Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) [Paperback]

Lisa McGirr (Author)

Book Description

Series: Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America | Publication Date: January 21, 2002

In the early 1960s, American conservatives seemed to have fallen on hard times. McCarthyism was on the run, and movements on the political left were grabbing headlines. The media lampooned John Birchers's accusations that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Mainstream America snickered at warnings by California Congressman James B. Utt that "barefooted Africans" were training in Georgia to help the United Nations take over the country. Yet, in Utt's home district of Orange County, thousands of middle-class suburbanites proceeded to organize a powerful conservative movement that would land Ronald Reagan in the White House and redefine the spectrum of acceptable politics into the next century.

Suburban Warriors introduces us to these people: women hosting coffee klatches for Barry Goldwater in their tract houses; members of anticommunist reading groups organizing against sex education; pro-life Democrats gradually drawn into conservative circles; and new arrivals finding work in defense companies and a sense of community in Orange County's mushrooming evangelical churches. We learn what motivated them and how they interpreted their political activity. Lisa McGirr shows that their movement was not one of marginal people suffering from status anxiety, but rather one formed by successful entrepreneurial types with modern lifestyles and bright futures. She describes how these suburban pioneers created new political and social philosophies anchored in a fusion of Christian fundamentalism, xenophobic nationalism, and western libertarianism.

While introducing these rank-and-file activists, McGirr chronicles Orange County's rise from "nut country" to political vanguard. Through this history, she traces the evolution of the New Right from a virulent anticommunist, anti-establishment fringe to a broad national movement nourished by evangelical Protestantism. Her original contribution to the social history of politics broadens--and often upsets--our understanding of the deep and tenacious roots of popular conservatism in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Prototypical rather than typical, suburban Orange County, Calif., provides Harvard historian McGirr with an illuminating microcosm of the historical transformations that took conservative activism from the conspiracy-obsessed fringes of the John Birch Society to the election of Ronald Reagan, first as governor of California and then as president. Drawing heavily on interviews with grassroots activists as well as a wide range of primary documents, McGirr paints a complex picture exploring the apparent contradiction of powerfully antimodern social, political and religious philosophies thriving in a modern, technological environment and translating into sustained political activity. Federal spending, beginning in WWII and continuing with massive Cold War defense contracts and military bases, was the driving force behind Orange County's booming economy. A frontier-era mythos of rugged individualism, nurtured on hatred of eastern elites who funded western growth before Uncle Sam conveniently hid this dependency. The local dominance of unfettered private development chaotically disorganized in the county's northwest, corporately planned elsewhere destroyed existing communities, producing an impoverished public sphere, a vacuum conservative churches and political activism helped fill. Migrants primarily from nonindustrial regions became more conservative in reaction to the stresses of suburban modernity, while selectively assimilating benefits. Racial and class homogeneity nurtured a comforting conformity consciously defended against outside threats. United by enemies, libertarian and social conservatives rarely confronted their differences. Against this complex, contradictory background, McGirr charts the evolution of a movement culture through various stages, issues and forms of organizing. Incisive yet fair, this represents an important landmark in advancing a nuanced understanding of how antimodernist ideologies continue to thrive. 12 illus.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Orange County, CA, has been the home of anti-Communist John Birchers, apocalypse-prophesying evangelists, "cowboy capitalists" who demanded free enterprise and an unregulated economy, libertarians opposed to a centralized government and taxes, and thousands of voters angered by liberals. McGirr (history, Harvard) presents a deft investigation of how these citizens mastered grass-roots politics to shift the conservative movement from discredited clusters of extremists to respectability and dominant party status through the 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater and the election of Ronald Reagan as California's governor in 1966. Although Orange County was arguably the most conservative county in America, it was, as the author concludes, mostly populated by middle- and upper-middle-class Republican professionals trying to protect their homes from what they viewed as a morally corrupt society. McGirr has not written the sweeping, spirited narrative that Rick Perlstein presented in his Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (LJ 2/15/01), but she presents a focused, stimulating account that demonstrates that many of the best contemporary works on the Sixties are about the rise of the Right. Strongly recommended for academic libraries and recommended for larger public libraries. Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Township Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (January 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691096112
• ISBN-13: 978-0691096117
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #36,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Red-Baiting to Reganomics, March 12, 2001

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. (Hardcover)

A marvelous cultural history of conservative political and religious activism in Orange County, CA circa 1960 to 1980, Suburban Warriors evocatively renders the rise of New Right and the SunBelt, and argues persuasively that Orange County, CA was at the epicenter of the conservative revolution of the late 20th Century. Combining interviews with activists with larger demographic analsyses of the immigrants who came to populate the area during the post-WWII economic boom, along with an economic history of the growth of the area, McGirr deftly points a portrait of a time and a place and a people who were uniquely ready to create a new post-modern, politically conservative future. But it is her description of how it was done that makes for the most compelling reading.

McGirr is particularly good at pointing out certain ironies that undercut the Conservative agenda. For instance, she notes that Orange Country was and is anti-tax (anti-egalitarian, anti-collectivist, anti-communist, anti-Federal government interference, anti-fair housing), but that the boom it enjoyed in the 60s was fueled primarily by federal defense spending. The Rugged Individualist, Boot-Stapping Entreprenuerial Businessman was in many ways beholden for his economic success on government expenditures. More recently, Orange County, following it's own free-market, low/anti-tax philosophy went backrupt due to investments in esoteric stock market products, investments the County felt forced to make because of budget shortfalls.

She also notes that the conservative philosophy spawned during that era partook of two incompatible philosophies: social conservatism (the moralizing, anti-sex education in schools, anti-abortion beliefs) and libertarianism (the Ayn Rand inspired Objectivist movement was particularly strong in Orange County). She notes that these philosophies share many of the same values, but that they have different endpoints. She also notes that while social conservatives battled government or "secular humanists" interference in their lives, they also attempted to get the McGuffey's Reader into their local classroom (textbooks from the 1920s which had lessons about God and morality). In addition, she notes that the conservative position on property rights -- the property owners' rights are absolute (which justifies race discrimination in the renting or selling of property)-- fails to recognize the "natural rights" assigned to citizens by the US Constitution: equality under the law.

These examples may make it sound as if McGirr is a liberal. I apologize if that is the case. She may well be, but if she is, it is difficult to discern it. Indeed, McGirr does us all a great favor by demonstrating it is possible to write about the often deep divisions in US politics fairly, with respect and insight. Balanced, deftly told, deeply researched, SUBURBAN WARRIORS may cause liberals to reexamine some of their deeply-held prejudices against this movement, it goals and its philosophy. The Left is just as guilty of demonizing its enemies as the Right. McGirr does such a splendid job of maintaining distance and objectivity that even a "liberal" can better understand the beginnings of a movement that was often dismmissed in its early days as nostalgic at best, and at worst, pathological.

(A confession: I grew up in a liberal suburb adjacent to Orange County and so part of my enthusiasm for this book is related to my nostalgia for that time. We were liberal Easterners from New York, who came to California to eventually take advantage of the post-war boom and eventually, the terrific, free, state-sponsored college education system -- which came to an end under Reagan before we could do so. I don't blame Reagan, by the way, we had moved to New York State by then where the old liberal promises were still, at least to a degree, in place.

60 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, April 17, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. (Hardcover)

The best part of McGirr's book about Orange County conservatism and the rise of the New American right is the first chapter on the setting. She discusses how Orange Country boomed under the post-war military buildup. One of the wealthiest counties in the country, thoroughly dependent on federal largesse, anti-communist ideology conveniently covered up that embarrassing fact in endless cant about individualism and the corrupting effects of the welfare state. In particular this homogenous county was peculiarly dispersed in its geography, encouraging an atomization and emphasis on consumerism that limiteed the development of a real community feeling. Into this vacuum the paranoia of the John Birch Society and a revived Fundamentalism rushed in. Instead of the rural communities of the South, or the anglophobic minorities of the Midwest, the banner of the radical right would be held by unequivocally modern upper middle class technicians and entrepreneurs of the warfare state. One could go, as McGirr does not, about how this wealthy stratum got government subsidized highways and tax deductions for their mortgages, while their racial exclusivity was backed up by Federal and State Housing authorities. Meanwhile a new Southern elite was subsidized by the state as it shucked off its black tenants. After getting so much power and wealth from the New Deal State, the radical right indignantly denounced it the minute the government tried to make a few measures to help the poor its plight it had helped to worsen.

The flaw in McGirr's book is that it does not really emphasize the essential selfishness of this posture. There is the occasional ironical mention of the role of the state and how evangelicalism never really faced the innate radicalism of the free market. But otherwise this is a book heavily dependant on the centrist consensus which, being naturally opportunist and prone to move to the winning side, tends to view Reagan's success as a victory against the "elitism" and "radicalism" of the Democrats. The flaws in this account are numerous. When Alan Brinkley, in a contribution to a fetschrift on the sixties repeats Kevin Phillips' assertion that the Nixon-Reagan victory was a triumph of the "middle class revolt," one must ask in what way were the Democrats and Liberal Republicans tribunes of the undeserving poor? Allan Matusow's The Unravelling of America makes it quite clear that the main beneficiary of LBJ's Great Society was the middle class. Peter Novick points out that more than two-thirds of New Yorkers though that civil rights were going "too fast" in 1964, before the Voting Rights Act.

McGirr's account is not helped by her narrow focus. She concentrates on those Birchites and Goldwater activists she was able to interview 30 years after the event. Now if I was being interviewed after the fall of Communism, I probably wouldn't volunteer my belief that Eisenhower was a Soviet agent, or that I opposed open housing because I don't like black people. There is not enough critical analysis of these interviews. At one point McGirr says Orange County residents rejected George Wallace because he was pro-union, which is fantastic. When McGirr writes about conflicts over abortion, or divorce or pre-marital pregnancy, I would have liked some discussion of how these things actually happened in Orange Country, rather than reading pious Conservative rhetoric about them. At one point McGirr quotes that Fundamentalist and Evangelical Protestantism boomed in the seventies and eighties because many people found secular values uninspiring. But does this not assume a Protestant valuation of the situation? A non-Protestant, after all, may find Fundamentalism uninspiring and turn to secular values. Clearly something more is involved than the relative merits of the two ideologies. A contrast with Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis reveal McGirr's weaknesses in every respect. Sugrue is far more critical, far more detailed and far more sophisticated. He starts his narrative in the late forties becuase he is aware that industrial decline and racial segregation started there. By contrast McGirr starts in the late fifties, and although there are brief mentions of the campaign against open housing, the homogeneity, the anti-union atmosphere, and the class structure are taken more or less for granted. Ultimately, this is a disappointing book.

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing,Thorough Analysis Of Neoconservative Ascent !, April 26, 2002

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Paperback)

This book represents both a fascinating study of the evolution of `60s politics as well as a historical attempt to document and explain the perplexing fact that a country flirting with the danger of a social and political revolution from the left suddenly veered so much farther to the right toward a broad-based popular conservatism. Herein Lisa McGirr, a gifted author and Harvard professor comes closer to making her prose swing than one would expect of a book of this type. Meanwhile, she also spins a convincing argument regarding the origins of the American neo-conservative revival in the late `60s and early `70s. At the time, domestic conservatism had been badly eclipsed by the burgeoning youth culture and their radical leftist notions. To her credit, the account rendered here is not only academically spirited, but is written in a way that makes this serious work of scholarship accessible to the general public.

She focuses meaningfully on the activities within a specific congressional district, in Orange County California, where, she argues quite persuasively, the seeds of the neo-conservative revival were most fruitfully planted and sown. Within this district, literally thousands of affluent and educated suburban "warriors" combined to launch a powerful movement destined less than a decade later to propel Ronald Reagan into the White House. In the process they also helped to chisel a new agenda into the granite pillars of the American pantheon, one that helped to define the very nature of domestic political battles for decades to come.

This book gives us a graphic and detail introduction to these hearty, healthy and enthusiastic warriors; housewives arguing political strategy over coffee and Danish, young and well-educated defense engineers arriving to live out the American dream, impressionable young religious workers convinced that the only way to save the country and themselves from Hellfire and brimstone was to work fervently against the designs of the "godless democrats". From this well-detailed work we begin to see how the movement came into being, how it organized itself, what motivated the individuals as well as what their evolving political agenda became and why.

McGirr demonstrates that this was far from being a movement of marginalized or isolated extremists; on the contrary, from the beginning it was more accurately characterized as an intensely enthusiastic enterprise, one formed and energized by the social, economic, and political elite, people with both means and motive for becoming involved to better control their own futures as well as those of the country at large. In what is perhaps her best set of insights, she demonstrates how these young and innovative neo-conservatives established a new set of political philosophies and precepts, forged in a alloy of Christian fundamentalism, misguided nationalism, and more traditional true conservatism (i.e. an old-style libertine attitude).

This is a seminal work, an effort at true scholarship which dares to look at Rosemary's baby in the face by searching through the afterbirth of the not so immaculate birthing of modern neo-conservatism. What she discovers and demonstrates along the way may often upset our traditional notions of what happened and why, but it never fails to inform or edify us as to what transpired or why. This is an interesting and worthwhile book, and one that I can heartily recommend. Enjoy!