Nation: Republicans: Who Are the Goldwaterites?

They wear tennis shoes only on tennis courts. They don’t read Robert Welch or hate Negroes. They aren’t nuclear-bomb throwers, and they don’t write obscene letters to editors who disagree with them. They are reasonably well-educated and informed. They are, in fact, nuts about Barry Goldwater without being nutty in the process.

These are the citizens who make up the great majority of Goldwater’s following. As such, they are the troops in a middle-class revolution that borrows from Populism, has a strong desire to maintain the economic and social advances it has achieved, looks with deep concern at the moral decline of the country, has geographical definitions and strong religious and patriotic overtones. The movement injects a new thrust into U.S. politics; and win, lose or draw in November, that thrust will be felt for a long while.

Goldwater’s nomination was much more than the victory of “a minority within a minority.” It signaled a basic shift in the Republican Party from its power base in the Northeast and Great Lakes states to a Southern-and Western-oriented geographical foundation that spreads from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast.

Impact in Suburbia. The revolution has been a long time brewing. As Cornell Political Scientist Andrew Hacker puts it: “The new conservatism is the result of the democratic process itself; the widening of new opportunities for millions of Americans who have risen to a better location in life and who at all cost want to ensure that they remain there.” Accordingly, many Goldwater admirers are middle-class “haves”—a fact that was obvious in the crowds of well-dressed, well-behaved men and matrons who showed up at receptions for their man all over San Francisco.

The impact of the revolution is most obvious in the burgeoning suburbs of the South and the West that are luring the skilled technicians and the professional men, many of them from farms and from low-income families that traditionally voted Democratic.

The Fed-Up Federation. In a sense, the Goldwaterites belong to what Atlanta Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson calls a “federation of the fed-up.” They are fed up with the portents of economic, social and moral decay they see across the U.S., particularly in its crime-infested cities. They are fed up with big government and big spending, with a bland foreign policy and with America’s failure to use its power abroad.

“Every damned time I turn around,” says Panama City, Fla., Scrap Dealer Joe LeSuer, a disillusioned Democrat, “there’s some federal man in here telling me what I’ve got to do. Hell, I spend 60% of my time making out infernal forms that if I don’t make out they can arrest me for.” To Chicago Industrialist Robert Galvin, chairman of Motorola Inc., it amounts to a resistance to being “averaged down.”

Charles Edison, a former New Jersey Governor, is disgusted with “power centralized in the hands of the Federal Government and with socialism. I am against states being pushed into oblivion. That is what is happening now.” Says Kansas’ Republican Representative Bob Dole: “Goldwater’s victory anchors a party which has been adrift for some years. Now we can, in candor, go out and make speeches for spending cuts and sound conservative principles, certain that we won’t be undercut by the leaders of our party.”

Despite the pollsters, Goldwater’s supporters are convinced that he can win in November. “In my own state, we have thousands of people who haven’t been voting,” says Dr. Durward Hall, chairman of Missouri’s delegation to the G.O.P. Convention. “They’ll vote this time. There is a great grass-roots uprising against the Republican me-too-ers and non-constitutionalists and one-worlders and the foreign press. This fellow Goldwater will sweep the nation.” According to some Goldwaterites, the bulk of the 39 million Americans who failed to vote in 1960 were not lower income citizens who would be Democratically inclined. Instead, they were conservatives who considered both candidates too liberal. “We’ve never been offered a real choice in my lifetime,” said Arlington, Va., Businessman Marvin Toombs, 43. “This is it.”

Part of Goldwater’s appeal is his undeniable personal magnetism. To teenagers his chief attraction may be his image as jet pilot, ham radio operator and driver of a flashy sports car, but his voting-age admirers couch it in more substantial terms—integrity, honesty and courage. Even his quick-draw, shoot-from-the-hip tendency has its defenders. “Truman shot from the hip,” says Virginian Walter Conklin, a magazine production manager. “Kennedy did it against U.S. Steel. I think it’s a very human frailty.”

A Touch of Innocence. Beyond the personal appeal, there is a quality of emotionalism and degree of loyalty among Goldwater’s supporters that is rare in U.S. politics. A measure of the loyalty is the fact that 40% of the $2,750,000 he raised for his pre-convention campaign came from some 400,000 “grassroots givers” who kicked in $10 or less apiece. The emotionalism was obvious in the wild cheers that greeted every mention of Barry’s name in the Cow Palace. And, in a far different way, it was manifest in jeers for Nelson Rockefeller as he spoke to the convention. These were not so much for the man or what he was saying as for what he symbolized—the urban Eastern “Establishment,” the Eastern press and the Eastern cash that have dominated the G.O.P. for generations.

There is a touch of innocence and naiveté in the Goldwater movement, but there is also great pride and determination. And perhaps Mrs. Eleanor Ring of San Diego, widow of a Navy admiral and an alternate delegate to last week’s convention, summed it up best when she said: “What’s happened here is a real revolution. We aren’t a bunch of extremists. All we are is a fast-growing group of people interested in law and order.”