Barry Goldwater arouses both fervour and fear, 1964

Getting back to ‘the old dogmas of the Old Frontier’: Senator Barry Goldwater and (pictured) his 89-year-old mother. Photograph: Bill Ray

‘We want Barry! We want Barry!’ cheered the crowd as Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater entered the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. ‘The band blared the crusaders’ song of American politics, Glory Glory Hallelujah’, writes Theodore H White in the Observer Magazine on 20 September 1964, with Goldwater’s 89-year-old mother on the cover.

America was ‘not to stagnate in the swamplands of collectivism, not to cringe before the bully of Communism’