Orange County Confidential
SCHNEIDER, GREGORY L.
Orange County Confidential The birth of conservatism out of the spirit of California. BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER In her examination of grass-roots conservatism in Orange County, California, Lisa...
...In 1966, county voters supported Ronald Reagan for governor...
...While conservatives often look back triumphantly on their political successes over the last three decades, this work captures the politically charged yet modest middle-class culture that gave life to the conservative movement...
...In Orange County, businessmen were also key players in the conservative movement...
...Evangelical ministers also thrived in Orange County—McGirr reminds us of the prominence of evangelical and fundamentalist sects in California history—preaching about the evils of communism and the virtues of the free market...
...And over time, the extremists who had joined the John Birch Society and supported the Goldwater campaign became respectable, and attractive, voters at the center of a new majority...
...Anti-Communists like former congressman James B. Utt, who worried that the United Nations was training "barefooted Africans" in Georgia to take over the United States, no longer exemplified the movement...
...And so it is no surprise that conservatism in the late 1960s should reflect a wide range of increasingly mainstream concerns...
...BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER In her examination of grass-roots conservatism in Orange County, California, Lisa McGirr ponders how a bunch of—well, she would say extremists—happened to take over a political party...
...Dependent on the military-industrial complex for their livelihood, Orange County folks naturally gravitated to conservatism's Gregory L. Schneider is assistant professor of History at Emporia State University and author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right...
...Anti-communism also took root among the landowners and agricultural interests that dominated Orange County's rich farmland, much of which was becoming suburbia...
...They grew amenable to populist appeals like those of Reagan, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Sam Yorty, and George Wallace...
...World War II and the defense industry boom of the Cold War years, particularly during the Korean War, led to a huge population increase in Orange County...
...They wrote letters to the conservative Orange County Register, established a ladies' auxiliary, held meetings, and signed petitions...
...After perfecting the boysenberry, Walter Knott and his wife sold berry pies and chicken dinners out of their roadside stand...
...Many residents were migrant midwesterners who had arrived during the Depression and had brought along their evangelical faiths and homespun values...
...As McGirr understands, ideology does not mean inflexibility...
...Others embraced, as McGirr makes clear, single-issue campaigns over things like abortion, sex education, obscenity, feminism, and gay rights...
...Knott and others donated money to conservative causes and funded their own advocacy groups, like the Free Enterprise Association...
...Orange County was one of the few places to give Barry Goldwater overwhelming majorities...
...Such grass-roots activity became the foundation for political organization well beyond the local level...
...By the end of the Goldwater campaign, Bircher membership had declined in the county and many activists shifted to a more respectable conservatism, one defensive of tradition and property rights...
...As McGirr argues, the region's combination of defense contractors, military bases, evangelical religion, and new suburban developments made its residents uniquely receptive to the conservative movement...
...In focusing on conservative identity, on conservatism's ability to shift positions while still defending some form of tradition, McGirr has provided an elegantly written analysis of the Right which will reshape historical understandings of the conservative movement for some time to come...
...Some moved in a more libertarian direction, recognizing the threat the state poses to businesses and personal freedoms...
...During the late 1960s residents fought against growing threats to law and order as conservatism moved to embrace social issues...
...In turn, some of these preachers gave the free market gospel a particularly Californian flavor, like Robert Schuller (of Crystal Cathedral fame) with his drive-in church...
...The new permissiveness among young people, the rise of student radicalism, and urban rioting alarmed these middle-class suburbanites...
...Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right is an imaginative study of the faces in the crowd who made up the Goldwater boom...
...Every movement needs a spark and for Orange County, it came in 1960 when Joel Dvorman, a school board trustee, held at his house a meeting of the ACLU to propose ending California's anti-Communist investigating committees...
...The same is true of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who had convinced many Orange County residents that there were actual Communists in their midst...
...Nixon won their support in 1968 running on law and order, and his aide Kevin Phillips would have Orange County residents in mind when he described a "new Republican majority...
...Locals protested someone with "Communist ideas" speaking in their neighborhood...
...Nonetheless, neighborly get-togethers reinforced ideas individuals may have gleaned from magazines like National Review and Human Events...
...Why was Orange County such a hotbed for the so-called Radical Right...
...Dvorman invited Frank Wilkinson, an anti-HUAC activist who was widely believed to be a party member, to speak at the meeting...
...Orange County both reflected and helped spawn the national conservative movement of the early 1960s: Bridge clubs, coffee klatches, and barbecues—all popular in the new suburban communities—provided some of the opportunity for right-wing ideas to spread literally from home to home...
...Within months, Orange County was hosting rallies for Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and establishing one of the largest chapters of the John Birch Society in the country (eventually county residents had to set up multiple chapters of the society...
...This mix of landed conservatism and nouveau middle-class migrants made a powerful brew...
...patriotic and anti-Communist principles...
...Women played particularly important roles in hosting meetings and coffees, though rarely did they become leaders of political organizations...
...The business grew into a restaurant empire...
...Indeed, conservative magazines and books were pivotal in providing arguments, sparking discussion, and inspiring activists to defend against a Communist menace and, later, to fight the culture wars...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 31
