“Hatchets with Soft-Covered Sheaths”: Conservative Publishing and the Goldwater Campaign

In this paper, I argue that grassroots activists revolutionized not only Republican politics but remade conservative publishing during the Goldwater campaign of 1964. In the spring of 1964, three paperback books jolted the political and publishing worlds. Within six months of their publication, 16 million copies were in circulation, a quantity sixty times greater than 1963’s best-selling novel. The Chicago Tribune called it “[o]ne of the strangest publishing phenomena of American political history.”

The three books, which argued America urgently needed a conservative in the White House, were more than just a publishing phenomenon. They were the leading edge of conservative media’s first presidential campaign. Low-priced and mass-distributed, these campaign paperbacks were something new. They were self-published by unknown authors. They contained few mentions of Goldwater. And while they seldom appeared in traditional bookstores, each sold millions of copies.

But the campaign paperbacks would never have become a political phenomenon without the conservative networks meticulously constructed over the 1950s and early 1960s. The little-known conservative counter-establishment made itself visible through these paperback polemics. The centrality of these books to the conservative campaign for Goldwater points to an often-overlooked side of right-wing media: the moments when unknown grassroots activists intersect with powerful right-wing distribution networks.

As I argue in this paper, these books energized grassroots conservatives, helped Barry Goldwater secure the nomination, and framed the right’s alternative campaign. But they also proved how powerful – and profitable – the combination of populist messengers and established networks could be.