DNC, 1952–1960: The Liberalization of the Democratic Party

In the eight years in which Democrats were locked out of the White House, the DNC focused (in the words of DNC chairman Stephen Mitchell [1952–1955]) on “broadening our Party and reviving it where necessary with new ideas and new leaders.”Footnote ³⁴ In the wake of the 1952 election, Democratic leaders identified a lack of national party publicity as a key concern moving forward. For example, Stephen Spingarn (an aide to President Harry Truman), in a letter to defeated presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, called for a “strong, resourceful and imaginative leadership at the Democratic National Committee,” as well as “a strong Research Division” and “an equally strong publicity division.”Footnote ³⁵ Spingarn's assessment was broadly shared in the party, and in January 1953 Mitchell announced that the DNC would operate its “public affairs activities—publicity, research, speaker's bureau—at campaign tempo”Footnote ³⁶ throughout the Eisenhower years. A newly organized Public Affairs division became particularly active and—aside from releasing a constant stream of press releases—introduced a variety of new approaches to inform voters on the Democratic Party's positions throughout the 1950s.

The most notable of these concerned a new monthly magazine: the Democratic Digest. While a publication with the same name had existed previously, the Digest introduced in May 1953 was fundamentally different from anything previously produced by a national committee of either party. With the new Digest available through subscription services and on newsstands at 25 cents per issue, the national committee now communicated directly—without interference of the media or even Democratic elected officials—with Democratic voters. The Digest was under the editorial control of the DNC, which meant it could engage any issue it believed was central to the party's national agenda. The Digest was thus presented as “the voice of the Democratic party,”Footnote ³⁷ with its principle task identifying “the campaign issues for the party and [projecting] them in terms easy for the public to understand.”Footnote ³⁸

In the assessment of political scientist Roger H. Marz, writing in 1957, the Digest was “an essentially new form of activity in the American party arena.”Footnote ³⁹ The Digest had a successful early launch, with 20,000 subscribers before the first issue was published, and a run of 100,000 copies per issue.Footnote ⁴⁰ Newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune regularly reported on articles published in the Digest.Footnote ⁴¹ Clayton Fritchey, who served as the Digest's first editor, in 1954 argued that the magazine was followed “by editors and publishers, by columnists and commentators, by political writers, educators, clergymen, civic leaders, lecturers, by the producers of radio and TV forums which have audiences in the millions.”Footnote ⁴² The DNC also actively pushed news organizations to cover what the Digest published: Fritchey, in April 1953, described how “when one of the news services failed to carry a story on the issue of the Democratic Digest a few days ago, when it came out, we got in touch with friendly publishers. They brought pressure to bear and we had the story out to 2,000 more papers than it would have gone out to otherwise.”Footnote ⁴³

Throughout the 1950s, the division between Southern conservatives and Northern liberals within the Democratic Party provided crucial context to the strategic choices the DNC made. In the wake of the 1952 defeat, the DNC attempted to placate Southern Democrats by relying on a “unity” approach. This meant that the party image the DNC promoted during the first Eisenhower administration was designed to be nonoffensive to Southern Democrats. For example, in campaign materials for the 1954 midterm elections, the DNC attacked the Republican Party by focusing on the economic downturn and negative campaign tactics by “Old Guard” Republicans in Congress and Vice President Richard Nixon.Footnote ⁴⁴ The DNC also countered Senator Joe McCarthy's (R-WI) ongoing attacks on (perceived) communist influences in the Democratic Party.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the same time, the committee carefully avoided issues related to civil rights.Footnote ⁴⁶

After the 1954 midterms, Mitchell resigned to focus on assisting Stevenson in winning the presidential nomination. Paul Butler, Mitchell's replacement, continued to invest in branding programs while maintaining the “unity” approach. During his acceptance speech, Butler pledged that he was “against any sectionalization of our Party by any issue, activity or any proceeding” and would “serve the Party and all members of the Party, all sections of our Country, with the same degree of understanding and appreciation of their problems in their local areas as they certainly are entitled to at all times.”Footnote ⁴⁷

After the 1956 election, however, the DNC radically adjusted the party image it promoted. While Democrats managed to retain their slim majorities in Congress despite Stevenson's second landslide loss to Eisenhower, liberals in the party were concerned by the “large-scale defections of Negroes and laborers from the Democratic fold.”Footnote ⁴⁸ More generally, liberals were frustrated that Southern Democrats had control over the congressional agenda due to the pro-Southern bias inherent in the seniority system.Footnote ⁴⁹ The result was that conservatives managed to veto the creation of a liberal national Democratic brand in Congress.

In late November 1956, during a meeting of the DNC's executive committee, liberals voiced their dismay that Republicans could start outperforming Democrats on civil rights and their concern on how this would affect Democrats in future elections.Footnote ⁵⁰ During this meeting the liberals also expressed their frustration at being unable to produce an alternative liberal Democratic brand to counter the conservative image outside of the South. DNC member and mayor of Pittsburgh David Lawrence argued that the dominance of Southerners in Congress had made it impossible for Democrats in the North to connect with black and union voters:

To help solve this problem, the DNC voted to create a new party institution, the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC). The DAC consisted of party leaders inside and outside of Congress, chaired by Butler, and the DNC decided it would have the power to set policy positions for the Democratic Party as a national body. The DNC created the DAC with the purpose of countering the regional Southern congressional Democratic brand with a national liberal one to ensure that Democrats outside of the South could reconnect with black and union voters. Southern members of the executive committee abstained in protest.Footnote ⁵² In the press release announcing the DAC, the DNC stressed the importance of a national brand, describing the new party institution as being “a vehicle for rallying national support behind constructive programs and organizing and giving voice to opposition to unwise programs which ill-serve the national interest.”Footnote ⁵³ The Washington Post’s assessment of the DAC was that “the National Committee in the past had seldom exercised such a voice”Footnote ⁵⁴ and that the creation of the council represented a major expansion of DNC power.Footnote ⁵⁵

In early December 1956, Butler announced a preliminary list of proposed DAC members: party elders such as Harry Truman, Stevenson, and Eleanor Roosevelt were joined on this list by congressional leaders such as Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-TX), Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-TX), and House Majority Whip Carl Albert (D-OK). Additionally, liberals such as senators Hubert Humphrey (D-MN), Mike Mansfield (D-MT), and John F. Kennedy (D-MA), and governors Averell Harriman (D-NY) and G. Mennen Williams (D-MI) were included. However, all of the members of the Democratic congressional leadership rejected Butler's invitation—a protest move liberals in the DNC had expected.Footnote ⁵⁶ In selecting the other members, Butler ensured that the DAC would be dominated by liberals, with even the Southern members identified as progressives.Footnote ⁵⁷ The DAC's steering commission—consisting of five members involved in the day-to-day planning of the new commission—included only one Southerner, while the other members (Stevenson, Harriman, Williams, and California DNC member Paul Ziffren) were all outspoken liberals.Footnote ⁵⁸

The DAC immediately came out in strong support of civil rights and called on Democrats in Congress to “redeem party pledges by supporting civil rights legislations” and for “legislation to end discrimination of all kinds.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The DAC also criticized the Eisenhower administration for its failure to stand up to Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus (a Democrat) in the Little Rock school controversy and passed a resolution criticizing antilabor right-to-work legislation—a rebuke of Senator John L. McClellan (D-AR), who had attempted to include a right-to-work amendment as a poison pill to the 1957 civil rights bill.Footnote ⁶⁰

Butler also became a vocal supporter of civil rights and an equally vocal critic of Southern Democrats. This represented a major departure for the chairman: Prior to the 1956 election, Butler had carefully avoided alienating the Southern Democrats and had argued that segregation should not be a core concern for the national Democratic Party.Footnote ⁶¹ Even the brutal murder of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old boy from Chicago lynched by a mob in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman while visiting his family—could not move Butler from this “party unity” position. Despite pleas by local Democratic organizations across the country, the NAACP, Rep. James Roosevelt (D-CA), and California DNC member Paul Ziffren for Butler to merely call for a fair trial of Till's murderers,Footnote ⁶² the DNC chair refused, stating that he could not interfere publicly because he was “Chairman of all Democrats, white and Negro, North and South.”Footnote ⁶³

However, the 1956 election altered Butler's thinking in this regard. His own analysis of the election results stressed Eisenhower's success among black, Catholic, and union voters—all traditionally reliable Democratic voting groups that were now turning away from the party.Footnote ⁶⁴ Butler thus began criticizing Southern Democrats for their lack of support for civil rights. In September 1958, Butler called out Governors Faubus, James Almond (D-VA), and Marvin Griffin (D-GA) for their failure to implement civil rights reforms, stating that these Southern Democrats did “not represent the position of the Democratic Party.”Footnote ⁶⁵ During a TV interview a month before the 1958 midterms, Butler went even further, telling Southern Democrats that “if they did not like the party's official stand in favor of integration they could find asylum either with the Republicans or in a third political party.”Footnote ⁶⁶

The 1958 midterm results strengthened the liberals' conviction that the party's move to the left was paying off. In both the House and Senate, the class of 1958 represented an important first wave of newly elected liberals. In the House, the “large influx of northern liberal Democrats”Footnote ⁶⁷ inspired the creation of the Democratic Study Group, which would go on to push for increased power for the party leadership at the expense of the seniority system. In the Senate, the class of 1958 included liberals such as Edmund Muskie (D-ME), Philip Hart (D-MI), and Eugene McCarthy (D-MN). As Sinclair has noted, these “new Democratic senators differed from their senior party colleagues in region of origin, ideological proclivities, and electoral security” and were a “markedly liberal group.”Footnote ⁶⁸

As Eric Schickler has shown, the DNC was not alone in calling for the liberalization of the national Democratic Party in this period. Indeed, many Democratic state party organizations embraced civil rights in the 1950s, and liberals in Congress began to organize to push for civil rights legislation after the 1956 election.Footnote ⁶⁹ Still, Democratic congressional leaders—most notably Rayburn and Johnson—strongly opposed the DNC's actions. For example, Rayburn, speaking in February 1959, warned that he had “no patience with people who claim to be Democrats who say they want to run other people who claim to be Democrats out of the party.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Other Southern Democrats also expressed their frustrations with the DNC's attempts at liberalizing the Democratic image. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) cautioned Butler in a personal letter that “if we hope to be victorious next year, we should and we must adopt unity as our watchword,” and reminded the chairman that if the Democrats would “[seek] to cast out all of the liberals, or, conversely, all of the conservatives, then it will cease to be the Democratic Party.”Footnote ⁷¹ Senator Spessard Holland (D-FL) advised Butler that “the great bulk of our members are distinctly out of sympathy with the pronouncements of the Advisory Council which seems to be running directly counter to the efforts of the leadership and the majority of the Democrats in both Senate and House.”Footnote ⁷² Other Southerners vowed to repeat their 1948 bolt during the 1960 convention and to free their presidential electors to vote against the Democratic ticket and turn a potentially close 1960 presidential election to the House of Representatives.Footnote ⁷³

These protests of congressional leaders and Southern Democrats did little to slow down the DNC-DAC's attempts to rebrand the Democratic Party as a liberal national party. In 1960, the DAC introduced a new subcommittee on civil rights chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt to draft a civil rights plank for the 1960 convention. The subcommittee called for Democrats in Congress to go “squarely on record as opposed to racial segregation in public schools” and “to enact additional laws to protect … rights of American citizens to register and vote free of discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Despite protests from Southern members of the DAC and Southern Democrats in Congress, the convention incorporated the DAC's civil rights proposal into the party platform. The DNC's push for a liberal brand, in James Sundquist's analysis, was therefore fundamental in signaling to voters that neither the “moderation” of Johnson and Rayburn, nor the “outright defiance” of Southern Democrats was the “Democratic party's position.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Throughout the 1950s, the DNC invested in new publicity programs to help produce an image that could improve the party's electoral performance. However, with the committee lacking presidential control, the type of brand the party promoted depended upon who controlled the DNC. After the 1952 election, Mitchell believed the key to improving the party's performance was in presenting a “unity” image aimed at reincorporating Southern voters frustrated with the Democratic Party's early support for civil rights under Truman. This strategy, however, alienated other groups in the Democratic coalition—most notably blacks and union members. Thus, after the 1956 election, Butler and other liberals in the party changed their strategy: While still relying on (new) branding activities, the DNC now used its publicity division and the DAC to promote a liberal party brand.Footnote ⁷⁶ The DNC's focus on publicity in this period continued despite Democratic successes in congressional elections in the 1954 midterms and beyond. That is, as long as Democrats did not control all branches of government, the national party organization continued to expand its publicity programs.

RNC, 1961–1968: Moderates versus Conservatives

Like Democrats after the 1952 elections, Republican Party leaders looked to their national committee after Nixon's 1960 loss. While the GOP was divided between moderates—predominantly Northeastern Republicans, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY)—and conservatives—such as Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)—members of both wings of the GOP agreed that the RNC should be in charge of creating a new national image. Goldwater argued that the RNC should “re-establish itself to its rightful positon as the governing body of the Party.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, Rockefeller argued that “the actual agency heading the Party in the next four years”Footnote ⁷⁸ should be the national committee.

But such a consensus was missing when it came to identifying what image the RNC should promulgate and which voting groups it should target. Moderates believed the 1960 loss was a result of the party's dismal performance in major cities among black and ethnic voters. Senator Thruston Morton (R-KY), Richard Nixon's selection as RNC chair during the 1960 campaign, concluded that “when you lose in the cities by 1.8 [million votes] and you lose an election by 112,000 clearly we have a job in certain metropolitan areas.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast, conservatives contended the lack of a consistent conservative party brand and the strategic failure of not focusing on the South caused Nixon's defeat.Footnote ⁸⁰ In particular, conservatives noted that the Republicans' poor performance in Congress was a direct result of Democratic domination of the South: Break the solid South, conservatives argued, and the GOP could win presidential elections and majorities in Congress.

With Morton as chairman, the RNC initially followed the moderates' prescription and created a fourteen-member committee to improve the Republican performance in big cities.Footnote ⁸¹ However, Morton announced his resignation in the spring of 1961 to focus on his own reelection in 1962. In the race to replace Morton, two main candidates competed: Ohio GOP chairman Ray Bliss—generally seen as a moderate—and Congressman William E. Miller (R-NY), who was also the chairman of the GOP national congressional committee.Footnote ⁸² While there were concerns from some Republicans that Miller's “views were too conservative and that the party needed a full-time chairman,”Footnote ⁸³ Bliss withdrew his nomination days before the vote. This left no other candidate, and the RNC membership elected Miller unanimously.Footnote ⁸⁴ Among Miller's first projects as chairman was to propose major investments in the RNC's public relations division. Speaking at an RNC meeting in January 1962, Miller argued:

Miller connected the need for such publicity programs to the GOP's national status, noting that “we are a minority party. We do not have the White House. We are not in control of the House or Senate.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Other party leaders and advisors agreed; in a presentation to the RNC in January 1962, advertising executive Duke Burgess advised the committee that “now is the time to create a public image of the word ‘Republican’. … Now is the time to sell the resurgent Republican Party. It will cost far less now; it is easier to sell now.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The RNC followed this advice and dedicated a considerable part of its budget to publicity: In 1962, the divisions that made up the RNC's publicity arm received 33.3 percent of its monthly operating budget.Footnote ⁸⁸ The RNC used these funds to produce a biweekly publication, Battle Line, sent to 100,000 subscribers; speech kits for Republican candidates; and Ratio, a weekly radio program broadcast via independent and small affiliate radio stations that lacked correspondents in Washington, DC.Footnote ⁸⁹

However, the type of voting groups the committee targeted changed. To be sure, the RNC did not abandon black and ethnic voters in big cities entirely.Footnote ⁹⁰ In January 1962, the RNC approved a six-point plan to recruit black leaders, increase organization activities in states with a large black population, and recruit black women to work for the party in their communities. Additionally, the RNC planned to reach out more regularly through black-owned media. Finally, the committee also produced more publicity materials aimed at foreign-language newspapers and radio stations.Footnote ⁹¹ Still, under Miller the committee downgraded expectations considerably. Miller believed a small improvement among black voters would be enough—noting in a 1963 press conference that “all we need to do is get a fair percentage of the votes. If we get 25 or 30 per cent of the vote in Philadelphia we can carry Pennsylvania.”Footnote ⁹²

Miller was far more concerned that the party improve its performance in the South since, as Klinkner argues, he “knew that the Republicans' only chance to capture the House was to win seats in the South and that a big city strategy offered no such hope.”Footnote ⁹³ Miller noted the surprise victory of Texas senatorial candidate John Tower in the race to win Lyndon Johnson's old Senate seat in 1961 and saw it as evidence that the GOP could indeed make the South competitive. While the Republican Party had largely abandoned the South to the Democratic Party after Reconstruction,Footnote ⁹⁴ the Democratic Party's shift toward civil rights in the late 1940s and ’50s, combined with Eisenhower's successes there in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, presented the party with the potential of breaking up the solid South. In 1957, the RNC created its Southern Division—known as Operation Dixie—with the objective of “[laying] an organizational foundation”Footnote ⁹⁵ for the GOP in the South. However, the Little Rock school integration crisis of September 1957 limited the GOP's ability to take advantage of the Democratic Party's initial moves to embracing civil rights. Still, conservatives in the GOP remained convinced that the path to both presidential and congressional majorities led through the South.Footnote ⁹⁶

As a result, under Miller the RNC expanded its Southern strategy considerably. A large element of this expansion included using the committee's publicity division to target Southern white voters and push a conservative party brand aimed at convincing them to switch their allegiance. Operation Dixie was a crucial element in the RNC's strategy during the 1962 midterm campaign, and Southern expenditures represented a considerable part of the RNC's budget (see Table 4). In April 1962, the RNC began producing The Republican Southern Challenge, a newsletter aimed at Southern whites. By 1964, the newsletter had become a monthly publication with a distribution list of 39,000 people, which “emphasized ‘conservatism,’ and … pushed hard for a two-party system in the South.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Additionally, the RNC ran ads in Southern newspapers and magazines criticizing the Democratic Party for neglecting Southern needs.Footnote ⁹⁸

Table 4.

RNC Campaign Division Expenditures, 1962

Source: Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956–1993 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 59.

The RNC believed these investments paid off: During the 1962 midterms, Republicans performed well in the South—gaining five new House seats in the former Confederacy.Footnote ⁹⁹ In its analysis of the midterm results, the RNC's research division concluded that “the most impressive aspect of the 1962 election was the sharp increase in Republican strength in the South,” noting a popular vote increase of 243.8 percent there in comparison to the 1958 midterms.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the first RNC meeting following the 1962 midterms, Miller strongly defended all party-building elements of Operation Dixie, boasting that “we worked to find good candidates, and we provided the money—more than a quarter of a million dollars—to help them get started, as well as supporting them with tailor-made campaign materials. You have seen the results.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Given these results, the RNC ramped up its Southern strategy and approved a “massive 1964 GOP assault on Democratic strongholds in the segregationist South.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Still, Operation Dixie was controversial among moderates in the party because under Miller, it backed Republican candidates who supported segregation.Footnote ¹⁰³ Former RNC chairman Meade Alcorn later recalled that the conservatives attempted to convert the RNC's Operation Dixie “into a lily-white Republican organization.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At the time, Republican moderates openly criticized Miller and the RNC for their appeal to white Southern segregationists. Advance, the magazine of the Young Republican organization, criticized the GOP for supporting segregationist candidates in the South, and Senator Kenneth Keating (R-NY) warned that the Republicans would be “forever a minority party” if they were to adopt segregationist policies in their effort to win in the South.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) warned that the party faced “permanent minority status as the result of negativism” unless it embraced “its Lincolnian tradition.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In contrast, conservatives in the party believed that—as the Washington Post summarized their views—“the Republicans are impractical fools to worry about the Northern Negro voters, because nothing will tempt the Negroes from their solid Democratic allegiance.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Miller remained steadfast in his support of the Southern strategy, arguing that “our successes in the South need no apology. They are the product of hard and intelligent efforts on the part of people dedicated to the Republican principle of freedom and sound government.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus, instead of prioritizing black voter outreach in major cities, the RNC continued to engage white voters in the South.

Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign complemented the RNC's strategy well.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In June, days after narrowly defeating Rockefeller in the California primary, Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While Republicans had been pivotal in the passage of the bill in both the House and Senate, Goldwater's opposition meant that “the credit—even the glory—that the Republican Party should have enjoyed” for supporting it “was effectively negated.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Goldwater's stance carried over to the Republican convention and the general election campaign in an attempt to recruit Southern whites. During the convention, Goldwater successfully demanded that the party abandon a proposed plank confirming that the Civil Rights Act was constitutional and stated that no person “should violate the rights of some in order to further the rights of others.”Footnote ¹¹¹ During the general election campaign, Goldwater and the RNC—now under the chairmanship of Goldwater's aide Dean BurchFootnote ¹¹²—embraced Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who switched his party identification to Republican.Footnote ¹¹³

The Southern strategy of the RNC and the Goldwater campaign resulted in one of the largest defeats in Republican Party history—with LBJ receiving slightly more than 61 percent of the popular vote.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moderates saw in the 1964 defeat evidence that the Southern strategy as applied by Goldwater, Miller, and Burch, had backfired. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) blamed the 1964 loss squarely on the RNC's publicity programs, arguing that “we failed to present a clear-cut image and sell it to the voters. … It was the fault of those whose business it was to project the true Republican image. It was the national committee's business and it flubbed the job.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

After the 1964 elections, moderates in the RNC used the defeat to force Burch to resign as chairman and replaced him with Ray Bliss, the chair of the Republican Party in Ohio. The change in leadership did not affect the broader committee publicity strategy. Bliss—like Miller and Burch before him—announced that the RNC would run “a 12-month a year, 24-hour a day” permanent election campaign.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The RNC requested a budget of $4.6 million for 1965, the bulk of which it spent on advertising ($3.5 million)—an extraordinary investment in party brand building for a nonelection year.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Additionally, the RNC created the Republican Coordinating Committee (RCC)—a new party institution inspired by the DAC.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Throughout the Bliss years, publicity spending not only continued to increase, but it also made up a larger part of the RNC's total budget, peaking at 41 percent of all RNC expenses in 1967 (see Table 5).

Table 5.

RNC Publicity Expenses, 1965–1968

Source: Ray C. Bliss Papers, Ohio Historical Society, series 2, subseries 2, box 79, folder 20; box 121, folder 8.

Under Bliss, the RNC initiated several major national publicity projects. Most notably, the radio program introduced under Miller was renamed Comment and was expanded from 170 radio stations in 1965 to 2,000 by 1968—one-third of all stations in the United States.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Comment consisted of a five-minute radio spot that stations could either play in its entirety or split up and use as separate clips in their news reporting. RNC Director of Public Relations Fred Morrison argued the format allowed the national party to “give the greatest possible impact to [issues] which the leaders of the party are attempting to drive home on a national scale.”Footnote ¹²⁰ By 1968, based on the RNC's own figures, 1,600 stations that received the material used parts of it, and 400 played the entire program each week.Footnote ¹²¹ In 1967, the RNC also introduced a television version of Comment, and by February 1968, 42 percent of all TV stations received the weekly program.Footnote ¹²²

While Bliss's image was one of an organizer interested in nuts and bolts politics rather than ideology, the new RNC chair fell on the moderate side of the party split. Within weeks of taking office, Bliss fired a number of Goldwater-era appointees and replaced them with moderates.Footnote ¹²³ Similar hires occurred throughout Bliss's term in office, with (Southern) conservatives frequently passed over in favor of moderate Republicans.Footnote ¹²⁴ Under Bliss's leadership, the RNC also began providing financial support to the Republican Governors Association, then the center of moderate Republican power, by paying for full-time national headquarters for the organization in Washington, DC, and providing moderate Republicans with more direct influence in the national party.Footnote ¹²⁵

The RNC also refocused its attention on black voters in major cities. In February 1966, the committee announced a major new push for black votes, with Bliss appointing an advisory committee consisting of twelve black Republican leaders. The committee was to help Bliss “prepare a program to strengthen Republican support among Negroes.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Bliss hired a special assistant—Clarence Lee Townes Jr.—and three additional black staff members to help “recruit Republican voters among the nation's Negro population.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In December 1966, the RNC announced Junius Griffin, an aide to Martin Luther King, had joined the RNC to further assist it in connecting with black voters. As an RNC staffer, Griffin advised Republican candidates such as John L. Waner—the GOP candidate in the Chicago mayoral election of 1967.Footnote ¹²⁸ With national black Republican support up in 1966 (19 percent of the vote compared with 13 percent in 1964), Townes and the RNC set their goal for 1968 at 30 percent.Footnote ¹²⁹

The RCC, under Bliss's leadership, also attempted to “moderate the party's image.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Like the DAC before it, the RCC produced a considerable number of policy papers supporting moderate policy issues on topics such as transportation, metropolitan planning, water pollution, poverty, aid for the elderly, and strengthening the United Nations. The positions the RCC took deviated from those taken in 1964. For example, the RCC embraced civil rights legislation and called on all Republicans to “reject membership in any radical or extremist organization.”Footnote ¹³¹ As Mary Brennan has noted, “eliminating the extremist blemish on the party was central to the new image Republicans tried to create.”Footnote ¹³² By having an RNC-controlled party organization signal to the broader electorate that the period of extreme conservative domination was over, Bliss and other moderates hoped to rebrand the GOP as a right-of-center party that could be trusted with control of government again. Bliss, speaking during a January 1967 RNC meeting, praised the RCC for helping the public understand “the general direction of movement of our party” and for producing “an image … around it. So we received tremendous publicity and more and more the papers are starting to pick up and review our papers and editorialize on them.”Footnote ¹³³

Much like the DNC in the 1950s, the RNC thus responded to its minority status by engaging in a variety of publicity programs to expand the party's voting coalition. These programs saw major financial investments and were a priority to the party leadership. However, the groups that were targeted depended on the wing of the party in control of the committee. Under the leadership of conservatives Miller and Burch, the RNC focused on convincing white Southerners to join the GOP. After 1964, under control of moderate chairman Bliss, tactics changed, and the RNC instead targeted black voters in major cities. The RNC had the freedom to take positions in intraparty conflict: Depending on the wing of the party that held the chairmanship, the specific type of image it promoted shifted from conservative to moderate.

DNC, 1960–1968: Committee Decline under Kennedy and Johnson

After the Kennedy-Johnson ticket won a tight victory in 1960, Kennedy named John M. Bailey chair of the DNC. Bailey remained chair throughout both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The DNC's role receded immediately upon the party's shift to national majority status. In the weeks after the election, the DNC began a process of “retrenchment,” in which staff members were fired and programs cut.Footnote ¹³⁴ The DNC terminated the Digest as a party magazine in mid-November 1960. Attempts at continuing the magazine independently produced only a celebratory issue surrounding the Kennedy inauguration in January 1961.Footnote ¹³⁵ The DNC also ended the DAC. Newspapers reported that JFK planned “a quiet death” for the institution that had “served to emphasize the deep liberal-conservative split within the party,”Footnote ¹³⁶ and the DNC announced the official end of the DAC in March 1961. Bailey acknowledged that the DAC had “served a function” while the party was out of the White House, but now that the Democrats restored their national majority, he argued that “policy should be made at the White House and by the leadership of Congress.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Of course, winning the presidential election did not end the intraparty conflict that had divided Democrats in the 1950s. With the committee under presidential control, the DNC now used its sparse remaining propaganda tools to promote the administration's policies—specifically through a new program called Operation Support. Active mostly in 1961 and 1962, Operation Support was built around assisting the Kennedy administration. For example, the DNC sent information on administration-supported bills in Congress to local party organizations in districts of members who opposed the plans.Footnote ¹³⁸ Additionally, the DNC organized several conferences across the country at which Kennedy administration officials explained their policy positions to local Democrats. In 1963, the DNC used Operation Support to support Kennedy's proposed tax cut plan.Footnote ¹³⁹ But the program was short lived: After JFK's death in 1963, Operation Support activities ended as well.

Beyond the restricted scope of Operation Support the DNC's ambitions were limited throughout the Kennedy and Johnson years. Early attempts by Bailey to reorganize the DNC fizzled out. Additionally, while the DNC provided some advice to black and Latino action groups, it did not actively organize voter registration drives. Contrary to Butler in the 1950s, Bailey was “careful not to antagonize southern Democratic politicians and state committees”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ that remained supportive of Jim Crow.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bailey and the DNC staff instead “tried their best to avoid favoring one faction or candidate over another in intraparty disputes within the states.”Footnote ¹⁴² This was hardly surprising. As Arthur Krock wrote in the New York Times immediately after the election, the 1960 results indicated that Kennedy “and the ‘liberal’ non-Southern party majority that nominated him on a platform repugnant to the South, are deeply in debt to the Southern leaders”Footnote ¹⁴³ for providing enough Southern electoral votes to win the election.

The DNC did continue to provide other non-publicity-related services, most notably fundraising. Here, the national committee innovated and created a new set of programs. Under Butler, the DNC had attempted to combine fundraising and grassroots activism. Bailey and DNC treasurer Richard Maguire replaced this project with a more elite system based on membership programs. The approach was wildly successful: By 1963, the DNC had erased its debt from the 1960 campaign.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Still, the committee did not use its fundraising ability to create new (or revitalize old) publicity programs.

After taking office, Johnson further diminished the DNC's nonfundraising activities. While LBJ was successful in pushing through major pieces of legislation that had stalled under Kennedy—including the 1964 Civil Rights Act—he relied on a broad coalition of Democrats and Republicans to do so. At the same time, LBJ attempted to placate (conservative) Democrats on other policy issues. A publicity-centered DNC would not serve either purpose, since “LBJ perceived a strong, national party organization with regular publicity … activities emphasizing partisan differences to be a threat to the suprapartisan, centrist consensus that he wanted to develop for his presidency.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ After the massive Democratic success in the 1964 presidential and congressional elections, the DNC's activities were further limited. With a considerable campaign debt, LBJ ordered Bailey to fire 30 percent of the DNC's regular staff.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The cuts meant that the already limited services the DNC provided were “savagely reduced.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ For example, the DNC cut the number of telephone lines members of Congress used to record messages for radio stations in their district. As a result, “members with something timely to say find that their recorded statements, which the Committee is supposed to deliver to home-town radio stations, often can't be recorded until it's too late.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Anonymous Democratic Party leaders and the media described the state of the DNC under Johnson as “absolutely disgusting,” “sharply curtailed,” and “a skeleton organization.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

In the wake of the 1966 midterm elections—in which Democrats lost forty-seven seats in the House and three in the Senate—and under pressure from Democratic governors and members of Congress, Johnson ordered Bailey to begin expanding the DNC's operations again. However, even then the DNC remained mostly invisible.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Not until 1968—when the combination of Vietnam, race riots, and challenges from, first, Eugene McCarthy and later Robert Kennedy in the 1968 presidential primaries began to scuttle the LBJ presidency—did the DNC take on a role publicizing issues again. At a set of regional meetings in early 1968, Johnson administration officials and other Democratic leaders (such as former DNC chair James Farley) deflected criticism on the Vietnam War and other issues. The DNC also produced a set of pamphlets defending the administration and distributed them among party activists.Footnote ¹⁵¹ However, after LBJ announced his intention not to run for reelection, the DNC ended all major fundraising efforts and public conferences until the national convention.Footnote ¹⁵²

The DNC's limited activities during the Kennedy-Johnson presidencies follow the expectations outlined in the brand theory. There was a major decline in national committee activities after the 1960 election, and this decline persisted throughout both the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. At the same time, though, the DNC did not go out of business entirely: Its fundraising apparatus was remodeled and effective. The Democrats also did not cease their campaign activities in the midterm elections of 1962 and 1966 or the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968. Yet, the type of publicity activities that the DNC had invested in during the Eisenhower administration mostly disappeared. Most notably, the Digest and DAC both ended around the time of Kennedy's inauguration, and the DNC largely remained out of intraparty debates about policy and did not engage in any major branding programs.

RNC, 1968–1976: Ongoing Activities under Minority Presidencies

The 1968 election produced a mixed result for the Republican Party: While Richard Nixon won a close presidential election against Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, Democrats maintained control of both the House and Senate. Four years later, Nixon won reelection in an unprecedented landslide, but Democrats again retained their majorities in Congress. Therefore, while Republicans controlled the White House between 1968 and 1976, they were not the national majority party. Thus, the RNC continued to invest in (new) publicity programs under Nixon. Immediately after the 1968 election, Nixon's advisor Herbert G. Klein appeared on Face the Nation and announced that Nixon intended to “develop the Republican Party into a stronger political entity.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Part of this project was an active publicity role for the RNC, and Nixon decided to replace Bliss as chairman—preferring “an issue-oriented man” as the “chief Republican spokesman during a period when the party needs promotion rather than consolidation.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rogers Morton, Bliss's replacement, was acutely aware of the GOP's party status—noting that to shed its “role as a minority party” Republicans would have to become “massively involved with millions of young people, with millions of poor people, with American Indians, with national and ethnic groups, farmers, senior citizens, and city folk.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

With the committee under control of the White House, the image it promulgated was inherently linked to its president. During his 1968 campaign, Nixon had relied on a “Southern strategy.” However, in contrast to Goldwater, Miller, and Burch, Nixon repudiated segregation itself while trying to court Southerners by stressing “law and order, reform of the welfare state, and the promise of a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ During the first years of the Nixon administration, the White House and RNC attempted to combine Nixon's personal Southern strategy with the RNC's outreach to black voters. For example, Nixon advisor Harry Dent asked the RNC to “intensify [its] efforts to enlist Negro leaders and, in fact, develop Negro leaders to work for our Party” by hiring “part-time workers all through the South.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Under Morton, the committee attempted to bring in new voting groups by improving the party's campaign apparatus through the Mission ’70s Party Organization Program—intended to coordinate the campaign efforts of county, state, and national party organizations.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The RNC also used the president himself to promote the party. In 1970, the RNC produced a major new promotional film, Setting the Course, with behind-the-scenes footage of Nixon's first year in office.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Nixon replaced Morton after the disappointing midterm elections of 1970, believing the RNC needed a chairman who would attack Democrats more aggressively. For this purpose, Nixon selected Senator Bob Dole (R-KS). Newspapers interpreted the selection of Dole as an attempt by the administration to name a new “major spokesman for the party.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Dole indeed became a much more visible chairman than Morton, attacking antiwar Democrats and the media for their criticism of Nixon's Vietnam policies.Footnote ¹⁶¹ After the 1970 election, the RNC aimed, in the assessment of RNC Vice Chairman Thomas Evans, to use its publicity tools to “provide Republican leaders … with ammunition with which to speak up for the President”Footnote ¹⁶² and to “get the story of Republican accomplishments out all over America.”Footnote ¹⁶³ The core communication tool the RNC relied on in this regard was Monday, a weekly publication distributed to Republican Party members and reporters that produced headlines in part through its attacks on (potential) 1972 Democratic presidential candidates—including Edmund Muskie, George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The publication was distributed to 285,000 recipients each week by the summer of 1973.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Additionally, the RNC produced and distributed over 3,000 video clips for use by television stations.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Nixon's president-centered approach to party building helped win his own major reelection victory in 1972, but produced limited success for the Republican Party as a whole. While Republicans won some House seats, they lost seats in the Senate. In Dole's view, the 1972 election was therefore “sort of a standoff” since “after you take the President's personal landslide, there wasn't any landslide at all.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Dole consequently concluded that the RNC did not have the luxury to “go underground” and would have to “continue a full-time operation aimed at winning the support of disaffected Democrats, primarily blue-collar workers and ethnics who voted for President Nixon, and concentrate on the 1974 election.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Nixon, now safely reelected, also refocused his attention on helping the Republican Party achieve national majority status, but he believed this required yet another new chairman and replaced Dole with George H. W. Bush, then ambassador to the United Nations.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Under Bush, the RNC began organizing “New Majority Workshops”—which were intended to train party activists to help ensure that the voters “who came over to us in such great numbers in support of President Nixon”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ in 1972 would vote in congressional and gubernatorial races as well. During the workshops, the RNC shared “best practices” on how to work with “ethnic voters, Spanish speaking voters, senior citizens, youths, blacks, and the blue collar laborers”Footnote ¹⁷¹—all traditional Democratic voting blocs that Nixon and the RNC believed needed to be incorporated into the Republican Party for it to become the majority party. The logic behind this program was clear—as Mississippi RNC member Clarke Reed explained: “The Republican Party is the minority party. The President is the majority president. Let's bridge that gap. … I say let's sell what's popular. That's the President.”Footnote ¹⁷²

However, the Nixon-centered New Majority program almost immediately stalled as Watergate began to consume the Nixon presidency and the party. Kenneth Reitz, a Nixon 1972 campaign aide hired by the RNC to run the New Majority campaign, resigned his position after he was implicated in a “spy corps” set up by the Nixon campaign to gather intelligence on Democrats.Footnote ¹⁷³ Watergate also harmed the RNC by reducing donations: By the middle of 1973 the RNC was $1 million behind in fundraising, resulting in a 25 percent cut in staff.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The cuts also meant Monday was now limited to a monthly publication—as the committee was unable to afford the $25,000 weekly production cost.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Beyond financial limitations, the RNC found that the media's focus on Watergate made its publicity role for the broader party impossible. As Bush told RNC members in September 1973: “We have cranked out reams of really positive comments, information on programs, but for the last six months a lot of the press has been interested in only you know what.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Despite these dire conditions, Bush did not abandon the RNC's image setting role. Most notably, Bush resurrected the RCC, which had been dormant since 1968. In announcing the return of the RCC, Bush explained that the organization could “help give us national party leadership on issues.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

After Nixon's resignation in 1974, but before that year's midterms, Bush resigned the RNC chairmanship to become the U.S. ambassador to China. On Bush's recommendation, incoming President Gerald Ford named RNC Co-chair Mary Louise Smith as his replacement. Smith, a self-described “Republican feminist,” was broadly perceived to be a moderate. However, Smith made it clear that she did not consider herself to be the leader of the party, arguing that “a President of your own party is certainly considered the leader of the party and plays the dominant role, and should.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ As such, Smith largely viewed her role as that of an administrator, running the party on behalf of its president.

Smith and the RNC anticipated the major losses the GOP would endure in the 1974 midterms and began planning a series of activities to rehabilitate the party even before the elections. This included a major program to reintroduce the Republican Party to American voters. The problem Smith identified before the 1974 elections was that “somewhere the Republican Party is doing something wrong, or else we are not doing enough things right. Either we are being outorganized or we are being outsold and I suspect it is some of both.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ After the midterm elections decimated the congressional GOP, Smith was even more convinced that the RNC would need to “reshape the image of the Republican Party and what it stands for in the minds of the American people.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ To help overcome this problem, the RNC proposed a $2 million advertising program aimed at improving the Republican Party's national image.Footnote ¹⁸¹ During a March 1975 RNC meeting, Smith explained the program would help give “voters a closer look at who we are and where we stand.”Footnote ¹⁸²

The plan—which also included training programs and voter registration efforts—represented a considerable investment given that the Watergate scandal had turned off many prominent donors and the RNC was now nearly bankrupt. In fact, by the end of 1975, the RNC was so insolvent it closed down its office for the month of December to save money on heating and electricity.Footnote ¹⁸³ While the publicity plan was controversial among a subset of RNC members and party leaders,Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Smith pushed forward, and in the summer of 1975 three 30-minute television showsFootnote ¹⁸⁵ were broadcast on CBS and NBC showing—among other things—“citizen testimonials to individualism, free enterprise, and local government” in an attempt to “combat the widely held misconception that Republicans are rich fat cats unconcerned with the problems of ordinary Americans.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Unlike the DNC under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the RNC remained engaged in providing branding-related services during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Crucially, the party invested in several major new branding operations—most notably, under Smith's chairmanship. The fundamental difference between the DNC and RNC under these presidents was the presence or lack of a congressional majority: While Kennedy and Johnson saw no reason to rely on the DNC given their party's comfortable majority, Nixon and Ford faced a different calculation—understanding that the national committee would need to act to help expand the party.