The conservative frontier Texas and the origins of the New Right

Jeff Roche

Book - 2025

"West Texas cities like Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, and Odessa, as well as smaller towns like Monahans, Dalhart, and Childress, have long been identified by political operatives as some of the most conservative places in America. In The Conservative Frontier, historian Jeff Roche asks why that is and looks to history for answers. Focusing on the decades between the 1870s and the 1970s, Roche illuminates the distinct political culture of West Texas through a series of episodes and portraits that reveal a larger history of the region. While most sections of the book are anchored by some form of electoral contest, for the most part Roche concentrates on the social and cultural conditions in which political events took place. His cast of c...haracters, as a result, moves beyond well known figures like George H.W. Bush to include lumber barons, rebellious football coaches, small-town newspaper editors, the breakfast cereal tycoon who founded America's only capitalist utopia, and many others. The people and places Roche studies are dominated by a belief system that he calls 'cowboy conservatism.' An ideology born on the old cattle frontier that spread across the North American prairies with the cattle business, cowboy conservatism was a powerful formative influence on the development of the politics of West Texas. Developed within the entrepreneurial and proto-libertarian culture of nineteenth-century Texas ranchers and boosted by the cult of the cowboy that later came to dominate American popular media, cowboy conservatism drew upon the mythology, iconography, and language of the western frontier to express a long and complicated set of ideas--including white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, anti-statism, and a fierce devotion to both individualism and small-town ideas about responsibility to community"-- more