From the Editor Approaching Conservatism

Leonard Moore

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
17 (January 2003). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2003, Organization of American Historians

Throughout the last third of the twentieth century, the growing power of political conservatism in the United States was nowhere more evident than in intense, often bitter disputes involving education. Considering the protracted battles over such issues as bussing, school prayer, sex education, AIDS, multiculturalism, textbook content, history curriculum standards, vouchers, and the political influence of teachers' unions, to name only a few, the schools have been awash with homegrown "teachable moments" about the nature of American conservatism, its history and significance. No doubt, countless teachers grasped such movements with enthusiasm and creativity, inspired by a sense of responsibility to explain the history of prevailing political attitudes, or perhaps, on some level, by their own passions about the politics of the Left and Right. On the other hand, one could easily imagine many teachers preferring to steer clear of such moments, weary of the controversy they could so readily engender, or perhaps not having a sense that they themselves could easily define American conservatism or identify the forces that shaped its evolution. A cursory glance at the titles of more than three hundred workshops and panel presentations at a recent meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies suggests, in fact, that conservatism is not a subject that teachers enthusiastically embrace. Only a handful could be construed as being clearly or consciously related to the role of conservatism in contemporary politics or American history.

College history courses and textbooks have done better, particularly during the last decade, but not nearly to the degree that the subject seems to merit. There is generally little concern about addressing such controversial topics as abortion, racial politics, or the death penalty in college classrooms. But conservatism itself remains a peripheral subject in prevailing narratives of American history, gaining recognition primarily in terms of its opposition to other, seemingly more dynamic forces (the rise of the welfare state, civil rights crusades, or the women's movement), or as examples of dark undercurrents in the national heritage (racism, xenophobia, and Red Scares). This has been true to a large degree because of the long interpretive shadow cast by liberal scholars of the post-World War II era who viewed America's political Right as pathological, a function throughout American history of intense, but ultimately passing, aberrant responses to the tumultuous changes of modernity. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many scholars and teachers have clung tenaciously to the belief that conservatives have been simply backward, traveling by oxcart in a superhighway world.

Teaching about conservatism has also been limited by what might be termed a liberal state paradigm, a prevailing interpretation of modern American history built around the rise and fall of political liberalism, progressive interventionism, and the welfare state. In this context, conservative political power has all too often been defined in narrow, reactive terms: as a free market reply to the growth of big government; as an expression of outrage against declining support for tradition and morality; as a sometimes extreme force of resistance to expressions of political dissent and the evolution toward an ever more pluralistic society.

None of this is to suggest that conservatism has not been tied to extremism, repression, or violence in the American past. Nor is it to suggest that the liberal state has not been at the center of modern United States history, that conservatives have not eagerly and often depicted themselves as "Davids" facing down a liberal "Goliath", or that political power did not shift dramatically toward Reagan Country when New Deal and Great Society liberalism lost its staying power. Indeed, the following contributions focus primarily on the ways in which conservatism in the post-World War II era grew from a seemingly marginal position in American politics to a point at which it eclipsed the old liberal state and sent liberal politicians scurrying to redefine themselves in a new, more conservative image.

At the same time, however, some of what follows also suggests that teachers and historians would benefit from thinking broadly about the role of conservatism in twentieth-century America, seeing it as having a deeply rooted history of its own, evolving alongside and not simply in response to twentieth-century liberalism. On many important levels, twentieth-century American conservatism developed much like its counterpart, as a widespread and lasting political consequence of the urban-industrial order that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern conservatism's two main branches--the economic, built on opposition to government action (or inaction) that impedes the vitality of business; and the cultural, centered on constantly evolving issues of race, religion, gender, family, sexuality, and patriotism, among others--emerged well before the New Deal, even before modern conservatives sought to define themselves as such or confine themselves primarily to one political party. When one considers the ways in which forces like anticommunism, Protestant fundamentalism, post-Great Migration racial politics, feminism, sexual revolutions, the corporate economy, and interventionist government profoundly shaped modern conservatism, there is ample reason to conclude that a foundation had been laid long before the crisis of the Great Depression. Any understanding of modern conservatism must be built on an understanding first and foremost of the gathering forces in postwar America that eventually brought Ronald Reagan to power. It is worth remembering, however, that one of Reagan's first symbolic acts was to hang the long-ignored portrait of Calvin Coolidge in the White House Cabinet Room. For Reagan, Coolidge was a nostalgic figure, representing the simpler, more virtuous era of his youth, and also, not coincidently, the time immediately preceding the era when government became "the problem." For historians, the Coolidge portrait in the Reagan White House could be seen as symbolizing something more substantial: a connection between the era when modern conservatism first emerged and the era when it triumphed.

The contributions that follow help us better conceptualize modern American conservatism and find more ways to make it a part of how we teach twentieth-century United States history. Leo Ribuffo offers a stimulating overview of the historical literature and fittingly concludes by asking us to consider the extent to which the United States has been a conservative country. Dan T. Carter traces the rise of postwar conservatism through the tumultuous social conflicts that drove so many traditionally Democratic blue-collar and southern white voters into the ranks of the Republicans, culminating in an era of conservative political dominance. Michelle Nickerson's essay and Victoria Straughn's lesson plan focus on different aspects of the critical issues of gender and domesticity. Nickerson focuses on the political mobilization of conservative women, long before the more well-known anti-Equal Rights Amendment and other New Right campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. Straughn's lesson plan asks students to consider the themes of domesticity and subversion during the early Cold War as observed in the film, Mildred Pierce (1945). The essay by Clyde Wilcox and the lesson plan by Ted Dickson both offer examples of conceptualizing modern conservatism as something more than a reaction against the New Deal. Dickson's lesson plan asks students to compare the "culture wars" of the 1920s to those of the 1980s. Wilcox makes an explicit connection between the cultural and the political in his overview of evangelical politics beginning with the rise of Protestant fundamentalism in the 1920s. In the process, he underscores the central place of religion in understanding conservatism and, therefore, twentieth-century America itself.

Leonard J. Moore teaches American history at McGill University.  He is the author of Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928. His current research focuses on cultural conflict and conservative politics during the 1920s.