Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

Introduction

After a period of relative neglect, the study of postwar American conservatism has recently come to preoccupy historians of the United States. It now ranks among the liveliest subjects in the entire field of 20th-century US history. The historiography breaks into four phases. In an early phase, from the 1950s through the 1970s, conservatism being written into the historical narrative was an act of scholarly will at a time when liberalism and radicalism were much closer to the historiographical mainstream. In a second phase, in the 1970s and 1980s, conservatism was deemed a major historical force in modern America and was characterized as a “backlash” against the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Great Society, the feminist movement, etc. In a third phase, conservatism was presented as more active than reactive. according to these historians, ideas that had crystallized in the 1950s came into their own politically in the 1980s, in the Reagan era. During the fourth and (for the time being) final phase, accent has fallen on the varieties of American conservatism and on its hybrid nature, absorbing and interacting with trends that could be characterized as liberal or radical. In this article, the relevant historiography is separated into seven branches (arranged alphabetically): anticommunism, the conservative movement, foreign policy, libertarianism, media, race-class-gender, and traditionalism. It has been argued that anticommunism, traditionalism, and libertarianism were fused into a “modern” American conservatism, that disparate ideas were fashioned into a workable ideology, and that this ideology was the tool Reagan used to remake American politics. The classic formulation of this argument is The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Nash 2006 cited under Monographs), to which there are many revisionist alternatives. Media concerns the changing role of communication, from the intellectual magazines of the 1950s to talk radio in the 1990s, and beyond. Foreign policy encompasses conservative debate on the ideals and practice of American foreign policy, moving among isolationism, realism, and neoconservatism. In the future, scholars will work through other arguments and narratives involving these branches, and new branches will surely be added.

General Overviews

The evolution of research on American conservatism has not been given the attention it deserves. While historians have been delving into the history of American conservatism, the delicate job of theoretical definition mostly remains to be done. Many bridges are still to be built between historical inquiry and political philosophy. The transnational orientation of some of these titles will enrich future scholarship and further expand the subject’s perimeter. As it stands, only one title in this bibliography, Soffer 2009, is a book-length study, much of it devoted to British historiography. The rest of the titles are either essays, books of essays, or edited volumes. Huntington 1957 remains a cogent outline of conservative typology, a fruitful point of departure for any theoretical study of American conservatism. Ribuffo 1992 is less theoretical than Huntington 1957. The value of Ribuffo 1992 resides in its juxtapositions and in Ribuffo’s against-the-grain efforts, c. 1992, to place the Right on par historiographically with the center and the Left. Muller 1997 is a contribution to the theoretical literature on American conservatism in two respects. The book gathers work by canonical conservative theorists (many of them European, a few American), and its introduction establishes key continuities and discontinuities. Berkowitz 2004 continues the work begun in Muller 1997, narrowing its focus to conservatism in America. Burns 2009 (cited under Libertarianism) is a reckoning with what remains the most important book on American conservatism, Nash 2006 (cited under Monographs). Burns 2009 is a theoretical portrait of conservatism in American historiography from the 1950s to the early 21st century. Critchlow and MacLean 2009 is a document collection with a spirited historiographical (and to a lesser extent theoretical) dimension.

Berkowitz, Peter, ed. Varieties of Conservatism in America. Stanford, CA: Hoover, 2004.
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This is an edited volume with essays on traditionalism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism/anticommunism. As the title implies, the Berkowitz’s organizational emphasis probes the relevance of Nash 2006 (cited under Monographs), balancing an appreciation of that book’s lasting stature with suggestions for new scholarly directions.
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Critchlow, Donald, and Nancy MacLean. Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
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A collection of primary sources, from 1961 to 1995, with scholarly commentary from two distinguished historians of American conservatism. Critchlow and MacLean address the question of scholarly attitude—critical distance versus sympathy—for historians at work on American conservatism.
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Huntington, Samuel. “Conservatism as an Ideology.” American Political Science Review 51.2 (June 1957): 454–473.
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This essay reviews several major theories of conservatism, from Burke to Mannheim to Kirk. The first half maps the various types of conservatism; the second half develops the thesis that conservatism in America has been a “situational ideology,” not a static set of ideas or a fixed ideology wedded to a single class or region.
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Muller, Jerry Z., ed. Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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This book is a collection of primary source documents that describe the evolution of conservative thought in Europe and America, from the 18th to the 20th century. Muller’s introduction provides a theoretical and historical overview of his subject in its Euro-American context.
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Ribuffo, Leo. Right, Center, Left: Essays in American History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
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This is an effort, from a distinguished historian of American conservatism, to think across the American political spectrum. Ribuffo is innovative in his refusal to isolate conservatism from the Left and/or the political center in his conceptualization of modern American history.
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Soffer, Reba. History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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A trans-Atlantic study of conservative historians, focusing, on the American side, on Russell Kirk, Peter Viereck, and Daniel Boorstin. Soffer analyzes the relationship between conservative principle and the fashioning of a conservative historiography.
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Landmark Works

The landmark works on the history of American conservatism are not primarily studies of conservative political thought, with the important exceptions of Nash 2006 and Rodgers 2011 (both cited under Monographs). They span a variety of methodological approaches: from political history (Edsall and Edsall 1991, Fraser and Gerstle 1989, Patterson 1972; all cited under Monographs) to social/political history (Bell 1966, McGirr 2001, Sugrue 1996; all cited under Monographs). The landmark articles are mostly historiographically oriented review essays.

Monographs

Nash 2006 is a history of the conservative movement or, as Nash terms it, the conservative intellectual movement. The other landmark works are not studies of the conservative movement. Fraser and Gerstle 1989 is focused on the waning liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, on a kind of liberal crack-up, which created a vacuum for the conservative movement to fill. Bell 1966 (originally published 1955) is premised on the marginal nature of American conservatism and in no way anticipates the Reagan era. Patterson 1972 is a biography of a conservative who was not a movement conservative: Robert Taft was an establishment conservative of the postwar period, against whom many movement conservatives defined themselves. Edsall and Edsall 1991 is an intricate study of public policy, race and an inchoate conservatism waiting to be consolidated on the national level. Sugrue 1996 foregrounds the nexus of race and inequality within an ever more conservative United States: this book is not a monograph on the conservative movement but an analysis of social, economic and racial dynamics that the conservative movement has either enabled or failed to tame. McGirr 2001 recreates a social world, in Southern California, that flowed into the conservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and Rodgers 2011 charts the terrain of conservative intellect, not so much its political strategies as the unstable outlines of it social imagination (or lack thereof). In sum, Nash 2006 is the only landmark book on postwar American conservatism that aspires to provide a synthetic overview of the subject. Nash’s aspirations to synthesis may explain the large influence this book has had on scholars of American conservatism.

Bell, Daniel, ed. The Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
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Originally published in 1955 as The New American Right. This book’s editor, Daniel Bell, was one of America’s premier 20th-century intellectuals. The Radical Right does not present American conservatism as politically or intellectually mainstream but rather as the product of an irrational radicalism, imbued with fear and status anxiety—conservatism between McCarthy and Goldwater, as it were. This book remains influential as an intellectually forceful specimen of 1950s liberalism.
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Edsall, Thomas Byrne, and Mary Edsall. Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics. New York: Norton, 1991.
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This is among the first of the “backlash” books on American conservatism, linking the civil rights movement to a racially motivated counter-reaction. The authors argue that this reaction gathered force in the 1970s. Chain Reaction locates the origins of a modern conservatism in the social and economic realities of the 1970s.
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Fraser, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
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This book is among the first academic histories to assimilate Reagan’s presidency into larger narratives of 20th-century US history. Its main supposition was a novel thesis, c. 1989, that would later shade into conventional wisdom: that Roosevelt’s New Deal order entered into crisis in the 1970s. The periodization of Fraser and Gerstle is historiographically notable: the New Deal order is assumed to have fallen by 1980.
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McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New Christian Right. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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A social history of postwar American conservatism, this book focuses on Southern California and identifies suburbia as a key environment for the rise of a popular and at times populist conservatism. McGirr describes anticommunism, a romantic vision of the free market, and Protestant piety as the constituent elements of the new Christian Right. McGirr also documents the prominent place of women in the postwar conservative movement.
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Nash, George. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
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Originally published in 1976, this book follows the development of conservative thought from the 1940s to the 1970s. Nash argues for “fusionism,” a merger of anticommunism, libertarianism, and traditionalism on the plane of ideas. This became the basis for Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and, later, for Reagan’s presidency. Nash’s overarching thesis has had a lasting impact on related scholarship.
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Patterson, James. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
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This is a carefully researched study of an important conservative figure, Robert Taft, by a major historian. It is not a theoretical reckoning with the phenomenon of a modern conservatism. It ties the moderate and somewhat isolationist Taft to the institution of Congress, deftly relating Taft to the political texture and tenor of his times.
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Rodgers, Daniel. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
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This book is a study of social thought in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces a fracturing of the social imagination on the Right and Left sides of the political spectrum. Rodgers includes economic thought, foreign policy and social thought, in his analysis. The individualistic tenor of American conservatism was itself a catalyst in a larger age of fracture, Rodgers contends.
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Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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In this work of social history, Sugrue ties the racism of the white working class to inequalities in Detroit’s urban structure, arguing that Detroit’s decline was a willed reality. Sugrue details impediments to the construction of a progressive political order in the 1960s and 1970s. Those impediments are salient to the history of American conservatism.
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Articles

These landmark articles are nicely bookended by Kazin 1992 and Phillips-Fein 2011. What Kazin 1992 examines as a modest deviation from the main lines of historical inquiry, where 20th-century US history is concerned, is itself a main line of historical inquiry by the time of the Phillips-Fein 2011 review. Brinkley 1994 offers a formulation of enormous historiographical reach, labeling American conservatism a problem c. 1994, a problem of proportion or of scholarly neglect. Historians have since honored this essay by gradually rendering its formulations obsolete, which in no way reduces the essay’s theoretical or historiographical salience. Zelizer 2010 is an invaluable challenge to solidifying conventional wisdom on the 1980s and 1990s as “the age of Reagan,” and Blee and Creasap 2010 carries forward the definitional labors evidenced in Huntington 1957 (cited under General Overviews). One can only hope that other scholars will carry on in the same direction.

Blee, Kathleen, and Kimberly Creasap. “Conservative and Right-Wing Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (August 2010): 269–286.
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This is a theoretical essay, sociological in orientation and focused on movements rather than on political parties. Blee and Creasap devote particular attention to the radicalism of right-wing movements in America, to the motives that have drawn people to such movements, and to the political strategies such movements employ.
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Brinkley, Alan. “The Problem of American Conservatism.” American Historical Review 99.2 (April 1994): 409–429.
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The abundance of conservatism in US history has not inspired much scholarship. This is one of the problems Brinkley outlines in this much-cited essay. Another is the complicated nature of American conservatism itself (a nature imbued with liberalism). Describing conservatism as a historiographical “orphan,” Brinkley observes, as does Kazin 1992, that few academic historians of the modern US are themselves conservatives.
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Kazin, Michael. “The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century.” American History Review 97 (February 1992): 136–155.
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This review essay departs from the “consensus” school of the 1950s, which associated conservatism with social pathology. Kazin disentangles multiple strands of a grass-roots Right newly visible in the 1970s, even if its origins lay in the 1920s and 1930s. Kazin applies a race-class-gender framework to the study of American conservatism. Since publication of this paper, this framework has decisively shaped the historiography.
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Phillips-Fein, Kim. “Conservatism: A State of the Field.” Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 723–743.
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This is a review essay on the burgeoning historiography on American conservatism c. 2011, a conscious contribution to the discussion initiated by Kazin 1992 and Brinkley 1994. Phillips-Fein asks whether historians have aligned American conservatism too closely with the mainstream and suggests that a transnational dimension should be woven into future scholarship.
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Zelizer, Julian. “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism.” Reviews in American History 38 (June 2010): 367–392.
DOI: 10.1353/rah.0.0217Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Zelizer makes an important revisionist claim in this essay. He examines public policy and political data, casting doubt on the argument that the Reagan era witnessed a decrease in the size and scope of the federal government. As does Troy 2005 (cited under Ronald Reagan), Zelizer asks whether American culture grew less conservative in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Key Primary Sources

It is remarkable how many key primary sources are libertarian in tone, though this would be different if texts from the first half of the 20th century (like The Education of Henry Adams) were included here. Rich as the pre-1940 texts are, they have not had the direct political impact of later conservative books. Hayek 1994 set an early publishing pattern in which an assertively conservative text reached a far greater audience than publisher (or author) had expected. Rand 2005 continued this pattern. It is the only novel on the list, albeit a politically charged novel of ideas. The other libertarian texts are Murray 1984, which translated libertarian theory into the language of American history, politics and policy; Friedman 2002, an ambitious work of political philosophy; and Buckley 1951, a self-conscious provocation to the nonlibertarian sensibilities of the liberal Establishment of the 1950s. Looked at from a different angle, three of these books are memoirs: Buckley 1951 at least in part; Chambers 1997, a long autobiography that doubles as a philosophical appeal for Christian anticommunist conservatism in America; and Podhoretz 1979, less programmatic in its conservative claims than Chambers 1997, though a crucially vivid recreation of the milieu in which neoconservatism took root. Another striking point about this literature is its continuing connection to the non-American world. Hayek and Friedman were Austrian-born, and Hayek 1994 was initially published in Great Britain. Chambers 1997 is steeped in European culture and Soviet politics. Rand was born in imperial Russia, lived in the Soviet Union, and drew upon this background in creating her American fiction. Podhoretz is expert in Soviet, European and Israeli politics, and in European literature and letters. This leads to Huntington 2011, a call for America to defend Western civilization in a world of rival civilizations.

Buckley, William F., Jr. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Chicago: Regnery, 1951.
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This book is part memoir, part critique of the Ivy League c. 1951. Universities like Yale, the author’s alma mater, impart atheism and socialism to their students, under the guise of academic freedom. They should be teaching Christianity and capitalism, Buckley argues. This book marks the emergence of conservative voices as “mainstream” and as part of America’s celebrity culture.
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Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997.
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A political and intellectual memoir, originally published in 1952., this is a critique of the American Left for having been receptive to communist ideas and, later, for failing to understand the menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is also an appeal for a Christian conservatism, rooted in agrarian values though honed to meet the realities of modern American life.
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Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
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Originally published 1962. Friedman reprises some of the arguments made in Hayek 1994, furthering the connection between economic and political liberties. Some suggestions, such as a proposal for school vouchers, have had a long policy career. If Hayek 1994 was a libertarian manifesto written during World War II, this book is a libertarian manifesto for the Cold War.
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Hayek, Friedrich. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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This book, appearing first in 1944, is a widely read statement of libertarian political philosophy. For those who endorsed his arguments, Hayek changed the terms of debate, pegging socialism or social democracy as antithetical to political freedom and upholding market freedoms as a guarantor and reflection of political freedoms. This book has inspired many conservative politicians.
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Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
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Originally published in 1996. This is not a book about conservatism, but it does make a spirited case for conserving and defending Western civilization. As such, it is among the first powerful examples of conservative foreign policy thinking after the Cold War. It is equally significant for the polemical responses it inspired from the Left.
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Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
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This book is a study of social policy, focusing particularly on welfare. Murray argues that welfare-oriented policies derived from the New Deal have done material harm to those they were intended to help. The influence of Murray was palpable in the Reagan years, and it also played a role in moving Clinton’s Democratic Party to the right.
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Podhoretz, Norman. Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
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This book, like Chambers 1997, is a political and intellectual memoir. It documents the intellectual culture of the 1960s, while arguing for a break with the Left. In his book, Podhoretz seeks to promote a new conservatism, centrist in its domestic political agenda and robustly anticommunist in its foreign-policy perspective. It is important as an early neoconservative statement and as a richly detailed record of its times.
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Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Dutton, 2005.
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Originally published 1957, this novel was and remains a publishing sensation. It demonstrates the decadence of socialism through various fictional devices. These same devices are used to argue for the necessity of individual talent, individual risk, and the principle of entrepreneurship, upon which societies rely to function and to make progress.
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Early Works

Many of these titles are intellectual history, tracing a traditionalist or Burkean strain in American conservative thought. The studies of traditionalism are: Kirk 1953, Guttmann 1967, Lora 1971, Crundon 1977, and Hoeveler 1977. The virtue of these books lies in the attention paid to the first half of the 20th century—the New Humanists in Kirk 1953, Lora 1971 and Hoeveler 1977; and the Southern Agrarians in Lora 1971. Among these histories, there is a general sense of traditionalism fighting a losing battle against the juggernaut of American modernity. It is notable that scholars, writing from the 1980s onward, are less apt to address the contrast between conservative traditions and the modernizing energies of a modern America. Rossiter 1962, with its focus on politics, is an early synthetic overview of American conservatism. Beard 1913 and Lipset and Raab 1978 emphasize an extremist and/or exploitative element in American conservatism, an approach taken by many later scholars. Extrapolating from the substance of these books, one can isolate the issues that did not visibly matter to the early scholars of American conservatism: libertarianism, anticommunism, race, gender/sexuality, and the structure of modern mass media. The historiographical innovations of the period, from around 1980 to the present, can be described as the addition of these issues to the scholarly landscape.

Beard, Charles. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1913.
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This is a classic work of US history, and Beard’s association of American democracy with deception is pertinent to the history of American conservatism. What purport to be universal rights are really, for Beard, the rights of an economic elite. This book contributes to the notion of an exploitative conservatism, elaborated upon by Edsall and Edsall 1991, Sugrue 1996 (both cited under Monographs), and Kruse 2005 (cited under Race/Ethnicity).
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Crundon, Robert, ed. The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900–1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977.
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This is an anthology of writing from the first half of the 20th century, a period often overlooked in histories of American conservatism. The Superfluous Men is important for the material it gathers and even more for its focus on a period when American conservatism was more closely aligned with agrarian traditions and with anticapitalist sentiments than it would later be.
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Guttmann, Allan. The Conservative Tradition in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
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This book is an exploration of American conservatism in the Burkean mode. Its thesis is that conservatism in America is politically frustrated and expresses itself therefore in literature or in culture rather than in politics. Guttman writes with Goldwater’s crushing 1964 defeat in mind.
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Hoeveler, J. David. The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900–1940. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977.
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This study, as with Crundon 1977, explores an early era of conservative thought, the high-culture conservatism of the New Humanists who sought a philosophical and literary tradition that could moderate the depredations of modern American life.
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Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1953.
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A primary source, written by a pivotal (traditionalist) conservative intellectual, this book is also a history of Anglo-American conservatism, from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Kirk posits an archetypal conservatism—a conservative mind—that he then traces from the writings of Burke to the texts, ideas, and debates of American conservatives.
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Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1977. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
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This is a study, sociological as well as historical, of the radical Right in America, from the founding of the republic through the 1970s. As with Hofstadter 1954–1955 (cited under 1950s) and Bell 1966 (cited under Monographs), Lipset and Raab suggest an Enlightenment tradition as one strain of American politics, to which they contrast an irrational or antirational tradition—which for them is essentially synonymous with the Right.
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Lora, Ronald. Conservative Minds in America. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.
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This is an early study of conservative thought in America, encompassing the Southern Agrarians, the New Humanists, and the New Conservatives (such as Russell Kirk). Lora devotes particular attention, as do Kirk 1953 and Guttmann 1967, to the Burkean or traditionalist spirit in American conservative letters.
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Rossiter, Clinton. Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion. New York: Knopf, 1962.
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Originally published 1955 as Conservatism in America. This book is an early study of American conservatism, which Rossiter sees as a notable part of American political culture, not as mere economic calculation or as a function of paranoia. The implication of the title—that American conservatism is embattled—echoed through later scholarship until publication of Kazin 1992 and Brinkley 1994 (both cited under Articles).
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Branches

This bibliography is separated into seven main branches: anticommunism; the conservative movement; foreign policy; libertarianism; media; race, class and gender (three words that form one branch); and traditionalism. Three of these branches—anticommunism, traditionalism, and libertarianism—correspond to the three constituents of the conservative movement identified in Nash 2006 (cited under Monographs). These are general bodies of conviction: a forceful opposition to the Soviet Union and/or other forms of communism; an effort to ground ethics and culture in traditional, and usually religious, worldviews; and a political philosophy dedicated to limited government on the one hand and to the free market on the other. The conservative movement has referenced these convictions repeatedly, but the movement itself is a historical phenomenon, a movement theorized in the 1950s, organized in the 1960s, directed toward national politics in the 1970s, and reaching a point of culmination in the Reagan era, living on after Reagan as an entrenched aspect of American politics and political culture. Foreign policy is a bland designation that speaks to a possible difference between the conservatism of domestic politics and conservatism as a part of foreign policy or foreign policy debate. Conservative foreign policy positions stem from three mutually contradictory (if mixable) sources: isolationism, realism, and neoconservatism. Media is no less bland a designation, but it describes an important area of the historiography. This is research into the means of communication that have mattered to conservatives: radio in the 1930s, magazines throughout the postwar period, television from the 1960s onwards, and talk radio as a genre popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. The medium may not be the message, but the message cannot be sent without a medium. An entirely different category is the branch encompassing race, class, and gender. This constitutes a historiographical angle of vision, focusing on race, class, and gender as historical factors. Though this angle of vision had progressive connotations in its first historiographical flowering, such connotations are not essential. More recent scholarship has explored these factors from various ideological and methodological points of view.

Anticommunism

A striking aspect of these books on anticommunism and conservatism is their biographical impetus. Diggins 1975 is a group biography of four intellectuals; Fried 1990 and Schrecker 1998 are not biographies in and of themselves, but they are inseparable from the biography of Joseph McCarthy; Smant 1992 is a biography of James Burnham; Tanenhaus 1997 is a biography of Whittaker Chambers; Kimmage 2009 is a dual biography of Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling; and Hochgeschwender 1998 is a group biography, on a grand scale, of the anticommunist intellectuals associated with the Committee for Cultural Freedom. A background circumstance may explain this trend. Many of the great anticommunist intellectuals in America began their lives as communists or were communists as young men and young women. This certainly describes Burnham, Chambers, and the quartet of intellectuals Diggins 1975 follows. The movement from communism to anticommunism has, in many cases, been a movement to conservatism, a movement rooted in numerous mid-century American biographies. This movement was given lasting form and influence in the vast memoir literature written by these ex-communists. Fried 1990 and Schrecker 1998 focus on those who were persecuted by anticommunists (like McCarthy), whereas Diggins 1975, Tanenhaus 1997, Hochgeschwender 1998, and Kimmage 2009 place their readers in the mindset of important anticommunist figures. Starting with Diggins 1975, whose study includes traditionalists as well as libertarians, this line of scholarship demonstrates the vast differences of opinion, background, and influence among those labeled anticommunist. Hochgeschwender 1998 adds an important European—and therefore international—element to the narrative of American anticommunist conservatism.

Diggins, John Patrick. Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
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This is an intellectual history of mid-century American conservatism grounded in four biographical essays. It traces patterns of de-radicalization or of transformation, from radical to conservative intellectual commitments. Through biographical sketches, Diggins shows a multiplicity of conservative possibility. Conservatism in this book bears the welcome impress of personality and contingency.
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Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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Fried traces McCarthyism back to the 1930s, associating anticommunism with the spirit of persecution and with a spirit larger than the career of a single man (Senator McCarthy). Fried’s title is indicative of his polemical posture.
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Hochgeschwender, Michael. Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für Kulurelle Freiheit und die Deutschen. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998.
DOI: 10.1524/9783486595253Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Translating as [Freedom in the Offensive? The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Germans], this is a work of Euro-American history, based upon archival research. Hochgeschwender recreates the trans-Atlantic world of intellectual anticommunism, with an emphasis upon Germany, and he provides close readings of books and articles written in the 1950s by intellectuals, many of whom would become neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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This is a monograph on the mid-century evolution of conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism. Kimmage illustrates some of the complexities and contradictions of “modern” conservatism, enamored of tradition yet forced to make peace with capitalism, with technology, and with the bureaucratic imperatives of the modern state. Kimmage alleges a porous border between conservative and liberal ideas.
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Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
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This is a broadly researched study of McCarthyism, the career of the senator, and the mechanics of his anticommunist zeal. Far from a neutral observer, Schrecker documents a destructive element implicit to the Cold War search for security, identifying this as a recurrent problem in US history.
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Smant, Kevin. How Great the Triumph: James Burnham, Anticommunism and the Conservative Movement. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992.
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This is an intellectual biography of James Burnham, one of America’s most influential conservative foreign policy thinkers during the early Cold War. Smant draws important connections between the rise of an anticommunist sensibility in the 1940s and 1950s and the advent of a newly relevant American conservatism, at National Review, the magazine where Burnham worked as an editor.
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Tanenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997.
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This book reinterprets the career of Whittaker Chambers, a key figure in American conservative thought and the rise of a postwar anticommunist sensibility. Working off of Weinstein 1978 (cited under 1950s), Tanenhaus documents the guilt of Alger Hiss and general credibility of Chambers. Tanenhaus also establishes the importance of Chambers as an anticommunist intellectual and conservative contributor to American political thought.
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The Conservative Movement

The conservative movement has become an object of significant historical inquiry. Such inquiry can be broken into decades—the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s—as well as into a single section, which could be substantially larger, on the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

1950s

A common generalization is that American conservatism was unformed in the 1950s. The historiography on conservatism in this decade confirms this generalization. Hofstadter 1954–1955 is an important acknowledgement of a political impulse outside of liberalism; it is less effective as a programmatic statement about American conservatism. Weinstein 1978 opened a new discussion about Whittaker Chambers, anticommunism, and conservatism, because of the empirical discoveries that Weinstein made while researching this book; it would take years for these discoveries to register. Reinhard 1983 chronicles the organizational stirrings of a conservative movement in the late 1940s and in the 1950s. Brick 1986 and Moser 2005 both identify right turns in the ideological landscape of the 1950s, right turns that would flow, directly and indirectly, into the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. Frost 2011 makes a helpful connection between a conservative-leaning gossip columnist of the 1950s and a growing right-wing media presence in the 1980s and 1990s.

Brick, Howard. Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
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This is a biographical study of a preeminent 20th-century American intellectual, Daniel Bell. Brick chronicles an unfolding cultural conservatism and pessimism in Bell’s thought and demonstrates the rightward pressure anticommunism could—and often did—exert on mid-century American intellectuals, some of whom became neoconservatives in the 1970s.
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Frost, Jennifer. Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
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This book chronicles the life of Hedda Hopper, who voiced conservative messages to a popular audience in the 1940s and 1950s. Hopper was an opponent of the liberal media, a crucial trope of late 20th-century conservatism. As such, she anticipated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Frost argues. Hopper also anticipated the cultural style of populist conservatives like Rush Limbaugh.
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Hofstadter, Richard. “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” American Scholar 24 (1954–1955): 11–17.
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This essay, important because of the historian who wrote it, both recognizes the new power of conservatism in postwar American politics and seeks to psychoanalyze cultural conservatism as an iteration of status anxiety, the collective fears of Americans who feel displaced by modernity. Hofstadter provides the framework for Bell 1966 (cited under Monographs).
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Moser, John. Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
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This book traces the career of John Flynn, a journalist affiliated with the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s. After experiencing a conservative turn, Flynn became a vocal critic of the New Deal and of American liberalism generally, arguing, as Reagan would, that it was the Democratic Party that changed over time, not his political priorities.
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Reinhard, David. The Republican Right Since 1945. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983.
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This book is an effort to chart the rise of conservative opposition to Eisenhower’s tepid or possibly nonexistent conservatism. Reinhard focuses on Congress—on Taft and Goldwater—in the 1950s to analyze a new direction in conservatism.
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Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Knopf, 1978.
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A once controversial book, this history of the Hiss-Chambers case now conveys the conventional wisdom that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Whether or not this was Weinstein’s original intention, his findings qualify the tone of earlier scholarship on American conservatism, since Chambers’s “lies” had been used as proof of the mendacity or pathology of conservatives in general.
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1960s

Scholarship on conservatism and the 1960s follows two tracks. One traces the activities of this frenetic decade: the Goldwater campaign of 1964 in Perlstein 2001; Frank Meyer’s efforts at fusionism in Smant 2002; the organizational work documented in Schneider 1999 and Bjerre-Poulsen 2002; and the clash between Right and Left analyzed in Klatch 1999. Klatch 1999 and Smant 2002 relate the intellectual ferment of the 1960s to later trends in conservative politics. Schneider 1999, Perlstein 2001, and Bjerre-Poulsen connect Reagan’s victory in 1980 with the conservative political labors of the 1960s. Some of this labor (like the organizing of the Goldwater insurgency) was thought to be unsuccessful at the time: historians have rightly reinterpreted the record with an eye on later history. The other scholarly track involves a replay of the 1960s, a reprise of its tensions, dramas, and disputes in the 1970s and 1980s, since the 1960s was both an actual decade and a contested metaphor. This track analyzes the resonance of the 1960s in later decades: popular culture and politics in Jenkins 2006; a pseudo-conservative dominance alleged to have followed from the 1960s in Courtwright 2010; and disputes over decency and sexuality, which have their origins in the 1960s, in Strub 2011.

Bjerre-Poulsen, Neils. Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement, 1945–1965. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2002.
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This book combines ideas, party politics, and movement politics in its analysis of American conservatism from 1945 to 1965. Instead of focusing on the rise of the Republican Party after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat, as many historians do, Bjerre-Poulsen addresses the divisive years after World War II and a mounting challenge to Eisenhower’s lukewarm conservatism. Bjerre-Poulsen builds upon Schneider 1999 and Reinhard 1983 (cited under 1950s).
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Courtwright, David. No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in Liberal America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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This is a book about the culture wars that began in the 1960s. Courtwright distinguishes between the unifying principle that American conservatives drew (in negative) from the counter-culture of the 1960s, and the failure of conservatives to realize their cultural vision(s) in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Jenkins, Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of the Eighties. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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This book revises the standard narrative of conservative ascendancy. Jenkins explores the imagery and tonality of popular culture in the 1970s. He sees the fears and anxieties within this culture as the foundation of Reagan’s political victories in the 1980s. Here the emotional interplay between culture and the president eclipses the mechanics of policy, legislation, and party.
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Klatch, Rebecca. A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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This book is revisionist in its immediate context. It deprives the Left of a unique hold on the 1960s. It integrates the study of women and men in its analysis of American conservatism, and its framework is dialectical: the New Right arose, Klatch argues, in opposition to and in dialogue with the New Left.
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Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001.
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This is a detailed narrative history of Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Perlstein argues that a political consensus, founded in the New Deal, broke apart in 1964 and later, more definitively, with the election of Ronald Reagan, which followed in long and complicated sequence from Goldwater’s 1964 defeat.
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Schneider, Gregory. Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Contemporary Right. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
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As with Klatch 1999, this is a detailed study of the conservative youth movement of the 1960s. It breaks down the cliché of the 1960s as a uniformly radical decade. Schneider examines the prevalence of conservatism among some American youth in the 1960s, thus explaining the Reagan era of the 1980s, which coincided with the maturation of the people Schneider analyzes.
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Smant, Kevin. Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2002.
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This is an intellectual biography of Frank Meyer, who made the journey from communism to conservatism and was an important editor at National Review. Meyer was also a champion of fusionism, a theorist eager to synthesize libertarianism and traditionalism. Working off of Nash 2006 (cited under Monographs), Smant relates Meyer’s fusionism to the conservative movement.
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Strub, Whitney. Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
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This book is a study of the cultural wars with a focus on the politics of pornography. Strub analyzes the conservative campaigns mounted to protest and oppose the liberalization of obscenity laws in the 1960s, placing the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s in the context of this particular, and particularly divisive, issue.
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1970s

The 1970s, as a decade, has emerged as major motif in research on American conservatism. This applies to certain distinct subjects within the history of American conservatism: the funding of conservative thought, for example, as discussed in Miller 2006, or the rise of the conservative legal movement analyzed in Teles 2008. Mergel 2010, as well as Greenberg 2003, turns attention to an underexplored subject, conservative intellectuals in relation to Nixon and the Nixon presidency. Shulman and Zelizer 2008, Cowie 2010, Stein 2010, and Sandbrook 2011 address the 1970s head on, and these books are interrelated in the following way: each aligns a fundamental change in political economy—globally and in the United States—with the collapse of the New Deal order identified in Fraser and Gerstle 1989 (cited under Monographs). This transition can be characterized negatively as the fall of the industrial or manufacturing economy in the United States, the characterization used in Cowie 2010 and Sandbrook 2011. This same transition can also be characterized positively as the rise of a new financial order, as in Stein 2010.

Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010.
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This is a social, economic, and cultural history of the American working class in the 1970s. In explaining the rise of Reagan, Cowie does not begin with the Cold War or with the play of ideas in the 1950s. Instead, the work relates Reagan’s rise to a widespread social disintegration inscribed in the political economy of the 1970s.
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Greenberg, David. Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. New York: Norton, 2003.
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Greenberg explicates key aspects of Nixon’s relationship to American conservatism, chronicling Nixon’s continuing popularity among some American conservatives. Greenberg explains the refashioning of American conservatism in the 1970s, between Nixon’s failure and Reagan’s success.
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Mergel, Sarah. Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230102200Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Many historians have scrutinized the relationship between Reagan and the intellectuals. Mergel looks back to an earlier moment, to the 1970s. She makes the revisionist argument that conservative intellectuals gained valuable experience as allies of Richard Nixon and that they drew upon this experience long after Watergate and other scandals had faded into the past.
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Miller, John. A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America Since 1945. San Francisco: Encounter, 2006.
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This is a monograph on the Olin Foundation, which sponsored a great deal of conservative intellectual activism in the 1970s and 1980s, from the Federalist Society at American law schools, to the Heritage Foundation, to the book projects of Charles Murray, Allan Bloom, and Frances Fukuyama. As does Rich 2004 (cited under Ronald Reagan), Miller anatomizes the sociology of knowledge in relation to American conservatism.
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Sandbrook, Dominic. Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right. New York: Knopf, 2011.
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This is a cultural history of the 1970s. Looking back to earlier phases of American political history, Sandbrook charts the rise of a populist conservatism in the 1970s—populist in the sense of being against the establishment and conservative in the pitch of its political aims. This book follows Shulman and Zelizer 2008, Cowie 2010, and Stein 2010.
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Shulman, Bruce, and Julian Zelizer. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
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This is a widely read volume of essays that integrates two areas of scholarly inquiry. One delves into the rise of American conservatism in the second half of the 20th century. The other concerns the structural changes in culture and political economy that marked the 1970s.
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Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
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This is a history of the 1970s related in theme to Cowie 2010. Stein sees the 1970s as transitional: the time when the manufacturing economy given political shape by Roosevelt’s New Deal yielded to a political order of industrial decline, government downsizing, and the rise of high finance. Stein indicts this politically willed transition as the cause of widespread inequality.
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Teles, Steven Michael. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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This is the history of a struggle. Teles chronicles the struggle of conservatives, operating as minorities in the world of legal academia, to reshape the climate of opinion in law schools and thereby to influence American politics. As does Miller 2006, Teles discusses the Olin Foundation and its financial role in the rise of a conservative legal movement. Teles examines setbacks as well as conservative victories.
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Ronald Reagan

Studies of Ronald Reagan and American conservatism divide into three categories. The first is the self-contained monograph: the analysis of think tanks in Rich 2004, for example, or the portrait of intellectuals in the Reagan era drawn in Hoeveler 1991. A second category follows the career of Ronald Reagan and the political nuances of his two-term presidency. This describes Evans 2006, a biographical inquiry into Reagan’s career before he formally entered politics; and Wilentz 2008, a detailed and ambitiously researched narrative of the Reagan administration, including some pre- and post-history. Schaller 1992 is an early effort to come to grips with the political narrative behind Reagan’s presidency. The third category of book concerns the American world around the White House in the age of Reagan. Troy 2005 attributes the invention of the 1980s to Reagan in his title. The book itself illustrates the many ways in which the age of Reagan militated against the ideals of Reagan and his followers. Ehrman 2005 shifts focus somewhat by looking at Reagan and simultaneously looking at the failure of his political opponents to dominate their age.

Ehrman, John. The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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Ehrman focuses on political economy and on technology to explain the forces of change in the 1980s, while examining Reagan’s political style. A subtheme is the inability of Democrats, or of liberals, to put a defining mark on this era, as they had in the period between the New Deal and the Great Society.
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Evans, Thomas. The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
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This book tracks Reagan’s evolution from Hollywood actor to political personage. Evans uses archival research to evaluate Reagan’s work for General Electric. Evans argues that this work gave Reagan national prominence and shaped his political sensibility, by developing Reagan’s appreciation for big business and by eviscerating his youthful appreciation for unions.
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Hoeveler, J. David. Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
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This book offers a series of biographical sketches. In doing so, it helps explain the relationship between politics and ideas in the Reagan era. Hoeveler demonstrates two claims: the importance of intellectuals to a president with many intellectual enemies; and the long trajectory, running from the 1930s to the 1980s, behind the ideas Reagan attempted to promote.
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Rich, Andrew. Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511509889Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book contributes to the sociology of knowledge where knowledge informs politics. For the formulation of domestic and foreign policy agendas, think tanks have proven to be an important aspect of the conservative movement. Though not a book about conservatism per se, Rich’s study details an important piece of the conservative puzzle within American political history.
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Schaller, Michael. Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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This is an early scholarly account of the Reagan years. Schaller is concerned less with the person of Reagan than with forces of cultural and political attraction, within the American body politic, that made Reagan such a popular president. Schaller devotes considerable attention to images and symbolism as a communicative bond between president and citizenry.
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Troy, Gil. Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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This book is a study of the Reagan presidency, of the president himself, and of the policies he supported. It is also a study of the cultural era that spanned the 1980s. Troy embraces paradox: Reagan the conservative did many things to radicalize American culture, Troy argues, as if Reaganomics found its true reflection in the anarchic movements of American culture.
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Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: Harper, 2008.
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This book, by a distinguished historian, is focused on elections, personalities, the passage of legislation, and the formulation of domestic and foreign policy agendas by Reagan and by those who worked for him. Wilentz is less concerned with conservatism in the abstract than with the party-political and legislative ways in which Reagan altered the course of American history.
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Foreign Policy

Conservative thinking about foreign policy follows three separate paths, though in practice conservatives in power often mix and match. These paths are realism, isolationism, and neoconservatism. Realism is not necessarily conservative, though it has informed the approaches of Republican presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon to George Bush Sr. Isolationism was a prominent part of American conservatism before Pearl Harbor, though it did not simply vanish in the Second World War or in the Cold War. Neoconservatism was born within the Democratic Party in the 1940s and 1950s. Only in the 1970s, under the pressure of the Vietnam War, was liberal anticommunism transformed into neoconservatism, an initiative mostly, though not exclusively, affiliated with the Republican Party.

Realism

Realism had its greatest expositor in Henry Kissinger, subject of Suri 2007 and Del Pero 2010. Both works connect Kissinger to trends in European conservatism, although it is this connection that has often alienated Kissinger from American conservatives. Gaddis 2011 takes realism in a different direction, in part because his subject, George Kennan, unlike Kissinger, was never a consistent realist thinker on foreign policy questions. Interdisciplinary work, between history and political science, would elucidate the relationship between foreign policy realism and American conservatism.

Del Pero, Mario. The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
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This is a revisionist account of Kissinger’s realism. Del Pero argues for such realism as both an ideology and a political strategy, well suited to the tumult and confusion of the 1970s. Del Pero makes important distinctions between Kissinger’s realism and the neoconservatism of his opponents on the Right.
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Gaddis, John. George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Penguin, 2011
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This book, by a distinguished historian, balances Suri 2007 and Del Pero 2010. Though conservatism was never a cause championed by Kennan, it informed his thinking—his deep worries about the status of a modern America, his skepticism about a progressive (Wilsonian) foreign policy, and his self-conscious search for order in an unruly world.
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Suri, Jeremi. Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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This is not a book about American conservatism. It is, however, a book about the most important 20th-century foreign policy adviser to Republican (and many Democratic) presidents. Suri traces the importance of Kissinger’s youth in Germany and explicates the intellectual origins of Kissinger’s realist foreign policy thinking.
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Isolationism

Studies of isolationism proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s: Cole 1974, Radosh 1975, Cole 1983, Pencak 1989, and Doenicke 1990. Presumably these monographs bear some relationship to contemporary debates about the Vietnam War. In each case, the approach is somewhat different: Cole 1974 is a biographical study, Radosh 1975 is a group biography, Cole 1983 examines isolationists as a bloc in critical dialogue with Franklin Roosevelt, while Pencak 1989 and Doenicke 1990 trace interventionist movements—the interwar period for Pencak 1989, and the war years 1940–1941 for Doenicke 1990. After Reagan’s election, isolationism must have grown less interesting the further it stood from present-day politics. The neglect of this subject since 1990 makes it worth revisiting in future scholarship.

Cole, Wayne. Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
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This is a study of Lindbergh’s career and of the evolution of his and others’ isolationism in the 1930s and 1940s. Cole is revisionist in his criticism of Lindbergh’s critics.
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Cole, Wayne. Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
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This book belongs with Cole 1974 and Radosh 1975. Cole’s is a study of isolationism, its bearing on conservative opinion in the 1930s and its relation to the foreign policy agendas of the Roosevelt administration.
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Doenicke, Justus, ed. In Danger Undaunted: The Anti-Interventionist Movement of 1940–1941 as Revealed in the Papers of the America First Committee. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1990.
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This is a collection of documents related to the subject analyzed in Cole 1974, Radosh 1975, Cole 1983 and Pencak 1989.
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Pencak, William. For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.
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This book draws upon archival research to evaluate the transition from isolationism to interventionism.
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Radosh, Ronald. Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.
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As does Cole 1974, Radosh scrutinizes the links between isolationism and American conservatism at mid-20th-century. Radosh offers considerable insight into the transformations imposed upon American conservatism by the Cold War and by the globalism or internationalism adopted by many Cold War conservatives—as well as liberals.
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Neoconservatism

Four books on neoconservatism were published in 2010 alone: Vaisse 2010, Velasco 2010, Ryan 2010, and Dueck 2010. Ehrman 1995, Halper and Clarke 2004, Velasco 2010, Ryan 2010, and Dueck 2010 are oriented toward foreign policy, concentrating on different phases. Ehrman 1995 runs from World War II to the presidency of George Bush Sr. Halper and Clarke 2004 pick up the story where Ehrman 1995 leaves off. Velasco 2010 encompasses recent history as well as the 1940s and 1950s. Ryan 2010 looks at neoconservatism amid a broader aspiration to American hegemony, and Dueck 2010 devotes considerable attention to the Republican Party as a vehicle for neoconservatism. The titles published after 2004 can be read as attempts to explain the ideological origins of the Second Gulf War. Vaisse 2010 is by far the best existing book on neoconservatism, because Vaisse moves beyond foreign policy and deeply into the intellectual history in which this subject has a natural home. Steinfels 1979 and Dorrien 1993 provide valuable sociological information on intellectuals associated with the neoconservative movement.

Dorrien, Gary. The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture and the War of Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
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This book is a detailed study of neoconservatism, anticommunism and key debates in the history of American foreign and domestic policy. Dorrien carries forward the research and the polemical distance on display in Steinfels 1979.
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Dueck, Colin. Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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This is a study of US foreign policy in which Dueck looks beyond categories such as isolationism, realism, conservatism, and neoconservatism and analyzes the ideas and actions of elite foreign policy makers in the Republican Party, from Taft to George W. Bush.
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Ehrman, John. The Rise of the Neoconservatives: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
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This book is a study of neoconservatism from the 1930s to the 1980s. It is focused explicitly on foreign policy and, unlike Steinfels 1979 and Dorrien 1993, moves chronologically beyond the Reagan era.
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Halper, Stefan, and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511509773Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book is an examination of neoconservatism balanced less toward the Reagan era than toward that of George W. Bush. Halper and Clarke present the 1990s as a time of crisis for neoconservatism. They then present a critical analysis of neoconservatism in relation to the Second Gulf War.
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Ryan, Maria. Neoconservatism and the New American Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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In this study of neoconservatism, Ryan casts a skeptical gaze on the promotion of democracy as a neoconservative ideal, by connecting neoconservatism to the pursuit of American hegemony.
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Steinfels, Peter. The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
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This is the first book-length study of neoconservatives and neoconservatism. Steinfels’ overall tone is journalistic, with polemical touches that detract from his scholarly aspirations, though he gathers together important documentary and factual material. Steinfels also introduces a Jewish element to the larger story of American conservatism.
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Vaisse, Justin. Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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This is a path-breaking history of the neoconservative movement. Vaisse provides original (and close) readings of the major neoconservative thinkers, from Daniel Bell to Irving Kristol. He also links neoconservatism, a voluntary association formed to levy political influence, to Tocqueville’s theories of American democracy. Vaisse addresses both domestic and foreign policy in his book.
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Velasco, Jesus. Neoconservatives in U.S. Foreign Policy Under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
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This book, based upon oral interviews, follows neoconservatism from generation to generation, from the 1940s and 1950s to the presidency of George W. Bush.
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Libertarianism

Libertarianism, largely missing from early scholarship on American conservatism, has attracted many historians in recent years. For the sake of convenience, the subject is divided here between monographs and more synthetic studies of libertarianism in the American vein.

Case Studies

Weinstein 1968 is not a study of libertarianism, but it belongs on this list because of its importance to later historical analyses of American governance. It sheds light on the complicated valences within the word liberty, as Americans have tended to use it. Three of these books are biographies: Valdes 1995 is a group biography of University of Chicago academics and the makers of public policy in Chile; Caldwell 2003 is a biography of the economist Friedrich Hayek; and Burns 2009 is a biography of Ayn Rand. Three of these books are studies of the Mont Pelerin Society: Walpen 2004, Plickert 2008, and Mirowski and Plehwe 2009. Interestingly, these books have a strong transnational emphasis: Valdes 1995 on the connection between the US and Chile, Caldwell 2003 on the US and Central Europe, and Burns 2009 on the links between the Soviet Union and the US. This emphasis appears in Cockett 1994 as well, a book that illustrates an Anglo-American exchange of (libertarian) ideas prior to the era of Thatcher and Reagan.

Burns, Jennifer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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This is an intellectual biography of a pivotal 20th-century American writer. Burns recreates Rand’s thought world, as well as the intellectual forces arrayed against Rand, providing a detailed interpretation of Rand’s writings, from fiction to philosophy. This book also chronicles the figures around Rand who helped her spread libertarian ideas and ideals.
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Caldwell, Bruce. Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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As its title states, this book is an intellectual history of Hayek’s life and times. It has two parts, one focused on Hayek’s early life in Austria, and a second part oriented toward Hayek’s highly consequential American career.
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Cockett, Richard. Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983. London: Harper Collins, 1994.
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This book is about think tanks and the articulation of libertarian positions in British politics. Though focused on the origins of Thatcherism, it also addresses the origins of Reaganism. Cockett sketches the intellectual opposition to Keynes and the institutions that helped to house and fund this trans-Atlantic opposition.
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Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe, eds. The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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This is an edited volume of essays that continues the work of Walpen 2004 and Plickert 2008. It is transnational in scope and demonstrates the wide reach of libertarian ideas in the later decades of the 20th century, ideas formulated by a small group of thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s.
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Plickert, Philip. Wandlungen des Neoliberalismus: Eine Studie zur Entwicklung und Austrahlung der “Mont Pelerin Society.” Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2008.
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This book builds upon Walpen 2004 in its concentration on the Mont Pelerin Society as a crucial libertarian institution. It emphasizes transitions and turning points within the history of libertarianism and/or neoliberalism.
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Valdes, Gabriel. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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This book narrates a journey of ideas from the University of Chicago to the ministries of the Chilean government. Valdes demonstrates a will to export on the part of libertarian thinkers in the United States. He also examines the political order in Chile that emerged from the thinking and recommendations of the Chicago School.
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Walpen, Bernard. Die Offenen Feinde und ihre Gesellschaft: Eine Hegemonietheoretische Studie zur Mont Pelerin Society. Hamburg, Germany: VSA Verlag, 2004.
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This book is a history, highly theoretical in orientation, of the Mont Pelerin Society, a key institution of libertarian thought. Walpen integrates sources in various languages.
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Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918. Boston: Beacon, 1968.
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This book examines the origins of the welfare state. Instead of locating these origins in American progressivism or in a proto-New Deal liberalism, it analyzes the power of economic elites, who learned to co-opt the process of reform and to orient it toward their financial and class interests. Echoes of Weinstein’s thesis can be heard in a great deal of later scholarship on American conservatism.
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Syntheses

These syntheses endeavor to explain the libertarian movement as a whole or to explain the relationship between libertarianism and conservatism in postwar America. Three surveys of libertarianism are: Newman 1984, Harvey 2005, and Doherty 2007. Raimondo 1993 is an examination of prewar traditions of libertarianism on the American Right. Fones-Wolf 1994 emphasizes the ties between libertarianism and some forms of American Christianity. Prasad 2006 is an ambitious comparative study of libertarianism and social democracy, in the United States and Europe. Bartels 2008 and Phillips-Fein 2009 explain the interaction between libertarianism—either as movement or as a body of ideas—and the messy world of electoral and legislative politics. Phillips-Fein 2009 underscores the contributions of free-market activists to the American conservative movement and to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Burgin 2012 illustrates that libertarianism has undergone significant changes over time and, by implication, that scholars cannot treat the libertarian line of argument as a static thing.

Bartels, Larry. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
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This book addresses growing inequality in American life over many decades. Bartels argues that postwar Republican administrations have increased inequality, while Democratic administrations have done little to reverse broader trends away from equality. Bartels points to short-term electoral politics, rather than ideology, to explain the electoral pull of American conservatism.
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Burgin, Angus. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.4159/harvard.9780674067431Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Burgin traces the long history of libertarianism, starting in the 1930s, and in the process he disaggregates two key tendencies, a pessimistic libertarianism of crisis forged in the late 1930s and an optimistic libertarianism of opportunity propagated in the 1970s. Alert to continuity, Burgin demonstrates an important evolution in libertarian thought.
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Doherty, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. New York: Public Affairs, 2007.
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This is a wide-ranging history of libertarianism composed of myriad biographical portraits.
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Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
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In this book, Fones-Wolf charts an ideology of free enterprise and analyzes institutions, such as business schools, that have promoted this ideology. She also discusses the merger of a free-enterprise ideology with certain kinds of Christian piety. This book does not posit free enterprise as an American inevitability but as something actively introduced into American politics.
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Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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This is the history of an idea, neoliberalism, which has many important ties to American political and intellectual culture. Harvey has written a global history of the libertarian impulse that came into its own in the 1970s, and nowhere more conspicuously than in the United States.
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Newman, Stephen. Liberalism at Wits’ End: The Libertarian Revolt Against the Modern State. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
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This book surveys libertarianism in American political thought. Its focus is on the New Deal moment and a galvanizing libertarian reaction to the New Deal, but Newman also looks back to the Founders and to early modern political thinkers, like John Locke, in his analysis of libertarianism’s origins and scope.
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Phillips-Fein, Kim. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton, 2009.
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Phillips-Fein details the activism of big business and of a conservative movement that arose neither from the pages of National Review nor from some spontaneous movement of the populist spirit. Phillips-Fein argues for a conservative movement that was top down in nature, though capable of mobilizing grassroots support. She places political economy and economic agents at the center of her story.
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Prasad, Monica. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Prasad’s analysis divides between two political traditions, one that, by the 1980s, was increasingly libertarian (in the US and Great Britain) and another that remained social democratic in orientation (in France and Germany). Prasad examines the respective tax policies of these four countries and emphasizes the energy crisis of the 1970s as a neoliberal (antiregulatory) catalyst for global economic change.
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Raimondo, Justin. Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. Wilmington, DE: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993.
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This book echoes Cole 1974, Cole 1983, and Radosh 1975 (all cited under Isolationism) in its exploration of an isolationist–libertarian–conservative tradition prior to the Cold War. Raimondo gathers together important material but does not write about it with neutrality.
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Media

Research into conservatism and the media tends toward the charismatic individual. Of these none is more prominent than William F. Buckley Jr., the subject of Judis 1988, Hart 2005, and Bogus 2011. Next in line come Rush Limbaugh in Jamieson and Capella 2008; Henry Luce in Brinkley 2010; and Norman Podhoretz in Abrams 2010. McPherson 2008 and Hendershot 2011 take more structural and less personality-driven looks at the rise of the right and at right-wing broadcasting respectively.

Abrams, Nathan. Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons. New York: Continuum, 2010.
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This book is both an intellectual biography of Norman Podhoretz and a history of Commentary, the magazine Podhoretz edited for several decades. It is based upon archival research.
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Bogus, Carl. William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
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This is an intellectual biography, similar to Judis 1988, of William F. Buckley Jr.; it runs from the 1940s to the 1960s. Bogus argues that Buckley erected a conservative ideology in the public sphere, in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was this ideology that later served as framework for conservatives politics, from the presidency of Ronald Reagan to that of George W. Bush.
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Brinkley, Alan. The Publisher: Henry Luce and the American Century. New York: Knopf, 2010.
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This book, by a major historian, traces the career of Henry Luce. Because Luce had many connections to conservative intellectuals, as he did to the Republican Party, this biography is pertinent to the history of American conservatism. It underscores the productive relationship between conservative politics and modern media alluded to in Judis 1988, McPherson 2008, and Jamieson and Capella 2008.
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Hart, Jeffrey. The Making of the Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2005.
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This book is a history, less scholarly than impressionistic, and partially autobiographical, of National Review. It helps to explain the personal dynamics behind the evolution of this magazine, and it recreates with literary flair the intellectual milieu in which National Review was written and read.
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Hendershot, Heather. What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
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This is a study of right-wing populism on the radio. Unlike most other studies of conservatism and mass media, What’s Fair on the Air? concludes in the 1970s. The later and better known conservative populism of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is, in fact, the second or third chapter of a longer story.
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Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Joseph Capella. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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This book examines a pivotal conservative figure, Rush Limbaugh—his rise to prominence, his outlook, and the establishment of his media empire. Jamieson and Capella argue that conservative opinion is often articulated with a unified message in mind, its salience linked to the needs of the Republican Party on the one hand and to the nexus of conservative media and conservative audience on the other.
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Judis, John. William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
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This is an intellectual biography of William F. Buckley Jr., Judis argues for Buckley’s counter-cultural élan in the 1950s and 1960s, when Buckley was creating a new political identify for himself and, by extension, for other postwar conservatives. The second half of Judis’s argument is that Buckley had become a conventional part of the American political scene by the 1970s.
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McPherson, James. The Conservative Resurgence and the Press: The Media’s Role in the Rise of the Right. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
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This is a study of multiple media, under the rubric of conservative resurgence, which McPherson understands as a long-term trend rather than a phenomenon delimited to the 1980s and 1990s. McPherson is interested not only in the conservative positions and ideas promoted in the media but in the plenitude of media outlets that have reflected and modified conservative opinion.
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Race, Class, and Gender

The trio of race-class-gender is the dominant mode of analysis for those historians of the United States who came of age in the 1960s. Though its origins lie in social history, it is a method or framework that can be used in all kinds of history, as scholarship on postwar American conservatism amply demonstrates. Race, class, and gender, as topics of research, came late to the scholarship on American conservatism, or American conservatism took time to capture the attention of historians interested in race-class-gender analysis. Since around 2000, research into American conservatism—as related to matters of race, class, and gender—has inspired some of the most innovative studies of this subject.

Race/Ethnicity

Kruse 2005 is a meticulously researched study of Southern race relations in the postwar period, of white flight to the suburbs and of a distinctive brand of Republican Party conservatism that flourished in suburban Atlanta, Kruse’s immediate subject, as it did nationally. Crespino 2007 and Crespino 2012 adds to Kruse’s argument, through a case study of Mississippi, Crespino 2007, and the biography of crucial postwar political figure, Crespino 2012. The rest of the titles on this list take up the subject of nonwhite and/or non-Christian conservatives. The first to do so was Dillard 2002, which intersperses chapters on female and homosexual conservatives among those on African-American and Hispanic conservatives. Friedman 2005 examines the Jewish element in neoconservatism. Ferguson 2005, Williams 2007, Walton 2009, and Ondaatje 2010 are all significant contributions to the history of African-American conservatism in general and of conservative African-American intellectuals in particular. Ferguson 2005 and Williams 2007 both chronicle the life of George Schuyler, a multi-faceted conservative intellectual. Walton 2009 could also be included in the section on media, since it looks closely at the medium of television. If Ferguson 2005 and Williams 2007 have a strong literary component, Ondaatje 2010 explores important matters of public policy in the context of conservative African-American thought.

Crespino, Joseph. In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
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Crespino advances a new understanding of white southerners during the civil rights movement era, emphasizing less the overt displays of racism and focusing more on the pragmatic efforts of white southerners to perpetuate elements of segregation. These efforts, Crespino argues, contributed to the reshaping of conservatism nationally in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Crespino, Joseph. Strom Thurmond’s America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.
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Continuing the argument of Crespino 2007, Crespino presents Strom Thurmond’s career as a template for conservative politics generally, comprised of the racism Thurmond used to forge a coalition of white southerners, of ties to the Christian Right and of an anticommunism around which conservatives of all stripes could rally.
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Dillard, Angela. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
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Dillard destroys the premise that all American conservatives are white heterosexual male Protestants. She analyzes the thought and activism of black, Hispanic, female, and homosexual conservatives, a fusing of disparate cultural strands around certain core conservative principles, without which the Republican Party would have had a much smaller following in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Ferguson, Jeffrey. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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This is an intellectual biography of George Schuyler, one of 20th-century America’s most prominent African-American conservative thinkers. Schuyler’s conservatism, which often expressed itself in anticommunist argumentation, was highly literary in origin and effect.
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Friedman, Murray. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511818721Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book chronicles the role of Jewish intellectuals within the neoconservative movement. It covers two distinct generations of Jewish neoconservative intellectuals: one that came of age in New York, in the 1930s and 1940s, and a second generation, rooted more in Washington, DC, with overlapping connections to academia, the media, and the Republican Party.
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Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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This is a monograph with the city of Atlanta at its center. Kruse connects the modulation of a segregationist mindset, prevalent among white Southerners in the 1950s, to the rise of suburbia and to the multiple kinds of segregation suburbia (in Atlanta and nationally) was designed to foster. Kruse concludes his book with an analysis of Newt Gingrich’s political career.
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Ondaatje, Michael. Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
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This is a study of African-American intellectuals and of three public policy issues in particular: affirmative action, welfare, and education. Ondaatje demonstrates the variety of African-American conservative thought, building upon Dillard 2002, in his analysis of minority-mainstream relationships among American conservatives.
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Walton, Jonathan. Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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This is not a study of African-American conservatism. It is, however, a study of Christian activism conveyed on television to African-Americans. As such, it compliments and qualifies the scholarship on African-American conservatism in Dillard 2002, Ferguson 2005, Williams 2007, and Ondaatje 2010.
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Williams, Oscar. George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
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Like Ferguson 2005, this book explores the career and thought of George Schuyler, doing so in relation to American conservatism in general and to African-American conservatism in particular.
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Class

Class is a subject so large that it figures in much of the scholarship on American conservatism, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly. The titles on this list are addressed to a subject within class, which is to say the white working class and its relationship to conservatism and the Republican Party. Rogin 1967 is a theoretical attempt to liberate the working class (white or otherwise) from the stigma of conservatism or of McCarthyism. Brinkley 1982 charts the rise of right-wing, anti–New Deal movements in the 1930s, movements that were largely working class in target and tone. Formisano 1991 and Jacobsen 2006 look at multiple varieties of backlash against the civil rights movement, one that was white and working class in Boston (Formisano 1991) and another that romanticized the image of the white ethnic in film, politics, and intellectual culture (Jacobsen 2006). Moreton 2009 provides a detailed social history of the Ozarks-based working class that supplied the labor and some of the management force for Walmart. This class, which resembles modernizing and previously agrarian classes in other countries, provided for Walmart both workers and customers.

Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Vintage, 1982.
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Though this book, by a major historian, does not address the subject of modern conservatism, it is a crucial study of early opposition to the New Deal. In the instance of Father Coughlin, it touches on the history of conservative media (i.e., radio). Brinkley offers a model for the linkage of populism and conservatism in American historiography, exactly the linkage that helps structure Kazin 1992 (cited under Articles).
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Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807855263Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Like Edsall and Edsall 1991 (cited under Monographs), this is a major book about the white working class in the 1960s and 1970s. Formisano focuses his book on the conflicts over school desegregation in Boston. He uses these conflicts to scrutinize the backlash of the white working class in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. This book is related, in important ways, to Sugrue 1996 (cited under Monographs) and to Kruse 2005 (cited under Race/Ethnicity).
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Jacobsen, Matt. Roots, Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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This is not a book about American conservatism per se. It is, however, a book that links neoconservatism with the ethnic revival of the 1970s and with a cultural reaction to the civil rights movement. Jacobsen identifies neoconservatism with a kind of immigrant mythology and sees its rise as enmeshed in the divisive racial politics of the 1970s and 1980s.
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Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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This path-breaking book, building on Fones-Wolf 1994 (cited under Syntheses), joins trends that had previously been historiographically isolated: the movement of women into the workforce, the promotion of an antiunion ideology by companies like Walmart, the abiding presence of Christian piety among many Americans, and the rise of globalization. Moreton explores the ideological world of working-class men and women from the Ozarks.
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Rogin, Michael Paul. The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967.
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This book departs from Hofstadter 1954–1955 (cited under 1950s) and Bell 1966 (cited under Monographs) in its author’s efforts to detach populism from political pathology. The pathological figure of the 1950s, Rogin argues, was Senator McCarthy, who manipulated the masses. For Rogin, populism belongs more to the progressive tradition and to the American future than it does to the Right and to the conservative past.
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Gender

Gender can be refracted in scholarship on conservatism in at least two ways. One is symbolic and is concentrated on battles over the family, over the ideal man and the ideal woman—a crucial aspect of the culture wars that began in the 1960s and intensified in the 1980s. Petchesky 1981, Luker 1985, and Neilsen 2001 offer substantial insight into this question. They trace the connection between antifeminism and antiradicalism from the time of the First World War through to the late 20th century. Another way in which gender can be refracted in scholarship on American conservatism is through research on conservative women. Three very different examples of this genre are Klatch 1987, Blee 1991, and Critchlow 2005. The conservatism in question ranges from the Ku Klux Klan to Phyllis Schlafly’s grassroots, Catholic, antifeminist, and anticommunist conservatism.

Blee, Kathleen. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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This is a path-breaking study of gender and the far Right in the 1920s. Blee crosses two historiographical borders in the book. She introduces women into the history of the Klan and into the history of the radical Right, with ample evidence of women’s engagement in far-right political movements; and she introduces conservatism or right-wing radicalism to women’s history.
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Critchlow, Donald. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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This is a political and intellectual biography of Phyllis Schlafly. Critchlow assesses the place of women in the conservative movement. He also addresses the role of Catholics and/or Catholicism in the formation of a postwar American conservatism. This is also a book about anticommunism, since Schlafly was an influential anticommunist activist before she became a crusader against the ERA.
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Klatch, Rebecca E. Women of the New Right. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
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This book explores the sociological, political, and intellectual contexts shared by conservative women in America. It employs social science and oral history research techniques. Klatch rejects the notion of women’s conservatism as simply antifeminist and finds many areas of ideological disagreement among the women on America’s new Right.
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Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
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This book assesses a subject of central importance to American conservatism, the politics of abortion. It starts in the late 19th century and moves forward to the late 20th century. Luker devotes a chapter to the pro-life movement. More broadly, she relates changing gender and sexual mores to key divisions in modern American politics.
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Neilsen, Kim. Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare. Ohio State University Press, 2001.
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This book is devoted to the Red Scare. It implies that later combinations of antifeminism and anticommunism were not exclusively the products of the 1940s and 1950s. American conservatives have long advanced a particular image of the family, of men and women within the family. Since 1917, the existence of radical regimes outside the United States has helped to mobilize these conservatives.
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Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. “Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right.” Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981): 206–246.
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This article is important for connections Petchesky draws between patterns of gender in American culture and the evolution of a new Right after World War II.
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Traditionalism

Traditionalism can take countless forms, but since Protestant traditionalism is such a robust part of American conservatism generally, it deserves a subsection of its own here. This body of scholarship can itself be separated into two areas of focus, the traditionalism of elite Protestants and the traditionalism of non-elite Protestants.

Protestant

Historians of Protestant traditionalism can easily range back before 1945 or go back and forth between the pre- and post-war periods. Lears 1981 is an intellectual and cultural history with many chapters devoted to an elite Protestant traditionalism between 1880 and 1920. Palmer 1980 is a study of the Southern Agrarians, not all of whom were elite to begin with, and not all of whom remained Protestant, though they coalesced as a group by celebrating the Protestant elites of the Old South. Genovese 1994 continues the regional focus on the South, while Harding 2000 concentrates on Virginia, and Dochuk 2011 on the Sunbelt. The South and Southwest, or Sunbelt, furnished the demographic base for assaults on the elite and moderate Republicanism of the Northeast—and on a secular/elite liberalism often associated symbolically with the East and West Coasts. Ribuffo 1983, Bruce 1990, Harding 2000, Williams 2010, and Dochuk 2011 shift focus to non-elite Protestants, whose political mobilization began in the 1920s and began to bear fruit in the 1970s. If elite Protestants figure prominently in the early 20th century, as in Lears 1981, they receive less attention from historians interested in the postwar period: Bruce 1990, Harding 2000, Williams 2010 and Dochuk 2011, whose work is as informed by the decline of mainline Protestantism as it is by the political agency of evangelicals.

Bruce, Steve. The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in America, 1978–1988. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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This book examines conservative Protestantism and American politics. Bruce is concerned with relations among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, with the activism of conservative Protestants and the growing prominence of their causes within late 20th-century American politics. Bruce illustrates the limits culture and politics have imposed upon fundamentalist efforts to remake the American polity.
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Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt; Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: Norton, 2011.
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This book is a history of the “plain-folk” migrants to Southern California. It records their religious piety and traces their efforts at political mobilization via their relationship to several figures of national provenance: Billy Graham, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon. Dochuk’s focus on Southern California allows him to comment in direct ways on the rise of Ronald Reagan as a national and conservative leader.
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Genovese, Eugene. The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limits of an American Conservatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
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This book, by a major historian, combines normative and historical analysis. It links 20th-century Southern conservatism to earlier instances of Southern conservatism, developing the theme of limited government as a core conservative conviction in the American South. The 20th-century passages focus on the Southern Agrarians.
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Harding, Susan Friend. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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Harding addresses fundamentalism’s place in American culture, paying especially close attention to biblical language. Her research persuasively challenges the theoretical distinction between modern and antimodern and/or between secular-modern and pious-antimodern. Modern and antimodern can (and often do) walk hand in hand.
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Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
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Conservatism as such is peripheral to this book. Nevertheless, the way in which Lears traces an antimodern impulse in American culture is richly relevant to the question of an American conservatism. Later American conservatives often defined themselves against the antimodernism that Lears finds in the period between 1880 and 1920. Thus, Lears’s book helps to highlight the “modernity” of postwar American conservatism.
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Palmer, Bruce. “Man over Money”: The Southern Critique of American Capitalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
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This is not a monograph on conservatism per se, but it follows Crundon 1977 and Hoeveler 1977 (both cited under Early Works) in its examination of conservative figures and texts prior to World War II. Palmer scrutinizes a distinctively Southern (anticapitalist, antimodern) contribution to American conservatism.
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Ribuffo, Leo. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983.
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This is an important monograph on the Protestant strain in 20th-century American conservatism. Ribuffo develops a “continuity” thesis: neither World War II nor the start of the Cold War form an insuperable dividing line, with conservatism on one side of the line and a modern conservatism on the other. In this book, Cold War conservatism has a deep historical pedigree.
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Williams, Daniel. God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195340846.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The point of departure for this history is not the 1970s, as is often the case for other scholars, but the 1920s. Williams emphasizes the political aspirations of Protestant fundamentalists in the 1920s, uncovering a pattern that recurs, as context and generations change, throughout the postwar period. Williams argues for this pattern as a crucial ingredient of modern American politics.
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Non-Protestant

Gage 2009 is not especially involved in denominational questions. Gage posits a kind of national security traditionalism formed in relation to threats from without and/or from subversives within the body politic. The other titles on this list divide neatly between Jewish and Catholic traditionalists. The pivotal role of Catholics in fashioning postwar American conservatism is analyzed in Allitt 1993 and Weaver and Appleby 1995. The role of Jewish intellectuals, not in the creation of neoconservatism, but in the articulation of a traditionalist conservatism is chronicled in Devigne 1994, McAlister 1996, Drury 1997, and Zuckert and Zuckert 2006. These works concentrate on the figure of Leo Strauss, a political thinker of immense—if difficult to define—significance for postwar American conservatism. Strauss himself was Jewish, as were many of his students, but he was a scholar of non-Jewish political philosophy. As with many thinkers who came to the US from Central Europe at mid-century, Strauss helped broaden American intellectual culture and, in doing so, helped make its tone less emphatically Protestant. Future scholarship would be well served by integrating Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist narratives into this area of inquiry.

Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950–1985. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
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This book brings Catholics and Catholicism into the larger history of American conservatism. It offers a series of biographical sketches, from Buckley to Michael Novak; it charts divisions among American Catholics on matters of culture and politics; and it contributes to a widening understanding of the varied conservative demographic.
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Devigne, Robert. Recasting Conservatism: Oakeshott, Strauss, and the Response to Postmodernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
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This is a transnational study of conservatism in British and American intellectual history, focused on two political philosophers, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Instead of devoting himself to the construction of an isolated conservative tradition, Devigne discusses conservatism, in political philosophy, as an impetus that has arisen in tandem with radicalism and liberalism.
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Drury, Shadia. Leo Strauss and the American Right. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
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This study—more than McAlister 1996 and Devigne 1994—seeks to explain the networks that formed around Leo Strauss and drew the rarified thought of this political philosopher into the public sphere. Drury examines the imprint of Strauss’s ideas on such conservative figures as Allan Bloom, Clarence Thomas, and Irving Kristol.
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Gage, Beverly. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Tracing an obsessive concern with national security back to the early 20th century, Gage posits terrorism as a galvanizing factor in America’s search for security. She looks at internal social tensions, at domestic terrorism, and at the fear of subversion from within, themes and issues that would fan conservative flames in the Cold War and in the years after September 11.
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McAlister, Ted. Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996.
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This book is related to Devigne 1994, although its comparative focus falls on two German-born thinkers, both of whom had substantive American careers: Leo Strauss and Eric Veogelin. If the word “postliberal” in this book’s title is not equivalent to the word “conservative,” Devigne shows the influence of Strauss and Voegelin upon bona fide American conservatives.
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Weaver, Mary Jo, and R. Scott Appleby, eds. Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
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This edited volume describes the varieties of conservatism among American Catholics. It starts with Vatican II and moves well into the 1980s. It builds upon Allitt 1993 and ranges far beyond intellectual history into political, social, and cultural history.
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Zuckert, Catherine, and Michael Zuckert. The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Where McAlister 1996 and Drury 1997 tend toward skepticism, regarding the thought and influence of Leo Strauss, Zuckert and Zuckert work from a more sympathetic standpoint. They are keen to distinguish between Strauss’s thought, in historical context, and later claims, many of them posthumous, about the (pernicious) nature of its influence.
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Syntheses and Narrative Histories

These syntheses and narratives are especially important for those intending to teach or for those at the outset of research projects. They are divided here into works that take the entire 20th century into view; works focused on the postwar period (as most histories of American conservatism happen to be) and works addressed to the period between 1980 and 2008.

20th-Century Conservatism

Writing a synthetic history of 20th-century American conservatism is no easy task. Two of these titles bravely extend back into the 19th and 18th centuries. These are Dunn and Woodard 1991 and Allitt 2009. Schneider 2003 is an edited volume of documents, starting with the Hoover administration. Miles 1980 is an interesting example of narrative history written before Reagan became president. Schoenwald 2001, Schneider 2009, and Nash 2009 broadly attempt to fit the narrative of American conservatism into a 20th-century context, the conservative century, in the words of Schneider 2003. Schoenwald 2001 and Allitt 2009 are ambitious, elegant books ideally suited to teaching graduate or undergraduate students not yet immersed in the topic. Nash 2009 is a collection of essays valuable for what they say about the challenges of writing about American conservatism. Good as Schoenwald 2001 and Allitt 2009 are, there is still room for further synthetic histories of 20th-century American conservatism, or of American conservatism more broadly construed, for teaching purposes, and to satisfy the curiosity of a nonacademic audience.

Allitt, Patrick. The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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As with Schneider 2009, this book examines several phases of conservative development prior to World War II. Allitt begins his monograph with the American Revolution and devotes careful attention to the 19th century as well as to the first and second halves of the 20th century. This long view furnishes a nuanced sense of conservative change and continuity over time.
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Dunn, Charles, and J. David Woodard. American Conservatism from Burke to Bush: An Introduction. Lanham, MD: Madison, 1991.
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This book is a historical narrative of conservatism’s postwar ascendancy; it balances political with intellectual history.
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Miles, Michael. The Odyssey of the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
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This is an early narrative history of American conservatism. Miles presents American conservatism as a reaction to the New Deal.
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Nash, George. Reappraising the Right: The Past and the Future of American Conservatism. Wilmington, DE: ISI, 2009.
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This is a book of essays on various aspects of conservatism—intellectual, political, and cultural—in the American vein. Nash is among the most distinguished historians of the subject at hand.
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Schneider, Gregory. The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
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This is a narrative history of conservatism with a longer chronological arc than is typical for such books.
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Schneider, Gregory, ed. Conservatism in America Since 1930: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
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This is a collection of primary-source documents related to American conservatism; it is helpful in establishing the wide parameters of debate among American conservatives.
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Schoenwald, Jonathan. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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This is a narrative (and academic) history of the conservative movement, with particular attention paid to Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan.
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Postwar Conservatism

These histories, concentrated on the postwar period, all imply some principle of movement, change, and transformation. Gottfried and Fleming 1988 denote a conservative movement or, rather, the conservative movement. Himmelstein 1990 is organized around the motif of conservative transformation. Brands 1994 looks at the transformative energies of the Cold War, which remade American conservatism. Hodgson 1996 discusses a conservative ascendancy. Edwards 1999 takes this a step further and declares his subject to be the conservative revolution. Farber 2010 and Kalman 2010 scrutinize the vertical movement of conservatism in postwar history, a rise and fall for Farber and a rising star for Kalman. In sum, it is two separate transformations that fascinate these historians: the transformation of American conservatism under the aegis of the conservative movement; and the country that postwar conservatism aspired to and did in fact transform, though the nature and degree of this transformation is, and should remain, hotly contested.

Brands, W. H. The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
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This book is a history of the Cold War with important insights into the Cold War incorporation of conservative and neoconservative ideas.
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Edwards, Lee. The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America. New York: Free Press, 1999.
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This is a history of the conservative movement written by a participant in that movement.
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Farber, David. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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This is a synthetic and narrative history focused on the biographies of six figures (Taft, Goldwater, Buckley, Schlafly, Reagan, and George W. Bush), each of whom has been a shaping influence upon American conservatism—whether rising or falling.
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Gottfried, Paul, and Thomas Fleming. The Conservative Movement. New York: Twayne, 1988.
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This is both a history of the conservative movement and an opinionated assessment of American conservatism. Gottfried and Fleming argue that conservatism had, by the 1980s, taken on too many and too contradictory meanings to constitute a single effective movement.
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Himmelstein, Jerome. To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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This book is a narrative history of American conservatism from the 1950s to the 1980s. A sociologist, Himmelstein draws upon social science methodologies in this history of conservatism’s ideological evolution.
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Hodgson, Godfrey. The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
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This is a sweeping narrative history of conservatism’s rise, written by a journalist.
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Kalman, Laura. Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980. New York: Norton, 2010.
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This is a narrative history of the Ford and Carter years in American politics. Kalman devotes scholarly attention to a period often neglected by other historians, providing helpful background to the 1980 election and subsequent political transformations.
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From Reagan to George W. Bush

Historians are only beginning the job of writing the history of conservatism after Reagan. An early effort to scrutinize the presidency of George Bush Sr. is Berman 1994, followed up by Schaller 2007. Mattson 2008 is an intellectual history that stretches past the age of Reagan. Critchlow 2007 is a history of the Republican Party in the late 20th century, and Zelizer 2010, as the title pronounces, makes “a first historical assessment.” Lepore 2010 is a history of the tea party movement and thus a very early assessment of conservatism after the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Berman, William. America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Bush. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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This book integrates large-scale political and economic history, as it charts a nation’s conservative turn. Berman separates conservatism from party politics. For this reason, he analyzes the conservative dimensions of the Clinton presidency.
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Critchlow, Donald. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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A narrative history of American conservatism, Critchlow’s thesis is that global economic conditions favored the rise of conservatism and the Republican Party, in the United States in the later decades of the 20th century.
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Lepore, Jill. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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This is an analysis of the tea party movement, with especial attention paid to the way it uses quotations, imagery, and themes associated with the American Revolution.
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Mattson, Kevin. Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
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This is a history of American conservatism structured around the divide between elitism and populism, the urge to rebel and the will to preserve tradition, the hunger for political combat and the desire to uphold civility.
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Schaller, Michael. Right Turn: American Life in the Reagan-Bush Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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This book is a synthetic history of the postwar period. It addresses the rise of conservatism and the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., drawing upon memoir literature and documents relating to foreign and domestic policy.
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Zelizer, Julian. The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
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This is a book of essays, by many of the most distinguished historians and scholars of American conservatism, on the presidency of George W. Bush.
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