Orange County Confidential

Suburban Warriors
The Origins of the New American Right
by Lisa McGirr
Princeton, 416 pp., $ 29.95

In her examination of grass-roots conservatism in Orange County, California, Lisa McGirr ponders how a bunch of -- well, she would say extremists -- happened to take over a political party. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right is an imaginative study of the faces in the crowd who made up the Gold water boom.

While conservatives often look back triumphantly on their political successes over the last there decades, this work captures the politically charged yet modest middle-class culture that gave life to the conservative movement.

Why was Orange County such a hotbed for the so-called Radical Right? As McGirr argues, the region's combination of defense contractors, military bases, evangelical religion, and new suburban developments made its residents uniquely receptive to the conservative movement. Many residents were migrant midwesterners who had arrived during the Depression and had brought along their evangelical faiths and homespun values. World War II and the defense industry boom of the Cold War years, particularly during the Korean War, led to a huge population increase in Orange County. Dependent on the military-industrial complex for their livelihood, Orange County folks naturally gravitated to conservatism's patriotic and anti-Communist principles.

Anti-communism also took root among the landowners and agricultural interests that dominated Orange Country's rich farmland, much of which was becoming suburbia. This mix of landed conservatism and nouveau middle-class migrants made a powerful brew.

Every movement needs a spark and for Orange County, it came in 1960 when Joel Dvorman, a school board trustee, held at his house a meeting of the ACLU to propose ending California's anti-Communist investigating committees. Dvorman invited Frank Wilkinson, an anti-HUAC activist who was widely believed to be a party member, to speak at the meeting. Locals protested someone with "Communist ideas" speaking in their neighborhood. They wrote letters to the conservative Orange County Register, established a ladies' auxiliary, held meetings, and signed petitions. Within months, Orange County was hosting rallies for Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and establishing one of the largest chapters of the John Birch Society in the country (eventually county residents had to set up multiple chapters of the society).

Such grass-roots activity became the foundation for political organization well beyond the local level. Orange County both reflected and helped spawn the national conservative movement of the early 1960s:

Bridge clubs, coffee klatches, and bar-because -- all popular in the new suburban communities -- provided some of the opportunity for right-wing ideas to spread literally from home to home.

Women played particularly important roles in hosting meetings and coffees, though rarely did they become leaders of political organizations. Nonetheless, neighborly get-together reinforced ideas individuals may have gleaned from magazines like National Review and Human Events. Indeed, conservative magazines and books were pivotal in providing arguments, sparking discussion, and inspiring activists to defend against a Communist menace and, later, to fight the culture wars.

In Orange County, businessmen were also key players in the conservative movement. After perfecting the boysenberry, Walter Knott and his wife sold berry pies and chicken dinners out of their roadside stand. The business grew into a restaurant empire. Knott and others donated money to conservative causes and funded their own advocacy groups, like the Free Enterprise Association. Evangelical ministers also thrived in Orange County -- McGirr reminds us of the prominence of evangelical and fundamentalist sects in California history -- preaching about the evils of communism and the virtues of the free market. In turn, some of these preachers gave the free market gospel a particularly Californian flavor, like Robert Schuller (of Crystal Cathedral fame) with his drive-in church.

Orange County was one of the few places to give Barry Goldwater overwhelming majorities. In 1966, county voters supported Ronald Reagan for governor. During the late 1960s residents fought against growing threats to law and order as conservatism moved to embrace social issues. The new permissiveness among young people, the rise of student radicalism, and urban rioting alarmed these middle-class suburbanites. They grew amenable to populist appeals like those of Reagan, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Sam Yorty, and George Wallace. And over time, the extremists who had joined the John Birch Society and supported the Goldwater campaign became respectable, and attractive, voters at the center of a new majority. Nixon won their support in 1968 running on law and order, and his aide Kevin Phillips would have Orange County residents in mind when he described a "new Republican majority."

As McGirr understands, ideology does not mean inflexibility. And so it is no surprise that conservatism in the late 1960s should reflect a wide range of increasingly mainstream concerns. Anti-Communists like former congressman James B. Utt, who worried that the United Nations was training "barefooted Africans" in Georgia to take over the United States, no longer exemplified the movement. The same is true of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who had convinced many Orange County residents that there were actual Communists in their midst. By the end of the Goldwater campaign, Bircher membership had declined in the county and many activists shifted to a more respectable conservatism, one defensive of tradition and property rights. Some moved in a more libertarian direction, recognizing the threat the state poses to businesses and personal freedoms. Others embraced, as McGirr makes clear, single-issue campaigns over things like abortion, sex education, obscenity, feminism, and gay rights.

In focusing on conservative identity, on conservatism's ability to shift positions while still defending some form of tradition, McGirr has provided an elegantly written analysis of the Right which will reshape historical understandings of the conservative movement for some time to come.

Gregory L. Schneider is assistant professor of History at Emporia State University and author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right.