The Orange Revolution - Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right - Review

Reason, Oct, 2001 by Brian Doherty

How "nut country" conquered America

For such a perfect place, Southern California's Orange County breeds a lot of dissatisfaction. The sprawling county located between San Diego and Los Angeles seemed so quintessentially American that Walt Disney chose it as the home for Disneyland. The weather is nearly ideal, if sun, sea breezes, eternal blue skies, and year-round mild temperatures are your bag. It's a land of fruit groves, gorgeous beaches, and tract houses in planned suburbs carved out of rolling hills.

Yet this prosperous and Edenic scene was the breeding ground for a radical '60s counterculture that indelibly stamped America. It was home to a conspiracy of militant malcontents who, while never representing a majority of Americans' concerns, raised such a well-organized fuss that they took over a major political party. American politics and culture would never be the same.

This counterculture wasn't the one exemplified by those loud, dirty kids from Northern California, who made such a splash with their sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Orange County's was a suburban counterculture of housewives, engineers, dentists, businessmen, and veterans who embraced a hardcore conservatism that combined libertarian disdain for centralized state power with unyielding anti-communism and moral traditionalism. They may have dressed straight, but their beliefs were no closer to the American norm than Wavy Gravy's.

Orange County was the place, after all, that once boasted mass ocean baptisms by the legendary "Jesus Freak" leader Rev. Chuck; high school auditoriums filled to the rafters with thousands of kids excused from classes to attend Fred Schwartz's traveling "School Anti-Communism" (Schwartz authored that thrift-store classic, You Can Trust the Communists--To Be Communists!); and school boards that banned UNICEF Halloween coin collections and any mention of the United Nations in the classroom. In 1968, Fortune quite casually--and not without evidence--condemned Orange County as "nut country." The combination of rabid anti-communism, staunch social conservatism, and anti-Washington sentiment placed the county's right-wingers far outside the postwar consensus, both intellectual and popular.

Lisa McGirr, a historian at Harvard, guides us through Orange County conservatism's rise and influence in Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. She makes a good case that standard political histories of postwar America concentrate too much on North-South divisions, and on race relations as the one vital issue. If we really want to see the true heart of postwar political change, she suggests, we should look closely at the pleasant suburbs of the Sunbelt, especially those in Orange County.

McGirr is among a growing number of political historians that considers the '60s movements on the right to have been as significant--if not more so--to contemporary America as the decade's better-known movements on the left. She treats her subject with commendable fairness and has written a rigorous, if somewhat dry, book, one deeply informed with dozens of interviews and serious archival work. While she is certainly no partisan for Orange County conservatism, her disagreements with it break through in only a few sentences. The result is a book that, like Gregory L. Schneider's Cadres for Conservatism (1999) and John A. Andrew's The Other Side of the Sixties (1997), adds greatly to our understanding of the '60s as a thoroughly antinomian period, one in which even conservatives proposed radical ideas that fundamentally reshaped the political and cultural landscape.

Most Orange County residents in the '50s and '60s were migrants, largely from the Midwest. This didn't make them hayseed traditionalists out of place in the modern world, as some liberal critics have insisted. Orange County's suburbia was fueled by high-tech and defense money, and it was populated by people who overwhelmingly chose to be there. In moving to California, such folks were the very definition of American modernity, seeking out a futuristic good life in Lotus Land.

These migrants, McGirr writes, mixed with Orange County's "cultural traditions, its conservative regional elite, [and] its mode of development...[to provide] the ingredients from which the Right would create a movement. First, there were the 'old-timers,' the large ranchers and small farmers, merchants, shop owners, and middle-class townspeople who had embraced a strong individualism and strict moralism for many years. Added to this older conservatism were the southland's 'cowboy capitalists,' the new boom-time entrepreneurs who made their fortunes in the post--World War II era of affluence and spent their capital and their energy spreading the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism and an anti-Washington ethos. Together with ranchers-turned-property-developers, county boosters, and real estate speculators, they created a built world that affirmed the values of privacy, individualism, and property rights and weakened a sense of cohesive community, providing an opening for organizations, churches, and missionary z ealots that could provide one."