The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Exposition. The Despoblado Book One. Wonderland 1. The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Kingdom 2. Agricultural Wonderland 3. Capitalist Utopia 4. West Texas Nationalism 5. Booster Politics Ascendant Book Two. The Right-Wing Frontier 6. Ruin 7. New Deal Agonistes 8. The Origins of the Texas Right 9. The Right-Wing Populism of Pappy O’Daniel 10. Rancher/Scholar/Reactionary 11. Brainwashed Book Three. Cowboy Conservatism 12. Birchtown 13. The West Texas Crowd 14. Viva! OlÉ! 15. Unintended Consequences: Civil Rights and West Texas Football 16. Right-Wing Republicanism: The 1968 Election in West Texas Coda. Reagan Country: The New Right of Texas Acknowledgments Notes Select Bibliography Index

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.

Review :
[An] expansive chronicle of West Texas politics...Roche's well-informed narrative abounds with fascinating detours, like an exploration of the role West Texas A&M football coach Joe Kerbel played in making the university's campus more diverse in the 1960s. It makes for a terrific window onto an influential but little regarded corner of the American political landscape.-- "Publishers Weekly" (10/24/2025 12:00:00 AM) [This is] a mostly affectionate account of West Texas's distinct political traditions...Roche is a well-read and discursive storyteller who is drawn to interesting characters..and [the book is] highly readable and engaging. He tells familiar stories well and has a keen eye for the informative but little-known detail.-- "Texas Monthly" (11/1/2025 12:00:00 AM) [This book is] an engaging and thorough political chronicle of West Texas...As Roche tells it, the remorseless plains of West Texas contain the headwaters of a mighty current that runs from the John Birch Society to Barry Goldwater and up through Ronald Reagan to the country beyond.-- "The New York Times" (10/7/2025 12:00:00 AM) 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" (10/2/2025 12:00:00 AM) By reconstructing the West Texas region's history starting in 1876, Roche helps readers understand the rise of the modern right and the relationships between history, place, and politics.-- "The College of Wooster" (10/9/2025 12:00:00 AM) 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 Jeff Roche convincingly argues that the origins and strength of West Texas's deeply conservative politics lie in the distinctive history of the region's settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His evocative portrayal of West Texas shows that this vast but only lightly studied region has been at the center of national developments for more than a century.--Benjamin Heber Johnson, Loyola University Chicago, author of Texas: An American History The Conservative Frontier is a landmark study of the social, cultural, economic, and demographic factors that have shaped the political landscape of West Texas, making it the most conservative place in the nation. Deeply researched and compellingly written, Jeff Roche's careful reconstruction of a century of regional history, from 1876 to 1976, introduces us to a remarkable cast of characters, such as Pappy O'Daniel, J. Evetts Haley, and Robert Welch, whose shared commitment to hyperpatriotism, religious fundamentalism, anti-statism, anti-communism, free-market capitalism, and white supremacy provide a direct pathway to and a profound mirror on the national political present.--David M. Wrobel, Stony Brook University, author of America's West: A History, 1890-1950