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

by Rick Perlstein

That was the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men (1946): the story of a rootless man (named Burden) who heals his alienation by filling himself with devotion for a charismatic strongman modeled after Louisiana governor Huey Long, then frees himself over the course of the story from what he increasingly realizes is an existential horror. Warren had Burden exclaim, “There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself.” Teddy White, in The Making of the President 1960, used similar language in pondering a delirious moment at the 1960 Democratic Convention: “If demonstrations and noise alone can sway a national decision at a nerve center of national politics,” he wrote, “then American politics could be reduced to that naked violence that has so frequently and tragically swayed the history of France and Germany.” That the object of the crowd’s roar was hardly führer material—quiet, cerebral Adlai Stevenson—hardly mattered. After Hitler, the crowd’s roar was frightening enough in itself.