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

Reason, Oct, 2001 by Brian Doherty

McGirr notes the irony of an individualist, anti-state philosophy dominating a place whose prosperity was heavily dependent upon Washington and Big Government projects. Military bases and high-tech manufacturing for defense purposes were the linchpin of Orange County's economic growth in the 1950s and '60s. The bulk of Suburban Warriors is a walk through the big battles and shifting concerns of Orange County right-wingers up through the end of the '60s.

In her account, Orange County's conservatives first began to feel their oats in a 1961 fight over Joel Dvorman, an elected school board trustee with the Magnolia School District in Anaheim. Dvorman made the mistake of inviting to a backyard meeting a speaker who publicly advocated eliminating the House Un-American Activities Committee. Appalled right-wingers organized, got Dvorman and two liberal colleagues recalled from the school board, and installed their own candidates.

The new board, writes McGirr, began to send home "monthly bulletins with its more than 6,400 pupils that meshed fundamentalist religion and a hostility toward modern experimentalism with a call for conservative renewal." One such bulletin stressed that America "was, is and must always be a God-centered nation." Principals started to resign en masse. By 1964, the radical rightists had themselves been purged from the Magnolia School Board. (As McGirr reminds us, hard-right conservatives were never a majority, even in Orange County.)

Still, in the wake of that initial victory, many right-wing groups organized to spread the word about how imperiled our precious traditions were and how Washington was illegitimately encroaching on local and state governments; most also propagandized in favor of free markets. The new groups ranged from local chapters of the John Birch Society to homegrown organizations such as the California Committee to Combat Communism, the Orange County School of Anti-Communism, and the California Free Enterprise Association. Area businessmen such as Walter Knott, the boysenberry magnate whose theme park Knott's Berry Farm is still a Southland tourist attraction, helped lead the way with money and encouragement. Publisher R.C. Hoiles dedicated the county's biggest paper, the Register (now the Orange County Register), to the cause of liberty; he called his chain of papers the ''Freedom Chain."

Local churches were also breeding grounds for right-wing thinking, particularly the many Baptist congregations and the Catholic parishes under Cardinal Francis McIntyre, whom McGirr calls "the most extreme right-wing member of the American Catholic hierarchy." The cardinal regularly hyped the John Birch Society in the archdiocese newsletter. Interestingly, the most fertile breeding ground for rightwing activism was the suburban coffee klatches. Simple personal proselytizing in living rooms and kitchens helped win many converts for conservative activism, particularly among the housewives who actually had the free time to organize, canvass, hold meetings, write letters, petition, and get out the vote.