by Jeff Roche
University of Texas Press
10/7/2025, hardcover
SKU: 9781477332641
How West Texas business and culture molded the rise of conservatism in the United States.
Much of what we understand as modern American political conservatism was born in West Texas, where today it predominates. How did the people of such a vast region--larger than New England and encompassing big cities like Lubbock and Amarillo, as well as tiny towns from Anson to Dalhart--develop such a uniform political culture? And why and how did it go national?
Jeff Roche finds answers in the history of what he calls cowboy conservatism. Political power players matter in this story, but so do football coaches, newspaper editors, and a breakfast cereal tycoon who founded a capitalist utopia. The Conservative Frontier follows these and other figures as they promoted an ideology grounded in the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian attitudes of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers, including a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town notions of community responsibility. This political sensibility was in turn popularized by its association with the mythology and iconography of the cowboy as imagined in twentieth-century mass media. By the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan, Roche shows, it was clear that the cowboy conservatism of West Texas had set the stage for the emergence of the New Right--the more professionalized and tech-savvy operation that dominated national conservative politics for the next quarter century.
Reviews:
"I didn't think I cared about how cattle drives worked in nineteenth-century West Texas. I had no inkling of how that might explain why Amarillo is presently the most right-wing city in the nation. But now I do. What this splendid book demonstrates is how, in the hands of a practitioner of style and erudition, narrative history can bridge centuries, making the connections between Then and Now feel both natural and fresh." -- Rick Perlstein, historian and journalist, author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
"A quietly convincing account of how the 'cowboy conservatism' of West Texas, with its evangelical anti-intellectualism and white nationalist leanings, was refined into the New Right...[This book is as] informative as it is exhaustive." -- "The Dallas Morning News"
About the Author:
Jeff Roche is a professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. He is the author and editor of several books and essays on American politics and the conservative movement, including Restructured Resistance, The Conservative Sixties, and The Political Culture of the New West.