New book explores impact of West Texas conservatism on the New Right
Jeff Roche’s The Conservative Frontier is a quietly convincing account of how the “cowboy conservatism” of West Texas, with its evangelical anti-intellectualism and white nationalist leanings, was refined into the New Right.
Roche weaves together the anti-statist strands of optimism that link Charles Goodnight’s cattle kingdom and ex-movie executive Hickman Price’s “factory farming” directly to the Dust Bowl and to a subsequent aversion to any federal intervention in the economy.
In The Conservative Frontier, we encounter the failed “capitalist utopia” of the New Thought-influenced cereal giant C.W. Post, the Prairie Home Companion-like populism of U.S. Sen. Pappy O’Daniel and a booster class of everyday Texans becoming more amenable to the extremist paranoia of the John Birch Society.
In “The Conservative Frontier,” author Jeff Roche examines how the “cowboy conservatism” of West Texas was refined into the New Right.
Christopher Roche
Amid this survey, moments of clear-headed heroism emerge in the person of Dallas-born football coach Joe Kerbel, who fearlessly recruited Black athletes to his West Texas State team, and folklorist J. Frank Dobie, who spoke before the Textbook Investigation Committee, assuring a crowd that sought to suppress any educational material deemed subversive that kids would not be “fooled by some dull tail-twisting and flag-waving propaganda.”
Informative as it is exhaustive, The Conservative Frontier is rife with tales of free-market amorality, wherein survivors of the antebellum South were coaxed into coming to Texas by advertisements describing the state as “a white man’s country” and USDA officials were bribed into covering up grain storage corruption with shopping sprees to Neiman Marcus.
Details
The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right
By Jeff Roche
(University of Texas Press, 482 pages, $34.95; due out Oct. 7)
Source link
