Republican Populist

Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump's America

Charles J. Holden, Zach Messitte, Jerald Podair

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813943275
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Typically a maligned figure in American political history, former vice president Spiro T. Agnew is often overlooked. Although he is largely remembered for his alliterative speeches, attacks on the media and East Coast intellectuals, and his resignation from office in 1973 in the wake of tax evasion charges, Agnew had a significant impact on the modern Republican Party that is underappreciated. It is impossible, in fact, to understand the current internal struggles of the Republican Party without understanding this populist "everyman" and prototypical middle-class striver who was one of the first proponents of what would become the ideology of Donald Trump's GOP.

Republican Populist examines Agnew's efforts to make the Republican Party representative of the "silent majority." Under the tutelage of a group of talented speechwriters assigned to Agnew by President Richard Nixon including Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Agnew crafted the populist-tinged, anti-establishment rhetoric that helped turn the Republican Party into a powerful national electoral force that has come to define American politics into the current era.

A fascinating political portrait of Agnew from his pre–vice presidential career through his scandal-driven fall from office and beyond, this book is a revelatory examination of Agnew's role as one of the founding fathers of the modern Republican Party and of the link between Agnew's "people's party" and the fraught party of populists and businessmen today.

1

REFUSING TO KNUCKLE UNDER

A Political Temperament Forged Early

A 1962 picture of Spiro and Judy Agnew’s family in the Baltimore Sun is a study in post–World War II suburban stability and conformity. The three older children—Pamela, Sue, and Randy—stand in back, while the youngest, Kimberly, kneels in front between her parents, who are seated. The men are in dark suits, and the women wear tasteful dresses. All are smiling more or less comfortably.1 The recently elected executive of Baltimore County, readers learned, was also a World War II veteran, a past president of the local junior high PTA, and a member of the Kiwanis “with a seven-year perfect attendance record.” There is not the slightest hint in this nice family portrait that the father would soon embark on one of the most dramatic rise-and-fall careers in American political history.

There is also nothing in Agnew’s story up to this point to suggest anything other than a lifetime of sturdy, respectable anonymity. Agnew was born in Baltimore city in 1918, the son of a Greek immigrant, Theophrastos Spiro Anagnostopoulos, and Margaret Pollard, whose parents were Virginians. Theirs was, by the standards of a century ago, a mixed marriage in that Theophrastos was Greek Orthodox and Margaret was Episcopalian. She had one son from a previous marriage. Her first husband, William Pollard, died in 1917, and she married the elder Agnew the next year.

The Agnews tried their hands at a number of business ventures, running at various times a restaurant, a grocery store, and a confectionary.2 Among his peers, young Spiro was embarrassed by his father’s accent and his habit of speaking Greek to his old friends. The son was at best an indifferent student at Baltimore’s Forest Park High School, where he “took part in no activities, won no honors, played no sports, made no enduring friendships.”3 He attended Johns Hopkins University, where again he made little impression and by his own admission was “more interested in having a good time than studying.”4 After deciding college was not for him at that time, Agnew dropped out and worked for an insurance company, Maryland Casualty, before he was drafted into the army in August 1941. The time at Maryland Casualty was well spent in at least one regard: Agnew met Elinor “Judy” Judefind there, and they married in 1942.5 His military service led him to the European Theater of Operations in 1944, where he endured the siege of Bastogne with the 54th Armored Infantry Battalion. He later recalled that he “slept on ice for a week” at one point.6 Decorated with the Bronze Star, he was discharged in November 1945 and returned home to Baltimore city.

After the war Agnew considered whether politics could be the “vehicle to lift him out of mediocrity and obscurity.”7 His big break came when an older lawyer and mentor, Lester Barrett, a staunch Republican, was appointed chief judge of Baltimore County Circuit Court and moved to Towson, the county seat.8 Agnew followed Barrett to the suburbs and opened a law office across from the courthouse. But as important as leaving Baltimore city was for Agnew’s future as a “creature of suburbia,” he also left behind the Democratic Party of his immigrant, urban father. According to Richard Cohen and Jules Witcover, it was Barrett, “rather than any great ideological pull,” who brought Agnew into the Republican Party. Agnew asked his mentor “how a young man got started in county politics. Become a Republican, Barrett had told him: the field of competition is smaller, and although the odds of winning public office are longer, there are other benefits, not the least of which is the law business Republican contacts can bring.”9 And with that, Spiro Agnew became a big fish in the small pond of the Baltimore County Republican Party.

This chapter picks up Agnew’s story in 1962, just after his election to head the government of the fast-growing suburban county surrounding Maryland’s largest city. Baltimore County’s population more than tripled after World War II, from 155,825 in 1940 to 492,428 in 1960.10 One profile of Agnew noted that the county now had “steel mills [and] farm fields” as well as “split-level homes [and] manor estates.” It had a “burgeoning population and a forest of industrial smokestacks growing along Chesapeake Bay.” In a matter of a few years, Baltimore County “seemed less rural than urban,” and it now “had all the problems of the big city—traffic, schools, taxes, crime.”11

Since Democrats in Baltimore County outnumbered Republicans nearly four to one, Agnew’s election as county executive came as a surprise to many. In other ways, however, he seemed the perfect fit for his time and place: a pragmatic, white-collar, middle-class man elected to lead a booming suburban county in need of order and direction. The Agnew Bi-Partisan Committee of supporters hailed the candidate as “The Man with the Plan.”12 The Sun described him as a “tall, unassuming, young Republican.” His election, it continued, “surprising as it seems, couldn’t have happened in a more likely setting than in Baltimore county, which, in shaking off its rural characteristics, is ‘busting out all over,’ and moving toward a position of leadership in the metropolitan area.”13

Agnew biographers portray him during these years as a results-oriented moderate, or even liberal, Republican.14 Indeed, Agnew described himself in 1962 as an Eisenhower Republican, saying, “It is possible to be liberal on one issue and conservative on another.”15 As county executive, he pushed for an open accommodations law against racist housing practices. He favored gun control. He supported antipollution measures. He was the only Republican county executive in the state—and in the state’s largest county, at that—and his election instantly launched him into the upper ranks of the party in Maryland.16 He immediately started receiving attention from national GOP leaders, especially those from the Eastern Establishment wing of the party. Nelson Rockefeller invited Agnew and other Maryland Republican leaders to New York City for lunch in 1963.17 In the 1964 presidential election Agnew first supported California senator Ted Kuchel and then Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, both moderates, but remained unenthusiastic about the successful hard-right campaign of Barry Goldwater, saying he “would much prefer a candidate of more moderate viewpoint.”18

But whether Agnew was a moderate or a conservative Republican overlooks what is his lasting legacy: his fighting political temperament, one particularly suited to his time and place. Cohen and Witcover, looking back in 1974 over Agnew’s rise and fall, observed that in the early days “contentiousness and righteousness” were “the man’s trademarks, trademarks that stayed with him throughout his political career.”19

Over time as he took on the press, academics, the antiwar movement, and liberals generally, this bare-fisted, everyman political style earned Agnew a loyal following, first among his fellow suburbanites and later among the white working-class “hard hats” as well. Behind the image of the Baltimore Colts–loving, Ping-Pong–playing suburban dad was a “tough, cold, and aggressive” political counterpuncher.20 His followers wrote to him of their adoration of “men like you who are not afraid to speak up, that will tell it like it is.”21 These characteristics surfaced early in his career, especially when Agnew spoke out against black activism. An examination of his pre–vice president years, therefore, sheds light on how Agnew became both a model and a magnet for those seeking a more confrontational political style, a blunt suburban populism from someone “like them.”22

Agnew possessed a keen sense of his image as a “normal” guy for his time and place. Sometime in late 1964 or early 1965 he received a draft of an article that chronicled his recent emergence in the state Republican Party. The piece, which was set to run in Kiwanis Magazine, portrayed a man who was impressive but not extraordinary; he was the “man of modest means” Richard Nixon had invoked in his famous Checkers speech. Agnew personified the civic-minded yet accomplished men of the Kiwanis. It was “more than a little tempting to Horatio-Algerize the arrival of the eminence of Spiro T. Agnew, son of a Greek immigrant,” the article said. Instead, the writer stuck to the era’s dominant middle-class themes of competency and pragmatism. Agnew personified “the new ‘commuter citizen’—men of moderate wealth, who have doubled the County’s population in the last decade by moving from the city and who . . . are interested in schools, highways, taxes and civic issues.” Agnew “was the right man for the job.”23

The article was happy to report that “Ted Agnew has not disappointed his supporters.” The accomplishments listed bolstered his image as a level-headed administrator in touch with the growing suburban county’s needs and problems. For example, Agnew “did not make job appointments on a strict party basis. Instead, he initiated a bi-partisan regime emphasizing ability rather than party label.” As a result, the county had launched efforts rejuvenating “blighted sections,” dealing with water pollution, starting “no less than 32 separate neighborhood sewer projects,” and getting “excess” tax revenues collected by the state returned to the county.24

Not surprisingly for an article highlighting the sterling qualities of a Kiwanian, Agnew’s personal characteristics figured into the piece even more than his political accomplishments. He was a “confident, well-dressed, soft-spoken man” with hair “greying at the temples.” He appeared “a foot taller” than he really was, and his most distinctive feature was “his eyes, sharp and penetrating under heavy brows.” The article also noted how “through the corridors of antiquity” the men in Agnew’s family had been named some variation of Spiro Theodore or Theodore Spiro. But befitting the post–World War II middle-class desire to fit in, the “latest Spiro Theodore, after having had to fight his way through grammar school in this country, decided to be the last. He named his one son among three daughters Randy.”25

The profile next covered Agnew’s military service and early professional career, a story that certainly would have struck a chord with millions of men of his generation. Drafted into the army in 1941, Agnew fought at the Battle of the Bulge, but “today [he] doesn’t dwell on his war experiences.” He used the G.I. Bill to enter the University of Baltimore’s law school, where he completed his degree by taking night classes. (The University of Baltimore was not accredited by the American Bar Association until 1972.26 If Richard Nixon felt snubbed by the Ivy League–trained elite because of his Duke University law degree, one can imagine the size of the chip on Agnew’s shoulder when he became a household name in the late 1960s.) Elected office was nowhere in his future, he was sure: “If people at that time had told me I would be in politics, I would have said they were crazy.” With the number of practicing attorneys rising steadily, Agnew took on a series of undistinguished yet respectable middle-management jobs in other fields. He worked as a claims adjustor for an insurance company and as a personnel director for a grocery store chain. After being called back into the army during the Korean War and relocating to Baltimore County, he finally returned to law in the early 1950s. By the end of the decade Agnew was the chair of the county’s first board of appeals, where he handled disputed zoning cases, an important and often contentious issue in fast-developing suburban areas.27

A close look at Agnew’s edits to the Kiwanis profile reveals a political savvy and self-awareness that challenges the later historical narrative of Agnew as a witless tool of Richard Nixon. For example, where the article noted Agnew’s creation of a “bi-partisan regime emphasizing ability rather than party label,” he edited out the next line: “‘One of these days I must appoint some Republicans,’ he said only half-jokingly.”28 More revealing, however, are the changes he made to the biographical facts; his attention to detail is impressive and his edits are canny, shaping the positive yet relatable image he wanted to portray. The original draft explained that “he is called Ted by almost everybody except his wife Judy and friends of his father from the old neighborhood, who are often disappointed to discover he can’t even speak Greek.” Agnew cut “from the old neighborhood,” likely sensing that he had done enough to embrace his background in a place where many upwardly mobile families had said a happy goodbye to the old neighborhood.29

In an environment where military service—and the experience of actual combat—was not uncommon, Agnew also knew better than to make too much of his time in the army. The original draft read: “Overseas in 1944 he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, but today doesn’t dwell on his war experiences. ‘I won four battle stars, but I can’t remember now for which battles. I was never wounded to the extent of reporting it.’ He earned the combat infantry badge and was discharged in 1946.” Agnew deleted his humble brag about winning four battle stars in now-forgotten military campaigns. But he kept the sentence about earning the combat infantry badge; it meant that he had come under fire in an active combat situation, as every veteran of his generation would have known.30

Finally, and wisely, Agnew reined in an overly enthusiastic description of his physical appearance. The draft read, “Ted Agnew is a serious, confident, well-dressed, heavy-necked, handsome, soft-spoken man with straight black hair greying at the temples, who, because of his erect carriage and quiet, yet not mirthless, manner, gives the impression of being something of a cross between John Wayne and [comic strip hero] Steven Canyon.” “Oh God!” Agnew penciled in the margin. Out went “heavy-necked, handsome,” his black hair became “brown,” and he cut the remainder of the sentence.31 The reader is left with a deftly created image of Spiro Agnew that fit the World War II generation in the postwar era: successful but not a show-off, a veteran but not a hero, a family man, and a capable administrator more interested in doing a good job for his fellow citizens than in personal accolades.

Despite his later reputation for not being an especially deep thinker, Agnew was notably attuned to the quickening pace of life Americans faced as the 1960s began. In addition to the existential anxieties caused by the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, the postwar explosion of new technology, the dizzying power and reach of consumerism, and the rise of the suburbs left many middle-class citizens with an uneasy feeling of rootlessness amid their many material comforts. As sociologist William Whyte, author of The Organization Man, observed in the mid-1950s, suburban life encouraged in those new to the middle class a “strong impulse to upgrade themselves” materially, culturally, and socially. The result made for a strange new kind o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Refusing to Knuckle Under: A Political Temperament Forged Early
• 2 Role Reversal: The Roots of the Republican Revival
• 3 The Road to 1968: Middle America, Meet Spiro Agnew
• 4 Becoming the Spokesman for the Silent Majority
• 5 Dixie’s Favorite: Agnew and the Southern Strategy
• 6 No Contest
• 7 From Agnew to Trump
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index