30030856

Rural? Radical?Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain by Catherine McNicol Stock; BeyondLeft and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment by David A. HorowitzReview by: Leo P. RibuffoReviews in American History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 659-666Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030856 .Accessed: 28/01/2014 10:35

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RURAL? RADICAL?

Leo P. Ribuffo

Catherine McNicol Stock. Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. xi + 219 pp. Note on method, note on sources, notes, and index. $25.00.

David A. Horowitz. Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. xviii + 444 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

An accident of alliteration has contributed considerably to our misunderstanding of the American political spectrum. Four decades ago consensus historians and pluralist social theorists in search of a term to fit nationalist movements less urbane and more militant than the conservatism typified by Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft settled on the label "radical right." "Raucous right" might have sounded just as melodious but, during the peak of the Cold War, "radical" had the advantage of suggesting a parallel between twin "extremist" threats assaulting the vital center-Communists from the left flank and sundry McCarthyites, John Birchers, and nativists from the right.

In The New American Right (1955), and in the enlarged edition of that book called The Radical Right (1963), pluralists Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Hofstadter offered a theory of political behavior as well as a lyrical label. Extremists, especially those on the radical right, were said to differ from sensible centrists in two main ways. First, instead of practicing practical interest politics, in which deals were made and goods or services apportioned, they indulged in mere "status politics" or "cultural politics," thereby venting their feelings about such extraneous matters as personal identity or religious faith. Indeed, for the pluralists, wheeling-and- dealing to advance piecemeal reform was the only legitimate brand of politics. Second, the radical right's expressions often took the form of ungrounded conspiracy theories, a way of thinking Hofstadter called the "paranoid style."1

Although scholarly interest in the far right derived initially from concern about the contemporary successes of Senators Joseph McCarthy and Barry

Reviews in American History 25 (1997) 659-666 @ 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


660 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / DECEMBER 1997

Goldwater, the pluralists quickly compiled a long list of precursor paranoids: status anxious Federalists obsessed with an international conspiracy of Illuminati, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, leaders of the People's party and the Robert LaFollette wing of the Progressive movement, Huey Long, pre- World War II "isolationists," and the leading anti-Semites of the 1930s and 1940s, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, William Dudley Pelley, and Gerald Winrod. Late-nineteenth-century agrarian rebels, typically dubbed "populists" whether or not they supported the Populist party, played the starring roles in the pluralist chronicles of extremism. Populists were as- sumed to be the chief source of the twentieth-century far right in general and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in particular.2

The foremost pluralist theorists of extremism deserve credit for stirring debate about sordid aspects of our history that many post-World War II American celebrationists preferred to ignore. Nor were they wrong in seeing some connection between nineteenth-century agrarian protest and twentieth- century bigotry (as C. Vann Woodward had shown almost a generation earlier in Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, 1938). Unfortunately, the pluralists were so determined to squeeze dissident social movements into their extremism model that they homogenized U.S. history even beyond the accepted stan- dards of social science simplification. In their most flamboyant accounts, such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab's The Politics of Unreason, these cosmopolitan intellectuals used rural, small town, provincial, moralistic, evangelical, and fundamentalist as virtual synonyms. Thus, thirty-five years ago, anyone trying to understand the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s would have been well advised to pass over the latest social theory and read the best accounts written at the end of the 1920s.3

Although the pluralist model of extremism remained the academic ortho- doxy well into the 1980s, skeptics questioned its theoretical and empirical adequacy from the outset. Several writers, including Michael Rogin, Geoffrey S. Smith, and I (interests must be confessed) doubted that far right activists differed qualitatively from mainstream political actors in their ideas, modes of operation, or psychological makeup-especially during the country's frequent countersubversive scares.4 Other scholars showed that Populists, Klan members, isolationists, McCarthyites, and Goldwaterites were not the stick figures portrayed in the folklore of pluralism.5 Neither, on the other extreme, were American Communists. Historians of religion explained that "fundamentalist" and "evangelical" were problematical terms with theologi- cal content rather than catch-all labels for noisy Protestants.6 Important questions remained unresolved. For example, no one really knows-and perhaps there is now no way to find out-whether or not supporters of the


RIBUFFO / Rural? Radical? 661

People's party were any more or less anti-Semitic than Republicans or Democrats of comparable social standing.

Debate about the usefulness of "radical right" as an interpretive category petered out with the end of the Cold War and the political reshuffling that culminated in the Reagan coalition. Although Bell, Glazer, and Lipset con- tinue to write important books, they seem content to let the theory formulated in their youth crumble without defense or renovation, perhaps because (at least in the latter two instances) they themselves coalesced with Reagan, an erstwhile Goldwaterite "extremist." Yet it is hard to keep a melodious phrase down. Denunciations of the latest radical right still appear regularly from the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, and comparable liberal advocacy groups.

Moreover, Catherine McNicol Stock's book shows that threadbare motifs concerning "righteous rage" among "rural radicals" can be made to look stylish when accessorized with the fashionable garb of social history and cultural studies. As was the case with Hofstadter, Bell, Glazer, and Lipset in the 1950s, Stock was moved to write about this subject by contemporary events, specifically, Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the simultaneous emergence of the militia movement. These rural "extremists" neither match the stereotype of "simple country folks" (p. 2) nor fit easily into the usual political spectrum designating "regressive or progressive" movements (p. 5), she writes. Rural Radicals, which the author describes as a synthetic essay for general readers, purports to show where so many "angry white rural men [and some women] come from" (p. 13).

Stock places contemporary rural radicalism in the context of five themes "older than the nation itself" (p. 4). Three of the themes are now standard fare: class, race, and gender. The fourth, the influence of evangelical Protestantism, would not have surprised the pluralists in the mid-1950s, and the fifth, the impact of the frontier, would not have surprised Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1890s. While conceding that conflicts over class, race, gender, and faith also occurred in cities, Stock believes that the countryside yielded a "special mix of contradictory experiences, impulses, ideologies, and actions ready to boil over into radical protest and collective violence in moments of economic, political, and cultural strain" (p. 7). The result was a dominant ideology of "rural producer radicalism" (p. 7), whose adherents accepted capitalism but distrusted unproductive big capitalists and government bureaucrats, as well as an overlapping "culture of vigilantism" (p. 87) in which violence was sanctioned to protect the rural white way of life.

The survey of rural producer radicalism begins in the colonial period,



when exponents included the North Carolina Regulators, the Green Moun- tain Boys, and local protesters against manorial land holdings. Post-Indepen- dence producer radicals included the Antifederalists, followers of Daniel Shays, participants in the Whiskey Rebellion, and most Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. The era between the Civil War and World War I represents a kind of secular fall, as the "dominant attitude of most Americans shifted from production to consumption" (p. 59). Yet "ordinary men and women" in the Grange, Farmers Alliances, and People's party held out against the "culture of consumption" (p. 50). Twentieth-century heirs to this tradition ranged from near socialists in the Nonpartisan League through LaFollette Progressives to Long, Coughlin, and Gerald Smith in the 1930s.

The culture of vigilantism was also well-established before Independence, bolstered especially by wars against native Americans and enslavement of blacks. Indeed, racism was a leitmotif among vigilantes from Bacon's rebellion in the seventeenth century through the successive Klans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religious intolerance not only characterized the anti- Semitic followers of Pelley and Winrod, but also motivated solid citizens who wanted to exterminate the Mormons. Often acting with official sanction, vigilantes thwarted labor unions in rural regions with threats, harassment, and violence.

In essence Rural Radicals is a Turnerian history of the United States supplemented by contemporary moral judgments often cast in the latest academic idiom. The Populists engaged in "out-of-doors rituals" (p. 69), vigilantes reinforced "patriarchy and heterosexuality" (p. 89), and Andrew Jackson, though a kind of frontier democrat, joined other "Euro-Americans" (p. 7) in owning slaves, killing native Americans, and advancing imperialism.

By the time Stock reaches the post-World War II period, her account becomes little more than an undifferentiated list of dissident movements she dislikes. In fourteen pages dealing with the "triumph of vigilantism in postwar America" (p. 163) she runs through McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, Pat Robertson, and such violent groups as the Order, Posse Comita- tus, and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. If McCarthy qualifies as a vigilante for his role in the second Red Scare, then where is Harry Truman? The vigilante label does fit the last three organizations, but general readers can find better brief accounts of their activities in David Bennett's The Party of Fear (1995).

Rural Radicals is also marred by Stock's inclination, consistent with current historiographical trends, to treat political history as a wholly owned subsid- iary of social and cultural history. The result is the flip side of the classic pluralist error of viewing wheeling-and-dealing as the only legitimate form of politics. For Stock, grassroots expressions of anger or identity constitute the



only politics worthy of attention. She says almost nothing about the deals made or the legislation enacted by the producer radicals who won elections.

Many historians, especially those under forty, will consider pluralist terminology old-fashioned and Stock's idiom au courant. Nonetheless, ignor- ing or misunderstanding three decades of revisionist scholarship, she ironi- cally replicates several of the pluralists' conceptual mistakes. First, the labels "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" appear in Rural Radicals without theo- logical content, a flaw much less excusable in 1997 than in 1963. Second, beyond references to the producer ethic, the adjective "radical" lacks ideologi- cal content and ultimately serves as a broad synonym for angry or militant. Third, Stock is so determined to squeeze American anger and militancy into the category "rural" that this term again becomes a sloppy synonym for provincial.

Since even by the Census Bureau's generous standard, which considers population centers of 2,500 urban, the United States did not become a majority "urban nation" until 1920, it would not be difficult to show that until the 1950s most Americans were or had been rural somethings. Even so, Stock must stretch to include "rural radicals" from medium-size cities she judges insufficiently cosmopolitan (for example, Gerald Winrod of Wichita, Kansas) and political movements centered in the suburbs whose leaders were born in small towns (for example, the John Birch Society under Robert Welch and Ross Perot's presidential candidacy). In Stock's judgment, residents of Lockport, New York, the small industrial city where Timothy McVeigh was born in 1968, felt "just as marginal to urban society as did those of any isolated country town" (p. 179). Perhaps so, but McVeigh worked as a teenager at the Burger King in nearby Amherst, an affluent suburb of Buffalo, and his mother was a travel agent who loved to dance at Lockport discos.7

David A. Horowitz agrees with Stock that the familiar left-center-right political spectrum leads historians to misconstrue important political movements, examines some of the same figures, and uses some of the same explanatory concepts. But he covers a shorter time period, slightly more than the past century, and discusses government policies as well as protests. He also shows a better grasp of relevant secondary sources, which he supple- ments with archival research. He wants to recapture the sensibility of the insurgent "democratic nationalists" whose producer ideology moved them to oppose "concentrated power in the established order" (p. xii).

Horowitz begins his story with the Populist rejection of the "incorporation of America" and continues with Progressive-era insurgents who adapted Populist ideas even if they had remained aloof from the People's party itself. This trend was strongest in the West, and many insurgents in the plains states supported the Nonpartisan League. The chief actors in Beyond Left and Right



held elective office: Senators William Borah, Hiram Johnson, George Norris, William Langer, Gerald Nye, Lynn Frazier, Peter Norbeck, Robert LaFollette, Sr. and Robert LaFollette, Jr.; Governor Philip LaFollette; and Representatives Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., William Lemke, and Wright Patman. Yet Horowitz devotes almost equal time to angry citizens whose views overlapped with those of these "old progressives" in Congress: small business foes of chain stores, moralists appalled by sexy Hollywood movies, opponents of Ameri- can entry into both World Wars, and members of the second Ku Klux Klan. During the Depression, Huey Long trod a parallel path and Father Coughlin organized the "urban ethnic counterpart" of the locally oriented insurgents (p. 101).

Although the congressional old progressives typically voted for early New Deal measures, most gradually broke with Franklin Roosevelt because they opposed a centralized welfare state, disliked the administration's cultural cosmopolitanism, and/or rejected foreign policies aiding the Allies in 1939- 1941. Drawing on the scholarship of Wayne S. Cole and Justus Doenecke, Horowitz does a fine job of sorting out the insightful and sordid aspects of what is usually caricatured as "isolationism." Few prominent old progressives survived politically after World War II. Rather, in an atmosphere of "en- hanced" antistatism and anticommunism, their amalgam of nationalism, cultural conservatism, and the producer ethic was appropriated by a new generation of anti-New Deal Republicans, including Robert Taft, John Bricker, and Karl Mundt. Horowitz's survey of the period since 1945, though much longer than Stock's, is similarly diffuse. He finds traces of the insurgents' antiestablishment sensibility in the careers of Joseph McCarthy, Estes Kefauver, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, and Ross Perot.

With one stunning exception, an extraordinarily generous description of George Wallace as a champion of local values, Horowitz interprets his protagonists with an admirable combination of empathy, skepticism, and grasp of day-to-day politics. Despite their anti-establishment rhetoric, insurgent officials often struck deals with the conservatives whom they claimed to disdain; Senator Borah, for example, supported Calvin Coolidge against Robert LaFollette in 1924. Even the greatest old progressives, Norris and LaFollette, sometimes yielded to provincialism and, in the latter case, a touch of anti-Semitism. When Horowitz moves from Capitol Hill to the grassroots, however, he overstates the single mindedness of cultural conservatives, who, despite their celebration of local ways and traditional values, were not immune to the lure of bright lights, big cities, Hollywood vamps, and Sunday baseball.

Horowitz joins Stock in relying excessively on the producer ethic as an explanation of political positions. This is a concept whose time has come and



now should go. The problem is not that a producer ethic does not exist, but rather-in a situation reminiscent of status anxiety, an earlier generation's explanation of last resort-that it is ubiquitous. In this century few prominent Americans have publicly advocated a sloth ethic and none of them has risen to high office. Therefore, though the concept may help to highlight differences between the United States and other countries, it provides no useful guide to internal political divisions. The New Dealers who created the Works Progress Administration were no less committed to general producer values than those old progressives who stood in opposition. Rather, they differed in their specific evaluation of what work was productive.

Horowitz knows that the modem left-center-right political spectrum did not come into common American use until the 1930s, and he therefore correctly concludes that his insurgents do not fit comfortably into the familiar categories. William Borah and Robert LaFollette were not liberals in the same sense as FDR or Hubert Humphrey. Yet his book would more aptly be called Before Left and Right rather than Beyond Left and Right. The standard spectrum still provides a convenient framework for understanding the central strand of American politics since the mid-1930s, when old progressive insurgency was already in eclipse. Simply put, liberals (as FDR decided to call reformers slightly left of center) favored creation and expansion of the welfare state while conservatives (as Hoover and Taft reluctantly began to call themselves) opposed it. On the left, Socialists and Communists rejected capitalism in principle; on the right, fervent nationalists typically emphasized moral regeneration rather than economic policy (especially during periods of prosperity) and displayed greater fondness than liberals or conservatives for ungrounded conspiracy theories.

Like all such models, this one must be applied flexibly. In real political life, issues relating to race, gender, faith, and foreign policy cut across economic lines, odd alliances occasionally flourish, and volatile issues are resolved or reconfigured over time; near right conservatives still dislike sexy movies, yet their definition of sexy looks lax compared to that of the 1950s, and they now settle for warning labels instead of censorship. Most important, we should stop applying the adjective "radical" to members of the odd, angry, or vicious groups arrayed along the far right section of the spectrum. The term misleadingly suggests that these men and women are deeply or permanently alienated from the beliefs of the bulk of the population. As is also the case with Communists, Socialists, and left liberals, that is frequently-perhaps usually-not so. With "radical right" interred, scholars might then begin to address one of the great paradoxes of American history: the United States has produced all sorts of angry men and women talking what David Riesman called "big talk," and yet it remains, as insurgent Senator Peter Norbeck said



with some hyperbole in the early 1920s, "probably the most conservative nation in the world" (Horowitz, p. 50).

Leo P. Ribuffo, Department of History, George Washington University, is the author of "From Carter to Clinton: The Latest Crisis of American Liberalism," American Studies International (Summer 1997).

1. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965). 2. The foremost pluralist chronicle of American extremism is Seymour Martin Lipset and

Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970; rev. ed., 1979).

3. For example, see Preston Slosson, The Great Crusade and After, 1914-1928 (1930), and Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (1931), which place the Klan in the broad context of American intolerance from the first Red Scare onward.

4. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967); Geoffrey S. Smith, To Save a Nation: American "Extremism," the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II (rev. ed. 1992); Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983).

5. For evaluations of the current state of scholarship on conservatism and the far right, see Michael Kazin, "The Grass-Roots Right: New Histories of U.S. Conservatism in the Twentieth Century," American Historical Review 97 (February 1992): 136-55; Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 409- 29; Leo P. Ribuffo, "Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything About It?" American Historical Review 99 (April 1994): 438-49; and Leonard J. Moore, "Good Old-Fashioned New Social History and the Twentieth- Century American Right," Reviews in American History 24 (December 1996): 555-73. Al- though the "new" historiography of the second Ku Klux Klan-that is, books published since the early 1980s-has probably attracted the most attention, these works are not necessarily superior to and certainly do not supplant the pioneering studies written during the mid and late 1960s. See especially David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (1965; rev. ed., 1981); Charles C. Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (1965); and Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City 1915-1930 (1967).

6. For a review of the pertinent scholarship on religion, see Leo P. Ribuffo, "God and Contemporary Politics," Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1515-33.

7. See Brandon M. Stickney, "All American Monster": The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh (1996).


Article Contentsp. [659]p. 660p. 661p. 662p. 663p. 664p. 665p. 666

Issue Table of ContentsReviews in American History, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. i-vii, 531-748Volume InformationFront MatterEditor's Note [p. viii-viii]Review: The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism: Without the Democracy and the Capitalism [pp. 531-536]Review: Prudent Rebels: New York City and the American Revolution [pp. 537-544]Review: The Restoration of George Washington [pp. 545-552]Review: The Forgotten Revolutionary War in the Middle States [pp. 553-556]Review: Black Communities in Antebellum America: Buttressing Held Views [pp. 557-563]Review: The Sectionalization of American Politics [pp. 564-569]Review: You Can't Go Home Again: Politics, War, and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century South [pp. 570-576]Review: Dead White Males on Horseback [pp. 577-582]Review: The Politics of Money in Industrializing America, 1865-1896 [pp. 583-588]Review: Art-Culture in the Gilded Age [pp. 589-593]Review: And to Think That It Happened on Mt. Auburn Street: Dr. James, Harvard, and the Making of Manhood [pp. 594-599]Review: Culturing Tuberculosis: The Multiple Meanings of Disease [pp. 600-605]Review: The Rise and Fall of the U.S. Children's Bureau [pp. 606-611]Review: The Troublesome History of Foundations: Correcting a Contentious History [pp. 612-618]Review: The Hairy Ape Up in Mabel's Room [pp. 619-624]Review: Popular Culture and the Popular Front [pp. 625-630]Review: Missionaries on the "Middle Ground" in China [pp. 631-636]Review: Public Housing in America: Lost Opportunities [pp. 637-642]Review: Science Goes to War: The Radiation Laboratory, Radar, and Their Technological Consequences [pp. 643-647]Review: How the West Won [pp. 648-652]Review: "The Only Salvation People Had Was to Organize" or Quiescence on the Installment Plan? [pp. 653-658]Review: Rural? Radical? [pp. 659-666]Review: The Urban Crisis as History [pp. 667-673]Review: Somewhat like Us [pp. 674-679]Review: White Crime: S&L Christmas [pp. 680-685]Review: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: Evangelicals and the Military since World War II [pp. 686-691]Review: A Religious Perspective on Writing and Teaching History [pp. 692-697]Review: Politics as Usual? [pp. 698-703]Review: Anything but "Correct" [pp. 704-708]Review: With Friends like These ... [pp. 709-714]Review: Still in Saigon ... [pp. 715-725]Review: Robert McNamara's Journey to Hanoi: Reflections on a Lost War [pp. 726-731]Review: War as Hell: Blasting Survivors' Minds [pp. 732-737]Back Matter

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30030856