Looking at a map of Texas and the voting proclivities of its residents, it’s no surprise that the dominant color is red. But in areas of West Texas, the red is so saturated, that it practically bleeds a deep crimson hue. And cities in the area routinely rank among the “most conservative” in national polls.
How and why West Texas went that way—and how it has affected the rest of the country both historically and in current times—is the subject of the in-depth and incisive The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right by Jeff Roche (512 pp., $32.95, University of Texas Press).
At the heart of Roche’s treatise is the region’s embracing of not just conservatism, but “cowboy conservatism.” Roche calls in “an ideology born on the old cattle frontier that spread across the North American prairies with the cattle business.”
Founded in the roots of entrepreneurism, proto-libertarian beliefs, and spread by mass media and mythology, its (purported) tenets according to Roche include militarism, religious fundamentalism, nationalism, the fear of government power, a devotion to free markets, and certain set ideas about gender and race. Plus, the “Code of the West” that preached (but didn’t always practice) the virtues of honesty, thrift, hard work, self-reliance, and faith.
Interestingly, the first half of The Conservative Frontier tends more to historical than political development. How West Texas was settled by “boosterist” whites like C.W. Post, the ambitious and visionary magnate whose two biggest products were a coffee substitute (Postum) and breakfast cereal (Grape Nuts) made in Michigan.
His “Post City” in Texas, though, was set to be an entirely self-contained capitalist utopia for families who would work, play, and live all within its confines, their every need tended to—so long as they worked and didn’t want to form things like pesky labor unions.
West Texas survived the Depression and depletion of lands in the Dust Bowl years, but when Roche starts to veer to the politics in the 1920s, it’s in a surprising place: Houston.
“Anyone looking to place a historical marker noting the birthplace of the radical right in Texas might consider 917 Main Street in Houston,” Roche writes. He puts a pin on the Kirby Building where one of Texas’ most powerful men—John Henry Kirby—oversaw the most powerful company in Texas—the Kirby Lumber Company. And it was on the 5th floor of this edifice where he headquartered his social and political activities, which leaned so far right it’s surprising that the building itself didn’t topple over and still stands.
The “Prince of the Pines” also had scores of “company towns” set up at timber camps, entirely self-contained area where he controlled everything and—while generous with workers—often paid them in scrip redeemable only at the company store.
After the Great Depression shockingly wiped him and his company out, the pro-business, anti-labor union Kirby blamed FDR and the New Deal. And he was not about to go quietly after declaring bankruptcy, founding many groups (including the Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas, the first significant right-wing business group in the state) and launching many PR campaigns to “take back” the Democratic party.
Roche details the wild rise and fall of flour salesman-turned-statesman W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel, the state’s first star right wing populist. Though he writes “even for Texas, the O’Daniel years were bizarre.” Nevertheless, O’Daniel rode the platform of “Jesus, Momma, Texas, country music, and the Constitution” all the way to the governor’s office and then the U.S. Senate.
As the book picks up speed, there is story after story of the right-wing infiltrating academia. Like University of Texas President Homer Riley’s struggle against a Board of Regents intending to purge faculty lists of undesirable “liberal” teachers. The Board would eventually fire Riley in 1944, but not before branding him a “secret integrationist” and suggest that his 19-year-old daughter was living with a Black Communist boyfriend.
There’s J. Evetts Haley, an actual cowboy historian from whose journalism pens flowed millions of words syndicated across the country who railed against “egghead intellectuals” and academics. Others focused on school textbook censorship, removing books from libraries, forecasts of doom for the United States, and rooting out “subversive” anti-American influences. Campaigns all financed by millionaires and billionaires with pro-business and pro-status quo interests. Sound familiar?
Eventually, organizations like the John Birch Society and National Council of Churches would find fertile soil for growth in West Texas. But when they started finger pointing at each other—arguing over who was a “true” flag wavin’, God-fearin’, Texas conservative, liberals could only eat their popcorn and watch.
But it was still taking hold. When Texas elected rock-ribbed conservative John Tower to the U.S. Senate in 1961, he was the first Republican to occupy a Lone Star State Senate seat since Reconstruction.
Ironically, Roche writes, it was not a Texas political figure who cemented the “West Texas takeover” of the Republican Party, but Barry Goldwater. The ultra-conservative Arizona Senator running for the U.S. Presidency was more popular in West Texas than his home state. And the intra-fighting (think early condemnations of “RINOs”) spilled over in the 1964 Republican National Convention. The Party—and the New Right—was in ascendancy.
Roche ends the book with the formation of the New Right election of the ultimate “cowboy conservative,” Ronald Reagan. The Gipper gained early and fervent support in West Texas, going back to the 1968 when he unsuccessfully challenged Richard Nixon for the Presidency. George Bush (the senior) also slipped into this mold.
The New Right, Roche sums up, lasted from 1980 up until 2016 with the election of the bomb thrower, Donald Trump. We’ve seen the Republicans return to infighting as to who is more conservative than thou. Today, conservative politics and policies may have may fathers, but as Roche says, it’s got a momma firmly planted on West Texas soil.
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