Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr

From the Publisher

In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism wa son the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers' accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century.

Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosing coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anti-Communist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circules; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism.

While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anti-Communist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens—and often upsets—our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.

Nation - Arlene Stein

Orange County's success as a crucible for conservatism, McGirr skillfully argues, was rooted in the fact that it took tried and true American values of individualism and community, boldly exaggerated them and then recombined them in ways that accentuated their messy contradictions.

Publishers Weekly

Prototypical rather than typical, suburban Orange County, Calif., provides Harvard historian McGirr with an illuminating microcosm of the historical transformations that took conservative activism from the conspiracy-obsessed fringes of the John Birch Society to the election of Ronald Reagan, first as governor of California and then as president. Drawing heavily on interviews with grassroots activists as well as a wide range of primary documents, McGirr paints a complex picture exploring the apparent contradiction of powerfully antimodern social, political and religious philosophies thriving in a modern, technological environment and translating into sustained political activity. Federal spending, beginning in WWII and continuing with massive Cold War defense contracts and military bases, was the driving force behind Orange County's booming economy. A frontier-era mythos of rugged individualism, nurtured on hatred of eastern elites who funded western growth before Uncle Sam conveniently hid this dependency. The local dominance of unfettered private development chaotically disorganized in the county's northwest, corporately planned elsewhere destroyed existing communities, producing an impoverished public sphere, a vacuum conservative churches and political activism helped fill. Migrants primarily from nonindustrial regions became more conservative in reaction to the stresses of suburban modernity, while selectively assimilating benefits. Racial and class homogeneity nurtured a comforting conformity consciously defended against outside threats. United by enemies, libertarian and social conservatives rarely confronted their differences. Against this complex, contradictory background, McGirr charts the evolution of a movement culture through various stages, issues and forms of organizing. Incisive yet fair, this represents an important landmark in advancing a nuanced understanding of how antimodernist ideologies continue to thrive. 12 illus. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Orange County, CA, has been the home of anti-Communist John Birchers, apocalypse-prophesying evangelists, "cowboy capitalists" who demanded free enterprise and an unregulated economy, libertarians opposed to a centralized government and taxes, and thousands of voters angered by liberals. McGirr (history, Harvard) presents a deft investigation of how these citizens mastered grass-roots politics to shift the conservative movement from discredited clusters of extremists to respectability and dominant party status through the 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater and the election of Ronald Reagan as California's governor in 1966. Although Orange County was arguably the most conservative county in America, it was, as the author concludes, mostly populated by middle- and upper-middle-class Republican professionals trying to protect their homes from what they viewed as a morally corrupt society. McGirr has not written the sweeping, spirited narrative that Rick Perlstein presented in his Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (LJ 2/15/01), but she presents a focused, stimulating account that demonstrates that many of the best contemporary works on the Sixties are about the rise of the Right. Strongly recommended for academic libraries and recommended for larger public libraries. Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Township Lib., King of Prussia, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

What People Are Saying

Kevin Starr
Something happened to the Republican Party in the 1960s,changing it forever. How did a crypto-liberal,Northeast-dominated,establishment-oriented party become a populist,counter-liberal crusade? Here's the story: exhaustively researched and presented with telling analysis and narrative verve.

Michael Kazin
A landmark study that will enlighten anyone who cares about the evolution of American politics since World War II. With Lisa McGirr's thorough,sophisticated,smoothly crafted exploration of Orange County conservatism,the history of the modern Right has finally come of age.

William E. Leuchtenburg
In her impressively researched,gracefully written book,Lisa McGirr convincingly demonstrates that historians,who have been preoccupied with the Left in the 1960s,need to develop a deeper comprehension of how conservatives in places such as Orange County reconfigured American political culture. Readers will find her attempt to understand them,rather than dismiss or condemn them,both rewarding and challenging.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0691096112
  
• ISBN-13: 9780691096117
• Format: Textbook Paperback, 416pp
• Publisher: California-Princeton Fulfillment Services
• Pub. Date: January 2002
• Edition Number: 1
• Sales Rank: 114,170
• Series: Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America Series

• Table of Contents
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• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2001, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers.

INTRODUCTION

ON MARCH 4, 1964, Estrid Kielsmeier, a mother of two young children and the wife of an accountant, rose bright and early at her home on Janet Lane in one of the newer suburban developments of Garden Grove, California. She made her way into the kitchen to set out coffee, putting dozens of cups on the table. Mrs. Kielsmeier was expecting visitors. But this was not to be an ordinary suburban coffee klatch. Next to the coffee, she placed blank nominating petitions to qualify Barry Goldwater as a candidate for president in her state's Republican primary. Starting at six o'clock, the first neighbors arrived to sign the petitions. Throughout the morning they came alone, as families, and in small groups. Goldwater was their candidate.

On this spring day, Kielsmeier and thousands of grassroots conservatives worked feverishly in a show of support for their standard-bearer. They had set up "Operation Q" for the March 4 opening, in the words of one commentator, "as meticulously drilled and planned as an expeditionary force waiting for D-Day."¹ Some, like Kielsmeier, set up "coffees." Others pounded the pavement.Doorbells rang throughout Southern California as volunteer cadres gathered signatures. In a remarkable organizational feat, before noon on the first day of their drive, these volunteers had gathered over 36,000 names, about three times as many as were needed to qualify their candidate for the ballot. Yet despite their having accomplished their goal, the torrent of support for Barry Goldwater continued, and by March 6, they had gathered another 50,000 names.² Kielsmeier's effort on behalf of Goldwater that early spring morning was just one step in her deepening conservative activism—an activism spurred by her strong conviction that the world's first "Christian Republic" was in danger. America was, in her eyes, on a course of political, economic, and moral decline; a course steered by the nation's liberals. To counter the tide, Kielsmeier, and many men and women like her, sought to create, as she put it, a "mini-revolution . . . in the true sense of the word . . . a revolving back . . . to the foundations of the country."³ It was a revolution quite different from those we usually associate with the 1960s.

Indeed, Kielsmeier and "suburban warriors" like her built a vibrant and remarkable political mobilization during the 1960s, and it is their history that this book seeks to chronicle. It was in suburbs such as Garden Grove, Orange County (the place Kielsmeier called home), in conjunction with the backing of regional entrepreneurs, that small groups of middle-class men and women met in their new tract homes, seeking to turn the tide of liberal dominance.⁴ Recruiting the like-minded, they organized study groups, opened "Freedom Forum" bookstores, filled the rolls of the John Birch Society, entered school board races, and worked within the Republican Party, all in an urgent struggle to safeguard their particular vision of freedom and the American heritage. In doing so, they became the ground forces of a conservative revival—one that transformed conservatism from a marginal force preoccupied with communism in the early 1960s into a viable electoral contender by the decade's end.

This book is a history of the conservative movement, using Orange County as the lens through which to explore the social base and ideological waters of one of the most profound transformations of twentieth-century U.S. politics. Orange County, as contemporary newspaper commentators never tired of emphasizing, was a real center and symbol of American conservatism in the 1960s.⁵ Its conservative movement was the nucleus of a broader conservative matrix evolving in the Sunbelt and the West that eventually propelled assertive and unapologetic conservatives to national prominence.⁶ Political analyst Kevin Phillips, noting the national significance of the conservative political traditions of Southern California suburbanites, observed as early as 1969 that "perhaps no other political impetus in the nation is so important as the middle-class upheaval of the Sun country, and Southern California in particular."⁷ The south-land's size and affluence has made it an important source of money and votes for conservative candidates and organizations, enabling it to help shape the political direction of the nation. Southland conservatives led the way in making an emerging Republican majority. Together with their conservative brethren elsewhere in the South and the West, they recast the party of Lincoln from the moderate Republicanism of the eastern Wall Street establishment into a southern and western mold of a far more conservative bent.⁸ These conservative activists and the movement they forged are essential to understanding the rightward shift in American politics since the 1960s. Far outside the boundaries of respectable politics in the early 1960s, the Right expanded its influence on the national scene in the late 1960s and 1970s and vaulted to national power with the Reagan landslide of 1980. Since that time, conservatives in Washington have transformed the relationship between federal and state power, limited the regulatory capacity of the central state, and altered the fundamental structure of the New Deal welfare state. Conservatives' successes, to be sure, were due in no small part to liberalism's foundering on the shoals of race, economic discontent, and its own internal contradictions. But just as significantly, conservatives' ability to build a powerful movement enabled them to pick up the pieces and profit politically from liberal failures.

This book, then, is not only about the making of the modern American Right but also about the forging of the late twentieth-century United States. People like Kielsmeier made history in the conservative revival, in effect recasting politics in ways comparable only to the upheavals of the New Deal. When their standard-bearer claimed the presidency in 1980, the long years of organizing in obscurity, the times when the conservative movement was ridiculed and marginalized seemed to have come to an end. "It was so exciting," one activist recalled. "People finally understood what we're about."⁹ From their inauspicious beginnings in the early 1960s, these conservatives had, by 1980, helped to transform the political landscape of America. For better or for worse, these other radicals of the 1960s have had lasting influence on American politics in the late twentieth century.

These "kitchen-table" activists have fundamentally shaped the course of American politics, and yet, until now, they have lived in obscurity. They have done so in part because their mobilization has been overshadowed by the more flamboyant Left and its movement culture. Images of Martin Luther King proclaiming "Let freedom ring" on the Washington Mall, students burning draft cards at federal induction centers, and flower children gathering in Haight-Ashbury for the "summer of love" filled American television screens in the 1960s. The left-wing and liberal movements of the period dominated the airwaves and newspapers; indeed, the sixties were the heyday of liberal social change. African-Americans in the South built the most successful social movement of the twentieth century. Inspired by their example and a deepening rights consciousness, white student radicals, counterculturalists, and feminists altered the political and cultural fabric of the nation.¹⁰ But at the same time, buffered and buffeted by these progressive gains, conservative intellectuals, politicians, and pastors—together with thousands of grassroots activists—set in place the ideas, strategies, and politics that would pave their road to national power.

It is not only because of liberalism's strength during this stormy decade that this movement has remained largely uncharted. Rather, the popular images of the 1960s grassroots Right as a band of emotional, irrational "kooks" contributed to their obscurity. Orange County's vibrant conservative movement, for example, earned the county the reputation, according to a Fortune magazine article in 1968, as America's "nut country."¹¹ Such pejorative labels resulted in part from liberal disdain for the unappealingly exclusionary aspects of conservative politics, but they were also given substance by the Right's apocalyptic and conspiratorial rhetoric. Robert Welch, the leader of the John Birch Society, for example, made the preposterous suggestion that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a "crypto-Communist" whose actions were driven by "Communist bosses who count on him merely for the execution of their planning," and Congressman James B. Utt of Orange County made national news in 1963 with his suggestions that "a large contingent of barefooted Africans" might be training in Georgia for what he hinted could be part of a United Nations military exercise to take over the United States.¹² Such outlandish statements by right-wing politicians and leaders were easy to lampoon and gave the popular press reason to dismiss the mobilization as "fanatical" and "extremist" without further examination. The kitchen-table activists and their motivations remained unchronicled.

Contemporary scholars amplified the tendencies of the popular press. In the wake of McCarthyism and the rise of right-wing groups in the early 1960s, Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and Seymour Martin Lipset turned their attention to explaining the roots of popular support for right-wing politics. Sharing a vision of the United States as fundamentally shaped by the liberal pluralism they so strongly sought to uphold, they viewed right-wing activists as motivated less by any coherent set of ideas or rational politics than by psychological distress. Bell and Lipset, in particular, argued that status anxieties of both an older, dispossessed middle class and an upwardly mobile group of white ethnics explained support for the Right. Hofstadter, in turn, borrowing from clinical psychology, suggested that a sense of "persecution" and a "paranoid style" characterized the Right's adherents. In effect, these influential scholars cast the Right as a marginal, embattled remnant fighting a losing battle against the inexorable forces of progress.¹³ The Right, they concluded, was prone to episodic outbursts similar to those of other "extremist" movements in American history that ran counter to the fundamental direction of change in American life—the tireless forward march of American liberalism.¹⁴ While they correctly argued for paying attention to the ordinary people who populated the ranks of the Right, their excessively psychological interpretation distorted our understanding of American conservatism.

This book's exploration of the world of Orange County activists and the movement they built, however, produces a picture of the Right that is at odds with both the contemporary media images and the explanations of conservatism put forth by the consensus-school scholars.¹⁵ While a segment of the Right appealed to traditional ideas, embraced a fundamentalist religious worldview and apocalyptic strands of thought, challenging some of the basic assumptions of modernism, these ideas took hold among a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women. Conservatives in Orange County enjoyed the fruits of worldly success, often worked in high-tech industries, shared in the burgeoning consumer culture, and participated in the bureaucratized world of post-World War II America.¹⁶ Their mobilization, then, was not a rural "remnant" of the displaced and maladapted but a gathering around principles that were found to be relevant in the most modern of communities. Post-World War II American conservatism thus explodes any easy dichotomies between tradition and modernity. Indeed, an exploration of this movement highlights the dual nature of modern American conservatism: its strange mixture of traditionalism and modernity, a combination that suggests the adaptability, resilience, and, thus perhaps, intractability of the Right in American life.

The question of how conservative political ideology, often considered an antimodern worldview, attracted a large number of people in the most technologically advanced and economically vibrant of American locales is one of the central puzzles this book tries to solve. The vibrant conservative milieu in which these activists flourished, of course, owed its strength, in part, to Orange County's established cultural patterns and traditions. But its real rise was linked to the region's breathtaking transformation after World War II. Propelled by the Cold War military-industrial complex, Southern California's ways of life and work changed radically, disposing many of its inhabitants to embrace a radicalized form of politics. The largely white-collar, educated, and often highly skilled women and men who embraced right-wing politics saw their own lives and the flowering communities where they made their homes as tributes to the possibilities of individual entrepreneurial success. Regional business leaders, moreover, promulgated a vigorous libertarianism that helped to lead Orange County citizens to an unabashed celebration of the free market. The people who came to Orange County were often steeped in nationalism, moralism, and piety that were part of the warp and woof of the communities from which they hailed. While, in other settings, this conservatism had been tempered by an earlier link to the political traditions of the New Deal, here it took on different meanings, a transformation sharpened by Orange Countians' new affluence and discomfort with the growing liberalism in state and national politics in the 1960s. Compounding the attraction of the Right was the sense of coherence, community, and commitment that conservative churches and right-wing organizations provided—a sense otherwise absent from the larger world of Orange County. For these middle-class men and women, Western libertarianism, combined with a theoretically incompatible social and cultural conservatism, came to make "common sense."¹⁷

The pejorative labels that served in the past to dismiss this movement have led me to be cautious in choosing terminology. The slipperiness of these older labels is evinced by their lack of durability. Whereas in 1965 William F. Buckley, Jr., was touted by Life magazine as "the enfant terrible of the Far Right" and Barry Goldwater was often labeled a dangerous extremist by his contemporaries, more recently these individuals have been regarded as representatives of respectable conservatism, despite the fact that their politics did not change significantly during the past decades.¹⁸ This not only shows how much the political spectrum has shifted but also complicates the question of how to talk about grassroots conservatives of the 1960s. I have chosen not to use the terms "ultraconservatism," "Radical Right," or "Far Right" when referring to the movement. I have done so first because these terms are fraught with psychological overtones and dismissive connotations. Second, they do not accurately reflect the politics and ideas of the conservative movement as a whole. Instead, they brand the entire movement with a dismissive label that may, at most, be said to fit a small segment of it. The "Radical Right" or "extreme Right" label might be usefully applied to that segment of the Right that engaged in con spiratorial thinking—organizations, for example, like the John Birch Society. Yet, even here, such terminology is problematic. Even the most militant John Birchers in Orange County sought to work through constitutional channels to forward their goals.¹⁹ Additionally, many conservatives who joined such conspiratorial organizations as the John Birch Society did not share the paranoid theories of their leader. Rather, they saw the society as the only organized voice for the right wing. More important, conservatives who embraced conspiratorial thinking shared a sufficient set of complaints, assumptions, and common enemies that united them with their more "respectable" cohorts in one movement. They swam in the same ideological waters as the broader conservative movement as a whole and, above all, participated in building one mobilization out of their common grievances against American liberalism. For definitional precision, then, the terms "Far Right" and "Radical Right" should be limited to white supremacist, paramilitary, and fascist fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Minute Men, groups that stepped outside of democratic political processes to achieve their goals. The Minute Men did have a small organized presence in Southern California in the 1960s, but they remained marginal.²⁰

I use the terms "conservatism" and "the Right" interchangeably to characterize the movement under investigation here, but these terms still require definition. The Right, after all, was composed of distinct groups whose priorities, worldviews, and political strategies differed. Despite important internal divisions, however, conservatives in the 1960s shared a number of concerns. First, they were united in their opposition to liberal "collectivism"—the growing tendency of the state to organize social and economic life in the name of the public welfare and the social good. Libertarians sought to limit the intrusiveness of the nation-state in economic matters (although their antistatism stopped at the door of a strong-armed defense), and normative conservatives opposed what they perceived to be a decline in religiosity, morality, individual responsibility, and family authority—a decline, they argued, that went hand in hand with the growth of centralized federal power. In Orange County, both groups championed virulent anticommunism, celebrated laissez-faire capitalism, evoked staunch nationalism, and supported the use of the state to uphold law and order. America, they believed, had an organic, benevolent order that would function well if not for tampering by liberal elites.²¹

The triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the new respectability of conservative ideas in national discourse thereafter brought a renewal of interest in the origins of the conservative movement. Indeed, historical and sociological studies on the post-World War II American Right have proliferated in recent years.²² Historians have charted the conservative intellectual movement, traced the odyssey of the Right in the Republican Party, offered biographical treatments of national conservative leaders, and outlined the history of organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom.²³ Sociologists have argued for the importance of understanding the Right as a social movement, taking into account its ideas and its coalition building.²⁴ These scholars and political observers have identified important factors that contributed to the rise of the Right.²⁵ Yet these studies have focused exclusively on the national level, leaving unexamined and unexplained the dynamic social base that propelled the movement and gave it its endurance and strength.²⁶ We still lack a deep understanding of the women and men who built the movement and of the communities from which they sprang.²⁷ The few studies that have explored single settings have focused on grievances and discontent among lower-middle-class, urban, eastern ethnics: the "Reagan Democrats," once considered locked into the New Deal coalition, whose shifting allegiances helped pave the road to national power for the Right.²⁸ Although they were undeniably important, such disgruntled Democrats were not the driving force of the conservative movement. The issues of race and welfare indeed alienated swing voters and, as this study confirms, were important motivators at all levels, but the conservative grassroots mobilization predated the height of urban violence and "white backlash" and had its ideological roots in a more thoroughgoing, anti-egalitarian, conservative worldview.

This book, then, advances a new perspective on the conservative insurgency of the recent past. It touches on all the existing narratives that have contributed to our understanding of the rise of the American Right, but it has a central dynamic that lies outside of them. Telling the story of Orange County's "suburban warriors" requires more attention to social forces, to regionalism, to enduring political traditions outside the liberal consensus, and to the political movements that ordinary men and women at times create.²⁹ I suggest that it is only within the context of the Cold War; postwar demographic transformation; the dynamics of economic, cultural, and political change; and their cumulative impact on the values and beliefs of ordinary people that we can uncover the process by which the modern American Right was made. This perspective moves beyond the realm of pure politics to explore the social forces that created political opportunities for the Right. It seeks to illuminate the world of the men and women who rejected the liberal vision and instead championed individual economic freedom and a staunch social conservatism.

In short, then, this book explores the Right as a social movement, distinguishing the distinct but intersecting levels at which right-wing mobilization occurred.³⁰ Locally, mobilization involved the grassroots leaders and rank-and-file men and women, the broader ideological waters in which they swam, as well as regional business elites who offered resources and institutional support. At the national level, it involved the formation of an intellectual leadership that sought to give cohesion to the ideas underpinning the movement, as well as a political leadership that offered direction to channel conservative sentiment.

While this book addresses the conservative movement at the state and national levels, it is primarily a local study. A thick description of right-wing politics in one locale, I believe, best reveals the process of conservative mobilization, the Right's means and mechanisms of recruitment, and the movement's evo lution. It allows me to describe the interplay between local and national political movements. Such a perspective, moreover, permits a rich understanding of the complex interaction between individuals and their social milieu, as well as the broader institutions and structural forces that informed their world. It provides a microscopic view of processes that are often left to the realm of abstraction: the sources of right-wing support, the creation of the Sunbelt, suburbanization, and white backlash. Such a study can best reveal the social setting, the economic forces, and the impulses, prejudices, and ideas that nourished popular conservatism in recent American history.

Although this is a local study that helps to explain the rise of a national movement, I make no claims that Orange County was "typical." Indeed, what makes Orange County worthy of attention was the atypical vibrancy of its conservative movement. But while Orange County differed in the degree and visibility of its mobilization, the socioeconomic, cultural, and political patterns that contributed to conservatism's success there were symptomatic of the patterns and forces that contributed to its appeal in other Sunbelt and western communities. In California itself, the neighboring counties of Los Angeles and San Diego also provided fertile soil for right-wing growth. In contrast to these areas, however, Orange County politics were not tempered by the presence of influential counterbalancing forces: liberal Jewish Democrats, organized workers, and vocal minorities. Orange County exaggerated trends occurring elsewhere—trends that were harbingers of future national change.

Orange County might best be understood as a prototype: the first functional form of a new conservative milieu that appeared less distinctly elsewhere. While studies remain to be written that would fully describe the details, the most cursory examination of postwar settings in the Sunbelt and the West where conservative cultures have flourished since the 1960s—places like Fort Worth ("Free Enterprise City") and the northeast suburbs of Dallas, Texas; Scottsdale and Maricopa County, Arizona; Cobb and northern Dekalb Counties, Georgia; the affluent suburbs of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana (towns like Metairie); or Colorado Springs, Colorado—suggests that they had much in common with Orange County. They have shared an older regional identity that defined itself against northeastern power, a model of growth based on "clean development," a socially homogeneous group of highly skilled, affluent inhabitants, and, often, the powerful presence of defense and military. Taken together, these large, prosperous communities have had a tremendous influence on the national scene, providing many of the rank-and-file supporters of the libertarian and Christian Right.

In telling the story of the making of the national Right through the lens of Orange County, my study will necessarily emphasize certain features of modern conservatism while downplaying others. As part of the American West, Orange County has had distinctive patterns of development and political and cultural traditions that have propelled a regional ethos and a staunch antistatist libertarianism significant in modern American political history.³¹ The modern West has drawn on a sense of identity rooted in notions of the self-made, individualist frontiersman counterpoised to an older, corrupt East. The themes of local control and of the threat of intrusion by a distant federal center of power have resonated powerfully in a region long dependent on East Coast financiers and federal funds to propel economic growth, an area where federal government bureaucrats have controlled vast amounts of land and resources.

These demands for local control and opposition to federal power (despite the region's simultaneous embrace of federal funds for internal development) were not unique to the West. They have been at the core of modern conservatism and are central to a distinct southern and western regional identity. Yet the forces underlying these concerns have varied. Racial issues were far more central to the texture and fabric of southern politics and to that region's conservatism. While Orange County's southwestern location links it geographically to the South as well as the West, making it a central part of the distinctive regional identity that has come to be known as the Sunbelt, racial issues did not occupy the same prominence in the life, ideas, and politics of Southern California as they did in the former confederate states in the 1960s. Opposition to government action to bolster the constitutional rights of African-Americans did contribute to the Right's appeal, but it was only one of a host of issues in a broader conservative package. Focusing on western conservatism, then, tells a somewhat different story that cannot be subsumed under the North-South civil rights dichotomy that has so much dominated our narratives of the 1960s.³²

This book traces the transformation of the modern American Right from a marginal force tagged as "extremist" in the early 1960s into the mainstream of national life by the decade's end. This transformation happened in four distinct steps, and the book is organized to highlight the ideas and strategies that characterized each of them. While a core set of assumptions informed all the stages, the package of conservative concerns shifted from a discursive preoccupation with public, political, and international enemies (namely, communism) to enemies within our own communities and families (namely, secular humanists, women's liberationists, and, eventually, homosexuals). Chapter 1 sets the stage for these developments, describing the Southern California that proved such a fertile seedbed for right-wing growth; painting a broad picture of the region's socioeconomic character in 1960, it argues that the process of rapid suburbanization, the Cold War economic boom, regional business entrepreneurs, and a particular group of inmigrants reinforced an already existing conservative ethos. Chapter 2 charts the first and second moments of mobilization: first, the movement's birth in the late 1950s, a time when conservatives, disheartened with their lack of power on the national stage, struck back by founding journals and organizations, creating the core around which the movement would grow. The period of the early 1960s, the second phase of conservative mobilization, was a time of deepening grassroots activism that drew from the ideas, symbols, and targets of McCarthyism. Chapter 2 lays out the history of this mobilization, paying close attention to its beginning, its leaders, its rank-and-file activists, its strategies, and its movement culture. This second stage led activists to enter the electoral arena in order to take over the local and state Republican Party apparatus—the subject of chapter 3. Here, I explore the intersection of the grassroots Right with a broader national political movement. Culminating with the successful nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency in 1964, this "moment" ended when the Right's extremist and apocalyptic rhetoric almost doomed conservatism as a national movement. Chapter 4 links this phase of conservative mobilization with the next one by analyzing the ideology of the Right, looking at the core strands of right-wing thought—namely, libertarianism and social conservatism—that transcended the different political strategies of its activists. The third stage of conservative mobilization was the birth of a new populist conservatism in the wake of Goldwater's defeat, the subject of chapter 5. Piloted by Ronald Reagan, who became the new standard-bearer in 1966, conservatives refashioned their discourse, moving away from tirades on socialism and communism, and toward attacks on liberal "permissiveness," "welfare chiselers," "criminality," and "big government." This shift in emphasis, which coincided with the dramatic events of the decade so familiar to us, produced the Right's first significant triumph: the election of Ronald Reagan to the governorship of California in 1966. The fourth and final stage, the rise of new social issues and the resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is charted in chapter 6. Here, the book explores the decline of older organizations on the Right that had been important early in the decade and the shifting lines of battle driven by concerns over sexual liberation, liberalized abortion laws, and the women's movement. Along with these new initiatives, large-scale and growing evangelical churches in the region brought conservative social concerns to new prominence. The confluence of a middle-class economic backlash over taxes and state spending with Christian conservative hostility toward "Big Brother" stoked a fiery brew that would nourish conservative fortunes nationally. The book ends by following the trajectory of a group of core conservative activists into the late twentieth century, highlighting the evolution of the movement since the 1960s.

This study examines how a group of people in one county of the nation responded to the social, economic, and cultural changes of the 1960s—a time when national leaders foresaw a major expansion of federal functions to improve the lives of citizens; a time when personal freedoms vastly expanded, when racial hierarchies came tumbling down, and when gender relations were fundamentally reworked. In chronicling the meaning of these changes for the women and men of Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Anaheim, and Newport Beach, and, in particular, the way these people organized to assert the dominance of their beliefs and values in politics, this book provides a case study of how the New Right was made. But it is also my hope that this study of how the men and women in Orange County came to act collectively in politics in the 1960s will further our understanding of the deep, tenacious roots of popular conservatism in twentieth-century America. The conservative movement in Orange County, after all, did not emerge sui generis in the 1960s. It formed but one stage in a much longer history of the contest between conservatives and progressives for public power in American life in the twentieth century. Conservatives in the 1960s drew from an older font of ideas. Indeed, until the New Deal, conservative ideas had occupied a central, if not dominant, place in American culture and national life. In conservatives' eyes, then, the period from 1933 to 1980 was a trying time of displacement, marginalization, and struggle. It was a time when they had to adjust to their new position as simultaneous insiders and outsiders to the realms of power. Eventually, as this book demonstrates, their posture as outsiders enabled them to build a self-conscious movement to develop a critique of liberal elites. The world of the New Deal state, thus, first marginalized, then reshuffled, and eventually reinvigorated American conservatism. By the 1960s, conservatives had organized a cohesive movement with institutions, networks, and a broad grassroots following. This movement, combined with growing opportunities, eventually enabled conservatives to obtain a central position in the halls of national power once more.

In the largest sense, then, this book probes the shifting nature of twentieth-century American conservatism. When, where, and how have conservative political cultures been generated? To what extent has a self-conscious conservative movement advanced and defined itself in reaction to social change? And, most of all, how do we explain the staying power of the Right in American life? In the wake of conservative upheavals—from the fundamentalist mobilizations of the 1920s and the Red-baiting crusades of the 1950s to the Goldwater movement in the 1960s—liberal commentators argued that the Right was in disarray and retreat. With the spread of national liberal culture, education, and modernization to the rural areas and small towns that had once formed the heartland of conservative mobilizations, so the argument went, the Right would become increasingly marginalized. But conservative forces have instead flourished, and they have done so most recently in areas considered least conducive to them: modern suburban regions. They have been able to do so because, in Orange County and elsewhere, conservatives have meshed preservationism with adaptation. While embracing ideas often thought of as incompatible with modernity—in particular a rejection of secularism, egalitarianism, liberal relativism, and the tendency toward a centralized state—conservatives have conceived of themselves, in many ways, as a modern force. Just as importantly, they have accommodated aspects of American pluralism and jettisoned older unpalatable ideas (of anti-Semitism, biological racism, and anti-Catholicism, for example) in the face of new circumstances. At the same time, however, they have carried forward a core set of older assumptions about the nation, God's place within it, law and order, and limited government precepts that resonated with the new circumstances of life of many post-World War II middle- and lower-middle-class (especially white) Americans—Catholics and Protestants alike—particularly in the South and the West. They have addressed real dilemmas that faced Ameri cans in the post-World War II period: concerns about the erosion of local autonomy, of community, of individualism, and a disparagement of tradition in a familiar language. They have done so, moreover, in a way that seemed to safeguard a way of life and a set of power relations its adherents wished to preserve. Conservatism has been both a reactive and a proactive force, a mixture that helps explain its strength and endurance.

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Chapter One

    THE SETTING

    On July 17, 1955, Walt Disney opened his visionary new amusement park in Anaheim, California. After years of planning, Disneyland stood ready to provide packaged and planned family fun to hosts of tourists from around the nation and to the growing number of Americans who made Southern California their home. Women, children, and men crowded the sidewalks to witness the festivities: Life-size cartoon characters paraded through the streets of a sentimentalized "Main Street, U.S.A.," "Frontierland," "Tomorrowland," and "Fantasyland." In keeping with its founder's vision of Disneyland as an alternative to the chaotic Coney Islands of the East, with their "tawdry rides and hostile employees," clean-cut employees strove to maintain order and a friendly attitude.

    Walt Disney could not have found a more fitting home for his ambitious theme park, with its mixture of nostalgia for a simple American past and its bright optimism about the future, than this booming western locale at midcentury. No state in the nation in the mid-twentieth century represented the promises of the United States more than California, and no part of California stood for this dream more than the southland—the stretch of towns and cities extending from Santa Barbara to San Diego. Having packed their bags and said good-bye to their families and friends and the old "Main Streets" of their childhoods, millions of migrants settled in Southern California in the decades following World War II to realize their American dream. They took new jobs in high-techindustries,professions, and services, settled in single-family homes, and raised their children. In so doing, they formed part of a seismic demographic shift that would eventually forge the Sunbelt. Los Angeles stood as the prime destination in this migration, but just to the south of the City of Angels, Orange County came into its own in the 1960s as the land of promise for hundreds of thousands of Americans drawn by its job opportunities, climate, and suburban lifestyle. One of the thousands of migrants to Orange County noted years later that "it was God's country.... It was the dream of being able to get somewhere."

This suburban heartland was not only home to Walt Disney's visionary new park, to thousands of new California families and new towns and cities; it was also the birthing ground of a powerful grassroots political movement. A revitalized and militant Right—fueled by a politics of antistatism, virulent anticommunism, and strict normative conservatism—burst onto the scene nationally in the early 1960s, and nowhere more forcefully than Orange County. At living room bridge clubs, at backyard barbecues, and at kitchen coffee klatches, the middle-class men and women of Orange County "awakened" to what they perceived as the threats of communism and liberalism. Sensing an urgent need for action, they forged study groups, multiplied chapters of national right-wing organizations, and worked within the Republican Party to make their voices heard. In so doing, they became the cutting edge of the conservative movement in the 1960s. But before we examine the movement these people built, it is necessary to understand the setting in which it grew: the region's history, political and cultural traditions, and its economic development. The characteristics of Orange County's development—its specific form of economic growth, the domination of its politics by an antiliberal and anti-eastern business elite, and the experiences of the people who settled there—created a favorable context for virulent right-wing beliefs.

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Orange County lies at the geographic center of the Southern California basin, bounded by Los Angeles County to the northwest, Riverside and San Bernardino to the northeast, San Diego County to the southeast, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. Approximately 800 square miles in size, about 575 square miles of which are inhabitable, it is a geographically diverse region. In its easternmost recesses to the north and south, beautiful mountains, rolling hills, and forests break the monotony of the thousands of acres of plains that made Orange County so well suited to farming. On its westernmost reaches, the sparkling waters and soft, sandy beaches of the Pacific Ocean beckon Orange Countians to enjoy its pleasures.

    A migrant family from a small town or urban center in the Midwest or border South moving into one of the many new suburban tracts in 1960 would likely have been first struck by the county's lack of internally bounded towns and communities. Towns flowed together with little spatial distinction, intersected by a complex web of superhighways. It had not always been so. Only twenty years earlier, the county consisted of distinct small townships and cities, surrounded by ranches large and small. But spiraling growth led to a centrifugal form of development that lessened the importance of city centers and town units. Individuals and families may have resided in Garden Grove, Fullerton, Anaheim, Huntington Beach, or Costa Mesa, but, more important, they lived and increasingly worked in Orange County, a cohesive spatial unit with a self-definition distinct from neighboring Los Angeles.

    Despite its centrifugal growth, Orange County did have distinct geographic areas defined less by the twenty-two cities incorporated there by 1960 than by three differentiated regions. In the northwest, the rapid growth of suburban tract housing in the 1950s and the commercial and industrial establishments that sprang up in their wake created unending miles of suburban sprawl. Here, cities such as Anaheim, Garden Grove, Buena Park, and Santa Ana provided affordable, albeit uninteresting, single-family homes for the middle classes. While this region was predominantly lower-middle- and middle-class, north Fullerton and east Tustin were home to some of the wealthiest enclaves within the county, and central and southern Santa Ana contained some of the county's poorest areas.

    The coast made up the county's second distinct region. In contrast to the inland north, the central and south coast grew more slowly due to its distance from Los Angeles and its controlled development. The beaches of Orange County, extending forty miles from Seal Beach in the north to San Clemente in the south, had long been a favored retreat for weary Angelenos. Consequently, resort towns and beautiful homes dotted the Orange County coastline as early as the 1920s. But a large portion of this land was owned by the Irvine Company and released for development only in the 1950s and 1960s. Its setting, and the exclusive homes the company built on the land, made it a playground of the wealthy, who leased or bought the expensive properties of Newport Beach and Balboa Island, creating exclusive townships and some of the most valuable houses within the county.

    Agribusiness gave the southeast, the county's third region, a distinctive rural flavor throughout the 1960s. Suburban home construction proceeded slowly and, as in the coastal areas, only in a highly controlled fashion. This area was home to the 60,000-acre Cleveland National Forest and to vast working farms owned by a few modern-day land barons. In 1959, only ten landowners held more than 200,000 acres. The Irvine ranch alone covered almost one-fifth of the county. These landowners slowly sold their land to developers or went into development themselves, transforming profitable working farms into huge development companies that created corporate visions of the American dream and packaged communities for the wealthy.

Like much of the West, Orange County's history was one of contest and conquest, of winners and losers, of boom and bust. In its early days, before the United States' conquest of California in 1848, the area's economy was dominated by a small number of cattle rancheros who had been given massive land grants under Spanish and Mexican rule. When California was admitted as a state in 1850, legislators eager to assert control over the region nullified all land titles and forced landowners to spend exorbitant sums of money to defend their property. Anglo-American entrepreneurs bought land at cheap rates from the ruined Mexican ranchers and quickly became the new ruling class of the southland.

    A host of other colonists, ranging from merchants to small farmers to religious utopians who bought up the property so avidly hawked by local real estate speculators joined the few large ranching families who dominated the economy. Unified in their desire for local control over their new townships in the wake of the speculative boom of the 1880s, they broke away from neighboring Los Angeles in 1889. The county experienced the boom-and-bust cycles the old West was famous for—with town maps filed for cities that have long since been forgotten. But Anaheim, Santa Ana, Orange, and Tustin thrived, and other towns, such as Buena Park, Fullerton, and Laguna Beach, plotted during the real estate boom of the 1880s, just managed to survive. By 1890, Orange County's population stood at 13,589. While developers broke up the holdings in the western part of the county, the new American ranch owners in the east and south passed their holdings almost intact to their heirs. As a consequence, landholdings remained extremely concentrated.

    Agricultural crops had replaced the cattle industry as the driving force of the local economy in the 1870s and remained a basic source of income into the mid-twentieth century. Farmers produced sugar beets, truck crops, beans, and dairy, but no crop proved more important to the county's economy than citrus fruits. By 1930, lemon and orange groves covered the soft hills, slopes, and plains of Orange County. Small, thriving commercial centers and townships, along with packinghouses and the cottages and shacks of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican laborers, dotted the landscape. The slightly pungent scent of oranges permeated the air, and the balmy climate and small townships lent an idyllic atmosphere to the place. Although an oil boom in the 1920s brought in an important second industry, the county remained a prosperous, though sleepy, agricultural region. As late as 1940, only 113,760 people lived in the area.

    World War II transformed the American West and, with it, Orange County. A watershed in the region's development, it set in motion a chain of developments that would eventually turn Orange County into a sprawling metropolis. Taking advantage of their strategic location on the Pacific Coast, local businessmen, real estate speculators, and boosters who had long envisioned a bright future for the county sought to entice the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force to locate bases there. To encourage the military to settle in Orange County, the Santa Ana City Council obtained an option to lease a 412-acre berry ranch south of the city and offered to subcontract the property to the War Department for the symbolic sum of one dollar per year. The War Department accepted the offer and built the United States Air Corps Replacement Training Center, later renamed the Santa Ana Army Air Base. Two years later, the navy added a Naval Ammunition Depot at nearby Seal Beach and, in 1942, the United States Naval Air Station moved from Long Beach to Los Alamitos. El Toro became the home of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station, an installation that remained important during the Cold War.

    The military was thoroughly entrenched by 1950, and the bases provided one of the county's main sources of income. Thousands of military personnel moved to the area, enticing some farmers, battling a destructive plant disease and facing stiff competition from Florida, to take advantage of the new demand for housing and development and subdivide their land.

    World War II foreshadowed other, even greater, changes for Orange County and the nation. Rising tensions with the Soviet Union meant that the development model that had spurred the economy during wartime could serve as a catalyst for growth, even in times of peace. The Cold War and its close relative, the military-industrial complex, shaped U.S. economic development in the postwar years. New industries sprouted up to feed the voracious appetite of Uncle Sam for new weapons in a spiraling arms race. From 1950 to 1959, contracts by the Department of Defense amounted to the staggering sum of $228 billion nationally. This was an increase of 246 percent over these ten years; during the same period, the nation's business as a whole expanded by only 76 percent. By 1962, defense had become the nation's largest business, and from 1946 to 1965, 62 percent of the federal budget went to defense. These huge expenditures catalyzed the "affluent society" and directly and indirectly affected the lives of every American.

While defense money drove national economic growth, the regions that profited most directly were the Sunbelt South and West, and the biggest beneficiary was Southern California. The federal funds that poured into California created the nation's largest urban military-industrial complex. In 1953, California topped New York as the leading state in net value of military prime contracts awarded. Throughout the next decade, awards to the Golden State amounted to twice as much as the annual amount any other state received. These federal funds, plus the annual military and civilian payroll of the Department of Defense in California, funneled more than $50 billion in defense dollars into California for approximately the ten-year period from 1950 to 1960. And no region received more funds than Southern California. With the exception of Santa Clara in the north, Los Angeles County, San Diego County, and Orange County received the lion's share of defense moneys. As a result, whereas virtually no Orange Countians worked in defense-related industries in 1950, there were 31,000 workers on their payrolls twelve years later.

    World War II and subsequent defense spending transformed Los Angeles and Southern California into a new regional power. Los Angeles, at the heart of the initial growth, received 61 percent of California defense outlays in 1959, making it a "world city" and a leading international industrial center. It grew from a population of 1.5 million in 1940 to close to 2.5 million by 1960. The metropolitan region included more than 6 million inhabitants by 1960. The phenomenal growth of Los Angeles spilled over into sleepy Orange County, turning it into a sprawling suburban region. Los Angeles's new bedroom community soon attracted its own manufacturing base (with defense leading the way), making Orange County the second most populous county in California by 1967.

    By the early 1960s, Orange County had become an important center for defense-related industries in its own right. Between 1957 and 1961, Hughes Aircraft moved into the county, employing 10,000 people; Autonetics made its home in Anaheim, adding 10,000 workers to its payroll; Ford Aeronutronics set up facilities in Newport, bringing 2,800 jobs. American Electronics came to Fullerton, generating 380 jobs; Beckman Instruments also chose Fullerton when it moved its headquarters into Orange County, employing 3,100 workers; and Nortronics settled in Anaheim, hiring 2,300 employees. By 1960, more people worked in manufacturing than in any other sector. Orange County had become a "military-related suburb." Electronics was the fastest-growing manufacturing industry, accounting for about 40 percent of all manufacturing employment in the county. By 1964, of the thirteen manufacturing firms in Orange County employing 500 or more workers, nine were in the electronics-instruments-missile-aircraft classification. The growth of these industries, as Spencer C. Olin has argued, was the result not only of the vast defense outlays but also of the availability of a pool of technical and scientific labor, low rates of unionization, and the existence of venture capital. These factors drew the burgeoning new growth industries in defense and electronics not only to Orange County but also to other regions in the West and South. At the same time, the older northern industrial cities of the East and Midwest saw a decline in their manufacturing base. The resulting demographic and economic changes would eventually help shift the balance of economic and political power in the nation increasingly southward and westward.

    The military-industrial complex brought equally impressive employment gains in other sectors. Retail sales and service industries that provided the amenities, the fast food, the household furnishings, and the appliances for the growing suburban communities trailed closely behind manufacturing in providing jobs. The demand for housing and commercial buildings brought a frenzied construction boom, along with phenomenal profits for the building industry. New lots and rising land prices brought with them a mushrooming real estate industry as property development became a vast business. Together with retail and services, these three sectors employed the majority of workers in the county, more than manufacturing itself. The underpinning of the local economy, however, was the defense-related manufacturing sector.

    The rapid growth and affluence of the region drew scores of entrepreneurs whose ventures, in turn, spurred new development. Walt Disney and his engineers, for example, decided to locate Disneyland in Orange County after scouring the country for the choicest location. They counted on the region's pleasant climate and future growth to draw crowds and profits. The park, in turn, brought hotels, restaurants, and other service establishments to Anaheim. By 1963, tourist expenditures counted for approximately 20 percent of retail sales in the county. Professionals, small businessmen, doctors, and dentists, moreover, moved into the region to service the new suburban communities. Even ministers saw opportunities in Southern California, becoming religious entrepreneurs bent on preaching the word of God in the new promised land.

    The Sunbelt economic boom brought new people into the area at a dizzying pace. While in 1940, 130,760 people made their homes in Orange County, by 1960, 703,925 people resided there—a growth of an astounding 385 percent. In individual cities, these gains ranged from 25 percent (Cypress) to an astronomical 18,000 percent (Garden Grove) in the decade after 1950. With growth rates three times the state average and eleven times the national average, Orange County ranked among the fastest-growing counties in the nation. In the 1960s, the spiraling growth continued, though at a slower pace. By the decade's end, the population stood at close to 1.5 million.

    This growth was, in a very real sense, a modern-day version of the California gold rush—making Orange County the new frontier West of the second half of the twentieth century. Entrepreneurs found unending opportunities to try their hands and stake their capital, betting on the continued growth of the region. Their success and the resulting prosperity reaffirmed many Orange Countians' faith in the American dream. Notwithstanding that economic growth took place as a result of the largesse of Uncle Sam, for many this link was indirect, since they made their fortunes in private businesses, in construction, and as professionals serving the new communities. For others, particularly a segment of regional businessmen who experienced the link more directly, the presence of the federal government—and the bureaucracy, red tape, and control it brought with it—deepened their resentment against Washington regulators. But for everybody, the hundreds of individual success stories, the thousands of new businesses—ranging from medical and dental practices to new construction firms—reinforced an ethos of individualism that boded favorably for the Right.