The Ripon Report

Of all the agonizing Republican reappraisals of the 1964 elections, by far the best documented and most out spoken is that of the Ripon Society, a group of some 80 young G.O.P. intellectuals, mostly from academic circles, who aspire, as one leader describes it. "to be a link between the ivory-tower group and the people ringing doorbells." In a recently issued report, the society said that the Republican presidential campaign was "one of the dullest, emptiest, lowest-level campaigns in the history of American presidential politics. The whole cast of the Republican effort was too often amateurish, almost never profound, occasionally tasteless, and almost always ineffective."

A Small Cabal. The Ripon Society, founded in Cambridge, Mass., on December 12, 1962, is named after the Wisconsin city where the Republican Party was founded to oppose the spread of slavery.* The society's president is John Saloma III, 30, an assistant professor of political science at M.I.T., who, along with Harvard Law Student Thomas Petri, 24, headed the group that put the report into final form.

Predictably, the report lays most of the blame for the losing campaign on Candidates Barry Goldwater and William Miller, who "shifted emphasis erratically from day to day, achieving little continuity and no momentum. Issues were selected and articulated at the very times and places where they would do the ticket the most harm." Goldwater "read his speeches stoically and unenthusiastically. His rhetoric confused the debate and left him terribly vulnerable to charges of name-calling, smearing and carelessness." Moreover, says the report, the "Goldwater leadership clique" exercised "an oppressive exclusiveness that put loyalty to a small cabal ahead of loyalty to the Republican Party."

Beyond such general failures, the report says, the campaign was based on the "implicit racist appeal of the Southern strategy. The Senator's objections to legislating morality, his criticisms of the Supreme Court, his advocacy of states' rights, all became the shorthand for an anti-civil rights appeal. An uglier aspect of the appeal was the not very subtle attempt to link lawlessness in the streets with the Negroes, and street riots with peaceful civil rights demonstrations."

The Conscience Vote. This strategy badly backfired as "the Negroes of America waited in long, silent lines on Nov. 3 to register one of the greatest protest votes ever recorded." It also led to the loss of the "conscience vote of many Northern white Republicans who were repelled."

Johnson carried six Southern states to Goldwater's five, picked up 81 Southern electoral votes to Goldwater's 47. The report contends that it was the Negro vote that gave Johnson four of those states (Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia). In large Southern cities, such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Orlando and Houston, Goldwater did not run as well as had Eisenhower in 1956 and Nixon in 1960.

Nationwide, only 6% of the Negro vote went Republican, compared to roughly one-third in both 1956 and 1960. In Ohio the Negro vote dropped from 29% for Nixon to 2% for Goldwater--accounting for the defeat of Robert Taft Jr. in his senatorial campaign. At the same time, the Northern white backlash did not develop: Goldwater failed to carry a single county in Maryland, Indiana and Wisconsin, where Alabama's Governor George Wallace had run strongly in presidential primaries.

Both Old & Young. The report contends that the election "was genuinely dominated by issues rather than by social stratification or by personality," cites "nuclear responsibility" and "social welfare legislation" as the decisive issues in addition to civil rights. "Goldwater's positions on national issues, clearly documented in his past statements and publications, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to his campaign ever getting off the ground."

Goldwater lost both old and young. His position on social security and medicare, the report says, led to a 13% defection of Republican voters among persons over 50 years old--the G.O.P.'s biggest age-group loss. Even more hurtful to the Republican future was the fact that Goldwater's campaign "alienated most young people" and made the party "an object of ridicule" in their eyes.

* The new party was named at a meeting of 53 men in a small wooden schoolhouse on the Ripon College campus on March 20, 1854. They assembled on a cold night, held their discussion by the light of tallow candles. "We went into the little meeting Whigs, Free Soilers and Democrats," one of their leaders, Alvan E. Bovay, later recalled. "We came out Republicans."

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