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

Response to Professor Farber, Roundtable on The Conservative Sixties

Professor Farber’s opening comments raise two important questions, one
historiographical, the other factual:  Why did it take modern American
historians so long to explore seriously the Right in America? And, did the
election of Richard Nixon mark the resurgence of the Right in America?

Professor Farber maintains that academic historians writing on the turbulent
decade of the 60s explored nearly every subject under the sun except the
emergence of conservatism in this decade.  He suggests that even as late as
1997 the left still was not taking the Right in the 1960s seriously, as
indicated by the poor reviews his Chicago ’68 received from The Village Voice
and Maurice Isserman in the American Historical Review. (Poor Maurice. He
continues to get it from all sides.)  While this is not the occasion to renew a
discussion over Farber’s book on the riots at the Chicago Democratic
convention, I believe that this is an impressive study that has opened, new
areas for research, especially in political and legal history.

Without doubt, the political Left was slow in coming to grips with the
political
transformation that was occurring with the emergence of a powerful grassroots
Right in America. The Left was not alone in this regard. The Ford White House
in 1976 continued to underestimate, even deride, the Reagan challenge in the
GOP primaries. Presidential advisors Donald Rumsfield and Dick Cheney privately
scoffed at the emergence of the conservative movement.  As for the Left, it
seemed incapable of coming to grips with Reagan even in 1984.  I remember
shortly after Reagan’s victory in 1984 being asked by an editor at The Nation
to write a piece on the Heritage Foundation. At the time I had been invited by
the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars to! spend a semester
studying think-tanks in Washington, D.C. and I had spent considerable time
interviewing people at the Heritage Foundation. (The editor had learned of my
work through an after-dinner talk I had given at Wilson to the presidents of
the major think-tanks in Washington.)  I wrote the piece, sent it off, and
returned to South Bend, Indiana where I was teaching at the time. The major
point of the essay was that the Right had made significant inroads in
grassroots America as evidenced in the activities of the Heritage Foundation,
which was in the process of setting up conservative research institutes in many
states. Weeks passed and finally I phoned the editor (I will not name names) to
ask what had become of the piece. I was told that the piece was not critical
enough of the Heritage Foundation and was not going to be printed. A few weeks
later, however, an article did appear in The Nation on the Heritage Foundation
base! d on research striking similar to my own. The major difference was in its
conclusion, which was that the Heritage Foundation revealed how corporate
American was dictating policy in the Reagan administration. Not a single word
was given to what was occurring on the grassroots.  At that point I realized
that not all was well in Elsinore and that the Left was obstinately refusing to
ask the fundamental question of whether to be or not to be.

Still, even after saying this, I think it has become a cliché that academic
historians ignored the conservatism until Alan Brinkley issued in his call in
1994 to study the history of conservatism.  The historiography of conservatism
shows a continuous discussion of conservatism, but often this literature has
not been precise in its definitions of conservatism and its many varieties. As
Jennifer Burns observes in her astute retrospective of George H. Nash in
Reviews in American History (September, 2002), there has been a constant study
of conservatism within the academy including McCloskey (1951), Wolfskill
(1962), Patterson (1967), Allen Guttman (1967),  Lora (1971),  Nash (1976),
Diggins (1975), ! Doenecke (1976), and Ribuffo (1983). In the 1990s,
conservatism in the 1960s came under close scrutiny by anew generation of
academic writers, Klatch (1987), Gottfried (1993), Allitt (1993),  Brennan
(1995), Hodgson (1996), McAllister (1996), Andrew (1997),  Shuparra, (1998),
Schneider (1999),  Himmelstein (1990), McGirr (2001),and Schoenwald (2001). (My
apologies to those historians left off the list).

These books were something more, to quote Professor Farber, than “the failure
and decline, the end of anti-communism, the last gasps of the Birchers and
their kind, the rejection of the Goldwater crowd and their candidate, and the
breakup of the segregationist cause.”  Nonetheless, before the burst of studies
in the 1990s, with some notable exceptions such as Ribuffo, the grassroots
conservatism was often ignored. Moreover, as Jennifer Burns accurately notes,
this pre-1990s literature did not give much attention to the libertarian
contribution to conservatism. Professor Farber notes that Dan Carter “almost
single-handedly pushed Wallace and reactionary populism into the narrative”
with his Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of New Conservatism, and
the Politics of Transformation. (1995).

Professor Farber in his inclusion of Dan Carter in the historiography of
conservatism reveals a problem that is found even in some of the more recent
literature. Although Lisa McGirr rightfully admonishes those historians who
equate extremists and conservatives, too often the KKK, the Minute Men, white
supremacists, and neo-Nazis are included in the same narrative. The issue of
race and conservatism needs further exploration by scholars and it should be
noted that political scientists such as Bryon Shafer are beginning to challenge
the presumption that a racial backlash was the key to the creation of the
Republican South. The question needs to be asked whether George Wallace was a
conservative at all?  In 1968, most conservatives did not think so.
Conservatives supported Ronald Reagan or! Richard Nixon. Indeed, grassroots
Republican conservative Phyllis Schlafly openly criticized George Wallace as
not an alternative to the New Deal liberal state. For many conservatives,
Wallace was a typical New Deal Southern Democrat who played the race card,
while welcoming huge subsidies from the federal government for schools, roads,
and welfare.

This leads to a factual question about the place of Nixon in the conservative
revival. Professor Farber writes that Nixon’s election in 1968 and 1972 was
historically significant. Within the context of the New Left 1960s, this is
true, but Nixon’s place in a narrative of the American conservatism is a
negative one.  Nixon won the 1968 GOP nomination over Ronald Reagan through the
support of Strom Thurmond and Phyllis Schlafly. Thurmond kept Southern
delegates in line at the Miami convention when it looked like they might
deflect to the Reagan camp.  Schlafly convinced many conservatives that Nixon
could be trusted on strategic defense policy with his promise to restore
American nuclear supremacy over the Soviet Union.  Once in office, Nixon purs!
ued opportunistic domestic and foreign policies that left the GOP Right in
shambles. After Nixon’s trip to Beijing it was clear, as William F. Buckley,
Jr. wrote, Nixon was “not one of us [conservatives].” Even before Watergate,
the GOP Right had disassociated itself from Nixon. After Watergate, the entire
Republican party was demoralized with less than 20 percent of the electorate
identifying themselves as Republicans.  Republican leaders openly spoke of the
GOP going the way of the Whig party.  The Right only revived with the emergence
of social issues—abortion, prayer in school, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Much of this revival came about because the Democratic party had swung to the
left on cultural issues beginning in 1972.  In other words, Richard Nixon was
less significant in the revival of con! servatism as a political force than the
arrogance of the cultural Left.  This suggests that the historians need to move
beyond the 1960s to the new frontier of the 1970s.

Donald Critchlow

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

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