The Birth of Modern Polarization: Part 2- The Rise of Reagan (1964-1966)

Welcome to the second of my polarization posts- tracing, in this election season, how the opposition between our two political parties has become so bitter (if not outright violent and dangerous!!). The structure of my thread is centered around a series of pivotal elections: 1964, 1966, 1980, and 2016. In each case, I will try to assess the legacy of the election for the politics we have today.

My first segment began the story in 1964, when a well-organized conservative minority within the Republican Party (which up to then had been broad-based in its ideology) captured the majority of the delegates to the National Convention, and thereby succeeded in nominating Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a far more outspoken and radical candidate than his predecessors. In turn, Goldwater went down to a landslide defeat by Democrat Lyndon Johnson in November. Although Johnson had some major liability issues (including friction within his own party), he had many factors in his favor: broad economic prosperity; his wrapping himself in the mantle of the popular John F. Kennedy, murdered just a year earlier; broad popular support then for an activist liberal federal government; and his effective portrayal of Goldwater, in the context of the nuclear danger of the Cold War, as an impulsive extremist. In the end Goldwater won just 5 states, and many pundits concluded that the conservative takeover had put the very existence of the Republican Party in jeopardy! 

But, as this post will show, not only was that political obituary misguided, but it would be Johnson and the Democrats instead who would soon be in grave jeopardy (though after a year of stunning legislative accomplishments). Significantly (and this was only visible in hindsight), 1964 was the last presidential election, to date, in which a majority of white Americans have voted for a Democratic candidate. The Democrats’ swift downfall would be due to rising crime, to increasing militance among young people, to racial violence in major cities, and, above all, to Johnson’s decision, starting in early 1965, to plunge the U.S. (rapidly, and on a massive scale) into war in Vietnam (a war that was ultimately unwinnable). Tragically, Johnson ordered this intervention without portraying his actions honestly to his people, and without really reckoning with how the nation was to bear the war’s enormous cost of money and lives. One cost would be to Johnson himself, who would be forced into ending his own political career (by not running in 1968).

Johnson’s political disaster, by 1966, was on just as colossal a scale as Goldwater’s, while being much more far-reaching and long-lasting. It took place during, and it accelerated, the most far-reaching social changes in American culture and society in decades (remembered today in shorthand simply as “the Sixties”). And it paved the way for a swift Republican comeback. The once-mighty Democratic New Deal coalition broke apart into “hawks” and “doves”- factions passionately for and against Johnson’s Vietnam policy. That Republican comeback would be led by a middle-aged former Hollywood actor with no political experience, a former Democrat who had fully embraced Goldwater’s conservatism: Ronald Reagan. Reagan, starting with his fateful 1966 election as governor of California (the topic of this post), would accomplish what Goldwater did not. He would start to move his party much further to the right (especially after he won the presidency in 1980).

The story of how Reagan came to be elected governor can be seen as the convergence of three lives: Reagan; Clark Kerr (the man who created the giant multi-campus University of California in its modern form); and Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor of the state from 1959 to 1967. All three came from humble beginnings (Reagan- Illinois; Brown- San Francisco; Kerr- rural Pennsylvania). All were from the same generation (Brown born in 1905 and both Kerr and Reagan in 1911), and both Reagan and Brown had difficult childhoods (they were also both half-Irish). Reagan and Kerr would graduate from college (something only a small minority did in their time period), while Brown would skip college, going right to a law degree instead. Kerr was a lifelong liberal Democrat (a Quaker and experienced labor negotiator); Brown converted as a young man from Republican to centrist Democrat; and Reagan’s conversion, from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, happened gradually over decades. Finally (spoiler alert!), Kerr and Brown, would, in the mid-1960’s, have their careers permanently damaged by Reagan (who would fire Kerr and defeat Brown in the '66 governor's race).

Reagan grew up in the small town of Dixon, Illinois, with a caring mother and an erratic and alcoholic father. He had three important roles before his film career- as lifeguard; as a college student at Eureka, a small religious school (where he focused on football and cheerleading more than classwork); and as sports broadcaster. In 1937, he headed to California (where he would settle), with a Hollywood contract. Tall, handsome and amiable, he usually was a co-star, though he had one great success as a lead in a drama (“King’s Row” in 1942). He spent the World War II years making promotional films for the War Department. Afterward he was twice elected the head of the Hollywood actors’ union (the Screen Actors Guild), becoming a passionate anticommunist in the early Cold War. By the late 1940s, his film jobs began to dwindle, and he had an unsuccessful first marriage. He got a big break when the giant General Electric, the dominant maker of appliances, hired him in 1954 to be an inspirational speaker and presenter of TV plays (with a big salary and a house full of gadgets) for the corporation’s 250,000 employees. He traveled endlessly for years, developing what would be called “the Speech”, using his quick memory and honing his skills for presentation and for charming, as well as persuading, big audiences with his homespun jokes and short anecdotes. He also remarried very happily (his wife Nancy, a master at networking, would play an essential role in building his political career). His travels exposed him to many conservative businessmen, including members of the John Birch Society (conspiracy theorists who believed that President Eisenhower was a secret Communist!). His increasing political activism wound up costing him his GE job in early 1962.

He got his next big break after he became an enthusiastic Goldwater supporter, and convention delegate, in 1964. Right before Election Day, he was hired to give a half-hour political version of “The Speech”, entitled “A Time for Choosing”, which proved to be wildly popular with conservatives. He was immediately seen as a much more effective “messenger” for the cause than Goldwater- more important than ever for the weakened Republicans.

It’s important at this stage to point out that California was changing now at breathtaking speed. It had of course done so repeatedly, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1850s and the arrival of the film industry in the 1910s, plus the war manufacturing boom of the 1940s. After 1945, the war’s white veterans and white workers had then benefited enormously from the GI Bill (allowing many men to earn the first college degrees in their families’ history) and generous housing loans (enabling them to move into cheap suburban housing to raise their large families).

The next big boom started with the birth of what is now called “Silicon Valley,” the modern electronics industry, in the late 1950s (outside San Francisco- which benefited a great deal from Cold War federal military spending). The writers and photographers at America’s cultural forefront flocked to the state, living alongside blue-collar workers in San Francisco or in the spectacular coast scenery of Big Sur. By the early ‘60s, one would have thought from pop culture that the only inhabitants were bronzed white teenage surfers (celebrated by the Beach Boys’ music and by the wholesome flirtations of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the beach party movies). In other words, it was “cool” to be young in California! But its diverse industries, including Silicon Valley, also offered adults the best job market in the nation. Vast numbers of its white male workforce moved from blue collar urban jobs (voting then mostly Democratic),  to white collar suburban jobs (increasingly voting Republican), whether within California or as migrants from other states (especially from the Midwest). It was that white collar world of white men in identical suits, in new occupations such as “software engineer”, that Reagan got to know so well as a traveling GE speaker, and which would become a big part of his voter base. By 1962, when he was fired by GE for his right-wing political activities and formally switched to Republican, he had come to identify with the management class (which would fund his runs for office). The men in that white collar world would gladly have “stopped the clock” in 1960, when their kind (culturally homogenous- conservative, patriotic and churchgoing) were at their most flourishing, and before Presidents Kennedy and Johnson set out to further expand the New Deal federal liberal state (and its definition of American democracy).

Kerr and Brown also saw their stars rise at this same moment. Both were visionaries who responded to the boom. Brown was elected in 1958 when the then-dominant Republicans split; plump and uncharismatic, he proved to be the perfect bureaucrat governor for the moment. He welcomed the population surge (even declaring a state holiday on the day California surpassed New York as the most populous state!). But he also recognized the citizens’ need for more water (so he built a giant aqueduct to take it from the Central Valley down to thirsty Los Angeles), and better transportation (so he built a host of freeways). Both building projects were of course extremely expensive, but also very popular.

Kerr in turn had his own kind of vision, when he became the head of the University of California, also in 1958- realizing that the state’s higher education system would also need rapid modernization and expansion. California’s public colleges had grown haphazardly over many decades; now they faced an unprecedented demographic crisis. The state’s fast-growing middle class could now afford to send their kids to college (far more than in any previous generation), and the first of those Baby Boom kids, the largest generation in US history, would arrive on campus in the fall of 1963. Kerr came up with a blueprint to meet that moment, first by centralizing and standardizing the 23 UC schools, and second by proposing a “multiversity” model with three tiers (according to size, cost, and academic standards), with much broader course offerings and more facilities than ever before. He welcomed students of all races and backgrounds (and charged no tuition!). 

Not surprisingly, both Kerr and Brown fully embraced Kennedy’s famous idealistic inaugural call in 1961 (“the torch has passed to a new generation…ask what you can do for your country”). They were both committed future-oriented Kennedy Democrats.

One of the two main issues that would spur Reagan’s rise, campus dissent, started by the fall of 1964. By this time the national civil rights struggle was coming to the West. The Black sit-in movement had been born on college campuses in 1960, and the minority student population was now increasing in California. Way back in 1934, the then-head of UC had imposed Rule 17, which banned political activity on public college campuses. It remained little enforced for decades, but, in Sept. 1964, under pressure from off-campus groups (incensed by Berkeley students picketing against Goldwater at the summer Republican Convention), Berkeley revived the ban. On Oct. 1, a student was seen at Sproul Plaza (the heart of campus) at a table organizing for CORE (one of the major civil rights organizations). The administration called the police, and a car drove into the plaza. When the students in the area saw one of their own being put in the back, they converged on the car, led by one Mario Savio, who had just come from doing dangerous voter registration (“Freedom Summer”) in Mississippi. Upset at what they saw as a blatant violation of promised academic freedom, Savio and others organized the Free Speech Movement (FSM) soon afterward, calling for the removal of the ban on on-campus politics. At this time college students generally were under far tighter controls than today (with administrations acting “in loco parentis”, in the place of parents), including curfews, dress codes, and same-sex dorms. The FSM was a clear sign that Boomer students wanted to be treated as adults, and that they were ready to use the nonviolent confrontational tactics of the civil rights movement (unlike any previous expressions of dissent). Both UC Pres. Kerr and Gov. Brown, who had long preached academic freedom, were shocked and dismayed. Brown had praised idealistic young people as a “new impatient, critical crop of young gadflies” in a 1961 speech. Kerr had talked about “making students safe for ideas, not ideas safe for students” (a slogan repeated word for word by a college president during the Gaza protests in 2024!). How were these intelligent and competent liberals to respond to dissent by the children of their own voter base?

FSM leader Mario Savio being placed under arrest at Berkeley, 1964 (sfgate.com)

Kerr stalled for time with the FSM, but on Dec. 2, Savio & the others had had enough. Savio gave an eloquent speech, clearly inspired by Martin Luther King’s movement to overthrow racial segregation, that soon reverberated around the country: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.” After that, he led a thousand students into a peaceful takeover of the main administration building (overnight). Gov. Brown then overreacted; after a testy phone call with Savio (arranged by his son Jerry, who would also be California’s governor in the future), and others who were already offended by the FSM, he, without consulting Kerr, sent in hundreds of police to arrest all the sit-in students. He got plenty of support from the general public, but he had also permanently tarnished the Democrats’ support of academic freedom, and had created a issue- response to campus dissent- that would help propel Reagan into Brown’s job in 1966.

As already mentioned, Reagan’s TV speech for Goldwater, at the same time as the FSM was getting started, had already won him many conservative supporters, who now set to work to persuade him to run against Brown. Not surprisingly, Reagan put them off at first, given Goldwater’s recent election catastrophe and his own political inexperience. But, by early 1965, he agreed to do speaking trips around the state, paid for by his businessmen friends, to see if he had genuine public support. He immediately drew crowds, and decided to hire a talented pair of experienced consultants (Spencer and Roberts) to manage his as-yet-undeclared campaign.

Just as Reagan was starting out, Pres. Johnson made the decision that would doom his career (and would greatly damage the Democrats’ chances in 1966 and 1968): to send ground troops to fight the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam (as well as starting a massive bombing campaign). Although his commitment grew within months to hundreds of thousands of troops (and thousands of deaths), opposition to the Vietnam War developed slowly at first.

In the meantime, the second issue that would galvanize support for Reagan emerged: crime and racial conflict. Most of the Black people who came West in the Great Migration out of the South in the early 1900’s had found themselves confined to pockets in California cities, notably within Oakland and Los Angeles (the Watts neighborhood). Adamant resistance by white real estate agents and neighboring white landowners kept them penned in (the racist head of the Los Angeles Police Department, William Parker, coined the phrase “thin blue line” to refer to the way his white cops held poor Blacks at bay!). Predictably, over decades, those inner city neighborhoods grotesquely deteriorated, while also becoming dangerously overcrowded (Watts, for example, did not have a single hospital!). In Aug. 1965, just days after Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act, a young Black man was stopped by a cop in Watts for driving while drunk. The situation got out of hand, especially when locals heard a (false) rumor that a pregnant Black woman had been beaten. The result was rioting (random attacks on whites, plus massive looting and burning of buildings) by an estimated 34,000 Black residents, on an unprecedented scale (13,000 National Guard deployed- 34 dead, mostly Black; thousands arrested; and at least $40 million in property damage). 

National Guard deployed in Watts area of Los Angeles, Aug. 1965 (gettyimages.com)

As had happened with the Berkeley FSM, Gov. Brown (then on vacation abroad) was caught completely unprepared by Watts. He commissioned a report, which did correctly identify the causes (poverty, unemployment, discrimination), but many white middle class Californians concluded that he was not going to do anything about the possible threat of (Black) rioters invading their neighborhoods (as well as about a marked rise in violent crimes). They had already voted 2-1 for Proposition 14 in 1964, which repealed Brown’s Rumford Act (which had banned discrimination in the sale of private homes). Rumford was seen as opening the way for Blacks to break out of their ghettos to become neighbors in white suburbia; a similar national bill by Johnson also failed in 1966. It didn’t help that Brown had angrily labeled all of those voters for 14 as “bigots”!

Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown of California, 1964 (Wikipedia.org)

Reagan finally made his run official in Jan. 1966. He had long seen himself in the role of “defender” of traditional values (going back to testifying about Communists in the film industry in 1947); now he could readily pose as the defender of the state’s white majority (he consciously emphasized the old stereotype of himself as the tall virile lawman, standing up to Wild West villains; he was even introduced by a TV gunfighter, Chuck Connor of “The Rifleman”, as “the man for a state that needs a man”!). Instead of a conventional platform, Reagan used just two slogans throughout his run for governor: that he would “clean up the mess at Berkeley” and “send the welfare bums back to work.” He said little about the war. He had two opponents: first, for the primary, George Christopher, the moderate Republican former mayor San Francisco (he had built the mass transit system and the Candlestick Park baseball stadium, where the Beatles would play their final concert in 1966). Fortunately for Reagan, Christopher was a poor public speaker, and political moderation was not a winner in this turbulent election year. Brown made his first major error in leaking an old (and minor) scandal about Christopher to a national columnist to ruin his run, thinking that he would much rather face Reagan, the actor turned political novice, in the general election. Reagan beat Christopher in June by a huge margin (while Brown barely defeated conservative Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty), and then he very wisely recruited many moderate Republicans as allies. Brown’s second big error, in the general campaign, was in trying to do what Johnson had done so successfully in ’64 against Goldwater- to paint Reagan as a “kook,” a fringe extremist. All voters had to do was to see Reagan, on TV or in person, to be charmed by his genial, self-deprecating, and articulate personality; he didn’t seem at all extremist. Brown also continued to defend Johnson and his policies- both of which were rapidly fading in popularity. 

Ronald Reagan campaigning in Lawndale, California in 1966 (pbssocal.org)

In Nov. 1966, Reagan won in a landslide, by over a million votes, a spectacular reversal of Johnson’s landslide just two years earlier. His majority included countless “Reagan Democrats”- people who had enthusiastically backed Johnson, and who had been an essential pillar of the liberal New Deal coalition, just a short time before!

So- from the perspective of the politics of 2024, what is the significance of the sudden emergence of Reagan (a candidate with no previous political experience), as governor of the nation's most populous state, in 1966? Certainly part of the reason for his victory was the timing of his run: as happening in the wake of national division and disillusion about Johnson's intervention in Vietnam, combined with deep anxiety among the state's white majority about protests by college students, and about street violence by poor Blacks (set off by years of increasing poverty and police brutality). His opponents (including Brown and Kerr) saw themselves as compromisers and mediators. But Reagan, an outstanding public speaker (in his later presidency he would be known as the "Great Communicator"!), tapped directly into that voter anxiety. He appeared to offer a reassuring image of competence and confidence, as a latter-day "lawman" who would return California to social peace (though he never actually said that he would "make California great again"!).

The significance for the story of polarization is that Reagan saw himself as representing only part of his state's people. He never once in his campaign talked directly to either college activists or inner city Blacks (indeed he, like Goldwater in 1964, wrote off African Americans from the start). Instead both students and poor Blacks represented an "other" in his mind (in the former case, he saw their behavior as verging on treason!). Dissent to him, to countless supporters, and also to J. Edgar Hoover (whose FBI was an important covert Reagan ally), was dangerous in itself (never mind the First Amendment!). He had no interest in finding out why his opponents were protesting.

Reagan would carry his conservative ideology on into his run for the Republican nomination in 1976, and, most importantly, on into two presidential terms (1981-1989). In the latter case he would also have the support of (newly politicized) evangelical Christians, a crucial part of the Republican base of today. Reagan's policies would still differ from those of his party now (he supported immigration reform as president, and signed a law as governor loosening abortion restrictions). But he solidified the party's long-term modern identity: as based on racial/ethnic lines (as representing whites and some Latinos), and on being the party of "law and order".

Readers, I will be taking a break from politics and the polarization theme in my next post (looking instead at the world impact of climate change on coffee!), but I will return to it (for a look at Reagan's impact on the Republican Party in the 1980's). Till next time!

Resources:

Boot, Max. “Reagan: His Life and Legend.” (2024)

Boyle, Kevin. “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.” (2021)

Brands, H.W. “Reagan: The Life.” (2015)

Cannon, Lou. “Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power.” (2003)

Dallek, Matthew. “The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.” (2000)

De Groot, Gerard. “Selling Ronald Reagan: The Emergence of a President.” (2015)

Patterson, James T. “Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974.” (1996)

Perlstein, Rick. “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.” (2008)

“-“Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980”. (2020)

Rosenfeld, Seth. “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.” (2012)