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Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) |
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Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)
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by Lisa McGirr
Sales Rank: 159344
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List Price: $26.95
$8.79
At Amazon
on 6-21-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 416 pages
Published by: Princeton University Press; New Ed edition January 21, 2002
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0691096112
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0691096117
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
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 greater 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.
Reader 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 thirty 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.
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