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Anonymous

On Thursday, former senator William Emerson Brock III <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/bill-brock-dead/2021/03/25/e8e2e7b2-8d97-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html" target=_blank>died at 90</a>. As a man who dedicated his life in unprecedented ways to building the Republican Party, his death raises questions about the political career he led and the history of the GOP’s path to its current iteration — one that Brock found disheartening in his final years.

The Brock family’s changing politics charted the generational decline of the Democratic Party in the South. In the 1930s, Brock’s grandfather served briefly in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, at the time the strongest party in the region. His father, by contrast, a wealthy candy manufacturer, committed himself to community institutions such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and rejected party loyalties. Bill Brock III’s concerns with corruption and the expansion of the federal government motivated his decision to flee the Democratic Party entirely when he began his political career as a prominent young Republican leader in Tennessee during the late 1950s.

Bill Brock, Tenn. senator who rebuilt the GOP after Watergate and became labor secretary, dies at 90

In 1962, campaigning as a new sort of Republican, Brock won a congressional seat that Democrats had held for over 30 years. His brand of Republicanism was a progenitor of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy. At first, most pundits and politicians called Brock’s politics staunchly conservative, even right-wing. He developed a reputation as an acolyte of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), who opposed any legislation that expanded the federal government, from farm subsidies to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Brock emphasized his opposition to the Great Society, the end of school prayer and busing to desegregate schools — all Democratic initiatives that appalled many Southern Whites and motivated the backlash politics against the party.

Yet Brock’s winning formula included a youthful optimism and projected a happy warrior affect that soothed fears the GOP’s Southern success in the 1960s fed on and fueled painful racial divisions in the South. Brock went on to ride this formula to unseat the longtime incumbent Sen. Albert Gore Sr. in 1970, one of the few victories President Richard Nixon could claim in a dismal midterm election.

Brock then became a leading proponent of expanding the GOP’s constituency and led Nixon’s vast and unprecedented youth campaign, Young Voters for the President, in 1972. He also blended conservative positions on fiscal and defense issues with moderate ones on cultural issues. He supported women’s right to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. In a reversal of his earlier position on race, he supported affirmative action policies. He even denounced his own vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the “worst decision of my life.”

In a surprising setback, Brock lost his seat in 1976. Suddenly out of office, the former senator leaped at the opportunity to lead the GOP as the Republican National Committee chair. This gave him the opportunity to shape his party at a national level, as he had already done at a state level, as he led the transformation of the state into its 1980 nickname, “the capital of the Republican Party.” Among the Tennessee GOP’s bounty of talent: Senate Republican leader Howard Baker and a promising young governor, Lamar Alexander, who would go on to a half-century of public service.

The press dubbed Brock the “architect of Republican revival,” and indeed, he emerged as a party leader at a time when it was out of power following Watergate and lacked one single figurehead or leader. His selection over more ideologically rigid conservatives proved influential in determining the direction of the party. The popular narrative of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory credits either massive grass-roots efforts from the New Right’s prominent young operatives such as Paul Manafort, Richard Viguerie and Terry Dolan or attributes Reagan’s success to his personal charisma and magnetism. But immediately after the election, observers gave credit to Brock for the party’s resurrection. As one reporter put it, the Republican revival was “engineered by a man who almost four years ago took over a party almost in the same shape he was — out of power and with no place to go.”

Brock’s policy emphasis — lower taxes, a balanced budget, free trade, devout patriotism and family values — provided his blueprint to rebuild the GOP as the “party of ideas,” and he even created a scholarly journal, Common Sense, that the RNC produced to examine conservative solutions to issues ranging from the busing controversy to free trade.

Strategically, Brock built a wide base of small donors and worked to establish Republicans at all levels of office, investing in local elections and beginning a true political realignment from the bottom up. This meant courting working-class White ethnic voters in the North as well as an increasingly conservative evangelical leadership. But Brock had a far broader vision. He supported his co-chair Mary Dent Crisp’s push to expand the GOP’s grass<del> </del>roots reach to women, Latinos and African Americans. He established a savvy campaign to reach both minorities and “heritage” groups composed of urban White ethnic voters through national training and recruiting events called Concord Conferences.

In some ways, Brock’s plan worked. He increased the RNC’s budget from $19 million in 1977 to $45 million in 1980, enabling the once moribund party to win substantial victories in state legislatures, governorships and Congress. And this organizational work didn’t go unnoticed. As prominent Washington Post columnist David Broder quipped, bickering Democrats reeling in defeat could at least agree that they “would like to find — and hire — a national chairman like Brock.”

Yet, Brock’s tenure also initiated some of the trends that today plague the GOP, notably the rise of rigid partisanship and deep ideological fissures over social issues, like the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and LGBTQ rights. In Brock’s desperate attempt to build the party and include as many voters as possible, he courted special interest groups and mistakenly believed the party’s leadership could temper these factions. As campaigns became more expensive and candidate-focused, New Right organizations stepped in with resources and influence, ultimately diminishing the power of party leaders and the party apparatus to control its shape. These conservative activists also focused exclusively on White voters’ resentment about government programs. As the prominent National Conservative Political Action Committee fundraiser for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, Dolan clarified that his attack ads on Democratic spending would court White ethnics and Southerners, but not Black voters. “Let Brock spend the RNC’s money to try to get that vote,” Dolan scoffed.

Brock resisted these transformations. He wanted the party to exercise control to moderate its policies and tailor candidate selection to various electorates to give the GOP the broadest appeal possible — a stark contrast to the GOP today. The mild-mannered Brock emphasized civility and respectfulness and exemplified a partisan yet moderate political approach that was a far cry from the more confrontational politics that emerged during the 1980s.

But the end of Brock’s career foreshadowed that the GOP was turning away from his style and vision. Just as Brock dedicated himself to rebuilding the GOP, single-issue organizations and massive financial resources outside the institution’s control emerged to determine candidates, positions and exacerbate polarization — the Republican Party no longer commanded the same influence on conservatism’s path. Indeed, once he won the presidency, Reagan consolidated his control over the party when he replaced Brock with his own RNC chair, Dick Richards, to the glee of many on the right. While he gave Brock a seat in his Cabinet — first as the U.S. trade representative and then as U.S. labor secretary — the party became more controlled by ideological purist “para-party” interest groups such as the Conservative Political Action Committee.

In 2017, when I asked Brock if he was going to run for office again, he laughed: “They wouldn’t have me!” This may have been a nod to his self-deprecating charm, but it also spoke to the differences between the party Brock built and the GOP we have today.

Seth Blumenthal is a senior lecturer in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences and author of "<a href="https://kansaspress.ku.edu/978-0-7006-2701-1.html">Children of the Silent Majority: Youth Politics and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1984</a>." He is working on a book titled, "Party Man: Bill Brock and the New Republicans."