Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right [Hardcover]

Gregory Schneider (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 081478108X | ISBN-13: 978-0814781081 | Publication Date: December 1, 1998

In this history of the "other Sixties," Gregory L. Schneider traces the influence of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political group that locked horns with the New Left and spawned many of the major players in the contemporary conservative movement, from the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to Reagan's revolution in the 1980s.

Cadres for Conservatism reveals how young political conservatives, unlike their leftist counterparts, avoided fracture in the wake of the Sixties. Rather, YAF continued to serve as a seedbed for future conservative leaders, many of whom drew on the contacts and (counter-)activism of their youth to consolidate conservative power.

Schneider's talent for trenchant archival research is supplemented by a plethora of detailed interviews with virtually every past national chairman and executive director of the YAF, as well as important sponsors such as William F. Buckley, William Rusher, and M. Stanton Evans.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A deeply engaging work. I am enormously impressed with the archival research and oral interviews this book represents. Exceptionally well-done."

-Kenneth J. Heineman,author of Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at State Universities in the Vietnam Era

About the Author

Gregory L. Schneider is Assistant Professor of History at Emporia State University and author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right from NYU Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 263 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081478108X
• ISBN-13: 978-0814781081
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,242,349 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is a very flawed study which tells only half the story,, June 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (Hardcover)

Except for the chapter describing conservatism's very early days, the rest of this work is very disappointing. It does not describe YAF as I and others knew it. YAF was the center of what became the American political conservative movement. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan represented the mainstream. Within YAF, it was typified by our two greatest National Chairmen: David A. Keene of the University of Wisconsin the the late 1960s, and especially Dr. Ronald F. Docksai of New York University in the early 1970s. These were the two active as well as intelligent young conservative leaders. The others were glorified "young Republicans" and various flake-blowhards. However, too little is said about how Keene and Docksai built up YAF into something big and active. Dr. Schneider gives us a very flawed study with only half the story. He also mistakenly associates "reactionaries" like youthful followers of George Wallace with YAF. However, it was Keene and Docksai who effectively purged the Wallace-types and reactionaries from YAF; and perhaps ruthlessly at times. Yet, Schneider misses all of this. He tells the story only from the standpoint of the ARMCHAIR-libertarians (versus the CAMPUS-libertarians---with whom I associate myself). Keene and Docksai were too close to the William Buckley family, but they nevertheless successfully built up young conservatives into something different than and opposed to the John Birchers or religion-fanatics with all their intolerant hangups. It is clear to me Schneider must be too young to have really experienced any of this, or at least his book is lacking. -Ralph Fucetola

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dull; humorless; revisionist; but very meager., June 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (Hardcover)

Handsomely "covered," of the hardcopy's 288 pages, only 182 are actual written text. Comprising what's left are "chapter notes" of meandering accuracy and arguable interest.

As YAF's longest serving National Chairman, i.e., retiring in 1975; my name is correctly in this book's citations, which are otherwise amazingly inaccurate. I ascribe this to never having been interviewed by the author, nor as I learn were other more important but equally active young conservative alumnae.

For those of us who actually lived through the brief period described, this book is "history"-lite. Lamely written, but flagrantly inaccurate was Mr. Schneider's description of YAF's profoundest success: its singularly conceived grassroots-campaign against selling STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGIES to (then) Soviet-dominated economies, the keystone of which becoming YAF's final success with IBM. Schneider tells it otherwise, yet in a fashion less provocative than somnalent....To describe YAF during the period 1968 to 1978 without a large portion devoted to Hon. James L. Buckley, and the unique ad hoc YAF youth movement organized by Herbert Stupp in New York, is to watch opera without music. I could go on, but this book grows ever more boring justthinking about it.

It reads like a foreign student's Masters Thesis submitted to an American university's faculty-committee with little to no knowledge of politics or "conservatives"; and badly "Englished" by its northern Korean translaters.

Someday someone will write an interesting, accurate history of the brief but ideologically formative epoch this book's cover pretends to encase. That day has not yet arrived.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Valuable history of a key conservative political group, March 13, 1999

By 

wayne thorburn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (Hardcover)

Greg Schneider interviewed many of the major players in YAF and had access to documents and correspondence not previously available. Like John Andrew's earlier work, Schneider spends much time on internal machinations at the national level to the detriment of reflecting "grass roots" activism on campuses and in communities across America. While Andrew's coverage ends in 1964,Schneider covers 25 years of YAF-through the campus conflicts, the Vietnam War era, and the various Reagan presidential campaigns. What is missing? 1. an overemphasis on the actual misses the role of YAF as a training ground for future leadership. Thus, projects and campaigns were undertaken not merely for immediate ends but to develop individual skills for later leadership roles. 2. The book fails to explain a key word in its title. YAF was a "cadre" as part of a nascent conservative movement which represented a bringing together of those intellectuals and writers around National Review and the DC political operatives with a network of activists across the nation. As a "cadre," YAF facilitated the development of lasting relationships and contacts in every state. In this sense, YAF was similar to, but more than, a fraternity or sorority. 3. Finally, the early internal politics tends to overlook the fact that YAF as a youth group was autonomous and independent - a fact which in the 1980s tended to exacerbate its decline. While one can debate when the "end" came, the scattered remnant which employs the YAF name now is not the same as the group portrayed in Schneider's most engaging study.