Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

Abraham Lincoln’s party was formed in the 1850s to fight the spread of slavery, and also to fight for something: the ideal that would later be called liberal capitalism—every man making the best for himself through his own hard work, every farmhand aspiring to be a farmer, every factory hand aspiring to own a factory. On this much the Republican homesteaders of the West and the industrialists and artisans in the East could agree. America prospered under Republican rule through the Gilded Age. But the Republicans themselves split. The Easterners desired, and got, high tariff walls that protected their manufactures from foreign competition. The Midwesterners—beholden to the Easterners for credit to buy machinery and finance mortgages, to their railroads to bring their goods to market—wanted free trade. In later years the issues would change. The split endured. As Eastern entrepreneurs became an Eastern Establishment, they came to prefer a settled economic order to a wide-open one; as America became an equal partner with Europe, the Eastern business titans became free-trade internationalists. Their noblesse oblige gave way to a taste for liberal reform. Republicans in the heartland, meanwhile, were protectionist, isolationist, and laissez-faire. Each faction decried the other’s monopoly in party councils. Here, too, both sides were right: Midwesterners sent a powerful obstructionist bloc of conservative congressmen to the Capitol; Wall Streeters got the presidential nominees ...