Nico Rivera
Features Editor
On Monday, Feb. 2, Jeff Roche, professor of history at the College, gave a talk in Lean Lecture Hall on his new book, “The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right.” Spanning decades of political history in the state of Texas, the book inspects how conservatism developed and grew in the frontier state, while also examining the role of social institutions like sport and religion, to a lesser extent.
Roche began the talk with a review of his approach to research and writing as a historian. He noted four major questions that he wanted to explore in the book: How does power work?; What “makes a place a place?”; What is the relationship between place and identity?; What is the relationship between spatial identity and political culture? With these questions in mind, Roche explained how he wanted to explore the dominance of conservatism in Texas. He began by saying that he wanted to “start further back than necessary” to ensure that he began his historical survey at the right time and that he didn’t “miss anything.”
Rather than taking a “great men” historical approach, which would focus on significant individuals as historical actors, Roche’s book focused on grassroots movements and political developments in the public. In an online Q&A Reddit thread, Roche explained, “What I think separates this work from the excellent scholarship produced over the last couple of decades is the coverage and attention to the grassroots movement building in the part of the nation where the right-wing came to absolutely dominate local political cultures and where conservatives were able to mold the GOP [Grand Old Party] into a vehicle for the expression of their values.” Roche writes, “It’s a matter of paying attention to the ways that those visible hands operated at the small-town and small-city level as the civic elite built out political systems.”
Roche began his overview with the agricultural development of Texas throughout the 1800s, which was explicitly marketed towards white farmers by land developers as “A White Man’s Town.” Roche categorized this era of development as an “era of American agricultural revolution” in a region that was “built by real estate developers and built to cater to commercial family agriculture.” During this time, Roche explained that frontier Texas was politically synonymous with the American South. The state was Democrat-dominated and “overwhelmingly white, Christian and middle-class.”
Roche then focused on the presidential elections of 1928 and 1964, which he viewed as crucial moments for the growth of conservatism in Texas, along with other crucial intermittent political developments in the state. The 1928 election was a massive success for the Republican party and conservatism in Texas, with Herbert Hoover winning all but 11 counties in West Texas. Roche explains that Texans were “voting not as much for Hoover, but against [Democrat] Al Smith,” whose roots in the urban East Coast, Catholic faith and platform to end Prohibition made him wildly unpopular.
In discussing the context of the 1964 elections, Roche spoke in detail about the anti-communist fervor which had developed in West Texas following the end of World War II. When combined with religious fears, the West Texas red scare manifested as a belief in an existential war between good and evil, as a fight against secular communism and “moral relativism.” Roche also explained his conception of “cowboy conservatism,” a unique flavor of political and social conservatism arising from the material circumstances of Texas as a frontier state. In short, Roche explains it as “a blend of an almost hyper form of individualism (almost libertarian) tempered by an expectation of commitment to community.” In his Reddit thread, Roche explains, “What makes Texas so particularly interesting in the development of the modern right was the way that local political activists and ideologues were able to fuse frontier mythology, regional history, and political ideology into a movement that had national appeal.”
“Conservative Frontier” has received positive reviews from a number of outlets. Writing for the New York Times, Paul Begala said that the text is “… An engaging and thorough political chronicle of West Texas … As Roche tells it, the remorseless plains of West Texas contain the headwaters of a mighty current that runs from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater and up through Ronald Reagan to the country beyond.” From the Dallas Morning News, Roberto Ontiveros writes, “A quietly convincing account of how the ‘cowboy conservatism’ of West Texas, with its evangelical anti-intellectualism and white nationalist leanings, was refined into the New Right … [as] informative as it is exhaustive.”
Reddit Q&A Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1pd4xom/my_name_is_jeff_roche_and_my_new_book_is_the/.