Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Steve Housman
Guest: Dr. Jeff Roche, Professor of History, College of Wooster
Episode: "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)
Date: December 18, 2025

This episode delves into Dr. Jeff Roche’s new book, "The Conservative Frontier," exploring how the unique history and culture of West Texas helped incubate and export a distinctive brand of conservative politics that ultimately shaped the New Right in America. Through discussion of key figures, events, myths, and regional developments, the conversation connects local West Texas realities to national trends in American conservatism.

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Introduction & Author’s Background

• Jeff Roche’s Journey
  • Roche describes a meandering academic path: dropping out of college for several years, bartending, then returning to finish at Georgia State (03:22–03:58).
  • First in his family to attend college, he was drawn to politics and regionalism, living in both the West and South, and fascinated by their differences (04:52–05:27).
  • Focused on exploring how politics and "frontier myth" interact, especially in places like the Texas Panhandle, considered one of the most conservative regions in the U.S. (06:58–08:12).
  • “The stark geography of the political landscape there... seemed pretty obvious that this was a place to study.” (08:12, Roche)

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Setting the Scene: The Texas Panhandle

• Physical and Social Geography
  • Described as "the ultimate flyover country," the Panhandle is remarkably flat, harsh, and treeless, with extreme weather and little water (09:29–11:23).
  • Little long-term Native habitation due to environmental severity. Settlers view the landscape as alien and unforgiving (11:20–11:47).

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The Frontier and Foundational Figures

Charles Goodnight & Cattle Ranching

• Goodnight as Frontier Icon
  • “He’s one of the greatest ranchers in American history...a legitimate frontier figure.” (12:26–12:41, Roche)
  • After financial ruin, Goodnight exploits newly available lands post-Comanche removal, essentially replacing bison with cattle on the native grasslands (14:01–14:29).
  • Pioneers a cooperative, low-overhead ranching model, with informal codes of conduct instead of state oversight, emblematic of the region’s entrepreneurial, anti-government ethos (15:25–17:02).

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Land, Agriculture, and Economic Change

• Technological Innovations & Settlement
  • Barbed wire and windmills facilitate a shift from open range to enclosed ranches and support the marketing of land to settlers (18:20–19:08).
  • Land companies, often started by former ranchers, profit immensely from selling newly “developed” land (19:23–22:21).
  • Transition to mechanized farming (wheat, cotton) and rural small-town life builds a culture of self-sufficiency and boosts economic optimism—until drought and depression hit (22:04–22:21).

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Unexpected Influences: C.W. Post and Market Utopianism

• From Breakfast Cereal to Capitalist Utopia
  • C.W. Post, inventor of Grape Nuts, establishes Post City, Texas—a planned capitalist utopia built on strict anti-union, property-ownership, and business-first principles (24:32–27:41).
  • “He tries to create this utopia to demonstrate how pure capitalism... should be the model for modern America.” (27:09–27:41, Roche)
  • The "booster ideal" of business-led governance in small towns spreads as a model across the region (28:03–28:24).

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The Great Depression, New Deal, and Conservative Formation

Crisis & Relief

• Boom to Collapse
  • The 1920s bring unprecedented prosperity to Panhandle agriculture ("middle class and its future... looked like they'd figured it out," 31:03–31:17).
  • The Depression and drought devastate the region; FDR’s New Deal relief checks save what remains, but federal power also breeds resentment and seeds distrust (34:15–35:31).

Key Insight:

“The seeds of sort of distrust of federal programs and a powerful federal government are planted... in that part of the world.” (35:31, Roche)

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Intellectuals as Architects of Conservatism: J. Evetts Haley

• Haley’s Dual Influence
  • Begins as a historian (biographer of Goodnight), becomes a tireless activist and ideologue (36:03–37:54).
  • The New Deal cattle-killing program profoundly alienates him, exemplified in his widely read “Monkey Business in the Cattle Business,” catapulting him into national prominence as “anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal” (41:32–42:34).
  • Haley fuses defense of free markets with white supremacy and segregationist politics (44:00–44:30).
  • “For him, the idea of free enterprise and free markets are just natural law... God given.” (43:00, Roche)
  • His activism forms a throughline into later far-right organizing in Texas.

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Cold War Anxiety and the Rise of New Right Ideology

Paranoia, Anti-Communism, and Media

• Conspiratorial Turn in the 1950s-60s
  • West Texas becomes fertile ground for anti-communist paranoia and conspiracy theories, fueled by media and civic organizations (45:48–48:53).
  • “The group we’re talking about are conspiracy theorists... [who believe in] a secret communist conspiracy at work in American life…” (45:59, Roche)
  • Local media (papers, radio, TV) dominated by editors who push these narratives, limiting counter-discourse (48:53–49:42).

Exporting the Model: National Republicanism

• From Regional Movement to National Influence
  • Grassroots conservatism circulates through civic organizations (Rotary, American Legion), which consume anti-communist content at meetings (52:03–53:39).
  • With virtually no Republican Party in Texas until the 1960s, the shell GOP is taken over by these new activists (54:35–54:56).
  • Key elections (John Tower, Goldwater) catalyze the realignment, shifting the Texas GOP firmly right (54:56–57:07).

“Once the Texas GOP becomes this powerful force, they begin to move into critical positions within the national party... and spread this kind of right wing conservatism across the entire party.” (57:07–57:29, Roche)

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The Reagan Revolution

• Reagan as Cowboy Conservative
  • Reagan’s ascent resonates deeply with Texans—“They loved Reagan. They loved him for a long time.” (58:02, Roche)
  • His ideology, rooted in "cowboy conservatism," feels like a direct continuation of earlier West Texas beliefs (58:00–59:05).

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Methodology & Reflections

Innovative Bibliography

• Roche uses “Top 5” themed bibliographies inspired by High Fidelity, highlighting the most influential works for each chapter, making historical research accessible and personal (59:43–64:32).

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Broader Historical Framework

• The book situates West Texas as a Western region, with similarities to other arid, ranching-based societies, but notes unique political development due to absence of federal land programs and territorial status (65:38–69:41).

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The Conservative Frontier Today

“What they found were not necessarily Trump country. What they found was a county... that is just Republican, Republican in the way that they used to be Democrat.” (71:18–73:18, Roche)

• Despite national attention post-2016, Roche argues that the region’s hardline conservatism is not new, but simply part of a long, entrenched political identity (70:42–74:10).
• He also notes similar rightward shifts occurring today in places like southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

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Big Takeaways

“This is a book that describes an intimate, almost symbiotic relationship between the history of a place and the political identity of a place, that these should not be separated.” (75:13–76:20, Roche)

• Local and regional histories matter deeply—political identity is forged in place, not in abstract national trends.

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Upcoming Projects

• Roche is working on a cultural biography of C.W. Post, exploring the Gilded Age, utopian schemes, and Post’s eccentric role as inventor, capitalist, and anti-labor crusader (77:15–80:30).

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Notable Quotes & Time Stamps

• On the “Code” of Conservatism:

  “For someone like Haley, the idea of free enterprise and free markets are just natural law...The New Deal, it disrupts everything he thinks he understands.” (43:00, Roche)

• On the Impact of Place:

  “It’s a book that describes an intimate... relationship between the history of a place and the political identity of a place, that these should not be separated…” (75:13, Roche)

• On the Endurance of Local Conservatism:

  “What they found were... a county... that is just Republican, Republican in the way that they used to be Democrat.” (71:18, Roche)

• On engaging bibliography:

  “What if I just boiled everything down to the five things that made the biggest impact on me in subjects, but most particularly in chapters...” (60:55, Roche)

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Suggested Listening Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------|-------------| | Author’s background & book’s genesis | 03:05–08:31 | | West Texas geography & culture | 08:57–11:47 | | Charles Goodnight & cattle frontiers | 12:26–17:21 | | Post City & capitalist utopianism | 24:32–28:24 | | Depression, New Deal & conservatism | 30:14–35:31 | | J. Evetts Haley & ideology | 36:03–44:30 | | Cold War, John Birch, & GOP realignment | 45:48–57:29 | | Reagan Revolution | 57:29–59:05 | | Methodology, bibliography | 59:43–64:32 | | Place in Western historiography | 65:13–69:41 | | Contemporary reflections | 70:42–74:36 | | Final takeaways | 75:02–76:22 | | Next book project (C.W. Post) | 77:15–80:30 |

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Summary by the New Books Network Podcast Summarizer

Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Steve Housman]

Hello and welcome back to New Books in the American West, a channel on the New Books Network of podcasts.

[Interviewer]

Steve I'm Steve Housman. I'm an assistant professor of environmental history.

[Steve Housman]

At Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. And I am your host for today's interview and for this episode. I'm speaking with Jeff Roesch, Dr. Roesch is a professor of history at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and we'll be discussing his new book, the Conservative Texas and the Origins of the New Right, which came out just recently with University of Texas Press earlier this year in 2025. Welcome to the New Books Network, Jeff. Good to have you today.

[Jeff Roche]

Well, thanks for having me, Steve.

[Steve Housman]

Why don't we start, as we always like to do on this podcast, by just hearing a little bit about who you are and how you got interested in history. So what's your background and what's the path that you took to becoming a professional historian?

[Jeff Roche]

A fairly long and twisted path to.

[Co-Interviewer]

Get to the professional historian part.

[Jeff Roche]

I I had a pretty long path through undergraduate.

[Co-Interviewer]

I took six years off in the middle and started bartending and liked it, liked it more than college. And I got back into college after, like I said, about a six year period. And that was when I was living in Atlanta and I went to Georgia State. And after, like I said, a couple years, I started West Texas State. I went to Sam Houston State for a year and but I graduated from.

[Jeff Roche]

Georgia State immediately went into the MA program.

[Co-Interviewer]

I was the first person in my family to go to college alone, sort.

[Jeff Roche]

Of graduate from college, and didn't really know quite how anything worked.

[Co-Interviewer]

So I just thought, well, now I get an MA and then I go get a PhD after that. So once I got on the MA.

[Jeff Roche]

Program, I knew I wanted to be a historian. I knew I wanted to be a history professor, and I knew more than.

[Co-Interviewer]

Anything else I wanted to write history.

[Jeff Roche]

So I sort of took that, took.

[Co-Interviewer]

That path towards the PhD so that.

[Jeff Roche]

I could do those things.

[Co-Interviewer]

I didn't, you know, I didn't realize how complicated the whole thing was very often.

[Jeff Roche]

So the naivete served in the middle.

[Co-Interviewer]

I think, in a lot of ways.

[Jeff Roche]

So I got my MA at Georgia.

[Co-Interviewer]

State and then knew I wanted to.

[Jeff Roche]

Focus in on politics and particularly the way politics and region work to work together. I grew up in the west and then I spent several years in the.

[Co-Interviewer]

South and recognized that these are very, very different places. And so I wanted to find a way to explore sort of that, you know, politics in the region. So New Mexico had, you know, you know, I'd lived in Albuquerque as a kid and I really liked Albuquerque, New Mexico, had a fantastic history, Western history program.

[Jeff Roche]

So I went there and worked with.

[Co-Interviewer]

Amazing faculty and I had a great.

[Jeff Roche]

Advisor in David Farber and produced this.

[Co-Interviewer]

Pretty crappy dissertation about Texas Panhellen politics. But it was good enough to be done. So I was able to get a job. And then I spent a year at Charity College in Hartford as a sort of visitor visiting as a student professor, and then got the gig at the College of Worcester 20 plus years ago. And I've had just a really fruitful and productive career there. How's that?

[Interviewer]

That's fantastic.

[Steve Housman]

And I mean, we can talk more about this off mic, but I also know David Farber. I took some classes with him at Temple University actually, when I was in graduate school several years ago.

[Jeff Roche]

Okay.

[Co-Interviewer]

You might have been there when Ryan Edgington was there.

[Steve Housman]

I just missed Ryan Edgington by a couple years. He had just stopped, just graduated when I started the program, actually. But I know of Rya.

[Co-Interviewer]

Yeah. Also an Albuquerque kid.

[Steve Housman]

Yeah, Right, right, right. Well, more conversation to have off Mike. But small world academia in Westminster.

[Co-Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Jeff Roche]

Big something.

[Co-Interviewer]

Next.

[Steve Housman]

So I'm curious. I mean, you mentioned spending time in Texas, and I'm wondering what brought you to the topic of this book and if your time spent in the state itself or in West Texas maybe influenced coming to this book.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, yeah. So when it came time to think through what a dissertation would look like, by that point I had settled on some kind of exploration of the relationship between some frontier mythology and conservative politics. So. And I was also very interested in.

[Co-Interviewer]

The kinds of places that produced, you.

[Jeff Roche]

Know, really conservative politics.

[Co-Interviewer]

And.

[Jeff Roche]

And there it was.

[Co-Interviewer]

I mean, the Texas Panhandle was the subject of the. Of the dissertation.

[Jeff Roche]

And it is consistently.

[Co-Interviewer]

Through all kinds of different measurements, the most conservative part of the United States. And it was a part of the United States that's very much influenced by. By frontier myth.

[Jeff Roche]

So that's what drew me was, I.

[Co-Interviewer]

Mean, the stark geography of the political landscape there. This is a place that in the 2000 teens was voting Republican at like an 83% clip in almost every single county.

[Jeff Roche]

So, yeah, it seemed pretty obvious that this was a place and I'd lived there.

[Co-Interviewer]

I went to high school there. I went to junior high school there. I started college there.

[Jeff Roche]

So it was a part of the world that I knew fairly well. And I knew the people.

[Co-Interviewer]

I liked it. It's a part of the world that.

[Jeff Roche]

I enjoy being in.

[Co-Interviewer]

So, yeah, that worked out pretty well.

[Steve Housman]

Yeah. In the book you describe, this is like a perfect. I try to teach my students asking good historical questions, asking why about things. And this is such a good example of that. In the book, you described looking at a political map, like a county by county election map of this part of Texas, and even just the pink Red stands out amidst the sea of red. And then asking, why is this the case? That's a great example of what the historian's supposed to be doing.

[Jeff Roche]

That was the question.

[Steve Housman]

Yeah, right, right. So this is a book that's very much about place, about a specific place that's kind of West Texas and the Texas Panhandle. So let's start by just describing this part of the state. You mentioned the political geography, but let's say imagine that we're driving across this part of Texas. What would you see, who might you meet, and what would be the history that you'd be driving through and across and over in this region. Give us kind of a brief overview and a sense of place of where we're talking about here.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, it's talking about the ultimate flyover.

[Co-Interviewer]

Country for lots of folks.

[Jeff Roche]

And unless you know how to read.

[Co-Interviewer]

This landscape and what this landscape holds.

[Jeff Roche]

You won't think you see anything.

[Co-Interviewer]

This is the Panhandle in particular is one of the flattest places on Earth.

[Jeff Roche]

Over an area the size of Pennsylvania.

[Co-Interviewer]

The topography changes, I think less than 800 meters.

[Jeff Roche]

It's just the joke goes on. On a clear day you can see.

[Co-Interviewer]

The back of your own head. That's how flat it is.

[Jeff Roche]

There's no trees. There's up until recently, and now it's.

[Co-Interviewer]

Been replaced with wheat.

[Jeff Roche]

But most of, the, most of this.

[Co-Interviewer]

Part of the world until the 20th century was covered with these long prairie grasses. The sun shines almost every single day.

[Jeff Roche]

It's windy almost every single day.

[Co-Interviewer]

It's, it's, it's a very stark, harsh landscape.

[Jeff Roche]

It doesn't, it averages a, you know.

[Co-Interviewer]

15, 18, 20 inches a year.

[Jeff Roche]

But it's not the averages that, that.

[Co-Interviewer]

Sort of define the weather there. It's, it's very often extremes, extremes in temperature in the summer and can be insanely hot in the winter.

[Jeff Roche]

It can be bitterly cold.

[Co-Interviewer]

Like I said, the wind blows all the time.

[Jeff Roche]

It's a place where it's very easy.

[Co-Interviewer]

To get disoriented if you're more used to places that have a greater variation in topography. If you're in the part of the world where I am now in Pittsburgh or Ohio, the lack of trees would really bother you. There are no navigable rivers.

[Jeff Roche]

So it's this part of the world.

[Co-Interviewer]

Like I said, it's one of Earth's great savannas.

[Jeff Roche]

And it's such an alien landscape for.

[Co-Interviewer]

Most Europeans and it was such a harsh, unforgiving landscape that even indigenous peoples very rarely had any kind of long term presence, really. Anywhere in this part of the world there may be a group that'll come out and spend a few generations, a couple hundred years, but no sort of long lasting settlements. It's that alien, that harsher landscape.

[Steve Housman]

It sounds like a very stark place and yeah, a difficult place to make a life. And yet as we talking about people have done so and that story, I mean obviously there's a deeper history here, but the story in the book really kind of gets going in the late 19th century with the character that some people that are familiar with kind of western history might be familiar with. Charles Goodnight and the rise of Texas cattle ranching Tell us a little bit about Goodnight and who he was and this moment in Texas history and how it kind of gets the ball rolling on the story of conservatism in this part of the country.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, so Goodnight again, people who are.

[Co-Interviewer]

Familiar with, with, with Western history have.

[Jeff Roche]

Have run into his name before.

[Co-Interviewer]

He's, he's one of the greatest ranchers in, in American history. Fantastic businessman and you know, one of.

[Jeff Roche]

These sort of legitimate frontier figures.

[Co-Interviewer]

I mean he, he, he, he literally did it all.

[Jeff Roche]

He had been a rancher since he was a teenager and he, he, he grew up sort of near the Cross Timbers and he was one of the.

[Co-Interviewer]

Sort of pioneer ranchers who developed the kind of ranching that would spread across the western half the Great Plains. Refers to his range ranching, where you let your cattle sort of wander around and then you round them up a couple times a year, you brand them, take them to market. He was one of the innovators in that.

[Jeff Roche]

He started out in Texas, he did really, really well.

[Co-Interviewer]

He went to Colorado in Pueblo. He basically helped build the town of Pueblo. He established a ranch there and he was incredibly successful.

[Jeff Roche]

And then the panic of 1873 wiped him out.

[Co-Interviewer]

I mean completely wiped him out. He was left with almost nothing.

[Jeff Roche]

So he decided that he would try again.

[Co-Interviewer]

And this is when he decided that the Texas Panhandle would be perhaps a perfect site to establish an even larger scale range ranching program. The Comanche High had been cleared out over 1874 and 1875, driven onto the Fork Silva reservation.

[Jeff Roche]

So this land was suddenly available. And this, as I mentioned a little.

[Co-Interviewer]

While ago, these prairie grasses, they had been feeding megafauna for millennia. I mean, woolly rhinoceroses were chewing on those grasses. And the bison, this is part of the southern herd, they had been living on these in this part of the world for a long time. They were really the only natural resource. So what Goodnight figured was he would just replace bison with cattle.

[Jeff Roche]

So he, he moved out and he. And when he moved out there, there were.

[Co-Interviewer]

There was a few pastores which are sheep herders who had been set up along where present day in Hutchinson County. But really he's out there by himself. He moves into Powder Canyon, he moves his cattle down, and it works, it works incredibly well. He's got a model that the return on investment is very high because the investment is really, really low cost almost nothing to cattle ranch out there.

[Jeff Roche]

And he's making so much money that within two, three, four years, there are.

[Co-Interviewer]

All kinds of outfits moving into that part of the world and practicing the same kind of. Same kind of industrial range cattle raising. And the way it works is this is really important for, for those who need a reminder, for those who don't.

[Jeff Roche]

Really know how this works.

[Co-Interviewer]

Cattle are docile and lazy creatures for the most part.

[Jeff Roche]

So all you really need to do.

[Co-Interviewer]

Is find a place where they'll be comfortable and they don't, they don't wander around very much. So you find a place that has some amount of water. It can be a spring or a regular creek and enough grass and you.

[Jeff Roche]

Would move to this place, you'd move.

[Co-Interviewer]

Your cattle onto this range. And the range is measured 8 miles in any direction from this, from this water source. And you just let them be. The rancher themselves would go down to the local newspaper or the closest newspaper and they would literally just file a claim and said, this is my range.

[Jeff Roche]

So the way the whole thing worked.

[Co-Interviewer]

Is all of these ranchers had to respect each other's ranges. And when it worked, we said that the overhead for this sort of. For this sort of production is incredibly low.

[Jeff Roche]

You could, you could make decent money. The.

[Co-Interviewer]

They built a kind of a code. It is, it was a code really, a set of industrial standards that allowed them to function as an industry with a minimum of violence. As you can imagine. If you, you. If you don't have title to property and the all. Everything you own is out just wandering around you. You need to have some kind of.

[Jeff Roche]

A cooperative measure to make the industry work.

[Co-Interviewer]

Otherwise you're going to involve the state. And this is a very entrepreneurial culture. And entrepreneurial cultures try to operate as far outside of state control as they can. Just because when the energy is the state, that makes things a lot more expensive.

[Jeff Roche]

So this was the industry, this was the Texas Panhandle. And most of West Texas was governed.

[Co-Interviewer]

By this cattle business until literally the 20th century. And it's a cattle business that it's governed because these people cooperate with one another.

[Steve Housman]

So what brings other people to this place then? I mean, you've been describing this landscape as so stark and so unforgiving, and yet this part of Texas begins, you know, in the late 19th and early 20th century to market itself as an agricultural wonderland. So how does it do that? And what kind of settlers are attracted to this, this place as a result?

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[Co-Interviewer]

So it's really a technological, a technological revolution.

[Jeff Roche]

Three things are going to happen that are going to make the cattle business.

[Co-Interviewer]

Change away from the range. And it's, you know, despite all this, the sort of elevation of the protecting the range in dime novels, really. By the last decade of the 19th century, ranching had shifted toward a fenced model.

[Jeff Roche]

So barbed wire is super cheap. So you're able to fence in cattle.

[Co-Interviewer]

So you don't really need as you don't let them wander around as much. You can get them fatter. The windmill comes in and the windmill allows them to draw water up. So you could literally move a pasture anywhere because you're drawing, you don't rely on this on some natural ground source of water.

[Jeff Roche]

And the ranchers figure out that they.

[Co-Interviewer]

Don'T need as many acres, so they decide to market it. And a lot of these ranchers form land development companies. Almost every single one of the major ranches goes into the real estate business.

[Jeff Roche]

The first thing they do is they.

[Co-Interviewer]

As they start selling small ranches, like four section ranches. A section is a square mile, so you could have four square miles and.

[Jeff Roche]

A family could put 100 head on.

[Co-Interviewer]

That or run a cow calf operation or something. And the ranchers can sell land that they picked up for close to nothing for A$50 an acre.

[Jeff Roche]

So this is the first stage.

[Co-Interviewer]

And.

[Jeff Roche]

Once it starts raining a little bit, they start realizing that they can.

[Co-Interviewer]

Start selling land to commercial families. And what I mean by commercial families.

[Jeff Roche]

Rather than kind of a homestead, you.

[Co-Interviewer]

Can sell off a parcel of land and market it as a land investment, but also a place where you can practice commercial agriculture. And they were Trying everything.

[Jeff Roche]

They tried green beans, they tried corn, potatoes.

[Co-Interviewer]

There's still a lot of potato farms up in the Panhandle.

[Jeff Roche]

But the two big ones that came.

[Co-Interviewer]

Online pretty early and proved successful were wheat and long stable cotton and the kind of wheat they were growing. And originally a version of this wheat had been grown on the Russian steppes. It's a winter wheat, it's very hardy, it withstands wind, and you plant it in the, in the fall, you let dormant in the spring or in the winter, and that comes up in the spring and you harvest it in early summer.

[Jeff Roche]

And it's a, it's a kind of.

[Co-Interviewer]

Crop that lends itself to mechanized agriculture. And this is, this is what's happening.

[Jeff Roche]

This is the middle of a major.

[Co-Interviewer]

Revolution in agriculture where tractors are replacing animal power. And West Texas, the Panhandle especially embraces tractors more than almost any other region in the country.

[Jeff Roche]

And you could now farm at a.

[Co-Interviewer]

At a, at a slightly different scale. If you're a cotton farmer in East Texas, for example, 40 acres is about all a family could possibly hope to farm because cotton farming is just backbreaking labor. But they're doing long staple cotton that's harvested with a tractor in the, in the panel. So you can have 320 acres because you're doing it on a machine. So this is what, this is the agricultural wonderland.

[Jeff Roche]

And the ranchers and the other land.

[Co-Interviewer]

Companies are also building out small towns.

[Jeff Roche]

That serve the needs of these commercial.

[Co-Interviewer]

Family farmers, both in terms of there's going to be a tractor dealership there, there's going to be an auto dealership.

[Jeff Roche]

There, but there's also going to be.

[Co-Interviewer]

A haberdasher and there's going to be a beauty salon and there's going to be a barber shop and there's going to be a local newspaper and there's going to be a bank and there's going to be lawyers.

[Jeff Roche]

So all to service this new modern.

[Co-Interviewer]

Tech forward agricultural, commercial family, Commercial family agricultural model that they're building out. And as you mentioned, I call it the agricultural wonderland. And it's incredibly successful for. Well, successful until it stops raining.

[Steve Housman]

And I imagine that this process of selling this land is making your Charles Goodnights and their elk fabulously wealthy as well. At the same time.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, the, the land companies are, because they bought the land either through sort.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of surveying teams for, you know, anywhere of 12 cents an acre, and then you can buy it from the state.

[Jeff Roche]

For 50 cents an acre and they can sell it for buck 50 too.

[Co-Interviewer]

And just make incredible profits and Then.

[Jeff Roche]

When you build out of town.

[Co-Interviewer]

You know, while these DWight, I'm sorry, TD Hobart built out the town of Pampa and you know, landlocks go for even more.

[Jeff Roche]

So yeah, there's a, there's an incredible.

[Co-Interviewer]

Amount of money to be made and.

[Jeff Roche]

This is a time when land values.

[Co-Interviewer]

In, you know, what we used to call the old Middle west, places like Illinois and Iowa, and there's like a land price.

[Jeff Roche]

Land is becoming so expensive, you know.

[Co-Interviewer]

50, 60, 80, 90, 100 an acre and you could go out here to the, to the Panhandle and pick up land for 2 bucks an acre and you buy 320 acres for nothing, basically. And then you have enough money left over to build a nice little house, buy a tractor and just practice this brand new kind of commercial agriculture.

[Steve Housman]

So in our conversation we're taking kind of a bit of A top down, 30,000 foot view of the book, but.

[Interviewer]

It'S worth saying that one of my.

[Steve Housman]

Favorite parts of reading this was it's a book that's full of characters, kind of, you know, almost cartoonishly classic western, larger than life characters, you know, Goodnight among them. But there's lots of people like that. And kind of the next critical figure in the story, in kind of early 20th century Texas history, was someone that was surprising to me. So can you explain the connection between breakfast cereal and West Texas conservatism? Tell us about Grape Nuts and the guy behind Grape Nuts and how this matters for the story of why this place became so conservative.

[Jeff Roche]

Sure.

[Co-Interviewer]

Fair warning though. What I'm literally working on right now while I'm on this sabbatical is a cultural biography of C.W. post. So sort of knee deep in his world. C.W. post is the, is the founder of the guy who invents great Mets, who.

[Jeff Roche]

Was a lifelong entrepreneur.

[Co-Interviewer]

He grows up in Springfield, Illinois and you know, his dad served in the agricultural implement business. And Post gets involved in sort of this in selling agricultural implements and has patents and he for a while owns his own farm implement company that's designed, that's selling some things that he had invented, gets involved in Fort Worth real estate. He invents a pair of suspenders that are quite popular. He tries his hand at being a guru for a while.

[Jeff Roche]

But he's this, he's this figure who finally finds success.

[Co-Interviewer]

Fairly late in life with originally a. A drink that's marketed as a. A drink for people who coffee doesn't agree with. It's called Poster and it's hugely successful. It launches in 1895 and it's hugely Successful largely because he is an advertising genius. He invents a lot of what we sort of refer to as modern advertising techniques, things like taglines and branding. He's a pioneer in this. And then he launches this great nuts, which is the world's first ready made breakfast cereal. And it too takes off and then, and then Post Toasties.

[Jeff Roche]

So by, you know, 1905, 1906, he is one of the wealthiest men in.

[Co-Interviewer]

The United States and he has very strong opinions about labor units. He is one of America's most zealous activists against organized labor and a pro, you know, free market enterprise. This is the only kind of economy we should have.

[Jeff Roche]

So in 1907 he founds America's only.

[Co-Interviewer]

Capitalist utopia, Post City Texas, now called Post Texas in Garza County. And he buys up million acres of.

[Jeff Roche]

Land and he's going to, and he's.

[Co-Interviewer]

Going to create a farming slash small town utopia where everyone will own their own business, everyone will own their own home, everyone will own or farmers will own their own farm. No sharecropping. And so he, he tries to create this utopia to demonstrate how pure capitalism, it should be the model for modern America. And that's, there's a chapter in the book that tells sort of that story.

[Jeff Roche]

And central to his vision of that the town and the community is a.

[Co-Interviewer]

City government that is run by and for business people and a real estate model where everyone will own their own house, everyone will own their own business.

[Jeff Roche]

And this kind of booster ideal becomes.

[Co-Interviewer]

A model that small towns all across Texas, the South, the Great Plains, the American west, adopt that sort of city commission where the role of city government is to promote the local economy.

[Steve Housman]

I want to zoom back out a bit and just as a quick aside, while you were talking about Post Texas a moment ago, I just kind of looked it up on the map on my phone and it looks like such a planned community. Like this is these perfect grid streets and it's just kind of little dot out on the Texas Panhandle and it's just wild. You can really see how it was designed to be this kind of planned little community like that.

[Co-Interviewer]

Yeah, it was for, you know, it's.

[Jeff Roche]

It'S like a lot of towns on.

[Co-Interviewer]

The, on the Great Plains and the Southern Plains in particular. It's, it's, it's fallen on harder times. But man in, in, you know, 1914, 1915, it was one of the cutest towns in America. Post designed all of the houses, I mean all of the architectural drawings are available.

[Jeff Roche]

You can look them at the Southwest.

[Co-Interviewer]

Collection, the Texas Tech, he's got a, he's got a team out there, they're building a house every 11 days. They're just these adorable little California cottages. You could order almost everything to spec. He had 20,000 trees in the town. He had a special greenhouse built so he could get the trees going. Nice wide streets.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, it was very much a planned community and it was built out really.

[Co-Interviewer]

In less than a decade.

[Steve Housman]

So all of these individuals and these plans and these ideas, they're going to run headlong into events that are larger than any one person. So zooming out a bit, let's talk about these kind of national and global goings on that are going to impact Texas. Tell us about the Great Depression and the New Deal, this kind of critical decade of the 1930s in Texas and the rise of conservative politics.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, I think it's, it's the central.

[Co-Interviewer]

Event in the history of West Texas. I don't doubt that for a moment, for a couple of reasons.

[Jeff Roche]

The place to start is in the 1920s and that's because this part of.

[Co-Interviewer]

Texas and here we're talking about the entire Panhandle. We're also talking about the Southern plains. Sort of think of where Lubbock is. And then the permission basin area around Midland and Odessa is experiencing massive growth. It is the fastest growing part of the country. It is. The farms and the ranches are incredibly financially successful. This commercial family farming model is working. This is a place that's middle class and its future. It seems that they have created, you.

[Jeff Roche]

Know, a new, a new way to.

[Co-Interviewer]

Create modern tech forward, progressive agricultural communities. It looked to all the world like they'd figured it out.

[Jeff Roche]

And the Depression of course, hits 1929 and 1930. But through most of those early months, it looked as if West Texas had.

[Co-Interviewer]

Escaped the worst of the Depression. I think it's 1930. In summer 1930, Emerald is named, you know, a safe harbor, an economic safe harbor against all of the chaos. And then it stopped raining.

[Jeff Roche]

So once, once it stopped raining, the, the, the potential, the, the agricultural potential plummets. You've got places that are going from.

[Co-Interviewer]

You know, they're, they're producing 75 bushels of wheat per acre to zero. You know, cotton field just, they just dry up.

[Jeff Roche]

So it doesn't rain in 30, it doesn't rain in 31, 32, 33, 34 is the worst of it.

[Co-Interviewer]

And there's out migration.

[Jeff Roche]

And it looks to, it looks now.

[Co-Interviewer]

As if the great experiment has failed.

[Jeff Roche]

So Roosevelt comes in in 33 and one of his large concerns as president.

[Co-Interviewer]

And it had been a concern of his as governor was the failure of rural economies. And it terrifies him. He's one of these, he's one of these folks and they were more prevalent then that are convinced that the health of the political economy and the health of democracy depends on having a strong rural class of farmers as part of your culture. And what he's seeing happen across all agriculture communities, cotton in the south and pigs and corn in the Midwest and certainly the wheat counties and cotton counties of West Texas is failure.

[Jeff Roche]

So he works really hard to try.

[Co-Interviewer]

To figure out ways to save the economy. And originally this is, you know, super boring history, you know, American History 101 stuff.

[Jeff Roche]

But one of the ways that the.

[Co-Interviewer]

The New Deal tried to address the, the agricultural crisis was by limiting production. So they start paying farmers not to grow things and they're paying them with taxes on, on sort of mid level producers. So you know, you're a farmer and.

[Jeff Roche]

They'Ll pay you, you know, keep 30%.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of your, of your acreage life fallow and, and, and we'll cover, we'll cover some of your costs. And this, this, this program saves the region. There's no question. I mean the, the, when the wheat checks came in in 33, this was 20 point type headline news in the canyon news. For example, the wheat checks are here, here, all the cotton checks are here. So it, it, it works.

[Jeff Roche]

But at the same time, you know.

[Co-Interviewer]

The, the people who are remaining in that part of the world are the people who really can't go anywhere because they've got, you know, investments in land or they've got investments in buildings and, and the like. So it's whereas you know, people lawyers or, or doctors or something and, or, or sharecroppers or richers are, are leaving.

[Jeff Roche]

So there's still quite a bit of.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of out migration during this. But the New Deal by paying landowners in particular, help preserve what population and the economy. And this goes on for a decade.

[Jeff Roche]

The change comes when the federal government.

[Co-Interviewer]

Begins to talk less about relief and recovery and more about reform. So there's an organization within the New Deal, it doesn't last very long, called the Resettlement Administration. And they start talking about planned economies and state control over agriculture and they'll tell you what you can plan and when you can't plan. And that's really when the seeds of sort of distrust of federal programs and a powerful federal government are planted I think within the minds of a lot of people in that part of the world.

[Jeff Roche]

And Other parts of the.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of the agriculture and farming America.

[Steve Housman]

I want to talk about another individual who makes an appearance in this book, another one of the kind of crucial characters in the roots of Texas's conservative politics. And this person was, of all things, a historian like you and me. Tell us about Jay Evitz Haley. Who is this person and how important and why is he a vital part of the story that you're telling here?

[Jeff Roche]

So one of the great joys of really working at the grassroots is you discover the unexpected.

[Co-Interviewer]

I don't want to say protagonist, but you uncover unexpected characters in the narrative. And I originally knew about J. Evattale as a historian rather than necessarily an activist. I had read, he wrote a fantastic biography of Charles Goodnight, came out, I think 36, and he'd written a history of the Xit ranch.

[Jeff Roche]

And I had read these. I'd read both these books like in.

[Co-Interviewer]

High school or maybe early college.

[Jeff Roche]

And so I knew him like, literally as.

[Co-Interviewer]

As a historian of. Of that region and a historian of the cattle, of the cattle business. So when I started on. On the project is that's when I discovered him as a political activist and an organizer and an ideologue. So he operates on. On a lot of different kinds of levels. He's a media figure. You know, he's a scholar. But he's also very much involved in party politics and in the group organization.

[Jeff Roche]

And as I, as I.

[Co-Interviewer]

As I started, you know, this book started as a dissertation about the 60s, and as I kept going farther back to sort of discover the roots of this political philosophy that I call cowboy conservatism. He's just there at almost every step, almost every organization. There are Jay Evans Haley connections.

[Jeff Roche]

So to give the short bio, he's born in 1901.

[Co-Interviewer]

We actually share a birthday in Belton, Texas.

[Jeff Roche]

His family moves to Midland fairly early.

[Co-Interviewer]

They operate a hotel in town. His mom operates the cafe in the hotel in town. But they also have a ranch outside of town.

[Jeff Roche]

And all J.F. taylor wants to be is a cowboy.

[Co-Interviewer]

He just wants the cowboy that's. He wants to work on ranches. Except, you know, he's born in 1901, not, you know, 1870.

[Jeff Roche]

So he turns 18 and.

[Co-Interviewer]

Or 17 or something. And his mom makes. He's got to go to college. So he ends up at West Texas. He ends up at West Texas Teachers College and thrives. Absolutely thrives.

[Jeff Roche]

He's.

[Co-Interviewer]

He's a. He's a gifted writer. He's, you know, he said he thinks he's. He's interested in history. And he's. And he's a student in just an amazing. An amazing history department. And he just digs right in. He's one of the founding members of the Panhandle Plains Historical Society. And when he graduates from college, he goes to work for them as a field secretary with this. And this is in the early sort of days of historical museums and. And things the like.

[Jeff Roche]

So he's just driving around West Texas and this tricked out Model T Ford, and he's going.

[Co-Interviewer]

And he's interviewing old timers all about, you know, what it was like to settle the region. And he's, you know, interviewing cowboys about what it was like to cowboy back in the day. And he tries to sell memberships to the Panhandle Plains Historical Society. He's very, very good at it.

[Jeff Roche]

And he's just collecting stuff.

[Co-Interviewer]

Whatever people want to donate, he just.

[Jeff Roche]

Throws it in the back of the.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of the Model T. And when it gets full, he drives back to Canyon and unloads. And so he does this for years.

[Jeff Roche]

And he's so good at it that he gets poached by the University of Texas.

[Co-Interviewer]

And they say, we want you to.

[Jeff Roche]

Do this for us.

[Co-Interviewer]

We want you to collect for us.

[Jeff Roche]

And so he does, and he goes to work for them, and he writes an MA Thesis while he's there. He goes to work for the Texas Centennial Exposition. And at this point, he's, you know.

[Co-Interviewer]

He'S 35 by now, and he's, you know, he's. He's writing Texas history for all kinds of different publications, and he's given all sorts of public talks about Texas history.

[Jeff Roche]

And he's becoming.

[Co-Interviewer]

No, he's not becoming.

[Jeff Roche]

He is.

[Co-Interviewer]

He is the leading expert on the cattle business in Texas and the West Texas frontier.

[Jeff Roche]

And then he's. This is the 19.

[Co-Interviewer]

By now, we're into the. We're into the mid-1930s, and he's still collecting. He's still going off and doing interviews. And now he's starting to talk to the old timers more and more about politics. And they are very uncomfortable with the New Deal. And when the cattle killing program starts, and this is. I'm not going to go into too many, too much details, but basically, ranchers had avoided becoming part of the agricultural adjustment programs to limit production. But the drought eventually forces them into it. And Haley's got to go back home and take part in a program where he has to kill cattle on his family's ranch and get paid by the federal government. And his whole world is turned upside down. This is for him ranching was the pinnacle of a free enterprise system. These were, these were men who asked no quarter, gave none, made their way in a harsh landscape and now the federal government is protecting them.

[Jeff Roche]

So he writes this piece to the Saturday Evening Post.

[Co-Interviewer]

The monkey business and the cattle business. And it's a pretty solid description of some of the logical fallacies that are behind some of these programs, but also how they violate what he thought was the code that governed West Texas that define the identity of what it meant to be a West Texan. And it catapults him. This essay, this is the Saturday Evening post in the 30s. It's the most red magazine in America. And it catapults him into the stratosphere of anti Roosevelt, anti New Deal thinkers. And from there it's just by night. We're not talking about 1936. From there for the next literal 30 years, he is going to be at the forefront of the right wing movement in Texas, especially in the western half of the state where he lived.

[Steve Housman]

So the problem was, according to Haley, that the New Deal and Roosevelt and New Dealers like him, that they violated basically the same code that was laid out by Charles Goodnight and his ilk in the 1870s and 1880s, that this sort of what it meant to be a West Texas rancher was in their minds incompatible with the new economic order of the late Great Depression.

[Co-Interviewer]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Jeff Roche]

For someone like Haley, the idea of.

[Co-Interviewer]

Free enterprise and free markets are, that's just, just natural law. To someone like him, this is a. For someone like Haley, that concept is God given. And the New Deal, it disrupts everything he thinks he understands.

[Jeff Roche]

So for someone like Haley, if a rancher goes out of business, they go out of business.

[Co-Interviewer]

They weren't meant to be in business. And if you can't make it out on the West Texas prairies, then you don't make it it. And to prop up folks who were incapable of doing what it took to profit, then that's the way the market's supposed to work. So yeah, the New Deal just represented an aberration. And then he's not, I mean the other thing we have to understand about his, he's also.

[Jeff Roche]

He fears what a.

[Co-Interviewer]

Powerful federal government might do to segregation. Haley is also an arch segregationist and a firm believer in constructing society around the idea of white supremacy. So that was the other big fear for him and that you can see across his careers is this free enterprise plus the protection of white supremacies. Very important to him. Many of his followers.

[Steve Housman]

Yeah, when I was reading the Book I ran just a curiosity, Google image search of Jay Evitz Haley. And one of the first images that comes up is of a campaign poster, I think Haley for governor or some political campaign that says right underneath in huge letters for segregation and states rights underneath a picture of the guy. So yeah, that's definitely part of his whole, whole ideology.

[Co-Interviewer]

Oh yeah.

[Steve Housman]

So as we get into the 1950s and 1960s and the kind of middle decades of the 20th century, the post war era, we begin to see nationally a movement that is starting to become recognizable as something akin to the contemporary American right. I mean, obviously there's still a lot.

[Interviewer]

Of changes to come.

[Steve Housman]

The right, as we think of it, doesn't have the kind of political power yet that it has today, but it's forming the kernel, the nucleus is there. The ball that got rolling in this part of the country with Goodnight and these ideas about free markets and natural law and all that you were just talking about, they're crystallizing. So what does this sort of birth of modern conservatism look like in West Texas? How did groups like the John Birch Society, for instance, how do they find a toehold here?

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, so the signature sort of move.

[Co-Interviewer]

That happens in this time period you're.

[Jeff Roche]

Describing is.

[Co-Interviewer]

Not a mass movement, not.

[Jeff Roche]

Yet, but a large enough movement in going from being uncomfortable with the spread.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of federal power and centralized power to be seeing that as part of a larger plot. And when we're talking about the, the right wing, the Texas right wing, in the nineteen, late 1940s into the 1950s and early 1960s, the, the, the group we're talking about are conspiracy theorists and they are paranoid and they have come to various versions of a conclusion that there is a secret communist conspiracy at work in American life and American public life to overthrow the nation from within. And that gains traction over the 1950s.

[Jeff Roche]

And anti communism becomes this powerful language.

[Co-Interviewer]

It's, you know, it's not very delicate, but, you know, it's as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it's, but it's powerful.

[Jeff Roche]

Anything that any, anything you notice in.

[Co-Interviewer]

Modern life that, that you don't really feel comfortable with. One of the explanations for that, the arrival of this thing that you don't like, it's part of a communist conspiracy and that finds fertile soil in West.

[Jeff Roche]

Texas for a variety of reasons. Central is that the region during this.

[Co-Interviewer]

Time period hadn't really changed. I mean, this is once the war begins and once the rains come back, the idea of commercial family agriculture in so small town continues.

[Jeff Roche]

But the rest of the nation had.

[Co-Interviewer]

Become more urbanized and had become larger, larger industries are at work and there's a lot of movement around the country and that's just not really happening in West Texas. And the powers that be, let's call them the decision makers that are local and and regional level, really begin to focus in on protecting the status quo and protecting their idea, their vision of what American life should look like. So threats to that vision become, they're taken seriously. And so this easy explanation that things you don't like are a part of a communist plot takes root everywhere all over the country. But, but in particular here.

[Jeff Roche]

The other part of the reason is.

[Co-Interviewer]

That the, the media culture in west Texas was dominated by people who took this communist, this internal communist very, very seriously. And with limited media markets and then, you know, lack of access to alternative points of view certainly helped us along. All of the major newspapers in the region from in Emerald, Lubbock and Midland were all dominated by sort of conservative editors and who pushed a particular kind of conspiracy laden anti communism within the pages of the newspapers and the radio and to some degree on the newer TV station.

[Jeff Roche]

So good, so good, so good.

[Co-Interviewer]

Score.

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[Jeff Roche]

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[Co-Interviewer]

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[Co-Interviewer]

Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

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[Jeff Roche]

Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Ferry unwritten by.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Steve Housman]

So if this kind of politics is, you know, very much facilitated by the culture and the media environment in this particular corner of the country, how does this get exported? You make the argument in the book that, you know, obviously the rise of the new right and everything has a lot of different sort of antecedents and things that lead to it. But you make the case that you can't understand this kind of national story without understanding the west Texas story. So how does this west Texas version of conservatism how does it end up, as you say in the book, kind of taking over the national Republican Party? What does this apotheosis kind of look like?

[Jeff Roche]

So there's a couple ways this happened.

[Co-Interviewer]

And I should have mentioned this in.

[Jeff Roche]

The, in the section about, about West.

[Co-Interviewer]

Texas and how it spreads there so quickly. There's a, I neglected mention that this is one of the great sort of joys of doing grassroots history is you find places where politics happen that you don't necessarily didn't expect it to see.

[Jeff Roche]

It there or you didn't.

[Co-Interviewer]

Maybe that's not a strong enough word.

[Jeff Roche]

But.

[Co-Interviewer]

When you see it afterwards, like, okay, that makes sense. So a lot of this politics is also happening in small town and small city civic organizations, chambers of commerce, Kiwanis Club, Rotary, Junior League, these kinds of things.

[Jeff Roche]

And at a national level there is.

[Co-Interviewer]

An outpouring of what we would now just call content, sort of right wing, ultra conservative, anti communist content that's being produced in several kinds of places.

[Jeff Roche]

And the content is usually in the form of film strips, but also speakers.

[Co-Interviewer]

Bureaus and these, this content in particular was designed to be shown at the weekly meetings of these kinds of organizations.

[Jeff Roche]

And they're all, I mean, if you've.

[Co-Interviewer]

Ever been to Rotary Club meetings or.

[Jeff Roche]

Things, they're always looking for something to.

[Co-Interviewer]

Fill the hour that you meet a week. So what they need is like 30, 35 minutes.

[Jeff Roche]

So there's all of this sort of.

[Co-Interviewer]

Of anti communist content that just starts showing up everywhere across the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[Jeff Roche]

And that helps build this movement among.

[Co-Interviewer]

Booster organizations, not just in West Texas and the rest of the Great Plains where they're very, very powerful. But this is happening nationwide. This is happening in these kinds of organizations everywhere. And you'll find, you know, groups like, you know, the JCs of the American Legion forming Americanism committees within their local organizations that sort of root out.

[Jeff Roche]

So it's happening there in these, in.

[Co-Interviewer]

These unexpected kind of places.

[Jeff Roche]

And it's a fairly easy move to.

[Co-Interviewer]

Get that kind of political engagement and then, then transfer that into electoral politics. And that's what you start seeing happening. And the reason it works so well in West Texas and, and I would argue also in other parts, parts of the American south is there's no Republican Party to speak of in Texas until the 1960s. There had been, you know, to Texas at the time was the South. There's no Republicans in the south after Reconstruction. So the Democratic Party had developed into this monolith that's controlled at the county level. And it is also very conservative in Texas. The Democratic Party is not liberal by any stretch of the imagination. It's a very conservative party.

[Jeff Roche]

But the Republican Party is just sitting there.

[Co-Interviewer]

It's a shell of an organization.

[Jeff Roche]

In 1958, the Randall County GOP had.

[Co-Interviewer]

Their county convention in the chair's living room and there were only five people there. So here's this organization that's available to you if you want to become active in electoral politics.

[Jeff Roche]

And then there's a couple of really.

[Co-Interviewer]

Important elections in Texas in the early 1960s. One is the 1960s senatorial election where Lyndon Johnson had convinced the Texas legislature to allow him to run for United States Senate and the Vice presidency because he was up for reelection in 1960. And in case he and Kennedy lost that election, he wanted to make sure he didn't lose his Senate seat.

[Jeff Roche]

So he runs for both offices simultaneously. And the Republican Party had recruited a.

[Co-Interviewer]

Guy named John Tower who would, you know, go on to become a long, a long serving senator from Texas.

[Jeff Roche]

And there's a new kind of energy.

[Co-Interviewer]

Behind the Republican Party that's being fueled by sort of right wing growth. And they get behind John Tower in 1960 and he does very well. Johnson crushes him of course, but then.

[Jeff Roche]

Johnson wins vice presidency.

[Co-Interviewer]

So there's a special election to replace, to replace Johnson in the U.S. senate. And the right wing conservatives in Texas and a growing powerful Republican Party throw everything into this election. And it just, it really translates the sort of energy behind this, you know, anti communist political movement into electoral politics.

[Jeff Roche]

And Tower wins.

[Co-Interviewer]

And then just that's in 61. And three years later, bear Goldwater runs for president. And the Texas Republican Party says we are going to make our entire identity tied to Goldwater. Conservatism, which really was topic conservatives, it was the same kind of western frontier, individualistic still responsibility of community politics. And those two elections just build out the Texas gop.

[Jeff Roche]

And once the Texas GOP becomes this.

[Co-Interviewer]

Powerful force, they begin to move into.

[Jeff Roche]

Critical positions within the national party.

[Co-Interviewer]

John Tower becomes a major figure in the national GOP and they spread this kind of right wing conservatism that had lured them into the GOP in the first place across the entire party.

[Steve Housman]

Which of course brings us to someone like Ronald Reagan in the late 70s and early 1980s who, you know, you can't, you can't think of a better example of that kind of cowboy conservatism. I mean, here's someone that loves to play cowboy for the camera whenever he gets a chance to and is very much Sort of in line with that gold watery and sort of version of conservatism as well. And you wrap up the book right around there, talking about the so called Reagan revolution and the conservative takeover in the 1980s too.

[Co-Interviewer]

Yeah, Texans loved him.

[Jeff Roche]

Texans love, they loved Reagan. They loved him for a long time. One of the things I wanted to do with Reagan in the book is so often he just kind of appears.

[Co-Interviewer]

As a political figure in a lot of, of, in a lot of narratives. He, you know, maybe the first time you hear about him is, is when he gives this speech for Goldwater in, in 64. That's, you know, that's kind of the starting point. And then, you know, the narrative says, oh, people saw him. Oh, you should run for governor, and they run for governor.

[Jeff Roche]

But he had been this figure on.

[Co-Interviewer]

The, on the far right for a long time when he's giving far right speeches and almost sort of John Birch Society style rhetoric in the late 1950s across Texas. And so they loved him, you know, long before he became a figure in California politics. And when they finally had their very first Republican primary, which as you mentioned, I closed the book with, Reagan just sweeped Texas. It's not even close.

[Interviewer]

So as we begin to wrap up here, I wanted to ask a couple kind of big picture and methodology questions. And the first one I wanted to ask about was your bibliography because you take kind of an interesting approach to the bibliography of this book. I mean, I really appreciate it. I thought it was very well done. I'm a historian too. A part of me always loves bibliographies, but they're not always a joy to read. This one was genuinely an interesting read. So tell me a little bit about the form of the bibliography. Can you explain it a bit and then tell me why you went with this particular approach?

[Jeff Roche]

Sure, sure. So the, the format of it is based on this, one of my sort of favorite novels that's about a record store owner. They made a movie of it. It's called High Fidelity. And in the movie and in the book, the, the protagonist, he and his friends, they, they organize everything by top five lists. And I liked, I liked that. And I was, I faced this kind of daunting moment. The book was done, it had been drafted, it was out with peer reviewers and. Or was about to go out to peer reviewers. And I faced this, this challenge that a lot of us, when we do something like this, we confront. And that was. I had a working bibliography, and I use Otero pretty extensively. I had a working bibliography of, I think it was probably close to 16 or 1700 separate entries. And no one needs a bibliography, a printed bibliography that long. The book was already, you know, way.

[Co-Interviewer]

Way long, certainly longer than the, than.

[Jeff Roche]

We'D originally designed it. But as hopefully you can attest, it reads fast. So I, I messed around with a bunch of different approaches historiographic essay, and I've written a couple of those and I didn't like it. Then little sort of paragraph essays for each chapter. And then I finally thought, what if I just boiled everything down to the five things that made the biggest impact on me in subjects, but most particularly in chapters. And then I thought, well, what if I just have the top five books that influenced my thinking? These aren't necessarily the five essential books that, you know, someone needs to read, you know, about, you know, anti communism in the 1950s. Instead, the top five books that influenced my thinking as I put that, that chapter together. And then I expanded out to another list of five alternative kinds of sources because one of the things that, that I found myself relying on and, and enjoying were different kinds of cultural artifacts that made me think differently. So, so a quick example. So, for example, in the, in the chapter in the Dust Bowl, I was really influenced by the paintings of Alexander Hoag and the poetry of Archibald McLeish. These aren't necessarily the kinds of sources that historians would, would go to, to find out about the Dust bowl, but they had a really serious impact on the way I viewed the Dust Bowl. So I, so I organized the bibliography around these top five lists. The first one for every chapter, and then a few more lists for larger subjects like, you know, conservatism in general.

[Co-Interviewer]

And Texas politics in general.

[Jeff Roche]

And once I got there, I found the challenge to create a working bibliography a really enjoyable exercise because it forced me to go back and say, you know, know, what really did impact my thinking on, on these subjects? And you know, what were the, what were the books that sort of were the articles that turned my head in a way or not. So it became personal, almost biographical in terms of the, of the biography, of the relationship that a historian has with their sources and with the, with the book at large. And recognizing the limitation of that and, and also desirous of producing something valuable to other historians, especially historians of this part of the world where the historiography is less full than something like Politics in Georgia or something, I took the massive zotero bibliography that I had created and put it all on my website. So there jeffroche.net you have, there's 18, 1900 total sources, again, organized by chapter there. So you have both the. The personal sort of, you know, bespoke type of short bibliography, but also the. The longer lists of the things that I consulted.

[Interviewer]

Well, and I love the, as you call it, the kind of bespoke bibliography because it makes the bibliography more accessible. I mean, like I was saying a second ago, I'm a historian. I love a big old long list of sources as much as the next guy, as much as the next historian. But this is a book that, as you were indicating, was written, and I certainly think so, in an accessible way. It's the kind of book that, you know, maybe not every single person is going to pick up off the shelf and read, but that, I get the sense was written with a kind of wider audience in mind. And this makes something like a bibliography just a little less scary, a little less daunting, something that people might actually use, you know, historian or not historian.

[Jeff Roche]

Yeah, that would be.

[Co-Interviewer]

I would. I would hope so. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I wanted to ask you also about where this story and where this book fits into the larger story of Western history as a whole. This is a book about West Texas. You know, Texas often kind of straddles Western and Southern histories in some pretty interesting ways. But I'm curious where you see this book and this history kind of more broadly fitting into the field of Western studies and the American west in general.

[Co-Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Jeff Roche]

So I identify myself as a Western historian. That was one of my fields in graduate school. I approached the study of this part of Texas as a Western historian would approach this part of Texas. And, you know, as you mentioned, Texas occupies this very strange place in the historiography and the history really, of both of these. These regions, you know, south and west, and Texas historians. Bicker.

[Co-Interviewer]

Bicker's probably not the right verb, but.

[Jeff Roche]

About whether or not Texas is the south or whether or not Texas is the.

[Co-Interviewer]

It's the West.

[Jeff Roche]

And when clearly, you know, the answer is, is both. Texas is a. Is a politically created entity. If you remove those. The borders of that. Of that shape and just look at regions, you know, once you.

[Co-Interviewer]

You know, to use the.

[Jeff Roche]

The classic definition of the west, once you cross the hundredth meridian in Texas, you are no longer in the same environmental or ecological space as you are and, say, the great piney woods.

[Co-Interviewer]

So.

[Jeff Roche]

So therefore, you know, I looked at that part of Texas, you know, as a. As a Western space with one absolutely critical difference between the western half of Texas and the rest of the west, and that is the federal government had a. A very limited presence In West Texas. Texas joins the Union in 1845 with the caveat that they will retain control of their public lands. So you don't have federal land programs at work in West Texas. You, you don't have, you know, large scale, federally owned or controlled spaces. There are no Native American reservations there. There are very few forts, even no homestead program. So Texas without control over its public lands is, is a different kind of space. Also, the fact that Texas never experienced territorial status. So, you know, in a place like Montana or say, Colorado, you know, the, the politics is very different there because during those territorial days, citizens really couldn't afford to be too hyper partisan because the next governor was going to be appointed by the next president, who could be a Democrat, could be a Republican. The judges were appointed. So Texas developed a little bit differently, but in terms of its environment and the kind of politics that it created, it's not very, very similar to other spaces in the American west, particularly the western half of the Great Plains and the inner Mountain west, the kinds of places that had similar histories with the removal of Native Americans, the coming of cattle ranching, the shift from cattle ranching into some other form of extractive industry or agriculture different from the Mountain west, obviously. So those kinds of places, in terms of their political development over time, very, very similar to western Texas. And I think in some ways, hopefully, one of the goals of the book was to provide a model's too strong a word, but a series of questions that we could ask about how the politics in a place develops with its relationship with the history of that place. So, and that I think it's a western history in terms of the development of those kinds of politics over, particularly the first three or three quarters of the 20th century.

[Interviewer]

And the book does a really great job of taking the local seriously while also keeping an eye on the big picture as well. I mean, the book kind of of zooms in and out and shows how both lenses are interconnected really, really well. So, yeah, I think that you achieved that goal for sure. So as a historian, as we start to wrap up here a little bit, you and I are not in the business of making predictions about the future. At the same time, though, this is a book that is very much about historical trends and issues and threads that are very present, very loud in our world today. So I guess the one thing I would ask you is what's the kind of afterlife to the story that you tell here? Is this kind of conservative tide in West Texas still on the rise? Is it breaking at all? If you were to bring the story up to the present day. How might you do so?

[Jeff Roche]

I think that the, so I in the book, in 1976, which is the moment where what I'm describing as the conservative frontier, which is a kind of a politics that's out beyond the edges of political settlement, to extend the metaphor. And when I end the book, the politics of that kind of conservatism had been settled right where they're now. The Texas Republican Party has declared itself a conservative party. So it's no longer surpassed past those edges. And it is the dominant ideology in that part of the world. The Republicanism, big R Republicanism of the place is fully in place. And there's a story I like to tell after the 2016 election and a lot of people started looking at maps and they noticed that Roberts county, which is up in the, up in the Panhandle, voted for Donald Trump in it was the, he received his highest percentage of the county of, of any county's votes in Roberts County. So ABC News sent a team down to Roberts county to investigate. You know, how does it that this place voted for Trump in the, in these overwhelming numbers. And you know, they discovered that, you know, these, these folks were rock ribbed Republicans. And I just, I just thought to myself, had they looked at the same county level voting map in 2012, they would have seen that Roberts county voted for Mitt Romney in the same numbers. And in 2008, they voted for George W. Bush in the same numbers. I'm sorry, in 2008, John McCain, before that, George Bush. So what they found were not necessarily Trump country. What they found was a county and this spreads across most of that part of Texas that is just Republican, Republican in the way that they used to be Democrat. I mean, back in the 1920s, Texans couldn't imagine voting, voting for a Republican. And it's that way in the world now. They just can't imagine necessarily voting for a Democrat. So in terms of the future, I can't see with my limited cloudy crystal ball any change to that. The demography is very similar. The economy there is essentially, essentially the same. So I don't see a big change in that part of the world called keeping in mind exactly what you, what you said. You know, historians are not in the business of predicting the future. Now what I do think is sort of interesting in the past 15 years is seeing the emergence of new spaces where we're watching people move from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party.

[Co-Interviewer]

Particularly around the part of the world where.

[Jeff Roche]

I'm right now in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but this sort of southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, parts of West Virginia. We're watching a very similar move that.

[Co-Interviewer]

I describe over the course of this.

[Jeff Roche]

Book from being a solidly Democratic place to being a solidly Republican place, which I think would. Would be worthy of. Of historical examination to. To watch how the new congressional districts are coming up higher and higher in the partisan voting index that weren't there 15 years ago.

[Interviewer]

One question I like to ask all of my guests toward the end of my discussions with them is to imagine themselves rather than the author of the book, as someone that has read the book and then puts it down, walks away from it, and maybe remembers it or picks it back up the shelf a few years on down the line.

[Steve Housman]

What would you hope?

[Interviewer]

What's like one big point or one idea that you would hope that reader comes away from this book understanding and remembering?

[Co-Interviewer]

Wow, what a great question.

[Jeff Roche]

So the big takeaway message when they pick it back up and start reading again, like, oh, yeah, this is the.

[Co-Interviewer]

Book about X or this is the book that does this.

[Interviewer]

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

[Jeff Roche]

I think from an intellectual standpoint, I think I would like it if a reader recalled the fact that this is a book that describes an intimate, almost symbiotic relationship between the history of a place and the political identity of a place, that these should not be separated. Politics does not happen in a vacuum. Political identity doesn't happen necessarily at an individual level, but very oftentimes at a regional level, especially if a region has a very distinct political identity. I think that from an intellectual standpoint point, I think that'd be something that I'd like for people to remember. On another, I would like to people, I'd like to think that they would remember that it was a fun book to read. It's like, oh, yeah, I liked reading this book.

[Co-Interviewer]

This was kind of cool.

[Interviewer]

I definitely will come away with both of those takeaways. I mean, in terms of the first one in particular, I mentioned this a second ago, but the way this book takes seriously regionalism and localism, and as I've said also a second ago, as someone that's working on a book myself, it's something I have to keep in mind that local politics and regional politics, what's going on in a particular place matters just as much, if not more than these large, big picture trends. And your book is a really great shiny example of how that's the case. And then for my last question, Jeff, I know this book has not been out for very long. It came out earlier this year in 20, 25. But histor, in my experience, often have a couple pots boiling at once. I'm curious if you have any other projects that you've been working on or considering working on or anything like that you'd like to talk about and give a plug for.

[Jeff Roche]

Sure, sure. I'm. I'm one of these people who, who can only have one other pot. I literally cannot work on more than.

[Co-Interviewer]

One thing at a time.

[Jeff Roche]

And when I do work on something, it's, it's, it's. I'm all in. So I'm on a sabbatical this year and in the time when I'm sort of not promoting the conservative frontier, I am working on a cultural biography of CW Post, who makes an appearance in this, in. In this book. And learning about him as I was, as I was writing the book about Texas, I just, I grew really intrigued by this figure who, between, say, I don't know, 1896 and his death in 1914, was a huge figure in American public life in just a fascinating array of ways. In the Texas book, it's a chapter about. He tried to.

[Co-Interviewer]

Found. He did find.

[Jeff Roche]

He founded the only capitalist utopia in the United States, and that was right there in Garza County. But he spent time as a real estate developer. He has several patents to his name for agricultural implements. He was one of these people who believed he could shoot dynamite up into the sky and make it rain. His father was part of Lincoln's funeral guard. And his daughter is the person who, who built Mar A Lago at the time the second largest private residence in the United States. He was a guru and a leader in what we call new thought, an expert marksman. He's just this sort of fascinating, almost zelig like character of Gilded Age America who, you know, 1908, 1912, people were throwing his name around as a potential presidential candidate. I mean, he was, he was that well known as a business person, as an advertiser, as an anti labor zealot. He was, he was this major figure in, in this period American history that there's nothing out there about him.

[Co-Interviewer]

There's two or three books about his.

[Jeff Roche]

Daughter Marjorie, who was for a large.

[Co-Interviewer]

Part of her life the wealthiest woman.

[Jeff Roche]

In the United States, but really nothing about him. So that's what I'm working on. I've. I've been to the Post family archives, excuse me, in Ann Arbor, on a bunch of. Just zip in to the archives for two or three days and sit back out taking photos of every, basically every.

[Co-Interviewer]

Document in the collection. I have on my computer.

[Jeff Roche]

So I'm in the middle of processing, processing all that to produce what I hope will also be a book, sort of a general reading book that's going to use CW Post as a lens into sort of that Gilded Age and.

[Co-Interviewer]

Progressive era when at the at the sort of the birth of what we now consider modern America.

[Interviewer]

Dr. Jeff Roche is a professor of history at the College of Worcester. His new book is the Conservative Texas and the Origins of the New Right, which came out earlier this year in 2025 with the University of Texas Press. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jeff. It's been a pleasure.

[Co-Interviewer]

You're welcome.

[Jeff Roche]

Thank you for having me.

[Co-Interviewer]

I appreciate it.

[Jeff Roche]

It's really a great conversation.