The Meaning of Freedom in These United States

Nicholas Buccola is a historian of the United States who will still be read 30-40-50 years from now.  I regret that I will not be here to see where he takes us.  In 2019 he published The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.  This book covered the history leading up to the debate between Baldwin and Buckley at the Cambridge Union in 1965 (worth the hour) when both men were at the height of their powers.  From the PUP link:

The topic (of the debate) was “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it.  Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America’s racial divide today.

In October 2025, Buccola published One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal.  Americans are taught from the cradle that freedom is the one true attribute of the United States, and has been from the beginnings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.  Of course, this elides much of the history of the United States, even while the current administration strives to make America great again by various and sundry pronouncements.  While it can be fairly stated that all history is revisionist, much of it is also in need of remembering.  The long debate at a distance between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barry Goldwater, from the post-war stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s through the presidential campaign of 1964, is as significant as the Baldwin-Buckley Debate, what came before and what came after.  Nicholas Buccola leads a master class once again.

Barry Goldwater  (1909-1998) is an American archetype.  He was born in Arizona Territory three years before Arizona became a state.  His patrimony included Goldwater’s Department Store, which began as a trading post opened by his grandfather in 1860.  It lasted until 1989.  The Goldwater name is now associated with Goldwater’s Foods, which is run by Barry Goldwater’s granddaughter.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLKJr, 1929-1968) is also an American archetype, the son of a Baptist pastor in Atlanta, a graduate of Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminar and subsequently pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  After the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956, he became a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Civil Rights Movement that flourished against considerable opposition from all sides through the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s and beyond.

When Goldwater was asked “What kind of Republican are you,” he replied that he was opposed to “appeasement,” “Communism,” and Communist-inclined sympathizers” while being animated by “the principles of honesty, integrity, devotion, and thrift.”  It necessarily followed in his view that his opponents – New Dealers in Washington DC and Big Labor, particularly in the person of Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers – were not animated by these principles, probably because they were Communist-inclined sympathizers.  This was not true, but it was widely believed.  We should note that principles of “honesty, integrity, devotion, and thrift” do not come with a political label, despite what Senator Goldwater said.

In Goldwater’s view, the “freedom of the individual” is opposed by the power of the federal government.  This individual freedom is supported best by the “freedom of the states” and the “autonomy of local government.  At the same time, the despairing 27-year-old MLKJr heard an inner voice saying as he contemplated life during a long dark night in his kitchen, “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.”  As he put it, “My uncertainty disappeared…I was ready to face anything.”  And he faced a lot through the remainder of his too-short life.

The fight against racism and bigotry is recounted well and with sensitivity in One Man’s Freedom.  All the actors are present as remembered by those of us who were present.  On the one side were the Dixiecrats led by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in the Congress, the John Birch Society of Robert W. Welch, Jr and their erstwhile conservative opponents such as Buckley and Russell Kirk.  On the other side were the leaders of the SCLC, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, including John Lewis); James Farmer [1] of the Congress of Racial Equality, Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph who were forces behind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; and James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964 [2].

The difference between the views of freedom held by Barry Goldwater and MLKJr are distinguished from each other unmistakably in this passage:

Down in Montgomery, King was having his doubts about the soundness of (Barry Goldwater’s) freedom propositions.  Just days after he had revelatory moment in his kitchen – and just feet away from where he communed with God – a bundle of dynamite ripped a large hole in the porch of his home and shattered several windows.

No one was hurt when innocent people were targeted with a bomb, this time.  MLKJr asked that his friends and followers love their enemies.  The Montgomery police commissioner and mayor “joined in his call for peace and pledged to do their part to protect King from extralegal violence in the future.”  Note the use of the term “extralegal.”  As they say, “lather – rinse – repeat” for the next twelve years.  Only three weeks later MLKJr was indicted for entering a conspiracy “for the purpose of hindering the operation of a public transportation system.”  In 1960 he was sent to the infamous Georgia State Prison in Reidsville for an outstanding traffic violation.  This harassment continued at the local, state, and federal levels.  J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI infamously viewed MLKJr as the prime menace threatening America’s freedom, until his murder by the “lone gunman” James Earl Ray Memphis in April 1968.

No one can seriously contest the idea that government should remain as close to the people of the community as possible if it is to be effective, responsive, and responsible.  I was young through the period covered in One Man’s Freedom but nevertheless old enough to have seen and understood the evil that was the Jim Crow South.  For example, everyone was welcome in the independent grocery store that was a mainstay of my neighborhood.  But it had three restrooms at the back of the building – men, women, colored.  Movie theatres and restaurants were segregated.  A close friend from high school had to go to a side window of the Dairy Queen to get her ice cream.  I was at the Recreation Department Pool in the summer of 1964 with my younger brother when the director of the department closed the pool rather than admit Black children.  Local public schools remained thoroughly but not completely segregated through my freshman year of high school, at which point the de jure dual school system finally ceased to exist after sixteen years of “all deliberate speed” since Brown v. Board of Education.

This was evil.  Local and state governments that willfully denied the political/civil rights of up to 50% of their population were illegitimate.  At the 1956 Democratic National Convention King addressed the Platform Committee (before Dwight Eisenhower trampled Adlai Stevenson that November, 457-73, in the antiquated but undead Electoral College):

“States’ Rights are valid only as they serve to protect larger human rights.”  This is not about empowering the federal government to do all things for all people.  This is about empowering the federal government to perform its most essential function.  “Human rights are prior to and therefore more basic than States’ Rights, and whenever human rights are trampled over by States’ Rights, the Federal Government is obligated to intervene for their protection.”  There it was, King had cut to the heart of the matter.

Yes, MLKJr did cut to the heart of the matter.  But there was still a lot of work to do.  Nevertheless, MLKJr was on the cover of Time on February 18, 1957.  Progress.

While reading One Man’s Freedom, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Goldwater and MLKJr were talking past one another in their conceptions of the primary threats to the “common man’s (and woman’s) freedom.”  For Goldwater, “The greatest threat to the common man’s freedom was the public-private partnership that wedded union bosses with Big Government” and threatened the “right to work.” [3]  For MLKJr, “the greatest threat to the common man’s freedom was the public-private partnership that was Jim Crow.  On this public side stood intransigent state and local governments and on the private side stood the millions of people who discriminated based on race and benefited in myriad ways from maintaining racial domination.”

We should also remember that Jim Crow also kept the White man down.  Jim Crow has a strange history, but it was a win-win proposition for States’ Rights partisans and Big Business in the Solid South.  The ultimate goal of business, be it the White Citizen Council (the Ku Klux Klan in business suits and wingtips instead of bedsheets work boots) in the American South or the Business Council/Chamber of Commerce elsewhere, was to keep the working man in his place, whatever the color of his skin.  This has worked exceedingly well from the Civil Rights era into the current Neoliberal Dispensation.  Throughout his first career as a US Senator, Barry Goldwater traveled throughout the South speaking to the Citizens Councils and telling them exactly what they wanted to hear, e.g., Brown v. Board of Education was not based in constitutional law.

While it is true that the anti-poverty programs envisioned by MLKJr were “Big Government” by any measure or definition, they were big projects.  Why should we continue to be beset with such abject poverty in the richest of countries?  This was the question asked then.  It is just as pressing in 2025.

As explained very well in One Man’s Freedom, a common, but hardly convincing, objection to Civil Rights laws was that “You cannot legislate morality.”  Or to put it another way, “You cannot pass a law that will make me like you.”  This is, of course, true, as Barry Goldwater would say with intelligence and conviction (while countless others parroted his words):

But the fundamental issue of our day – the new area into which the (Civil Rights) act of 1964 dangerously treads – is a different one.  It is the issue of unfair discrimination in the private affairs of men.  Here the government can provide no lasting solution.  No law can make one person like another person if he doesn’t want to.

Civil Rights laws were never intended to do anything other than legislate behavior, something laws in the West have done since the early Sixth Century BCE.  MLKJr agreed that the law could not make another man love him or his family, but it could stop the other man from discriminating against him, and much worse, based on the color of his skin.  Although we most assuredly have a long way to go, it can be fairly observed that the Civil Rights laws of the mid-1960s have transformed how people relate to one another, for example, in something as simple and as profound as the perfectly normal interracial couple where in living memory “race-mixing” represented the absolute end of the world in society and politics.  The proscription of evil behavior eventually changed the moral climate.  One Man’s Freedom repeatedly reminds us of this.

It must also be noted that limited government has never really been a chief concern of the Right.  Throughout the ten years leading up to the 1964 presidential election, and since then:

The truth is that Goldwater was really calling for limiting the power of government in some areas while enlarging it in others.  More specifically, his vision called for a return to states’ rights in areas such as civil rights, education, and social welfare, while demanding greater federal power to combat labor unions and prosecute the Cold War. (italics in original)

The long argument between MLKJr and Barry Goldwater, which continues unto today, concerns the idea of liberty, or freedom, as the American Way of Life:

The idea of liberty is at the core of liberalism, which is best understood as a political doctrine that has one overriding aim: the achievement of maximum liberty for all people.  For Goldwater the achievement of this primary liberal goal required a minimal welfare state.  For King, the achievement of this primary liberal goal required a robust welfare state.  For Goldwater, the liberty promised by liberalism was largely a freedom from government interference.  For King, the liberty promised by liberalism had to be understood as a freedom to act in the world, and in order to be so empowered, support from the government was sometimes necessary. (italics in original)

The keyword in the final sentence here is “sometimes.”  After passage of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and the development of an industrial policy that guaranteed “good jobs at a family wage” for all who wanted to work (those who do not want to work at a living wage represent a vanishingly small fraction of society), government support could have been dispensed with, eventually.  But this would have worked only if we did not persist in our all-war-all-the-time mode.  MLKJr warned against this in one of his final addresses in 1968, when his opposition to the Vietnam War had stretched his approval very thin.  He was correct, though.  Alas, we did not listen and this is where we are more than fifty years later, preparing for war against Venezuela because reasons.

Barry Goldwater finally “arrived” and appeared on the cover of time on June 14, 1963, with the banner stating “CANDIDATE WATCHING IN THE G.O.P: Can they find a winner?”  Progress.  In a case of synchronicity, Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy were on the cover the next week with the banner: CIVIL RIGHTS: THE MORAL CRISIS. “It is time to act in all of our daily lives.”  The GOP did not find a winner in 1964, but The Long Southern Strategy [4], which Barry Goldwater foreshadowed as early as his first term in the US Senate ten years before, eventually prevailed with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  That success has persisted as predicted, with no end in sight.

Finally, it is clear that Barry Goldwater was never a bigot or a racist. [5]  Nevertheless, he seemed to willfully ignore his colleagues in the United States Senate who were, beginning with Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.  Senator Goldwater could not see that he was essential to their perpetuation of White Supremacy:

King said Goldwater’s “tragic blindness” manifested itself on civil rights issues and on questions of economic justice by arguing that the senator “does not realize” what his is saying when he chalks up poverty to “low intelligence” and “low ambition.” [6]  From King’s point of view, Goldwater was not a bad man, but he was a morally “blind” one, and for that reason he – and all those who think like him – pose a danger to the realization of freedom for all people.

Perhaps most threatening of all for American conservatives would be the fact that King’s proposal (for a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged) was rooted in a demand we come to terms with our history in ways that would force us to confront not only American racism but also persistent economic exploitation across racial lines.  “While the Negroes form the vast majority of disadvantaged (by percentage if not raw numbers), there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill.”  Black people had been the victims of “the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery,” and “poor whites” were “derivative victims of slavery because the institution drove down the cost of labor.  King was proposing the formation of an interracial coalition to combat systemic injustice.  What could be more threatening to a conservative than that?

Nothing would have been more threatening.  Would the social democracy in Martin Luther King’s dream that was both social and democratic have been a better path?  Yes.  And here is the thing about that.  Rich people, on both the notional Right and notional Left, conservative in protecting their social status above all else, would still have been rich.  The divergence between real wages, which have been stagnant since the mid-1970s, and productivity would have made for a wealthier and more equal society that could have become more democratic rather the current “one dollar-one vote” Citizens United charade in which Tesla granting Elon Musk a trillion-dollar pay package is seriously discussed. [7]

Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. were serious and honorable leaders.  And flawed human beings just like every one of us.  However, one who was there, admittedly as a child, does wonder how things might have turned out but for the tragedy of Dallas on 22 November 1963 that prevented Senator Goldwater and President Kennedy from running a race on principle rather than the politics of the moment (yes, perhaps I am stretching my imagination past reasonable limits), and then followed by the tragedies of Memphis on 4 April 1968 and Los Angeles two months later on 6 June 1968.  The summer I was twelve years old was a miserable time.

Yes, all politics is performative, but there was a time when politics was not only performative.

We live in rich but extremely parlous times for the vast majority.  Nicholas Buccola has published two outstanding books in the past six years, The Fire Is Upon Us and One Man’s Freedom, that explain a large part of our political, social, and cultural failures.  We could use many more historians like him.  I expect to get more out of each upon the second and third readings.

Notes

Furious Minds, from my previous essay, and The Fire Is Upon Us and One Man’s Freedom, are available from Princeton University Press at 30% off with the code PUP30.  And I looked.  Our public library, which I can see from this window, has ordered Furious Minds!  I will suggest the other two.

[1] I was privileged to meet James Farmer at a conference for the like-minded in West Virginia in the summer of 1978.  He is unforgettable.

[2] It should be remembered that Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign a short sixteen years later at the Neshoba County Fair, with States’ Rights as his natural theme.

[3] Right-to-Work laws that allow workers to refuse to pay union dues even when a majority of the workers in a plant have voted for union representation are more accurately called Right-to-Work-for-Less laws.  Still, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is a thing of beauty for conservatives, and is only one of thousands of examples of the Right admirably playing the long game to win, while the notional Left has retreated into identity politics and other assorted performative acts of complete and utter futility.

[4] This is an essential book on American politics since the 1964 presidential election.

[5] It is also true that the Black population of Arizona in 1950 was 25,974 (3.5%), while in Georgia in 1950 the Black population was 1,062,762 (31%).

[6] In the late-1990s an exhibition of Herblock editorial cartoons in the National Portrait Gallery included this cartoon, which has stuck with me for nearly thirty years.  The thumbnail resolution is poor but if enlarged the outline is clear.  Summary: Editorial cartoon shows Barry Goldwater standing in front of a mother with her three children huddled together, sitting on the stoop of a partially opened door to a building in a slum neighborhood.  The caption reads: “If you had any initiative, you’d go out and inherit a department store.” Published on December 6, 1961, in the middle of the period covered in One Man’s Freedom.  Harsh, yes, but of a piece with Goldwater’s reasoning, at the time, and still distressingly common among Liberals of the notional Right and Left (the latter are self-regarding denizens of the Professional Managerial Class, which would be defined by Barbara Ehrenreich more than fifteen years later).  However, had things turned out differently beginning with 22 November 1963, I believe the rational man that was Barry Goldwater would have repudiated his support for the Dixiecrat Way of Life sooner rather than later.  During the debate about “Gays in the Military” in the early-1990s he reminded us that a soldier does not have to be “straight” to serve, s/he only has to learn to shoot straight.  The remnants of the Moral Majority were not pleased.

[7] I have written of this before.  At the high end of the wage scale in the unionized heavy chemical plant that employed me fifty years ago, Relief Operators made an annual wage of $192,088 in current dollars, while at the low end I made $54,185, as a 17-year-old high school graduate.  This included full benefits had I become a permanent employee (defined schedule of 7:30 – 4:00, health insurance, defined benefit pension, on-the-job training while moving up in maintenance to become a machinist or equivalent, three weeks of vacation plus eight other holidays with six weeks after ten years, overtime at time-and-a-half with a minimum of four hours).  Imagine that!  Calculations were made with the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator.