In the 1930s, America experienced the Great Depression, the New Deal,
and the presidencies of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.
California, meanwhile, witnessed a serious shift in the Republican Party
- a shift that would impact the entire country for decades to
come.Kathryn Olmsted <https://history.ucdavis.edu/people/fzkolmst>, a
professor of history at the University of California Davis and author
ofRight Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of
Modern Conservatism
<http://thenewpress.com/books/right-out-of-california>, says that all
sorts of factors came together to make conservatives see the government
“as a force for evil, instead of a force for protecting the markets.”
From crops to communism, she explains how California paved the way for
modern conservatism.
*Main Takeaways*
* Under FDR’sNew Deal
<http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2020/2/21/new-deal-are-we-ready-another-one/>,
workers’ unions began to form all over the country. Farmworkers were
not included in those protections, but, in California, they began to
organize with the help of the Communist Party. As workers went on
strike, leaders of corporate agriculture began to feel that the
government wasn’t on their side any longer. In an effort to push
back against the progressive policies of the New Deal, conservative
farm owners and businesses teamed up with social conservatives to
build a political coalition that framed the New Deal as an attack on
American values.
* The political tactics that worked to undermine New Deal
progressivism have stuck with us. Olmsted points to the California
governor’s race of 1934 between Frank Merriam andUpton Sinclair
<https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair.html>as
foundational to conservative campaigns for decades to come. Sinclair
faced coordinated attacks from his opponents, their allies in the
media, and even an early political consulting firm. Merriam’s team
leaned on themes of God and the family, claimed his opponent was
“anti-American,” and even brought dark money into play. Some of the
people that backed Merriam in 1934 later went on to champion Richard
Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
* Over the course of the last century, Olmsted says that historians
wondered if we’d turned a corner and the country was growing
increasingly progressive. It wasn’t until the 1990s that historians
began to reconsider the power that conservatism still has in
America. Today, historians see a split among those on the right:
neo-conservatives (who have generally embraced a more international
role for the U.S.) vs. paleo-conservatives like President Trump, who
reflect the 1930s’ roots of conservatism.
http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2021/1/1/makings-modern-conservatism/
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