American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

In the two decades since Alan Brinkley called conservatism the “orphan” of political history, scholars have responded by looking for the primary issue(s) which ignited Right-wing activism in the mid-twentieth century. Yet while hot button issues are necessary to rouse support, they are by themselves an insufficient cause. There are always means, media, or institutions around which movements coalesce. To put that in other terms, historians often explain the rise of the New Right by looking at shifts in the demand for conservative ideas. Yet changes in the supply of those ideas were equally important to the rise of modern conservatism. This panel focuses on the media infrastructure of the New Right. Radio, television, paperback publishing, and private intelligence agencies brought scattered conservatives into a national movement.

As Paul Matzko shows in “Polish Ham, Talk Radio, and the Rise of the New Right,” conservative radio broadcasting in the early 1960s stimulated grassroots activism. In one instance, broadcaster Carl McIntire condemned the John F. Kennedy administration for allowing imports from Communist Eastern Europe; a large group of his listeners, mostly housewives, organized boycotts of stores selling Polish hams and other goods. As amusing as the incident sounds in retrospect, it was no laughing matter for the Kennedy administration as detailed in internal White House memoranda.

Anti-ham housewives were an irritant during the 1962 midterm elections, but during the 1964 election season Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign encountered a flood of cheaply-produced, best-selling conservative paperback books. Nicole Hemmer, in “’Hatchets with Soft-Covered Sheaths,’” details the surprising success of these campaign paperbacks, which despite being authored by little known grassroots activists managed to sell upwards of 16 million copies via an informal network of Right-wing publishers and marketing outlets.

Michael McVicar, in “Surveillance—Dossier—Exposé,” reveals a darker side to the campaign to put a conservative in the White House. Using do-it-yourself manuals, Right-wing activists created private intelligence agencies that compiled dossiers on Left-wing politicians and activists. Their goal was to expose embarrassing connections between the Left and Communist front organizations. The anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s had been democratized, commodified, and placed in the hands of grassroots activists.

Despite a self-imposed distance from grassroots activism, even conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley needed a way to circulate their ideas. In “Firing Line,” Heather Hendershot describes how Buckley used his television program to create a more cerebral strand of the New Right. Grassroots activists are adept at disruption, but Buckley gave the movement an intellectual foundation on which to build a more sustainable movement.

By the 1960s, New Right activists could access conservative ideas in new ways, whether on the car radio on the way to work, as a family gathered around the television set at night, reading a campaign paperback in bed, or writing in to a private intelligence agency for information on a local political candidate. The expansion of the media infrastructure of the New Right enabled new forms of conservative, grassroots activism which would dramatically reshape national and party politics.