The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right

In this expansive chronicle of West Texas politics, historian Roche (The Conservative Sixties) makes the case that the modern Republican party’s “radical” rightward turn owes a lot to that region’s inculcation of extreme ideologies. Roche begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, citing the anti-union efforts of food magnate C.W. Post, who built the company town Post City as a “capitalist utopia on the Texas plains,” as well as John Henry Kirby of the Kirby Lumber Company, the Houston headquarters of which had an entire floor dedicated to Kirby’s “political projects,” ranging from anti-tax and anti-union groups to white supremacist organizations. Roche carries his account through most of the 20th century, stopping along the way to consider the outsize impact of the Great Depression on the region (“a quarter of the counties in what would become the country’s most reliably Republican congressional district lost a quarter of their population”), the exuberant support that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan found there, and the early forays into local politics of a young George W. Bush. Roche’s well-informed narrative abounds with fascinating detours, like an exploration of the role West Texas A&M football coach Joe Kerbel played in making the university’s campus more diverse in the 1960s. It makes for a terrific window onto an influential but little regarded corner of the American political landscape. (Oct.)