- Included among the Political Analysis Posts List.
- Rev. Jerry Falwell, et al. had arrived on the national scene, but the man who drove me out of the Republican Party was a preacher named Rev. Coy Privette.
Martin Winfree
December 11, 2018
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Shared with Public
POLITICAL ANALYSIS, PART VI (let’s call this one “Equal Time”):
You have probably heard the term “Conservative Movement” (or someone saying that they are a “movement conservative”) over the years. It has meant different things at different times, but our College Republican group at North Carolina State University thought of ourselves as being in the Movement. Those were heady times, involving a major realignment of one of the two political parties that is much more dramatic than what Trump has done. My political views have greatly changed since then, but I am not ashamed of my conservative political activism while I was in college and immediately afterward – well, mostly not ashamed anyway 
.
Until Barry Goldwater became the GOP Nominee for President in 1964, frontrunners and nominees for the Republican Party nomination tended to be moderates and even borderline liberals, such as Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller (another super-rich New Yorker like Trump), George Romney (Mitt Romney’s dad), Harold Stassen, etc. There were a few real conservatives out there, such as Robert A. Taft, who might have taken the 1952 nomination had Ike not entered the race. Nelson Rockefeller was the odds-on pick to be the nominee in 1964.
The fledgling Conservative Movement didn’t have much money or influence, but they did have some ideas that led to the publication of several books that were printed, sold and distributed in the millions in 1963-1964 and helped launch a counter-assault to Rockefeller on behalf of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater: A Choice Not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly; None Dare Call it Treason by John Stormer; A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley; and Barry Goldwater’s own The Conscience of a Conservative. (Phyllis Schlafly no doubt is familiar to you; she led the successful fight against the Equal Rights Amendment some years later).
Well, by God it worked, and Barry Goldwater became the Republican nominee. I was a major fan of Goldwater in the eighth grade, and I talked him up and wore his buttons all the time. I started wearing black-rimmed glasses like Goldwater wore back then and continued doing so even in my early years in college as I recall – although I knew fairly quickly that they didn’t really look that great on me. (I realized, just this week, that I am wearing black-rimmed glasses again; and now I think they look pretty good! ) One of my school papers that I remember most fondly was on the upcoming 1964 election, called Who Will Win. I even footnoted my own junior-high-school paper in a term paper that I prepared while I was in high school .
As I grew older, I began reading those 1964 books and others about conservative philosophy. I found a stash of copies of None Dare Call it Treason in a used bookstore once, and I gave a copy of the book to everyone in my family for Christmas that year (not just that , but I included the book in each of their presents) – to the great delight of my younger sister Julie W. Kovasckitz, who still talks about it. I inherited my parents’ copy of the book to replace the one that had washed away with Katrina.
Of course, Barry Goldwater was slaughtered in the 1964 election by Lyndon Johnson in one of the most lopsided contests ever. His would probably have been an uphill climb in any case, but on the heels of the JFK assassination, LBJ had the election locked up from the word go. One event late in the campaign that at least boosted the spirits of the Goldwater supporters, whether or not it actually had any effect on the election, was a well-received speech called A Time for Choosing on October 27, 1964 by a then little-known former Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan. In short order, Reagan became the darling of the Conservative Movement.
Anyway, Goldwater carried his home state, but he also carried a band of five Southern states (Louisiana through South Carolina). Augmented by Nixon’s “Southern strategy”, what had been the Solid South for the Democrats quickly became the Solid South for the Republicans. Actually, nothing had really changed as to what the South wanted from their politicians: With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that LBJ marshaled through Congress, the Republican Party rather than the Democratic Party became the party on the “right side”, insofar as the segregationists that ran the lion’s share of the power structure in the South were concerned.
This history though is a little unfair to Barry Goldwater: He had supported all of the previous civil rights bills and acts, and correspondingly, Lyndon Johnson had opposed them all. LBJ decided that the time had come to pursue John Kennedy’s agenda that included the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other civil rights acts to follow. Goldwater thought that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an overreach on the part of the Federal government, so he opposed the bill. When Goldwater talked about “states’ rights”, that is what he meant – it wasn’t just code words for preserving segregation like it was when people used that term in the South. (Not all Republicans opposed the measure, of course; Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen was a key figure in getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed.)
Another bit of history about Barry Goldwater that is even less well-known is that he had had frequent contacts with John Kennedy when it began to look like they might be facing each other in the 1964 election. The two men were friendly with each other, even though they agreed on very little politically. They had talked about traveling the country together and planned a long series of reasoned debates about the liberalism that Kennedy represented, and the conservatism that Goldwater represented.
This was long before any of the corrosiveness had seeped into our politics, even though the contentiousness about civil rights, the Vietnam War, the counter-culture, and other aspects of life in the 1960’s was as real as it gets. Had these two men actually been able to pull this off, airing these two very different political philosophies in a respectful manner, there is no telling how much sunnier our political climate might have been in the 50+ years that followed. Alas, that was not to be; JFK was assassinated about a year before election day, and the 1964 campaign was fairly conventional.
The Goldwater campaign could have been a one-off, and the Conservative Movement might have died on the vine right afterward. Instead, conservatives moved into the driver’s seat in the Republican Party. While Richard Nixon again became the Republican nominee in 1968 (and won the next two Presidential elections), his campaign had a very different tone from the Richard Nixon campaign against John Kennedy in 1960, including familiar themes from Republican campaigns to come like “law and order” and “the silent majority”.
However, segregation was clearly on its way out, and both national parties made it clear that they were not going to work to preserve it. Alabama Governor George Wallace mounted an insurgent campaign, and he also managed to carry five Southern states as a candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968 (Arkansas instead of South Carolina, but otherwise the same as those carried by Goldwater in the previous election). This election too involved a Kennedy assassination, this time of Robert Kennedy on the night in June 1968 when he won two Presidential primaries including California. Incidentally, for reasons that I am not entirely clear on, Bobby Kennedy was very popular among whites and blacks alike in the South – much more so than either John or Ted.
While President Richard Nixon was a conservative and a Republican, he was not Barry Goldwater, and he was not Ronald Reagan; so I turned against him pretty quickly. By the time Reagan was elected President in 1980 (see Part V for that story), I had left the Republican Party. There were many reasons for this – I was so used to being on the losing side in political contests that I figured it was time to switch; that was part of it – but the rise of the “religious right” was the main factor.
Rev. Jerry Falwell, et al. had arrived on the national scene, and I didn’t like them at all; but the man who drove me out of the Republican Party was a preacher named Rev. Coy Privette, who was the most prominent spokesman for a group called the Christian Action League that led the fight against repealing the ban on what was known then as “liquor by the drink”. City and County prohibitions on this sort of thing are common to this day in North Carolina and Mississippi alike, and in plenty of other states as well. But this was a ban statewide – and every other state had long since taken care of the matter.
This quote from a Charlotte magazine article sums up the state of affairs at the time: “It’s all a little hard to imagine in 2013 Charlotte, where you can’t walk half a block uptown without bumping into one or seven sidewalk signs advertising drink specials. But 35 years ago, state law prohibited restaurants (and the handful of ‘bars’ in existence) from selling liquor. Establishments could sell beer and wine, but patrons who wanted hard alcohol had to bring their own bottles in paper bags. Waiters could sell ‘set ups’ of ice and mixers. Bottles had to remain in the bag at all times, and drinkers were supposed to do all their pouring under the table.”
I had actually forgotten that last part, but in the few instances when I was with someone who was “brown-bagging”, they kept their bottle under the table and brought it up to do the pouring. For me, I thought it was an issue of being civilized. I remember telling a lot of people in that era that I might not ever order a drink in a restaurant (I was perfectly fine with drinking beer and wine with meals then) – but I ought to be able to know when I go to a restaurant or bar that it was an option if I wanted one.
Naturally, the libertarians I knew were all for ending the ban; and just about all of the other conservatives were drinkers, so if they wanted to keep out liquor by the drink, I don’t remember them ever talking about it. I didn’t even think of it as a liberal issue or a conservative issue; it was just stupid. It was a long and contentious fight until finally, there was a successful referendum that passed statewide in 1978.
Before that though, our conservative friends in the leadership of the North Carolina Republican Party (whose statewide office was pretty close to the NCSU campus as I remember) started talking up Coy Privette as a gubernatorial candidate. I couldn’t believe it, and I was pretty vocal in my opposition. People tried to tell me that he was the best conservative candidate now that Jim Gardner’s star was fading, but I wasn’t buying it. I didn’t see anything at all conservative in keeping people from having a drink with dinner, and the other stuff Privette was saying didn’t sound like what I believed in either.
Coy Privette was on the primary ballot but lost the 1976 Republican nomination to David Flaherty, who in turn lost to popular Democratic Governor Jim Hunt. Hunt was Governor of the state multiple times and, according to Wikipedia: “Hunt is tied for the fourth-longest gubernatorial tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history at 5,838 days [16 years].” By the end of 1976, I was no longer a registered Republican.