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

As Meryl Streep said on an analogous occasion, let’s do this every year. For Streep, this is done every year but this is my only opportunity to contextualize myself and my first book, The Old Christian Right. So, I will begin by expressing sincere thanks for the kind words from Rick Perlstein, Michelle Nickerson, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, and for Andrew Hartman’s sponsorship of this equivalent to the Oscars lifetime achievement award.

It is nice to have a book honored that was rejected by five publishers, sometimes with readers’ reports suggesting that the author was as weird as the three villains who were his main characters, William Dudley Pelley, Gerald Winrod, and Gerald L. K. Smith. I did want to add Elizabeth Dilling, as Michelle suggests, but there were not enough sources available at the time.  This gap has subsequently been filled in thanks to books by Glen Jeansonne and June Melby Benowitz. Let me say, however, that I paid more attention to Dilling than did the editors of the “dictionary” of Notable American Women first published in the 1970s.

Perhaps you can already sense why Rick calls me an “ornery cuss.”

There are four parts to this response. First, I discuss the intellectual trends that influenced the book. Second, I thank teachers and friends, including the small cohort interested in the Right, broadly conceived, in my generation. Third, I describe what I think The Old Christian Right is about, with asides about the study of the Right generally, issues raised especially by Rick and Elizabeth. Fourth, I suggest topics you might pursue if you want readers’ reports suggesting that you are as weird as your subject matter.

Let’s begin with the intellectual trends I did not quite fit into during my early twenties. The chief trend among my generation of historians was to rediscover heroes and heroines on the Left, broadly conceived; thus, there was a general lack of interest in the Right which was, of course, dying out. There also was the residual, dominant interpretation of the Hofstadter/Bell/Lipset “pluralist” school of “extremism” studies. Extremism was simultaneously an epithet and part of a comprehensive theory of American politics.

When organizing this panel, Andrew asked me why I thought scholarly interest in the American Right did not begin earlier given a visible Christian Right in the late 1970s and Reagan’s victory in 1980.  My short answer: Beats the crap out of me.

Slightly longer, I would borrow the adage that all politics is local, which may pertain with particular force to academic politics. Way back then, only two historians from elite universities paid serious attention to the Right, Alan Brinkley of Harvard/Columbia and James Patterson of Brown. Patterson’s work on the Congressional conservative coalition and his biography of Robert Taft remain enormously important but he moved on to other topics. The great George Nash was intellectually influential, if often misinterpreted, but essentially blackballed by the historical profession.

Perhaps the longest explanation—for later discussion: the history profession in my generation was dominated by a Popular Frontish left that thought a socialist-feminist commonwealth was just around a couple of corners. I fitted with a more pessimistic left of a previous generation—Gabriel Kolko, William Appleman Williams and (in Europe) Eric Hobsbawm.

I started to discover these questions during 1965-66 while writing a senior thesis at Rutgers on the self-styled American fascist Lawrence Dennis under the direction of Warren Susman.  Susman, Eugene Genovese, another undergrad mentor, and my dissertation adviser at Yale, Sydney Ahlstrom had an even greater interest in weirdos than I did.

There were some propitious trends for me in the Sixties and Seventies.

Graduate students specializing in contemporary history were expected to learn a lot about earlier eras. So, you could not write about Reverend Winrod unless you knew a good deal about Reverend Cotton Mather and Reverend Dwight Moody.

Religious history, though outside either the rising or falling historiographical orthodoxy, was enjoying one of its periodic booms, notably in the study of Protestant theological conservatives by Ernest Sandeen, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Joel Carpenter, Grant Wacker, and my friend D. G. Hart, the only cognac-drinking, cigar-smoking Calvinist I have ever met.

Graduate students were also expected to read books more than 20 years old. (If you take only one lesson from this essay: read books more than 20 years old!) Thus, unlike some historians, perhaps a few of whom are in this room (or reading this essay), I did not think that I invented the study of conservatism. On the contrary, the first generation of professional historians, notably Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, were obsessed with the conflict between conservatives and liberals throughout U. S. history.  So, too, were the great rivals of the next generation, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and William Appleman Williams. Indeed, there was a large body of good scholarship pre- and alongside Hofstadter, Bell, etc. from the Fifties.

Despite the perennial, casual use of the term “fascism,” there was among Europeanists a boom in the study, both theoretical and empirical, of Fascist and Nazi movements and regimes. No one studying the American Right in the 1930s could avoid the “fascism” issue. Among the empirical landmarks from Europeanists, David Schoenbaum’s Hitler’s Social Revolution and William Sheridan Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power, which I read in 1967, stand up well in comparison to many recent local social histories of the American Right, not least because Schoenbaum and Allen avoided moral posturing and expressions of surprise that there actually were Nazis and Fascists.

Although studying the wrong side of the spectrum, I did fit into one Sixties trend, evident from novelists Joseph Heller and Ken Kesey to psychiatrists R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, to try to figure out weird worldviews. Along with countless scholars, I was influenced by sociologist Peter Berger, co-coiner of the phrase “social construction of reality.” In my history graduate student milieu, there was an almost incessant invocation of one verse of methodological Scripture, E. P. Thompson’s admonition to avoid the “enormous condescension of posterity.”  Perhaps no historian’s admonition has been quoted more and honored less in practice. It’s a lot easier to empathize with long dead Luddites than with their spiritual descendants, non-college whites screwed by modernization/neoliberalism blah blah, blah, who vote for Donald Trump in small town Pennsylvania.

Luckily, I had friends who tolerated and occasionally shared my interest in Right-wing weirdos.  Dan Singal, Hofstadter’s last PhD advisee, convinced me that psychological explanations can be more than reductionist applications of Hofstadter’s phrase “paranoid style.” Henry Abelove reminded me often to remember the Christian origins of most anti-Semitism. Michael Sherry stressed the Roosevelt administration’s serious flaws beyond those being rediscovered regarding civil rights and the Japanese-American internment. Justus Doenecke, Geoff Smith, Glen Jeansonne, and Mary Brennan joined me in more convention sessions than I can count. Mary is younger than the generational cohort but she seems to have become an expert on the Right by age eleven. At one such panel, Glen, historian of anti-Semitism Leonard Dinnerstein, and I outnumbered the audience 3 to 2.

So, what do I think The Old Christian Right is about?  It is MOSTLY NOT about conservatism as that now hot topic came to be conceptualized. As Elizabeth, Michelle, and Rick noted, I have opinions about those matters and will offer a few later on.

In memory and via a recent skimming, four concerns stand out in The Old Christian Right: the nature of American anti-Semitism, a hot topic when I began the book, especially as related to upper case Populism and lower case populism; the conceptualization of the Left-Center-Right political spectrum; the weaknesses in the pluralist interpretation of these matters; responses to the so-called “radical right” by liberals and leftists, which sometimes constitute a Brown Scare with special controversies relating to free speech and assembly.

I’ll give Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, and the rest of the mid-century pluralists their due. In mulling over “status anxiety,” cultural politics,” and the general application of psychology to political belief and behavior, they were trying to move beyond the clunky economic interpretations they encountered during their twenties. My complaint is that they generally did so in a reductionist and condescending way. Their basic point, stripped of condescension, is not rocket science even by the standards of 1950s rocket science. How many people do you know across any political spectrum who would reject the Jesse Jackson mantra, “I am somebody?” How many people do not become angry, or at least sullenly pissed off, when groups they identify with are denigrated?

The pluralists maintained that upper case and lower-case Populists were the chief source of modern American anti-Semitism. As John Higham responded to them when I was a teenager, the evidence is at best problematic, especially when holding constant for social class. This “populist” line was also something of a dodge to avoid saying the obvious, that the main source of anti-Semitism was Christianity in a broad sense (though often in complicated ways, as I tried to show with my three villains). Irving Katz, a biographer of August Belmont, told me in 1976 that Jews simply could not say that. It was also obvious that theologically liberal Christians did not want to say it. As a first-generation college Reinhold Niebuhrian secular humanist with a Catholic father and Protestant mother, I had no trouble saying it.

We seem to be stuck with the Left-Center-Right spectrum as a model for American politics. Almost everybody knows that it was a validation of Cold War “vital center” liberalism. Less known is that it did not become the standard American model until the early 1950s. Even less known is that its origins lay in an earlier attempt to make sense of European Fascism and Nazism as well as American analogues. My point was that, for good or ill, the center in practice is rarely sealed off from the so-called extremes. On the right side of the spectrum, from the Congressional conservative coalition of the Great Depression to the Trump coalition today, there have been many connections between far right bigots and conspiracy theorists on the one hand and respectable conservatives on the other.  Similarly, the boundary between what used to be called polite anti-Semitism and vicious and violent anti-Semitism is porous.  I am not saying that Gerald Smith and Senator John Bricker were the same, any more than I would agree with Communist leader William Z. Foster in the Communist Party’s Third Period that Mussolini and John Dewey were fellow fascists. But Smith and Bricker’s constituencies did overlap.

What historians are supposed to do is to sort out continuity and change, similarity and difference.

My term Brown Scare, discussed at length by Rick, Michelle, and Elizabeth, was meant to show that the often over-wrought rhetorical response to the Right fitted within the American countersubversive tradition. Conservatives and libertarians have picked up the phrase more often than liberals or radicals though they typically miss the caveats. Insults are not the same as indictments or even FBI surveillance. Except during World War II, when the Roosevelt administration initiated several prosecutions directed primarily at real Nazi sympathizers, the Far Right has never faced the level of persecution routinely faced even by the moderate left. Standard issue fundamentalists and evangelicals often complain that they are persecuted.  Certainly, they have been laughed at by cosmopolitans for a century, and like most humans who think they are somebody, these theological conservatives are pissed off. But ridicule is not the same as jail or government sanctioned vigilante violence.

Why should we care that Smith, Pelley, and Winrod were sometimes officially barred from speaking and, in the latter two cases, were tried for sedition? When I called them villains, I chose the term deliberately. I have no doubt that all three would have collaborated with an occupation of the United States by Nazi Germany. As it was, they contributed to an anti-Semitic ethos—from “polite” to violent—that lessened the ever-so-slight chances of rescuing European Jews. But you don’t have to be Reinhold Niebuhr to recognize that ideas and actions have unanticipated—even ironic—consequences. Nor am I sentimental about an issue Roger Baldwin of the ACLU called “civil liberties for our side only.” As I discuss in The Old Christian Right, impressive critiques of formally free speech have been made by Straussian conservative Walter Berns and Hegelian Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Feminist Catharine Mackinnon later offered a different version of the critique. And several democratic countries have more restrictions in practice than the United States.

But restrictions don’t work out well here, as I tried show in the connection between FDR’s prosecution of the Nazi sympathizers and the Truman administration’s prosecution of Communist leaders. And for William F. Buckley, Jr., McCarthyism was pay back time for charges that so-called isolationists were part of the “Nazi transmission belt” with Pelley, Winrod, and Smith.

Finally, some suggestions, obvious to me, about the study of the Right that you might pursue if you too want to receive readers’ reports suggesting that you are as weird as the people you study.

First, it is peculiar that many highly esteemed scholars of the Right  display virtually no interest in the following: Social Darwinism,  William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace; foreign policy; debates about and conduct of numerous wars, including accompanying Hun scares and Red scares; the military as an institution and war veterans as a political force; and the day-to-day functioning of the three branches of the federal government—with the possible exception of issues relating to race and gender.

Second, the ubiquitous phrase “people of color” reflects a political hope, perhaps even wishful thinking, at least as much as demographic developments.

Third, in essential respects Seymour Martin Lipset understood the United States better than Howard Zinn.

Fourth, the most important single sentence about the history of conservatism was written by political scientist Clinton Rossiter when I was a teenager, to the effect that the conflation of conservatism and laissez faire was the “Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history.”

Fifth, the dominant form of American identity politics since the late nineteenth century has been nationalism, occasionally beneficial but usually not.

Sixth, the basic features of premillennial dispensationalist Bible prophecy, a significant part of The Old Christian Right addressed here at greatest length by Michelle, are understood by more Americans than understand the basic features of Keynesian economics. There are many popular novels and cable TV religious talk shows explaining premillennial dispensationalism. There is no Praise the Keynes Hour in which Paul Krugman and Janet Yellin explain how the best of us will be Raptured up into the national debt.

I could go on and on…