politics that continues to shape the GOP to this day.
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In 1963, Rockefeller had warned that a “radical right lunatic fringe” within the party was seeking to attract racists and segregationists to bolster its electoral strength outside the North under the guise of defending state’s rights. Republicans, the governor asserted, needed to save their party before it was too late.
Privately, many members of the moderate and establishment conservative wings of the GOP agreed with Rockefeller. But few were willing to say so. They either remained silent or dismissed the governor’s statement as run-of-the-mill campaigning.
It could be construed that way because Rockefeller and Goldwater were the two leading contenders for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. And though the governor did not name Goldwater when issuing this warning, the people he referred to were avid supporters of the Arizonan. Publicly, Goldwater kept the John Birch Society and groups like it at arm’s length, but privately they were welcomed. Goldwater’s campaign manager F. Clifton White, referred to them as “nuts,” but recognized the value of their intense support, particularly in California.
In the subsequent months, Goldwater became the frontrunner for the nomination and eked past Rockefeller in the pivotal California primary, which convinced the New Yorker to end his campaign.
A few weeks later, the ascendency of Goldwater and his wing of the GOP became more historically significant when the senator voted against the Civil Rights Act, which put him in the minority among congressional Republicans. Disregarding extra-legal violence that terrorized African Americans in the South, Goldwater leaned into concerns about big government by arguing that enforceable civil rights legislation was the real threat to Americans’ liberties because it would turn the region into a police state where neighbors spied on one another in the name of protecting civil rights.
That set the stage for the convention, at which moderates planned to take a stand.
The first sign that they stood no chance came when the delegates rejected a resolution that would deny admittance of any state delegation that discriminated against Black people. A delegate who seconded the resolution said this was part of a larger effort to remove African Americans from positions of power in the party. Someone on the convention floor responded: “Yeah, and next convention there won’t be no n—–s to expel!”
Rockefeller’s speech was the first of three given in support of an amendment to the party platform that would denounce the extremists who moderates argued sought to subvert the GOP. Moderate Republicans saw the measure as a last-ditch effort to resist, if not Goldwater’s nomination, than the embrace of his most extreme supporters.
What was supposed to be a five-minute speech lasted over 10 minutes thanks to the jeering and chants of “We want Barry.”
The delegates resoundingly defeated the amendment, as well as a parallel one that removed any mention of specific organizations.
While Rockefeller focused on the explicit rejection of extremists, other moderates advocated for an amendment to the platform that would strengthen the GOP’s stated commitment to protecting civil rights. Four years before, Rockefeller had worked with nominee Richard Nixon to strengthen the party’s civil rights plank, to the dismay of conservatives.
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In 1964, however, the conservatives had controlled the platform committee and produced a milquetoast civil rights plank. Five moderates spoke in favor of amending it on the convention floor, but their effort floundered when another group from their own wing of the party — with established records as advocates for civil rights — opposed strengthening the plank. Perhaps most astoundingly, New York Congressman Charles Goodell who had voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, admonished Republicans not to let the party’s fervor for civil rights get the best of them as it had for Reconstruction-era Republicans after the Civil War.
Moderates like Goodell refused to acknowledge that nominating Goldwater without a forceful commitment to protecting civil rights served as confirmation that the party was ready to welcome the segregationists and open racists who were present in the convention hall. The delegates rejected the strengthened civil rights plank, offering an unmistakable sign that the party’s commitment to the cause was under siege by the extreme right. Exemplifying this reality: Southern Goldwater supporters weren’t satisfied with their win on civil rights. They wanted to go further and adopt a plank that enshrined Goldwater’s oft stated argument that “human relations,” such as racial discrimination, could not be solved through legislation.
The moderates’ disunity hurt their cause, but a lack of support from the party establishment made their efforts futile. Most significantly, former president Dwight Eisenhower counseled against identifying groups like the John Birch Society for removal from the party — even though the group’s leader Robert Welch had accused him of being a communist agent.
Fundamentally, people like Eisenhower and Goodell were blinded by opportunity: they recognized that Goldwater’s appeal in the South presented an opportunity to reestablish the party in a region where it had been anathema to most white southerners since its inception. Instead of acknowledging the dangers of courting extremists, they expressed outrage at anyone who said Goldwater’s nomination marked a fundamental shift away from the party’s traditional support for African American rights.
Yet, while the party establishment stuck their head in the sand, the signs were unmistakable that Rockefeller was right. One Black delegate compared the convention floor to downtown Birmingham, while the most famous line of Goldwater’s acceptance speech proclaimed that “extremism in defense of liberty” was “no vice.”
The rejection of the moderates’ efforts sent a clear signal: criticizing the new direction of the party meant ostracism, particularly if you aspired to national leadership like Rockefeller. In the end, Rockefeller’s act of principle became confirmation to prominent Republicans that extremism, not candor or dissent, was welcome. And some of his fellow moderates, as well as the party establishment, were complicit in this shift.
The ensuing silence resulted in a new majority party that would come to dominate presidential politics. For his admirers, the stand in San Francisco was Rockefeller’s finest hour. But conservatives, whether they held extremist views or not, considered it a betrayal never to be forgiven.
Rockefeller remained in pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, but due to the new winds blowing in the party, he spent the rest of his career trying to convince an increasingly doctrinaire and southern party that he would not commit the same error again. The failure of his effort in 1964 helped set the party on the path to becoming the GOP that arrives in Milwaukee: a far-right one in which the fight from San Francisco would be unimaginable because there are no dissenting voices left.
Marsha E. Barrett is assistant professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism, available now for preorder from Three Hills an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.