To: H-1960S@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Subject: Schneider on _The Conservative Sixties_

David Farber ends his post on The Conservative Sixties by stating: “to
understand modern conservatism you must understand the events of the 1960s.  To
understand the Sixties era you have to recognize that conservatives were at the
center of the action.”  I’ll do him one better.  To understand modern America,
beginning with World War I and continuing to the present, you have to
understand conservatism.  For much of the twentieth-century conservatives
organized and developed their ideas right alongside modern liberalism.
Conservatism, as historian George H. Nash argued in his magisterial The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976),
emerged from “scattered voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the
future of the country.”  By the mid-1950s conservative intellectuals had
developed their ideas and founded publications, like William F. Buckley’s
National Review, from which to bring the nation “up from liberalism.”  In this
particular way, conservatism represented a movement founded first on ideas
before it moved into politics and grassroots organizing.  Whether one credits
Buckley’s National Review with being the birthplace of the movement’s ideology,
or the decade-earlier Human Events (Reagan’s favorite journal), ideas among
conservatives came first and helped set the stage for political organizing
later.  By the 1960s conservatism was about to experience one of many of its
shifts, from a movement of intellectuals to a movement of politicians and
activists.

        The great strength of a book like The Conservative Sixties lies in what
Jeff
Roche describes in his post as the “essayists [getting down] to the
grassroots.”  Almost all of the essays in the book are concerned with
grassroots activism and with the political questions involved among Sixties
conservatism.  I am uncomfortable with a couple of the essays, including the
study of the Minutemen, a fringe group that has nothing to do with postwar
conservatism.  The Minutemen could be considered conservative only if one wants
to label the American Nazi Party as conservative.  I am equally concerned with
the inclusion of an essay on the John Birch Society in a book on conservatism.
If the book were about anticommunists (one facet of conservative grassroots
organizing), the JBS should be included, but by including an essay on the
Birchers, one may leave the impression that conservatism deserved the mantle
extremist,  by which many labeled it in the early Sixties.  I do not think
either Farber or Roche had that intention.  Indeed, as Jonathon Schoenwald
points out, Birch Society founder Robert Welch was “excommunicated” in 1962 and
1963 from the conservative movement by William F. Buckley, in an effort to trim
the sails of extremism and make the movement more respectable politically.
After that, the Birch Society’s influence, as Lisa McGirr’s book Suburban
Warriors demonstrates, was negligible.  Very few movement conservatives who
would become influential politically or otherwise, owe (or owed) their
conservative activism to the John Birch Society.

And that brings to mind the two glaring omissions in the book.  A study of
Young
Americans for Freedom’s role in the 1960s, particularly their combat with the
new Left on college campuses in the late 1960s—well documented in my study,
Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the
Contemporary Right (NYU, 1999)--and an essay on libertarianism, should have
been included.  YAF was battling against the New Left, articulating a
pro-Vietnam War viewpoint and serving as the shock troops for conservatism
during the decade.  While YAF is mentioned in a few essays, the young
conservatives proved effective over the long term in building networks of
activists and dutifully serving the cause of conservatism.  The young founders
of YAF provided the basis for the movement’s interest in winning political
power, as Buckley mentioned in a 1960 National Review piece describing the new
organization.  While they did not always live up to the lofty expectations of
their mentors in the conservative movement, YAF members proved far more
resilient and more effective than the Minutemen or the John Birch Society.
Many of their members continue to serve the conservative cause today, some in
high positions in government, think tanks or journalism.  Very few Birchers
wound up in such positions, and the Birch Society today pays homage to Robert
Welch, much like some New Leftists sought to pay homage to Kim Il-sung or Mao
Zedong.

Libertarianism is not discussed in the book either, a glaring omission in
trying
to understand the modern conservative movement.  In part, an outgrowth of YAF
and of tensions within American conservatism over Vietnam by the late 1960s,
the libertarian awakening on the Right is one of the more interesting stories
of conservatism in the 1960s (I would point to John Kelley’s excellent history,
Bringing the Market Back In, which discusses the long history of classical
liberal ideas and political movements in modern America).  By the 1970s a
libertarian movement proved capable of developing institutions, like the CATO
Institute, founded a political party, and focused on “free markets and free
minds,” certainly in terms of slogans as important as other Sixties slogans,
like “Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did you Kill Today?”  The libertarian effort
to end the draft—in coordination with New Left organizations—would have been
worthy of exploration in the book.

In many ways what the book offers is a one-dimensional view of conservatism in
the decade.  Conservatism is anticommunist, extremist (why else would the
Birchers and Minutemen be included?), focused on rhetoric and symbols (cowboy
conservatism) and not on ideas and organizations (with the exception of Don
Critchlow’s fine essay on Phyllis Schlafly), and not really interested in
explaining how this all was translated into political power within a decade
after the Sixties ended.  This is not to criticize the essayists and their
finely tuned and well written contributions, nor is it to be mistaken as a
criticism of the editors, both of whose work I respect and admire.  Rather it
is to offer an alternative idea: instead of the conservative Sixties, what
about offering a book on the Conservative Century? (I do mean the 20th
century, not the 10th!)  By refocusing our attention on how conservatism
developed throughout the course of American history during the modern era, we
may break out of the constraints of attempting to explain conservatism simply
as a backlash, or a reaction, or as a new alternative, and see it for what is
has proven itself to be: a tradition in American political ideology whose reach
and influence extends throughout modern American history and whose end as an
idea and political movement is nowhere in sight.

Gregory L. Schneider
Emporia State University

Humanities & Social
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