Jeff Roche's "The Conservative Frontier"

Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.

Roche applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, and shared the following:

Page 99 is early in the book’s fifth chapter in a section that describes the conflict over prohibition in Amarillo Texas in 1907. The brutal murder of a young man in the Bowery (the city’s Red Light District) had created an uproar and a demand among citizens that the city prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. On one side were a group of people we would now call social conservatives, who believed that eliminating liquor was not just a step in creating a more righteous community, but also a signal that the city had emerged from its rough and tumble frontier phase to become a modern and moral city. On the other side were folks who we would recognize as more libertarian, who did not believe nor support any efforts to legislate morality. It also describes the violent corruption that surrounded the election to go “dry” and begins the tale of the bloody chaos of an Amarillo that was dry in name only, a time when local police and Texas Rangers fought each other in the streets and a local deputy assassinated a Ranger at the city courthouse.

Page 99 is possibly as good an indicator of the tone and style of the book as any other random page I suppose. It demonstrates the kinds of political conflicts that serve as the foundation of the book’s narrative structure and central premise – that it was local struggles over national issues that helped mold West Texas’s cowboy conservatism. It also describes an ongoing ideological conflict between the live-and-let-live libertarianism of a cattle culture and the demands for civic conformity of a small-town elite determined to see their communities grow.

The book itself covers roughly a century of West Texas history as it explains how the region became the most conservative and the most reliably Republican section of the United States. The story unfolds across dozens of vignettes (like the conflict over prohibition in turn of the century Amarillo) organized in shortish chapters written in an accessible style. The first third of the book describes the politics, culture, and economy of what I call the Agricultural Wonderland, a modern, forward-looking society, based on commercial family farming and designed as an alternative to a rapidly changing America. A place literally advertised as a white, Christian homeland on the Texas prairies. The second part of the book traces the origins of the modern Texas right-wing as it moved from a broadly conceived pro-business and anti-labor lobby to a paranoid and conspiratorially minded movement whose members believed that communists were secretly plotting to brainwash American children through subtle messaging in schoolbooks. The last third of the book describes and explains how the far-right took control of the Texas Republican Party over the course of the 1960s and turned it into a vehicle for the expression of their ideology, a project that was all but complete when the book ends with Ronald Reagan sweeping the Texas Republican Primary in 1976.

Visit Jeff Roche's website.

--Marshal Zeringue