The Conservative Frontier
Texas and the Origins of the New Right
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $34.99
-
- $34.99
Publisher Description
How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.
Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region—larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart—develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?
Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right—the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive chronicle of West Texas politics, historian Roche (The Conservative Sixties) makes the case that the modern Republican party's "radical" rightward turn owes a lot to that region's inculcation of extreme ideologies. Roche begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, citing the anti-union efforts of food magnate C.W. Post, who built the company town Post City as a "capitalist utopia on the Texas plains," as well as John Henry Kirby of the Kirby Lumber Company, the Houston headquarters of which had an entire floor dedicated to Kirby's "political projects," ranging from anti-tax and anti-union groups to white supremacist organizations. Roche carries his account through most of the 20th century, stopping along the way to consider the outsize impact of the Great Depression on the region ("a quarter of the counties in what would become the country's most reliably Republican congressional district lost a quarter of their population"), the exuberant support that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan found there, and the early forays into local politics of a young George W. Bush. Roche's well-informed narrative abounds with fascinating detours, like an exploration of the role West Texas A&M football coach Joe Kerbel played in making the university's campus more diverse in the 1960s. It makes for a terrific window onto an influential but little regarded corner of the American political landscape.
