Retrospective Roundtable on Leo Ribuffo’s Old Christian Right: Entry 3 from Nickerson

It was in the late 1990s that I first encountered Ribuffo’s Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War.[1]  One of my qualifying exam readers, Robert Johnston, assigned the book as part of my modern political history list.  Though incredibly stressed out by my preparations, I was aware enough to realize that Ribuffo and a few others were leading me down a different path than the one I had set out for myself in graduate school.  I started in my program as a historian of Alaska, and had just submitted a dissertation proposal on an environmental history of that place.  I was waiting for comments from the committee, when the Old Christian Right, along with Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Jane Mansbridge’s Why We Lost the ERA, Jane DeHart’s and John Mathews, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA, and Alan Brinkley’s “The Problem of American Conservatism” in the American Historical Review put me on a new course.[2]

The history of American conservatism was starting to become popular at that point; and I didn’t fight with Johnston when he insisted that my list include this literature.  My interests in politics had been growing, in part, because I had become involved in organizing for GESO, the graduate student union at Yale.  Participation in labor politics sparked my curiosity about the right, ironically, probably because conservatism became more alien to me in the liberal bubble of New Haven.  The director of my dissertation, John Mack Faragher, was surprised but supportive when I announced my desire to follow this new direction.  Ribuffo has had a lasting impact ever since, even as I now write a very different book about Vietnam-era radicalism.  It is mainly his approaches to the history of ideas and religion in the Old Christian Right that have inspired my work.

Intellectual History of the Far Right

Leo Ribuffo broke important ground in the early 1980s not merely because he wrote about the far right, but because of how deeply he dove into the ecology of ideas that shaped it.  Ribuffo is, of course, not the first historian to study the intellectual history of conservatism (George Nash was an important predecessor).[3]  What’s different about the Old Christian Right, however, is that it engages seriously with a body of repellent and chaotic thought; and it evaluates the impact of that thinking on U.S. politics of the 1930s and 1940s.  Ribuffo, in short, takes extremist anti-intellectualism seriously as intellectual history, rather than dismissing it as a mere expression of populist rage (i.e. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics).[4]

Particularly effective for this purpose, I think, is the biography featured in the book.  It tells the stories of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald Winrod, and Gerald L.K. Smith from the earliest parts of their lives.  We read about their parents, childhood experiences and their religion, as well as their friendships and courtships.  This approach is particularly compelling when applied to the careers of professional extremists because, of course, no one is born an extremist.  It also injects historical contingency into the political moment.  When you read about the misfortunes of the Smith family, it is hard not to side with young Gerald and his Disciples of Christ parents.  I am surely not the only person who thought: wow, I would have liked that guy if I encountered him at 18.  In this way, Ribuffo documents their political formation—how chains of events, relationships with people like Huey Long or Charles Coughlin lead to a Smith’s future as an anti-Semitic opponent of the New Deal.

The biographies lead us to the more integrated analysis of the final two chapters, where Ribuffo makes a unique argument.  Instead of assigning responsibility for the Cold War red scare on the generation of demagogues and extremists that he tracks, he says it’s their critics and prosecutors who are to blame. For example, in chapter 5, “The Brown Scare,” Ribuffo relates the history of government investigations and hearings of anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers of the 1930s and 1940s.  He writes that “while pursuing worthy goals [that being ending prejudice and discrimination] foes of the far right often exaggerated both its power and its Axis connections.” He continues, asserting that it “set precedents for Cold War suppression [McCarthyism] that would ultimately mold the postwar theory of extremism.”  Ribuffo criticized historians for taking exposés of native fascism, published by radicals and Jewish defense organizations, “at face value.” [5]

When I re-read Ribuffo’s critique of anti-fascist guilt-by-association, I can’t help but wonder how he interprets the power of the alt-right today.  Ribuffo wrote “…that leftists of all stripes falsely believed that fascism would triumph in disguise.”[6]  The Roosevelt administration, in short, went too far in its brown hunting investigations of the 1940s.  “When far right activists and their opponents called each other un-American, both sides were participating in a national celebration begun during the Depression that would have long-range consequences.”[7]  How should we draw insight from this period to understand our own political circumstances?  If one denounces President Trump and his supporters as extremists, is that a continuation of this pattern of exaggeration?  Do we continue to suffer from that “national celebration” of the interwar period?  Or does the racial violence we now witness represent different terrain?

In 2012, when Rick Santorum still had presidential ambitions, I was rolling my eyes at friends and colleagues who called him a fascist.  I wrote in an opinion piece on the History News Network site that “we find ourselves satisfied the same tired ‘walks like a duck, quacks like a duck’ logic that conservatives deploy relentlessly to convince themselves that President Obama is a socialist.”[8]  But I am no longer so certain of those opinions.  It seems more convincing that the sometimes passive, but sometimes explicit, approval of bigotry expressed by the President and other Republicans actually makes the most dangerous people bolder with their hate.  Extremism increasingly leads to violence.  White House praise for the strong men taking office globally compounds that danger.  When I see so many Americans either waving off or echoing Trump’s nativism, I wonder if we are seeing another dynamic at work, different than that characterized by Ribuffo as ugly but benign.  Maybe nativist hatred has been there all along, a sleeping giant waiting for someone in power to say it’s now safe to speak and act “politically incorrect.”  It’s okay to hate openly now.  In fact, separating migrant children from their parents isn’t hateful, it’s love for one’s own countryman; it’s “America First.”

Theology

Another dimension of the Old Christian Right that I have come to appreciate even more these days as I write about the Catholic Left is the attention to theology.  By probing fundamentalist Christianity in this period (or maybe in the case of Smith…not so fundamentalist) Ribuffo demonstrated that religious expression was no mere sideshow to the political projects of his subjects.  Winrod rose out of the premillennial revival of the early 20^th century.  As a dispensationalist, he regarded America as a civilization in the midst of a corrupt era.  This eschatology recognized the moment within seven ages in the history of the world. WWI and the rejection of Darwin’s theories of evolution, Ribuffo writes, “fostered cohesion as well as militancy among theological conservatives [who mounted a] defense of true Christianity.”[9]  The chapter on Gerald Winrod especially reveals how the many shades of fundamental Christianity animating debates in the Protestant world ultimately spilled over into the political realm.  Re-reading Winrod’s arguments about how God and “true science” (i.e. science that did not include Darwin) was going to save humanity, reminds me again how the 1920s echo into the twenty-first century America.[10]  Climate science is the new evolution, fielding attacks from religious and economic conservatives who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil against institutions that create jobs and generate wealth.  They listen to the Reverend Franklin Graham before the National Academy of Science for insight on global warming.  In this era of pizza-gate and Sandy Hook conspiracy theories, Americans can seriously disagree—as they did in the 1920s—over whether an apple is actually an apple.  Or perhaps these disputes about facts have been there all along, simmering below the surface of acceptable political discourse. 

What about the Women?

I do have a question for Leo.  Did he even consider including Elizabeth Dilling in this investigation?  Why is she not part of the trio?  Was she not as influential as any one of all of these figures (this is not rhetorical…I am seriously asking).  She was prolific and certainly interesting.  Is it that Christianity, in your evaluation, was less central to her political consciousness?  I ask both because women do not appear much in this story.  They are there, for the most part, to round out the stories of Pelley, Winrod, and Smith.  We know now, from the work of Glen Jeansonne, June Melby Benowitz, and Laura McEnaney, that women were all over the far right movements of the 1930s and 1940s.

In fact, I was listening to a lecture the other day by an exceptional historian of the Holocaust who pointed out to his audience that once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the isolationists who opposed U.S. entry into the World War II backed down from their attacks on Roosevelt.  The organization American First quickly pivoted to support American troops.  This is the accepted wisdom of that period.  But how true is this really?  Jeansonne and McEnaney write that hundreds of thousands of right-wing women participated in the mothers movement, also known at the time as the “America First movement,” which did not suspend its attacks on “internationalism” after 1941.  Do you think this number is correct?  Because if so, that is not inconsequential.[11]

The reason I bring this up is because, although historians have made great strides in documenting the role of women in the American right, their story still does not figure centrally in the history conservatism.  They generally appear as supporters, rather than drivers, of developments and ideas attributed to men.[12]  Nevertheless, I owe a debt of gratitude to Leo Ribuffo for his profound influence on my own work, most of which concerns the political history of women.  Taking, as I do, the formation of female political consciousness seriously, I relied on Ribuffo’s investigations of Pelley, Winrod, and Smith to guide my own research.  The Old Christian Right thus represented an essential model for my own studies of conservative minds in the 1950s and 1960s, as it now does for the theological groundwork I seek to establish in my new work on Catholic radicals.

————————————————–

[1] Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

[2] Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. University of California Press, 1985; Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart; Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA : A State and the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alan Brinkley,”The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (1994): 409-29.

[3]George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

[4] Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first appeared in the November, 1964 is of Harper’s magazine before it was published in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. 1st Ed, ed. New York: Knopf, 1965.

[5] Ribuffo, Old Christian Right, 178.

[6] Ibid., 179.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Michelle Nickerson, “Memo to Pundits: Stop Calling Rick Santorum a Fascist,” History News Network, March 19, 2002, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/145154 (last accessed Nov. 23, 2018).

[9] Ribuffo, Old Christian Right, 83.

[10]Ibid., 90.

[11] This estimate is conservative. Jeansonne actually claims five to six million women participated in this movement. Glen Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right : The Mothers’ Movement and World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Benowitz, June Melby. Days of Discontent : American Women and Right-wing Politics, 1933-1945. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002; Mcenaney, Laura (1994). “He-Men and Christian Mothers: The America First Movement and the Gendered Meanings of Patriotism and Isolationism”. Diplomatic History 18 (1): 47–57.

[12] Michelle Nickerson, “Women, Gender, and American Conservatism,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, ed. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Mather (Oxford University Press, 2018), 11-29.