Retrospective Roundtable on Leo Ribuffo’s Old Christian Right: Entry 4 from Shermer

The Fall of 2018 was a particularly good moment to re-read Leo Ribuffo’s path-breaking 1983 The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War but Ribuffo’s unexpected passing after the USIH roundtable made revisiting this book all the more poignant. The literature on the American Right has exploded in the nearly twenty-five years since Ribuffo published a now famous essay, “Why is There So Much Conservatism in the United States and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything About It,” a comprehensive, stunning, and hilarious rebuke to Alan Brinkley’s “The Problem of American Conservatism” in the same 1994 special issue of the American Historical Review.

Only some of the most recent scholarship reflects Ribuffo’s important insights into the Far Right’s complexity and importance to American politics in the twentieth-century’s fractious middle third. Historians should revisit the often-cited Old Christian Right in order to better re-interrogate those pivotal decades, remember American liberalism’s failures, and take care when throwing around charges of fascism. Those takeaways are especially important now when Americans are once again wrestling with how best to respond to a revival of far-right politics in this country and around the world.

Ribuffo’s work seemed just as important in the early 1980s when the academy struggled to make sense of the so-called Reagan Revolution that surprised so many academics. He did not promise to explain conservatism’s apparent triumph. He proclaimed himself to be “rescuing the 1930s.” He considered that supposedly “red decade” to have been wrongly treated as an era onto itself when, in fact, the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Tribal Twenties shaped those tumultuous years and influenced how postwar politics would unfold.

But Ribuffo did not put New Dealers at the center of his story as an earlier generation of scholars had done. He instead scrupulously interrogated the lives, writings, and evolving anti-Semitic convictions of William Pelley, Gerald Winrod, and Gerald L. K. Smith in order to show the Far Right to have been an important, organic part of the Depression years.

Unlike 1950s consensus scholars, Ribuffo never relegated those men or the rest of the Far Right to a paranoid few. He instead showed their ideas and organizational initiatives to be pivotal to understanding the entirety of American politics. Longstanding traditions, the speculative 1920s, and the chaotic 1930s shaped these men’s individual journeys to the Far Right. Those intellectual odysseys did not arise out of the same social milieu or unfold in the backwards South, which many scholars still presume to be the cradle of American reactionaries. Their writings, lives, and followings instead brought them to New England, the Midwest, the Deep South, and Southern California.

Ribuffo’s rich portrayals also offered comprehensive explanations of these men’s worldviews, which included the ebbs and flows of their hostility toward women, unions, and other religions (particularly Catholicism). That research underscored that Pelley, Winrod, and Smith were hardly marginalized pseudo-conservatives. They had enough of a following to give them a shot at winning elected offices, which alarmed the FBI, Congress, and the Roosevelt Administration. They also had real, important connections to mainstream politicians and businessmen, including Henry Ford. Ribuffo also offered thoughtful comparisons to the political movements roiling Europe at the same time in order to remind Americans to take care with casually labeling everything to the right of center fascism.

That warning was especially pertinent to Ribuffo’s final chapters. He raised pointed concerns about, what he called, the Brown Scare, which insinuated that the fear of fascism greatly surpassed the Far Right’s actual power. That hysteria fueled executive, judicial, and Congressional efforts to suppress rightwing groups during the late New Deal and World War II. Those tactics, Ribuffo emphasized, would later be turned against the left and liberals during the McCarthy period.

During that postwar Red Scare, Pelley, Winrod, and Smith oddly found themselves in the odd position of being both vindicated and shoved to the side. That era’s “new” conservatives sought to distance themselves from those men, whom intellectuals like William Buckley openly maligned. Yet the book’s ending, unlike so much of the subsequent scholarship on the Right, did not culminate in Reagan’s 1980 election. Ribuffo’s epilogue instead cast the early 1980s as a new chapter in the Right’s history, particularly its seemingly new Christian wing.

Unfortunately, a lot of Ribuffo’s care and precision has been missing from the explosion of literature on the broad American Right since that 1994 American Historical Review special issue. The mid-1990s Republican takeover of Congress served as the backdrop for the rise of a near academic obsession with the Right amongst twentieth-century historians, which nevertheless tended to place the analysis of American conservatism in something of a vacuum. Only a few experts have looked back to the New Deal. An even smaller number have explored longstanding American intellectual, cultural, social, and political traditions critical to the forging of modern American conservatism. Most historians have delved into the more respectable origins of a postwar conservative movement with William Buckley and Barry Goldwater seemingly at the helm before Reagan’s conversion from New Deal liberalism.

A lot of those post-1994 books have been case studies. Historians have chronicled Steelbelt, Southern, and Far West revolts against taxation, communist subversion, moderate Republicanism, and racial integration in order to explain the coming together of a largely ill-defined conservative insurgency that eventually put Reagan in the White House. These narratives tended to fall back on assertions that liberalism had once been overwhelmingly popular, despite the growing number of studies that showed widespread discomfort and even disdain with the so-called New Deal order. Scholars initially presumed these postwar uprisings to be grassroots rebellions shaped by racial or ethnic resentment, discomfort with changes in the status of women, efforts to once again assert that the U.S. was a Christian nation, and peculiar southern campaigns that eventually upended the national status quo. In the late 2000s and into well into the 2010s, a new generation of historians started to draw attention to the power and importance of religious leaders, executives, managers, and intellectuals to explain the top-down orchestration of a “neo-liberal” world order.

Some of this recent scholarship implicitly challenges a few of Ribuffo’s conclusions. For example, Ribuffo’s epilogue rooted the post-1970 Christian Right in early Cold War Christian crusades when the Old Right seemed hopelessly marginalized. Yet new evidence suggests clear connections between the Old Right and the New. Darren Dochuk’s 2011 From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism showed that evangelical southern migrants had been enthralled with Huey Long before his 1935 assassination, open to the CIO when they worked in California shipyards, participants in the Ham and Eggs campaign that Smith was involved in after World War II, and then disgusted with what remained of the Popular Front when anti-fascist Cary McWilliam’s led the effort to not only keep Smith out of Los Angeles but stop Southern migrants from building the ramshackle churches necessary to nurture the plain-folk religions that they had brought with them to California.

Marie Koenig’s political ascent in Southern California highlights the Old Christian Right’s connection to the New Christian Right and importance to conservatism’s ascendance. Dochuk uncovered that her faith had been nurtured as a child who had adored the Kingfish as much as Jesus. She also appeared in Michelle Nickerson’s 2011 Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, which (along with Dochuk’s book) showed how this devout Christian helped other women build the para-church political organizations that groomed evangelicals for mainstream politics in the 1950s. The devout were only poised to upend American politics in the 1970s and 1980s because they had roiled the Golden State in the 1960s and after, when Koenig, according to Daniel Hosang’s 2010 Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California, had been instrumental in transforming grassroots-driven ballot measures into big-money initiatives that have corrupted direct democracy and arguably still stymie legislatures in California and other Western states.

Yet none of this recent scholarship has been as attuned to the Right’s complexity as Ribuffo was thirty-five years ago. As he pointedly reminded us at the roundtable, The Old Christian Right was not about the conservative movement. He had instead delved into the Far Right, which has rarely been the sole focus of discreet books and articles. That status quo might change in the wake of Kathleen Belew’s 2018 Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and John Huntington’s forthcoming Dissent from the Right: Ultraconservatism and Modern American Politics. Both highlight that the Far Right had connections to but were not the same as the postwar conservative movement.

Hopefully their books will inspire the kind of thoughtful attention to the Far Right in Ribuffo’s book, which will greatly benefit the scholarship still being done on conservatism as well as renewed historical interest in liberalism and the left. Historians have tended to briefly discuss the John Birch Society as a thorn-in-the-side to new conservatives, like Buckley, who tried to marginalize the Far Right in order to build a respectable movement and then a winning majority. Rarer still have been discussions of the early Minutemen, who had been armed, rabid anti-Communists before they took to patrolling the US-Mexico border for undocumented immigrants. Far-Right politicians have also made a few cameo appearances even if they managed to get elected to important offices. Profiles of Georgia’s Lester Maddox, Arizona’s Ev Mecham, and Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo mentioned but did not really probe these infamous men’s religion, the business backing that made their political careers possible, or analogues elsewhere in the world during and after the convulsive 1960s.

Much could also be learned if scholars undertook a serious reconsideration of the 1930s, an era that still needs rescuing thirty-five years after The Old Christian Right’s publication. That decade is still largely treated as an entity onto itself. Help seemed to be on the way in the 2000s, when the self-proclaimed new historians of capitalism promised the kind of broad sweeping narratives that would take seriously the longstanding trends and traditions undergirding American political economy. Yet much of this work has ended the long nineteenth century around World War I before offering an epilogue on the 1970s or Great Recession. Twentieth-century scholars have an equally frustrating tendency to begin narratives in 1945 or, increasingly, in 1968, which relegates the twentieth-century’s middle third to a dustbin when, in fact, Ribuffo’s book made clear decades ago that this era was as pivotal as scholars have recently been proclaiming the 1970s to be.

The Old Christian Right also forces a reconsideration of the New Deal at a time when Ira Katznelson, Gary Gerstle, Meg Jacobs, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Jean-Christian Vinel are once again undertaking a serious look at the rise and fall of that political order. The Old Christian Right highlighted a still eye-opening range of reactions to Roosevelt-Era policies and programs as well as the unexpected political coalitions formed out of them. Ribuffo’s book uncovered a remarkable diversity of political opinions and ideas far beyond the now-standard descriptions of Democrat, Republican, left, right, or center. Yet some scholars still frustratingly regurgitate the idea that there was a liberal consensus, which belied not only the work Ribuffo has done but also the countless case studies produced since 1994.

The Old Christian Right also offers a timely reminder of the uglier sides of American liberalism and the left when the Democrats’ 2018 midterm-election performance have reinvigorated hopes for a progressive supermajority. Ribuffo offered far more than the common scholarly indictments of liberal complicity in keeping America racist, sexist, elitist, and religiously intolerant. Anyone curious about contemporary threats to free speech and privacy need to re-read his Brown Scare chapter, which documented draconian policies made, FBI investigations undertaken, hearings conducted, lawsuits filed, and jail sentences issued.

Ribuffo’s warnings against using the term “fascism” are even timelier.  He argued that fascism actually represented only a sliver of a far more complex Far Right in the US and Europe. The scholars once again pondering whether the fascist door was ever open in America should keep that point in mind as they start to revise longstanding political narratives in the wake of recent events. That word has increasingly been used in social media memes and even in mainstream news reports. Sometimes there has been cause. An Illinois Republican openly ran as a Neo-Nazi during the 2018 midterms. He won roughly 25% of the vote, some of which came from the same Chicago areas where American Neo-Nazis lived in the 1970s. Those neighborhoods are relatively close to where thousands gathered for a 1939 Nazi rally.

Hindsight not only highlights possible continuities but also forces scholars to grapple with whether the Brown Scare was more dangerous than the Far Right. Ribuffo’s concerns about hysteria over domestic fascism never provoked the kind of question that has roiled histories of the American Left and Labor movement: how seriously should scholars take the threat of American and Soviet Communism? New Left scholars have been and are still occasionally denounced for reflexively celebrating the small American Left and attacking those wary of radicals’ influence.

Scholars should start a similar debate about the American Far Right now and in the past. By the mid-1960s, libeal pundits started to call the Far Right the conservative movement’s “Frankenstein’s monster.” That phrase was and is as problematic as “pseudo-conservative” because that allusion presumed that leading conservatives, like Buckley, created the so-called “ultras,” who openly railed against the new political establishment that the seemingly more respectable new conservatives had built. Far-right thinkers (like Pelley, Winrod, and Smith) or politicians (including Mecham, Maddox, and Rizzo) were not simply demons that conservatives had created. They instead came to ideas and built followings deeply embedded in longstanding trends in American political culture and society. Mecham, Maddox, Rizzo, and other far-right populists were also far more popular and destructive than many predicted or now remember in the decades since they won elected offices, which the men in The Old Christian Right were unable to do.

Belew’s scholarship indicates that the Far Right seems far more dangerous now than eighty years ago. She has noted that historians have still not grappled with the larger meaning of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well as subsequent mass killings. A lot of this recent violence highlights the prescient nature of Ribuffo’s deep, complex portrayals of the Far Right. Anti-Semitism certainly drove some recent attacks, including the Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre. But women were the targets at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at a small Florida yoga studio. The Charleston and Louisville shooters sought to kill African Americans. And some Americans still celebrate Sheriff Joe for detaining Latino immigrants in Arizona concentration camps years before the Trump Administration started putting children in cages.

As much as Americans might like to think this violence and hatred is relatively recent, the 1930s were also far more brutal than the world described in The Old Christian Right. Ribuffo captured the rhetorical violence found in Far Right discourse but did not grapple with whether or not Pelley, Winrod, and Smith’s followers used physical violence. But McWilliams, then acting as a journalist, boldly told the world about California’s infamous Factories in the Field, where the business-backed Associated Farmers’ henchmen lynched left-wing union organizers. That carnage partially shaped, as historian Dan Geary noted, McWilliams’s strident anti-Fascism, which fueled his opposition to Smith, the Ham and Eggs campaign, and Los Angeles’ plain folk. Yet the Golden State’s blood-soaked agricultural fields were just one example of the violent clashes across the country before, during, and after the 1930s, which historians need to seriously revisit in order to fully grapple with the complexity, ugliness, and savageness of American politics as Ribuffo rightly asked us to do thirty-five years ago.

Tumult then and now makes re-reading The Old Christian Right imperative. Ribuffo underscored that Americans have long struggled with how to respond to the Far Right. That question even divided the Supreme Court in the 1940s, when the American Jewish Committee urged “silent contempt instead of the free publicity provided by picket lines.”

Similar issues vex Americans today. Journalists now question the value of 24-hour news coverage. Such obsessive reporting, many fear, feeds violence, hysteria, and polarization. Social media rants seem just as dangerous. There have subsequently been fervent public discussions about broadly guaranteeing free speech, which has become increasingly weaponized in the US. Some American Civil Liberties Union officials have even publicly raised concerns about the hateful, rich, powerful few using the ACLU’s resources. That money, these higher-ups insist, should be protecting the many ordinary Americans who lack basic protections for their civil liberties on the job or in public life. Yet Americans still recoil at European (particularly German) efforts to restrict hate speech.

There are, of course, no easy solutions to these systemic problems as Ribuffo noted at the USIH roundtable. Yet re-reading Ribuffo’s book is certainly a way to begin the thoughtful consideration they deserve in an era as fraught, convulsive, and complex as the 1930s, especially since he will no longer be at the podium or in the audience to prod fellow historians to grapple with the ongoing consequences and larger importance of that era and the Far Right.